by Ray Bradbury
“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.”
THEY 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 u
ndulant 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.
THE 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.
It was the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, where, a moment before, was something.
The clean rocket men faced the directions from which the scream had come rushing forward like a tide.
The captain neatly disposed of the last book.
The air stopped quivering.
Silence.
The rocket men leaned and listened.
“Captain, did you hear it?”
“No.”
“Like a wave, sir. On the sea bottom! I thought I saw something. Over there. A black wave. Big. Running at us.”
“You were mistaken.”
“But the sound?”
“I say you heard nothing.”
“There, sir!”
“What!”
“See it? There! The castle! Way over! That black castle, near that lake! It’s splitting in half. It’s falling!”
The men stared. “I don’t see it.”
“Yes, it’s falling! It’s all fire and rock.”
The men squinted and shuffled forward.
Smith stood trembling among them. He put his hand to his head as if to find a thought there. “I remember. Yes, now I do. A long time back. When I was a child. A book I read. A story. Usher, I think it was. Yes, Usher. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’—”
“By whom?”
“I—I can’t remember.”
“Usher? Never heard of it.”
“Yes, Usher, that’s what it was. I saw it fall again, just now, like in the story.”
“Smith!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Report for psychoanalysis tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir!” A brisk salute.
“Be careful.”
The men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship’s aseptic light to gaze at the long sea and the low hills.
“Why,” whispered Smith, disappointed, “there’s no one here at all, is there? No one here at all.”
The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.
Carnival of Madness
“DURING THE WHOLE OF A DULL, DARK AND SOUNDLESS day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher …”
Mr. William Stendahl paused in his quotation. There, upon a low black hill, stood the house, its cornerstone bearing the inscription: 2249 A.D.
Mr. Bigelow, the architect said, “It’s completed. Here’s the key, Mr. Stendahl.”
The two men stood together, silently, in the quiet autumn afternoon. Blueprints rustled on the raven grass at their feet.
“The House of Usher,” said Mr. Stendahl, with pleasure. “Planned, built, bought, paid for. Wouldn’t Mr. Poe be delighted?”
Mr. Bigelow squinted. “Is it everything you wanted, sir?”
“Yes!”
“Is its color right? Is it desolate and terrible?”
“Very desolate, very terrible!”
“The walls are—bleak?”
“Amazingly so!”
“The tarn, is it ‘black and lurid’ enough?”
“Most incredibly black and lurid.”
“And the sedge—we’ve dyed it, you know—is it the proper gray and ebon?”
“Hideous!”
Mr. Bigelow consulted his architectural plans. From these he quoted in part: “Does the whole structure cause an ‘iciness, a sickening of the heart, a dreariness of thought?’ the House, the lake, the land, Mr. Stendahl?”
“Mr. Bigelow, your hand! Congratulations! It’s worth every penny. My word, it’s beautiful!”
“Thank you. I had to work in total ignorance. A puzzling job. You notice, it’s always twilight here, this land, always October, barren, sterile, dead. It took a bit of doing. We killed everything! Ten thousand tons of DDT. Not a snake, frog, fly or anything left! Twilight, always, Mr. Stendahl, I’m proud of that. There are machines, hidden, which blot out the sun. It’s always properly ‘dreary’.”
Stendahl drank it in, the dreariness, the oppression, the fetid vapors, the whole ‘atmosphere,’ so delicately contrived and fitted. And that House! That crumbling horror, that evil lake, the fungi, the extensive decay! Plastic or otherwise, who could guess?
He looked at the autumn sky. Somewhere, above, beyond, far off, was a sun. Somewhere it was the month of May, a yellow month with a blue sky. Somewhere above, the passenger rockets burned east and west across the continent in a modern land. The sound of their screaming passage was muffled and killed by this dim, sound-proofed world, this ancient autumn world.
“Now that my job’s done,” said Mr. Bigelow, uneasily, “I feel free to ask what you’re going to do with all this?”
“With Usher? Haven’t you guessed?”
“No.”
“Does the name Usher mean nothing to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, what about this name: Edgar Allan Poe?”
Mr. Bigelow shook his head.
“Of course.” Stendahl snorted delicately, a combination of dismay and contempt. “How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe? He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. That’s four centuries back. All of his books were burned in The Great Fire.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Bigelow, wisely, “One of those!”
“Yes, one of those, Bigelow. He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future, we
re burned. Heartlessly. They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. Centuries ago it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures, there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”
“I see.”
“Afraid of the word politics (which eventually became a synonym for communism among the more reactionary elements, so I hear, and it was worth your life to use the word!), and with a screw tightened here, a bolt fastened there, a push, a pull, a yank, Art and Literature were soon like a great twine of taffy strung all about, being twisted in braids and tied in knots, and thrown in all directions, until there was no more resiliency and no more savor to it. Then the film cameras chopped short and the theatres turned dark, and the print presses trickled down from a great Niagara of reading matter to a mere innocuous dripping of ‘pure’ material. Oh, the word “escape” was radical, too, I tell you!”
“Was it?”
“It was! Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now! Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in midair! So, they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning twenty years ago, in 2229, they lined them up, Saint Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose, oh, what a wailing! and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for, of course, it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!) and Once Upon A Time became No More!
“And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of The Land of Oz, they filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and shattered Polychrome in a spectroscope and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologist’s Ball! The Beanstalk died in a bramble of red tape! Sleeping Beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe. And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry Curioser and Curioser, and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to crash it and every Red King and Oyster away!”