by Ray Bradbury
‘You told me!’
‘Yes,’ he admitted, dazed, looking around for a weapon.
‘Wait.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d rather not.’
And I was out the door and down the hall, my knees jumping to knock my jaw.
‘Come back!’ cried Von Seyfertitz, behind me. ‘I must kill you!’
‘I was afraid of that!’
I reached the elevator first and by a miracle it flung wide its doors when I banged the Down button. I jumped in.
‘Say good-bye!’ cried Von Seyfertitz, raising his fist as if it held a bomb.
‘Good-bye!’ I said. The doors slammed.
I did not see Von Seyfertitz again for a year.
Meanwhile, I dined out often, not without guilt, telling friends, and strangers on street corners, of my collision with a submarine commander become phrenologist (he who feels your skull to count the beans).
So with my giving one shake of the ripe fruit tree, nuts fell. Overnight they brimmed the Baron’s lap to flood his bank account. His Grand Slam will be recalled at century’s end: appearances on Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, and Geraldo in one single cyclonic afternoon, with interchangeable hyperboles, positive-negative-positive every hour. There were Von Seyfertitz laser games and duplicates of his submarine periscope sold at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. With the superinducement of a half-million dollars, he force-fed and easily sold a bad book. Duplicates of the animalcules, lurks, and curious critters trapped in his brass viewer arose in pop-up coloring books, paste-on tattoos, and inkpad rubber-stamp nighmares at Beasts-R-Us.
I had hoped that all this would cause him to forgive and forget. No.
One noon a year and a month later, my doorbell rang and there stood Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘How come I didn’t kill you that day?’ he mourned.
‘You didn’t catch me,’ I said.
‘Oh, ja. That was it.’
I looked into the old man’s rain-washed, tear-ravened face and said, ‘Who died?’
‘Me. Or is it I? Ah, to hell with it: me. You see before you,’ he grieved, ‘a creature who suffers from the Rumpelstiltskin Syndrome!’
‘Rumpel—’
‘—stiltskin! Two halves with a rip from chin to fly. Yank my forelock, go ahead! Watch me fall apart at the seam. Like zipping a psychotic zipper, I fall, two Herr Doktor Admirals for the sick price of one. And which is the Doktor who heals and which the sellout best-seller Admiral? It takes two mirrors to tell. Not to mention the smoke!’
He stopped and looked around, holding his head together with his hands.
‘Can you see the crack? Am I splitting again to become this crazy sailor who desires richness and fame, being sieved through the hands of crazed ladies with ruptured libidos? Suffering catfish, I call them! But take their money, spit, and spend! You should have such a year. Don’t laugh.’
‘I’m not laughing.’
‘Then cheer up while I finish. Can I lie down? Is that a couch? Too short. What do I do with my legs?’
‘Sit sidesaddle.’
Von Seyfertitz laid himself out with his legs draped over one side. ‘Hey, not bad. Sit behind. Don’t look over my shoulder. Avert your gaze. Neither smirk nor pull long faces as I get out the crazy-glue and paste Rumpel back with Stiltskin, the name of my next book, God help me. Damn you to hell, you and your damned periscope!’
‘Not mine. Yours. You wanted me to discover it that day. I suppose you had been whispering Dive, Dive, for years to patients, half asleep. But you couldn’t resist the loudest scream ever: Dive! That was your captain speaking, wanting fame and money enough to chock a horse show.’
‘God,’ murmured Von Seyfertitz, ‘how I hate it when you’re honest. Feeling better already. How much do I owe you?’
He arose.
‘Now we go kill the monsters instead of you.’
‘Monsters?’
‘At my office. If we can get in past the lunatics.’
‘You have lunatics outside as well as in, now?’
‘Have I ever lied to you?’
‘Often. But,’ I added, ‘little white ones.’
‘Come,’ he said.
We got out of the elevator to be confronted by a long line of worshipers and supplicants. There must have been seventy people strung out between the elevator and the Baron’s door, waiting with copies of books by Madame Blavatsky, Krishnamurti, and Shirley MacLaine under their arms. There was a roar like a suddenly opened furnace door when they saw the Baron. We beat it on the double and got inside his office before anyone could surge to follow.
