The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories

by Ray Bradbury

  It was possible, of course, that Horton himself had heard it and that his ability to repeat it now—note for note, Gresham would have sworn—could be attributed to a hypersensitive musical memory.

  But no. Gresham brought himself erect with a start. Horton had been on the stage at Carnegie Hall at the very time Shor-rer’s work was being performed on television. He couldn’t possibly have heard the composition before. Gresham’s pencil dropped from his quivering fingers. He arose from his piano, his mind paralyzed by the enormity of what had happened and by the apprehension of what migjit happen next. He paced the floor of the study, unable to transmit to paper the concluding phrases of his own work which lay, totally formed, in the recesses of his brain. Horton, he knew, had exhausted the past; he had caught up with his own time.

  The next evening Gresham stood in the wings of the concert hall as Horton strode across the stage, acknowledged his applause with a nod, and seated himself briskly at the piano. As his fingers poised over the keyboard, a gasp of expectation escaped Gresham’s tightened lips.

  Horton struck a series of brilliant chords, which dissolved into a delicate and poignant melody. Gradually, it subsided into a throbbing echo, low and ominous, as a new theme developed against it. The counterpoint became more and more intense, mounted to a delirious climax, then fell to a whisper from which issued the slow and ghostly theme of a new movement.

  The beauty of his own sonata was almost painful to Gresham and he was so transported by it that it was minutes before he realized that he was witnessing Horton’s transition from the past into the immediate present.

  As he listened almost hypnotically to the mathematical symbols that he had so painfully written materializing into exquisite sound at Horton’s touch, Gresham felt a surge of triumph. For to have been transmitted through Horton— didn’t this mean that the sonata had been given a place, alongside all the other works which the pianist had unwittingly performed, in the history of great music? Tears of fulfillment and gratitude began to dim Gresham’s eyes.

  Then, almost as quickly as it had risen in him, triumph began to ebb. For the whispers among the few other onlookers in the wings and the excited glances in the front rows of the audience told him something that he hardly dared to believe but knew he must face: The sonata would be credited to Horton! And Horton, he^knew, would never disown it! Nor could anyone deprive him of it—except by explaining the truth that was too fantastic, too obviously an insane figment of jealousy, to be believed.

  Gresham started away in disappointment, but one thought consoled him and drew him back. For he had not given the whole of his work to Horton after all. The sonata was unfinished—its concluding passages had not yet been committed to form but existed only as ideas which lay unwritten in Gresham’s mind. And when Horton, having exhausted both past and present, reached the boundaries of the future—what could he do? Gresham stood waiting, a bitter smile on his lips.

  He listened as the music rolled to a thunderous climax. Horton’s hands hung over the keyboard, gestured uncertainly and fell. The echo of a chord faded into the excruciating silence of the hall.

  Gresham felt a quick lift of hope, which turned in the same instant to horror, as Horton’s hands fluttered, then inexorably returned to the keyboard. The knowledge struck Gresham sickeningly that he would no more be able to stop himself from creating such music than he could stop Horton from playing it as his own, and he thought of all the years of music that would pour, as quickly as he conceived it, from his own mind into Horton’s waiting fingers.

  Transfixed and helpless, he stood listening as the music resumed and Horton played the concluding bars of the sonata.

  THE MAN WHO VANISHED by Robert M. Coates

  Charlie Ballantine had little warning at first of the way things were going with him, and no one ever did find out what caused it, though the fcest opinion seemed to be that it sprang from some form of self-hypnosis. Such early inklings as Charlie himself had were more understandable in the light of hindsight than they were at the moment of happening. He saw nothing untoward, for instance, in an odd little incident that occurred one Sunday afternoon that spring, at his own apartment. He was at the telephone then, talking to Mary Mattson, who was trying to arrange a date for a dinner party, and as the phone was in the foyer he was relaying pertinent parts of the conversation to his wife, who was sitting in the living room, reading the Sunday paper.

