Killer, Come Back To Me

KILLER, COME BACK TO ME

Ray Bradbury

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Ray Bradbury Literary Works, LLC 2020

The Additional Copyright Information at end of this eBook constitutes an extension to this copyright page.

Introduction © Jonathan R Eller 2020

Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Many of the stories in this book were previously published in the UK in the following:

Dandelion Wine, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1957, Corgi 1965 and Grafton 1977; Dark Forces, first published in Great Britain by Macdonald 1980 and Futura 1984; I Sing the Body Electric!, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1970, Corgi 1971 and Grafton 1991; The Illustrated Man, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1952 and Grafton 1977; Long After Midnight, first published in Great Britain by Hart-Davis, MacGibbon 1977 and Granada 1984; The Machineries of Joy, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1966 and Grafton 1977; The October Country (containing some stories published in Dark Carnival), first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1953 and New English Library 1963; S is for Space, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1968; The Toynbee Convector, first published in Great Britain by Grafton 1989; Twice 22 (comprised of stories from The Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy) first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1953

This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008414047

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008414054

Version: 2020-07-23

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Talking Box: Ray Bradbury’s Crime Fiction by Jonathan R Eller

A Touch of Petulance

The Screaming Woman

The Trunk Lady

‘I’m Not So Dumb!’

Killer, Come Back to Me!

Dead Men Rise Up Never

Where Everything Ends

Corpse Carnival

And So Died Riabouchinska

Yesterday I Lived!

The Town Where No One Got Off

The Whole Town’s Sleeping

At Midnight, In the Month of June

The Smiling People

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl

The Small Assassin

Marionettes, Inc.

Punishment Without Crime

Some Live Like Lazarus

The Utterly Perfect Murder

Afterword: Hammett? Chandler? Not to Worry!

Additional Copyright Information

About the Author

Also by Ray Bradbury

About the Publisher

The Talking Box:

Ray Bradbury’s Crime Fiction by Jonathan R. Eller

‘I … took all these pages and put them in my talking box. That was the box I kept by my typewriter where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings … so my stories got written.’ In the early 1980s, Ray Bradbury used his imaginary talking box to compose Death Is a Lonely Business, an experiment in autobiography that emerged from decades of suspense crime stories told through unexpected plot twists and vividly dark metaphors. If you want to know how Ray Bradbury developed the power to write this late-life novel and its sequels, you must read through the tales gathered here in Killer, Come Back to Me.

As we look back from the vantage point of Bradbury’s 2020 centennial year, the significance of these sinister tales is unmistakable. They are as important to the first twenty years of his career – his most prolific decades as a story writer – as the fantasy and science fiction that he brought into the literary mainstream. In fact, his special off-trail brand of crime fiction found wide popularity in the detective pulps while he was still developing the mastery of science fiction that he would achieve in the postwar genre magazines.

Bradbury’s crime pathologies also spilled over into the pages of Weird Tales, where by 1944 he would appear in all six bimonthly issues. ‘The Smiling People,’ from the May 1946 issue of Weird Tales, is just such an example, but by then Bradbury had already fully established himself in the stable of detective pulps flourishing within the Popular Publications syndicate. There was just enough ‘grue’ in some of his crime tales to place five stories in Dime Mystery, one of Popular’s ‘shudder pulps’ modeled on the Grand Guignol tradition of visualized terror. These include the haunting ‘Dead Men Rise Up Never,’ ‘Corpse Carnival,’ and the shocking consequences of birth trauma found in ‘The Small Assassin,’ all featured in this volume.

Popular’s subeditors Mike Tilden and Ryerson Johnson quickly warmed to Bradbury’s unusual style and the emotional fire of his prose and accepted a total of eight stories in the less gruesome Popular pulps Detective Tales and New Detective. The range of these stories is represented in the collection by ‘Killer, Come Back to Me!,’ ‘The Trunk Lady,’ and ‘“I’m Not So Dumb!”’ Popular’s editor-in-chief Alden Norton was frustrated by Bradbury’s insistence on letting his characters tell their own stories, but he nonetheless took ‘Yesterday I Lived!’ for Flynn’s Detective Fiction just before wartime paper rationing killed off that well-respected genre magazine. Although Bradbury never submitted to the logical conventions of crime fiction, his early mastery of the form is evident in two of his earliest 1944 sales – ‘The Trunk Lady’ and ‘Yesterday I Lived!,’ stories highly regarded by Bradbury’s mentors Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner.

