by Ray Bradbury
He went to answer it. The landlord was there. ‘You’ll have to stop shouting,’ he said. ‘The neighbors are complaining.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Joe, stepping outside and half shutting the door. ‘We’ll try to be quiet—’
Then he heard the running feet. Before he could turn, the door slammed and locked. He heard Annie cry out triumphantly. He hammered at the door. ‘Annie, let me in, you fool!’
‘Now, take it easy, Mr Tiller,’ cautioned the landlord.
‘That little idiot in there, I’ve got to get inside—’
He heard the voices again, the loud and the high voices, and the shrill wind blowing and the dancing music and the glasses tinkling. And a voice saying, ‘Let him in, let him do whatever he wants. We’ll fix him. So he’ll never hurt us again.’
He kicked at the door.
‘Stop that,’ said the landlord. ‘I’ll call the police.’
‘Call them, then!’
The landlord ran to find a phone.
Joe broke the door down.
Annie was sitting on the far side of the room. The room was dark, only the light from a little ten-dollar radio illuminating it. There were a lot of people there, or maybe shadows. And in the center of the room, in the rocking chair, was the old woman.
‘Why, look who’s here,’ she said, enchanted.
He walked forward and put his fingers around her neck.
Ma Perkins tried to get free, screamed, thrashed, but could not.
He strangled her.
When he was done with her, he let her drop to the floor, the paring knife, the spilled peas flung everywhere. She was cold. Her heart was stopped. She was dead.
‘That’s just what we wanted you to do,’ said Annie tonelessly, sitting in the dark.
‘Turn the lights on,’ he gasped, reeling. He staggered back across the room. What was it, anyway? A plot? Were they going to enter other rooms, all around the world? Was Ma Perkins dead, or just dead here? Was she alive everywhere else?
The police were coming in the door, the landlord behind them. They had guns. ‘All right, buddy, up with them!’
They bent over the lifeless body on the floor. Annie was smiling. ‘I saw it all,’ she said. ‘He killed her.’ ‘She’s dead all right,’ said one of the policemen. ‘She’s not real, she’s not real,’ sobbed Joe. ‘She’s not real, believe me.’
‘She feels real to me,’ said the cop. ‘Dead as hell.’ Annie smiled.
‘She’s not real, listen to me, she’s Ma Perkins!’ ‘Yeah, and I’m Charlie’s aunt. Come on along, fellow!’ He felt himself turn and then it came to him, in one horrid rush, what it would be like from here on. After tonight, him taken away, and Annie returned home, to her radio, alone in her room for the next thirty years. And all the little lonely people and the other people, the couples, and groups all over the country in the next thirty years, listening and listening. And the lights changing to mists and the mists to shadows and the shadows to voices and the voices to shapes and the shapes to realities, until, at last, as here, all over the country, there would be rooms, with people in them, some real, some not, some controlled by unrealities, until all was a nightmare, one not knowable from the other. Ten million rooms with ten million old women named Ma peeling potatoes in them, chuckling, philosophizing. Ten million rooms in which some boy named Aldrich played with marbles on the floor. Ten million rooms where guns barked and ambulances rumbled. God, God, what a huge, engulfing plot. The world was lost, and he had lost it for them. It had been lost before he began. How many other husbands are starting the same fight tonight, doomed to lose at last, as he lost, because the rules of logic have been warped all out of shape by a little black evil electric box?
He felt the police snap the silver handcuffs tight.
Annie was smiling. And Annie would be here, night after night, with her wild parties and her laughter and travels, while he was far away.
‘Listen to me!’ he screamed.
‘You’re nuts!’ said the cop, and hit him.
On the way down the hall, a radio was playing.
In the warm light of the room as they passed the door, Joe peered swiftly in, one instant. There, by the radio, rocking, was an old woman, shelling some fresh green peas.
He heard a door slam far away and his feet drifted.
He stared at the hideous old woman, or was it a man, who occupied the chair in the center of the warm and swept-clean living room. What was she doing? Knitting, shaving herself, peeling potatoes? Shelling peas? Was she sixty, eighty, one hundred, ten million years old?
He felt his jaw clench and his tongue lie cold and remote in his mouth.
‘Come in,’ said the old woman–old man. ‘Annie’s fixing dinner in the kitchen.’
‘Who are you?’ he asked, his heart trembling.
‘You know me,’ the person said, laughing shrilly. ‘I’m Ma Perkins. You know, you know, you know.’
In the kitchen he held to the wall and his wife turned toward him with a cheese grater in her hand. ‘Darling!’
‘Who’s–who’s—’ He felt drunk, his tongue thick. ‘Who’s that person in the living room, how did she get here?’
