by Ray Bradbury
Footsteps. Gentle, approaching footsteps.
Far away, a voice said, “She’s asleep. Don’t disturb her.”
An odor of tweeds, a pipe, a certain shaving lotion. David was standing over her. And beyond him the immaculate smell of Dr. Jeffers.
She did not open her eyes. “I’m awake,” she said, quietly. It was a surprise, a relief to be able to speak, to not be dead.
“Alice,” someone said, and it was David beyond her closed eyes, holding her tired hands.
Would you like to meet the murderer, David? she thought. I hear your voice asking to see him, so there’s nothing but for me to point him out to you.
David stood over her. She opened her eyes. The room came into focus. Moving a weak hand, she pulled aside a coverlet.
The murderer looked up at David Leiber with a small, red-faced, blue-eyed calm. Its eyes were deep and sparkling.
“Why!” cried David Leiber, smiling. “He’s a fine baby!”
Something Wicked This Way Comes
For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. The shrill siren song of a calliope beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes … and the stuff of nightmare.
Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in high attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics and stirring up dreams about clocks in all the beds where children slept.
Will heard it.
Muffled away in the prairie lands, the chuffing of an engine, the slow-following dragon-glide of a train.
Will sat up in bed.
Across the way, like a mirror image, Jim sat up, too.
A calliope began to play oh so softly, grieving to itself, a million miles away.
In one single motion, Will leaned from his window, as did Jim. Without a word they gazed over the trembling surf of trees.
Their rooms were high, as boys’ rooms should be. From these gaunt windows they could rifle-fire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!
There, on the world’s rim, the lovely snail-gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-colored semaphore to the stars.
There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.
The train itself appeared, link by link, engine, coal-car, and numerous and numbered all-asleep-and-slumbering-dreamfilled cars that followed the firefly-sparked churn, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalo-haunched arms shoveling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.
The engine!
Both boys vanished, came back to lift binoculars. “The engine!”
“Civil War! No other stack like that since 1900!”
“The rest of the train, all of it’s old!”
“The flags! The cages! It’s the carnival!”
They listened. At first Will thought he heard the air whistling fast in his nostrils. But no—it was the train, and the calliope sighing, weeping, on that train.
“Sounds like church music!”
“Hell. Why would a carnival play church music?”
“Don’t say hell,” hissed Will.
“Hell.” Jim ferociously leaned out. “I’ve saved up all day. Everyone’s asleep so—hell!”
The music drifted by their windows. Goose pimples rose big as boils on Will’s arms.
“That is church music. Changed.”
“For cri-yi, I’m froze, let’s go watch them set up!”
“At three A.M.?”
“At three A.M.!”
Jim vanished.
For a moment, Will watched Jim dance around over there, shirt uplifted, pants going on, while off in night country, panting, churning was this funeral train all black plumed cars, licorice-colored cages, and a sooty calliope clamoring, banging three different hymns mixed and lost, maybe not there at all.
“Here goes nothing!”
Jim slid down the drainpipe on his house, toward the sleeping lawns.
“Jim! Wait!”
Will thrashed into his clothes.
“Jim, don’t go alone!”
And followed after.
Death Is a Lonely Business
A fantastical tale of mayhem and murder set among the shadows and the murky canals of Venice, California, in the early 1950s. Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. The nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort—until strange things begin happening around him. As the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious “accidents”—some of them fatal. Aided by a savvy, street-smart detective and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.
Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad. It had fog almost every night and along the shore the moaning of the oil well machinery and the slap of dark water in the canals and the hiss of sand against the windows of your house when the wind came up and sang among the open places and along the empty walks.
Those were the days when the Venice pier was falling apart and dying in the sea and you could find there the bones of a vast dinosaur, the rollercoaster, being covered by the shifting tides.
At the end of one long canal you could find old circus wagons that had been rolled and dumped, and in the cages, at midnight, if you looked, things lived—fish and crayfish moving with the tide; and it was all the circuses of time somehow gone to doom and rusting away.
And there was a loud avalanche of big red trolley car that rushed toward the sea every half-hour and at midnight skirled the curve and threw sparks on the high wires and rolled away with a moan which was like the dead turning in their sleep, as if the trolleys and the lonely men who swayed steering them knew that in another year they would be gone, the tracks covered with concrete and tar and the high spider-wire collected on rolls and spirited away.
