The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories

by Ray Bradbury

  Julia glanced up smiling. The smile became a stare. She closed the catalogue.

  “Hogan!” she stated, in the exact tone of her pa, Whitey Allison, refusing a last one to a customer in Whitey’s liquor store in town, “you’re plain drunk! Don’t shake your head— it’ll slop out your ears!”

  “Julia—” Hogan began excitedly.

  She stepped up to him and sniffed, wrinkling her nose. “Pfaah! Beer! Yes, darling?”

  “Julia, I just saw something—a sort of crazy little green spook—”

  Julia blinked twice.

  “Look, infant,” she said soothingly, “that’s how people get talked about! Sit down and relax while I make up coffee, black. There’s a couple came in this morning, and I stuck them in the end cabin. They want the stove tanked with kerosene, ice in the icebox, and wood for a barbecue—I fixed them up with linen.”

  “Julia,” Hogan inquired hoarsely, “are you going to listen to me or not?”

  Her smile vanished. “Now you’re yelling!”

  “I’m not yelling. And I don’t need coffee. I’m trying to tell you—”

  ‘Then do it without shouting!” Julia replaced the cover on the coffee can with a whack that showed her true state of mind, and gave Hogan an abused look which left him speechless.

  “If you want to stand there and sulk,” she continued immediately, “I might as well run along—I got to help pa in the store tonight.” That meant he wasn’t to call her up.

  She was gone before Hogan, struggling with a sudden desire to shake his Julia up and down for some time, like a cocktail, could come to a decision. So he went instead to see to the couple in the end cabin. Afterward he lay down bitterly and slept it off.

  When he woke up, Greenface seemed no more than a vague and very uncertain memory, an unaccountable scrap of afternoon nightmare—due to the heat, no doubt! Not to the beer: on that point Hogan and Julia remained in disagreement, however completely they became reconciled otherwise. Since neither was willing to bring the subject up again, it didn’t really matter.

  The next time Greenface was seen, it wasn’t Hogan who saw it.

  In mid-season, on the twenty-fifth of June, the success of Master Fishing Camp looked pretty well assured. Whitey Allison was hinting he’d be willing to advance money to have the old lodge rebuilt, as a wedding present. When Hogan came into camp for lunch everything was nice and peaceful, but before he got to the lodge steps, a series of piercing feminine shrieks from the direction of the north end cabin swung him around, running.

  Charging up to the cabin with a number of startled camp guests strung out behind him, Hogan heard a babble of excited talk shushed suddenly and emphatically within. The man who was vacationing there with his wife appeared at the door.

  “Old lady thinks she’s seen a ghost, or something!” he apologized with an embarrassed laugh. “Nothing you can do. I ... I’ll quiet her down, I guess—”

  Waving the others away, Hogan ducked around behind the cabin and listened shamelessly. Suddenly the babbling began again. He could hear every word of it.

  “I did so see it I It was sort of blue and green and wet— and it had a green face and it s-s-smiled at me! It fl-floated up a tree and disappeared! Oh—G-G-Georgie!”

  Georgie continued to make soothing sounds. But before nightfall, he came into the lodge to pay his bill.

  “Sorry, old man,” he said—he still seemed more embarrassed than upset—”I can’t imagine what the little woman saw but she’s got her mind made up, and we gotta go home. You know how it is. I sure hate to leave, myself!”

  Hogan saw them off with a sickly smile. Uppermost among his own feelings was a sort of numbed, horrified vindication. A ghost that was blue and green and wet and floated up trees and disappeared, was a far from exact description of the little monstrosity he’d persuaded himself he hadn’t seen—but still too near it to be a coincidence. Julia, driving out from town to see him next day, didn’t think it was a coincidence, either.

  “You couldn’t possibly have told that hysterical old goose about the funny little green thing you thought you saw? She got confidential in the liquor store last night, and her hubby couldn’t hush her. Everybody was listening. That sort of stuff won’t do the camp any good, Hogan!”

  Hogan looked helpless. If he told her about the camp haunt, she wouldn’t believe him anyhow. And if she did, it would scare her silly.

