The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories

by Ray Bradbury

  He was still listening, trying to analyze the commotion, when a girl in a dark sweater and skirt stepped out quietly from the shadow of the roadside pines beyond him. Hogan didn’t see her; he heard her cross the ditch to the road in a beautiful reaching leap. When he looked around, she was running like a rabbit for the car.

  He yelped breathlessly: “Julia!”

  For just an instant, Julia looked back at him, her face a pale, scared blur in the moonlight. Then the car door slammed shut behind her, and with a shiver and groan the old machine lurched into action. Hogan made no further attempt to stop her. Confused and unhappy, he watched the headlights sweep down the road until they swung out of sight around the corner behind Jefferies’ farm.

  “Now what the devil was she poking around here for?”

  He sighed, shook his head and started back to the camp. There was a cool draft of air flowing up from the lake across the road, but Old Battler’s vicious snarls were no longer audible on it. Hogan sniffed idly at the breeze, wondered at a faint, peculiar odor that tainted it, and sniffed again. Then, in a flash of apprehensive rage, he realized what had happened. Greenface was down in the pines somewhere—the hound had stirred it up, discovered it was alive and worth worrying, but lost it again and was now casting about silently to find its hiding place!

  Hogan crossed the ditch in a jump that bettered Julia’s, blundered into the wood and ducked just in time to avoid being speared in the eye by a jagged branch of asp. More cautiously he worked his way in among the trees, went sliding down a moldy incline, swore in exasperation as he tripped over a rotten trunk and was reminded thereby of the flashlight in his hand. He walked slowly across a moonlit clearing, listening, then found himself confronted by a dense cluster of evergreens and switched on the light.

  It stabbed into a dark-green oval, bigger than a man’s head, eight feet away.

  He stared fascinated at the thing, expecting it to vanish. But Greenface made no move beyond a slow writhing among the velvety foot ribbons that supported it. It seemed to have grown again in its jack-in-the-box fashion; it was taller than Hogan and stooping slightly toward him. The lines on its pulsing head formed two tightly shut eyes and a wide, thin-lipped, insanely smiling mouth.

  Gradually it was borne in upon Hogan that the thing was asleep! Or had been asleep—for in that moment, he became aware of a change in the situation through something like the buzzing escape of steam, a sound just too high to be audible, that throbbed through his head. Then he noticed that Greenface, swaying slowly, quietly, had come a foot or two closer, and he saw the tips of the foot ribbons grow dim and transparent as they slid over the moss toward him. A sudden horror of this stealthy approach seized him, draining the strength out of his body. Without thinking of what he did he switched off the light.

  Almost instantly the buzzing sensation died away, and before Hogan had backed off to the edge of the moonlit clearing, he realized that Greenface had stopped its advance. Suddenly he understood.

  Unsteadily he threw the beam on again and directed it full on the smiling face. For a moment there was no result; then the faint buzzing began once more in his brain, and the foot ribbons writhed and dimmed as Greenface came sliding forward. He snapped it off, and the thing grew still, solidifying.

  Hogan began to laugh in silent hysteria. He had caught it now I Light brought Greenface alive, let it act, move—enabled it to pull its unearthly vanishing stunt. At high noon it was as vital as a cat or hawk. Lack of light made it still, pulled, though perhaps able to react automatically.

  Greenface was trapped!

  He began to play with it, savagely enjoying his power over the horror, switching the light off and on. Presently, Green-face would die; but first—he seemed to sense a growing dim anger in that soundless buzzing—and suddenly the thing did not stop!

  In a flash, Hogan realized he had permitted it to reach the edge of the little moonlit clearing, and under the full glare of the moon, Greenface was still advancing upon him, though slowly. Its outlines grew altogether blurred—even the head started to fade.

  Hogan leaped back, with a new rush of the helpless horror with which he had first sensed it coming toward him. But he retreated only into the shadows on the other side of the clearing.

  The ghostly outline of Greenface came rolling on, its nebulous leering head swaying slowly from side to side like the head of a hanged and half-rotted thing. It reached the fringe of shadows and stopped, while the foot ribbons darkened as they touched the darkness and writhed back. Dimly it seemed to be debating this new situation.