And it was in that time, in one of those lonely years when the fogs never ended and the winds never stopped their laments, that riding the old red trolley, the high-bucketing thunder, one night I met up with Death’s friend and didn’t know it.
It was a raining night, with me reading a book in the back of the old, whining, roaring railcar on its way from one empty confetti-tossed transfer station to the next. Just me and the big, aching wooden car and the conductor up front slamming the brass controls and easing the brakes and letting out the hell-steam when needed.
And the man down the aisle who somehow had got there without my noticing.
I became aware of him finally because of him swaying, swaying, standing there behind me for a long time, as if undecided because there were forty empty seats and late at night it is hard with so much emptiness to decide which one to take. But finally I heard him sit and I knew he was there because I could smell him like the tidelands coming in across the fields. On top of the smell of his clothes, there was the odor of too much drink taken in too little time.
I did not look back at him. I learned long ago, looking only encourages.
I shut my eyes and kept my head firmly turned away. It didn’t work.
“Oh,” the man moaned
.
I could feel him strain forward in his seat. I felt his hot breath on my neck. I held on to my knees and sank away.
“Oh,” he moaned, even louder. It was like someone falling off a cliff, asking to be saved, or someone swimming far out in the storm, wanting to be seen.
“Ah!”
It was raining hard now as the big red trolley bucketed across a midnight stretch of meadow-grass and the rain banged the windows, drenching away the sight of open fields. We sailed through Culver City without seeing the film studio and ran on, the great car heaving, the floorboard whining underfoot, the empty seats creaking, the train whistle screaming.
And a blast of terrible air from behind me as the unseen man cried, “Death!”
The train whistle cut across his voice so he had to start over.
“Death—”
Another whistle.
“Death,” said the voice behind me, “is a lonely business.”
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Halloween night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous invitation leads him from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.
Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glades cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead.
As the lights went out and the motions stopped and the wind that blew around the corners of the studio buildings cooled, an incredible melancholy seemed to sweep from the front gate of the living all the way along through twilight avenues toward that high brick wall that separated the two cities within a city. And suddenly the streets were filled with something one could speak of only as remembrance. For while the people had gone away, they left behind them architectures that were haunted by the ghosts of incredible happenings.
For indeed it was the most outrageous city in the world, where anything could happen and always did. Ten thousand deaths had happened here, and when the deaths were done, the people got up, laughing, and strolled away. Whole tenement blocks were set afire and did not burn. Sirens shrieked and police cars careened around corners, only to have the officers peel off their blues, cold-cream their orange pancake makeup, and walk home to small bungalow court apartments out in that great and mostly boring world.
Dinosaurs prowled here, one moment in miniature, and the next looming fifty feet tall above half-clad virgins who screamed on key. From here various Crusades departed to peg their armor and stash their spears at Western Costume down the road. From here Henry the Eighth let drop some heads. From here Dracula wandered as flesh to return as dust. Here also were the Stations of the Cross and a trail of ever-replenished blood as screenwriters groaned by to Calvary carrying a back-breaking load of revisions, pursued by directors with scourges and film cutters with razor-sharp knives. It was from these towers that the Muslim faithful were called to worship each day at sunset as the limousines whispered out with faceless powers behind each window, and peasants averted their gaze, fearing to be struck blind.
This being true, all the more reason to believe that when the sun vanished the old haunts rose up, so that the warm city cooled and began to resemble the marbled orchardways across the wall. By midnight, in that strange peace caused by temperature and wind and the voice of some far church clock, the two cities were at last one. And the night watchman was the only motion prowling along from India to France to prairie Kansas to brownstone New York to Piccadilly to the Spanish Steps, covering twenty thousand miles of territorial incredibility in twenty brief minutes. Even as his counter-part across the wall punched the time clocks around among the monuments, flashed his light on various Arctic angels, read names like credits on tombstones, and sat to have his midnight tea with all that was left of some Keystone Kop. At four in the morning, the watchmen asleep, the two cities, folded and kept, waited for the sun to rise over withered flowers, eroded tombs, and elephant India ripe for overpopulation should God the Director decree and Central Casting deliver.
And so it was on All Hallows Eve, 1954.
Halloween.
