As they rode they could hear the radio in the front seat humming the poignant theme-song from Dr. Zhivago.
“Listen!” the Hoover hissed. “Of all possible songs to be singing, it has chosen one of the master’s favorites. Already it has forgotten him!”
“Ah,” said the toaster, “what choice does it have, poor thing? Once one of us had been turned on, would we have behaved any otherwise? Would you? Would I?”
The old vacuum groaned, and the radio went on playing its sad, sad song.
What graveyards are for people—horrible, creepy places that any reasonable individual tries to stay away from—the City Dump is for appliances and machines of every description. Imagine, therefore, what the appliances must have felt when they realized (the pirate had parked his pickup in front of high, ripply iron gates and was opening the padlock with a key from the ring that swung from his belt) that they had been brought to the City Dump! Imagine their horror as he drove the truck inside and they assimilated the terrible fact that he lived here! There, with smoke curling from a tin chimney, was his wretched shack—and all about it the most melancholy and fearsome sights the toaster had ever witnessed. Dismembered chassis of once-proud automobiles were heaped one atop the other to form veritable mountains of rusted iron. The asphalt-covered ground was everywhere strewn with twisted beams and blistered sheet metal, with broken and worn-out machine parts of all shapes and sizes—with all the terrible emblems, in short, of its own inevitable obsolescence. An appalling scene to behold—yet one that exercised a strange fascination over the toaster’s mind. As often as it had heard of the City Dump, it had somehow never really believed in its existence. And now it was here, and nothing, not even the pirate’s stony gaze, could prevent its shudder of fear and wonder.
The pirate got out of the truck and took the radio, along with his fishing rod and his day’s catch, into the hovel where he lived. The appliances, left to themselves in the back of the truck, listened to the radio sing song after song with apparently indefatigable good cheer. Among them was the toaster’s own favorite melody, “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” The toaster was certain this couldn’t be a coincidence. The radio was trying to tell its friends that if they were brave and patient and cheerful, matters would work out for the best. Anyhow, whether that was the radio’s intention or just a program it had been tuned to, it was what the toaster firmly believed.
After he’d had his dinner the pirate came out of his shack to examine the other appliances. He fingered the Hoover’s mudstained dustbag and the frayed part of its cord where it had been chewing on itself. He lifted the blanket and shook his head in mute deprecation. He looked inside the lamp’s little hood and saw—which the lamp itself had not realized till now—that its tiny bulb was shattered. (It must have happened when the lamp had fallen off the office chair, just before they’d found the boat.)
Finally the pirate picked up the toaster—and made a scornful grimace. “Junk!” he said, depositing the toaster on a nearby scrap pile.
“Junk!” he repeated, dealing with the lamp in a similar fashion.
“Junk!” He hurled the poor blanket over the projecting, broken axle of a ‘57 Ford.
“Junk!” He set the Hoover down on the asphalt with a shattering thunk.
“All of it, just junk.” Having delivered this dismaying verdict, the pirate returned to his shack, where the radio had gone on singing in the liveliest manner all the while.
“Thank goodness,” said the toaster aloud, as soon as he was gone.
“Thank goodness?” the Hoover echoed in stricken tones. “How can you say ‘Thank goodness’ when you’ve just been called junk and thrown on a heap of scrap?”
“Because if he’d decided to take us into his shack and use us, we’d have become his, like the radio. This way we’ve got a chance to escape.”
The blanket, where it hung, limply, from the broken axle, began to whimper and whine. “No, no, it’s true. That’s all I am now—junk! Look at me—look at these tears, these snags, these stains. Junk! This is where I belong.”
The lamp’s grief was quieter but no less bitter. “Oh, my bulb,” it murmured, “oh, my poor poor bulb!”
The Hoover groaned.
“Pull yourselves together, all of you!” said the toaster, in what it hoped was a tone of stern command. “There’s nothing wrong with any of us that a bit of fixing-up won’t put right. You—” it addressed the blanket “—are still fundamentally sound. Your coils haven’t been hurt. After some sewing up and a visit to the dry cleaner you’ll be as good as new.”
