Let's All Kill Constance

by Ray Douglas Bradbury

  I stepped back. Crumley regarded Rattigan's tiny shoes lodged in prints put down a long, long time ago. "Not exactly ruby slippers," he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  we rode across town in a warm silence. I tried to describe the great black sea of Grauman's.

  "There's this big dressing-room cellar, maybe full of stuff from 1925, 1930. I have a feeling she might be there."

  "Save your breath," said Crumley.

  "Someone's got to go down there to see."

  "You afraid to go there alone?"

  "Not exactly."

  "That means damn right! Shut up and ride shotgun."

  We were soon at Crumley's. He put a cold beer against my brow.

  "Hold it there until you feel it cure your thinking."

  I held it there. Crumley switched on the TV and began switching through the channels.

  "I don't know which is worse," he said, "your gab or the local TV news."

  "Father Seamus Rattigan," the TV said.

  "Hold it!" I cried.

  Crumley switched back.

  "… Vibiana's Cathedral."

  And a blizzard of static and snow.

  Crumley hit the damned TV with his fist.

  "… Natural causes. Rumored to be future cardinal…"

  Another snowstorm. And the TV went dead.

  "I been meaning to have it fixed," said Crumley.

  We both stared at his telephone, telling it to ring.

  We both jumped.

  Because it did!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  IT was a woman, Father Rattigan's assistant, Betty Kelly, inarticulate, going down for the third time, begging for mercy.

  I offered what small mercy I had, to come visit.

  "Don't wait, or I'm dead myself," she wailed.

  Betty Kelly was out in front of St. Vibiana's when Crumley and I arrived. We stood for a long moment before she saw us, gave a quick, half-realized wave, and dropped her gaze. We came to stand by her. I introduced Crumley.

  "I'm sorry," I said. She raised her head.

  "Then you are the one was talking to Father!" she said. "Oh, Lord, let's get inside."

  The big doors were locked for the night. We went in through a door at the side. Inside she swayed and almost fell. I caught and led her to one of the pews, where she sat breathless.

  "We came as quick as we could," I said.

  "You knew him?" She gasped. "It's so confusing. You knew someone in common, an acquaintance, a friend?"

  "A relative," said Crumley. "The same name."

  "Rattigan! She killed him. Wait!" She grabbed my sleeve.

  For I was on my feet.

  "Sit," she gasped. "I don't mean murder. But she killed him."

  I sat back down, gone cold. Crumley backed off. She clutched my elbow and lowered her voice.

  "She was here, sometimes three times a day, in confession, whispering, then raving. Poor Father looked like he'd been shot when she left, but she hardly left, just stayed until he fell out starving, couldn't eat, and the liquor cabinet low. He let her rave. Later I'd check the confessional: empty. But the air smelled like it had been hit by lightning. She kept shouting the same thing."

  "What?"

  '"I'm killing them, killing them!' she yelled. And I'll keep on killing them until I've killed them all. Help me to kill them, bless their souls! Then I'll kill the rest. Kill them all! Get them off my back, out of my life! Then, Father,' she cried, Til be free, clean! But help me bury them so they won't come back! Help me!'

  '"Off! Away!' Father yelled. 'My God, what are you asking me to do?'

  '"Help me put them away, pray over them so they won't come back, stay dead! Say yes!'

  "'Get out!' Father cried, and then she said worse."

  "What?"

  "She said, 'Then damn you, damn, damn, damn you to hell!' Her voice was so loud, people left. I could hear her weeping. The Father must have been in a state of shock. Then I heard footsteps running in the dark. I waited for Father Rattigan to speak, say anything. Then I dared open the door. He was there. And silent because… he was dead."

  And here the secretary let the tears shed themselves down her cheeks.

  "Poor man," she said. "Those dreadful words stopped his heart, as they almost stopped mine. We must find that awful woman. Make her take back the words so he can live again. God, what am I saying? Him slumped there as if she had drained his blood. You know her? Tell her she's done her worst. There, I've said it. Now I've thrown up, and where do you go to be clean? It's yours, and sorry I did it to you."