  Hogan swallowed hard. He had noticed a blurred, shapeless something which churned about slowly within the jeflylike shroud beneath the head; and he had a sudden conviction that he knew the reason for Old Battler’s silence. Greenface had become as dangerous as a tiger!

  Meanwhile, he had no intention of leaving it in the moonlight’s liberty. He threw the beam on the dim oval mask again, and slowly, stupidly, moving along that rope of light, Green-face entered the darkness; and the light flicked out, and it was trapped once more.

  Trembling and breathless after his half-mile run, Hogan reached the lodge and began stuffing his pockets with as many shells as they would take. Then he picked up the shotgun and started back toward the spot where he had left the thing, forcing himself not to hurry. If he didn’t blunder now, his troubles would be over. But if he did—Hogan shivered. He hadn’t quite realized before that a time was bound to come when Greenface would be big enough to lose its fear of him.

  Pushing down through the ditch and into the woods, he flashed the light ahead of him. In a few more minutes he reached the place where he had left Greenface. And it was not there!

  Hogan glared about, wondering wildly whether he had missed the right spot and knowing he hadn’t. He looked up and saw the tops of the jack pines swaying against the pale blur of the sky; and as he stared at them, a ray of moonlight flickered through that broken canopy and touched him and was gone again, and then he understood. Greenface had crept up along such intermittent threads of light into the trees.

  One of the pine tops appeared blurred and top-heavy. Hogan watched it a few minutes; then he depressed the safety button on the automatic, cradled the gun, and put the flashlight beam dead-center on that blur. In a moment he felt the fine mental irritation as the blur began to flow downward through the tree toward him. Remembering that Greenface did not mind a long drop to the ground, he switched off the light and watched it take shape among the shadows, and then begin a slow retreat toward the treetops and the moon.

  Hogan took a deep breath and raised the gun.

  The five reports came one on top of the other in a rolling roar, while the pine top jerked and splintered and flew. Green-face was plainly visible now, still clinging, twisting and lashing in spasms like a broken snake. Big branches, torn loose in those furious convulsions, crashed ponderously down toward Hogan. He backed off hurriedly, flicked in five new shells and raised the gun again.

  And again!

  And again!

  The whole top of the tree seemed to be coming down with it! Droping the gun, Hogan covered his head with his arms and shut his eyes. He heard the sodden, splashy thump with which it landed on the forest mold a half dozen yards away. Then something hard and solid slammed down across his shoulders and the back of his skull.

  There was a brief sensation of plunging headlong through a fire-streaked darkness. For many hours thereafter, no sort of sensation reached Hogan’s mind at all.

  “Haven’t seen you around in a long time,” bellowed Pete Jeffries across the fifty feet of water between his boat and Hogan’s. The farmer pulled a fat flapping whitefish out of the illegal gill net he was emptying and plunked it down on the pile before him. “What you do with yourself—sleep up in the woods?”

  “Times I do,” Hogan admitted.

  “Used to myself when I was your age. Out with a gun alia time,” Pete said mournfully. “It ain’t no real fun anymore—’specially since them
game wardens got Old Battler.”

  Hogan shivered imperceptibly, remembering the ghastly thing he’d buried that July morning, six weeks back, when he awoke, thinking his skull was caved in and found Greenface somehow had dragged itself away, with enough shot in it to lay out a township. At least it felt sick enough to disgorge what was left of Old Battler, and to refrain from harming Hogan. Maybe he’d killed it, at that—though he couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Think the storm will hit before evening?” he asked out of his thoughts, not caring much either way. Pete glanced at the sky.

  “Yes!” he agreed matter-of-factly. “Hit the lake in half an hour maybe. I know two guys,” he added, “who are going to get awful wet. Not meaning us—”

  “That so?”

  ‘Yeah. Know that little bay back where the Indian outfit used to live? There’s two of the drunkest buggers I seen on Thursday Lake this summer—fishing there from a little duck boat! They come across the lake somewheres.”

