Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

There stood the Dwarf in the middle of the small blue room. His eyes were shut. He wasn’t ready to open them yet. Now, now he opened his eyelids and looked at a large mirror set before him. And what he saw in the mirror made him smile. He winked, he pirouetted, he stood sidewise, he waved, he bowed, he did a little clumsy dance.

And the mirror repeated each motion with long, thin arms, with a tall, tall body, with a huge wink and an enormous repetition of the dance, ending in a gigantic bow!

‘Every night the same thing,’ whispered Ralph in Aimee’s ear. ‘Ain’t that rich?’

Aimee turned her head and looked at Ralph steadily out of her motionless face, for a long time, and she said nothing. Then, as if she could not help herself, she moved her head slowly and very slowly back to stare once more through the opening. She held her breath. She felt her eyes begin to water.

Ralph nudged her, whispering.

‘Hey, what’s the little gink doin’ now?’

They were drinking coffee and not looking at each other in the ticket booth half an hour later, when the Dwarf came out of the mirrors. He took his hat off and started to approach the booth, when he saw Aimee and hurried away.

‘He wanted something,’ said Aimee.

‘Yeah.’ Ralph squashed out his cigarette, idly. ‘I know what, too. But he hasn’t got the nerve to ask. One night in this squeaky little voice he says, “I bet those mirrors are expensive.” Well, I played dumb. I said yeah they were. He sort of looked at me, waiting, and when I didn’t say any more, he went home, but next night he said, “I bet those mirrors cost fifty, a hundred bucks.” I bet they do, I said. I laid me out a hand of solitaire.’

‘Ralph,’ she said.

He glanced up. ‘Why you look at me that way?’

‘Ralph,’ she said, ‘why don’t you sell him one of your extra ones?’

‘Look, Aimee, do I tell you how to run your hoop circus?’

‘How much do those mirrors cost?’

‘I can get ’em secondhand for thirty-five bucks.’

‘Why don’t you tell him where he can buy one, then?’

‘Aimee, you’re not smart.’ He laid his hand on her knee. She moved her knee away. ‘Even if I told him where to go, you think he’d buy one? Not on your life. And why? He’s self-conscious. Why, if he even knew I knew he was flirtin’ around in front of that mirror in Screwy Louie’s Room, he’d never come back. He plays like he’s goin’ through the Maze to get lost, like everybody else. Pretends like he don’t care about that special room. Always waits for business to turn bad, late nights, so he has that room to himself. What he does for entertainment on nights when business is good, God knows. No, sir, he wouldn’t dare go buy a mirror anywhere. He ain’t got no friends, and even if he did he couldn’t ask him to buy him a thing like that. Pride, by God, pride. Only reason he even mentioned it to me is I’m practically the only guy he knows. Besides, look at him – he ain’t got enough to buy a mirror like those. He might be savin’ up, but where in hell in the world today can a dwarf work? Dime a dozen, drug on the market, outside of circuses.’

‘I feel awful. I feel sad.’ Aimee sat staring at the empty boardwalk. ‘Where does he live?’

‘Flytrap down on the waterfront. The Ganghes Arms. Why?’

‘I’m madly in love with him, if you must know.’

He grinned around his cigar. ‘Aimee,’ he said. ‘You and your very funny jokes.’

A warm night, a hot morning, and a blazing noon. The sea was a sheet of burning tinsel and glass.

Aimee came walking, in the locked-up carnival alleys out over the warm sea, keeping in the shade, half a dozen sun-bleached magazines under her arm. She opened a flaking door. The world of Giants far away, an ugly rumor beyond the garden wall. Poor mama, papa! They meant only the best for me. They kept me, like a porcelain vase, small and treasured, to themselves, in our ant world, our beehive rooms, our microscopic library, our land of beetle-sized doors and moth windows. Only now do I see the magnificent size of my parents’ psychosis! They must have dreamed they would live forever, keeping me like a butterfly under glass. But first father died, and then fire ate up the little house, the wasp’s nest, and every postage-stamp mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff!

‘It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, “I want you to meet the little woman!”’

Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she handed it to Ralph. ‘You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It’s all right. But don’t you see? That little man. That little man.’

Ralph tossed the magazine aside and lit a cigarette lazily. ‘I like Westerns better.’