By the early 1950s, Bradbury’s newer crime and suspense ideas radiated out into the science fiction stories he described as his ‘marionette’ tales. Two of these, ‘Marionettes, Inc.’ and ‘Punishment Without Crime,’ are paired in the second half of this collection. By this time Bradbury was well-established in the major market magazines, where he would take his murderers out of noir settings and into the small-town Midwestern life he remembered from childhood. ‘The Whole Town’s Sleeping,’ perhaps Bradbury’s most famous suspense tale, prompted Ellery Queen’s Frederic Dannay to solicit the sequel, ‘At Midnight, in the Month of June’; both tales are paired here, surrounded by other experiments in crime fiction originating in the 1950s and early 1960s, but often not published until years later.

It didn’t really matter when these stories were published; in his mind, they already formed a great part of the foundation that had made him one of the best-known storytellers of our time – a masterful explorer of the dark fantastic; a universally recognized guardian of freedom of the imagination; an abiding presence in Hollywood; and a visionary of the Space Age. But Bradbury was, above all, an explorer of the things that make us human, and his probing creativity reached deepest into the darker regions of the human mind. Perhaps more than any other aspect of his work, Bradbury’s crime suspense fiction reveals what Damon Knight called Bradbury’s prime area of interest: ‘the fundamental prerational fears and longings and desires: the rage at being born; the will to be loved; the longing to communicate; the hatred of parents and siblings, the fear of things that are not the self.’

Selecting the stories for this collection proved to be a challenge eagerly embraced. An earlier collection, aptly titled A Memory of Murder, gathered a number of the stories from Bradbury’s Popular Publications magazine sales of the mid-1940s. Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai, Bradbury’s long-time literary agent Michael Congdon, and I eventually reached across a far broader span of time to bring together the best early stories with the later tales that document Bradbury’s best crime suspense efforts written in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the process, we harvested three of Bradbury’s noir-era tales that had evaded the earlier collection entirely: ‘The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl’; our title story, ‘Killer, Come Back to Me!’; and ‘Where Everything Ends,’ the long-unpublished source text for Bradbury’s milestone 1985 detective novel, Death Is a Lonely Business.

The imaginary talking box of that novel, representing mysterious and unpredictable upwellings from the writer’s deep subconscious, is as close as we’ll ever get to the enigmatic source of Ray Bradbury’s ideas. He viewed life as a long rope that ‘goes back to the time we were born and extends on out ahead to the time of our death.’ The moments in between became stories that probe the past or perhaps catch a glimpse of the future. Killer, Come Back to Me opens with ‘A Touch of Petulance,’ the story of a possible dark future; the second tale, ‘The Screaming Woman,’ pivots on a crucial memory from the past. Present, past or future, this new collection of Ray Bradbury’s crime stories beckons. You are invited to follow his lead.

Jonathan R. Eller is a Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University’s School of Liberal Arts. His books on Bradbury’s life and career include the trilogy Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo.

A Touch of Petulance

On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fate, commuting from another time, another year, another life.

His fate was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island. It was the newspaper held by this fate disguised as an older man that caused Jonathan Hughes to stare and finally say:

‘Sir, pardon me, your New York Times seems different from mine. The typeface on your front page seems more modern. Is that a later edition?’

‘No!’ The older man stopped, swallowed hard, and at last managed to say, ‘Yes. A very late edition.’

Hughes glanced around. ‘Excuse me, but – all the other editions look the same. Is yours a trial copy for a future change?’

‘Future?’ The older man’s mouth barely moved. His entire body seemed to wither in his clothes, as if he had lost weight with a single exhalation. ‘Indeed,’ he whispered. ‘Future change. God, what a joke.’

Jonathan Hughes blinked at the newspaper’s dateline: May 2, 1999.

‘Now, see here –’ he protested, and then his eyes moved down to find a small story, minus picture, in the upper-lefthand corner of the front page:

WOMAN MURDERED

POLICE SEEK HUSBAND

Body of Mrs. Alice Hughes found shot to death—

The train thundered over a bridge. Outside the window, a billion trees rose up, flourished their green branches in convulsions of wind, then fell as if chopped to earth.

The train rolled into a station as if nothing at all in the world had happened.

In the silence, the young man’s eyes returned to the text:

Jonathan Hughes, certified public accountant, of 112 Plandome Avenue, Plandome—

‘My God!’ he cried. ‘Get away!’

But he himself rose and ran a few steps back before the older man could move. The train jolted and threw him into an empty seat where he stared wildly out at a river of green light that rushed past the windows.

Christ, he thought, who would do such a thing? Who’d try to hurt us – us? What kind of joke? To mock a new marriage with a fine wife? Damn! And again, trembling, Damn, oh, damn!

