Bradbury, Ray - SSC 21

by Long After Midnight (v1. 1)

  A wind took me around a final comer of wilderness where a dark wall waited for me.

  The cemetery.

  I stood by the heavy iron gates, looking numbly in.

  The graveyard resembled the scattered ruins of an ancient fort, blown up lifetimes ago, its monuments buried deep in some new Ice Age.

  Suddenly, miracles were not possible.

  Suddenly the night was just so much wine and talk and dumb enchantments and I running for no reason save I believed, I truly believed, I had felt something happen out here in this snow-dead world.

  Now I was so burdened at the blind sight of those untouched graves and printless snow, I would gladly have sunk and died there myself. I could not go back to town to face Charlie. I began to think this was all some brutal humor and awful trick of his, his insane ability to guess someone's terrible need and toy with it. Had he whispered behind my back, made promises, nudged me toward this wish? Christ!

  I touched the padlocked gate.

  What was here? Only a flat stone with a name and born 1888, died 1957, an inscription that even on summer days was hard to find, for the grass grew thick and the leaves gathered in mounds.

  I let go of the iron gate and turned. Then, in an instant, I gasped. An unbelieving shout tore from my throat.

  For I had sensed something beyond the wall, near the small boarded-up gatekeeper's lodge^

  Was there some faint breathing there? A muted cry?

  Or just a hint of warmth on the wind?

  I clenched the iron gate and stared beyond.

  Yes, there! The faintest track, as if a bird had landed to run along between the buried stones. Another moment, and I would have missed it forever!

  I yelled, I ran, I leaped.

  I have never, oh, God, in all my life, leaped so high. I cleared the wall and fell down on the other side, a last shout bloodying my mouth. I scrambled around to the far side of the gatehouse.

  There in shadows, hidden away from the wind, leaning against a wall, was a man, eyes shut, his hands crossed over his chest.

  I stared at him, wildly. I leaned insanely close to peer, to find.

  I did not know this man.

  He was old, old, very old.

  I must have groaned with fresh despair.

  For now the old man opened his trembling eyes.

  It was his eyes, looking at me, that made me shout:

  "Dad!"

  I lurched to seize him into dim lamplight and the falling snows of after-midnight.

  Charlie's voice, a long way off in the snowy town, echoed, and pleaded: No, don't, go, run. Nightmare. Stop.

  The man who stood before me did not know me.

  Like a scarecrow held up against the wind, this strange but familiar shape tried to make me out with his white-blind and cobwebbed eyes. Who? he seemed to be thinking.

  Then an answering cry burst from his mouth:

  "_om! —om!"

  He could not pronounce the T.

  But it was my name.

  Like a man on a cliff edge, terrified that the earth might fall and drop him back to night and soil, he shuddered, grappled me.

  "-om!"

  I held him tight. He could not fall.

  Riveted in a fierce embrace, not able to let go, we stood and rocked gently, strangely, two men made one, in a wilderness of shredding snow.

  Tom, O Tom, he grieved brokenly, over and over.

  Father, O dear Pa, Dad, I thought, I said.

  The old man stiffened, for over my shoulder he must have truly seen for the first time the stones, the empty fields of death. He gasped as if to cry: What is this place?

  Old as his face was, in the instant of recognition and remembrance, his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth withered and grew yet older, saying No.

  He turned to me as if seeking answers, some guardian of his rights, some protector who might say No with him. But the cold truth was in my eyes.

  We were both staring now at the dim path his feet had made blundering across the land from the place where he had been buried for many years.

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no!

  The words fired from his mouth.

  But he could not pronounce the n.

  So it was a wild explosion of: "... o .,. o ... o ..; o ... o ...!"

  A forlorn, dismayed, child-whistling cry.

  Then, another question shadowed his face.

  I know this place. But why am I here?

  He clawed his arms. He stared down at his withered chest.

  God gives us dreadful gifts. The most dreadful of all is memory.

  He remembered.