My favorite night in all the year.
About the Author
The author of more than thirty books, RAY BRADBURY is one of the most celebrated fiction writers of our time. Among his best-known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He has written for the theater and the cinema, including the screenplay for John Huston’s classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and has been nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television’s “The Ray Bradbury Theater” and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. In 2000, Mr. Bradbury was honored by the National Book Foundation with a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His most recent collection of short fiction, One More for the Road, is currently available in hardcover from William Morrow. Mr. Bradbury lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Marguerite.
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Praise
“Filled with poetic imagery, paeans to yesterday and lost faith, and plenty of magic storytelling, From the Dust Returned is ample proof that Bradbury hasn’t lost the passion and the fire of his youth.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The Elliotts—that weird and wonderful family that Ray Bradbury has conjured up over the years—finally score in their own full-fledged book.... In ecstatic rushes of language, Bradbury creates a world of storm-tossed trees, mysterious attics, forbidding cellars, and rattling trains.... A wonderful flight of fancy.”
Seattle Times
“Think ‘The Addams Family’ and ‘The Munsters’ as written by a literary master … Although Bradbury has given his characters fabulous powers, he has succeeded in showing the importance of family bonds and love.... If you have never read Bradbury’s Elliott stories, you’re in for a treat. If you are a fan like I am, you wouldn’t miss this book for the world.”
Denver Rocky Mountain News
“Ray Bradbury is Edgar Allan Poe for optimists.... Mixed in with the boisterous adventures of a family that’s spirited in more ways than one are wistful meditations on the fragile preciousness of life. For Bradbury, the most bewitching force in the universe is human nature.... The joy of From the Dust Returned is the way in which the author’s boyish enthusiasm for goblins and spirits intersects with his adult conviction that the fantastic is unmatched by the tangible.... ‘Make haste to live’ is the Elliotts’ motto, and it’s an invitation so moving and earnest that the reader can’t help wanting to take them up on it.”
New York Times Book Review
“From the Dust Returned is as much poetry as fiction. Images abound, lyrical, heartbreaking.”
Baltimore Sun
“A novel funny, beautiful, sad, and wise, to rank with his finest work. Full of wide-eyed wonder and dazzling imagery, the stories retain as an integrated whole their original freshness and charm.... This book will shame the cynics and delight the true believers who never lost faith in their beloved author.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“One of the greats of twentieth century American fantasy … From the Dust Returned revisits dreams begun when our land had other preoccupations—ones that seemed grave enough at the time, but now seem reassuringly manageable.... The message is certainly timely.... It warns of witch hunts, a danger again as it was in the McCarthy era.... Not everyone who looks scary is dangerous; not everyone who looks normal mea
ns well.”
Newsday
“Written in trademark Bradbury style, the book reads like liquid poetry while telling the interconnected stories of a number of unusual—yet strangely familiar—family members.... A new novel by Bradbury is an event worth noting.”
Library Journal (*Starred Review*)
“Master writer Bradbury gave life to the Eternal Family in the 1940s, and in this reunion, the imaginative and wayward share their curious memories and fantastical legends.”
New York Daily News
“Ray Bradbury is besotted with the English language. He has carried to term the love-child of exquisite verbiage.... What [he] proffers is a reverie, a delicate between-courses sorbet in a crystal goblet, intended to flense your palate and your spirit of the lingering harsh tastes of a less-than-perfect world.... From the Dust Returned is superlatively what it is: a touchstone, a codex and sampler of the pure Bradbury voice.... It is that iconographic voice that compels us to read him, and read him, and somehow … prevents us from escaping his weirding ways.... This Poet Laureate of the Chimerical and Phantasmagoric is still with us, still writing, still freshening our ration of dreamdust.”
Harlan Ellison, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“This book’s mood combines autumnal nostalgia with the old-fashioned excitement of a child anticipating Halloween.... Its gifts include lovely prose, a few laughs, and the atmosphere of rummaging around in a beloved attic.”
Dallas Morning News
“One of America’s rarest dreamers and thinkers … Bradbury is a living legend.”
Orange County Register
“Almost no one can imagine a time or a place without the fiction of Ray Bradbury. It’s as if he’s always been with us, his books always fresh on the shelves … His stories and novels are part of the American language.”
Washington Post
