Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (89 page)

I live in a well. I live like smoke in a well. Like vapor in a stone throat. I don’t move. I don’t do anything but wait. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when I don’t know? I cannot. I am simply waiting. I am mist and moonlight and memory. I am sad and I am old. Sometimes I fall like rain into the well. Spider webs are startled into forming where my rain falls fast, on the water surface. I wait in cool silence and there will be a day when I no longer wait.

Now it is morning. I hear a great thunder. I smell fire from a distance. I hear a metal crashing. I wait. I listen.

Voices. Far away.

‘All right!’

One voice. An alien voice. An alien tongue I cannot know. No word is familiar. I listen.

‘Send the men out!’

A crunching in crystal sands.

‘Mars! So this is it!’

‘Where’s the flag?’

‘Here, sir.’

‘Good, good.’

The sun is high in the blue sky and its golden rays fill the well and I hang like a flower pollen, invisible and misting in the warm light.

Voices.

‘In the name of the Government of Earth. I proclaim this to be the Martian Territory, to be equally divided among the member nations.’

What are they saying? I turn in the sun, like a wheel, invisible and lazy, golden and tireless.

‘What’s over here?’

‘A well!’

‘No!’

‘Come on. Yes!’

The approach of warmth. Three objects bend over the well mouth, and my coolness rises to the objects.

‘Great!’

‘Think it’s good water?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Someone get a lab test bottle and a dropline.’

‘I will!’

A sound of running. The return.

‘Here we are.’

I wait.

‘Let it down. Easy.’

Glass shines, above, coming down on a slow line.

The water ripples softly as the glass touches and fills. I rise in the warm air toward the well mouth.

‘Here we are. You want to test this water, Regent?’

‘Let’s have it.’

‘What a beautiful well. Look at that construction. How old you think it is?’

‘God knows. When we landed in that other town yesterday Smith said there hasn’t been life on Mars in ten thousand years.’

‘Imagine.’

‘How is it, Regent? The water.’

‘Pure as silver. Have a glass.’

The sound of water in the hot sunlight. Now I hover like a dust, a cinnamon, upon the soft wind.

‘What’s the matter, Jones?’

‘I don’t know. Got a terrible headache. All of a sudden.’

‘Did you drink the water yet?’

‘No, I haven’t, It’s not that, I was just bending over the well and all of a sudden my head split. I feel better now.’

Now I know who I am.

My name is Stephen Leonard Jones and I am twenty-five years old and I have just come in a rocket from a planet called Earth and I am standing with my good friends Regent and Shaw by an old well on the planet Mars.

I look down at my golden fingers, tan and strong. I look at my long legs and at my silver uniform and at my friends.

‘What’s wrong, Jones?’ they say.

‘Nothing,’ I say, looking at them. ‘Nothing at all.’

The food is good. It has been ten thousand years since food. It touches the tongue in a fine way and the wine with the food is warming. I listen
to the sound of voices. I make words that I do not understand but somehow understand. I test the air.

‘What’s the matter, Jones?’

I tilt this head of mine and rest my hands holding the silver utensils of eating. I feel everything.

‘What do you mean?’ this voice, this new thing of mine, says.

‘You keep breathing funny. Coughing,’ says the other man.

I pronounce exactly. ‘Maybe a little cold coming on.’

‘Check with the doc later.’

I nod my head and it is good to nod. It is good to do several things after ten thousand years. It is good to breathe the air and it is good to feel the sun in the flesh deep and going deeper and it is good to feel the structure of ivory, the fine skeleton hidden in the warming flesh, and it is good to hear sounds much clearer and more immediate than they were in the stone deepness of a well. I sit enchanted.

‘Come out of it, Jones, Snap to it. We got to move!’

‘Yes,’ I say, hypnotized with the way the word forms like water on the tongue and falls with slow beauty out into the air.

I walk and it is good walking. I stand high and it is a long way to the ground when I look down from my eyes and my head. It is like living on a fine cliff and being happy there.

Regent stands by the stone well, looking down. The others have gone murmuring to the silver ship from which they came.

I feel the fingers of my hand and the smile of my mouth.

‘It is deep,’ I say.

‘Yes.’

‘It is called a Soul Well.’

Regent raises his head and looks at me. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Doesn’t it look like one?’

‘I never heard of a Soul Well.’

‘A place where waiting things, things that once had flesh, wait and wait,’ I say, touching his arm.

The sand is fire and the ship is silver fire in the hotness of the day and the heat is good to feel. The sound of my feet in the hard sand. I listen. The sound of the wind and the sun burning the valleys. I smell the smell of the rocket boiling in the noon. I stand below the port.