‘Ralph, you got to read it. He needs someone to tell him how good he is and keep him writing.’

Ralph looked at her, his head to one side. ‘And guess who’s going to do it? Well, well, ain’t we just the Savior’s right hand?’

‘I won’t listen!’

‘Use your head, damn it! You go busting in on him he’ll think you’re handing him pity. He’ll chase you screamin’ outa his room.’

She sat down, thinking about it slowly, trying to turn it over and see it from every side. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Oh, it’s not just pity, Ralph, honest. But maybe it’d look like it to him. I’ve got to be awful careful.’

He shook her shoulder back and forth, pinching softly, with his fingers. ‘Hell, hell, lay off him, is all I ask; you’ll get nothing but trouble for your dough. God, Aimee, I never seen you so hepped on anything. Look, you and me, let’s make it a day, take a lunch, get us some gas, and just drive on down the coast as far as we can drive; swim, have supper, see a good show in some little town – to hell with the carnival, how about it? A damn nice day and no worries. I been savin’ a coupla bucks.’

‘It’s because I know he’s different,’ she said, looking off into darkness. ‘It’s because he’s something we can never be – you and me and all the rest of us here on the pier. It’s so funny, so funny. Life fixed him so he’s good for nothing but carny shows, yet there he is on the land. And life made us so we wouldn’t have to work in the carny shows, but here we are, anyway, way out here at sea on the pier. Sometimes it seems a million miles to shore. How come, Ralph, that we got the bodies, but he’s got the brains and can think things we’ll never even guess?’

‘You haven’t even been listening to me!’ said Ralph.

She sat with him standing over her, his voice far away. Her eyes were half shut and her hands were in her lap, twitching.

‘I don’t like that shrewd look you’re getting on,’ he said, finally.

She opened her purse slowly and took out a small roll of bills and started counting. ‘Thirty-five, forty dollars. There. I’m going to phone Billie Fine and have him send out one of those tall-type mirrors to Mr Bigelow at the Ganghes Arms. Yes, I am!’

‘What!’

‘Think how wonderful for him, Ralph, having one in his own room any time he wants it. Can I use your phone?’

‘Go ahead, be nutty.’

Ralph turned quickly and walked off down the tunnel. A door slammed.

Aimee waited, then after a while put her hands to the phone and began to dial, with painful slowness. She paused between numbers, holding her breath, shutting her eyes, thinking how it might seem to be small in the world, and then one day someone sends a special mirror by. A mirror for your room where you can hide away with the big reflection of yourself, shining, and write stories and stories, never going out into the world unless you had to. How might it be then, alone, with the wonderful illusion all in one piece in the room. Would it make you happy or sad, would it help your writing or hurt it? She shook her head back and forth, back and forth. At least this way there would be no one to look down at you. Night after night, perhaps rising secretly at three in the cold morning, you could wink and dance around and smile and wave at yourself, so tall, so tall, so very fine and tall in the bright looking-glass.

A telephone voice said, ‘Billie Fine’s.’

‘Oh, Billie!’ she cried.

Night came in over the pier. The ocean lay dark and loud under the planks. Ralph sat cold and waxen in his glass coffin, laying out the cards, his eyes fixed, his mouth stiff. At his elbow, a growing pyramid of burned cigarette butts grew larger. When Aimee walked along under the hot red and blue bulbs, smiling, waving, he did not stop setting the cards down slow and very slow. ‘Hi, Ralph!’ she said.

‘How’s the love affair?’ he asked, drinking from a dirty glass of iced water. ‘How’s Charlie Boyer, or is it Cary Grant?’

‘I just went and bought me a new hat,’ she said, smiling. ‘Gosh, I feel good! You know why? Billie Fine’s sending a mirror out tomorrow! Can’t you just see the nice little guy’s face?’

‘I’m not so hot at imagining.’

‘Oh, Lord, you’d think I was going to marry him or something.’

‘Why not? Carry him around in a suitcase. People say, Where’s your husband? all you do is open your bag, yell, Here he is! Like a silver cornet. Take him outa his case any old hour, play a tune, stash him away. Keep a little sandbox for him on the back porch.’

‘I was feeling so good,’ she said.