It turned to the lamp. “And what nonsense—to fuss over a broken bulb! You’ve broken your bulb before and probably will many times again. What do you think replaceable parts are for?”
Finally the toaster directed its attention to the vacuum cleaner. “And you? You, who must be our leader! Who ought to inspire us with your own greater strength! For you to sit there groaning and helpless! And just because some old pirate who lives in a dump makes an unflattering remark. Why, he probably doesn’t even know how to use a vacuum cleaner—that’s the sort of person he is!”
“Do you think so?” said the Hoover.
“Of course I do, and so would you if you’d be rational. Now, for goodness’ sake, let’s all sit down together and figure out how we’re going to rescue the radio and escape from here.”
By midnight it was amazing how much they’d managed to accomplish. The Hoover had recharged the rundown battery from the battery in the pirate’s own truck. Meanwhile the lamp, in looking about for another doorway or gate than the one they’d come in by (there wasn’t any), had discovered a vehicle even better suited to their needs than the office chair the pirate had thrown in the river. This was a large vinyl perambulator, which is another word for pram, which is also known, in the appliances’ part of the world, as a baby buggy. By whatever name, it was in good working order—except for two minor faults. One fault was a squeak in the left front wheel, and the other was the way its folding visor was twisted out of shape so as to give the whole pram an air of lurching sideways when it was moving straight ahead. The squeak was fixed with a few drops of 3-in-1 Oil, but the visor resisted their most determined efforts to bend it back into true. But that didn’t matter, after all. What mattered was that it worked.
To think how many of the things consigned to this dump were still, like the pram (or themselves, for that matter) essentially serviceable! There were hair dryers and four-speed bicycles, water heaters and wind-up toys that would all have gone on working for years and years with just the slightest maintenance. Instead, they’d be sent to City Dump! You could hear the hopeless sighs and crazed murmurings rising from every dark mound round about, a ghastly medley that seemed to swell louder every moment as more and more of the forlorn, abandoned objects became conscious of the energetic new appliances in their midst.
“You will never, never, never get away,” whispered a mad old cassette player in a cracked voice. “No, never! You will stay here like all the rest of us and rust and crack and turn to dust. And never get away.”
“We will, though,” said the toaster. “Just you wait and see.”
But how? That was the problem the toaster had to solve without further delay.
Now the surest way to solve any problem is to think about it, and that’s just what the toaster did. It thought with the kind of total, all-out effort you have to give to get a bolt off that’s rusted onto a screw. At first the bolt won’t budge, not the least bit, and the wrench may slip loose, and you begin to doubt that any amount of trying is going to accomplish your purpose. But you keep at it, and use a dab of solvent if there’s any on hand, and eventually it starts to give. You’re not even sure but you think so. And then, what do you know, it’s off! You’ve done it! That’s the way the toaster thought, and at last, because he thought so hard, he thought of a way they could escape from the pirate and rescue the radio at the same time.
“Now here’s my plan,” said the toaster to the ot
her appliances, which had gathered round him in the darkest corner of the dump. “We’ll frighten him, and that will make him run away, and when he’s gone we’ll go into his shack—”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” said the blanket with a shiver of dread.
“We’ll go into his shack,” the toaster insisted calmly, “and get the radio and put it inside the baby buggy and get in ourselves, all except the Hoover, of course, which will high-tail it out of this place just as fast as it can.”
“But won’t the gate be locked?” the lamp wanted to know. “It is now.”
“No, because the pirate will have to unlock it to get out himself, and he’ll be too frightened to remember to lock it behind him.”
“It’s a very good plan,” said the Hoover, “but what I don’t understand is—how are we going to frighten him?”
“Well, what are people afraid of the most?”
“Getting run over by a steam roller?” the Hoover guessed.
“No. Scarier than that.”
“Moths?” suggested the blanket.
“No.”
“The dark,” declared the lamp with conviction.
