A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

by Ray Bradbury

  Lantry forced himself to stop and stand on the steps before the warehouse. The man with the white hair came on onto the steps also and stood, looking at the sky. He looked as if he was going to speak at any moment. He fumbled in his pockets and took out a packet of cigarettes.

  V

  They stood outside the morgue together, the tall, pink, white-haired man, and Lantry, hands in their pockets. It was a cool night with a white shell of a moon that washed a house here, a road there, and farther on, parts of a river.

  “Cigarette?” The man offered Lantry one.

  “Thanks.”

  They lit up together. The man glanced at Lantry’s mouth. “Cool night.”

  “Cool.”

  They shifted their feet. “Terrible accident.”

  “Terrible.”

  “So many dead.”

  “So many.”

  Lantry felt himself some sort of delicate weight upon a scale. The other man did not seem to be looking at him, but rather listening and feeling toward him. There was a feathery balance here that made for vast discomfort. He wanted to move away and get out from under this balancing, weighing. The tall white-haired man said, “My name’s McClure.”

  “Did you have any friends inside?” asked Lantry.

  “No. A casual acquaintance. Awful accident.”

  “Awful.”

  They balanced each other. A beetle hissed by on the road with its seventeen tires whirling quietly. The moon showed a little town farther over in the black hills.

  “I say,” said the man McClure.

  “Yes.”

  “Could you answer me a question?”

  “Be glad to.” He loosened the knife in his coat pocket, ready.

  “Is your name Lantry?” asked the man at last.

  “Yes.”

  “William Lantry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re the man who came out of the Salem graveyard day before yesterday, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good Lord, I’m glad to meet you, Lantry! We’ve been trying to find you for the past twenty-four hours!”

  The man seized his hand, pumped it, slapped him on the back.

  “What, what?” said Lantry.

  “Good Lord, man, why did you run off? Do you realize what an instance this is? We want to talk to you!”

  McClure was smiling, glowing. Another handshake, another slap. “I thought it was you!”

  The man is mad, thought Lantry. Absolutely mad. Here I’ve toppled his incinerators, killed people, and he’s shaking my hand. Mad, mad!

  “Will you come along to the Hall?” said the man, taking his elbow.

  “Wh-what hall?” Lantry stepped back.

  “The Science Hall, of course. It isn’t every year we get a real case of suspended animation. In small animals, yes, but in a man, hardly! Will you come?”

  “What’s the act!” demanded Lantry, glaring. “What’s all this talk.”

  “My dear fellow, what do you mean?” the man was stunned.

  “Never mind. Is that the only reason you want to see me?”

  “What other reason would there be, Mr. Lantry? You don’t know how glad I am to see you!” He almost did a little dance. “I suspected. When we were in there together. You being so pale and all. And then the way you smoked your cigarette, something about it, and a lot of other things, all subliminal. But it is you, isn’t it, it is you!”

  “It is I. William Lantry.” Dryly.

  “Good fellow! Come along!”

  The beetle moved swiftly through the dawn streets. McClure talked rapidly.

  Lantry sat, listening, astounded. Here was this fool, McClure, playing his cards for him! Here was this stupid scientist, or whatever, accepting him not as a suspicious baggage, a murderous item. Oh no! Quite the contrary! Only as a suspended animation case was he considered! Not as a dangerous man at all. Far from it!

  “Of course,” cried McClure, grinning. “You didn’t know where to go, whom to turn to. It was all quite incredible to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I had a feeling you’d be there at the morgue tonight,” said McClure, happily.

  “Oh?” Lantry stiffened.

  “Yes. Can’t explain it. But you, how shall I put it? Ancient Americans? You had funny ideas on death. And you were among the dead so long, I felt you’d be drawn back by the accident, by the morgue and all. It’s not very logical. Silly, in fact. It’s just a feeling. I hate feelings but there it was. I came on a, I guess you’d call it a hunch, wouldn’t you?”

  “You might call it that.”

