by Ray Bradbury
Nothing. Nothing but fog sifting across the empty boulevard.
Run, I thought. Run telephone. Call Crumley. Why isn’t he here? Run. But no. If I did. Shrank might go free.
Far away, two miles off, the big red trolley bucketed along, whistling, wailing, sounding like the terrible beast in my dream, come to take my time, my life, my future away, heading for a tar pit at the end of the line.
I found a small pebble and dropped it in.
Shrank.
It hit and sank. Silence.
He’s escaped me. I wanted to pay him back for Fannie.
Then, Peg, I thought. Call her.
But no, she would have to wait, too.
My heart pounded so loudly that I feared the waters would stir below and the dead rise. I feared that my very breathing would knock down the oil derricks. I held onto my heart and breath and made them slow, eyes shut.
Shrank, I thought, come out. Fannie’s here, waiting. The canary lady s here, waiting. The old man from the ticket office is beside me. Pietro’s here and wants his pets. Come out. I’m here, along with the rest, waiting.
Shrank!
This time he must have heard.
He came to get me.
He shot out of the black water like a cannonball off a springboard.
Christ, I thought, fool! Why did you call to him?
He was ten feet tall, a dragon yeasted up from a dwarf. Grendel, who was once a jockey.
He snatched up like a Fury, talons out. He hit me like a balloon full of scalding water, with thrash and yell and shriek. He had long since forgotten his good intentions, his plans, his myth, his murderous integrity.
“Shrank!” I yelled.
There was something slow-motion and terrible about it, as if, frame by frame, I might stop him along the way and examine his astonishing arc and growth, and how his eyes blazed and his mouth ached with hate and hands gripped with rage as he seized my coat, my shirt, my neck in iron grapples. His mouth was blooded with my name as he heaved back. The tar waters waited. Christ, not there, I thought. The lion cages waited with doors flung wide.
“No!”
The slow motion stopped. The swift fall followed.
Fused by his rage, we fell down, sucking air in flight.
We struck like two concrete statues and sank, loving each other with a mindless frenzy of passion, climbing each other to keep each other down, making ladders to air and light.
On the way down I thought I heard him whining, wailing, “Get in there, get in there, get in,” like a boy at some rude game without rules, and I was playing wrong. “Get in!”
But now, under, we went from sight. We whirled around like two crocodiles at each other’s necks. From up top we must have seemed like a moil and welter of piranhas self-feasting, or a great propeller off center and amok in rainbow oils and tars.
And at center of the drowning there was a small pinpoint flash of hope which burst but to fire again behind my eyes.
This is his first real murder, I must have thought, or was there time? But I am flesh and will not behave. I fear dark more than he fears life. He must know that. I must win!
Not proven.
We rolled and struck something that knocked most of the air from my lungs. The Hon cage. He was shoving and kicking me through the open door. I thrashed. We whirled and in the surge and white water I suddenly thought:
God. I’m inside. The cage. The whole thing ends as it began! Crumley comes to find—me! beckoning behind the bars at dawn. Christ My lungs ballooned with fire. I tried to whirl and knock free. I wanted to shout him off with my last breath. I wanted to …
It was over.
Shrank relaxed his grip.
What? I thought. What? What!
He almost let go.
I seized him to push but it was like grabbing a dummy that had suddenly lost its ability to gesticulate. It was like handling a corpse that had leaped out of the grave and now wanted back.
He’s quit, I thought. He knows he must be the last one. He knows he can’t kill me, it doesn’t fit.
He had indeed made up his mind and as I held him I could see his face, the merest pale ghost, and the shrug that said I was to at last go free and move up toward night and air and life. In the dark water, I saw his eyes accept his own dread as he opened his mouth, flexed his nostrils, and let out a terrible gaseous illumination. Whereupon he took a deep breath of black water and sank away, a lost man seeking his final loss.
He was a cold marionette I left behind in the cage as blindly I thrashed for the door, pushed out, and pushed up, wildly praying to live forever, to seek the fog, to find Peg, wherever she was in all the dread damned world.
I broke up and out into a mist that had begun to rain. As my head burst out, I gave a great cry of relief and sorrow. All the souls of all the people lost and not wanting to be lost in the last month wailed out of me. I gagged, threw up, almost sank again, but made it to the bank and dragged myself out to sit and wait on the rim of the canal.
Somewhere in the world I heard a car pull up, a door slam, running feet. Out of the rain, one long arm reached and a big hand clutched to shake my shoulder. Crumley’s face, like a frog’s under glass, came to view in a movie closeup. He looked like a father in shock, bending to his drowned son.
“You okay, you all right, you okay?”
I nodded, gasping.
Henry came up behind, sniffing the rain, alert for dread smells and finding none.
“He okay?” said Henry.
“Alive,” I said, and truly meant it. “Oh, God, alive.”
“Where’s Armpits? I got to give him one for Fannie.”
“I already did, Henry,” I said.
