Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1

By the time he got down the hill there was not a shingle, bolt or threshold of it that wasn’t alive with flame. It made blistering, crackling, fumbling noises.

No one screamed inside. No one ran around or shouted.

He yelled in the yard. ‘Molly! Susie! Drew!’

He got no answer. He ran close in until his eyebrows withered and his skin crawled hot like paper burning, crisping, curling up in tight little curls.

‘Molly! Susie!’

The fire settled contentedly down to feed. Drew ran around the house a dozen times, all alone, trying to find a way in. Then he sat where the fire roasted his body and waited until all the walls had sunken down with fluttering crashes, until the last ceiling bent, blanketing the floors with molten plaster and scorched lathing. Until the flames died and smoke coughed up, and the new day came slowly; and there was nothing but embering ashes and an acid smoldering.

Disregarding the heat fanning from the leveled frames, Drew walked into the ruin. It was still too dark to see much. Red light glowed on his sweating throat. He stood like a stranger in a new and different land. Here – the kitchen. Charred tables, chairs, the iron stove, the cupboards. Here – the hall. Here the parlor and then over there was the bedroom where—

Where Molly was still alive.

She slept among fallen timbers and angry-colored pieces of wire spring and metal.

She slept as if nothing had happened. Her small white hands lay at her sides, flaked with sparks. Her calm face slept with a flaming lath across one cheek.

Drew stopped and didn’t believe it. In the ruin of her smoking bedroom she lay on a glittering bed of sparks, her skin intact, her breast rising, falling, taking air.

‘Molly!’

Alive and sleeping after the fire, after the walls had roared down, after ceilings had collapsed upon her and flame had lived all about her.

His shoes smoked as he pushed through piles of fuming litter. It could have seared his feet off at the ankles, he wouldn’t have known.

‘Molly …’

He bent over her. She didn’t move or hear him, and she didn’t speak. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t alive. She just lay there with the fire surrounding her and not touching her, not harming her in any way. Her cotton nightgown was streaked with ashes, but not burnt. Her brown hair was pillowed on a tumble of red-hot coals.

He touched her cheek, and it was cold, cold in the middle of hell. Tiny breaths trembled her half-smiling lips.

The children were there, too. Behind a veil of smoke he made out two smaller figures huddled in the ashes sleeping.

He carried all three of them out to the edge of the wheat field.

‘Molly. Molly, wake up! Kids! Kids, wake up!’

They breathed and didn’t move and went on sleeping.

‘Kids, wake up! Your mother is—’

Dead? No, not dead. But—

He shook the kids as if they were to blame. They paid no attention; they were busy with their dreams. He put them back down and stood over them, his face cut with lines.

He knew why they’d slept through the fire and continued to sleep now. He knew why Molly just lay there, never wanting to laugh again.

The power of the wheat and the scythe.

Their lives, supposed to end yesterday, May 30, 1938, had been prolonged simply because he refused to cut the grain. They should have died in the fire. That’s the way it was meant to be. But since he had not used the scythe, nothing could hurt them. A house had flamed and fallen and still they lived, caught halfway, not dead, not alive. Simply – waiting. And all over the world thousands more just like them, victims of accidents, fires, disease, suicide, waited, slept just like Molly and her children slept. Not able to die, not able to live. All because a man was afraid of harvesting the ripe grain. All because one man thought he could stop working with a scythe and never work with that scythe again.

He looked down upon the children. The job had to be done every day and every day with never a stopping but going on, with never a pause, but always the harvesting, forever and forever and forever.

All right, he thought. All right. I’ll use the scythe.

He didn’t say good-by to his family. He turned with a slow-feeding anger and found the scythe and walked rapidly, then he began to trot, then he ran with long jolting strides into the field, raving, feeling the hunger in his arms, as the wheat whipped and flailed his legs. He pounded through it, shouting. He stopped.

‘Molly!’ he cried, and raised the blade and swung it down.

‘Susie!’ he cried. ‘Drew!’ And swung the blade down again.

Somebody screamed. He didn’t turn to look at the fire-ruined house.

And then, sobbing wildly, he rose above the grain again and again and hewed to left and right and to left and to right and to left and to right. Over and over and over! Slicing out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, over and over, swearing, laughing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling in the sun with a singing whistle! Down!

Bombs shattered London, Moscow, Tokyo.

The blade swung insanely.

And the kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire.

The blade sang, crimson wet.

And mushrooms vomited out blind suns at White Sands, Hiroshima, Bikini, and up, through, and in continental Siberian skies.