‘Benevolent is the word.’ Ralph did not look at her, his mouth tight. ‘Ben-eve-o-lent. I suppose this all comes from me watching him through that knothole, getting my kicks? That why you sent the mirror? People like you run around with tambourines, taking the joy out of my life.’

‘Remind me not to come to your place for drinks anymore. I’d rather go with no people at all than mean people.’

Ralph exhaled a deep breath. ‘Aimee, Aimee. Don’t you know you can’t help that guy? He’s bats. And this crazy thing of yours is like saying, Go ahead, be batty, I’ll help you, pal.’

‘Once in a lifetime anyway, it’s nice to make a mistake if you think it’ll do somebody some good,’ she said.

‘God deliver me from do-gooders, Aimee.’

‘Shut up, shut up!’ she cried, and then said nothing more.

He let the silence lie awhile, and then got up, putting his finger-printed glass aside. ‘Mind the booth for me?’

‘Sure. Why?’

She saw ten thousand cold white images of him stalking down the glassy corridors, between mirrors, his mouth straight and his fingers working themselves.

She sat in the booth for a full minute and then suddenly shivered. A small clock ticked in the booth and she turned the deck of cards over, one by one, waiting. She heard a hammer pounding and knocking and pounding again, far away inside the Maze; a silence, more waiting, and then ten thousand images folding and refolding and dissolving, Ralph striding, looking out at ten thousand images of her in the booth. She heard his quiet laughter as he came down the ramp.

‘Well, what’s put you in such a good mood?’ she asked, suspiciously.

‘Aimee,’ he said carelessly, ‘we shouldn’t quarrel. You say tomorrow Billie’s sending that mirror to Mr Big’s?’

‘You’re not going to try anything funny?’

‘Me?’ He moved her out of the booth and took over the cards, humming, his eyes bright. ‘Not me, oh no, not me.’ He did not look at her, but started quickly to slap out the cards. She stood behind him. Her right eye began to twitch a little. She folded and unfolded her arms. A minute ticked by. The only sound was the ocean under the night pier, Ralph breathing in the heat, the soft ruffle of the cards. The sky over the pier was hot and thick with clouds. Out at sea, faint glows of lightning were beginning to show.

‘Ralph,’ she said at last.

‘Relax, Aimee,’ he said.

‘About that trip you wanted to take down the coast—’

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Maybe next month. Maybe next year. Old Ralph Banghart’s a patient guy. I’m not worried, Aimee. Look.’ He held up a hand. ‘I’m calm.’

She waited for a roll of thunder at sea to fade away.

‘I just don’t want you mad, is all. I just don’t want anything bad to happen, promise me.’

The wind, now warm, now cool, blew along the pier. There was a smell of rain in the wind. The clock ticked. Aimee began to perspire heavily, watching the cards move and move. Distantly, you could hear targets being hit and the sound of the pistols at the shooting gallery.

And then, there he was.

Waddling along the lonely concourse, under the insect bulbs, his face twisted and dark, every movement an effort. From a long way down the pier he came, with Aimee watching. She wanted to say to him, This is your last night, the last time you’ll have to embarrass yourself by coming here, the last time you’ll have to put up with being watched by Ralph, even in secret. She wished she could cry out and laugh and say it right in front of Ralph. But she said nothing.

‘Hello, hello!’ shouted Ralph. ‘It’s free, on the house, tonight! Special for old customers!’

The Dwarf looked up, startled, his little black eyes darting and swimming in confusion. His mouth formed the word thanks and he turned, one hand to his neck, pulling his tiny lapels tight up about his convulsing throat, the other hand clenching the silver dime secretly. Looking back, he gave a little nod, and then scores of dozens of compressed and tortured faces, burned a strange dark color by the lights, wandered in the glass corridors.

‘Ralph,’ Aimee took his elbow. ‘What’s going on?’

He grinned. ‘I’m being benevolent, Aimee, benevolent.’

‘Ralph,’ she said.

‘Sh,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

They waited in the booth in the long warm silence.

Then, a long way off, muffled, there was a scream.

‘Ralph!’ said Aimee.

‘Listen, listen!’ he said.