The train rounded a curve and all but threw him to his feet. Like a man drunk with travelling, gravity, and simple rage, he swung about and lurched back to confront the old man, bent now into his newspaper, gone to earth, hiding in print. Hughes brushed the paper out of the way, and clutched the old man’s shoulder. The old man, startled, glanced up, tears running from his eyes. They were both held in a long moment of thunderous travelling. Hughes felt his soul rise to leave his body.

‘Who are you?’

Someone must have shouted that.

The train rocked as if it might derail.

The old man stood up as if shot in the heart, blindly crammed something in Jonathan Hughes’s hand, and blundered away down the aisle and into the next car.

The younger man opened his fist and turned a card over and read a few words that moved him heavily down to sit and read the words again:

JONATHAN HUGHES, CPA

679-4990. PLANDOME.

‘No!’ someone shouted.

Me, thought the young man. Why, that old man is … me.

There was a conspiracy, no, several conspiracies. Someone had contrived a joke about murder and played it on him. The train roared on with five hundred commuters who all rode, swaying like a team of drunken intellectuals behind their masking books and papers, while the old man, as if pursued by demons, fled off away from car to car. By the time Jonathan Hughes had rampaged his blood and completely thrown his sanity off balance, the old man had plunged, as if falling, to the farthest end of the commuter’s special.

The two men met again in the last car, which was almost empty. Jonathan Hughes came and stood over the old man, who refused to look up. He was crying so hard now that conversation would have been impossible.

Who, thought the young man, who is he crying for? Stop, please, stop.

The old man, as if commanded, sat up, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and began to speak in a frail voice that drew Jonathan Hughes near and finally caused him to sit and listen to the whispers:

‘We were born –’

‘We?’ cried the young man.

‘We,’ whispered the old man, looking out at the gathering dusk that travelled like smokes and burnings past the window, ‘we, yes, we, the two of us, we were born in Quincy in nineteen fifty, August twenty-second –’

Yes, thought Hughes.

‘– and lived at Forty-nine Washington Street and went to Central School and walked to that school all through first grade with Isabel Perry –’

Isabel, thought the young man.

‘We …’ murmured the old man. ‘Our’ whispered the old man. ‘Us.’ And went on and on with it:

‘Our woodshop teacher, Mr. Bisbee. History teacher, Miss Monks. We broke our right ankle, age ten, ice-skating. Almost drowned, age eleven; Father saved us. Fell in love, age twelve, Impi Johnson –’

Seventh grade, lovely lady, long since dead, Jesus God, thought the young man, growing old.

And that’s what happened. In the next minute, two minutes, three, the old man talked and talked and gradually became younger with talking, so his cheeks glowed and his eyes brightened, while the young man, weighted with old knowledge given, sank lower in his seat and grew pale so that both almost met in mid-talking, mid-listening, and became twins in passing. There was a moment when Jonathan Hughes knew for an absolute insane certainty, that if he dared glance up he would see identical twins in the mirrored window of a night-rushing world.

He did not look up.

The old man finished, his frame erect now, his head somehow driven high by the talking out, the long-lost revelations.

‘That’s the past,’ he said.

I should hit him, thought Hughes. Accuse him. Shout at him. Why aren’t I hitting, accusing, shouting?

Because …

The old man sensed the question and said, ‘You know I’m who I say I am. I know everything there is to know about us. Now – the future?’

‘Mine?’

‘Ours,’ said the old man.

Jonathan Hughes nodded, staring at the newspaper clutched in the old man’s right hand. The old man folded it and put it away.

‘Your business will slowly become less than good. For what reasons, who can say? A child will be born and die. A mistress will be taken and lost. A wife will become less than good. And at last, oh believe it, yes, do, very slowly, you will come to – how shall I say it – hate her living presence. There, I see I’ve upset you. I’ll shut up.’

They rode in silence for a long while, and the old man grew old again, and the young man along with him. When he had aged just the proper amount, the young man nodded the talk to continue, not looking at the other who now said:

‘Impossible, yes, you’ve been married only a year, a great year, the best. Hard to think that a single drop of ink could colour a whole pitcher of clear fresh water. But colour it could and colour it did. And at last the entire world changed, not just our wife, not just the beautiful woman, the fine dream.’

‘You –’ Jonathan Hughes started and stopped. ‘You – killed her?’

‘We did. Both of us. But if I have my way, if I can convince you, neither of us will, she will live, and you will grow old to become a happier, finer me. I pray for that. I weep for that. There’s still time. Across the years, I intend to shake you up, change your blood, shape your mind. God, if people knew what murder is. So silly, so stupid, so – ugly. But there is hope, for I have somehow got here, touched you, begun the change that will save our souls. Now, listen. You do admit, do you not, that we are one and the same, that the twins of time ride this train this hour this night?’

