Killer, Come Back to Me

by Ray Bradbury

  Getting tired. Steve thought quickly. How much further? As far as I can go and be dead tired, and then about one block, two blocks farther, counting in the added strength of an athlete like Markham. That should make it.

  The shark came silent, swift and neat.

  Shining only faintly, bubbles trailing from it, it shot from dimness, the strength of it becoming hands, legs, a man’s face and body!

  Steve shouted under water! The anger only shot up in frothed foam!

  Markham!

  When you take someone into your arms it is to love or to kill. There was no love here. Only the shock of bodies throwing cushions of water, fingers coming up like spiders on Steve’s face, trying to poke into his eyes. Instinctively, he balled himself and kicked into that shimmering face, using it as a something to push on at the same time.

  Markham came back. This time Steve was ready and used the canal side for traction, striking ahead to meet him. They exploded upward into the fog world, yelling for air, and then down. Muscles and training are not good things to meet. The underwater world was no place for a guy who hadn’t been down in it for years.

  Markham swarmed over Steve as they sank in a fury of split water. When it came to holding breath Markham had lungs for it, big and long-trained. Just by holding onto Steve and sinking and staying on the bottom, he could win out. Steve would eventually breathe water.

  Markham tried that.

  Steve relaxed on purpose, just wriggling one arm, one hand. He saved his air, his legs locked against Markham’s. Funny. A guy named Markham. Fighting him underwater. Never seen his face before, can’t even see it now, thought Steve, and here I am fighting with a name and a lot of muscles and bubbles! They plummeted and struck the canal floor, like they were caught in the falling drapery of a stage’s scenery, long yards of green and black velvet tangled around them in the midst of a thunderstorm. Lightning blew Steve’s brain apart, he saw fires and comets behind closed eyes. Air! In another second his lungs would—

  Steve got his right hand on Markham’s nose, thrust sharply upward. Markham’s mouth broke open, an open trap, air gurgling out sharp, quick, awful. He broke away from Steve as a crab would, scuttling.

  Steve knew what happened next. Markham would rise up for air, come down again quick and hold Steve before Steve could get any air at all. Next time there’d be no failure. Only lungs getting cold and dead and soggy.

  Steve did it first. He came up, swearing. You can’t swear underwater, only in your mind. The swearing is caught in you, just as you are caught in the cold web of water. Steve swore to the night, the insane pulse of oil pumps, the ocean colliding in mighty blows upon some far beach. Then he fell down upon the upcoming Markham, and Markham was wriggling like bait in a can!

  Steve held his precious cache of air in raw lungs. His ears were shaking like hunks of tin hung in a high wind, beaten by great timbers of wood.

  This is for you, Charlie! He made a slow beat against the slime with Markham’s jerking head. For you, Charlie! And for Big Irish and the burning shack and old man Gerbelow and the man-shark that swam in calm waters and left no print but a trail of water where he came and went, that evaporated by morning and was gone!

  Two beats, three beats.

  “Give up your air, you bastard! Give up your air!”

  Four beats. Markham laxed. Steve held on in a tight fury. Held until the head got drowsy and all the air regurgitated. With an intake, a rushing, Markham breathed of the good cold canal water where children played in the old days, of the good cold canal water where Charlie and Steve and a little boy who grew up to be a shark played in the warm sun, where all three fell into it and, now, only one would come up alive!

  Steve held on until the intake was complete.

  A drowsy nightmare. He came up to the outer world, glad for lungs, glad for the miracle of air. He simply clung limp to the side of the canal for fifteen minutes and sucked in and breathed out, in and out, enjoying it.

  Then, treading water very slowly, he went down and found what had to be found, and taking it by the hand, swam slowly toward the end of the canal. It seemed a million miles away, so he took it easy, stopping every now and then, and going on again, like two kids going home hand in hand, one leading the other through the cold waters.

  The end of the canal. Steve thought of that, thought of Charlie walking, thought of the circus wagons; and then the ironic idea came of itself. With his last strength, he’d do it.

  The end of the canal. He reached it. He went under.

  When he came up, a moment later, alone, he heard noises. A siren coming in from the suburbs, car motors slowing down, brakes, doors opening. Steve climbed from the water. He heard car doors slam, feet running.