  “And there you were!”

  “There I was,” said Lantry.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I’ve eaten.”

  “How did you get around?”

  “I hitchhiked.”

  “You what?”

  “People gave me rides on the road.”

  “Remarkable.”

  “I imagine it sounds that way.” He looked at the passing houses. “So this is the era of space travel, is it?”

  “Oh, we’ve been traveling to Mars for some forty years now.”

  “Amazing. And those big funnels, those towers in the middle of every town?”

  “Those. Haven’t you heard? The Incinerators. Oh, of course, they hadn’t anything of that sort in your time. Had some bad luck with them. An explosion in Salem and one here, all in a forty-eight-hour period. You looked as if you were going to speak; what is it?”

  “I was thinking,” said Lantry. “How fortunate I got out of my coffin when I did. I might well have been thrown into one of your Incinerators and burned up.”

  “Quite.”

  Lantry toyed with the dials on the beetle dash. He wouldn’t go to Mars. His plans were changed. If this fool simply refused to recognize an act of violence when he stumbled upon it, then let him be a fool. If they didn’t connect the two explosions with a man from the tomb, all well and good. Let them go on deluding themselves. If they couldn’t imagine someone being mean and nasty and murderous, heaven help them. He rubbed his hands with satisfaction. No, no Martian trip for you, as yet, Lantry lad. First, we’ll see what can be done boring from the inside. Plenty of time. The Incinerators can wait an extra week or so. One has to be subtle, you know. Any more immediate explosions might cause quite a ripple of thought.

  McClure was gabbling wildly on.

  “Of course, you don’t have to be examined immediately. You’ll want a rest. I’ll put you up at my place.”

  “Thanks. I don’t feel up to being probed and pulled. Plenty of time in a week or so.”

  They drew up before a house and climbed out.

  “You want to sleep, naturally.”

  “I’ve been asleep for centuries. Be glad to stay awake. I’m not a bit tired.”

  “Good.” McClure let them into the house. He headed for the drink bar. “A drink will fix us up.”

  “You have one,” said Lantry. “Later for me. I just want to sit down.”

  “By all means sit.” McClure mixed himself a drink. He looked around the room, looked at Lantry, paused for a moment with the drink in his hand, tilted his head to one side, and put his tongue in his cheek. Then he shrugged and stirred the drink. He walked slowly to a chair and sat, sipping the drink quietly. He seemed to be listening for something. “There are cigarettes on the table,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Lantry took one and lit it and smoked it. He did not speak for some time.

  Lantry thought, I’m taking this all too easily. Maybe I should kill and run. He’s the only one that has found me, yet. Perhaps this is all a trap. Perhaps we’re simply sitting here waiting for the police. Or whatever in blazes they use for police these days. He looked at McClure. No. They weren’t waiting for police. They were waiting for something else.

  McClure didn’t speak. He looked at Lantry’s face and he looked at Lantry’s hands. He looked at Lantry’s chest a long time, with easy quietness. He sipped his drink. He loo
ked at Lantry’s feet.

  Finally he said, “Where’d you get the clothing?”

  “I asked someone for clothes and they gave these things to me. Darned nice of them.”

  “You’ll find that’s how we are in this world. All you have to do is ask.”

  McClure shut up again. His eyes moved. Only his eyes and nothing else. Once or twice he lifted his drink.

  A little clock ticked somewhere in the distance.

  “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Lantry.”

  “Nothing much to tell.”

  “You’re modest.”

  “Hardly. You know about the past. I know nothing of the future, or I should say ‘today’ and day before yesterday. You don’t learn much in a coffin.”

  McClure did not speak. He suddenly sat forward in his chair and then leaned back and shook his head.

  They’ll never suspect me, thought Lantry. They aren’t superstitious, they simply can’t believe in a dead man walking. Therefore, I’ll be safe. I’ll keep putting off the physical checkup. They’re polite. They won’t force me. Then, I’ll work it so I can get to Mars. After that, the tombs, in my own good time, and the plan. God, how simple. How naïve these people are.