  "Speak up, Charles," she kept calling to him. "I can hardly hear a word you're saying." And when he had hung up and come back into the room she looked at him a moment curiously.

  "What's the matter?" he asked a little petulantly, for at the end he had been almost shouting at her.

  "I don't know. You looked sort of, well, dim, for a second, standing there," she replied. "Your voice was dim, too. Are you all right, Charles?"

  "Mary heard me all right," he told her. Oddly, both then and later his voice always carried perfectly over the telephone.

  "I bet she didn't," his wife replied. Charlie, an importer of porcelains by profession and then in his middle forties, was a thin, shy man, dark-haired, studious, and self-effacing. At the moment, he would have been quite content to let the matter drop, but his wife, whose name was Marcia, persisted. A large, handsome woman with what is often called a "striking" figure, she had ordinarily far too practical an outlook on life to be easily disturbed by anything—except, possibly, Charlie's shortcomings. Yet she looked at him now a little puzzledly.

  “Anyway, you did look dim,” she repeated. “It was almost—” and here, in spite of herself, she laughed. “It was almost as if you were fading away. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  But it was getting toward dusk at the time, the hour when one ought to put on the lights and still doesn’t. And Charlie had a slight cold, which might have accounted for her failure to hear Mm. For the time, at least, they thought nothing of it.

  In the days that followed, a few friends of his also remarked on his appearance. He looked “a little frail” was the way they usually put it, and once old Mrs. Morris, the bookkeeper at Charlie’s office, after almost walking right into him in the corridor, stopped, stared, and then snatched off her glasses and stared at them. “Can’t think what’s come over me, Mr. B.,” she remarked with her dry little air. “For a moment, I just didn’t see you there at all.”

  And a few days later, Charlie’s secretary, glancing up from her pad—he was dictating some letters at the time—gasped suddenly and then openly gaped at him.

  “What’s the matter, Miss Frazier?” he asked uneasily, for he could see that whatever was troubling her had something to do with him. The next instant she was covered with confusion.

  “I don’t know what got into me, Mr. Ballantine,” she protested. “I must be seeing things, I guess, or something. But gollies, it was the strangest thing! For a second, back there, I thought I could see right through you.”

  To the various individuals concerned, the episodes so far had been separate, and isolated. But to Charlie himself they were already vaguely forming a pattern, and though all this suggested so far was that something out of the ordinary was happening to him, it was beginning to disturb him. He sat for a moment, staring at the girl steadily.

  “See right through me?” he asked quietly.

  But that, of course, threw the girl into greater confusion than ever, and it was probably only the fact that she was an old hand with the firm that made her willing to continue. “Well, not really, of course!” she protested, giggling nervously. And then, gaining courage, “Or, well, darn it, yes,” she went on. “Anyway, part of you. It was the darnedest thing!” It turned out, under questioning—and even that was difficult; “You don’t really believe it, do you, Mr. B?” she asked at one point—that it had seemed as if his whole upper body had just “faded away,” as she put it. “It sounds crazy, I guess, but it all got smoky and hazy, sort of. I could see that Cunard lines poster right through you, for instance. Or I thought I could.” She paused a moment
and looked at him doubtfully. “I guess now it was some trick of the light, or something. It must have been, mustn’t it? But honestly, it was the darnedest thing. Your voice seemed to fade, too.”

  In the end, of course, they let it go at that; what else could they do? But in the days that followed Charlie noticed the girl glancing curiously at him occasionally; and—whether it was because she had told them or for other reasons—he caught others of the staff around the office staring at him, too. Indeed, the worst thing about the situation, as it developed, was his constant uncertainty about whether people were looking at him because he was going through one of his “fading” phases (as he was even then beginning to call them) or not—unless, possibly, the times when there was no doubt whatever about tiie matter were worse.