  The water ran off him in cold drippings. He shivered with it. His throat was raw, cold agony, and the world suddenly became six flashlights blazing over his wet body.

  Lisa was there, crying, suddenly. A siren was just dying. She grabbed hold of him.

  “Steve, Steve, you’re all right.”

  “Sure, sure, Lisa sweets. You’ll get yourself wet.”

  “Oh, Steve…”

  He let her shake against him, so warm, so sweet, and over her shoulder he closed his eyes, felt the water running from his dark hair, running, running. He thought, it’s raining in my brain. This’ll help wash away part of Charlie’s blood. Yeah. Wash away.

  His teeth chattering, holding onto Lisa like she was a warm buoy in a sea of fog, he forced the words out of himself:

  “Call the wagon. Get the hooks. There’s a new kind of animal down in one of those cages. I think I got him tamed. Yeah—”

  The lights turned down, burning the cold water through in slashes. Bars. Rusted Bars. And a white animal drifting sluggish behind the bars. Behind the bars. Behind the bars.

  Steve laughed crazy and held Lisa close.

  “Don’t go away.”

  Corpse Carnival

  It was unthinkable! Raoul recoiled from it, but was forced to face its reality because convulsions were surging sympathetically through his nervous system. Over him the tall circus banners in red, blue, and yellow fluttered somber and high in the night wind; the fat woman, the skeleton man, the armless, legless horrors, staring down at him with the same fierce hatred and violence they expressed in real life. Raoul heard Roger tugging at the knife in his chest.

  “Roger, don’t die! Hold on, Roger!” Raoul screamed.

  They lay side by side on the warm grass, a sprinkle of odorous sawdust under them. Through the wide flaps of the main tent, which flipped like the leathery wings of some prehistoric monster, Raoul could see the empty apparatus at the tent top where Deirdre, like a lovely bird, soared each night. Her name flashed in his mind. He didn’t want to die. He only wanted Deirdre.

  “Roger, can you hear me, Roger?”

  Roger managed to nod, his face clenched into a shapeless ball by pain. Raoul looked at that face: the thin, sharp lines; the pallor; the arrogant handsomeness; the dark, deep-set eyes; the cynical lip; the high forehead; the long black hair—and seeing Roger was like gazing into a mirror at one’s own death.

  “Who did it?” Raoul struggled, got his frantically working lips to Roger’s ear. “One of the other freaks? The Cyclops? Lal?”

  “I—I—” sobbed Roger. “Didn’t see. Dark. Dark. Something white, quick. Dark.” He sucked in a rattling breath.

  “Don’t die, Roger!”

  “Selfish!” hissed Roger. “Selfish!”

  “How can I be any other way; you know how I feel! Selfish! How would any man feel with half his body, soul, and life cast off, a leg amputated, an arm yanked away! Selfish, Roger. Oh, God!”

  The calliope ceased, the steam of it went on hissing, and Tiny Mathews, who had been practicing, came running through the summer grass, around the side of the tent.

  “Roger, Raoul, what happened!”

  “Get the doctor, quick, get the doctor!” gibbered Raoul. “Roger’s hurt badly. He’s been stabbed!”


  The midget darted off, mouselike, shrilling. It seemed like an hour before he returned with the doctor, who bent down and ripped Roger’s sequined blue shirt from his thin, wet chest.

  Raoul shut his eyes tight. “Doctor! Is he dead?”

  “Almost,” said the doctor. “Nothing I can do.”

  “There is,” whispered Raoul, reaching out, seizing the doctor’s coat, clenching it as if to crush away his fear. “Use your scalpel!”

  “No,” replied the doctor. “There are no antiseptic conditions.”

  “Yes, yes, I beg of you, cut us apart! Cut us apart before it’s too late! I’ve got to be free! I want to live! Please!”

  The calliope steamed and hissed and chugged; the brutal roustabouts looked down. Tears squeezed from under Raoul’s lids. “Please, there’s no need of both of us dying!”

  The doctor reached for his black bag. The roustabouts did not turn away as he ripped cloth and bared the thin spines of Raoul and Roger. A hypodermic load of sedative was injected efficiently.