  McClure sat across the room for five minutes. A coldness had come over him. The color was very slowly going from his face, as one sees the color of medicine vanishing as one presses the bulb at the top of a dropper. He leaned forward, saying nothing, and offered another cigarette to Lantry.

  “Thanks.” Lantry took it. McClure sat deeply back into his easy chair, his knees folded one over the other. He did not look at Lantry, and yet somehow did. The feeling of weighing and balancing returned. McClure was like a tall thin master of hounds listening for something that nobody else could hear. There are little silver whistles you can blow that only dogs can hear. McClure seemed to be listening acutely, sensitively for such an invisible whistle, listening with his eyes and with his half-opened, dry mouth, and with his aching, breathing nostrils.

  Lantry sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, and, as many times, blew out, blew out, blew out. McClure was like some lean red-shagged hound listening and listening with a slick slide of eyes to one side, with an apprehension in that hand that was so precisely microscopic that one only sensed it, as one sensed the invisible whistle, with some part of the brain deeper than eyes or nostril or ear.

  The room was so quiet the cigarette smoke made some kind of invisible noise rising to the ceiling. McClure was a thermometer, a chemist’s scales, a listening hound, a litmus paper, an antennae; all these. Lantry did not move. Perhaps the feeling would pass. It had passed before. McClure did not move for a long while and then, without a word, he nodded at the sherry decanter, and Lantry refused as silently. They sat looking but not looking at each other, again and away, again and away.

  McClure stiffened slowly. Lantry saw the color getting paler in those lean cheeks, and the hand tightening on the sherry glass, and a knowledge come at last to stay, never to go away, into the eyes.

  Lantry did not move. He could not. All of this was of such a fascination that he wanted only to see, to hear what would happen next. It was McClure’s show from here on in.

  McClure said, “At first I thought it was the first psychosis I have ever seen. You, I mean. I thought, he’s convinced himself, Lantry’s convinced himself, he’s quite insane, he’s told himself to do all these little things.” McClure talked as if in a dream, and continued talking and didn’t stop.

  “I said to myself, he purposely doesn’t breathe through his nose. I watched your nostrils, Lantry. The little nostril hairs never once quivered in the last hour. That wasn’t enough. It was a fact I filed. It wasn’t enough. He breathes through his mouth, I said, on purpose. And then I gave you a cigarette and you sucked and blew, sucked and blew. None of it ever came out your nose. I told myself, well, that’s all right. He doesn’t inhale. Is that terrible, is that suspect? All in the mouth, all in the mouth. And then, I looked at your chest. I watched. It never moved up or down, it did nothing. He’s convinced himself, I said to myself. He’s convinced himself about all this. He doesn’t move his chest, except slowly, when he thinks you’re not looking. That’s what I told myself.”

  The words went on in the silent room, not pausing, still in a dream. “And then I offered you a drink but you don’t drink and I thought, he doesn’t drink, I thought. Is that terrible? And I watched and watched you all this time. Lantry holds his breath, he’s fooling himself. But now, yes, now, I understand it quite well. Now I know everything the way it is. Do you know how I know? I do not hear breathing in the room. I wait and I hear nothing. There is no beat of heart or intake of lung. The room is so silent. Nonsense, one might say, but I know. At the Incinerator I know. There is a difference. You enter a room where a man is on a bed and you know immediately whether he will look up and speak to you or whether he will not speak to you ever again. Laugh if you will, but one can tell. It is a subliminal thing. It is the whistle the dog hears when no human hears. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.”

  McClure shut his eyes a moment. He put down his sherry glass. He waited a moment. He took up his cigarette and puffed it and then put it down in a black tray.

  “I am alone in this room,” he said.

  Lantry did not move.