  “Well?” she urged suspiciously.

  Hogan sighed. “Never spoke more than a dozen words with the woman—”

  Julia seemed miffed but puzzled. There was a peculiar oily hothouse smell in the air when Hogan walked up to the road with her and watched her start back to town in her ancient car, but with a nearly sleepless night behind him, he wasn’t as alert as he might have been. He was recrossing the long, narrow meadow between the road and the camp before the extraordinary quality of that odor struck him. And then, for the second time, he found himself looking at Greenface—at a bigger Greenface and not a better one.

  About sixty feet away, up in the birches on the other side of the meadow, it was almost completely concealed: an indefinable oval of darker vegetable green in the thick foliage. Its markings were obscured by the leaf shadows among which it lay motionless except for that sluggish pulsing.

  Hogan stared at it for long seconds while his scalp crawled and his heart hammered a thudding alarm into every fiber of his body. What scared him was its size—that oval was as big as a football; it had been growing at a crazy rate since he saw it last!

  Swallowing hard, he mopped off the sweat that was starting out on his forehead while he walked on stiffly toward the lodge. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to scare it off! He had an automatic shotgun slung above the kitchen door, for emergencies; and a dose of No. 2 shot would turn this particular emergency into a museum specimen—

  Around the corner of the lodge, he went up the entrance steps four at a time. A few seconds later, with the gun in his hands and reaching for a handful of shells, he shook his head to drive a queer soundless buzzing out of his ears. Instantly, he remembered when he’d experienced that sensation before and wheeled toward the screened kitchen window.

  The big birch trembled slightly as if horrified to see a huge spider with jade-green body and blurred cluster of threadlike legs flow down along its trunk. Twelve feet from the ground, it let go of the tree and dropped with the long bunched threads stretched straight down before it. Hogan grunted and blinked.

  It happened before his eyes: at the instant the bunched tips hit the ground, Greenface was jarred into what could only be called a higher stage of visibility. There was no change in the head, but the legs abruptly became flat, faintly greenish ribbons, flexible and semitransparent. Each about six inches wide and perhaps six feet long, they seemed attached in a thick fringe all around the lower part of the head, like a Hawaiian dancer’s grass skirt. They showed a bluish gloss wherever the sun struck them, but Greenface didn’t wait for a closer inspection.

  Off it went, swaying and gliding swiftly on the ends of these foot ribbons into the woods beyond the meadow. For all the world, it did look like a conventional ghost, the ribbons glistening in a luxurious winding sheet around the area where a body should have been, but wasn’t! No wonder that poor woman—

  He found himself giggling helplessly. Forcing himself to stop, he laid the gun upon the kitchen table. Then he tried to control the shaking of his hands long enough to get a cigarette going.

  Long before the middle of July, every last tourist had left Masters Fishing Camp in a more or less perturbed condition. Vaguely, Hogan sensed it was unfortunate that two of his attempts to dispose of Greenface had been observed while his quarry remained unseen. It wasn’t, of course, his fault if the creature chose to exercise an uncanny ability to become almost completely invisible at will—nothing more than a tall, glassy blur which flickered off through the woods and was gone. And it wasn’t until he drove into town one evening that he realized how unfortunate that lit
tle trick was, nevertheless, for him.

  Whitey Allison’s greeting seemed brief and chilly, while Julia delayed putting in an appearance for almost half an hour. Hogan waited patiently enough.

  “You might pour me a Scotch,” he suggested at last.

  Whitey passed him a significant look.

  “Better lay off the stuff,” he advised heavily. Hogan flushed red.

  “What you mean by that?”

  “There’s plenty of funny stories going around about you right now!” Whitey told him, blinking belligerently. Then he looked past Hogan, and Hogan knew Julia had come into the store behind him; but he was too angry to drop the matter there.

  “What do you expect me to do about them?” he demanded.

  “That’s no way to talk to pa!”