  “Think we ought to warn ‘em?”

  “Not me!” said Jeffries. “They made some kinda crack when I passed there. I like to have rammed ‘em.” He looked at Hogan with puzzled benevolence. “Seems there was something I was gonna tell you . . . well, guess it was a lie!” He sighed. “How’s the walleyes hitting?”

  “Pretty good.” Hogan had picked up a stringful trolling along the lake bars.

  “I got it now!” Pete spluttered excitedly. “Whitey told me last night: Julia’s got herself engaged up with a guy in the city—place she’s working at! They’re going to get married real quick.”

  Hogan bent over the side of his boat and began to unknot the fish-stringer. He hadn’t seen Julia since the night he last met Greenface. A week or so later he heard she’d left town and taken a job in the city.

  “Seemed to me I oughta tell you,” Pete continued with remorseless neighborliness. “Didn’t you and she used to to go around some?”

  “Yeah, some,” Hogan agreed desperately. He held up the walleyes. “Want to take these home for the missis, Pete? I was just fishing for the fun of it.”

  “Sure will!” Pete was delighted. “If you don’t want ‘em. Nothing beats walleyes for eatin’, less it’s whitefish. But I’m going to smoke these. Say, how about me bringing you a ham of buck, smoked, for the walleyes?”

  “O. K.,” Hogan smiled.

  “Have to be next week,” Pete admitted regretfully. “I went shooting the north side of the lake three nights back, and there wasn’t a deer around. Something’s scared ‘em all out over there.”

  “O. K.,” Hogan said again, not listening at all. He got the motor going and cut away from Pete with a wave of his hand. “Be seeing you, Pete!”

  Two miles down the lake he got his mind off Julia long enough to find a possible unpleasant significance in Pete’s last words.

  He cut the motor to idling speed and then shut it off entirely, trying to get his thoughts into some kind of order. Since that chunk of pine rapped him over the head and robbed him of his chance of finishing off Greenface, he’d seen no more of the thing and heard nothing to justify his suspicion that it was still alive somewhere, maybe still growing. But from Thursday Lake northward to the border of Canada stretched two hundred miles of bush, tree and water, with only the barest scattering of towns and tiny farms. Hogan often pictured Greenface prowling about back there, safe from human detection and a ghastly new enemy for the harried small life of the bush, while it nourished its hatred for the man who had so nearly killed it.

  It wasn’t a pretty picture. It made him take the signs indicating MASTERS FISHING CAMP from the roads, and made him turn away the occasional would-be guest who still found his way to the camp in spite of Whitey Allison’s unrelenting vigilance in town. It also made it impossible for him even to try to get in touch with Julia and explain what couldn’t have been explained anyhow.

  A rumble of thunder broke through Hogan’s thoughts. The sky in the east hung black with clouds; and the boat was beating in steadily toward shore with the wind and waves behind it. Hogan started the motor and came around in a curve to take a direct line toward camp. As he did so, a white object rose sluggishly on the waves not a hundred yards ahead of him and sank again. With a start of dismay he realized it was the upturned bottom of a small flat boat, and remembered the two fishermen he’d intended warning against the approach of the storm.

  The little bay Jeffries had mentioned, lay a half-mile in back of him; he’d come past it without being aware of the fact. There was no immediate reason to think the drunks had met with an accident; more likely they’d simply landed and neglected to draw the boat high enough out of the water, so that it drifted off into the lake on the first puff of wind.

  Circling the derelict to make sure it was really empty, Hogan turned back to pick up the two sportsmen and take them to his camp until the storm was over.

  On reaching the comparatively smooth water of the tree-ringed bay, Hogan throttled the motor and came in slowly because the bay was shallow and choked with pickerel grass and reeds. There was little breeze here; the air seemed even oppressively hot and still after the free race of wind on the outer lake. It was also darkening rapidly.

  He stood up in the boat and stared along the shoreline over the tops of the reeds, wondering where the two had gone— and whether they mightn’t have been in the boat anyway when it overturned.

  “Hey, there!” he yelled uncertainly.