  “You are dead,” said McClure. “My mind does not know this. It is not a thinking thing. It is a thing of the senses and the subconscious. At first I thought, this man thinks he is dead, risen from the dead, a vampire. Is that not logical? Would not any man, buried as many centuries, raised in a superstitious, ignorant culture, think likewise of himself once risen from the tomb? Yes, that is logical. This man has hypnotized himself and fitted his bodily functions so that they would in no way interfere with his self-delusion, his great paranoia. He governs his breathing. He tells himself, I cannot hear my breathing, therefore I am dead. His inner mind censors the sound of breathing. He does not allow himself to eat or drink. These things he probably does in his sleep, with part of his mind, hiding the evidences of this humanity from his deluded mind at other times.”

  McClure finished it. “I was wrong. You are not insane. You are not deluding yourself. Nor me. This is all very illogical and—I must admit—almost frightening. Does that make you feel good, to think you frighten me? I have no label for you. You’re a very odd man, Lantry. I’m glad to have met you. This will make an interesting report indeed.”

  “Is there anything wrong with me being dead?” said Lantry. “Is it a crime?”

  “You must admit it’s highly unusual.”

  “But, still now, is it a crime?” asked Lantry.

  “We have no crime, no criminal court. We want to examine you, naturally, to find out how you have happened. It is like that chemical which, one minute is inert, the next is living cell. Who can say where what happened to what. You are that impossibility. It is enough to drive a man quite insane.”

  “Will I be released when you are done fingering me?”

  “You will not be held. If you don’t wish to be examined, you will not be. But I am hoping you will help by offering us your services.”

  “I might,” said Lantry.

  “But tell me,” said McClure. “What were you doing at the morgue?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I heard you talking when I came in.”

  “I was merely curious.”

  “You’re lying. That is very bad, Mr. Lantry. The truth is far better. The truth is, is it not, that you are dead and, being the only one of your sort, were lonely. Therefore you killed people to have company.”

  “How does that follow?”

  McClure laughed. “Logic, my dear fellow. Once I knew you were really dead, a moment ago, really a—what do you call it—a vampire (silly word!) I tied you immediately to the Incinerator blasts. Before that there was no
reason to connect you. But once the one piece fell into place, the fact that you were dead, then it was simple to guess your loneliness, your hate, your envy, all of the tawdry motivations of a walking corpse. It took only an instant then to see the Incinerators blown to blazes, and then to think of you, among the bodies at the morgue, seeking help, seeking friends and people like yourself to work with—”

  “Blast you!” Lantry was out of the chair. He was halfway to the other man when McClure rolled over and scuttled away, flinging the sherry decanter. With a great despair Lantry realized that, like an idiot, he had thrown away his one chance to kill McClure. He should have done it earlier. It had been Lantry’s one weapon, his safety margin. If people in a society never killed each other, they never suspected one another. You could walk up to any one of them and kill him.

  “Come back here!” Lantry threw the knife.

  McClure got behind a chair. The idea of flight, of protection, of fighting, was still new to him. He had part of the idea, but there was still a bit of luck on Lantry’s side if Lantry wanted to use it.

  “Oh, no,” said McClure, holding the chair between himself and the advancing man. “You want to kill me. It’s odd, but true. I can’t understand it. You want to cut me with that knife or something like that, and it’s up to me to prevent you from doing such an odd thing.”

  “I will kill you!” Lantry let it slip out. He cursed himself. That was the worst possible thing to say.

  Lantry lunged across the chair, clutching at McClure.

  McClure was very logical. “It won’t do you any good to kill me. You know that.” They wrestled and held each other in a wild, toppling shuffle. Tables fell over, scattering articles. “You remember what happened in the morgue?”

  “I don’t care!” screamed Lantry.

  “You didn’t raise those dead, did you?”

  “I don’t care!” cried Lantry.

  “Look here,” said McClure, reasonably. “There will never be any more like you, ever, there’s no use.”

  “Then I’ll destroy all of you, all of you!” screamed Lantry.

  “And then what? You’ll still be alone, with no more like you about.”