‘Where’s Regent?’ someone says.

‘I saw him by the well,’ I reply.

One of them runs toward the well. I am beginning to tremble. A fine shivering tremble, hidden deep, but becoming very strong. And for the first time I hear it, as if it too were hidden in a well. A voice calling deep within me, tiny and afraid. And the voice cries,
Let me go, let me go
, and
there is a feeling as if something is trying to get free, a pounding of labyrinthine doors, a rushing down dark corridors and up passages, echoing and screaming.

‘Regent’s in the well!’

The men are running, all five of them. I run with them but now I am sick and the trembling is violent.

‘He must have fallen. Jones, you were here with him. Did you see? Jones? Well, speak up, man.’

‘What’s wrong, Jones?’

I fall to my knees, the trembling is so bad.

‘He’s sick. Here, help me with him.’

‘The sun.’

‘No, not the sun,’ I murmur.

They stretch me out and the seizures come and go like earthquakes and the deep hidden voice in me cries,
This is Jones, this is me, that’s not him, that’s not him, don’t believe him, let me out, let me out!
And I look up at the bent figures and my eyelids flicker. They touch my wrists.

‘His heart is acting up.’

I close my eyes. The screaming stops. The shivering ceases.

I rise, as in a cool well, released.

‘He’s dead,’ says someone.

‘Jones is dead.’

‘From what?’

‘Shock, it looks like.’

‘What kind of shock?’ I say, and my name is Sessions and my lips move crisply, and I am the captain of these men. I stand among them and I am looking down at a body which lies cooling on the sands. I clap both hands to my head.

‘Captain!’

‘It’s nothing,’ I say, crying out. ‘Just a headache. I’ll be all right. There. There,’ I whisper. ‘It’s all right now.’

‘We’d better get out of the sun, sir.’

‘Yes,’ I say, looking down at Jones. ‘We should never have come. Mars doesn’t want us.’

We carry the body back to the rocket with us, and a new voice is calling deep in me to be let out.

Help, help
. Far down in the moist earthen-works of the body.
Help, help!
in red fathoms, echoing and pleading.

The trembling starts much sooner this time. The control is less steady.

‘Captain, you’d better get in out of the sun, you don’t look too well, sir.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Help,’ I say.

‘What, sir?’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You said “Help,” sir.’

‘Did I, Matthews, did I?’

The body is laid out in the shadow of the rocket and the voice screams in the deep underwater catacombs of bone and crimson tide. My hands jerk. My mouth splits and is parched. My nostrils fasten wide. My eyes roll.
Help, help, oh help, don’t, don’t, let me out, don’t, don’t
.

‘Don’t,’ I say.

‘What, sir?’

‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘I’ve got to get free,’ I say. I clap my hand to my mouth.

‘How’s that, sir?’ cries Matthews.

‘Get inside, all of you, go back to Earth!’ I shout.

A gun is in my hand. I lift it.

‘Don’t, sir!’

An explosion. Shadows run. The screaming is cut off. There is a whistling sound of falling through space.

After ten thousand years, how good to die. How good to feel the sudden coolness, the relaxation. How good to be like a hand within a glove that stretches out and grows wonderfully cold in the hot sand. Oh, the quiet and the loveliness of gathering, darkening death. But one cannot linger on.

A crack, a snap.

‘Good God, he’s killed himself!’ I cry, and open my eyes and there is the captain lying against the rocket, his skull split by a bullet, his eyes wide, his tongue protruding between his white teeth. Blood runs from his head. I bend to him and touch him. ‘The fool,’ I say. ‘Why did he do that?’

The men are horrified. They stand over the two dead men and turn their heads to see the Martian sands and the distant well where Regent lies lolling in deep waters. A croaking comes out of their dry lips, a whimpering, a childish protest against this awful dream.

The men turn to me.

After a long while, one of them says, ‘That makes you captain, Matthews.’

‘I know,’ I say slowly.

‘Only six of us left.’

‘Good God, it happened so quick!’

‘I don’t want to stay here, let’s get out!’

The men clamor. I go to them and touch them now, with a confidence which almost sings in me. ‘Listen,’ I say, and touch their elbows or their arms or their hands.

We all fall silent.

We are one.

No, no, no, no, no, no!
Inner voices crying, deep down and gone into prisons beneath exteriors.

We are looking at each other. We are Samuel Matthews and Raymond Moses and William Spaulding and Charles Evans and Forrest Cole and John Summers, and we say nothing but look upon each other and our white faces and shaking hands.

We turn, as one, and look at the well.

‘Now,’ we say.

No, no
, six voices scream, hidden and layered down and stored forever.