‘See what you have done to me!’ Von Seyfertitz pointed.
The office walls were covered with expensive teak paneling. The desk was from Napoleon’s age, an exquisite Empire piece worth at least fifty thousand dollars. The couch was the best soft leather I had ever seen, and the two pictures on the wall were originals – a Renoir and a Monet. My God, millions! I thought.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘The beasts, you said. You’ll kill them, not me?’
The old man wiped his eyes with the back of one hand, then made a fist.
‘Yes!’ he cried, stepping up to the fine periscope, which reflected his face, madly distorted, in its elongated shape. ‘Like this. Thus and so!’
And before I could prevent, he gave the brass machine a terrific slap with his hand and then a blow and another blow and another, with both fists, cursing. Then he grabbed the periscope as if it were the neck of a spoiled child and throttled and shook it.
I cannot say what I heard in that instant. Perhaps real sounds, perhaps imagined temblors, like a glacier cracking in the spring, or icicles in midnight. Perhaps it was a sound like a great kite breaking its skeleton in the wind and collapsing in folds of tissue. Maybe I thought I heard a vast breath insucked, a cloud dissolving up inside itself. Or did I sense clock machineries spun so wildly they smoked off their foundations and fell like brass snowflakes?
I put my eye to the periscope.
I looked in upon—
Nothing.
It was just a brass tube with some crystal lenses and a view of an empty couch.
No more.
I seized the viewpiece and tried to screw it into some new focus on a far place and some dream bacteria that might fibrillate across an unimaginable horizon.
But the couch remained only a couch, and the wall beyond looked back at me with its great blank face.
Von Seyfertitz leaned forward and a tear ran off the tip of his nose to fall on one rusted fist.
‘Are they dead?’ he whispered.
‘Gone.’
‘Good, they deserved to die. Now I can return to some kind of normal, sane world.’
And with each word his voice fell deeper within his throat, his chest, his soul, until it, like the vaporous haunts within the peri-kaleidoscope, melted into silence.
He clenched his fists together in a fierce clasp of prayer, like one who beseeches God to deliver him from plagues. And whether he was once again praying for my death, eyes shut, or whether he simply wished me gone with the visions within the brass device, I could not say.
I only knew that my gossip had done a terrible and irrevocable thing. Me and my wild enthusiasm for a psychological future and the fame of this incredible captain from beneath Nemo’s tidal seas.
‘Gone,’ murmured Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, whispered for the last time. ‘Gone.’
That was almost the end.
I went around a month later. The landlord reluctantly let me look over the premises, mostly because I hinted that I might be renting.
We stood in the middle of the empty room where I could see the dent marks where the couch had once stood.
I looked up at the ceiling. It was empty.
‘What’s wrong?’ said the landlord. ‘Didn’t they fix it so you can’t see? Damn fool Baron made a damn big hole up into the office above. Re
nted that, too, but never used it for anything I knew of. There was just that big damn hole he left when he went away.’
I sighed with relief.
‘Nothing left upstairs?’
‘Nothing.’
I looked up at the perfectly blank ceiling.
‘Nice job of repair,’ I said.
‘Thank God,’ said the landlord.
What, I often wonder, ever happened to Gustav Von Seyfertitz? Did he move to Vienna, to take up residence, perhaps, in or near dear Sigmund’s very own address? Does he live in Rio, aerating fellow Unterderseaboat Captains who can’t sleep for seasickness, roiling on their waterbeds under the shadow of the Andes Cross? Or is he in South Pasadena, within striking distance of the fruit larder nut farms disguised as film studios?
I cannot guess.
All I know is that some nights in the year, oh, once or twice, in a deep sleep I hear this terrible shout, his cry,
‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’
And wake to find myself, sweating, far under my bed.
Another Fine Mess
The sounds began in the middle of summer in the middle of the night.
Bella Winters sat up in bed about three A.M. and listened and then lay back down. Ten minutes later she heard the sounds again, out in the night, down the hill.