  I looked down at my suit as if expecting to find her vile upchuck.

  Crumley walked over to the confessional and opened both doors and stared in at the darkness. I came to stand next to him and take a deep breath.

  "Smell it?" said Betty Kelly. "It's there and ruined. I've told the cardinal to tear it down and burn it."

  I took a final breath. A touch of charcoal and St. Elmo's fires.

  Crumley closed the doors.

  "It won't help," Betty Kelly said. "She's still there. So is he, poor soul, dead tired and dead. Two coffins, side by side. God help us. I've used you all up. You have the same look the poor father had."

  "Don't tell me that," I said weakly.

  "I won't," she said.

  And led by Crumley, I beggared my way to the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I COULDN'T nap, I couldn't stay awake, I couldn't write, I couldn't think. At last, confused and maddened, very late I called St. Vibiana's again.

  When at last Betty Kelly answered she sounded like she was in a cave of torments.

  "I can't talk!"

  "Quickly!" I begged. "You remember all she said in the confessional? Anything else important, consequential, different?"

  "Dear God," said Betty Kelly. "Words and words and words. But wait. She kept saying you must forgive all of us! All of us, every one! There was no one in the booth but her. All of us, she said. You still there?"

  At last I said, "I'm here."

  "Is there more you want?"

  "Not now."

  I hung up.

  "All of us," I whispered. "Forgive all of us!"

  I called Crumley.

  "Don't say it." He guessed. "No sleep tonight? And you want me to meet you at Rattigan's in an hour. You going to search the place?"

  "Just a friendly rummage."

  "Rummage! What is it, theory or hunch?"

  "Pure reason."

  "Sell that in a sack for night soil!" Crumley was gone.

  "He hang up on you?" I asked my mirror. "Hung up on you," my mirror said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE phone rang. I picked it up as if it were red-hot.

  "Is that the Martian?" a voice said.

  "Henry!" I cried.

  "That's me," the voice said. "It's crazy, but I miss you, son. Kinda dumb, a colored saying that to an ethnic flying-saucer pilot."

  "I've never heard better," I said, choking up.

  "Hell," said Henry, "if you start crying, I'm gone."

  "Don't," I sniffled. "Oh God, Henry, how fine it is to hear your voice!"

  "Which means you've milked the cow and got a bucket of I-won't-say. You want me polite or impolite?"

  "Both, Henry. Things are nuts. Maggie's back east. I got Crumley here, of course, but-"

  "Which means you need a blind man to find your way out of a cowshed full of cowsheds, right? Hell, let me get my hankie." He blew his nose. "How soon do you need this all-seeing nose?"

  "Yesterday."

  "I'm there now! Hollywood, visiting some poor black trash."

  "You know Grauman's Chinese?"

  "Hell, yes!"

  "How quickly can you meet me there?"

  "As quick as you want, son. I'll be standing in Bill Robinson's tap-dancer shoes. Do we visit another graveyard?"

  "Almost."

  I called Crumley to say where I was going, that I might be late getting to Rattigan's, but that I
'd be bringing Henry with me.

  "The blind leading the blind," he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  he was standing exactly where he said he would be: in Bill Robinson's "copasetic" dancing footprints, not banished to that long-gone nigger heaven but out front where thousands of passing whites could see.

  His body was erect and quiet, but his shoes were itching around in Bill Robinson's marks, ever so serenely. His eyes were shut, like his mouth, turned in on a pleased imagination.

  I stood in front of him and exhaled.

  Henry's mouth burst.

  "Wrigley's Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, with Wrigley's Doublemint, Doublemint Gum! Don't get it on me!" He laughed, seized my elbows. "Lord, boy, you look fine! I don't have to see to know. You've always sounded like some of those people up on the screen!"

  "That comes from sneaking into too many movies."

  "Let me feel you, boy. Hey, you been drinking lotsa malts!"

  "You look swell, Henry."

  "I always wondered what I looked like."