The grain wept in a green rain, falling.

Korea, Indo-China, Egypt, India trembled: Asia stirred, Africa woke in the night …

And the blade went on rising, crashing, severing, with the fury and the rage of a man who has lost and lost so much that he no longer cares what he does to the world.

Just a few short miles off the main highway, down a rough dirt road that leads to nowhere, just a few short miles from a highway jammed with traffic bound for California.

Once in a while during the long years a jalopy gets off the main highway, pulls up steaming in front of the charred ruin of a little white house at the end of the dirt road, to ask instructions from the farmer they see just beyond, the one who works insanely, wildly, without ever stopping, night and day, in the endless fields of wheat.

But they get no help and no answer. The farmer in the field is too busy, even after all these years; too busy slashing and chopping the green wheat instead of the ripe.

And Drew Erickson moves on with his scythe, with the light of blind suns and a look of white fire in his never-sleeping eyes, on and on and on …

There Was an Old Woman

‘No, there’s no lief arguin’. I got my mind fixed. Run along with your silly wicker basket. Land, where you ever get notions like that? You just skit out of here; don’t bother me, I got my tattin’ and knittin’ to do, and no never minds about tall, dark gentlemen with fangled ideas.’

The tall, dark young man stood quietly, not moving. Aunt Tildy hurried on with her talk.

‘You heard what I said! If you got a mind to talk to me, well, you can talk, but meantime I hope you don’t mind if I pour myself coffee. There. If you’d been more polite. I’d offer you some, but you jump in here high and mighty and you never rapped on the door or nothin’. You think you own the place.’

Aunt Tildy fussed with her lap. ‘Now, you made me lose count! I’m makin’ myself a comforter. These winters get on mighty chill, and it ain’t fittin’ for a lady with bones like rice-paper to be settin’ in a drafty old house without warmin’ herself.’

The tall, dark man sat down.

‘That’s an antique chair, so be gentle,’ warned Aunt Tildy. ‘Start again, tell me things you got to tell, I’ll listen respectful. But keep your voice in your shoes and stop starin’ at me with funny lights in your eyes. Land, it gives me the collywobbles.’

The bone-porcelain, flowered clock on the mantel finished chiming three. Out in the hall, grouped around the wicker basket, four men waited, quietly, as if they were frozen.

‘Now, about that wicker basket,’ said Aunt Tildy. ‘It’s past six feet long, and by the look, it ain’t laundry. And those four men you walked in with, you don’t need them to carry that basket – why, it’s light as thistles, Eh?’

The dark young man was leaning forward on the antique chair. Something in his face suggested the basket wouldn’t be so light after a while.

‘Pshaw,’ Aunt Tildy mused. ‘Where’ve I seen a wicker like that before? Seems it was only a couple years ago. Seems to me – oh! Now I remember. It was when Mrs Dwyer passed away next door.’

Aunt Tildy set her coffee cup down, sternly. ‘So that’s what you’re up to? I thought you were workin’ to sell me somethin’. You just set there until my little Emily trounces home from college this afternoon! I wrote her a note last week. Not admittin’, of course, that I wasn’t feelin’ quite ripe and pert, but sort of hintin’ I want to see her again, it’s been a good many weeks. Her livin’ in New York and all. Almost like my own daughter. Emily is.

‘Now, she’ll take care of you, young man. She’ll shoo you out’n this parlor so quick it’ll—’

The dark young man looked at Aunt Tildy as if she were tired.

‘No, I’m not!’ she snapped.

He weaved back and forth on the chair, half shutting his eyes, resting himself. O, wouldn’t she like to rest, too? he seemed to murmur. Rest, rest, nice rest …

‘Great sons of Goshen on the Gilberry Dike! I got a hundred comforters, two hundred sweaters and six hundred potholders in these fingers, no matter they’re skinny! You run off, come back when I’m done, maybe I’ll talk to you.’ Aunt Tildy shifted subjects. ‘Let me tell you about Emily, my sweet, fair child.’

Aunt Tildy nodded thoughtfully. Emily, with hair like yellow corn tassels, just as soft and fine.

‘I well remember the day her mother died, twenty years ago, leavin’ Emily to my house. That’s why I’m mad at you and your wickers and such goin’s-on. Who ever heard of people dyin’ for any good cause? Young man, I don’t like it. Why, I remember—’

Aunt Tildy paused; a brief pain of memory touched her heart. Twenty-five years back, her father’s voice trembled in the late afternoon:

‘Tildy,’ he whispered, ‘what you goin’ to do in life? The way you act, men don’t walk much with you. You kiss and skedaddle. Why don’t you settle down, marry, raise children?’

