by Otto Penzler
THE WHOLE TOWN’S SLEEPING
BY RAY BRADBURY
IT WAS A WARM SUMMER NIGHT in the middle of Illinois country. The little town was deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a ravine. In the town the sidewalks were still scorched. The stores were closing and the streets were turning dark. There were two moons: a clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon that was slowly rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.
In the downtown drug store, fans whispered in the high ceiling air. In the rococo shade of porches, invisible people sat. On the purple bricks of the summer twilight streets, children ran. Screen doors whined their springs and banged. The heat was breathing from the dry lawns and trees.
On her solitary porch, Lavinia Nebbs, aged 37, very straight and slim, sat with a tinkling lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, waiting.
“Here I am, Lavinia.”
Lavinia turned. There was Francine, at the bottom porch step, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus. Francine was all in snow white and she didn’t look 35.
Miss Lavinia Nebbs rose and locked her front door, leaving her lemonade glass standing empty on the porch rail. “It’s a fine night for the movie.”
“Where you going, ladies?” cried Grandma Hanlon from her shadowy porch across the street.
They called back through the soft ocean of darkness: “To the Elite Theater to see Harold Lloyd in Welcome, Danger!”
“Won’t catch me out on no night like this,” wailed Grandma Hanlon. “Not with The Lonely One strangling women. Lock myself in with my gun!”
Grandma’s door slammed and locked.
The two maiden ladies drifted on. Lavinia felt the warm breath of the summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalk. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress and along your legs with a stealthy sense of invasion.
“Lavinia, you don’t believe all that gossip about The Lonely One, do you?”
“Those women like to see their tongues dance.”
“Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed a month ago. And Roberta Ferry the month before. And now Eliza Ramsell has disappeared …”
“Hattie McDollis walked off with a traveling man, I bet.”
“But the others—strangled—four of them, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say.”
They stood on the edge of the ravine that cut the town in two. Behind them were the lighted houses and faint radio music; ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies, and dark.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go to the movie,” said Francine. “The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don’t like that ravine. Look how black, smell it, and listen.”
The ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day: there was a great moving hum among the secret mists and washed shales, and the odors of a rank greenhouse. Always the black dynamo was humming, with green electric sparkles where fireflies hovered.
“And it won’t be me,” said Francine, “coming back through this terrible dark ravine tonight, late. It’ll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over that rickety bridge and maybe The Lonely One standing behind a tree. I’d never have gone over to church this afternoon if I had to walk through here all alone, even in daylight.”
“Bosh,” said Lavinia Nebbs.
“It’ll be you alone on the path, listening to your shoes, not me. And shadows. You all alone on the way back home. Lavinia, don’t you get lonely living by yourself in that house?”
“Old maids love to live alone,” said Lavinia. She pointed to a hot shadowy path. “Let’s walk the short cut.”
“I’m afraid.”
“It’s early. The Lonely One won’t be out till late.” Lavinia, as cool as mint ice cream, took the other woman’s arm and led her down the dark winding path into cricket-warmth and frog-sound, and mosquito-delicate silence.
“Let’s run,” gasped Francine.
“No.”
If Lavinia hadn’t turned her head just then, she wouldn’t have seen it. But she did turn her head, and it was there. And then Francine looked over and she saw it too, and they stood there on the path, not believing what they saw.
In the singing deep night, back among a clump of bushes—half hidden, but laid out as if she had put herself down there to enjoy the soft stars—lay Eliza Ramsell.
Francine screamed.
The woman lay as if she were floating there, her face moon-freckled, her eyes like white marble, her tongue clamped in her lips.
Lavinia felt the ravine turning like a gigantic black merry-go-round underfoot. Francine was gasping and choking, and a long while later Lavinia heard herself say, “We’d better get the police.”
“HOLD ME, LAVINIA, please hold me, I’m cold. Oh, I’ve never been so cold since winter.”
Lavinia held Francine and the policemen were all around in the ravine grass. Flashlights darted about, voices mingled, and the night grew toward 8:30.
“It’s like December. I need a sweater,” said Francine, eyes shut against Lavinia’s shoulder.
The policeman said, “I guess you can go now, ladies. You might drop by the station tomorrow for a little more questioning.”
Lavinia and Francine walked away from the police and the delicate sheet-covered thing on the ravine grass.
Lavinia felt her heart going loudly within her and she was cold, too, with a February cold. There were bits of sudden snow all over her flesh and the moon washed her brittle fingers whiter, and she remembered doing all the talking while Francine just sobbed.
A police voice called, “You want an escort, ladies?”
“No, we’ll make it,” said Lavinia, and they walked on. I can’t remember anything now, she thought. I can’t remember how she looked lying there, or anything. I don’t believe it happened. Already I’m forgetting, I’m making myself forget.
“I’ve never seen a dead person before,” said Francine.
Lavinia looked at her wrist watch, which seemed impossibly far away. “It’s only 8:30. We’ll pick up Helen and get on to the show.”
“The show!”
“It’s what we need.”
“Lavinia, you don’t mean it!”
“We’ve got to forget this. It’s not good to remember.”