  There was the time, for instance, when the man bumped into him on Forty-eighth Street. He was a big, husky, red-faced fellow, and although the mishap was entirely his fault —he’d come barging out of a cigar store, quite regardless of who might be in his way—he took the offensive instantly. “Whyn’t you look where you’re going?” he demanded—or, rather, he started to, for in the midst of the sentence, as he really faced Charlie, he stopped, and his voice trailed off. His face paled and—big, husky as he was—he raised one hand in an odd little pushing gesture of one who is feeling his way in the dark and can’t be sure just what confronts him. An instant later, he was off down the street, almost running, and it wasn’t till he’d reached the corner—it was Lexington Avenue —that he even looked back.

  Charlie walked on after him, somewhat shaken himself, and when he came to a store with a mirror in the window, a little way farther on, he stopped and looked into it. It was an antiques store, and the mirror itself was one of those Early American affairs, with a wide, gold-leafed frame, full of carved curlicues, and a spread-winged eagle, also golden, at its top. The glass was slightly convex, which made it difficult to focus on it clearly, and a bit dim with dust and with age as well; at first, as Charlie looked, he could make out nothing in it, except a bulbously distorted reflection of the buildings across the way. Then, a moment later—and it is impossible to describe the shock it caused him—he heard a truck rumbling down the street behind him and saw its image, ballooning a little but still unmistakable, pass swiftly across the glass he was staring at. And the truck, he reminded himself instantly, had been behind him. Charlie, if he was there, should have been visible on that mirror, too!

  And he was there; there could be no doubt of that. For no reason that he could have defined, Charlie stepped back a pace and glanced up and down the sidewalk. There was no one in sight, on the quiet street, and after standing a second in what can hardly be called thought—it was more a mixture of dull panic and incredulity—he brought his gaze back and, stepping forward till his body almost touched the glass of the window, peered intently at the mirror. In a sense, he was willing himself to be there, and this time, wonderfully, rewardingly, he was there—hazily, at first, to be sure, but then, even as he stared, more clearly. Yet even as the image cleared there was still something odd about it; it was almost as if it had grown on the glass, forming there as he watched, and he found himself wondering later: Was it possible that he himself, so to speak, had superimposed himself there, by some effort of the will or the imagination—as one can, say, call up the image of another, clearly, in a sense visibly, before the mind? And if so, had it been the same forces, oppositely and of course unconsciously operating, that had caused the disappearance in the first place? He still didn’t dare ask himself why.

  There was, he decided later, a good deal more than a little truth in these surmises. He was disappearing, though at first only partially and intermittently, and, as he had suspected, his mind was directly involved. That time with Miss Frazier, for instance, his thoughts had definitely been wandering. He had been dictating a letter to a ceramist whose factory he had once visited, in the south of France, and his mind had drifted momentarily until he’d almost felt—and with such a sense of peace, of contentment—that he was back there again, sitting in the little vine-shaded arbor at the back of the plant, where the proprietor often took his ease while a batch was baking in the loins inside. At the time of the encounter with the man on the street, he’d been thinking of a girl he had known years before in Buffalo, and when he had first looked in the mirror afterward his mind, of course, had been still on the man and his curious behavior. And that first time of all, on the telephone, he had been thinking, even as he talked, of how dull the Mattsons were—great friends of his wife though they might be—and from that to the days of his youth, when his whole life had seemed gayer and more promising.

  Incredible as it seemed, then, it appeared that if he wanted to stay visible he had to keep his mind on it, and it may be added that as time went on this need for constant concentration on himself—”of all people,” as Charlie put it, wryly, to himself—became one of the most annoying aspects of the phenomenon. Let his mind wander even for a moment, and— particularly on the street—he was likely to find himself in trouble immediately; for that reason the trips to and from his office became, eventually, a kind of dash along the tightrope of his own frail ego, with an abyss of what practically amounted to oblivion on either side.

