Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

by Ray Bradbury

  Without a word he began to scrub the wall, up and down, back and forth, up and down, as high as he could stretch and as low as he could bend.

  “Ridiculous, oh my Lord, ridiculous!”

  But you must be certain, his thought said to him.

  “Yes, one must be certain,” he replied.

  He got one wall finished, and then . . .

  He came to another wall.

  “What time is it?”

  He looked at the mantel clock. An hour gone. It was five after one.

  The doorbell rang.

  Acton froze, staring at the door, the clock, the door, the clock.

  Someone rapped loudly.

  A long moment passed. Acton did not breathe. Without new air in his body he began to fail away, to sway; his head roared a silence of cold waves thundering onto heavy rocks.

  “Hey, in there!” cried a drunken voice. “I know you’re in there, Huxley! Open up, dammit! This is Billy-boy, drunk as an owl, Huxley, old pal, drunker than two owls.”

  “Go away,” whispered Acton soundlessly, crushed.

  “Huxley, you’re in there, I hear you breathing!” cried the drunken voice.

  “Yes, I’m in here,” whispered Acton, feeling long and sprawled and clumsy on the floor, clumsy and cold and silent. “Yes.”

  “Hell!” said the voice, fading away into mist. The footsteps shuffled off. “Hell . . .”

  Acton stood a long time feeling the red heart beat inside his shut eyes, within his head. When at last he opened his eyes he looked at the new fresh wall straight ahead of him and finally got courage to speak. “Silly,” he said. “This wall’s flawless. I won’t touch it. Got to hurry. Got to hurry. Time, time. Only a few hours before those damn-fool friends blunder in!” He turned away.

  From the corners of his eyes he saw the little webs. When his back was turned the little spiders came out of the woodwork and delicately spun their fragile little half-invisible webs. Not upon the wall at his left, which was already washed fresh, but upon the three walls as yet untouched. Each time he stared directly at them the spiders dropped back into the woodwork, only to spindle out as he retreated. “Those walls are all right,” he insisted in a half shout. “I won’t touch them!”

  He went to a writing desk at which Huxley had been seated earlier. He opened a drawer and took out what he was looking for. A little magnifying glass Huxley sometimes used for reading. He took the magnifier and approached the wall uneasily.

  Fingerprints.

  “But those aren’t mine!” He laughed unsteadily. “I didn’t put them there! I’m sure I didn’t! A servant, a butler, or a maid perhaps!”

  The wall was full of them.

  “Look at this one here,” he said. “Long and tapered, a woman’s, I’d bet money on it.”

  “Would you?”

  “I would!”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes!”

  “Positive?”

  “Well—yes.”

  “Absolutely?”

  “Yes, damn it, yes!”

  “Wipe it out, anyway, why don’t you?”

  “There, by God!”

  “Out damned spot, eh, Acton?”

  “And this one, over here,” scoffed Acton. “That’s the print of a fat man.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t start that again!” he snapped, and rubbed it out. He pulled off a glove and held his hand up, trembling, in the glary light.

  “Look at it, you idiot! See how the whorls go? See?”

  “That proves nothing!”

  “Oh, all right!” Raging, he swept the wall up and down, back and forth, with gloved hands, sweating, grunting, swearing, bending, rising, and getting redder of face.

  He took off his coat, put it on a chair.

  “Two o’clock,” he said, finishing the wall, glaring at the clock.

  He walked over to the bowl and took out the wax fruit and polished the ones at the bottom and put them back, and polished the picture frame.

  He gazed up at the chandelier.

  His fingers twitched at his sides.

  His mouth slipped open and the tongue moved along his lips and he looked at the chandelier and looked away and looked back at the chandelier and looked at Huxley’s body and then at the crystal chandelier with its long pearls of rainbow glass.

  He got a chair and brought it over under the chandelier and put one foot up on it and took it down and threw the chair, violently, laughing, into a corner. Then he ran out of the room, leaving one wall as yet unwashed.

  In the dining room he came to a table.

