Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09

by The Small Assassin (v2. 1)

  A long pause. “Gramps?”

  “Yes?”

  “What if a man didn’t have a heart or lungs or stomach but still walked around, alive?”

  “That,” rumbled Gramps, “would be a miracle.”

  “I don’t mean a—a miracle. I mean, what if he was all different inside. Not like me.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t be quite human then, would he, boy?”

  “Guess not, Gramps. Gramps, you got a heart and lungs?”

  Gramps chuckled. “Well, tell the truth, I don’t know. Never seen them. Never had an X-ray, never been to a doctor. Might as well be potato-solid for all I know.”

  “Have I got a stomach?”

  “You certainly have!” cried Grandma from the parlor entry. “‘Cause I feed it! And you’ve lungs, you scream loud enough to wake the crumblees. And you’ve dirty hands, go wash them! Dinner’s ready. Grandpa, come on. Douglas, git!”

  In the rush of boarders streaming downstairs, Grandpa, if he intended questioning Douglas further about the weird conversation, lost his opportunity. If dinner delayed an instant more, Grandma and the potatoes would develop simultaneous lumps.

  The boarders, laughing and talking at the table—Mr. Koberman silent and sullen among them—were silenced when Grandfather cleared his throat. He talked politics a few minutes and then shifted over into the intriguing topic of the recent peculiar deaths in the town.

  “It’s enough to make an old newspaper editor prick up his ears,” he said, eying them all. “That young Miss Larson, lived across the ravine, now. Found her dead three days ago for no reason, just funny kinds of tattoos all over her, and a facial expression that would make Dante cringe. And that other young lady, what was her name? Whitely? She disappeared and never did come back.”

  “Them things happen alla time,” said Mr. Britz, the garage mechanic, chewing. “Ever peek inna Missing Peoples Bureau file? It’s that long.” He illustrated. “Can’t tell what happens to most of ’em.”

  “Anyone want more dressing?” Grandma ladled liberal portions from the chicken’s interior. Douglas watched, thinking about how that chicken had had two kinds of guts—God-made and Man-made.

  Well, how about three kinds of guts?

  Eh?

  Why not?

  Conversation continued about the mysterious death of so- and-so, and, oh, yes, remember a week ago, Marion Barsumian died of heart failure, but maybe that didn’t connect up? or did it? you’re crazy! forget it, why talk about it at the dinner table? So.

  “Never can tell,” said Mr. Britz. “Maybe we got a vampire in town.”

  Mr. Koberman stopped eating.

  “In the year 1927?” said Grandma. “A vampire? Oh, go on, now.”

  “Sure,” said Mr. Britz. “Kill ’em with silver bullets. Anything silver for that matter. Vampires hate silver. I read it in a book somewhere, once. Sure, I did.”

  Douglas looked at Mr. Koberman who ate with wooden knives and forks and carried only new copper pennies in his pocket.

  “It’s poor judgment,” said Grandpa, “to call anything by a name. We don’t know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can’t heave them into categories with labels and say they’ll act one way or another. That’d be silly. They’re people. People who do things. Yes, that’s the way to put it: people who do things.”

  “Excuse me,” said Mr. Koberman, who got up and went out for his evening walk to work.

  The stars, the moon, the wind, the clock ticking, and the chiming of the hours into dawn, the sun rising, and here it was another morning, another day, and Mr. Koberman coming along the sidewalk from his night’s work. Douglas stood off like a small mechanism whirring and watching with carefully microscopic eyes.

  At noon, Grandma went to the store to buy groceries.

  As was his custom every day when Grandma was gone, Douglas yelled outside Mr. Koberman’s door for a full three minutes. As usual, there was no response. The silence was horrible.

  He ran downstairs, got the pass-key, a silver fork, and the three pieces of colored glass he had saved from the shattered window. He fitted the key to the lock and swung the door slowly open.

  The room was in half light, the shades drawn. Mr. Koberman lay atop his bedcovers, in slumber clothes, breathing gently, up and down. He didn’t move. His face was motionless.