“But Eliza’s back there now and—”
“We need to laugh. We’ll go to the show as if nothing happened.”
“But Eliza was once your friend, my friend—”
“We can’t help her; we can only help ourselves forget. I insist. I won’t go home and brood over it. I won’t think of it. I’ll fill my mind with everything else but.”
They started up the side of the ravine on a stony path in the dark. They heard voices and stopped.
Below, near the creek waters, a voice was murmuring, “I am The Lonely One. I am The Lonely One. I kill people.”
“And I’m Eliza Ramsell. Look. And I’m dead, see my tongue out my mouth, see!”
Francine shrieked. “You, there! Children, you nasty children! Get home, get out of the ravine, you hear me? Get home, get home, get home!”
The children fled from their game. The night swallowed their laughter away up the distant hills into the warm darkness.
Francine sobbed and walked on.
“I THOUGHT YOU ladies’d never come!” Helen Greer tapped her foot atop her porch steps. “You’re only an hour late, that’s all.”
“We—” started Francine.
Lavinia clutched her arm. “There was a commotion. Someone found Eliza Ramsell dead in the ravine.”
Helen gasped. “Who found her?”
“We don’t know.”
The three maiden ladies stood in the summer night looking at one another. “I’ve a notion to lock myself in my house,” said Helen at last.
But finally she went to fetch a sweater, and while she was gone Francine whispered frantically, “Why didn’t you tell her?�
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“Why upset her? Time enough tomorrow,” replied Lavinia.
The three women moved along the street under the black trees through a town that was slamming and locking doors, pulling down windows and shades and turning on blazing lights. They saw eyes peering out at them from curtained windows.
How strange, thought Lavinia Nebbs, the ice-cream night, the Popsicles dropped in puddles of lime and chocolate where they fell when the children were scooped indoors. Baseballs and bats lie on the unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn white chalk hopscotch line is there on the steamed sidewalk.
“We’re crazy out on a night like this,” said Helen.
“Lonely One can’t kill three ladies,” said Lavinia. “There’s safety in numbers. Besides, it’s too soon. The murders never come less than a month apart.”
A shadow fell across their faces. A figure loomed. As if someone had struck an organ a terrible blow, the three women shrieked.
“Got you!” The man jumped from behind a tree. Rearing into the moonlight, he laughed. Leaning on the tree, he laughed again.
“Hey, I’m the—The Lonely One!”
“Tom Dillon!”
“Tom!”
“Tom,” said Lavinia. “If you ever do a childish thing like that again, may you be riddled with bullets by mistake!”
Francine began to cry.
Tom Dillon stopped smiling. “Hey, I’m sorry.”
“Haven’t you heard about Eliza Ramsell?” snapped Lavinia. “She’s dead, and you scaring women. You should be ashamed. Don’t speak to us again.”
“Aw—”
He moved to follow them.
“Stay right there, Mr. Lonely One, and scare yourself,” said Lavinia. “Go see Eliza Ramsell’s face and see if it’s funny!” She pushed the other two on along the street of trees and stars, Francine holding a handkerchief to her face.
“Francine,” pleaded Helen, “it was only a joke. Why’s she crying so hard?”
“I guess we better tell you, Helen. We found Eliza. And it wasn’t pretty. And we’re trying to forget. We’re going to the show to help and let’s not talk about it. Enough’s enough. Get your ticket money ready, we’re almost downtown.”
THE DRUG STORE WAS a small pool of sluggish air which the great wooden fans stirred in tides of arnica and tonic and soda-smell out into the brick streets.
“A nickel’s worth of green mint chews,” said Lavinia to the druggist. His face was set and pale, like all the faces they had seen on the half-empty streets. “For eating in the show,” she explained, as the druggist dropped the mints into a sack with a silver shovel.
“Sure look pretty tonight,” said the druggist. “You looked cool this noon, Miss Lavinia, when you was in here for chocolates. So cool and nice that someone asked after you.”
“Oh?”
“You’re getting popular. Man sitting at the counter—” he rustled a few more mints in the sack—“watched you walk out and he said to me, ‘Say, who’s that?’ Man in a dark suit, thin pale face. ‘Why, that’s Lavinia Nebbs, prettiest maiden lady in town,’ I said, ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Where’s she live?’” Here the druggist paused and looked away.
“You didn’t?” wailed Francine. “You didn’t give him her address, I hope? You didn’t!”
“Sorry, guess I didn’t think. I said, ‘Oh, over on Park Street, you know, near the ravine.’ Casual remark. But now, tonight, them finding the body, I heard a minute ago, I suddenly thought, what’ve I done!” He handed over the package, much too full.
“You fool!” cried Francine, and tears were in her eyes.
“I’m sorry. ’Course maybe it was nothing.”
“Nothing, nothing!” said Francine.
Lavinia stood with the three people looking at her, staring at her. She didn’t know what or how to feel. She felt nothing—except perhaps the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat. She held out her money automatically.
“No charge for those peppermints.” The druggist turned down his eyes and shuffled some papers.
“Well, I know what we’re going to do right now!” Helen stalked out of the drug shop. “We’re going right straight home. I’m not going to be part of any hunting party for you, Lavinia. That man asking for you. You’re next! You want to be dead in that ravine?”
