by Ray Bradbury
‘What do you want?’ demanded Mr Charles Dickens.
‘We’ve come to plead with you again, Charles; we need your help,’ said Poe.
‘Help? Do you think I would help you fight against those good men coming in the rocket? I don’t belong here, anyway. My books were burned by mistake. I’m no supernaturalist, no writer of horrors and terrors like you, Poe; you, Bierce, or the others. I’ll have nothing to do with you terrible people!’
‘You are a persuasive talker,’ reasoned Poe. ‘You could go to meet the rocket men, lull them, lull their suspicions and then – then we would take care of them.’
Mr Dickens eyed the folds of the black cape which hid Poe’s hands. From it, smiling, Poe drew forth a black cat. ‘For one of our visitors.’
‘And for the others?’
Poe smiled again, well pleased. ‘The Premature Burial?’
‘You are a grim man, Mr Poe.’
‘I am a frightened and an angry man. I am a god, Mr Dickens, even as you are a god, even as we all are gods, and our inventions – our people, if you wish – have not only been threatened, but banished and burned, torn up and censored, ruined and done away with. The worlds we created are falling into ruin. Even gods must fight!’
‘So?’ Mr Dickens tilted his head, impatient to return to the party, the music, the food. ‘Perhaps you can explain why we are here? How did we come here?’
‘War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the year 2020 they outlawed our books. Oh, what a horrible thing – to destroy our literary creations that way! It summoned us out of – what? Death? The Beyond? I don’t like abstract things. I don’t know. I only know that our worlds and our creations called us and we tried to save them, and the only saving thing we could do was wait out the century here on Mars, hoping Earth might overweight itself with these scientists and their doubtings; but now they’re coming to clean us out of here, us and our dark things, and all the alchemists, witches, vampires, and were-things that, one by one, retreated across space as science made inroads through every country on Earth and finally left no alternative at all but exodus. You must help us. You have a good speaking manner. We need you.’
‘I repeat, I am not of you, I don’t approve of you and the others,’ cried Dickens angrily. ‘I was no player with witches and vampires and midnight things.’
‘What of A Christmas Carol?’
‘Ridiculous! One story. Oh, I wrote a few others about ghosts, perhaps, but what of that? My basic works had none of that nonsense!’
‘Mistaken or not, they grouped you with us. They destroyed your books – your worlds too. You must hate them, Mr Dickens!’
‘I admit they are stupid and rude, but that is all. Good day!’
‘Let Mr Marley come, at least!’
‘No!’
The door slammed. As Poe turned away, down the street, skimming over the frosty ground, the coachman playing a lively air on a bugle, came a great coach, out of which, cherry-red, laughing and singing, piled the Pickwickians, banging on the door, shouting Merry Christmas good and loud, when the door was opened by the fat boy.
Mr Poe hurried along the midnight shore of the dry sea. By fires and smoke he hesitated, to shout orders, to check the bubbling caldrons, the poisons and the chalked pentagrams. ‘Good!’ he said, and ran on. ‘Fine!’ he shouted, and ran again. People joined him and ran with him. Here were Mr Coppard and Mr Machen running with him now. And there were hating serpents and angry demons and fiery bronze dragons and spitting vipers and trembling witches like the barbs and nettles and thorns and all the vile flotsam and jetsam of the retreating sea of imagination, left on the melancholy shore, whining and frothing and spitting.
Mr Machen stopped. He sat like a child on the cold sand. He began to sob. They tried to soothe him, but he would not listen. ‘I just thought,’ he said. ‘What happens to us on the day when the last copies of our books are destroyed?’
The air whirled.
‘Don’t speak of it!’
‘We must,’ wailed Mr Machen. ‘Now, now, as the rocket comes down, you, Mr Poe; you, Coppard; you, Bierce – all of you grow faint. Like wood smoke. Blowing away. Your faces melt—’
‘Death! Real death for all of us.’
‘We exist only through Earth’s sufferance. If a final edict tonight destroyed our last few works we’d be like lights put out.’
Coppard brooded gently. ‘I wonder who I am. In what Earth mind tonight do I exist? In some African hut? Some hermit, reading my tales? Is he the lonely candle in the wind of time and science? The flickering orb sustaining me here in rebellious exile? Is it him? Or some boy in a discarded attic, finding me, only just in time! Oh, last night I felt ill, ill, ill to the marrows of me, for there is a body of the soul as well as a body of the body, and this soul body ached in all of its glowing parts, and last night I felt myself a candle, guttering. When suddenly I sprang up, given new light! As some child, sneezing with dust, in some yellow garret on Earth once more found a worn, time-specked copy of me! And so I’m given a short respite!’
A door banged wide in a little hut by the shore. A thin short man, with flesh hanging from him in folds, stepped out and, paying no attention to the others, sat down and stared into his clenched fists.
‘There’s the one I’m sorry for,’ whispered Blackwood. ‘Look at him, dying away. He was once more real than we, who were men. They took him, a skeleton thought, and clothed him in centuries of pink flesh and snow beard and red velvet suit and black boot; made him reindeers, tinsel, holly. And after centuries of manufacturing him they drowned him in a vat of Lysol, you might say.’
