The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories

by Ray Bradbury

  Meanwhile, the storm continued, day and night. Hogan couldn’t quite remember finally how long it had been going on, but it was as bad a wet blow as he’d ever got stuck in. The lake water rolled over the dock with every wave, and the little dock down near the end cabins had been taken clean away. At least three trees were down within the confines of the camp, the ground littered with branches. There were times when Hogan got to wondering why Greenface didn’t come—and whether he hadn’t possibly made the whole thing up.

  But then he would always remember that on cold wet days it didn’t like to move about. It was hiding up, waiting for the storm to subside. It would be hard for so huge a thing to find shelter anywhere, of course; but after a little thinking, he knew exactly where it must be—at the cut-off above the lake, about three miles west of the camp and a mile or so from the bay where he had seen it last.

  On the eighth morning the storm ebbed out. In mid-afternoon the wind veered around to the south; shortly before sunset the cloud banks began to dissolve while mists steamed from the lake surface. Hogan went out with a hand ax and brought in a few dead birches from a windfall over the hill to the south of the lodge. His firewood was running low; he felt chilled and heavy all through, unwilling to exert himself. He had left the gun in the lodge, and as he came downhill dragging the last of the birches, he was frightened into a sweat by a pale, featureless face that stared at him out of the evening sky between the trees. The moon had grown nearly full in the week it was hidden from sight; and Hogan remembered that Greenface was able to walk in the light of the full moon.

  He cast an anxious look overhead. The clouds were melting toward the horizon in every direction; it threatened to be an exceptionally clear night. He stacked the birch logs beside the fireplace in the lodge’s main room. Then he brewed up the last of his coffee and drank it black. A degree of alertness returned to him.

  Afterward he went about, closing the shutters over every window except those facing the south meadow. The tall cottonwoods on the other three sides of the house should afford a protective screen, but the meadow would be flooded with moonlight. He tried to remember at what time the moonset came—no matter, he’d watch till then and afterward sleep! The effect of the coffee was wearing off, and he had no more. He pulled an armchair up to an open window from where, across the still, he controlled the whole expanse of open ground over which Greenface could approach. Since a rifle couldn’t have much effect on a creature that lacked both vital parts and sufficient solidity to stop a bullet, he had the loaded shotgun across his knees. The flashlight and the contents of five more shell boxes lay on the small table beside him.

  With the coming of night, all but the brightest of stars were dimmed in the gray gleaming sky. The moon itself stood out of Hogan’s sight above the lodge roof, but he could look across the meadows as far as the machine shed and the icehouse.

  He got up twice to replenish the fire which made a warm, heartening glow on his life side; and the second time he considered replacing the armchair with something less comfortable. He was becoming thoroughly drowsy. Occasionally a ripple of apprehension brought him bolt upright, pulse hammering; but the meadow always appeared quiet and unchanged, and the night alive only with familiar, heartening sounds: the crickets, a single whippoorwill, and the occasional dark wail of a loon from the outer lake.

  Each time fear wore itself out again, and then, even thinking of Julia, it was hard to keep awake. But she remained in his mind tonight with almost physical clearness—sitting opposite him at the kitchen table, raking back her unruly hair while she leafed slowly through the mail-order catalogues; or diving off the float he’d anchored beyond the dock, a bathing cap tight around her head and the chin strap framing her beautiful, stubborn little face like a picture.

  Beautiful but terribly stubborn, Hogan thought, frowning drowsily. Like one evening, when they’d quarreled again and she hid among the empty cabins at the north end of the camp. She wouldn’t answer when Hogan began looking for her, and by the time he discovered her, he was worried and angry. So he came walking slowly toward her through the half-dark, without a word—and that was one time Julia did get a little scared of him. “Hogan!” she cried breathlessly. “Now wait! Listen, Hogan—”

  He sat up with a jerky start, her voice still ringing in his mind.