  “Hello, Mr. Koberman!”

  The colorless walls echoed the man’s regular breathing.

  “Mr. Koberman, hello!”

  Bouncing a golf ball, Douglas advanced. He yelled. Still no answer. “Mr. Koberman!”

  Bending over Mr. Koberman, Douglas picked the tines of the silver fork in the sleeping man’s face.

  Mr. Koberman winced. He twisted. He groaned bitterly.

  Response. Good. Swell.

  Douglas drew a piece of blue glass from his pocket. Looking through the blue glass fragment he found himself in a blue room, in a blue world different from the world he knew. As different as was the red world. Blue furniture, blue bed, blue ceiling and walls, blue wooden eating utensils atop the blue bureau, and the sullen dark blue of Mr. Koberman’s face and arms and his blue chest rising, falling. Also . . .

  Mr. Koberman’s eyes were wide, staring at him with a hungry darkness.

  Douglas fell back, pulled the blue glass from his eyes.

  Mr. Koberman’s eyes were shut.

  Blue glass again—open. Blue glass away—shut. Blue glass again—open. Away—shut. Funny. Douglas experimented, trembling. Through the glass the eyes seemed to peer hungrily, avidly through Mr. Koberman’s closed lids. Without the blue glass they seemed tightly shut.

  But it was the rest of Mr. Koberman’s body. . . .

  Mr. Koberman’s bedclothes dissolved off him. The blue glass had something to do with it. Or perhaps it was the clothes themselves, just being on Mr. Koberman. Douglas cried out.

  He was looking through the wall of Mr. Koberman’s stomach, right inside him!

  Mr. Koberman was solid.

  Or, nearly so, anyway.

  There were strange shapes and sizes within him.

  Douglas must have stood amazed for five minutes, thinking about the blue worlds, the red worlds, the yellow worlds side by side, living together like glass panes around the big white stair window. Side by side, the colored panes, the different worlds; Mr. Koberman had said so himself.

  So this was why the colored window had been broken.

  “Mr. Koberman, wake up!”

  No answer.

  “Mr. Koberman, where do you work at night? Mr. Koberman, where do you work?”

  A little breeze stirred the blue window shade.

  “In a red world or a green world or a yellow one, Mr. Koberman?”

  Over everything was a blue glass silence.

  “Wait there,” said Douglas.

  He walked down to the kitchen, pulled open the great squeaking drawer and picked out the sharpest, biggest knife.

  Very calmly he walked into the hall, climbed back up the stairs again, opened the door to Mr. Koberman’s room, went in, and closed it, holding the sharp knife in one hand.

  Grandma was busy fingering a piecrust into a pan when Douglas entered the kitchen to place something on the table.

  “Grandma, what’s this?”

  She glanced up briefly, over her glasses. “I don’t know.”

  It was square, like a box, and elastic. It was bright orange in color. It had four square tubes, colored blue, attached to it. It smelled funny.

  “Ever see anything like it, Grandma?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Douglas left it there, went from the kitchen. Five minutes later he returned with something else. “How about this?”

  He laid down a bright pink linked chain with a purple triangle at one end.

  “Don’t bother me,” said Grandma. “It’s only a chain.”

  Next time he turned with two hands full. A ring, a square, a triangl
e, a pyramid, a rectangle, and—other shapes. All of them were pliable, resilient, and looked as if they were made of gelatin. “This isn’t all,” said Douglas, putting them down. “There’s more where this came from.”

  Grandma said, “Yes, yes,” in a far-off tone, very busy.

  “You were wrong, Grandma.”

  “About what?”

  “About all people being the same inside.”

  “Stop talking nonsense.”

  “Where’s my piggy-bank?”

  “On the mantel, where you left it.”

  “Thanks.”

  He tromped into the parlor, reached up for his piggybank. Grandpa came home from the office at five.

  “Grandpa, come upstairs.”

  “Sure, son. Why?”

  “Something to show you. It’s not nice; but it’s interesting.”

  Grandpa chuckled, following his grandson’s feet up to Mr. Koberman’s room.