“That’s close,” said the toaster. “They’re afraid of ghosts.”
“What are ghosts?” demanded the Hoover.
“Ghosts are people who are dead, only they’re also sort of alive.”
“Don’t be silly,” said the lamp. “Either they are dead or they aren’t.”
“Yes,” the blanket agreed. “It’s as simple as ON and OFF. If you’re ON, you can’t be OFF, and vice versa.”
“I know that, and you know that, but people don’t seem to. People say they know that ghosts don’t exist but they’re afraid of them anyhow.”
“No one can be afraid of something that doesn’t exist,” the Hoover huffed.
“Don’t ask me how they do it,” said the toaster. “It’s what they call a paradox. The point is this—people are afraid of ghosts. And so we’re going to pretend to be one.”
“How?” asked the Hoover skeptically.
“Let me show you. Stoop down. Lower. Wrap your cord around my cord. Now—lift me up…”
After an hour’s practice of pretending to be a ghost, they decided they were ready. Carefully, so that the other appliances wouldn’t fall off, the old Hoover trundled toward the window of the shack. The toaster, where it was balanced atop the handle of the vacuum, was just able to see inside. There on a table between a stack of unwashed dishes and the pirate’s ring of keys was the poor captive radio, and there, in dirty striped pajamas, getting ready to go to bed, was the pirate.
“Ready?” the toaster whispered.
The blanket, which was draped over the vacuum in a roughly ghostlike shape with a kind of hood at the top through which the toaster was able to peer out, adjusted its folds one last time. “Ready,” the blanket replied.
“Ready?” the toaster asked again.
For just a moment the lamp, where it was hidden halfway down the handle of the Hoover, turned itself on and then, quickly off. The bulb it had taken from the socket in the ceiling of the pickup truck had only half the wattage it was used to, and so its beam of light was noticeably dimmer—just enough to make the blanket give off the faintest yellowish glow.
“Then let’s start haunting,” said the toaster.
That was the signal the Hoover had been waiting for.
“Whoo!” groaned the Hoover in its deepest, most quivery voice. “Whoo!”
The pirate looked up with alarm. “Who’s there?” he demanded.
“Whoo—oo!” the Hoover continued.
“Whoever you are, you’d better go away.”
“Whoo—oo—oo!”
Cautiously the pirate approached the window from which the groaning seemed to issue.
Upon receiving a secret electric signal from the toaster, the vacuum crept quietly alongside the shack to where they would be out of sight from the window.
“Whoo…” breathed the Hoover in the barest of whispers. “Whoo… Whoo—oo…”
“Who’s out there?” the pirate demanded, pressing his nose against the pane of glass and peering into the outer darkness. “You’d better answer me. Do you hear?”
In answer the Hoover made a strangling, gurgling, gaspy sound that sounded frightening even if you knew it was only the Hoover doing it. By now the pirate, who didn’t have any idea what this mysterious groaning might be, had got into a considerable state of nerves. When you live all alone in the City Dump you don’t expect to hear strange noises just outside your window in the middle of the night. And if you were also a bit superstitious, as pirates tend to be…
“All right then—if you won’t say who you are, I’m going to come out there and find out!” He lingered yet a while before the window, but at last, when no reply was forthcoming, the pirate pulled on his pants and then got into his boots. “I’m warning you!” he called out, though not in a tone that could be called threatening.
Still there was no reply. The pirate took up his key ring from where it lay on the table beside the radio. He went to the door.
He opened it.
“Now!” said the toaster, signaling secretly to the blanket along its electric cord.
“I can’t,” said the blanket, all atremble. “I’m too afraid.”
“You must!”
“I mustn’t: it’s against the rules.”
“We discussed all that before, and you promised. Now hurry—before he gets here!”
With a shudder of trepidation the blanket did as it was bidden. There was a rent in its side where it had been pierced by a branch on the night it was blown up into the tree. The lamp was hiding just behind this rent. As the pirate appeared around the corner of the shack, the blanket twitched the torn fabric aside.
