Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

It’s not impossible, he thought, half closing his eyes, trying to see it and build it. Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic’s a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long Ago, why, it …

  He stopped, realizing he had spoken some of this aloud. Cora was eating rapidly.

  “Well, wouldn’t it be interesting,” he asked the part in her hair, “if Time Travel could occur? And what more logical, proper place for it to happen than in an attic like ours, eh?”

  “It’s not always summer back in the old days,” she said. “It’s just your crazy memory. You remember all the good things and forget the bad. It wasn’t always summer.”

  “Figuratively speaking, Cora, it was.”

  “Wasn’t.”

  “What I mean is this,” he said, whispering excitedly, bending forward to see the image he was tracing on the blank dining-room wall. “If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life.”

  “Unicycle?”

  “You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seater, the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colors, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your hands, flying, suspended, and you, smiling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance.”

  “Blah,” she said, “blah, blah.” And added, “blah!”

  He climbed the long cold stairs to the attic, shivering.

  There were nights in winter when he woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears, with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white-cold fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze suns to thaw him free of his wintry sheath. He was a great tasteless chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside forever, a great leaden wine press smashing down its colorless lid of sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing color and sense and being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung lower above town each day and every eternal night.

  Mr. Finch lifted the attic trap door. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trap door down.

  He began to smile.

  The attic was quiet as a thundercloud before a storm. On occasion, Cora Finch heard her husband murmuring, murmuring, high up there.

  At five in the afternoon, singing My Isle of Golden Dreams, Mr. Finch flipped a crisp new straw hat in the kitchen door. “Boo!”

  “Did you sleep all afternoon?” snapped his wife. “I called up at you four times and no answer.”

  “Sleep?” He considered this and laughed, then put his hand quickly over his mouth. “Well, I guess I did.”

  Suddenly she saw him. “My God!” she cried, “where’d you get that coat?”

  He wore a red candy-striped coat, a high white, choking collar and ice cream pants. You could smell the straw hat like a handful of fresh hay fanned in the air.

  “Found ’em in an old trunk.”

  She sniffed. “Don’t smell of moth balls. Looks brand-new.”

  “Oh, no!” he said hastily. He looked stiff and uncomfortable as she eyed his costume.

  “This isn’t a summer-stock company,” she said.

  “Can’t a fellow have a little fun?”

  “That’s all you’ve ever had,” she slammed the oven door. “While I’ve stayed home and knitted, lord knows, you’ve been down at the store helping ladies’ elbows in and out doors.”

  He refused to be bothered. “Cora.” He looked deep into the crackling straw hat. “Wouldn’t it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress whishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don’t drugstores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan’s Pier for a box supper and listen to the brass band. How about it?”

  “Supper’s ready. Take that dreadful uniform off.”

  “If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-laned country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?” he insisted, watching her.

  “Those old roads were dirty. We came home looking like Africans. Anyway,” she picked up a sugar jar and shook it, “this morning I had forty dollars here. Now it’s gone! Don’t tell me you ordered those clothes from a costume house. They’re brand-new; they didn’t come from any trunk!”

  “I’m—” he said.

  She raved for half an hour, but he could not bring himself to say anything. The November wind shook the house and as she talked, the snows of winter began to fall again in the cold steel sky.

  “Answer me!” she cried. “Are you crazy, spending our money that way, on clothes you can’t wear?”

  “The attic,” he started to say.

  She walked off and sat in the living room.

  The snow was falling fast now and it was a cold dark November evening. She heard him climb up the stepladder, slowly, into the attic, into that dusty place of other years, into that black place of costumes and props and Time, into a world separate from this world below.

  He closed the trap door down. The flashlight, snapped on, was company enough. Yes, here was all of Time compressed in a Japanese paper flower. At the touch of memory, everything would unfold into the clear water of the mind, in beautiful blooms, in spring breezes, larger than life. Each of the bureau drawers slid forth, might contain aunts and cousins and grandmamas, ermined in dust. Yes, Time was here. You could feel it breathing, an atmospheric instead of a mechanical clock.

  Now the house below was as remote as another day in the past. He half shut his eyes and looked and looked on every side of the waiting attic.

  Here, in prismed chandelier, were rainbows and mornings and noons as bright as new rivers flowing endlessly back through time. His flashlight caught and flickered them alive, the rainbows leapt up to curve the shadows back with colors, with colors like plums and strawberries and Concord grapes, with colors like cut lemons and the sky where the clouds drew off after storming and the blue was there. And the dust of the attic was incense burning and all of Time burning, and all you need do was peer into the flames. It was indeed a great machine of Time, this attic, he knew, he felt, he was sure, and if you touched prisms here, doorknobs there, plucked tassels, chimed crystals, swirled dust, punched trunk hasps and gusted the vox humana of the old hearth bellows until it puffed the soot of a thousand ancient fires into your eyes, if, indeed, you played this instrument, this warm machine of parts, if you fondled all of its bits and pieces, its levers and changers and movers, then, then, then!