  “I want to show you my Gregorian cutlery, Acton,” Huxley had said. Oh, that casual, that hypnotic voice!

  “I haven’t time,” Acton said. “I’ve got to see Lily—”

  “Nonsense, look at this silver, this exquisite craftsmanship.”

  Acton paused over the table where the boxes of cutlery were laid out, hearing once more Huxley’s voice, remembering all the touchings and gesturings.

  Now Acton wiped the forks and spoons and took down all the plaques and special ceramic dishes from the wall itself. . . .

  “Here’s a lovely bit of ceramics by Gertrude and Otto Natzler, Acton. Are you familiar with their work?”

  “It is lovely.”

  “Pick it up. Turn it over. See the fine thinness of the bowl, hand-thrown on a turntable, thin as eggshell, incredible. And the amazing volcanic glaze. Handle it, go ahead. I don’t mind.”

  HANDLE IT. GO AHEAD. PICK IT UP!

  Acton sobbed unevenly. He hurled the pottery against the wall. It shattered and spread, flaking wildly, upon the floor.

  An instant later he was on his knees. Every piece, every shard of it, must be found. Fool, fool, fool! he cried to himself, shaking his head and shutting and opening his eyes and bending under the table. Find every piece, idiot, not one fragment of it must be left behind. Fool, fool! He gathered them. Are they all here? He looked at them on the table before him. He looked under the table again and under the chairs and the service bureaus, and found one more piece by match light and started to polish each little fragment as if it were a precious stone. He laid them all out neatly upon the shining polished table.

  “A lovely bit of ceramics, Acton. Go ahead—handle it.”

  He took out the linen and wiped it and wiped the chairs and tables and doorknobs and windowpanes and ledges and drapes and wiped the floor and found the kitchen, panting, breathing violently, and took off his vest and adjusted his gloves and wiped the glittering chromium. . . . “I want to show you my house, Acton,” said Huxley. “Come along. . . .” And he wiped all the utensils and the silver faucets and the mixing bowls, for now he had forgotten what he had touched and what he had not. Huxley and he had lingered here, in the kitchen, Huxley prideful of its array, covering his nervousness at the presence of a potential killer, perhaps wanting to be near the knives if they were needed. They had idled, touched this, that, something else—there was no remembering what or how much or how many—and he finished the kitchen and came through the hall into the room where Huxley lay.

  He cried out.

  He had forgotten to wash the fourth wall of the room! And while he was gone the little spiders had popped from the fourth, unwashed wall and swarmed over the already clean walls, dirtying them again! On the ceilings, from the chandelier, in the corners, on the floor, a million little whorled webs hung billowing at his scream! Tiny, tiny little webs, no bigger than, ironically, your—finger!

  As he watched, the webs were woven over the picture frame, the fruit bowl, the body, the floor. Prints wielded the paper knife, pulled out drawers, touched the tabletop, touched, touched, touched everything everywhere.

  He polished the floor wildly, wildly. He rolled the body over and cried on it while he washed it, and got up and walked over and polished the fruit at the bottom of the bowl. Then he put a chair under the chandelier and got up and polished each little hanging fire of it, shaking it like a crystal tam
bourine until it tilted bellwise in the air. Then he leaped off the chair and gripped the doorknobs and got up on other chairs and swabbed the walls higher and higher and ran to the kitchen and got a broom and wiped the webs down from the ceiling and polished the bottom fruit of the bowl and washed the body and doorknobs and silverware and found the hall banister and followed the banister upstairs.

  Three o’clock! Everywhere, with a fierce, mechanical intensity, clocks ticked! There were twelve rooms downstairs and eight above. He figured the yards and yards of space and time needed. One hundred chairs, six sofas, twenty-seven tables, six radios. And under and on top and behind. He yanked furniture out away from walls and, sobbing, wiped them clean of years-old dust, and staggered and followed the banister up, up the stairs, handling, erasing, rubbing, polishing, because if he left one little print it would reproduce and make a million more!—and the job would have to be done all over again and now it was four o’clock!—and his arms ached and his eyes were swollen and staring and he moved sluggishly about, on strange legs, his head down, his arms moving, swabbing and rubbing, bedroom by bedroom, closet by closet. . . .