  The empty moonlit meadow lay like a vast silver carpet below him, infinitely peaceful; even the shrilling of the tireless crickets was withdrawn in the distance. He must have slept for some while, for the shadow of the house formed an inky black square on the ground immediately below the window. The moon was sinking.

  Hogan sighed, shifted the gun on his knees, and immediately grew still again. There’d been something—and then he heard it clearly: a faint scratching on the outside of the bolted door behind him, and afterward a long breathless whimper like the gasp of a creature that has no strength to cry out.

  Hogan moistened his lips and sat very quiet. In the next instant, the hair at the back of his neck rose hideously of its own accord.

  “Hogan . . . Hogan ... oh, please! . . . Hogan!”

  The toneless cry might have come out of the shadowy room behind him, or over miles of space, but there was no mistaking that voice. Hogan tried to say something, and his lips wouldn’t move. His hands lay cold and paralyzed on the shotgun.

  “Hogan . . . please! Listen . . . Hogan—”

  He heard the chair go over with a dim crash behind him. He was moving toward the door in a blundering, dreamlike rush, and then struggling with numb fingers against the stubborn resistance of the bolt.

  “That awful thing! That awful thing! Standing there in the meadow! I thought it was a ... a TREE! I . . . I’m not CRAZY, am I Hogan?”

  The jerky, panicky whispering went on and on, until he stopped it with his mouth on hers and felt her relax in his arms. He’d bolted the door behind them before carrying her to the fireplace couch—Greenface must be standing somewhere around the edge of the Cottonwood patch if she’d seen it coming across the meadow from the road. Her hand tightened on his shoulder, and he looked down. Julia’s eyes were wide and dark, but incredibly she was smiling—well, he’d always known Julia was wonderful!

  “I came back, Hogan. I had to find out—was that it, Hogan? Was that what—”

  He nodded hastily; there was no time to wonder, hardly any time left to explain. Now she was here, he realized he’d never have stopped Greenface with any amount of buckshot —but they could get away if only they kept to the shadows.

  The look of nightmare came back into Julia’s eyes as she listened; her fingers dug painfully into his shoulder. “But, Hogan,” she whispered, “it’s so big ... big as the tree, a lot of them!”

  Hogan frowned at her uncomprehendingly until, watching him, Julia’s expression began to change. He knew it mirrored the change in his own face, but he couldn’t do anything about that.

  “It could come right through them—” she whispered.

  Hogan still wasn’t able to talk.

  “It could be right outside the house!” Julia’s voice wasn’t a whisper any more, and he put his hand over her mouth, gently enough, until her breathing steadied.

  “Don’t you smell it?” he murmured, close to her ear.

  It was Greenface all right; the familiar oily odor was seeping into the air they breathed, growing stronger moment by moment until it became the smell of some foul tropical swamp, a wet, rank rottenness. Hogan was amazed to find he’d stopped shaking. He felt quick and strong and reckless—he knew he couldn’t afford to be reckless. He thought frantically.

  “Look, Julia,” he whispered, “it’s dark in the cellar. No moonlight; nothing. Make it there alone?”

  She nodded doubtfully.

  “I’ll put the fire out first,” he explained in hasty answer to her look. “Be down right after you!”

  “I’ll help you,” she gasped. All Julia’s stubbornness was concentrated in the three words.

  Hogan fought down an urgent impul
se to slap her face hard, right and left. Like a magnified echo of that impulse was the vast soggy blow that smashed immediately against the outer lodge wall, above the door.

  They stared stupidly. The whole house was shaking. The wall logs were strong, but a prolonged tinkling of broken glass announced that each of the shuttered windows on that side had been broken simultaneously. “The damn thing!” Hogan thought. “The damn thing! It’s really come for me! If it hits the door—”

  The ability to move returned to them together. They left the couch in a clumsy, frenzied scramble and reached the head of the cellar stairs not a step apart. With the second shattering crash, the telephone leaped from the wall beside Hogan. His hand on the stair railing, he stared back.