Our feet walk in the sand and it is as if a great hand with twelve fingers were moving across the hot sea bottom.

We bend to the well, looking down. From the cool depths six faces peer back up at us.

One by one we bend until our balance is gone, and one by one drop into the mouth and down through cool darkness into the cold waters.

The sun sets. The stars wheel upon the night sky. Far out, there is a wink of light. Another rocket coming, leaving red marks on space.

I live in a well. I live like smoke in a well. Like vapor in a stone throat. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when even I don’t know? I cannot.

I am simply waiting.

He opened a door on darkness. A voice cried, ‘Shut it!’ It was like a blow in the face. He jumped through. The door banged. He cursed himself quietly. The voice, with dreadful patience, intoned, ‘Jesus. You Terwilliger?’

‘Yes,’ said Terwilliger. A faint ghost of screen haunted the dark theater wall to his right. To his left, a cigarette wove fiery arcs in the air as someone’s lips talked swiftly around it.

‘You’re five minutes late!’

Don’t make it sound like five years, thought Terwilliger.

‘Shove your film in the projection room door. Let’s
move
.’

Terwilliger squinted.

He made out five vast loge seats that exhaled, breathed heavily as amplitudes of executive life shifted, leaning toward the middle loge where, almost in darkness, a little boy sat smoking.

No, thought Terwilliger, not a boy. That’s him. Joe Clarence. Clarence the Great.

For now the tiny mouth snapped like a puppet’s, blowing smoke. ‘Well?’

Terwilliger stumbled back to hand the film to the projectionist, who made a lewd gesture toward the loges, winked at Terwilliger and slammed the booth door.

‘Jesus,’ sighed the tiny voice. A buzzer buzzed. ‘Roll it, projection!’

Terwilliger probed the nearest loge, struck flesh, pulled back and stood biting his lips.

Music leaped from the screen. His film appeared in a storm of drums:

TYRANNOSAURUS REX: THE THUNDER LIZARD.

Photographed in stop-motion animation with miniatures created by John Terwilliger. A study in life-forms on Earth one billion years before Christ.

Faint ironic applause came softly patting from the baby hands in the middle loge.

Terwilliger shut his eyes. New music jerked him alert. The last titles faded into a world of primeval sun, mist, poisonous rain and lush wilderness. Morning fogs were strewn along eternal seacoasts where immense flying dreams and dreams of nightmare scythed the wind. Huge triangles of bone and rancid skin, of diamond eye and crusted tooth, pterodactyls, the kites of destruction, plunged, struck prey, and skimmed away, meat and screams in their scissor mouths.

Terwilliger gazed, fascinated.

In the jungle foliage now, shiverings, creepings, insect jitterings, antennae twitchings, slime locked in oily fatted slime, armor skinned to armor, in sun glade and shadow moved the reptilian inhabitors of Terwilliger’s mad remembrance of vengeance given flesh and panic taking wing.

Brontosaur, stegosaur, triceratops. How easily the clumsy tonnages of name fell from one’s lips.

The great brutes swung like ugly machineries of war and dissolution through moss ravines, crushing a thousand flowers at one footfall, snouting the mist, ripping the sky in half with one shriek.

My beauties, thought Terwilliger, my little lovelies. All liquid latex, rubber sponge, ball-socketed steel articulature; all night-dreamed, clay-molded, warped and welded, riveted and slapped to life by hand. No bigger than my fist, half of them; the rest no larger than this head they sprang from.

‘Good Lord,’ said a soft admiring voice in the dark.

Step by step, frame by frame of film, stop motion by stop motion, he, Terwilliger, had run his beasts through their postures, moved each a fraction of an inch, photographed them, moved them another hair, photographed them, for hours and days and months. Now these rare images, this eight hundred scant feet of film, rushed through the projector.

And lo! he thought. I’ll never get used to it. Look! They come
alive
!

Rubber, steel, clay, reptilian latex sheath, glass eye, porcelain fang, all ambles, trundles, strides in terrible prides through continents as yet unmanned, by seas as yet unsalted, a billion years lost away. They
do
breathe. They
do
smite air with thunders. Oh, uncanny!

I feel, thought Terwilliger, quite simply, that there stands
my
Garden, and these my animal creations which I love on this Sixth Day, and tomorrow, the Seventh. I must rest.

‘Lord,’ said the soft voice again.

Terwilliger almost answered, ‘Yes?’

‘This is beautiful footage, Mr Clarence,’ the voice went on.

‘Maybe,’ said the man with a boy’s voice.

‘Incredible animation.’

‘I’ve seen better,’ said Clarence the Great.

