A Pleasure to Burn (11 page)

 

M
R
. H
AWTHORNE WAS THE MAN
who bolted doors and looked out at you from shuttered windows. You knew he was home by the smoke in his chimney, or you saw his footprints in the paths on an autumn afternoon after a drenching rain. You saw his pale breath on the winter windows of his house on mornings when the panes were blind with frost. Here was his house, away from the rest on Mars, in a land he had made for himself, a land where snows fell, rains cooled the hot sands, or spring and summer lingered in an instant if Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne so much as blinked from his door.

As Mr. Poe, Mr. Bierce and Mr. Blackwood approached at a brisk pace, Mr. Hawthorne's front door, a moment before, open to a summer night's warmth and smell of red apples in distant trees, slammed shut. There was a skirl of raindrops, a flurry of snow as light as pollen; then all was still.

Mr. Poe gave a rap on the door.

“Who's there?” said a voice, at last.

“It's Mr. Poe.”

“What do you want?” much later.

“We've come to tell you the latest.”

“I know, I know. I saw it on the sky. The red mark.”

“Open up, we need your help. We want you to meet the rocket.”

“I don't like to meet people,” said Hawthorne, hidden away. “I don't belong here, anyway. I'm not like you out there, you Poe, you Bierce!”

At last the door creaked wide and Hawthorne stood revealed, his mass of blowing white hair and his full animal-like mustache, and his deep, enquiring and lonely eyes.

“You'll be a delegate to greet the rocket men,” said Poe. “When they're lulled and unsuspecting, we'll take care of them.”

Mr. Hawthorne eyed the folds of the black cape which hid Poe's hands. From it, smiling, Mr. Poe drew forth a trowel.

“The Amontillado?” Hawthorne drew back.

“For
one
of our visitors.” In his other hand now, Poe brought forth a cap and bells, which jingled softly and suggestively.

“And for the others?”

Poe smiled again, well pleased. “We finished digging the Pit this morning.”

“And the Pendulum?”

“Is being installed.”

“The Premature Burial?”

“That, too.”

“You are a grim man, Mr. Poe.”

“I am a frightened and an angry man. I am a god, Mr. Hawthorne, even as you are a god, even as we all are gods, and our inventions, our people, if you wish, have been not only threatened, but banished and burned, torn up and censored, ruined and done away with. The worlds we created are falling to ruin! Even gods must fight!”

“So.” Hawthorne tilted his head a little. “Yes. Perhaps that explains why we are here. How did we come here?”

“War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the year 2067, they outlawed our books. Oh, what a horrible thing, to destroy our literary creations that way. It summoned us out of—what? Death? The Beyond? I don't like abstract things. I don't know. I only know that our worlds and our creations called us and we tried to save them and the only saving thing we could do was wait out the century here on Mars, hoping that Earth might overweight itself with these scientists and their doubtings, but now they're coming to clean us out of here, us and our dark thing, and all the alchemists, witches, vampires, and were-things that, one by one, retreated across space as science made inroads through every country on Earth and finally left no alternative at all but exodus. You must help us. You have a good speaking manner. We need you.”

“But I'm not
of
you, I don't approve of you and the others,” cried Hawthorne, indignantly. “I was no fantasist, no player with witches and vampires and midnight things.”

“What of ‘Rappacini's Daughter'?”

“Ridiculous!
One
story. Oh, I wrote a few others, perhaps, but what of that? My basic works had none of that nonsense!”

“Mistaken or not, they grouped you with us. They destroyed your works, too. You
must
hate them, Mr. Hawthorne.”

“They are stupid and rude,” reflected Mr. Hawthorne. He looked at the immense crimson symbol on the sky where the rocket burned. “Yes,” he said, finally, “I will help you.”

 

T
HEY HURRIED ALONG
the midnight shore of the dry sea. By fires and smokes, Mr. Poe hesitated, to shout orders, to check the bubbling poisons and chalked pentagrams. “Good!” He ran on. “Fine!” And he ran again, past shadowed armies, the armies of Oberon and Othello, the armies of Arthur and Macbeth, waiting in full armor. And there were serpents and angry demons and fiery bronze dragons and spitting vipers and trembling witches like the barbs and nettles and thorns and all the vile flotsams and jetsams of the retreating sea of imagination, left on the melancholy shore, whining and frothing and spitting.

Bierce stopped. He sat like a child on the cold sand. He began to sob. They tried to soothe him, but he would not listen. “I just thought,” he said, “what happens to us on the day when the
last
copies of our books are destroyed?”

The air whirled.

“Don't speak of it!”

“We must,” wailed Bierce. “Now, now as the rocket comes down, you, Hawthorne, Poe, Coppard, all of you, grow faint. Like wood smoke. Blowing away. Your faces thin and melt—”

“Death.
Real
death for all of us.”

“We exist only through Earth's sufferance. If a final edict tonight destroyed our last few works we'd be like lights put out.”

Hawthorne brooded gently. “I wonder who I am. In what Earth mind tonight do I exist? In some African hut? Some hermit, reading my tales? Is he the lonely candle in the wind of time and science? The flickering orb sustaining me here in rebellious exile? Is it he? Or some boy in a discarded attic, finding me, only just in time! Oh, last night I felt ill, ill, ill to the marrows of me, for there is a body of the soul as well as a body of the body, and this soul-body ached in all of its glowing parts, and last night I felt myself a candle, guttering. When suddenly I sprang up, given new light! As some child in some yellow garret on Earth once more found a worn, time-specked copy of me, sneezing with dust! And so I'm given a short respite.”

 

A
DOOR BANGED WIDE
in a little hut by the shore. A thin short man, with flesh hanging from him in folds, stepped out and, paying no attention to the others, sat down and stared into his clenched hands.