  And he began to melt away. He recalled his body shriveling, his dim heart gone to stillness; the slam of some eternal door of night

  He stood very still in my arms, his eyelids flickering over the stuffs that shifted grotesque furnitures within his head. He must have asked himself the most terrible question of all:

  Who has done this thing to me?

  He opened his eyes. His gaze beat at me.

  You? it said.

  Yes, I thought. I wished you alive this night.

  You/ his face and body cried.

  And then, half-aloud, the final inquisition:

  "Why . . . ?"

  Now it was my turn to be blasted and riven.

  Why, indeed, had I done this to him?

  How had I dared to wish for this awful, this harrowing, confrontation?

  What was I to do now with this man, this stranger, this old, bewildered, and frightened child? Why had I summoned him, just to send him back to soils and graves and dreadful sleeps?

  Had I even bothered to think of the consequences? No. Raw impulse had shot me from home to this burial field like a mindless stone to a mindless goal. Why? Why?

  My father, this old man, stood in the snow now, trembling, waiting for my pitiful answer.

  A child again, I could not speak. Some part of me knew a truth I could not say. Inarticulate with him in life, I found myself yet more mute in his waking death.

  The truth raved inside my head, cried along the fibers of my spirit and being, but could not break forth from my tongue. I felt my own shouts locked inside.

  The moment was passing. This hour would soon be gone. I would lose the chance to say what must be said, what should have been said when he was warm and above the earth so many years ago.

  Somewhere far off across country, the bells sounded twelve-thirty on this Christmas morn. Christ ticked in the wind. Snow flaked away at my face with time and cold, cold and time.

  Why? my father's eyes asked me; why have you brought me here?

  "I—" and then I stopped.

  For his hand had tightened on my arm. His face had found its own reason.

  This was his chance, too, his final hour to say what he should have said when I was twelve or fourteen or twenty-six. No matter if I stood mute. Here in the falling snow, he could make his peace and go his way.

  His mouth opened. It was hard, so dreadfully hard, for him to force the old words out. Only the ghost within the withered shell could dare to agonize and gasp. He whispered three words, lost in the wind.

  "Yes?" I urged.

  He held me tight and tried to keep his eyes open in the blizzard-night. He wanted to sleep, but first his mouth gaped and whistled again and again:

  "... I uw yuuuuuuuu !"

  He stopped, trembled, wracked his body, and tried to shout it again, failing:

  ".. . I wv yyy u... I"

  "Oh, Dad!" I cried. "Let me say it for you!"

  He stood very still and waited.

  "Were you trying to say I ... love . .. you?"

  "Esssss!" he cried. And burst out, very clearly, at long last: "Oh, yes!"

  "Oh, Dad," I said, wild with miserable happiness, all gain and loss. "Oh, and Pa, dear Pa, I love you."

  We fell together. We held.

  I wept.

  And from some strange dry well within his terrible flesh I saw my father squeeze forth tears which trembled a
nd flashed on his eyelids.

  And the final question was thus asked and answered.

  Why have you brought me here?

  Why the wish, why the gifts, and why this snowing night?

  Because we had had to say, before the doors were shut and sealed forever, what we never had said in life.

  And now it had been said and we stood holding each other in the wilderness, father and son, son and father, the parts of the whole suddenly interchangeable with joy. The tears turned to ice upon my cheeks.

  We stood in the cold wind and falling snow for a long while until we heard the sound of the bells at twelve forty-five, and still we stood in the snowing night saying no more—no more ever need be said—until at last our hour was done.

  All over the white world the clocks of one a.m. on Christmas morn, with Christ new in the fresh straw, sounded the end of that gift which had passed so briefly into and now out of our numb hands.

  My father held me in his arms.

  The last sound of the one-o'clock bells faded.

  I felt my father step back, at ease now.

  His fingers touched my cheek.

  I heard him walking in the snow.

  The sound of his walking faded even as the last of the crying faded within myself.

  I opened my eyes only in time to see him, a hundred yards off, walking. He turned and waved, once, at me.