Terwilliger stiffened. He turned from the screen where his friends lumbered into oblivion, from butcheries wrought on architectural scales. For the first time he examined his possible employers.

‘Beautiful stuff.’

This praise came from an old man who sat to himself far across the theater, his head lifted forward in amaze toward that ancient life.

‘It’s jerky. Look there!’ The strange boy in the middle loge half rose, pointing with the cigarette in his mouth. ‘Hey, was
that
a bad shot? You
see
?’

‘Yes,’ said the old man, tired suddenly, fading back in his chair. ‘I see.’

Terwilliger crammed his hotness down upon a suffocation of swiftly moving blood.

‘Jerky,’ said Joe Clarence.

White light, quick numerals, darkness; the music cut, the monsters vanished.

‘Glad that’s over.’ Joe Clarence exhaled. ‘Almost lunchtime. Throw on the next reel. Walter! That’s all. Terwilliger.’ Silence. ‘Terwilliger?’ Silence. ‘Is that dumb bunny still here?’

‘Here.’ Terwilliger ground his fists on his hips.

‘Oh,’ said Joe Clarence. ‘It’s not bad. But don’t get ideas about money. A dozen guys came here yesterday to show stuff as good or better than yours, tests for our new film,
Prehistoric Monster
. Leave your bid in an envelope with my secretary. Same door out as you came in. Walter, what the hell you waiting for? Roll the next one!’

In darkness, Terwilliger barked his shins on a chair, groped for and found the door handle, gripped it tight, tight.

Behind him the screen exploded: an avalanche fell in great flourings of stone, whole cities of granite, immense edifices of marble piled, broke and flooded down. In this thunder, he heard voices from the week ahead:

‘We’ll pay you one thousand dollars, Terwilliger.’

‘But I need a thousand for my equipment alone!’

‘Look, we’re giving you a break. Take it or leave it!’

With the thunder dying, he knew he would take, and he knew he would hate it.

Only when the avalanche had drained off to silence behind him and his own blood had raced to the inevitable decision and stalled in his heart, did Terwilliger pull the immensely weighted door wide to step forth into the terrible raw light of day.

Fuse flexible spine to sinuous neck, pivot neck to death’s-head skull, hinge jaw from hollow cheek, glue plastic sponge over lubricated skeleton, slip snake-pebbled skin over sponge, meld seams with fire, then rear upright triumphant in a world where insanity wakes but to look on madness—Tyrannosaurus Rex!

The Creator’s hands glided down out of arc-light sun. They placed the granuled monster in false green summer wilds, they waded it in broths of teeming bacterial life. Planted in serene terror, the lizard machine basked. From the blind heavens the Creator’s voice hummed, vibrating the Garden with the old and monotonous tune about the footbone connected to the…anklebone, anklebone connected to the…legbone, legbone connected to the…kneebone, kneebone connected to the…

A door burst wide.

Joe Clarence ran in very much like an entire Cub Scout pack. He looked wildly around as if no one were there.

‘My God!’ he cried. ‘Aren’t you set up yet? This costs me money!’

‘No,’ said Terwilliger dryly. ‘No matter how much time I take, I get paid the same.’

Joe Clarence approached in a series of quick starts and stops. ‘Well, shake a leg. And make it real horrible.’

Terwilliger was on his knees beside the miniature jungle set. His eyes were on a straight level with his producer’s as he said, ‘How many feet of blood and gore would you like?’

‘Two thousand feet of each!’ Clarence laughed in a kind of gasping stutter. ‘Let’s look.’ He grabbed the lizard.

‘Careful!’

‘Careful?’ Clarence turned the ugly beast in careless and non-loving hands. ‘It’s my monster, ain’t it? The contract—’

‘The contract says you use this model for exploitation advertising, but the animal reverts to me after the film’s in release.’

‘Holy cow.’ Clarence waved the monster. ‘That’s wrong. We just signed the contracts four days ago—’

‘It feels like four years.’ Terwilliger rubbed his eyes. ‘I’ve been up two nights without sleep finishing this beast so we can start shooting.’

Clarence brushed this aside. ‘To hell with the contract. What a slimy trick. It’s my monster. You and your agent give me heart attacks. Heart attacks about money, heart attacks about equipment, heart attacks about—’

‘This camera you gave me is ancient.’

‘So if it breaks, fix it; you got hands? The challenge of the shoestring operation is using the old brain instead of cash. Getting back to the point, this monster, it should’ve been specified in the deal, is my baby.’

‘I never let anyone own the things I make,’ said Terwilliger honestly. ‘I put too much time and affection in them.’

‘Hell, okay, so we give you fifty bucks extra for the beast, and throw in all this camera equipment free when the film’s done, right? Then you start your own company. Compete with me, get even with me, right, using my own machines!’ Clarence laughed.