‘Papa,’ Tildy shouted back at him. ‘I like laughin’ and playin’ and singin’. I’m not the marryin’ kind. I can’t find a man with my philosophy, Papa.’

‘What “philosophy’s” that?’

‘That death is ridiculous! It run off with Mama when we needed her most. You call that intelligent?’

Papa’s eyes got wet and gray and bleak. ‘You’re always right, Tildy. But what can we do? Death comes to everybody.’

‘Fight!’ she cried. ‘Strike it below the belt! Don’t believe in it!’

‘Can’t be done,’ said Papa sadly. ‘We all stand alone in the world.’

‘There’s got to be a change sometime. Papa. I’m startin’ my own philosophy here and now! Why, it’s silly people live a couple years and are shoved like wet seeds in a hole; but nothin’ sprouts. What good do they do? Lay there a million years, helpin’ no one. Most of them fine, nice, neat people, or at least tryin’.’

But Papa wasn’t listening. He bleached out, faded away, like a photo left lying in the sun. She tried to talk him out of it, but he passed on, anyway. She spun about and ran. She couldn’t stay on once he was cold, for his coldness denied her philosophy. She didn’t attend his burial. She didn’t do anything but set up this antique shop on the front of an old house and live alone for years, that is, until Emily came. Tildy didn’t want to take the girl in. Why? Because Emily believed in dying. But her mother was an old friend and Tildy had promised help.

‘Emily,’ continued Aunt Tildy, to the man in black, ‘was the first to live in this house with me in all the years. I never got married. I feared the idea of livin’ with a man twenty-thirty years and then have him up and die on me. It’d shake my convictions like a house of cards. I shied off from the world. I screamed at people if they so much as mentioned death.’

The young man listened patiently, politely. Then he lifted his hand. He seemed to know everything, with the dark, cold shining of his eyes, before she opened her mouth. He knew about her and World War II, when she shut off her radio forever and stopped the newspapers and beat a man’s head with an umbrella, driving him from her shop when he insisted on describing the invasion beaches and the long, slow tides of the dead drifting under the silent urgings of the moon.

Yes, the dark young man smiled from the antique rocker, he knew how Aunt Tildy had stuck to her nice old phonograph records. Harry Lauder singing ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’,’ Madame Schumann-Heink and lullabies. With no interruptions, no foreign calamities, murders, poisonings, auto accidents, suicides. Music stayed the same each day, every day. So the years ran, while Aunt Tildy tried to teach Emily her philosophy. But Emily’s mind was fixed on mortality. She respected Aunt Tildy’s way of thinking, however, and never mentioned – eternity.

All this the young man knew.

Aunt Tildy sniffed. ‘How do you know all those things? Well, if you think you can talk me into that silly wicker basket, you’re way off the trestle. You lay hands on me, I’ll spit right in your face!’

The young man smiled. Aunt Tildy sniffed again.

‘Don’t simper like a sick dog. I’m too old to be made love at. That’s all twisted dry, like an old tube of paint, and left behind in the years.’

There was a noise. The mantel clock chimed three. Aunt Tildy flashed her eyes to it. Strange. Hadn’t it chimed three o’clock just five minutes ago? She liked the bone-white clock with gold angels dangling naked about its numeraled face and its tone like cathedral bells, soft and far away.

‘Are you just goin’ to sit there, young man?’

He was.

‘Then, you won’t mind if I take a little cat nap. Now, don’t you stir off that chair. Don’t come creepin’ around me. Just goin’ to close my eyes for a spell. That’s right. That’s right …’

Nice and quiet and restful time of day. Silence. Just the clock ticking away, busy as termites in wood. Just the old room smelling of polished mahogany and oiled leather in the Morris chair, and books sitting stiff on the shelves. So nice. Nice …

‘You aren’t gettin’ up from the chair, are you, mister? Better not. I got one eye open for you. Yes, indeed I have. Yes, I have. Oh. Ah, hmmmm.’

So feathery. So drowsy. So deep. Under water, almost. Oh, so nice.

Who’s that movin’ around in the dark with my eyes closed?

Who’s that kissin’ my cheek? You, Emily? No. No. Guess it was my thoughts. Only – dreamin’. Land, yes, that’s it. Driftin’ off, off, off …

Ah? What say? Oh!