  He thrust out his hands to orchestrate, to conduct, to flourish. There was music in his head, in his mouth shut tight, and he played the great machine, the thunderously silent organ, bass, tenor, soprano, low, high, and at last, at last, a chord that shuddered him so that he had to shut his eyes.

  About nine o’clock that night she heard him calling, “Cora!” She went upstairs. His head peered down at her from a
bove, smiling at her. He waved his hat. “Good-by, Cora.”

  “What do you mean?” she cried.

  “I’ve thought it over for three days and I’m saying good-by.”

  “Come down out of there, you fool!”

  “I drew five hundred dollars from the bank yesterday. I’ve been thinking about this. And then when it happened, well … Cora …” He shoved his eager hand down. “For the last time, will you come along with me?”

  “In the attic? Hand down that stepladder, William Finch. I’ll climb up there and run you out of that filthy place!”

  “I’m going to Hannahan’s Pier for a bowl of clam chowder,” he said. “And I’m requesting the brass band to play ‘Moonlight Bay.’ Oh, come on, Cora …” He motioned his extended hand.

  She simply stared at his gentle, questioning face.

  “Good-by,” he said.

  He waved gently, gently. Then his face was gone, the straw hat was gone.

  “William!” she screamed.

  The attic was dark and silent.

  Shrieking, she ran and got a chair and used it to groan her way up into the musty darkness. She flourished a flashlight. “William! William!”

  The dark spaces were empty. A winter wind shook the house.

  Then she saw the far west attic window, ajar.

  She fumbled over to it. She hesitated, held her breath. Then, slowly, she opened it. The ladder was placed outside the window, leading down onto a porch roof.

  She pulled back from the window.

  Outside the opened frame the apple trees shone bright green, it was twilight of a summer day in July. Faintly, she heard explosions, firecrackers going off. She heard laughter and distant voices. Rockets burst in the warm air, softly, red, white, and blue, fading.

  She slammed the window and stood reeling. “William!”

  Wintry November light glowed up through the trap in the attic floor behind her. Bent to it, she saw the snow whispering against the cold clear panes down in that November world where she would spend the next thirty years.

  She did not go near the window again. She sat alone in the black attic, smelling the one smell that did not seem to fade. It lingered like a sigh of satisfaction, on the air. She took a deep, long breath.

  The old, the familiar, the unforgettable scent of drugstore sarsaparilla.

  A Medicine for Melancholy (or: The Sovereign Remedy Revealed!), by Ray Bradbury

  “Send for some leeches; bleed her,” said Doctor Gimp.

  “She has no blood left!” cried Mrs. Wilkes. “Oh, Doctor, what ails our Camillia?”

  “She’s not right.”

  “Yes, yes?”

  “She’s poorly.” The good doctor scowled.

  “Go on, go on!”

  “She’s a fluttering candle flame, no doubt.”

  “Ah, Doctor Gimp,” protested Mr. Wilkes. “You but tell us as you go out what we told you when you came in!”

  “No, more! Give her these pills at dawn, high noon, and sunset. A sovereign remedy!”

  “Damn, she’s stuffed with sovereign remedies now!”

  “Tut-tut! That’s a shilling as I pass downstairs, sir.”

  “Go down and send the Devil up!” Mr. Wilkes shoved a coin in the good doctor’s hand.

  Whereupon the physician, wheezing, taking snuff, sneezing, stamped down into the swarming streets of London on a sloppy morn in the spring of 1762.

  Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes turned to the bed where their sweet Camillia lay pale, thin, yes, but far from unlovely, with large wet lilac eyes, her hair a creek of gold upon her pillow.

  “Oh,” she almost wept. “What’s to become of me? Since the start of spring, three weeks, I’ve been a ghost in my mirror; I frighten me. To think I’ll die without seeing my twentieth birthday.”

  “Child,” said the mother. “Where do you hurt?”

  “My arms. My legs. My bosom. My head. How many doctors—six?—have turned me like a beef on a spit. No more. Please, let me pass away untouched.”

  “What a ghastly, what a mysterious illness,” said the mother. “Oh, do something, Mr. Wilkes!”

  “What?” asked Mr. Wilkes angrily. “She won’t have the physician, the apothecary, or the priest!—and Amen to that!—they’ve wrung me dry! Shall I run in the street then and bring the Dustman up?”

  “Yes,” said a voice.

  “What!” All three turned to stare.

  They had quite forgotten her younger brother, Jamie, who stood picking his teeth at a far window, gazing serenely down into the drizzle and the loud rumbling of the town.

  “Four hundred years ago,” he said serenely, “it was tried, it worked. Don’t bring the Dustman up, no, no. But let us hoist Camillia, cot and all, maneuver her downstairs, and set her up outside our door.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “In a single hour”—Jamie’s eyes jumped, counting—“a thousand folk rush by our gate. In one day, twenty thousand people run, hobble, or ride by. Each might eye my swooning sister, each count her teeth, pull her ear lobes, and all, all, mind you, would have a sovereign remedy to offer! One of them would just have to be right!”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Wilkes, stunned.