  "The way Bill Robinson sounds is how you shape, Henry."

  "Am I in his shoes here? Say yes."

  "A perfect fit. Thanks for coming, Henry."

  "Had to. It's one helluva time since we ransacked graveyards! I go to sleep nights running those graves ahead or behind. What kind of graveyard's here?"

  I glanced at Grauman's Oriental facade.

  "Ghosts. That's what I said when I snuck backstage when I was six and stared up at all those black-and-white things leering on the screen. The Phantom playing the organ has his mask yanked off and jumps thirty feet tall to kill you with one stare. Pictures tall and wide and pale and the actors mostly dead. Ghosts."

  "Did your folks hear you talk like that?"

  "With them? Mum's the word."

  "That's a nice son. I smell incense. Got to be Grauman's. Real class. No chop-suey name."

  "Here goes, Henry. Let me hold the door."

  "Hey, it's dark in there. You bring a flashlight? Always feels good to wave a flashlight and look like we know what we're doing."

  "Here's the flashlight, Henry."

  "Ghosts, you said?"

  "Seances four times a day for thirty years."

  "Don't hold my elbow, makes me feel useless. If I fall, shoot me!"

  And he was off, hardly ricocheting down the aisle toward the orchestra pit and the great spaces beyond and below.

  "It getting darker?" he said. "Let me turn on the flash-light."

  He switched it on.

  "There." He smiled. "That's better!"

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  in the dark unlit basement, there were rooms and rooms and rooms, all with mirrors lining their walls, the reflections reflecting and re-reflecting, emptiness facing emptiness, corridors of lifeless sea.

  We went into the first, biggest one. Henry circled the flashlight like a lighthouse beam.

  "Plenty of ghosts down here."

  The light hit and sank in the ocean deeps.

  "Not the same as the ghosts upstairs. Spookier. I always wondered about mirrors and that thing called reflection. Another you, right? Four or five feet off, sunk under ice?" Henry reached out to touch the glass. "Someone under there?"

  "You, Henry, and me."

  "Hot damn. I sure wish I could know that."

  We moved on along the cold line of mirrors.

  And there they were. More than ghosts. Graffiti on glass. I must have sucked in my breath, for Henry swung his flashlight to my face.

  "You see something I don't?"

  "My God, yes!"

  I reached out to the first cold Window on Time.

  My finger came away smudged with a faint trace of ancient lipstick.

  "Well?" Henry bent as if to squint at my discovery. "What?"

  "Margot Lawrence. R.I.P. October 1923."

  "Someone stash her here under glass?"

  "Not quite. And over about three feet, another mirror: Juanita Lopez. Summer '24."

  "Don't ring no bell."

  "Next mirror: Carla Moore. Christmas, 1925."

  "Hey," said Henry. "Silent film but a sighted friend spoke her to me one matinee. Carla Moore! She was something!"

  I guided the flashlight.

  "Eleanor Twelvetrees. April '26," I read.

  "Helen Twelvetrees was in The Cat and the Canary?

  "This might've been her sister, but so many names were fake, you never know. Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford. Lily Chauchoin was reborn as Claudette Colbert. Gladys Smith: Carole Lombard. Gary Grant was Archibald Leach."

  "You could run a quiz show." Henry extended his fingers. "What's this?"

  "Jennifer Long: '29."

  "Didn't she die?"

  "Disappeared, about the time Sister Aimee sank in the sea and arose, reborn, on the Hallelujah shore."

  "How many more names?"

  "As many as" there are mirrors."

  Henry tasted one finger. "Yum! It's been a long time but-lipstick. What color?"

  "Tangee Orange. Summer Heat Coty. Lanvier Cherry."

  "Why do you figure these ladies wrote their names and dates?"

  "Because, Henry, it wasn't a lot of ladies. One woman signed the names, all different."

  "One woman who wasn't a lady? Hold my cane while I think."

  "You don't have a cane, Henry."

  "Funny how your hand feels things not there. You want me to guess?"