  They found him at six-thirty that morning.

  In the attic.

  The entire house was polished to a brilliance. Vases shone like glass stars. Chairs were burnished. Bronzes, brasses, and coppers were all aglint. Floors sparkled. Banisters gleamed.

  Everything glittered. Everything shone, everything was bright!

  They found him in the attic, polishing the old trunks and the old frames and the old chairs and the old carriages and toys and music boxes and vases and cutlery and rocking horses and dusty Civil War coins. He was half through the attic when the police officer walked up behind him with a gun.

  “Done!”

  On the way out of the house Acton polished the front doorknob with his handkerchief and slammed it in triumph!

  BUG

  LOOKING BACK NOW, I CAN’T REMEMBER A TIME when Bug wasn’t dancing. Bug is short for jitterbug and, of course, those were the days in the late thirties, our final days in high school and our first days out in the vast world looking for work that didn’t exist when jitterbugging was all the rage. And I can remember Bug (his real name was Bert Bagley, which shortens to Bug nicely), during a jazz-band blast at our final aud-call for our high school senior class, suddenly leaping up to dance with an invisible partner in the middle of the front aisle of the auditorium. That brought the house down. You never heard such a roar or such applause. The bandleader, stricken with Bug’s oblivious joy, gave an encore and Bug did the same and we all exploded. After that the band played “Thanks for the Memory” and we all sang it, with tears pouring down our cheeks. Nobody in all the years after could forget: Bug dancing in the aisle, eyes shut, hands out to grasp his invisible girlfriend, his legs not connected to his body, just his heart, all over the place. When it was over, nobody, not even the band, wanted to leave. We just stood there in the world Bug had made, hating to go out into that other world that was waiting for us.

  It was about a year later when Bug saw me on the street and stopped his roadster and said come on along to my place for a hot dog and a Coke, and I jumped in and we drove over with the top down and the wind really hitting us and Bug talking and talking at the top of his lungs, about life and the times and what he wanted to show me in his front parlor—front parlor, hell, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom.

  What was it he wanted me to see?

  Trophies. Big ones, little ones, solid gold and silver and brass trophies with his name on them. Dance trophies. I mean they were everywhere, on the floor by his bed, on the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, but in the parlor, especially, they had settled like a locust plague. There were so many of them on the mantel, and in bookcases instead of books, and on the floor, you had to wade through, kicking some over as you went. They totaled, he said, tilting his head back and counting inside his eyelids, to about three hundred and twenty prizes, which means grabbing onto a trophy almost every night in the past year.

  “All this,” I gasped, “just since we left high school?”

  “Ain’t I the cat’s pajamas?” Bug cried.

  “You’re the whole darned department store! Who was your partner, all those nights?”

  “Not partner, partners,” Bug corrected. “Three hundred, give or take a dozen, different women on three hundred different nights.”

  “Where do you find three hundred women, all talented, all good enough, to win prizes?”

  “They weren’t talented or all good,” said Bug, glancing around at his collection. “They were just ordinary, good, every-night dancers. I won the prizes. I made them good. And when we got out there dancing, we cleared the floor. Everyone else stopped, to watch us there out in the middle of nowhere, and we never stopped.”

  He paused, blushed, and shook his head. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to brag.”

  But he wasn’t bragging. I could see. He was just telling the truth.

  “You want to know how this all started?” said Bug, handing over a hot dog and a Coke.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “I know.”

  “How could you?” said Bug, looking me over.

  “The last aud-call at L.A. High, I think they played ‘Thanks for the Memory,’ but just before that—”

  “‘Roll Out the Barrel’—”

  “—‘the Barrel,’ yes, and there you were in front of God and everyone, jumping.”