There was another scream, and another and still another, and a threshing and a pounding and a breaking, a rushing around and through the Maze. There, there, wildly colliding and ricocheting, from mirror to mirror, shrieking hysterically and sobbing, tears on his face, mouth gasped open, came Mr Bigelow. He fell out in the blazing night air, glanced about wildly, wailed, and ran off down the pier.

‘Ralph, what happened?’

Ralph sat laughing and slapping at his thighs.

She slapped his face. ‘What’d you do?’

He didn’t quite stop laughing. ‘Come on. I’ll show you!’

And then she was in the Maze, rushed from white-hot mirror to mirror, seeing her lipstick all red fire a thousand times repeated on down a burning silver cavern where strange hysterical women much like herself followed a quick-moving, smiling man. ‘Come on!’ he cried. And they broke free into a dust-smelling tiny room.

‘Ralph!’ she said.

They both stood on the threshold of the little room where the Dwarf had come every night for a year. They both stood where the Dwarf had stood each night, before opening his eyes to see the miraculous image in front of him.

Aimee shuffled slowly, one hand out, into the dim room.

The mirror had been changed.

This new mirror made even tall people little and dark and twisted smaller as you moved forward.

And Aimee stood before it thinking and thinking that if it made big people small, standing here, God, what would it do to a dwarf, a tiny dwarf, a dark dwarf, a startled and lonely dwarf?

She turned and almost fell. Ralph stood looking at her. ‘Ralph,’ she said. ‘God, why did you do it?’

‘Aimee, come back!’

She ran out through the mirrors, crying. Staring with blurred eyes, it was hard to find the way, but she found it. She stood blinking at the empty pier, started to run one way, then another, then still another, then stopped. Ralph came up behind her, talking, but it was like a voice heard behind a wall late at night, remote and foreign.

‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said.

Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr Kelly from the shooting gallery. ‘Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol from my place, loaded, run off before I’d get a hand on him! You help me find him?’

And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.

Aimee rocked back and forth and took a step.

‘Aimee, where you going?’

She looked at Ralph as if they had just turned a corner, strangers passing, and bumped into each other. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘I’m going to help search.’

‘You won’t be able to do nothing.’

‘I got to try anyway. Oh God, Ralph, this is all my fault! I shouldn’t have phoned Billie Fine! I shouldn’t’ve ordered a mirror and got you so mad you did this! It’s me should’ve gone to Mr Big, not a crazy thing like I bought! I’m going to find him if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.’

Swinging about slowly, her cheeks wet, she saw the quivery mirrors that stood in front of the Maze, Ralph’s reflection was in one of them. She could not take her eyes away from the image; it held her in a cool and trembling fascination, with her mouth open.

‘Aimee, what’s wrong? What’re you—’

He sensed where she was looking and twisted about to see what was going on. His eyes widened.

He scowled at the blazing mirror.

A horrid, ugly little man, two feet high, with a pale, squashed face under an ancient straw hat, scowled back at him. Ralph stood there glaring at himself, his hands at his sides.

Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.

A Wild Night in Galway

We were far out at the tip of Ireland, in Galway, where the weather strikes from its bleak quarters in the Atlantic with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain. You go to bed sad and wake in the middle of the night thinking you heard someone cry, thinking you yourself were weeping, and feel your face and find it dry. Then you look at the window and turn over, sadder still, and fumble about for your dripping sleep and try to get it back on.

We were out, as I said, in Galway, which is gray stone with green beards on it, a rock town, and the sea coming in and the rain falling down; and we had been there a month solid working with our film director on a script which was, with immense irony, to be shot in the warm yellow sun of Mexico sometime in January. The pages of the script were full of fiery bulls and hot tropical flowers and burning eyes, and I typed it with chopped-off frozen fingers in my gray hotel room where the food was criminal’s gruel and the weather a beast at the window.

On the thirty-first night, a knock at the door, at seven. The door opened, my film director stepped nervously in.

‘Let’s get the hell out and find some wild life in Ireland and forget this damn rain,’ he said, all in a rush.

‘What rain?’ I said, sucking my fingers to get the ice out. ‘The concussion here under the roof is so steady I’m shellshocked and have quite forgot the stuff’s coming down!’

‘Four weeks here and you’re talking Irish,’ said the director.