  Julia’s voice was sharper than Hogan had ever heard it— he swallowed hard and tramped out of the liquor store without looking at her. Down the street he had a couple of drinks; and coming past the store again on the way to his car, he saw Julia behind the counter laughing and chatting with a group of summer residents. She seemed to be having a grand time; her gray eyes sparkled and there was a fine high color in her cheeks.

  Hogan snarled out the worst word he knew and went on home. It was true he’d grown accustomed to an impressive dose of whiskey at night, to put him to sleep. At night, Green-face wasn’t abroad and there was no sense in lying awake to wonder and worry about it. On warm, clear days around noon was the time to be on the alert; twice Hogan caught it basking in the treetops in full sunlight and each time took a long shot at it, which had no effect beyond scaring it into complete visibility. It dropped out of the tree like a rotten fruit and scudded off into the bushes, its foot ribbons weaving and flapping all about it.

  Well, it all added up. Was it surprising if he seemed constantly on the watch for something nobody else could see? When the camp cabins grew empty one by one and stayed empty, Hogan told himself that he preferred it that way. Now he could devote all his time to tracking down that smiling haunt and finishing it off! Afterward would have to be early enough to repair the damage it had done his good name and bank balance.

  He tried to keep Julia out of these calculations. Julia hadn’t been out to the camp for weeks; and under the circumstances he didn’t see how he could do anything now to patch up their misunderstanding.

  After being shot at the second time, Greenface remained out of sight for so many days that Hogan almost gave up hunting for it. He tramped morosely down into the lodge cellar one afternoon and pulled a banana from a cluster he’d got from the wholesale grocer in town. Wedged in under the fruit he found the tiny mummified body of a hummingbird, some tropical species with a long curved beak and long ornamental tail feathers.

  Except for beak and feathers, it would have been unrecognizable: bones, flesh and skin were shriveled together into a small lump of doubtful consistency, like dried gum. Hogan, reminded of the dead snake from which he had driven Greenface near the icehouse, handled it with fingers that shook a little. In part, at least, the hummingbird seemed to explain the origin of the camp spook.

  Greenface was, of course, carnivorous, in some weird, out-of-the-ordinary fashion. The snake had been an indication, and since then birds of every type were growing shy around the camp, while red squirrels and chipmunks disappeared without trace. When that banana cluster was shipped from Brazil or some island in the Caribbean, Greenface—a seedling Greenface, very much smaller even than when Hogan first saw it—had come along with it, clinging to its hummingbird prey!

  But during the transition, something—perhaps merely the touch of the colder North—must hav.e removed some internal check on its growth which still seemed to be progressing in a jerky and unpredictable fashion. For though it appeared to lack any solid parts that might resist decomposition after death, creatures of such size and conforming to no recognizable pattern of either the vegetable or the animal kingdoms, couldn’t very well be in existence anywhere without finally attracting human attention. Whereas, if they grew normally to be only a foot or two high in those luxuriant tropical places, they seemed intelligent and alert enough to escape observation —even discounting that inexplicable knack of turning transparent from one second to the next!

  His problem, meanwhile, was a purely practical one; and the next time he grew aware of the elusive hothouse smell near the lodge, he had a plan ready laid. His nearest neighbor, Pete Jeffries, who provided Hogan with most of his provisions from a farm two miles down the road to town, owned a hound by the name of Old Battler—a large, surly brute with a strain of Airedale in its make-up and reputedly the best trailing nose in the county.

  Hogan’s excuse for borrowing Old Battler was a fat buck who’d made his headquarters in the marshy ground across the bay. Pete had no objection to that sort of business. He whistled the hound in and handed him over to Hogan with a parting admonition to “keep an eye peeled for them damn game wardens!” Pete and Old Battler were the slickest pair of poachers for a hundred miles around.

  The oily fragrance under the birches was so distinct that Hogan could almost have followed it himself. Unfortunately, it didn’t mean a thing to the dog. Panting and growling as Hogan, cradling the shotgun, brought him up on a leash, Old Battler was ready for any type of quarry from rabbits to a pig-stealing bear; but he simply wouldn’t or couldn’t understand that he was to track down that bloodless vegetable odor to its source!