  “Grandma mustn’t know about this; she wouldn’t like it,” said Douglas. He pushed the door wide open. “There.”

  Grandfather gasped.

  Douglas remembered the next few hours all the rest of his life. Standing over Mr. Koberman’s naked body, the coroner and his assistants. Grandma, downstairs, asking somebody, “What’s going on up there?” and Grandpa saying, shakily, “I’ll take Douglas away on a long vacation so he can forget this whole ghastly affair. Ghastly, ghastly affair!”

  Douglas said, “Why should it be bad? I don’t see anything bad. I don’t feel bad.”

  The coroner shivered and said, “Koberman’s dead, all right.”

  His assistant sweated. “Did you see those things in the pans of water and in the wrapping paper?”

  “Oh, my God, my God, yes, I saw them.”

  “Christ.”

  “The coroner bent over Mr. Koberman’s body again. “This better be kept secret, boys. It wasn’t murder. It was a mercy the boy acted. God knows what might have happened if he hadn’t.”

  “What was Koberman? A vampire? A monster?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Something—not human.” The coroner moved his hands deftly over the suture.

  Douglas was proud of his work. He’d gone to much trouble. He had watched Grandmother carefully and remembered. Needle and thread and all. All in all, Mr. Koberman was as neat a job as any chicken ever popped into hell by Grandma.

  “I heard the boy say that Koberman lived even after all those things were taken out of him.” The coroner looked at the triangles and chains and pyramids floating in the pans of water. “Kept on living. God.”

  “Did the boy say that?”

  “He did.”

  “Then, what did kill Koberman?”

  The coroner drew a few strands of sewing thread from their bedding.

  “This. . . .” he said.

  Sunlight blinked coldly off a half-revealed treasure trove; six dollars and seventy cents’ worth of silver dimes inside Mr. Koberman’s chest.

  “1 think Douglas made a wise investment,” said the coroner, sewing the flesh back up over the “dressing” quickly.

  THE CISTERN

  It was an afternoon of rain, and lamps lighted against the gray. For a long while the two sisters had been in the dining-room. One of them, Juliet, embroidered tablecloths; the younger, Anna, sat quietly on the window seat, staring out at the dark street and the dark sky.

  Anna kept her brow pressed against the pane, but her lips moved and after reflecting a long moment, she said, “I never thought of that before.”

  “Of what?” asked Juliet.

  “It just came to me. There’s actually a city under a city. A dead city, right here, right under our feet.”

  Juliet poked her needle in and out the white cloth. “Come away from the window. That rain’s done something to you.”

  “No, really. Didn’t you ever think of the cisterns before? They’re all through the town, there’s one for every street, and you can walk in them without bumping your head, and they go everywhere and finally go down to the sea,” said Anna, fascinated with the rain on the asphalt pavement out there and the rain falling from the sky and vanishing down the gratings at each corner of the distant intersection. “Wouldn’t you like to live in a cistern?”

  “I would not!”

  “But wouldn’t it be fun—I mean, very secret? To live in the cistern and peek up at people through the slots and see them and them not see you? Like when you were a child and played hide-and-seek and nobody found you, and there you were in their midst all the time, all sheltered and hidden and warm and excited. I’d like that. That’s what it must be like to live in the cistern.”

  Juliet looked slowly up from her work. “You are my sister, aren’t you, Anna? You were born, weren’t you? Sometimes, the way you talk, I think Mother found you under a tree one day and brought you home and planted you in a pot and grew you to this size and there you are, and you’ll never change.”

  Anna didn’t reply, so Juliet went back to her needle. There was no color in the room; neither of the two sisters added any color to it. Anna held her head to the window for five minutes. Then she looked way off into the distance and said, “I guess you’d call it a dream. While I’ve been here, the last hour, I mean. Thinking. Yes, Juliet, it was a dream.”

  Now it was Juliet’s turn not to answer.

  Anna whispered. “All this water put me to sleep a while, I guess, and then I began to think about the rain and where it came from and where it went and how it went down those little slots in the curb, and then I thought about deep under, and suddenly there they were. A man . . . and a woman. Down in that cistern, under the road.”

