Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

by Ray Bradbury

  “I don’t know.” Stendahl glanced in at the whirling yellow and blue and orange people. The music swept through the misting halls. “I should have guessed Garrett wouldn’t be fool enough to come in person. But wait!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing the matter. Garrett sent a robot to us. Well, we sent one back. Unless he checks closely, he won’t notice the switch.”

  “Of course!”

  “Next time he’ll come himself. Now that he thinks it’s safe. Why, he might be at the door any minute, in person! More wine, Pikes!”

  The great bell rang.

  “There he is now, I’ll bet you. Go let Mr. Garrett in.”

  Rapunzel let down her golden hair.

  “Mr. Stendahl?”

  “Mr. Garrett. The real Mr. Garrett?”

  “The same.” Garrett eyed the dank walls and the whirling people. “I thought I’d better come see for myself. You can’t depend on robots. Other people’s robots, especially. I also took the precaution of summoning the Dismantlers. They’ll be here in one hour to knock the props out from under this horrible place.”

  Stendahl bowed. “Thanks for telling me.” He waved his hand. “In the meantime, you might as well enjoy this. A little wine?”

  “No, thank you. What’s going on? How low can a man sink?”

  “See for yourself, Mr. Garrett.”

  “Murder,” said Garrett.

  “Murder most foul,” said Stendahl.

  A woman screamed. Miss Pope ran up, her face the color of a cheese. “The most horrid thing just happened! I saw Miss Blunt strangled by an ape and stuffed up a chimney!”

  They looked and saw the long yellow hair trailing down from the flue. Garrett cried out.

  “Horrid!” sobbed Miss Pope, and then ceased crying. She blinked and turned. “Miss Blunt!”

  “Yes,” said Miss Blunt, standing there.

  “But I just saw you crammed up the flue!”

  “No,” laughed Miss Blunt. “A robot of myself. A clever facsimile!”

  “But, but . . .”

  “Don’t cry, darling. I’m quite all right. Let me look at myself. Well, so there I am! Up the chimney. Like you said. Isn’t that funny?”

  Miss Blunt walked away, laughing.

  “Have a drink, Garrett?”

  “I believe I will. That unnerved me. My God, what a place. This does deserve tearing down. For a moment there . . .”

  Garrett drank.

  Another scream. Mr. Steffens, borne upon the shoulders of four white rabbits, was carried down a flight of stairs which magically appeared in the floor. Into a pit went Mr. Steffens, where, bound and tied, he was left to face the advancing razor steel of a great pendulum which now whirled down, down, closer and closer to his outraged body.

  “Is that me down there?” said Mr. Steffens, appearing at Garrett’s elbow. He bent over the pit. “How strange, how odd, to see yourself die.”

  The pendulum made a final stroke.

  “How realistic,” said Mr. Steffens, turning away.

  “Another drink, Mr. Garrett?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “It won’t be long. The Dismantlers will be here.”

  “Thank God!”

  And for a third time, a scream.

  “What now?” said Garrett apprehensively.

  “It’s my turn,” said Miss Drummond. “Look.”

  And a second Miss Drummond, shrieking, was nailed into a coffin and thrust into the raw earth under the floor.

  “Why, I remember that,” gasped the Investigator of Moral Climates. “From the old forbidden books. The Premature Burial. And the others. The Pit, the Pendulum, and the ape, the chimney, the Murders in the Rue Morgue. In a book I burned, yes!”

  “Another drink, Garrett. Here, hold your glass steady.”

  “My lord, you have an imagination, haven’t you?”

  They stood and watched five others die, one in the mouth of a dragon, the others thrown off into the black tarn, sinking and vanishing.

  “Would you like to see what we have planned for you?” asked Stendahl.

  “Certainly,” said Garrett. “What’s the difference? We’ll blow the whole damn thing up, anyway. You’re nasty.”

  “Come along then. This way.”

  And he led Garrett down into the floor, through numerous passages and down again upon spiral stairs into the earth, into the catacombs.