  “Father!” said Jamie breathlessly. “Have you ever known one single man who didn’t think he personally wrote Materia Medica? This green ointment for sour throat, that ox-salve for miasma or bloat? Right now, ten thousand self-appointed apothecaries sneak off down there, their wisdom lost to us!”

  “Jamie boy, you’re incredible!”

  “Cease!” said Mrs. Wilkes. “No daughter of mine will be put on display in this or any street—”

  “Fie, woman!” said Mr. Wilkes. “Camillia melts like snow and you hesitate to move her from this hot room? Come, Jamie, lift the bed!”

  “Camillia?” Mrs. Wilkes turned to her daughter.

  “I may as well die in the open,” said Camillia, “where a cool breeze might stir my locks as I …”

  “Bosh!” said the father. “You’ll not die. Jamie, heave! Ha! There! Out of the way, wife! Up, boy, higher!”

  “Oh,” cried Camillia faintly.“ I fly, I fly …!”

  Quite suddenly a blue sky opened over London. The population, surprised by the weather, hurried out into the streets, panicking for something to see, to do, to buy. Blind men sang, dogs jigged, clowns shuffled and tumbled, children chalked games and threw balls as if it were carnival time.

  Down into all this, tottering, their veins bursting from their brows, Jamie and Mr. Wilkes carried Camillia like a lady Pope sailing high in her sedan-chair cot, eyes clenched shut, praying.

  “Careful!” screamed Mrs. Wilkes. “Ah, she’s dead! No. There. Put her down. Easy …”

  And at last the bed was tilted against the house front so that the River of Humanity surging by could see Camillia, a large pale Bartolemy Doll put out like a prize in the sun.

  “Fetch a quill, ink, paper, lad,” said the father. “I’ll make notes as to symptoms spoken of and remedies offered this day. Tonight we’ll average them out. Now—”

  But already a man in the passing crowd had fixed Camillia with a sharp eye.

  “She’s sick!” he said.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Wilkes, gleefully. “It begins. The quill, boy. There. Go on, sir!”

  “She’s not well.” The man scowled. “She does poorly.”

  “Does poorly—” Mr. Wilkes wrote, then froze. “Sir?” He looked up suspiciously. “Are you a physician?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “I thought I knew the words! Jamie, take my cane, drive him off! Go, sir, be gone!”

  But the man hastened off, cursing, mightily exasperated.

  “She’s not well, she does poorly … pah!” mimicked Mr. Wilkes, but stopped. For now a woman, tall and gaunt as a specter fresh risen from the tomb, was pointing a finger at Camillia Wilkes.

  “Vapors,” she intoned.

  “Vapors,” wrote Mr. Wilkes, pleased.

  “Lung-flux,” chanted the wom
an.

  “Lung-flux!” Mr. Wilkes wrote, beaming. “Now, that’s more like it!”

  “A medicine for melancholy is needed,” said the woman palely. “Be there mummy ground to medicine in your house? The best mummies are: Egyptian, Arabian, Hirasphatos, Libyan, all of great use in magnetic disorders. Ask for me, the Gypsy, at the Flodden Road. I sell stone parsley, male frankincense—”

  “Flodden Road, stone parsley—slower, woman!”

  “Opobalsam, pontic valerian—”

  “Wait, woman! Opobalsam, yes! Jamie, stop her!”

  But the woman, naming medicines, glided on.

  A girl, no more than seventeen, walked up now and stared at Camillia Wilkes.

  “She—”

  “One moment!” Mr. Wilkes scribbled feverishly. “—magnetic disorders—pontic valerian—drat! Well, young girl, now. What do you see in my daughter’s face? You fix her with your gaze, you hardly breathe. So?”

  “She—” The strange girl searched deep into Camillia’s eyes, flushed, and stammered. “She suffers from … from …”

  “Spit it out!”

  “She … she … oh!”

  And the girl, with a last look of deepest sympathy, darted off through the crowd.

  “Silly girl!”

  “No, Papa,” murmured Camillia, eyes wide. “Not silly. She saw. She knew. Oh, Jamie, run fetch her, make her tell!”

  “No, she offered nothing! Whereas, the Gypsy, see her list!”

  “I know it, Papa.” Camillia, paler, shut her eyes.

  Someone cleared his throat.

  A butcher, his apron a scarlet battleground, stood bristling his fierce mustaches there.

  “I have seen cows with this look,” he said. “I have saved them with brandy and three new eggs. In winter I have saved myself with the same elixir—”

  “My daughter is no cow, sir!” Mr. Wilkes threw down his quill. “Nor is she a butcher, nor is it January! Step back, sir, others wait!”

  And indeed, now a vast crowd clamored, drawn by the others, aching to advise their favorite swig, recommend some country site where it rained less and shone more sun than in all England or your South of France. Old men and women, especial doctors as all the aged are, clashed by each other in bristles of canes, in phalanxes of crutches and hobble sticks.