“It was just a man,” said Lavinia slowly, eyes on the streets.
“So’s Tom Dillon a man, but maybe he’s The Lonely One!”
“We’re all overwrought,” said Lavinia reasonably. “I won’t miss the movie now. If I’m the next victim, let me be the next victim. A lady has all too little excitement in her life, especially an old maid, a lady thirty-seven like me, so don’t you mind if I enjoy it. And I’m being sensible. Stands to reason he won’t be out tonight, so soon after a murder. A month from now, yes, when the police’ve relaxed and when he feels like another murder. You’ve got to feel like murdering people, you know. At least that kind of murderer does. And he’s just resting up now. And anyway I’m not going home to stew in my own juices.”
“But Eliza’s face, there in the ravine!”
“After the first look I never looked again. I didn’t drink it in, if that’s what you mean. I can see a thing and tell myself I never saw it, that’s how strong I am. And the whole argument’s silly anyhow, because I’m not beautiful.”
“Oh, but you are, Lavinia. You’re the loveliest maiden lady in town, now that Eliza’s—” Francine stopped. “If you’d only relaxed, you’d been married years ago—”
“Stop sniveling, Francine. Here’s the box office. You and Helen go on home. I’ll sit alone and go home alone.”
“Lavinia, you’re crazy. We can’t leave you here—”
They argued for five minutes. Helen started to walk away but came back when she saw Lavinia thump down her money for a solitary movie ticket. Helen and Francine followed her silently into the theater.
The first show was over. In the dim auditorium, as they sat in the odor of ancient brass polish, the manager appeared before the worn red velvet curtains for an announcement:
“The police have asked for an early closing tonight. So everyone can be home at a decent hour. So we’re cutting our short subjects and putting on our feature film again now. The show will be over at 11. Everyone’s advised to go straight home and not linger on the streets. Our police force is pretty small and will be spread around pretty thin.”
“That means us, Lavinia. Us!” Lavinia felt the hands tugging at her elbows on either side.
Harold Lloyd in Welcome, Danger! said the screen in the dark.
“Lavinia,” Helen whispered.
“What?”
“As we came in, a man in a dark suit, across the street, crossed over. He just came in. He just sat in the row behind us.”
“Oh, Helen.”
“He’s right behind us now.”
Lavinia looked at the screen.
Helen turned slowly and glanced back. “I’m calling the manager!” she cried and leaped up. “Stop the film! Lights!”
“Helen, come back!” said Lavinia, her eyes shut.
WHEN THEY SET down their empty soda glasses, each of the ladies had a chocolate mustache on her upper lip. They removed them with their tongues, laughing.
“You see how silly it was?” said Lavinia. “All that riot for nothing. How embarrassing!”
The drug-store clock said 11:25. They had come out of the theater and the laughter and the enjoyment feeling new. And now they were laughing at Helen, and Helen was laughing at herself.
Lavinia said, “When you ran up that aisle crying ‘Lights!’ I thought I’d die!”
“That poor man!”
“The theater manager’s brother from Racine!”
“I apologized,” said Helen.
“You see what panic can do?”
The great fans still whirled and whirled in the warm night air, stirring and restirring the smells of vanilla, raspberry, peppermint, and disinfectant in the drug store.
/> “We shouldn’t have stopped for these sodas. The police said—”
“Oh, bosh the police,” laughed Lavinia. “I’m not afraid of anything. The Lonely One is a million miles away now. He won’t be back for weeks, and the police’ll get him then, just wait. Wasn’t the film funny!”
The streets were clean, and empty. Not a car or a truck or a person was in sight. The bright lights were still lit in the small store windows where the hot wax dummies stood. Their blank blue eyes watched as the ladies walked past them, down the night street.
“Do you suppose if we screamed they’d do anything?”
“Who?”
“The dummies, the window-people.”
“Oh, Francine.”
“Well …”
There were a hundred people in the windows, stiff and silent, and three people on the street, the echoes following like gunshots when they tapped their heels on the baked pavement.
A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzing like a dying insect. They walked past it.
Baked and white, the long avenue lay ahead. Blowing and tall in a wind that touched only their leafy summits, the trees stood on either side of the three small women.
“First we’ll walk you home, Francine.”
“No, I’ll walk you home.”
“Don’t be silly. You live the nearest. If you walked me home, you’d have to come back across the ravine all by yourself. And if so much as a leaf fell on you, you’d drop dead.”
Francine said, “I can stay the night at your house. You’re the pretty one!”
“No.”
So they drifted like three prim clothes-forms over a moonlit sea of lawn and concrete and trees. To Lavinia, watching the black trees flit by, listening to the voices of her friends, the night seemed to quicken. They seemed to be running while walking slowly. Everything seemed fast, and the color of hot snow.
“Let’s sing,” said Lavinia.
They sang sweetly and quietly, arm in arm, not looking back. They felt the hot sidewalk cooling underfoot, moving, moving.
“Listen,” said Lavinia.
They listened to the summer night, to the crickets and the far-off tone of the courthouse clock making it fifteen minutes to 12.