The pirate stopped short in his tracks when he saw the shrouded figure before him.
“Whoo—oo!” groaned the Hoover one last time.
At this cue the lamp turned itself on. Its beam slanted up through the hole in the blanket right into the pirate’s face.
When the lamp lit up, the pirate stared at the figure before him with the utmost horror. What he saw that was so frightening was the same thing the daisy had seen, the same thing Harold and Marjorie had seen, as well—he saw his own features reflected in the toaster’s mottled chrome. And as he had been a very wicked person from his earliest youth, his face had taken on that special kind of ugliness that only very evil people’s faces acquire. Seeing such a face grimacing at him from this strange hooded figure, what was the pirate to suppose but that he had come upon the most dangerous kind of ghost, the kind that understands exactly who we are and knows all the wrong things we’ve done and intends to punish us for them. From such ghosts even grown-up pirates will flee in terror. Which is exactly what the pirate did.
As soon as he was gone, the appliances rushed into the pirate’s shack and rescued the joyful radio. Then before the pirate could return they scrambled into the baby buggy, and the old Hoover drove off with them as fast as its wheels would revolve.
As luck would have it, they didn’t have much farther to go: where the master lived on Newton Avenue was only a mile or so from City Dump. They reached his apartment building early in the morning before a single milk truck had appeared on the street.
“You see,” said the toaster cheerfully, “in the end everything really does work out for the best.”
Alas, the toaster had spoken too soon. Their tribulations were not yet at an end, and not everything would work out for the best, as they were shortly to discover.
The Hoover, which had an instinctive knack for such things, buzzed the street door open and summoned the automatic elevator. When the elevator door slid open, it wheeled the pram in and pressed the button for the 14th floor.
“It’s changed so,” said the tensor lamp, as the Hoover pushed the pram out of the elevator and down the corridor. “The wallpaper used to be green squiggles and white blobs, and now it’s crisscross l
ines.”
“It’s we who’ve changed,” said the blanket miserably.
“Hush,” said the Hoover sternly. “Remember the rules!” It pressed the doorbell beside the door to the master’s apartment.
All the appliances kept perfectly still.
No one came to the door.
“Maybe he’s asleep,” said the alarm clock/radio.
“Maybe he’s not home,” said the Hoover. “I’ll see.” It rang the doorbell again, but in a different way so that only the appliances in the apartment would be able to hear it ring.
In only a moment a Singer sewing machine answered the door. “Yes?” said the sewing machine in a tone of polite curiosity. “Can I help you?”
“Oh, excuse me, I seem to have made a mistake.” The Hoover looked at the number on the door, then at the name on the brass panel over the bell. It was the right number, the right name. But… a sewing machine?
“Is that… ?” said a familiar voice within the apartment. “Why, it is! It’s the old Hoover! How are you? Come in! Come in!”
The Hoover wheeled the pram into the apartment and over the deep-piled carpet toward the friendly old TV.
The blanket peeked out shyly over the side of the pram.
“And who’s that with you? Come out—don’t be shy. My goodness, what a treat this is.”
The blanket crawled out of the pram, taking care to keep the worst effects of the journey folded up out of sight. It was followed by the radio, the lamp, and, last of all, the toaster.
The TV, which knew all five of them from the time it had spent with the master at the summer cottage, introduced them to the many appliances from all over the apartment which had begun to gather in the living room. Some, like the Water Pik, the blender, and the TV itself, were old friends. Some, like the stereo and the clock on the mantel, were known to the four appliances that had lived in the apartment at one time themselves but not to the toaster. But a great many were complete strangers to them all. There were huge impractical ginger-jar lamps squatting on low tables and, out of the bedroom, dim little lamps with frilly shades and other lamps screwed into the dining-nook wall that were pretending to be candleflames. Out of the kitchen had trooped a whole tribe of unfamiliar gadgets: a crockpot, a can opener, a waffle iron, a meat grinder, a carving knife, and, somewhat abashedly, the master’s new toaster.
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