‘Why, it’s only Ma Perkins, you know, from the radio,’ his wife said with casual logic. She kissed him a sweet kiss on the mouth. ‘Are you cold? You’re shaking.’
He had time only to see her nod a smile before they dragged him on.
Doubles
Bernard Trimble played tennis against his wife and when he beat her she was unhappy and when she beat him he was demon-possessed and double-damn madness unhappy, to put it mildly.
One summer, on a country road, in verdant Santa Barbara, Bernard Trimble was motoring along a farmland road with a beautiful and compatible lady of recent acquaintance in the seat beside him, her hair whipping in the wind, with her bright scarf snapping, and a look of philosophic tiredness on her face as from recent pleasant exertions, when an open roadster gunned past them going in the opposite direction, with a woman driving and a young man lounging beside her.
‘My God!’ cried Trimble.
‘Why’d you just cry “my God”?’ said the beautiful temptress at his side.
‘My wife just passed with the most terrible look on her face.’
‘What kind of look?’
‘Just like the one you have right now,’ said Trimble.
And he gunned the car down the road.
At an early dinner that night at the tennis club, with the sound of the tennis balls flying back and forth like soft doves, Trimble sat between two lit candles heartily devouring a bottle of wine. He growled when his wife finally arrived after much too long a shower and sat across from him wearing a spider-woven Spanish mantilla and a phosphorescent breath, like the breath of a twilight forest, sighing from her mouth.
He bent close to examine her chin, her cheeks, and her eyes.
‘No, it’s not there.’
‘What’s not there?’ she asked.
The look, he thought, of remembered and pleasant exertion.
She in turn bent forward, searching his face.
He leaned back in his chair and at last got the courage to say, ‘A strange thing happened this afternoon.’
His wife took a sip of wine and replied, ‘Strange, I was going to say somewhat the same thing.’
‘You first, then,’ he said.
‘No, go ahead. Tell me the strange thing.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I was driving along a country road outside town when a car passed, going the other way. There was a woman in it who looked very much like you. In the seat beside her, wearing an extravagantly rich white suit, his hair whipping in the wind and looking terribly and pleasantly tired, was the billionaire tennis-playing magnate Charles William Bishop. It was all over in a second and the car was gone. After all, we were traveling forty miles an hour.’
‘Eighty,’ said his wife. ‘Two cars passing each other in opposite directions at forty miles an hour, the aggregate i
s eighty.’
‘Oh yes,’ he agreed. ‘Well, wasn’t that strange?’
‘Indeed,’ said his wife. ‘Now let me tell you my strangeness. I was driving in a car this afternoon on a country road and a car passed at an accumulated eighty miles an hour and I thought I saw a man in it who looked very much like you. In the seat beside him was that beautiful heiress from Spain, Carlotta de Vega Montenegro. It was all over in a second and I was stunned and drove on. Two strange occurrences, yes?’
‘Have some more wine,’ he said quietly. He filled her glass much too full and they sat for a long while studying each other’s face and drinking the wine.
They listened to the soft sound of the dovelike tennis balls being struck and tossed through the twilight air; there seemed to be a lot of people out on the courts, enjoying themselves.
He cleared his throat and at last picked up a knife and began to run its edge along the tablecloth between them.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘this is the way we solve our two strange problems.’
With his knife he scored a long rectangle in the cloth and cut across it so that it resembled a metaphorical tennis court on the table.
Trimble and his wife looked across the net at the figures of Charles William Bishop and Carlotta de Vega Montenegro walking away, shaking their heads, their shoulders slumped in the noonday sun.
His wife lifted a towel to touch his cheek and he lifted one to touch hers.
‘Well done!’ he said.
‘Bull’s-eye!’ she said.
And they looked into each other’s face to find a look of tired contentment from recent amiable exertions.
Pater Caninus
Young Father Kelly edged his way into Father Gilman’s office, stopped, turned, and looked as if he might go back out, and then turned back again.
Father Gilman looked up from his papers and said, ‘Father Kelly, is there a problem?’
‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Father Kelly.
Father Gilman said, ‘Well, are you coming or going? Please, come in, and sit.’
Father Kelly slowly inched back in and at last sat and looked at the older man.
‘Well?’ said Father Gilman.
‘Well,’ said Father Kelly. ‘This is all very silly and very strange, and maybe I shouldn’t bring it up at all.’
Here he stopped. Father Gilman waited.
‘It has to do with that dog, Father.’
‘What dog?’
‘You know, the one here in the hospital. Every Tuesday and Thursday there’s that dog with the red bandanna that makes the rounds with Father Riordan, patrolling the first and second floors–around, up, down, in and out. The patients love that dog. It makes them happy.’
‘Ah, yes, I know the dog you mean,’ said Father Gilman. ‘What a gift it is to have animals like that in the hospital. But what is troubling you about this particular dog?’