  “I never stopped,” said Bug, eyes shut, back in those years. “Never,” he said, “stopped.”

  “You got your life all made,” I said.

  “Unless,” said Bug, “something happens.”

  What happened was, of course, the war.

  Looking back, I remember that in that last year in school, sap that I was, I made up a list of my one hundred and sixty-five best friends. Can you imagine that? One hundred and sixty-five, count ’em, best friends! It’s a good thing I never showed that list to anyone. I would have been hooted out of school.

  Anyway, the war came and went and took with it a couple dozen of those listed friends and the rest just disappeared into holes in the ground or went east or wound up in Malibu or Fort Lauderdale. Bug was on that list, but I didn’t figure out I didn’t really know him until half a lifetime later. By that time I was down to half a dozen pals or women I might turn to if I needed, and it was then, walking down Hollywood Boulevard one Saturday afternoon, I heard someone call:

  “How about a hot dog and a Coke?”

  Bug, I thought without turning. And that’s who it was, standing on the Walk of Stars with his feet planted on Mary Pickford and Ricardo Cortez just behind and Jimmy Stewart just ahead. Bug had taken off some hair and put on some weight, but it was Bug and I was overjoyed, perhaps too much, and showed it, for he seemed embarrassed at my enthusiasm. I saw then that his suit was not half new enough and his shirt frayed, but his tie was neatly tied and he shook my hand off and we popped into a place where we stood and had that hot dog and that Coke.

  “Still going to be the world’s greatest writer?” said Bug.

  “Working at it,” I said.

  “You’ll get there,” said Bug and smiled, meaning it. “You were always good.”

  “So were you,” I said.

  That seemed to pain him slightly, for he stopped chewing for a moment and took a swig of Coke. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I surely was.”

  “God,” I said, “I can still remember the day I saw all those trophies for the first time. What a family! Whatever—?”

  Before I could finish asking, he gave the answer.

  “Put ’em in storage, some. Some wound up with my first wife. Goodwill got the rest.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and truly was.

  Bug looked at me steadily. “How come you’re sorry?”

  “Hell, I dunno,” I said. “It’s just, they seemed such a part of you. I haven’t thought of you often the last few years or so, to be honest, but when I do, there you are knee-d
eep in all those cups and mugs in your front room, out in the kitchen, hell, in your garage!”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Bug. “What a memory you got.”

  We finished our Cokes and it was almost time to go. I couldn’t help myself, even seeing that Bug had fleshed himself out over the years.

  “When—” I started to say, and stopped.

  “When what?” said Bug.

  “When,” I said with difficulty, “when was the last time you danced?”

  “Years,” said Bug.

  “But how long ago?”

  “Ten years. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Yeah, twenty. I don’t dance anymore.”

  “I don’t believe that. Bug not dance? Nuts.”

  “Truth. Gave my fancy night-out shoes to the Goodwill, too. Can’t dance in your socks.”

  “Can, and barefoot, too!”

  Bug had to laugh at that. “You’re really something. Well, it’s been nice.” He started edging toward the door. “Take care, genius—”

  “Not so fast.” I walked him out into the light and he was looking both ways as if there were heavy traffic. “You know one thing I never saw and wanted to see? You bragged about it, said you took three hundred ordinary girls out on the dance floor and turned them into Ginger Rogers inside three minutes. But I only saw you once at that aud-call in ’38, so I don’t believe you.”

  “What?” said Bug. “You saw the trophies!”

  “You could have had those made up,” I pursued, looking at his wrinkled suit and frayed shirt cuffs. “Anyone can go in a trophy shop and buy a cup and have his name put on it!”

  “You think I did that?” cried Bug.

  “I think that, yes!”

  Bug glanced out in the street and back at me and back in the street and back to me, trying to decide which way to run or push or shout.

  “What’s got into you?” said Bug. “Why’re you talking like that?”

  “God, I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s just, we might not meet again and I’ll never have the chance, or you to prove it. I’d like, after all this time, to see what you talked about. I’d love to see you dance again, Bug.”