Bella Winters lived in a first-floor apartment on top of Vendome Heights, near Effie Street in Los Angeles, and had lived there now for only a few days, so it was all new to her, this old house on an old street with an old staircase, made of concrete, climbing steeply straight up from the lowlands below, one hundred and twenty steps, count them. And right now …
‘Someone’s on the steps,’ said Bella to herself.
‘What?’ said her husband, Sam, in his sleep.
‘There are some men out on the steps,’ said Bella. ‘Talking, yelling, not fighting, but almost. I heard them last night, too, and the night before, but …’
‘What?’ Sam muttered.
‘Shh, go to sleep. I’ll look.’
She got out of bed in the dark and went to the window, and yes, two men were indeed talking out there, grunting, groaning, now loud, now soft. And there was another noise, a kind of bumping, sliding, thumping, like a huge object being carted up the hill.
‘No one could be moving in at this hour of the night, could they?’ asked Bella of the darkness, the window, and herself.
‘No,’ murmured Sam.
‘It sounds like …’
‘Like what?’ asked Sam, fully awake now.
‘Like two men moving—’
‘Moving what, for God’s sake?’
‘Moving a piano. Up those steps.’
‘At three in the morning?’
‘A piano and two men. Just listen.’
The husband sat up, blinking, alert.
Far off, in the middle of the hill, there was a kind of harping strum, the noise a piano makes when suddenly thumped and its harp strings hum.
‘There, did you hear?’
‘Jesus, you’re right. But why would anyone steal—’
‘They’re not stealing, they’re delivering.’
‘A piano?’
‘I didn’t make the rules, Sam. Go out and ask. No, don’t; I will.’
And she wrapped herself in her robe and was out the door and on the sidewalk.
‘Bella,’ Sam whispered fiercely behind the porch screen.
‘Crazy.’
‘So what can happen at night to a woman fifty-five, fat, and ugly?’ she wondered.
Sam did not answer.
She moved quietly to the rim of the hill. Somewhere down there she could hear the two men wrestling with a huge object. The piano on occasion gave a strumming hum and fell silent. Occasionally one of the men yelled or gave orders.
‘The voices,’ said Bella. ‘I know them from somewhere,’ she whispered and moved in utter dark on stairs that were only a long pale ribbon going down, as a voice echoed:
‘Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.’
Bella froze. Where have I heard that voice, she wondered, a million times!
‘Hello,’ she called.
She moved, counting the steps, and stopped.
And there was no one there.
Suddenly she was very cold. There was nowhere for the strangers to have gone to. The hill was steep and a long way down and a long way up, and they had been burdened with an upright piano, hadn’t they?
How come I know upright? she thought. I only heard. But – yes, upright! Not only that, but inside a box!
She turned slowly and as she went back up the steps, one by one, slowly, slowly, the voices began to sound again, below, as if, disturbed, they had waited for her to go away.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded one voice.
‘I was just—’ said the other.
‘Give me that!’ cried the first voice.
That other voice, thought Bella, I know that, too. And I know what’s going to be said next!
‘Now,’ said the echo far down the hill in the night, ‘just don’t stand there, help me!’
‘Yes!’ Bella closed her eyes and swallowed hard and half fell to sit on the steps, getting her breath back as black-and-white pictures flashed in her head. Suddenly it was 1929 and she was very small, in a theater with dark and light pictures looming above the first row where she sat, transfixed, and then laughing, and then transfixed and laughing again.
She opened her eyes. The two voices were still down there, a faint wrestle and echo in the night, despairing and thumping each other with their hard derby hats.
Zelda, thought Bella Winters. I’ll call Zelda. She knows everything. She’ll tell me what this is. Zelda, yes!
Inside, she dialed Z and E and L and D and A before she saw what she had done and started over. The phone rang a long while until Zelda’s voice, angry with sleep, spoke half-way across L.A.
‘Zelda, this is Bella!’
‘Sam just died?’
‘No, no, I’m sorry—’
‘You’re sorry?’