  Then the doctor set to work at the thin epidermal skin structure that had joined Raoul to Roger, one to the other, ever since the day of their birth twenty-seven years before.

  Lying there Roger said nothing, but Raoul screamed.

  * * *

  Fever flooded him to the brim for days. Drenching the bed with sweat, crying out, he looked over his shoulder to talk with Roger but—Roger wasn’t there! Roger would never be there again!

  Roger had been there for twenty-seven years. They’d walked together, fallen together, liked and disliked together, one the echo of the other, one the mirror, slightly distorted by the other’s perverse individuality. Back to back they had fought the surrounding world. Now Raoul felt himself a turtle unshelled, a snail irretrievably dehoused from its armor. He had no wall to back against for protection. The world circled behind him now, came rushing in to strike his back!

  “Deirdre!”

  He cried her name in his fever, and at last saw her leaning over his bed, her dark hair drawn tight to a gleaming knot behind her ears. In memory, too, he saw her whirling one hundred times over on her hempen rope at the top of the tent in her tight costume. “I love you, Raoul. Roger’s dead. The circus is going on to Seattle. When you’re well, you can catch up with us. I love you, Raoul.”

  ‘‘Deirdre, don’t you go away too!”

  Weeks passed. Often he lay until dawn with the memory of Roger next to him in the old bondage. “Roger?” Silence. Long silence.

  Then he would look behind himself and weep. A vacuum lived there now. He must learn never to look back. How many months he hung on the raw edge of life, he had no accounting of. Pain, fear, horror, pressured him and he was reborn again in silence, alone, one instead of two, and life had to start all over.

  He tried to recall the murderer’s face or figure, but could not. Twisting, he thought of the days before the murder—Roger’s insults to the other freaks, his adamant refusal to get along with anyone, even his own twin. Raoul winced. The freaks hated Roger, even if Raoul gave them no irritation. They’d demanded that the circus get rid of the twins for once and all!

  Well, the twins were gone now. One into the earth. The other into a bed. And Raoul lay planning, thinking of the day when he might return to the show, hunting the murderer, to live his life, to see Father Dan, the circus owner, to kiss Deirdre again, to see the freaks and search their faces to see which one had done this to him. He would let no one know that he had not seen the killer’s face in the deep shadows that night. He would let the killer simmer in his juices, wondering if Raoul knew more than he had said!

  * * *

  It was a hot summer twilight. Animal odors sprang up all around him in infinite acrid varieties. Raoul walked across the tanbark uneasily, seeing the first evening star, unused to this freedom, always peering behind himself to make certain Roger wasn’t lagging.

  For the first time in his life Raoul realized he was being ignored! The sight of him and Roger had gathered crowds anywhere, anytime. And now the people looked only at the lurid canvases, and Raoul noticed, with a turn of his heart, that the canvas painting of himself and Roger had been taken down. There was an empty space, as if a tooth had been extracted from the midway. Raoul resented this sudden neglect, but at the same time he glowed with a new sensation of individuality.

  He could run! He wouldn’t have to tell Roger: “Turn here!” or “Watch it, I’m falling!” And he wouldn’t have to put up with Roger’s bitter comments: “Clumsy! No, no, not that direction. I want to go this way. Come on!”

  A red face poked out of a tent. “What the hell?” cried the man. “I’ll be damned! Raoul!” He plunged forward. “Raoul, you’ve come back! Didn’t recognize you because—” He glanced behind Raoul. “That is, well, dammit, welcome home!”

  “Hello, Father Dan!”

  Sitting in Father Dan’s tent they clinked glasses. Father Dan was a small, violently red-haired Irishman and he shouted a lot. “God, boy, it’s good to see you. Sorry the show had to push on, leave you behind that way. Lord! Deirdre’s been a sick cow over you, waiting. Now, now, don’t fidget, you’ll see her soon enough. Drink up that brandy.” Father Dan smacked his lips.

  Raoul drank his down, burning. “I never thought I’d come back. Legend says that if one Siamese twin dies, so does the other. I guess Doc Christy did a good job with his surgery. Did the police bother you much, Father Dan?”

  “A coupla days. Didn’t find a thing. They get after you?”