The train whistled ahead of them, clearing the track of an encumbrance of years.

The young man nodded the most infinitely microscopic of nods. The old man needed no more.

‘I ran away. I ran to you. That’s all I can say. She’s been dead only a day, and I ran. Where to go? Nowhere to hide, save Time. No one to plead with, no judge, no jury, no proper witnesses save – you. Only you can wash the blood away, do you see? You drew me, then. Your youngness, your innocence, your good hours, your fine life still untouched, was the machine that seized me down the track. All of my sanity lies in you. If you turn away, great God, I’m lost, no, we are lost. We’ll share a grave and never rise and be buried forever in misery. Shall I tell you what you must do?’

The young man rose.

‘Plandome,’ a voice cried. ‘Plandome.’

And they were out on the platform with the old man running after, the young man blundering into walls, into people, feeling as if his limbs might fly apart.

‘Wait!’ cried the old man. ‘Oh, please.’

The young man kept moving.

‘Don’t you see, we’re in this together, we must think of it together, solve it together, so you won’t become me and I won’t have to come impossibly in search of you, oh, it’s all mad, insane, I know, I know, but listen!’

The young man stopped at the edge of the platform where cars were pulling in, with joyful cries or muted greetings, brief honkings, gunnings of motors, lights vanishing away. The old man grasped the young man’s elbow.

‘Good God, your wife, mine, will be here in a moment, there’s so much to tell, you can’t know what I know, there’s twenty years of unfound information lost between which we must trade and understand! Are you listening? God, you don’t believe!’

Jonathan Hughes was watching the street. A long way off a final car was approaching. He said: ‘What happened in the attic at my grandmother’s house in the summer of nineteen fifty-eight? No one knows that but me. Well?’

The old man’s shoulders slumped. He breathed more easily, and as if reciting from a promptboard said. ‘We hid ourselves there for two days, alone. No one ever knew where we hid. Everyone thought we had run away to drown in the lake or fall in the river. But all the time, crying, not feeling wanted, we hid up above and … listened to the wind and wanted to die.’

The young man turned at last to stare fixedly at his older self, tears in his eyes. ‘You love me, then?’

‘I had better,’ said the old man. ‘I’m all you have.’

The car was pulling up at the station. A young woman smiled and waved behind the glass.

‘Quick,’ said the old man, quietly. ‘Let me come home, watch, show you, teach you, find where things went wrong, correct them now, maybe hand you a fine life forever, let me –’

The car horn sounded, the car stopped, the young woman leaned out.

‘Hello, lovely man!’ she cried.

Jonathan Hughes exploded a laugh and burst into a manic run. ‘Lovely lady, hi –’

‘Wait.’

He stopped and turned to look at the old man with the newspaper, trembling there on the station platform. The old man raised one hand, questioningly.

‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

Silence. At last: ‘You,’ said Jonathan Hughes. ‘You.’

The car rounded a turn in the night. The woman, the old man, the young, swayed with the motion.

‘What did you say your name was?’ the young woman said, above the rush and run of country and road.

‘He didn’t say,’ said Jonathan Hughes quickly.

‘Weldon,’ said the old man, blinking.

‘Why,’ said Alice Hughes. ‘That’s my maiden name.’

The old man gasped inaudibly, but recovered. ‘Well, is it? How curious!’

‘I wonder if we’re related? You –’

‘He was my teacher at Central High,’ said Jonathan Hughes, quickly.

‘And still am,’ said the old man. ‘And still am.’ And they were home.

He could not stop staring. All through dinner, the old man simply sat with his hands empty half the time and stared at the lovely woman across the table from him. Jonathan Hughes fidgeted, talked much too loudly to cover the silences, and ate sparsely. The old man continued to stare as if a miracle was happening every ten seconds. He watched Alice’s mouth as if it were giving forth fountains of diamonds. He watched her eyes as if all the hidden wisdoms of the world were there, and now found for the first time. By the look of his face, the old man, stunned, had forgotten why he was there.

‘Have I a crumb on my chin?’ cried Alice Hughes, suddenly. ‘Why is everyone watching me?’

Whereupon the old man burst into tears that shocked everyone. He could not seem to stop, until at last Alice came around the table to touch his shoulder.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘It’s just that you’re so lovely. Please sit down. Forgive.’

They finished off the dessert and with a great display of tossing down his fork and wiping his mouth with his napkin, Jonathan Hughes cried, ‘That was fabulous. Dear wife, I love you!’ He kissed her on the cheek, thought better of it, and rekissed her, on the mouth. ‘You see?’ He glanced at the old man. ‘I very much love my wife.’