‘Hand me my clay pipe,’ I said. And we ran from the room.

‘Where?’ said I.

‘Heber Finn’s pub,’ said he.

And we blew along the stony street in the dark that rocked gently as a boat on the black flood because of the tilty-dancing streetlights above which made the shadows tear and fly, uneasy.

Then, sweating rain, faces pearled, we struck through the pub doors, and it was warm as a sheepfold because there were the townsmen pressed in a great compost heap at the bar and Heber Finn yelling jokes and foaming up drinks.

‘Heber Finn,’ cried the director, ‘we’re here for a wild night!’

‘A wild night we’ll make it,’ said Heber Finn, and in a moment a slug of poteen was burning lace patterns in our stomachs, to let new light in.

I exhaled fire. ‘That’s a start,’ I said.

We had another and listened to the rollicking jests and the jokes that were less than half clean, or so we guessed, for the brogue made it difficult, and the whiskey poured on the brogue and thus combined made it double-difficult. But we knew when to laugh, because when a joke was finished the men hit their knees and then hit us. They’d give their limbs a great smack and then bang us on the arm or thump us in the chest.

As our breath exploded, we’d shape the explosion to hilarity and squeeze our eyes tight. Tears ran down our cheeks not from joy but from the exquisite torture of the drink scalding our throats. Thus pressed like shy flowers in a huge warm-moldy book, the director and I lingered on, waiting for some vast event.

At last my director’s patience thinned. ‘Heber Finn,’ he called across the seethe, ‘it’s been wild so far, all right, but we want it wilder, I mean, the biggest night Ireland ever saw!’

Whereupon Heber Finn whipped off his apron, shrugged his meat-cleaver shoulders into a tweed coat, jumped up in the air, slid down inside his raincoat, slung on his beardy cap, and thrust us at the door.

‘Nail everything down till I get back,’ he advised his crew. ‘I’m taking these gents to the damnedest evening ever. Little do they know what waits for them out there.’

He opened the door and pointed. The wind threw half a ton of ice water on him. Taking this as no more than an additional spur to rhetoric, Heber Finn, not wiping his face, added in a roar, ‘Out with you! On! Here we go!’

‘Do you think we should?’ I said, doubtful now that things seemed really on the move.

‘What do you mean?’ cried the director. ‘What do you want to do? Go freeze in your room? Rewrite that scene you did so lousily today?’

‘No, no,’ I said, and slung on my own cap.

I was first outside thinking, I’ve a wife and three loud but lovely children, what am I doing here, eight thousand miles gone from them, on the dark side of God’s remembrance? Do I really want to do this?

Then, like Ahab, I thought on my bed, a damp box with its pale cool winding-sheets and the window dripping next to it like a conscience: all night through. I groaned. I opened the door of Heber Finn’s car, took my legs apart to get in, and we shot down the town like a ball in a bowling alley.

Heber Finn at the wheel talked fierce, half hilarity, half sobering King Lear.

‘A wild night, is it? You’ll have the grandest night ever,’ he said. ‘You’d never guess, would you, to walk through Ireland, so much could go on under the skin?’

‘I knew there must be an outlet somewhere,’ I yelled.

The speedometer was up to fifty miles an hour. Stone walls raced by on the right, stone walls raced by on the left. It was raining the entire dark sky down on the entire dark land.

‘Outlet indeed!’ said Heber Finn. ‘If the Church knew, but it don’t! Or then maybe it does, but figures – the poor craythurs – and lets us be!’

‘Where, what—?’

‘You’ll see!’ said Heber Finn.

The speedometer read sixty. My stomach was stone like the stone walls rushing left and right. Does the car have brakes? I wondered. Death on an Irish road, I thought, a wreck, and before anyone found us strewn we’d melt away in the pounding rain and be part of the turf by morn. What’s death anyway? Better than hotel food.

‘Can’t we go a bit faster?’ I asked.

‘It’s done,’ said Heber Finn, and made it seventy.

‘That will do it, nicely,’ I said in a faint voice, wondering what lay ahead. Behind all the slate-stone weeping walls of Ireland, what happened? Beneath the rain-drenched sod, the flinty rock, at the numbed core of living, was there one small seed of fire which, fanned, might break volcanoes free and boil the rains to steam?