‘Well,’ said Father Kelly. ‘Do you have a few minutes to come watch that dog, because he’s doing something very peculiar right now.’
‘Peculiar? How?’
‘Well, Father,’ said Father Kelly, ‘the dog has come back to the hospital twice this week already–on his own–and he’s here again now.’
‘Father Riordan isn’t with him?’
‘No, Father. That’s what I’m trying to get at. The dog is making his rounds, all on his own, without Father Riordan telling him where to go.’
Father Gilman chuckled. ‘Is that all? Clearly, he’s just a very smart dog. Like the horse that used to pull the milk wagon when I was a boy–it knew exactly which houses to stop and wait at without the milkman saying a word.’
‘No, no. He’s up to something. But, I’m not sure what, so I want you to come see for yourself.’
Sighing, Father Gilman rose and said, ‘All right, let’s go look at this most peculiar beast.’
‘This way, Father,’ said Father Kelly, and led him out into the hall and up the stairs to the second floor.
‘I think he’s somewhere here now, Father,’ said Father Kelly. ‘Ah, there.’
At which moment the dog with the red bandanna trotted out of room 17 and moved on, without looking at them, into room 18.
They stood outside the door and watched the dog who was sitting by the bed and seemed to be waiting.
The patient in the bed began to speak, and as Father Gilman and Father Kelly listened, they heard the man whispering while the dog sat there patiently.
Finally, the whispering stopped and the dog reached out a paw, touched the bed, waited a moment, and then came trotting out to move on to the next room.
Father Kelly looked at Father Gilman. ‘How does that strike you? What was he doing?’
‘Good Lord,’ said Father Gilman. ‘I think the dog was—’
‘What, Father?’
‘I think the dog was taking confession.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘Yes. Can’t be, but is.’
The two priests stood there in the semidarkness, listening to the voice of another patient whispering. They moved toward the door and looked in the room. The dog sat there quietly as the penitent unburdened his soul.
Finally they saw the dog reach out its paw to touch the bed, then turn and trot out of the room, hardly noticing them.
The two priests stood, riveted, and then silently followed.
At the next room the dog went to sit beside the bed. After a moment the patient saw the dog and smiled and said in a faint voice, ‘Oh, bless me.’
The dog sat quietly as the patient began to whisper.
They followed the dog along the hall, from room to room.
Along the way the young priest looked at the older one and noticed that Father Gilman’s face was beginning to contort and grow very red indeed, until the veins stood out on his brow.
Finally the dog finished its rounds and started down the stairs.
The two priests followed.
When they got to the hospital doors, the dog was starting out into the twilight; there was no one there to greet it or lead it away.
At which moment Father Gilman suddenly exploded and cried out: ‘You! You there! Dog! Don’t come back, you hear?! Come back and I’ll call damnation, hell, brimstone, and fire down on your head. You hear me, dog?! Go on, get out, go!’
The dog, startled, spun in a circle and bounded away.
The old priest stood there, his breathing heavy, eyes shut, and his face crimson.
Young Father Kelly gazed off into the dark.
Finally he gasped, ‘Father, what have you done?!’
‘Damnation,’ said the older priest. ‘That sinful, terrible, horrible beast!’
‘Horrible, Father?’ said Father Kelly. ‘Didn’t you hear what was said?’
‘I heard,’ said Father Gilman. ‘Taking it on himself to forgive, to offer penance, to hear the pleas of those poor patients!’
‘But, Father,’ cried Father Kelly. ‘Isn’t that what we do?’
‘And that’s our business,’ gasped Father Gilman. ‘Our business alone.’
‘Is that true, Father? Aren’t others like us?’ said Father Kelly. ‘I mean, in a good marriage, isn’t pillow talk in the middle of the night a kind of confession? Isn’t that the way young couples forgive and go on? Isn’t that somehow like us?’
‘Pillow talk!’ cried Father Gilman. ‘Pillow talk and dogs and sinful beasts!’
‘Father, he may not come back!’
‘Good riddance. I’ll not have such things in my hospital!’
‘My God, sir, didn’t you see? He’s a golden retriever. What a name. After an hour of listening to your penitents, to ask and forgive, wouldn’t you love to hear me call you that?’
‘Golden retriever?’
‘Yes. Think about it, Father,’ said the young priest. ‘Enough. Come. Let’s go back and see if that beast, as you call him, has done any harm.’
Father Kelly went back into the hospital. Moments later, the older priest followed. They wal
ked along the hall and looked in the rooms at the patients in their beds. A peculiar sound of silence hung over the place.
In one room they saw a look of strange peace.
In another room they heard whispering. Father Gilman thought he caught the name Mary, though he could not be sure.