  “What would they be doing there?” asked Juliet.

  Anna said, “Must they have a reason?”

  “No, not if they’re insane, no,” said Juliet. “In that case no reasons are necessary. There they are in their cistern, and let them stay.”

  “But they aren’t just in the cistern,” said Anna, knowingly, her head to one side, her eyes moving under the half-down lids. “No, they’re in love, these two.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” said Juliet, “did love make them crawl down there?”

  “No, they’ve been there for years and years,” said Anna.

  “You can’t tell me they’ve been in that cistern for years, living together,” protested Juliet.

  “Did I say they were alive?” asked Anna, surprised. “Oh, but no. They’re dead.”

  The rain scrambled in wild, pushing pellets down the window. Drops came and joined with others and made streaks.

  “Oh,” said Juliet.

  “Yes,” said Anna, pleasantly. “Dead. He’s dead and she’s dead.” This seemed to satisfy her; it was a nice discovery, and she was proud of it. “He looks like a very lonely man who never traveled in all his life.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He looks like the kind of man who never traveled but wanted to. You know by his eyes.”

  “You know what he looks like, then?”

  “Yes. Very ill and very handsome. You know how it is with a man made handsome by illness? Illness brings out the bones in the face.”

  “And he’s dead?” asked the older sister.

  “For five years.” Anna talked softly, with her eyelids rising and falling, as if she were about to tell a long story and knew it and wanted to work into it slowly, and then faster and then faster, until the very momentum of the story would carry her on, with her eyes wide and her lips parted. But now it was slowly, with only a slight fever to the telling. “Five years ago this man was walking along a street and he knew he’d been walking the same street on many nights and he’d go on walking it, so he came to a manhole cover, one of those big iron waffles in the center of the street, and he heard the river rushing under his feet, under the metal cover, rushing toward the sea.” Anna put out her right hand. “And he bent slowly and lifted up the cistern lid and looked down at the rushing foam and the water, and he thought of someone he wanted to love a
nd couldn’t, and then he swung himself onto the iron rungs and walked down them until he was all gone. . . .”

  “And what about her?” asked Juliet, busy. “When’d she die?”

  “I’m not sure. She’s new. She’s just dead, now. But she is dead. Beautifully, beautifully dead.” Anna admired the image she had in her mind. “It takes death to make a woman really beautiful, and it takes death by drowning to make her most beautiful of all. Then all the stiffness is taken out of her, and her hair hangs up on the water like a drift of smoke.” She nodded her head, amusedly. “All the schools and etiquettes and teachings in the world can’t make a woman move with this dreamy ease, supple and ripply and fine.” Anna tried to show how fine, how ripply, how graceful, with her broad, coarse hand.

  “He’d been waiting for her, for five years. But she hadn’t known where he was till now. So there they are, and will be, from now on. . . . In the rainy season they’ll live. But in the dry seasons—that’s sometimes months—they’ll have long rest periods, they’ll lie in little hidden niches, like those Japanese water flowers, all dry and compact and old and quiet.”

  Juliet got up and turned on yet another little lamp in the corner of the dining-room. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about it.”

  Anna laughed. “But let me tell you about how it starts, how they come back to life. I’ve got it all worked out.” She bent forward, held onto her knees, staring at the street and the rain and the cistern mouths. “There they are, down under, dry and quiet, and up above the sky gets electrical and powdery.” She threw back her dull, graying hair with one hand. “At first all the upper world is pellets. Then there’s lightning and then thunder and the dry season is over, and the little pellets run along the gutters and get big and fall into the drains. They take gum wrappers and theater tickets with them, and bus transfers!”

  “Come away from that window, now.”

  Anna made a square with her hands and imagined things. “I know just what it’s like under the pavement, in the big square cistern. It’s huge. It’s all empty from the weeks with nothing but sunshine. It echoes if you talk. The only sound you can hear standing down there is an auto passing above. Far up above. The whole cistern is like a dry, hollow camel bone in a desert, waiting.”