  “What do you want to show me down here?” said Garrett.

  “Yourself killed.”

  “A duplicate?”

  “Yes. And also something else.”

  “What?”

  “The Amontillado,” said Stendahl, going ahead with a blazing lantern which he held high. Skeletons froze half out of coffin lids. Garrett held his hand to his nose, his face disgusted.

  “The what?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of the Amontillado?”

  “No!”

  “Don’t you recognize this?” Stendahl pointed to a cell.

  “Should I?”

  “Or this?” Stendahl produced a trowel from under his cape smiling.

  “What’s that thing?”

  “Come,” said Stendahl.

  They stepped into the cell. In the dark, Stendahl affixed the chains to the half-drunken man.

  “For God’s sake, what are you doing?” shouted Garrett, rattling about.

  “I’m being ironic. Don’t interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite. There!”

  “You’ve locked me in chains!”

  “So I have.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Leave you here.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “A very good joke.”

  “Where’s my duplicate? Don’t we see him killed?”

  “There is no duplicate.”

  “But the others?”

  “The others are dead. The ones you saw killed were the real people. The duplicates, the robots, stood by and watched.”

  Garrett said nothing.

  “Now you’re supposed to say, ‘For the love of God, Montresor!’” said Stendahl. “And I will reply, ‘Yes, for the love of God.’ Won’t you say it? Come on. Say it.”

  “You fool.”

  “Must I coax you? Say it. Say ‘For the love of God, Montresor!’”

  “I won’t, you idiot. Get me out of here.” He was sober now.

  “Here. Put this on.” Stendahl tossed in something that belled and rang.

  “What is it?”

  “A cap and bells. Put it on and I might let you out.”

  “Stendahl!”

  “Put it on, I said!”

  Garrett obeyed. The bells tinkled.

  “Don’t you have a feeling that this has all happened before?” inquired Stendahl, setting to work with trowel and mortar and brick now.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Walling you in. Here’s one row. Here’s another.”

  “You’re insane!”

  “I won’t argue that point.”

  “You’ll be prosecuted for this!”

  He tapped a brick and placed it on the wet mortar, humming.

  Now there was a thrashing and pounding and a crying out from within the darkening place. The bricks rose higher. “More thrashing, please,” said Stendahl. “Let’s make it a good show.”

  “Let me out, let me out!”

  There was one last brick to shove into place. The screaming was continuous.

  “Garrett?” called Stendahl softly. Garrett silenced himself. “Garrett,” said Stendahl, “do you know why I’ve done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe’s books without really reading them. You took other people’s advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you’d have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.”

  Garrett was silent.

  “I want this to be perfect,” said Stendahl, holding his lantern up
so its light penetrated in upon the slumped figure. “Jingle your bells softly.” The bells rustled. “Now, if you’ll please say, ‘For the love of God, Montresor,’ I might let you free.”

  The man’s face came up in the light. There was a hesitation. Then grotesquely the man said, “For the love of God, Montresor.”

  “Ah,” said Stendahl, eyes closed. He shoved the last brick into place and mortared it tight. “Requiescat in pace, dear friend.”

  He hastened from the catacomb.

  In the seven rooms the sound of a midnight clock brought everything to a halt.

  The Red Death appeared.

  Stendahl turned for a moment at the door to watch. And then he ran out of the great House, across the moat, to where a helicopter waited.

  “Ready, Pikes?”

  “Ready.”

  “There it goes!”

  They looked at the great House, smiling. It began to crack down the middle, as with an earthquake, and as Stendahl watched the magnificent sight he heard Pikes reciting behind him in a low, cadenced voice:

  “‘. . . my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.’”

  The helicopter rose over the steaming lake and flew into the west.