  He couldn’t see the door from there. The fire roared and dancer in the hearth, as if it enjoyed being shaken up so roughly. The head of the eight-point buck had dropped off the cabinet and lay on the floor beside the fire, its glass eyes fixed in a red baleful glare on Hogan. Nothing else seemed changed.

  “HOGAN!” Julia wailed aloud from the shadows at the foot of the stairs. He heard her start up again and turned to tell her to wait there.

  Then Greenface hit the door.

  Glass, wood and metal flew inward together with an indescribable explosive sound. Hogan slid down four steps and stopped again, his head on a level with the top of the stairs. Below him he heard Julia’s choked breathing. Nothing else stirred.

  A cool draft of air began to flow past his face. Then came a heavy scraping noise and the renewed clatter of glass.

  “Hogan!” Julia sobbed recklessly. “Come down! IT’LL GET IN!”

  “It can’t read!” Hogan breathed.

  As if in answer, the stairs began to tremble under his feet. Wood splintered ponderously; the shaking continued and seemed to spread through the house. Then something smacked against the wall, just around the corner of the room that shut off Hogan’s view of the door. Laboriously, like a floundering whale, Greenface was coming into the lodge.

  At the foot of the stairs, Hogan caught his foot in a mess of telephone wires and nearly went headlong over Julia. She clung to him, trembling.

  “Did you see it?”

  “Just its head!” Hogan gasped. He was steering her by the arm through the dark cellar. “We gotta keep away from the stairs, out of the light. Stay there, will you? And, Julia, kid” —he was fumbling with the lock of the side entrance door— “keep awful quiet, please!”

  “I will,” she whispered scornfully. The timbers groaned overhead, and for a moment they stared up in tranced expectation, each sensing the other’s thought. Julia gave a low, nervous giggle.

  “Good thing that floor’s double strength!”

  “That’s the fireplace, right over us,” he said frowning. He opened the door an inch or so and peered out. “Look here, Julia!”

  The shifting light of the fire streamed through the shattered frame of the main lodge door. The steps leading up to it had been crushed to kindling wood. As they stared, a shadow, huge and formless, dropped soundlessly across the lighted area. They shrank back.

  “Oh, Hogan!” Julia whimpered. “It’s horrible!”

  “All of that,” he said, with dry lips. “Do you feel anything—funny?”

  She peered at him through the gloom. “Feel anything, Hogan?”

  “Up here!” He put his fingertips to her temples. “Sort of buzzing?”

  “Oh,” she said; “yes, I do!” She was getting panicky again, and he squeezed her arm reassuringly. “What is it, Hogan?”

  “A sort of sound our friend makes,” he explained, “when he’s feeling good. But it should be much louder. Julia, that thing’s been out in the cold and rain all week. No sun at all. I should have remembered! I bet it likes that fire up there. It’s getting friskier now, and that’s why we hear it.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Let’s run for it, Hogan! The car’s right up on the road.”

  “Uh-uh!” He shook his head. “We might make it all right, but Greenface can come along like a horse when it wants to . . . and the fire’s pepping it up—it might know perfectly well that we’re ducking around down here!”

  “Oh, no!” she said, shocked.

  “Anyway, it wouldn’t settle anything. I got an idea—Julia, honey, promise just once you’ll stay right here and not yell after me, or anything? I’ll be right back.”

  “What you going to do?”

  “I won’t go out of the cellar,” Hogan said soothingly. “Look, darling, there’s no time to argue—do you promise, or do I lay you out cold?”

  “I promise,” she said after a sort of frosty gasp.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Letting out the kerosene tank.” He was breathing hard. “Is it still there?”

  “HOGAN!”

  “All right!” he whispered excitedly. “I’m going to fix that devil’s whistling. Now then, I’ll put a match to it. But we won’t leave just yet. Wait here as long as we can—and then slip over into the nearest cabin. No running around in the moonlight!”