“There's the one I'm sorry for,” whispered Blackwood. “Look at him, dying away. He was once more real than we, who were men. They took him, a skeleton thought, and clothed him in centuries of pink flesh and snow-beard and red velvet suit and black boot, made him reindeers, tinsel, holly. And after centuries of manufacturing him they drowned him in a vat of Lysol, you might say.”

The men were silent.

“What must it be on Earth,” wondered Hawthorns, “without Christmas? No hot chestnuts, no tree, nor ornaments or drums or candies, nothing; nothing but the snow and the wind and the lonely, factual people—”

They all looked at the thin little old man with the scraggly beard and faded red velvet suit.

“Have you heard his story?”

“I can imagine it. The glitter-eyed psychologist, the clever sociologist, the resentful, froth-mouthed educationist, the antiseptic parents—”

“Has Dickens seen him?”

“Dickens!” Mr. Poe spat. “Him! He came for a visit! A
visit
, understand! How are you? he cried! A cozy place you have here! Dickens popped in and out of here. Why? Because the only book of his burned in the Great Fire was ‘A Christmas Carol' and a few other of his ghost stories. He'll live forever on Earth. He wrote such a wealth of uncensorable material.”

“It's not fair,” protested Hawthorne. “For him to stay and me to be here.”

“A dreadful mistake,” agreed everyone.

“A man's remembered for his sensational things,” observed Mr. Bierce. “Me for ‘Owl-Creek Bridge,' Mr. Poe for his corpses and terrors instead of his serious essays. And—”

Bierce did not continue. He fell forward with a sigh. And as all watched, horrified, his body burned into blue dust and charred bone, the ashes of which fled through the air in black tatters, settling about their shocked faces like terrible snow.

“Bierce, Bierce!”

“Gone.”

They looked up at the cold high clusters of stars.

“His last book gone. Someone, somewhere on Earth, just now, burned it.”

“God rest him, nothing of him left now. For what are we but books, and when those are gone, nothing's to be seen.”

A rushing sound filled the sky.

They cried out wildly and looked up. In the sky, dazzling it with sizzling fire-clouds, was the Rocket! Around the men on the seashore, lanterns bobbed, there was a squealing and a bubbling and an odor of cooking smells. Candle-eyed pumpkins lifted into the cold clear air. Thin fingers clenched into fists and a witch screamed from her withered mouth:

 

“Ship, ship, break, fall!
  Ship, ship, burn all!
  Crack, flake, shake, melt!
  Mummy-dust, cat-pelt!”

 

“Time to go,” murmured Hawthorne. “On to Jupiter, on to Saturn or Pluto.”

“Run away?” shouted Poe in the wind. “Never!”

“I'm a tired old man.”

Poe gazed into the old man's face and believed him. He climbed atop a huge boulder and faced the ten thousand grey shadows and green lights and yellow eyes on the hissing wind.

“The needles!” he cried.

The rocket flashed over.

“The powders!” he shouted.

A thick hot smell of bitter almond, civet, cumin, wormseed and orris!

The rocket came down—steadily down, with the shriek of a damned spirit! Poe raged at it! He flung his fists up and the orchestra of heat and smell and hatred answered in symphony! Like stripped tree fragments, bats flew upward! Burning hearts, flung like missiles, burst in bloody fireworks on the singed air. Down, down, relentlessly down, like a pendulum the rocket came! And Poe howled furiously and shrank back with every sweep and sweep of the rocket cutting and ravening the air! All the dead sea seemed a pit in which, trapped, they waited the sinking of the dread machinery, the glistening axe; they were people under the avalanche!

“The snakes!” screamed Poe.

And luminous serpentines of undulant green hurtled toward the rocket. But it came down, a sweep, a fire, a motion, and it lay panting out exhaustions of red plumage on the sand, a mile away.

“At it!” shrieked Poe. “The plan's changed! Only one chance! Run! At it! At it! Drown them with our bodies! Kill them!”

And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself free from primeval beds, the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea sands, down the empty river deltas, shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the furthest hollow. As if a great charred cauldron of sparkling lava had been overturned, the boiling people and snapping animals churned down the dry fathoms!

“Kill them!” screamed Poe, running. “Perhaps,” murmured Mr. Hawthorne, left behind, alone, at the edge of the ancient sea.

 

T
HE ROCKET MEN LEAPED OUT
of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about, sniffing the air like hounds. They saw nothing. They relaxed.

The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered, kindled, and a fire leapt up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a half circle about him.

“A new world,” he said, forcing himself to speak deliberately, though he glanced nervously, now and again, over his shoulder at the empty sea. “The old world left behind. A new start. What more symbolic than that we here dedicate ourselves all the more firmly to science and progress.” He nodded crisply to his lieutenant. “The books.”

The ancient books were brought forth.

Firelight limned the faded gilt titles:
The Willows, The Outsider, Behold the Dreamer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Land of Oz, Pellucidar, The Land That Time Forgot, A Midsummer Night's Dream
and the monstrous names of Machen and Edgar Allan Poe and Cabell and Dunsany and Blackwood and Lewis Carroll; the names, the old names, the evil names, the black names, the blasphemous names.

“A new world. With a gesture, we burn the last of the old!”

The captain ripped pages from the books. Leaf by seared leaf, he fed them into the fire.

A scream!

Leaping back, the men stared beyond the firelight at the edges of the encroaching and uninhabited sea.

Another scream! A high and wailing thing, like the death of a dragon and the thrashing of a bronzed whale left gasping when the waters of a leviathan's sea drain down the shingles and evaporate.