‘Zelda, I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but …’
‘Go ahead, be crazy.’
‘Zelda, in the old days when they made films around L.A., they used lots of places, right? Like Venice, Ocean Park …’
‘Chaplin did, Langdon did, Harold Lloyd, sure.’
‘Laurel and Hardy?’
‘What?’
‘Laurel and Hardy, did they use lots of locations?’
‘Palms, they used Palms lots, Culver City Main Street, Effie Street.’
‘Effie Street!’
‘Don’t yell, Bella.’
‘Did you say Effie Street?’
‘Sure, and God, it’s three in the morning!’
‘Right at the top of Effie Street!?’
‘Hey, yeah, the stairs. Everyone knows them. That’s where the music box chased Hardy downhill and ran over him.’
‘Sure, Zelda, sure! Oh, God, Zelda, if you could see, hear, what I hear!’
Zelda was suddenly wide awake on the line. ‘What’s going on?You serious?’
‘Oh, God, yes. On the steps just now, and last night and the night before maybe, I heard, I hear – two men hauling a – a piano up the hill.’
‘Someone’s pulling your leg!’
‘No, no, they’re there. I go out and there’s nothing. But the steps are haunted, Zelda! One voice says: “Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.” You got to hear that man’s voice!’
‘You’re drunk and doing this because you know I’m a nut for them.’
‘No, no. Come, Zelda. Listen. Tell!’
Maybe half an hour later, Bella heard the old tin lizzie rattle up the alley behind the apartments. It was a car, Zelda in her joy at visiting silent-movie theaters, had bought to lug herself around in while she wrote about the past, always the past, and steaming into Cecil B. DeMille’s old place or circling Harold Lloyd’s nation-state, or cranking and banging around the Universal backlot
, paying her respects to the Phantom’s opera stage, or sitting on Ma and Pa Kettle’s porch chewing a sandwich lunch. That was Zelda, who once wrote in a silent country in a silent time for Silver Screen.
Zelda lumbered across the front porch, a huge body with legs as big as the Bernini columns in front of St. Peter’s in Rome, and a face like a harvest moon.
On that round face now was suspicion, cynicism, skepticism, in equal pie-parts. But when she saw Bella’s pale stare she cried:
‘Bella!’
‘You see I’m not lying!’ said Bella.
‘I see!’
‘Keep your voice down, Zelda. Oh, it’s scary and strange, terrible and nice. So come on.’
And the two women edged along the walk to the rim of the old hill near the old steps in old Hollywood, and suddenly as they moved they felt time take a half turn around them and it was another year, because nothing had changed, all the buildings were the way they were in 1928 and the hills beyond like they were in 1926 and the steps, just the way they were when the cement was poured in 1921.
‘Listen, Zelda. There!’
And Zelda listened and at first there was only a creaking of wheels down in the dark, like crickets, and then a moan of wood and a hum of piano strings, and then one voice lamenting about this job, and the other voice claiming he had nothing to do with it, and then the thumps as two derby hats fell, and an exasperated voice announced:
‘Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.’
Zelda, stunned, almost toppled off the hill. She held tight to Bella’s arm as tears brimmed in her eyes.
‘It’s a trick. Someone’s got a tape recorder or—’
‘No, I checked. Nothing but the steps, Zelda, the steps!’
Tears rolled down Zelda’s plump cheeks.
‘Oh, God, that is his voice! I’m the expert, I’m the mad fanatic, Bella. That’s Ollie. And that other voice, Stan! And you’re not nuts after all!’
The voices below rose and fell and one cried: ‘Why don’t you do something to help me?’
Zelda moaned. ‘Oh, God, it’s so beautiful.’
‘What does it mean?’ asked Bella. ‘Why are they here? Are they really ghosts, and why would ghosts climb this hill every night, pushing that music box, night after night, tell me, Zelda, why?’
Zelda peered down the hill and shut her eyes for a moment to think. ‘Why do any ghosts go anywhere? Retribution? Revenge? No, not those two. Love maybe’s the reason, lost loves or something. Yes?’