  He walked off a few yards in the direction the thing had gone, nosing the grass; then, ignoring Hogan’s commands, he returned to the birch, smelled carefully around its base and paused to demonstrate in unmistakable fashion what he thought of the scent. Finally he sat on his haunches and regarded Hogan with a baleful, puzzled eye.

  There was nothing to do but take him back and tell Pete Jeffries the poaching excursion was off because the warden had put in an appearance. When Hogan got back to the lodge, he heard the telephone jingling above the cellar stairs and started for it with an eagerness that surprised himself.

  “Hello!” he shouted into the mouthpiece. “Hello? Julia? That you?”

  There was no answer from the other end. Hogan, listening, heard voices, several of them: people were laughing and talking. Then a door slammed faintly and someone called out: “Hi, Whitey! How’s the old man?” She had called up from the liquor store all right, perhaps just to see what he was doing. He thought he could even hear the faint flutter of her breath.

  “Julia,” Hogan said softly, scared by the silence. “What’s the matter, darling? Why don’t you say something?”

  Now he did hear her take a quick, deep breath. Then the receiver clicked down, and the line went dead.

  The rest of the afternoon, he managed to keep busy cleaning out the cabins that had been occupied. Counting back to the day the last of them was vacated, he decided the reason nobody had arrived since was that a hostile Whitey Allison, in his strategic position at the town bus stop, was directing all tourist traffic to other camps. Not—Hogan assured himself again—that he wanted anyone around until he had solved his problem; it would only make matters worse.

  But why had Julia called up? What did it mean?

  That night the moon was full. Near ten o’clock, with no more work to do, Hogan settled down wearily on the lodge steps. Presently he lit a cigarette. His intention was to think matters out to some conclusion in the quiet night air, but all he seemed able to do was to tell himself uselessly, over and over again, that there must be some way of trapping that elusive green horror!

  He pulled the sides of his face down slowly with his fingertips. “I gotta do something!”—the futile whisper seemed to have been running through his head all day: “Gotta do something! Gotta—” He’d be having a nervous collapse if he didn’t watch out!

  The rumbling barks of Jeffries’ Old Battler began to churn up the night to the eastward—and suddenly Hogan caught the characteristic tinny stutter of Julia’s little car as it turned down the road beyond the Jeffries farm and came
rattling on in the direction of the camp.

  The thrill that swung him to his feet was quenched at once by fresh doubts. Even if Julia was coming to tell him she’d forgiven him, he’d be expected to explain what was making him act like this. And he couldn’t explain it! If she actually believed him, it might affect her mind. If she didn’t she’d think he was crazy or lying—he couldn’t do it, Hogan decided despairingly. He’d have to send her away again!

  He took the big flashlight down from its hook beside the door and started off forlornly to meet her when she would bring the car bumping along the path from the road. Then he realized that the car, past Jeffries’ place but still a half mile or so away, had stopped.

  He waited, puzzled. From a distance he heard the creaky shift of gears, a brief puttering of the motor—another shift and putter. Then silence. Old Battler was also quiet, probably listening suspiciously; though he, too, knew the sound of Julia’s car. There was no one else to hear it; Jeffries had gone to the city with his wife that afternoon, and they wouldn’t be back till late next morning.

  Hogan frowned, flashing the light off and on against the moonlit side of the lodge. In the quiet, three or four whippoor-wills were crying to each other with insane rapidity up and down the lake front. There was a subdued shrilling of crickets everywhere, and occasionally the threefold soft call of an owl dropped across the bay. He started reluctantly up the path toward the road.

  The headlights were out, or he would have been able to see them from here. But the full moon sailed high, and the road was a narrow silver ribbon running straight down through the pines toward Jeffries’ farmhouse.

  Quite suddenly he discovered the car, drawn up beside the road and turned back toward town. It was Julia’s car all right; and it was empty. Hogan walked slowly toward it, peering right and left, then jerked around with a start to a sudden crashing noise among the pines a hundred yards or so down off the road—a scrambling animal rush that seemed to be moving toward the lake. An instant later, Old Battler’s angry roar told him the hound was running loose and had prowled into something it disapproved of down there.