The men were silent.
‘What must it be on Earth?’ wondered Poe. ‘Without Christmas? No hot chestnuts, no tree, no ornaments or drums or candles – nothing; nothing but the snow and wind and the lonely, factual people.…’
They all looked at the thin little old man with the scraggly beard and faded red velvet suit.
‘Have you heard his story?’
‘I can imagine it. The glitter-eyed psychiatrist, the clever sociologist, the resentful, froth-mouthed educationalist, the antiseptic parents—’
‘A regrettable situation,’ said Bierce, smiling, ‘for the Yuletide merchants who, toward the last there, as I recall, were beginning to put up holly and sing Noel the day before Halloween. With any luck at all this year they might have started on Labor Day!’
Bierce did not continue. He fell forward with a sigh. As he lay upon the ground he had time to say only, ‘How interesting.’ And then, as they all watched, horrified, his body burned into blue dust and charred bone, the ashes of which fled through the air in black tatters.
‘Bierce, Bierce!’
‘Gone!’
‘His last book gone. Someone on Earth just now burned it.’
‘God rest him. Nothing of him left now. For what are we but books, and when those are gone, nothing’s to be seen.’
A rushing sound filled the sky.
They cried out, terrified, and looked up. In the sky, dazzling it with sizzling fire clouds, was the rocket! Around the men on the seashore lanterns bobbed; there was a squealing and a bubbling and an odor of cooked spells. Candle-eyed pumpkins lifted into the cold clear air. Thin fingers clenched into fists and a witch screamed from her withered mouth:
‘Ship, ship, break, fall!
Ship, ship, burn all!
Crack, flake, shake, melt!
Mummy dust, cat pelt!’
‘Time to go,’ murmured Blackwood. ‘On to Jupiter, on to Saturn or Pluto.’
‘Run away?’ shouted Poe in the wind. ‘Never!’
‘I’m a tired old man!’
Poe gazed into the old man’s face and believed him. He climbed atop a huge boulder and faced the ten thousand gray shadows and green lights and yellow eyes on the hissing wind.
‘The powders!’ he shouted.
A thick hot smell of bitter almond, civet, cumin, wormseed and orris!
> The rocket came down – steadily down, with the shriek of a damned spirit! Poe raged at it! He flung his fists up and the orchestra of heat and smell and hatred answered in symphony! Like stripped tree fragments, bats flew upward! Burning hearts, flung like missiles, burst in bloody fireworks on the singed air. Down, down, relentlessly down, like a pendulum the rocket came. And Poe howled, furiously, and shrank back with every sweep and sweep of the rocket cutting and ravening the air! All the dead sea seemed a pit in which, trapped, they waited the sinking of the dread machinery, the glistening ax; they were people under the avalanche!
‘The snakes!’ screamed Poe.
And luminous serpentines of undulant green hurtled toward the rocket. But it came down, a sweep, a fire, a motion, and it lay panting out exhaustions of red plumage on the sand, a mile away.
‘At it!’ shrieked Poe. ‘The plan’s changed! Only one chance! Run! At it! At it! Drown them with our bodies! Kill them!’
And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself free from primeval beds, the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea sands, down empty river deltas, shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the farthest hollow. As if a great charred caldron of sparkling lava had been overturned, the boiling people and snapping animals churned down the dry fathoms.
‘Kill them!’ screamed Poe, running.
The rocket men leaped out of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about, sniffing the air like hounds. They saw nothing. They relaxed.
The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered, kindled, and a fire leaped up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a half circle about him.
‘A new world,’ he said, forcing himself to speak deliberately, though he glanced nervously, now and again, over his shoulder at the empty sea. ‘The old world left behind. A new start. What more symbolic than that we here dedicate ourselves all the more firmly to science and progress.’ He nodded crisply to his lieutenant. ‘The books.’
Firelight limned the faded gilt titles: The Willows, The Outsider, Behold, The Dreamer, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Land of Oz, Pellucidar, The Land That Time Forgot, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the monstrous names of Machen and Edgar Allan Poe, and Cabell and Dunsany and Blackwood and Lewis Carroll; the names, the old names, the evil names.
‘A new world. With a gesture, we burn the last of the old.’
The captain ripped pages from the books. Leaf by seared leaf, he fed them into the fire.
A scream!
Leaping back, the men stared beyond the firelight at the edges of the encroaching and uninhabited sea.
Another scream! A high and wailing thing, like the death of a dragon and the thrashing of a bronzed whale left gasping when the waters of a leviathan’s sea drain down the shingles and evaporate.
It was the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, where, a moment before, there had been something!
The captain neatly disposed of the last book by putting it into the fire.
The air stopped quivering.
Silence!
The rocket men leaned and listened.
‘Captain, did you hear it?’
‘No.’
‘Like a wave, sir. On the sea bottom! I thought I saw something. Over there. A black wave. Big. Running at us.’
‘You were mistaken.’
‘There, sir!’
‘What?’
‘See it? There! The city! Way over! That green city near the lake! It’s splitting in half. It’s falling!’
The men squinted and shuffled forward.