  All this, however, did not emerge with precision for some time. One difficulty encountered by a man in the process of vanishing is that it’s next to impossible to talk to others about it, and Charlie, perforce, had to do most of his analyzing of the problem himself. His wife, almost in spite of herself, was a help, though. From the start, Marcia regarded the whole thing as a subterfuge of some sort, cowardly on the face of it and undoubtedly aimed at her. But perhaps because of this she was the first to perceive the mind-image connection, as it might be called, and it was she, too, who finally got him to go see a doctor.

  Charlie himself had been doubtful about that, at first. He didn’t know what branch of specialized medicine he should turn to, and he feared—and in that he was right, for the most part—that a general practitioner would hardly be able to cope with a man whose sole problem was incipient invisibility. The man he went to, at last, was the New York substitute for a family doctor—which meant that Marcia had been to him twice in the past three years, once for a sort of bursitis in her left elbow and once for a pain in her side that she suspected had something to do with her kidneys (it turned out to be only a pain in her side), and he’d beeji called in once when Charlie was in bed with what threatened to be bronchial pneumonia. The men met, then, more or less as strangers in the consulting room; and the doctor, one of those brisk, youthful, efficient types, glanced at Charlie coldly at first and then warily as, rather diffidently, he essayed to describe his predicament.

  “Disappearing?” the doctor repeated. He had been jotting down notes on a pad on the desk before him, but now he raised his pen from the paper. “You mean you have a sort of feeling, or something?”

  “No, no. I don’t have it,” said Charlie. “It’s the others. And it’s only partly. I mean—as far as I can tell, that is—I only partly disappear, and just sometimes. So far, anyway. But I’m worried.”

  “You said ‘others,’“ the doctor said, and Charlie saw his hand slide out quietly to the push button on his desk. “What others? And how does it work?”

  And of course, as usual (doesn’t the car’s engine always run perfectly for the garageman, the tooth stop aching when one goes to the dentist’s?), Charlie had the darnedest time demonstrating his symptoms to the doctor. At the start, that is; for in the end, in desperation, with the doctor and his nurse staring steadily at him—she had come in early in the conversation and stood near the door; the doctor sat, his chair pushed back a little, at his desk—Charlie wrenched his mind away from the present and focused it deliberately on the girl in Buffalo.

  He had been thinking of her more and more, somehow, lately. Her first name was Lois, he had remembered, and where she was now after all these years was problematical— married, maybe, or anyhow he imagined so, a
nd if so, he hoped truly that she was happy; getting plump around the waist, perhaps, and also plumper in the cheeks and chin; but still, well, maybe as full as ever of that strange, charming mixture of knowingness, innocence, and gaiety that she had had when he had known her.

  He had met her one summer when, still in college, he had driven West with Ned Fellows in Ned’s jalopy, in search of jobs and maybe adventure, and the two of them had wound up in Buffalo, working in the Erie freight yards down along the lake front, and rooming together in an ancient rooming house near the railroad station. And she—Palancheck, her name was, Lois Palancheck—had been a filing clerk in the office of the express company in the yards. Lois Palancheck, blond, high-cheekboned; Polish, undeniably (“You know I’m Polish, so you think I’m easy,” she’d say), and, equally undeniably, beautiful: he had spent most of that summer trying to tame her, strangely wild and wise as she was—as a wild bird, from its very wildness, is more wary, less trusting than a tame one.

  Lois, yes, Lois Palancheck; he had even told Marcia about her once, in the early years of their marriage, though that had been a mistake. Now he wondered what had become of her. Meantime, sitting there in the doctor’s office, he remembered how, one day toward the end of summer, they had borrowed Ned’s car and driven out along the lake front to a resort called Erie Beach—only they hadn’t paid much attention to the roller coasters and the other amusements that were out there. They had sat on the beach, making promises, both still knowing it was really goodbye—making promises to wait, to write to each other, to remember. And they had written, too, and hers had been nice letters, for Lois was a high-school graduate and was taking bookkeeping, nights. “I’m not going to be just another dumb Polack. You wait and see,” she had told him. But it had been goodbye. ...