  “I talked a whole day with them before coming west. They let me go. I didn’t like talking to them anyway. This business is between Roger and me and the killer.” Raoul leaned back. “And now—”

  Father Dan swallowed thickly. “And now—” he muttered.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Raoul.

  “Me?” guffawed Father Dan too heartily, smacking Raoul’s knee. “You know I never think!”

  “The fact is, you know it, I know it, Papa Dan, that I’m no longer a Siamese twin,” said Raoul. His hand trembled. “I’m just Raoul Charles DeCaines, unemployed, no abilities other than gin rummy, playing a poor saxophone, and telling a very few feeble quips. I can raise tents for you, Papa Dan, or sell tickets, or shovel manure, or I might leap from the highest trapeze some night without a net; you could charge five bucks a seat. You’d have to break in a new man for that act every night.”

  “Shut up!” cried Father Dan, his pink face getting pinker. “Damn you, feeling sorry for yourself! Tell you what you’ll get from me, Raoul DeCaines—hard work! Damn right you’ll heave elephant manure and camel dung, but—maybe later when you’re strong, you can work the trapezes with the Condiellas.”

  “The Condiellas!” Raoul stared, not believing.

  “Maybe, I said. Just maybe!” retorted F.D., snorting. “And I hope you break your scrawny neck, damn you! Here, drink up, boy, drink up!”

  The canvas flap rattled, opened, a man with staring blind eyes set in a dark Hindu face felt his way inside. “Father Dan?”

  “I’m here,” said Father Dan. “Come in, Lal.”

  Lal hesitated, his thin nostrils drawing small. “Someone else here?” His body stiffened. “Ah.” Blind eyes shone wetly. “They are back. I smell the double sweat of them.”

  “It’s just me,” said Raoul, feeling cold, his heart pumping. “No,” insisted Lal gently. “I smell the two of you.” Lal groped forward in his own darkness, his delicate limbs moving in his old silks, the knife he used in his act gleaming at his waist.

  “Let’s forget the past, Lal.”

  “After Roger’s insults?” cried Lal softly. “Ah, no. After the two of you stole the show from us, treated us like filth, so we went on strike against you? Forget?”

  Lal’s blind eyes narrowed to slits. “Raoul, you had better go away. If you remain you will not be happy. I will tell the police about the split canvas, and then you will not be happy.”

  “The split canvas?”

 
; “The sideshow canvas painting of you and Roger in yellow and red and pink which hung on the runway with the printed words SIAMESE TWINS! on it. One night four weeks ago I heard a ripping sound in the dark. I ran forward and stumbled over the canvas. I showed it to the others. They told me it was the painting of you and Roger, ripped down the middle, separating you. If I tell the police of that, you will not be happy. I have kept the split canvas in my tent—”

  “What has that to do with me?” demanded Raoul angrily.

  “Only you can answer that,” replied Lal quietly. “Perhaps I’m blackmailing you. If you go away, I will not tell who it was who ripped the canvas in half that night. If you stay I may be forced to explain to the police why you yourself sometimes wished Roger dead and gone from you.”

  “Get out!” roared Father Dan. “Get out of here! It’s time for the show!”

  The tent flaps rustled; Lal was gone.

  * * *

  The riot began just as they were finishing off the bottle, starting with the lions roaring and jolting their cages until the bars rattled like loose iron teeth. Elephants trumpeted, camels humped skyward in clouds of dust, the electric light system blacked out, attendants ran shouting, horses burst from their roped stalls and rattled around the menagerie, spreading tumult; the lions roared louder, splitting the night down the seams; Father Dan, cursing, smashed his bottle to the ground and flung himself outside, swearing, swinging his arms, catching attendants, roaring directions into their startled ears. Someone screamed, but the scream was lost in the incredible dinning, the confusion, the chaotic hoofing of animals. A swell and tide of terror sounded from the throats of the crowd waiting by the boxes to buy tickets; people scattered, children squealed!

  Raoul grabbed a tent pole and hung on as a cluster of horses thundered past him.

  A moment later the lights came on again; the attendants gathered the horses together in five minutes. The damage was estimated as minor by a sweating, pink-faced, foul-tongued Papa Dan, and everything quieted down. Everybody was okay, except Lal, the Hindu. Lal was dead.