‘Wait while I put on my glasses. There!’

The clock chimed three again. Shame, old clock, now, shame. Have to have you fixed.

The young man in the dark suit stood near the door. Aunt Tildy nodded.

‘You leavin’ so soon, young man? Had to give up, didn’t you? Couldn’t convince me; no, I’m mule-stubborn. Never get me free of this house, so don’t bother comin’ back to try!’

The young man bowed with slow dignity.

He had no intention of coming again, ever.

‘Fine,’ declared Aunt Tildy. ‘I always told Papa I’d win! Why, I’ll knit in this window the next thousand years. They’ll have to chew the boards down around me to get me out.’

The dark young man twinkled his eyes.

‘Quit lookin’ like the cat that ate the bird,’ cried Aunt Tildy. ‘Get that old fool wicker away!’

The four men trod heavily out the front door. Tildy studied the way they handled an empty basket, yet staggered with its weight.

‘Here, now!’ She rose in tremulous indignation. ‘Did you steal my antiques? My books? The clocks? What you got in that wicker?’

The dark young man whistled jauntily, turning his back to her, walking along behind the four staggering men. At the door he pointed to the wicker, offered its lid to Aunt Tildy. In pantomime he wondered if she would like to open it and gaze inside.

‘Curious? Me? Pshaw, no. Get out!’ cried Aunt Tildy.

The dark young man tapped a hat onto his head, saluted her crisply.

‘Good-by!’ Aunt Tildy slammed the door.

There, there. That was better. Gone. Darned fool men with their maggoty ideas. No never minds about the wicker. If they stole something, she didn’t care, long as they let her alone.

‘Look.’ Aunt Tildy smiled. ‘Here comes Emily, home from college. About time. Lovely girl. See how she walks. But, land, she looks pale and funny today, walkin’ so slow. I wonder why. Looks worried, she does. Poor girl. I’ll just fix some coffee and a tray of cakes.’

Emily tapped up the front steps. Aunt Tildy, rustling around, could hear the slow, deliberate steps. What ailed the girl? Didn’t sound like she had no more spunk than a flue-lizard. The front door swung wide. Emily stood in the hall, holding to the brass doorknob.

‘Emily?’ called Aunt Tildy.

Emily shuffled into the parlor, head down.

‘Emily! I been waitin’ for you! There was the darndest fool men here with a wicker. Tryin’ to sell me somethin’ I didn’t want. Glad you’re home. Makes it right cozy—’

Aunt Tildy realized that for a full minute Emily had been staring.

‘Emily, what’s wrong? Stop starin’. Here, I’ll bring you a cup of coffee. There!

‘Emily, why you backin’ away from me?

‘Emily, stop screamin’, child. Don’t scream. Emily! Don’t! You keep screamin’ that way, you go crazy. Emily, get up off the floor, get away from that wall! Emily! Stop cringin’, child. I won’t hurt you!

‘Land, if it ain’t one thing it’s another.

‘Emily, what’s wrong, child … ?’

Emily groaned through her hands over her face.

‘Child, child,’ whispered Aunt Tildy. ‘Here, sip this water. Sip it, Emily, that’s it.’

Emily widened her eyes, saw something, then shut them, quivering, pulling into herself. ‘Aunt Tildy, Aunt Tildy, Aunt—’

‘Stop that!’ Tildy slapped her. ‘What ails you?’

Emily forced herself to look up again.

She thrust her fingers out. They vanished inside Aunt Tildy.

‘What fool notion!’ cried Tildy. ‘Take your hand away! Take it, I say!’

Emily dropped aside, jerked her head, the golden hair shaking into shiny temblors. ‘You’re not here, Aunt Tildy. I’m dreaming. You’re dead!’

‘Hush, baby.’

‘You can’t be here.’

‘Land of Goshen, Emily—’

She took Emily’s hand. It passed clean through her. Instantly. Aunt Tildy raised straight up, stomping her foot.

‘Why, why!’ she cried angrily. ‘That – fibber! That sneak-thief!’ Her thin hands knotted to wiry, hard, pale fists. ‘That dark, dark fiend; he stole it! He toted it away, he did, oh he did, he did! Why, I—’ Wrath steamed in her. Her pale blue eyes were fire. She sputtered into an indignant silence. Then she turned to Emily. ‘Child, get up! I need you!’

Emily lay, quivering.

‘Part of me’s here!’ declared Aunt Tildy. ‘By the Lord Harry, what’s left will have to do, for a bit. Fetch my bonnet!’