  The snow came down in a curtain.

  How brave, I thought, to go where you go now, old man, and no complaint.

  I walked back into town.

  I had a drink with Charles by the fire. He looked in . my face and drank a silent toast to what he saw there.

  Upstairs, my bed waited for me like a great fold of white snow.

  The snow was falling beyond my window for a thousand miles to the north, five hundred miles to the east, two hundred miles west, a hundred miles to the south. The snow fell on everything, everywhere. It fell on two sets of footprints beyond the town: one set coming out and the other going back to be lost among the graves.

  I lay on my bed of snow. I remembered my father's face as he waved and turned and went away.

  It was the face of the youngest, happiest man I had ever seen.

  With that I slept, and gave up weeping.

  Forever and the Earth

  After seventy years of writing short stories that never sold, Mr. Henry William Field arose one night at eleven-thirty and burned ten million words. He carried the manuscripts downstairs through his dark old mansion and threw them into the furnace.

  "That's that," he said, and thinking about his lost art and his misspent life, he put himself to bed, among his rich antiques. "My mistake was in ever trying to picture this wild world of a.d. 2257. The rockets, the atom wonders, the travels to planets and double suns. Nobody can do it. Everyone's tried. All of our modern authors have failed."

  Space was too big for them, and rockets too swift, and atomic science too instantaneous, he thought. But at least the other writers, while failing, had been published, while he, in his idle wealth, had used the years of his life for nothing.

  After an hour of feeling this way, he fumbled through the night rooms to his library and switched on a green hurricane lamp. At random, from a collection untouched in fifty years, he selected a book. It was a book three centuries yellow and three centuries brittle, but he settled into it and read hungrily until dawn. . . .

  At nine the next morning, Henry William Field staggered from his library, called his servants, televised lawyers, scientists, literateurs.

  "Come at once!" he cried.

  By noon, a dozen people had stepped into the study where Henry William Field sat, very disreputable and hysterical with an odd, feeding joy, unshaven and feverish. He clutched a thick book in his brittle arms and laughed if anyone even said good morning.

  "Here you see a book," he said at last, holding it out, "written by a giant, a man born in Asheville, North Carolina, in the year 1900. Long gone to dust, he published four huge novels. He was a whirlwind. He lifted up mountains and collected winds. He left a trunk of penciled manuscripts behind when he lay in bed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the year 1938, on September fifteenth, and died of pneumonia, an ancient and awful disease."

  They looked at the book.

  Look Homeward, Angel.

  He drew forth three more. Of Time and the River. The Web and the Rock. You Can't Go Home Again.

  "By Thomas Wolfe," said the old man. "Three centuries cold in the North Carolina earth."

  "You mean you've called as simply to see four books by a dead man?" his friends protested.

  "More than that! I've called you because I feel Tom Wolfe's the man, the necessary man, to write of space, of time, huge things like nebulae and galactic war, meteors and planets, all the dark things he loved and put on paper were like this. He was born out of his time. He needed really big things to play with and never found them on Earth. He should have been born this afternoon instead of one hundred thousand mornings ago."

  "I'm afraid you're a bit late," said Professor Bolton.

  "I don't intend to be late!" snapped the old man. "I will not be frustrated by reality. You, professor, have experimented with time-travel. I expect you to finish your time machine as soon as possible. Here's a check, a blank check, fill it in. If you need more money, ask for it. You've done some traveling already, haven't you?"

  "A few years, yes, but nothing like centuries—"

  "We'll make it centuries! You others"—he swept them with a fierce and shining glance—"will work with Bolton. I must have Thomas Wolfe."

  "What!" They fell back before him.

  "Yes," he said. "That's the plan. Wolfe is to be brought to me. We will collaborate in the task of describing the flight from Earth to Mars, as only he could describe it!"

  They left him in his library with his books, turning the dry pages, nodding to himself. "Yes. Oh, dear Lord yes, Tom's the boy, Tom is the very boy for this."