  His voice echoed back out of the creaking shore pines. From somewhere near the end of the bay sounded a series of loud splashes—probably a big fish flopping about in the reeds. When that stopped, the stillness became almost tangible; and Hogan drew a quick, deep breath as if he found breathing difficult.

  Again the splashing in the shallows, much closer now. Hogan faced the sound frowning; his frown became a puzzled stare. That was certainly no fish but some big animal, a deer, a bear, possibly a moose—the odd thing was that it should be coming toward him. Craning his neck, he saw the reed tops bend and shake about a hundred yards away, as if a slow, heavy wave of air were passing through them in his direction. There was nothing else to be seen.

  Then the truth flashed on him—a rush of horrified comprehension.

  Hogan tumbled back into the stern and threw the motor on full power. As the boat drove forward, he swung it around to avoid an impenetrable wall of reeds ahead, and straightened out toward the mouth of the bay. Over the roar of the motor and the splash and hissing of water, he was aware of one other sensation: that shrilling vibration of the nerves, too high to be a sound, that had haunted his dreams all summer! How near the thing came to catching him as he raced the boat throught the weedy traps of the bay, he never knew; but once past the first broad patch of open water he risked darting a glance back over his shoulder—

  And then, through a daze of incredulous shock, Hogan heard himself scream—raw, hoarse yells of sheer animal terror.

  He wasn’t in any immediate danger for Greenface had given up the pursuit. It stood, fully visible among the reeds, a hundred yards or so back. The smiling, jade-green face was turned toward Hogan, lit up by strange reflections from the stormy sky and mottled with red streaks and patches he didn’t remember having seen there before. The glistening, flowing mass beneath it writhed like a cloak of translucent pythons. It towered in the bay, dwarfing even the trees behind it in its unearthly menace. It had grown again! It was all of thirty feet high.

  The storm, breaking before Hogan reached camp, raged on through the night and throughout the next day. Since he would never be able to find the thing in that torrential downpour, he didn’t have to decide whether he must try to hunt Greenface down or not. In any case, he wouldn’t have to go looking for it, Hogan told himself, staring out of the lodge windows at the tormented chaos of water and wind without —it had come back for him, and presently it would find its way to the familiar neighborhood of the camp!

  There was a certain justice in that. He’d been the nemesis of the monster a
s much as it had been his. It was simply time to bring the matter to an end before anyone else got killed.

  Someone had told him—now he thought of it, it must have been Pete Jeffries, plodding up faithfully through the endless storm one morning with supplies for Hogan—that the two lost sportsmen were considered drowned; their boat had been discovered, and as soon as the weather made it possible, the lake would be searched for their bodies. Hogan nodded, saying nothing and keeping his face expressionless. Pete was looking at him in a worried way.

  “You shouldn’t drink so much, Hogan!” Pete blurted out suddenly. “It ain’t doing you no good. The missis was telling me you was really keen on that Julia—maybe I shoulda kept my trap shut. But you’d have found out anyhow.”

  “Sure I would,” Hogan said quickly. It hadn’t dawned on him before that Pete believed he’d shut himself up here to mourn for Julia.

  “Me,” Pete told him confidentially, “I didn’t marry the girl I was after, neither. But don’t you never tell that to the missis, Hogan! Well, anyhow, it got me just like it got you . . . you gotta snap outta it, see?”

  Something was moving, off in the grass back of the machine shed. Hogan watched it from the corner of his eye till he made sure it was only a bush shaking itself in the sleety wind.

  “Eh?” he said. “Oh, sure. I’ll snap out of it, Pete. Don’t you worry.”

  “That’s right.” Pete sounded hearty but not quite convinced. “Come around see us some evening, Hogan. It don’t do a guy no good to be sittin’ off here by himself alia time.”

  Hogan gave his promise. Maybe he was thinking of Julia a good deal; but mostly, it seemed to him, he was thinking of Greenface. As for drinking too much, he was certainly far too smart even to look at the whiskey. There was no telling when the crisis would come, and he intended to be ready for it. At night he slept well enough.