  THE SQUARE PEGS

  LISABETH STOPPED SCREAMING BECAUSE SHE WAS TIRED. Also, there was this room to consider. There was a vast vibration, like being plunged about in the loud interior of a bell. The room was filled with sighs and murmurs of travel. She was in a rocket. Suddenly she recalled the explosion, the plummeting, the Moon riding by in cool space, the Earth gone. Lisabeth turned to a round window deep and blue as a mountain well. It was filled to its brim with evil swift life, movement, vast space monsters lurking with fiery arms, hurrying to some unscheduled destruction. A meteor school flashed by, blinking insane dot-dash codes. She put her hand out after them.

  Then she heard the voices. Sighing, whispering voices.

  Quietly, she moved to an iron barred door and peered without a sound through the little window of the locked frame.

  “Lisabeth’s stopped screaming,” a tired woman’s voice said. It was Helen.

  “Thank heaven,” a man’s voice sighed. “I’ll be raving myself before we reach Asteroid Thirty-six.”

  A second woman’s voice said, irritably, “Are you sure this will work? Is it the best thing for Lisabeth?”

  “She’ll be better off than she was on Earth,” cried the man.

  “We might have asked her if she wanted to take this trip, at least, John.”

  John swore. “You can’t ask an insane sister what she wants!”

  “Insane? Don’t use that word!”

  “Insane she is,” John said, bluntly. “For honesty’s sake, call a spade a spade. There was no question of asking her to come on this trip. We simply had to make her do it, that’s all.”

  Listening to them talk, Lisabeth’s white fingers trembled on the caged room wall. They were like voices from some warm dream, far away, on a telephone, talking in another language.

  “The sooner we get her there and settled on Asteroid Thirty-six, the sooner I can get back to New York,” the man was saying in this incomprehensible telephone talk she was eavesdropping on. “After all, when you have a woman thinking she’s Catherine the Great—”

  “I am, I am, I am!” screamed Lisabeth out of her window into their midst. “I am Catherine!” It was as if she had shot a lightning bolt into the room. The three people almost flew apart. Now Lisabeth raved and cried and clung drunkenly to the cell bars and shouted out her belief in herself. “I am, oh, I am!” she sobbed.

  “Good heavens,” said Alice.

  “Oh, Lisabeth!”

  The man, with a look of startled concern, came to the window and looked in with the false understanding of a person looking down upon a wounded rabbit. “Lisabeth we’re sorry. We understand. You are Catherine, Lisabeth.”

  “Then call me Catherine!” screamed the wild thing in the room.

  “Of course, Catherine,” insisted the man, swiftly. “Catherine, your Highness, we await your commands.”

  This only made the pale thing writhing against the door the wilder. “You don’t believe, you don’t really believe. I can tell by your awful faces, I can tell by your eyes and your mouths. Oh, you don’t really believe. I want to kill you!” She blazed her hatred out at them so the man fell away from the door. “You’re lying, and I know it’s a lie. But I am Catherine and you’ll never in all your years understand!”

  “No,” said the man, turning. He went and sat down and put his hands to his face. “I guess we don’t understand.”

  “Good grief,” said Alice.

  Lisabeth slipped to the red velvet floor and lay there, sobbing away her great unhappiness. The room moved on in space, the voices outside the room murmured and argued and talked on and on through the next half hour.

  They placed a food tray inside her door an hour later. It was a simple tray with simple bowls of cereal and milk and hot buns on it. Lisabeth did not move from where she lay. There was one regal thing in the room—this red velvet on which she sprawled in silent rebellion. She would not eat their nasty food for it was most probably poisoned. And it did not come in monogrammed dishes with monogrammed napkins on a regally monogrammed tray for Catherine, Empress of All the Russias! Therefore she would not eat.

  “Catherine! Eat your food, Catherine.”

  Lisabeth said nothing. They could go on insisting. She wanted only to die now. Nobody understood. There was an evil plan to oust her from her throne. These dark, wicked people were part of the plan.

  The voices murmured again.

  “I have important business in New York, too, just as important as yours. Alice,” said the man. “The Amusement Park for one; those rides have to be installed next week, and the gambling equipment I bought in Reno, that has to be shipped East by next Saturday. If I’m not there to do it, who’ll attend to the job?”