‘If they don’t fall apart first,’ observed Terwilliger.

‘Another thing.’ Clarence put the creature on the floor and walked around it. ‘I don’t like the way this monster shapes up.’

‘You don’t like
what
?’ Terwiliger almost yelled.

‘His expression. Needs more fire, more…goombah. More mazash!’

‘Mazash?’

‘The old bimbo! Bug the eyes more. Flex the nostrils. Shine the teeth. Fork the tongue sharper. You can
do
it! Uh, the monster ain’t mine, huh?’

‘Mine.’ Terwilliger arose.

His belt buckle was now on a line with Joe Clarence’s eyes. The producer stared at the bright buckle almost hypnotically for a moment.

‘God damn the goddam lawyers!’

He broke for the door.

‘Work!’

The monster hit the door a split second after it slammed shut.

Terwilliger kept his hand poised in the air from his overhand throw. Then his shoulders sagged. He went to pick up his beauty. He twisted off its head, skinned the latex flesh off the skull, placed the skull on a pedestal and, painstakingly, with clay, began to reshape the prehistoric face.

‘A little goombah,’ he muttered. ‘A touch of mazash.’

They ran the first film test on the animated monster a week later.

When it was over. Clarence sat in darkness and nodded imperceptibly.

‘Better. But…more horrorific, bloodcurdling. Let’s scare the hell out of Aunt Jane. Back to the drawing board!’

‘I’m a week behind schedule now,’ Terwilliger protested. ‘You keep coming in, change this, change that, you say, so I change it, one day the tail’s all wrong, next day it’s the claws—’

‘You’ll find a way to make me happy,’ said Clarence. ‘Get in there and fight the old aesthetic fight!’

At the end of the month they ran the second test.

‘A near miss! Close!’ said Clarence. ‘The face is just almost right. Try again, Terwilliger!’

Terwilliger went back. He animated the dinosaur’s mouth so that it said obscene things which only a lip reader might catch, while the rest of the audience would think the beast was only shrieking. Then he got the clay and worked until 3 A.M. on the awful face.

‘That’s it!’ cried Clarence in the projection room the next week. ‘Perfect! Now
that’s
what I call a monster!’

He leaned toward the old man, his lawyer, Mr Glass, and Maury Poole, his production assistant.

‘You
like
my creature?’ He beamed.

Terwilliger, slumped in the back row, his skeleton as long as the monsters he built, could feel the old lawyer shrug.

‘You seen one monster, you seen ’em all.’

‘Sure, sure, but this one’s special!’ shouted Clarence happily. ‘Even
I
got to admit Terwilliger’s a genius!’

They all turned back to watch the beast on the screen, in a titanic waltz, throw its razor tail wide in a vicious harvesting that cut grass and clipped flowers. The beast paused now to gaze pensively off into mists, gnawing a red bone.

‘That monster,’ said Mr Glass at last, squinting. ‘He sure looks familiar.’

‘Familiar?’ Terwilliger stirred, alert.

‘It’s got such a look,’ drawled Mr Glass in the dark, ‘I couldn’t forget, from someplace.’

‘Natural Museum exhibits?’

‘No, no.’

‘Maybe,’ laughed Clarence, ‘you read a book once, Glass?’

‘Funny…’ Glass, unperturbed, cocked his head, closed one eye. ‘Like detectives, I don’t forget a face. But, that Tyrannosaurus Rex—where before did I meet
him
?’

‘Who cares?’ Clarence sprinted. ‘He’s great. And all because I booted Terwilliger’s behind to make him do it right. Come on, Maury!’

When the door shut, Mr Glass turned to gaze steadily at Terwilliger. Not taking his eyes away, he called softly to the projectionist, ‘Walt? Walter? Could you favor us with that beast again?’

‘Sure thing.’

Terwilliger shifted uncomfortably, aware of some bleak force gathering in blackness, in the sharp light that shot forth once more to ricochet terror off the screen.

‘Yeah. Sure,’ mused Mr Glass. ‘I almost remember. I almost know him. But…
who
?’

The brute, as if answering, turned and for a disdainful moment stared across one hundred thousand million years at two small men hidden in a small dark room. The tyrant machine named itself in thunder.

Mr Glass quickened forward, as if to cup his ear.

Darkness swallowed all.

With the film half finished, in the tenth week, Clarence summoned thirty of the office staff, technicians and a few friends to see a rough cut of the picture.

The film had been running fifteen minutes when a gasp ran through the small audience.

Clarence glanced swiftly about.

Mr Glass, next to him, stiffened.