Smith stood trembling among them. He put his hand to his head as if to find a thought there. ‘I remember. Yes, now I do. A long time back. When I was a child. A book I read. A story. Oz, I think it was. Yes, Oz, The Emerald City of Oz …’
‘Oz? Never heard of it.’
‘Yes, Oz, that’s what it was. I saw it just now, like in the story. I saw it fall.’
‘Smith!’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Report for psychoanalysis tomorrow.’
‘Yes, sir!’ A brisk salute.
‘Be careful.’
Then men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship’s aseptic light to gaze at the long sea and the low hills.
‘Why,’ whispered Smith, disappointed, ‘there’s no one here at all, is there? No one here at all.’
The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.
At Midnight, in the Month of June
He had been waiting a long, long time in the summer night, as the darkness pressed warmer to the earth and the stars turned slowly over the sky. He sat in total darkness, his hands lying easily on the arms of the Morris chair. He heard the town clock strike nine and ten and eleven, and then at last twelve. The breeze from an open back window flowed through the midnight house in an unlit stream, that touched him like a dark rock where he sat silently watching the front door – silently watching.
At midnight, in the month of June.…
The cool night poem by Mr Edgar Allan Poe slid over his mind like the waters of a shadowed creek.
The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
He moved down the black shapeless halls of the house, stepped out of the back window, feeling the town locked away in bed, in dream, in night. He saw the shining snake of garden hose coiled resiliently in the grass. He turned on the water. Standing alone, watering the flower bed, he imagined himself a conductor leading an orchestra that only night-strolling dogs might hear, passing on their way to nowhere with strange white smiles. Very carefully he planted both feet and his tall weight into the mud beneath the window, making deep, well-outlined prints. He stepped inside again and walked, leaving mud, down the absolutely unseen hall, his hands seeing for him.
Through the front porch window he made out the faint outline of a lemonade glass, one-third full, sitting on the porch rail where she had left it. He trembled quietly.
Now, he could feel her coming home. He could feel her moving across town, far away, in the summer night. He shut his eyes and put his mind out to find her; and felt her moving along in the dark; he knew just where she stepped down from a curb and crossed a street, and up on a kerb and tack-tacking, tack-tacking along under the June elms and the last of the lilacs, with a friend. Walking the empty desert of night, he was she. He felt a purse in his hands. He felt long hair prickle his neck, and his mouth turn greasy with lipstick. Sitting still, he was walking, walking, walking on home after midnight.
‘Good night!’
He heard but did not hear the voices, and she was coming nearer, and now she was only a mile away and now only a matter of a thousand yards, and now she was sinking, like a beautiful white lantern on an invisible wire, down into the cricket- and frog- and water-sounding ravine. And he knew the texture of the wooden ravine stairs as if, a boy, he was rushing down them, feeling the rough grain and the dust and the leftover heat of the day.…
He put his hands out on the air, open. The thumbs of his hands touched, and then the fingers, so that his hands made a circle, enclosing emptiness, there before him. Then, very slowly, he squeezed his hands tighter and tighter together, his mouth open, his eyes shut.
He stopped squeezing and put his hands, trembling, back on the arms of the chair. He kept his eyes shut.
Long ago, he had climbed, one night, to the top of the courthouse tower fire escape, and looked out at the silver town, at the town of the moon, and the town of summer. And he had seen all the dark houses with two things in them, people and sleep, the two elements joined in bed and all their tiredness and terror breathed upon the still air, siphoned back quietly, and breathed out again, until that element was purified, the problems and hatreds and horrors of the previous day exorcized long before morning and done away with forever.
He had been enc
hanted with the hour, and the town, and he had felt very powerful, like the magic man with the marionettes who strung destinies across a stage on spider threads. On the very top of the courthouse tower he could see the least flicker of leaf turning in the moonlight five miles away; the last light, like a pink pumpkin eye, wink out. The town did not escape his eye – it could do nothing without his knowing its every tremble and gesture.
And so it was tonight. He felt himself a tower with the clock in it pounding slow and announcing hours in a great bronze tone, and gazing upon a town where a woman, hurried or slowed by fitful gusts and breezes now of terror and now of self-confidence, took the chalk white midnight sidewalks home, fording solid avenues of tar and stone, drifting among fresh cut lawns, and now running, running down the steps, through the ravine, up, up the hill, up the hill!
He heard her footsteps before he really heard them. He heard her gasping before there was a gasping. He fixed his gaze to the lemonade glass outside, on the banister. Then the real sound, the real running, the gasping, echoed wildly outside. He sat up. The footsteps raced across the street, the pavement, in a panic. There was a babble, a clumsy stumble up the porch steps, a key ratcheting the door, a voice yelling in a whisper, praying to itself. ‘Oh, God, dear God!’ Whisper! Whisper! And the woman crashing in the door, slamming it, bolting it, talking, whispering, talking to herself in the dark room.
He felt, rather than saw, her hand move toward the light switch.
He cleared his throat.
She stood against the door in the dark. If moonlight could have struck in upon her, she would have shimmered like a small pool of water on a windy night. He felt the fine sapphire jewels come out upon her face, and her face all glittering with brine.
‘Lavinia,’ he whispered.