Emily confessed. ‘I’m scared.’

‘Certainly, oh, certainly not of me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why, I’m no spook! You known me most of your life! Now’s no time to snivel-sop. Fetch up on your heels or I’ll slap you crack across your nose!’

Emily rose, in sobs, stood like something cornered, trying to decide which direction to bolt in.

‘Where’s your car, Emily?’

‘Down at the garage – ma’am.’

‘Good!’ Aunt Tildy hustled her through the front door. ‘Now—’ Her sharp eyes poked up and down the streets. ‘Which way’s the mortuary?’

Emily held to the step rail, fumbling down. ‘What’re you going to do, Aunt Tildy?’

‘Do?’ cried Aunt Tildy, tottering after her, jowls shaking in a thin, pale fury. ‘Why, get my body back, of course! Get my body back! Go on!’

The car roared. Emily clenched to the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the curved, rain-wet streets. Aunt Tildy shook her parasol.

‘Hurry, child, hurry, before they squirt juices in my body and dice and cube it the way them persnickety morticians have a habit of doin’. They cut and sew it so it ain’t no good to no one!’

‘Oh, Auntie, Auntie, let me go, don’t make me drive! It won’t do any good, no good at all,’ sighed the girl.

‘Here we are.’ Emily pulled to the curb, and collapsed over the wheel, but Aunt Tildy had already popped from the car and trotted with mincing skirt up the mortuary drive, around behind to where the shiny black hearse was unloading a wicker basket.

‘You!’ She directed her attack at one of the four men with the wicker. ‘Put that down!’

The four men looked up.

One said, ‘Step aside, lady. We’re doing our job.’

‘That’s my body tucked in there!’ She brandished the parasol.

‘That I wouldn’t know anything about,’ said a second man. ‘Please don’t block traffic, madam. This thing is heavy.’

‘Sir!’ she cried, wounded. ‘I’ll have you know I weigh only one hundred and ten pounds.’

He looked at her casually. ‘I’m not interested in your heft, lady. I’m due home for supper. My wife’ll kill me if I’m late.’

The four of them moved on, Aunt Tildy in pursuit, down a hall, into a preparations room.

A white-smocked man awaited the wicker’s arrival with a rather pleased smile on his long, eager-looking face. Aunt Tildy didn’t care for the avidity of that face, or the entire personality of the man. The basket was deposited, the four men wandered off.

The man in the white smock glanced at Auntie and said:

‘Madam, this is no fit place for a gentlewoman.’

‘Well,’ she said, gratified, ‘glad you feel that way. It’s exactly what I tried to tell that dark-clothed young man!’

The mortician puzzled. ‘What dark-clothed young man is that?’

‘The one that came puddlin’ around my house, that’s who.’

‘No one of that description works for us.’

‘No matter. As you just so intelligently stated, this is no place for a lady. I don’t want me here. I want me home cookin’ ham for Sunday visitors, it’s near Easter. I got Emily to feed, sweaters to knit, clocks to wind—’

‘You are quite philosophical, and philanthropical, no doubt of it, madam, but I have work. A body has arrived.’ This last, he said with apparent relish, and a winnowing of his knives, tubes, jars, and instruments.

Tildy bristled. ‘You put so much as a fingerprint on that body, and I’ll—’

He laid her aside like a little old moth. ‘George,’ he called with a suave gentleness, ‘escort this lady out, please.’

Aunt Tildy glared at the approaching George.

‘Show me your backside, goin’ the other way!’

George took her wrists. ‘This way, please.’

Tildy extricated herself. Easily. Her flesh sort of – slipped. It even amazed Tildy. Such an unexpected talent to develop at this late day.

‘See?’ she said, pleased with her ability. ‘You can’t budge me. I want my body back!’

The mortician opened the wicker lid casually. Then, in a recurrent series of scrutinies he realized the body inside was … it seemed … could it be? … maybe … yes … no … no … it just couldn’t be, but …‘Ah,’ he exhaled, abruptly. He turned. His eyes were wide, then they narrowed.

‘Madam,’ he said, cautiously. ‘This lady here is – a – relative – of yours?’

‘A very dear relation. Be careful of her.’

‘A sister, perhaps?’ He grasped at a straw of dwindling logic, hopefully.

‘No, you fool. Me, do you hear? Me!’

The mortician considered the idea. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Things like this don’t happen.’ He fumbled with his tools. ‘George, get help from the others. I can’t work with a crank present.’