  Murmur, murmur, dream soft, listen, far away voices.

  Alice said, “Here it is autumn and the big fashion show tomorrow and here I am going off in space to some ridiculous planet for heaven knows what reason. I don’t see why one of us couldn’t have committed her.”

  “We’re her brother and sisters, that’s why,” the man snapped.

  “Well, now that we’re talking about it, I don’t understand it all. About Lisabeth and where we’re taking her. What is this Asteroid Thirty-six?”

  “A civilization.”

  “It’s an insane asylum, I thought.”

  “Nonsense, it’s not.” He struck a cigarette into fire, puffing. “We discovered, a century ago, that the asteroids were inhabited, inside. They’re really a series of small planets, inside of which people breathe and walk around.”

  “And they’ll cure Lisabeth?”

  “No, they won’t cure her at all.”

  “Then, why are we taking her there?” Helen was mixing a drink with a brisk shaking of her hands, the ice rattling in the container. She poured and drank. “Why?”

  “Because she will be happy there, because it will be the environment for her.”

  “Won’t she ever come back to Earth?”

  “Never.”

  “But how silly. I thought she’d be cured and come home.”

  He crushed out one cigarette, snapped another into light, smoked it hungrily, lines under his eyes, his hands trembling.

  “Don’t ask questions. I’ve got some radioing to do back to New York.” He walked across the cabin and fussed with some equipment. There was a buzzing and a bell sound. He shouted, “Hello, New York! Hang it. Get me through to Sam Norman on Eighth Avenue, Apartment C.” He waited. Finally. “Hello, Sam. My, but that was a slow connection. Look, Sam, about that equipment—What equipment? The gambling equipment, where’s your brain!”

 
; “While you have the contact through to Earth—” said Helen.

  “What? Sam—What?” He turned to glare at Helen.

  “While you’ve the contact through,” said Helen, holding his elbow urgently, “let me call my beauty operator, I want an appointment for Monday. My hair’s a mess.”

  “I’m trying to talk to Sam Norman,” John objected. To Sam he said. “What did you say?” To Helen: “Go away.”

  “But I want to talk—”

  “You can when I’m finished!” He talked with Sam for five minutes, very loud, and then hung up.

  “Oh.” Helen gasped.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, tiredly. “Call Earth back yourself and get your fool hairdresser.” He lighted another cigarette while she dialed and called into the speaker.

  He looked at Alice who was emptying her fourth cocktail glass. “Alice, you know, Lisabeth’s not really insane.”

  Helen, who was calling Earth, said “Shh!” then turned to her brother blankly. “Not insane?” To the space phone: “Hold on a minute, there.” To her brother: “What do you mean, not insane?”

  “It’s relative. She is insane to us. She wants to be Catherine of Russia. That’s illogical, to us. To her it is logical in the extreme. We are now taking her to a planet where it will be logic itself.”

  He got up, walked to the door and looked in at the lovely pale recumbent Catherine the Great. He put his hand to the bars, the cigarette tremoring out nervous smoke. He spoke quietly:

  “Some times, I envy her. I’ll envy her even more every hour. She’ll stay and be happy. And we? We’ll go back, back to New York, back to big roulettes and big dice.” He looked at Helen. “Back to hairdressers and men.” He looked at Alice, “Back to cocktails and straight gin.”

  “I don’t like insults,” cried Alice.

  “I wasn’t insulting anybody,” he replied.

  “Just a moment!” said Helen. “New York?”

  John sat wearily down. “Anyway, it’s all relative. These asteroids are amazing places; all kinds of cultures. You know that.”

  Lisabeth leaned against the cell door which swayed ever so quietly outward. It was unlocked. Her gaze dropped to the catch and her eyes widened. Escape. These talking fools, who didn’t understand, were trying to kill her. She might run out of the cell quickly, across the room and into the other little room, where there were all kinds of weird mechanisms. If she managed to reach that room, she could smash and tangle wires and boxes with her hands!