  I nodded even though Henry couldn't see; I knew he'd feel the rush of my bobbing head. I wanted him to say it, needed to hear him speak that name. Henry smiled at the mirrors, and his smile beamed one hundredfold.

  "Constance."

  His fingers touched the glass.

  "The Rattigan," he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  AGAIN, Henry leaned to brush a reddish signature and then touch it to his lips.

  He moved to the next glass, repeated the gesture, and let his tongue figure.

  "Different flavors," he noted.

  "Like different women?"

  "It all comes back." His eyes squeezed tight. "Lord, Lord. Lots of women passed through my hands, through my heart, came and went unseen; all those flavors. Why do I feel stopped up?"

  "Because I feel the same way."

  "Crumley says when you turn on the faucets, stand back. You're a good boy."

  "I'm no boy."

  "You sound like you're fourteen, when your voice changed and you tried to grow a mustache."

  He moved and touched, then looked with his sightless eyes at the ancient residue on his fingers.

  "All these have to do with Constance?"

  "A hunch."

  "You got a powerful stomach; I know from having your stuff read to me. My mama once said a powerful midsection is better than two brains. Most folks use their brains too much when they should be listening to that thing under their ribs. The gang-ganglion? My mama never called it that. House spider, she said. When she met some damn-fool politician, she always felt right above her stomach. If the spider was twitching, she'd smile: yes. But if the spider tightened into a ball, she shut her eyes: no. That's you.

  "My mama read you. She said you don't write them weary stories (she meant eerie) with gray matter. You pull the spider legs under your ribs. My mania said, 'That boy will never be sick, never get poisoned by people, he knows how to upchuck, teasing that balled-up spider to let go.' She said, 'He don't stay up nights in a bad life, getting old while he's young. He'd make a great doctor, cut right to the pain and toss it out.'"

  "Your mama said all that?" I blushed.

  "Woman who got twelve kids, buried six, raised the rest. One bad husband, one good. She got fine ideas which side to use in bed so you untie, let your gut free."

  "I wish I had met her."

  "She's still around." Henry put his palm on his chest.

  Henry surveyed the unseen mirrors, pulled his black glasses from his pocket, wiped and put them on.

  "That's better. Rattigan,
these names, was she crazy wild? Was she ever honest-to-God sane?"

  "Offshore. I heard her swimming way out with the seals, barking, a free soul."

  "Maybe she should have stayed out there."

  "Herman Melville," I muttered.

  "Say again?"

  "Took me years to finish Moby-Dick. Melville should have stayed at sea with Jack, his loving friend. Land? When he lived there, it tore his soul from his heart. Onshore, he aged thirty years, in a customs shed, half-dead."

  "Poor son of a bitch," whispered Henry.

  "Poor son of a bitch," I echoed quietly.

  "And Rattigan? You think she should've stayed offshore, not in her fancy beach place?"

  "It was big, bright, white, and lovely, but a tomb full of ghosts, like those films upstairs forty feet tall, fifty years wide, like these mirrors here, and one woman hating them all for unknown reasons."

  "Poor son of a bitch," murmured Henry.

  "Poor bitch," I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  "LET'S see some more," said Henry. "Switch on the lights so I won't need my cane."

  "Can you feel if lights are on or off?"

  "Silly child. Read me the names!"

  I took his arm and we moved along the mirrors as I read the names.

  "The dates under the names," Henry commanded. "They getting closer to now?"

  1935. 1937. 1939. 1950. 1955.

  And with names, names, names to go with them, all different.

  "One too many," said Henry. "We done?"

  "One last mirror and date. October thirty-first. Last year.”

  "How come everything happens to you on Halloween?"

  "Fate and providence love wimps like me."

  "You say the date, but…" Henry touched the cold glass. "No name?"

  "None."

  "She going to come add a name? Going to show up making noises just a dog hears, and no light down here. She-"

  "Shut up, Henry." I stared along the mirrors in the cellar night where shadow-phantoms ran.

  "Son." Henry took my arm. "Let's git."