  He ducked off again. After a minute, she saw a pale flare light up the chalked brick wall at the end of the cellar, and realized he was holding the match to a wad of paper. The kerosene fumes went off suddenly with a faint BOOM! and the glare of yellow light drove the shadows back with a rush toward Julia.

  She heard Hogan move around in the passageway behind a door to her left. There were two more muffled explosions; then he came out and closed the door softly behind him.

  “Going up like pine shavings!” he muttered gleefully. “Well, we wanted a new lodge anyhow. Now, Julia—”

  “It looks almost like a man, doesn’t it, Hogan? Like a sick old man!”

  Hogan hushed her nervously. The buzzing in his brain was louder now, rising and falling as if the strength of the thing were gathering and ebbing in waves. And Julia unconsciously had spoken too loud.

  “Keep under the ledge of the window,” he told her. “It hasn’t any real eyes, but it sees things somehow just as well as you and I.”

  Julia subsided reproachfully, and he gave her arm a quick squeeze. “If it’ll just stay put for another two minutes, the fire ought to catch it—”

  From the corner of the cabin window he could see half of the main room of the lodge through the door Greenface had shattered. Greenface itself filled most of that space. It was hunched up before the fireplace, its great, red-splotched head bending and nodding toward the flames; in that attitude there was something vaguely human about it. But its foot ribbons sprawled over all the rest of the floor space like the tentacles of an octopus, and Hogan noticed they, too, were now splotched with red.

  Most of his attention was directed toward the cellar windows of the lodge. Every one of them was alight with the flickering glare of the fires he had spread, and that glare was deepening while smoke poured out through the open door. The gathering roar of the fire mingled in his mind with the soundless, nervous rasp that meant Greenface’s strength was returning.

  It was like a race between the two: whether the fire would trap the thing before the heat which the fire kindled made it alert enough to perceive its danger and escape. It wasn’t just a question of its escaping, either I Hogan hadn’t told Julia how convinced he was that Greenface knew the two of them were there, to be caught at leisure as soon as it recovered enough to want to make the exertion. But it would make the exertion anyhow the instant it sensed they were trying to get away.

  WOULDN’T THAT FIRE EVER BREAK THROUGH?

  Then it happened—with blinding suddenness.

  The thing swung its head around from the fireplace and lunged hugely backward. In a flash it turned nearly transparent, and Hogan heard Julia cry out beside him—he hadn’t told her about that particularly ghastly little trick. In the same moment, the vibration in his mind became like a ragged, piercing shriek, like pain, brief and intolerable.

  Hogan reeled away from the window, dragging Julia with
him. There was a sudden series of muffled explosions—it wasn’t till afterward he remembered the shells left lying on the table —then the lodge floor broke through into a cellar with a thundering crash, and the released flames leaped bellowing upward.

  They were out of the cabin by then, running down toward the lake.

  “Your Pa isn’t going to like the idea,” Hogan pointed out thoughtfully.

  “He better like it!” Julia sounded a trifle grim. “But God bless the forest rangers—though they were kind of nasty!”

  “They put the fire out anyhow,” he said. “How would you care to mop up after a half-wit who lights a match to see how much kerosene he’d spilled in the dark?”

  “Poor Hogan. ... I got to tell you, too: I did get myself engaged in the city! I just couldn’t go through with it without coming back first—”

  “To find out if I really was batty? Can’t blame you, honeyl Well, it’s all over with, anyhow,” he said cheerily and put his arm around her.

  “Hogan,” Julia murmured after a suitably lengthy interval, “you think there might be anything left of it?”

  He shook his head decisively. “Not after that bonfire. We can go have a look.”

  They walked up from the dock together toward the blackened, water-soaked mess that had been the lodge building. It was still an hour before dawn. They stood staring at it in silence. Greenface’s funeral pyre had been worthy of a titan.

  “We won’t build here again till spring,” Hogan told her at last. “We can winter in town, if you like. There won’t be anything left of it then, for sure. There was nothing very solid about it, you know—just a big poisonous mass of jelly from the tropics. Winter would have killed it, anyhow.