  The months passed slowly. Days showed a maddening reluctance to leave the calendar, and weeks lingered on until Mr. Henry William Field began to scream silently.

  At the end of four months, Mr. Field awoke one midnight. The phone was ringing. He put his hand out in the darkness.

  "Yes?"

  "This is Professor Bolton calling."

  "Yes, Bolton?"

  "I'll be leaving in an hour," said the voice.

  "Leaving? Leaving where? Are you quitting? You can't do that!"

  "Please, Mr. Field, leaving means leaving."

  "You mean, you're actually going?"

  "Within the hour."

  "To 1938? To September fifteenth?"

  "Yes!"

  "You're sure you've the date fixed correctly? You'll arrive before he dies? Be sure of it! Good Lord, you'd better get there a good hour before his death, don't you think?"

  "Two hours. On the way back, well mark time in Bermuda, borrow ten days of free floating continuum, inject him, tan him, swim him, vitaminize him, make him well."

  "I'm so excited I can't hold the phone. Good luck, Bolton. Bring him through safely!"

  "Thank you, sir. Good-bye."

  The phone clicked.

  Mr. Henry William Field lay through the ticking night He thought of Tom Wolfe as a lost brother to be lifted intact from under a cold, chiseled stone, to be restored to blood and fire and speaking. He trembled each time he thought of Bolton whirling on the time wind back to other calendars and other days, bearing medicines to change flesh and save souls.

  Tom, he thought, faintly, in the half-awake warmth of an old man calling after his favorite and long-gone child, Tom, where are you tonight, Tom? Come along now, well help you through, you've got to come, there's need for you. I couldn't do it, Tom, none of us here can. So the next best thing to doing it myself, Tom, is helping you to do it. You can play with rockets like jackstraws, Tom, and you can have the stars, like a handful of crystals. Anything your heart asks, it's here. You'd like the fire and the t
ravel, Tom, it was made for you. Oh, we've a pale lot of writers today, I've read them all, Tom, and they're not like you. I've waded in libraries of their stuff and they've never touched space, Tom; we need you for that! Give an old man his wish then, for God knows I've waited all my life for myself or some other to write the really great book about the stars, and I've waited in vain. So, wherever you are tonight, Tom Wolfe, make yourself tall. It's that book you were going to write. It's that good book the critics said was in you when you stopped breathing.

  Here's your chance, will you do it, Tom? Will you listen and come through to us, will you do that tonight, and be here in the morning when I wake? Will you, Tom?

  His eyelids closed down over the fever and the demand. His tongue stopped quivering in his sleeping mouth.

  The clock struck four.

  Awakening to the white coolness of morning, he felt the excitement rising and welling in himself. He did not wish to blink, for fear that the thing which awaited him somewhere in the house might run off and slam a door, gone forever. His hands reached up to clutch his thin chest.

  Far away... footsteps...

  A series of doors opened and shut. Two men entered the bedroom.

  Field could hear them breathe. Their footsteps took on identities. The first steps were those of a spider, small and precise: Bolton. The second steps were those of a big man, a large man, a heavy man.

  "Tom?" cried the old man. He did not open his eyes.

  "Yes," said a voice, at last

  Tom Wolfe burst the seams of Field's imagination, as a huge child bursts the lining of a too-small coat.

  "Tom Wolfe, let me look at you!" If Field said it once he said it a dozen times as he fumbled from bed, shaking violently. "Put up the blinds, for God's sake, I want to see this! Tom Wolfe, is that you?"

  Tom Wolfe looked down from his tall thick body, with big hands out to balance himself in a world that was strange. He looked at the old man and the room and his mouth was trembling.

  "You're just as they said you were, Tom!"

  Thomas Wolfe began to laugh and the laughing was huge, for he must have thought himself insane or in a nightmare, and he came to the old man and touched him and he looked at Professor Bolton and felt of himself, his arms and legs, he coughed experimentally and touched his own brow. "My fever's gone," he said. "I'm not sick anymore."