I nodded down at the lion cage, where a new ghost drifted like pale gelatin behind the bars.
“Crumley,” I said, “he’s got a whole shack full of stuff, evidence.”
“I’ll check it.”
“Where the hell have you guys been?” I wondered.
“Damn-fool taxi driver’s blinder than me.” Henry felt his way to the canal rim and sat down on one side of me. Crumley sat on the other, all of us letting our feet dangle over almost into the dark water. “Couldn’t even find the police station. Where’s he at? I’ll give him a hit, too.”
I snorted a laugh. Water flew out of my nostrils.
Crumley leaned close to look me over.
“You hurt?”
Nowhere anyone could ever see, I thought. Ten years from now, some night, it’ll all surface. I hope Peg won’t mind a few screams just to get a little mothering.
In a moment, I thought, got to go phone. Peg, I’ll say. Marry me. Come tonight, come home. We’ll starve together but by God we’ll live. Many me at last, Peg, and protect me from the Lonelies. Peg.
And she would answer yes and come home.
“Not hurt,” I answered Crumley.
“Good,” said Crumley, “ ’cause who in hell would read my novel, if not you?”
I barked with laughter.
“Sorry.” Crumley ducked his head with embarrassment at his own honesty.
“Hell.” I grabbed his hand and put it on the back of my neck, showing him where to massage. “I love you, Crum. I love you, Henry.”
“Damn,” said Crumley, gently.
“Bless you, boy,” said the blind man.
Another car arrived. The rain was stopping.
Henry took a deep sniff. “I know that limo smell.”
“Jesus God,” said Constance Rattigan, leaning out. “What a sight. World’s champion Martian. World’s Greatest Blind Man. And Sherlock Holmes’s Bastard Son.”
We all responded one way or another to this, too tired to keep it up.
Constance got out and stood behind me, looking down.
“Is it all over? Is that him?”
We all nodded, like an audience at a midnight theater, not able to take our eyes away from the canal waters, and the lion cage and the ghost behind the bars that rose and fell and beckoned.
“God, you’re drenched; you’ll catch your death. Let’s get the kid stripped and warm. All right if I take him to my place?”
Crumley nodded.
I put my hand on his shoulder and held tight.
“Champagne now, beer later?” I said.
“See you,” said Crumley, “at my jungle compound.”
“Henry,” said Constance, “come along?”
“Couldn’t keep me away,” said Henry.
And more cars arrived and police were getting ready to dive in to get whatever that was out of the cage and Crumley was walking over toward Shrank’s hut, and I stood there trembling as Constance and Henry peeled off my wet jacket and helped me into the limousine and we drove along the middle of the night coast among the big, sighing derricks, leaving behind a strange, small apartment where I worked and leaving behind the dark, small lean-to where Spengler and Genghis Khan and Hitler and Nietzsche and a few dozen old candy wrappers waited and leaving behind the shut trolley station where tomorrow some lost old men would sit again waiting for the last trains of the century.
Along the way, I thought I saw myself passing on a bike, twelve years old, delivering papers in the dark morn. Further on, my older self, nineteen, wandered home, bumping into poles, lipstick on his cheek, drunk with love.
Just before we turned in at Constance’s Arabian fort, another limousine came roaring the other way, along the shore highway. It passed like thunder. Is that me too, I wondered, some year soon? And Peg, in an evening gown, with me, coming back from a dance? But the other limousine vanished. The future would have to wait.
As we pulled in to Constance’s sandlot backyard, I knew a simple present and the best kind of alive happiness.
With the limo parked and Constance and me waiting for him to move, with a grandiose wave Henry raised his arm.
“One side or a leg off.”
We stood aside.
“Let the blind man show you the way.”
He did.
We gladly followed.
About the Author
RAY BRADBURY, the author of more than thirty books, is the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Some of his best-known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. A writer for both theater and cinema, he has adapted sixty-five of his stories for television’s The Ray Bradbury Theater. He won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He lives with his wife, Marguerite, in Los Angeles.
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Also by Ray Bradbury
WHERE ROBOT MICE AND ROBOT MEN
RUN ROUND IN ROBOT TOWNS
LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT
WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED
THE HALLOWEEN TREE
I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!
THE MACHINERIES OF JOY
THE ANTHEM SPRINTERS
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
A MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY
DANDELION WINE
SWITCH ON THE NIGHT
THE OCTOBER COUNTRY
MOBY DICK (SCREENPLAY)
FAHRENHEIT 451
THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN
THE ILLUSTRATED MAN
THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES
DARK CARNIVAL
THE STORIES OF RAY BRADBURY
QUICKER THAN THE EYE
DRIVING BLIND
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS. Copyright © 1999 by Ray Bradbury. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Avon edition published 1999.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bradbury, Ray.
Death is a lonely business / Ray Bradbury.
p. cm.
I. Tide.
PS3503.R167 D3 1999 98-52425
813’.54—dc2I CIP
ISBN 0-380-78965-5
Epub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780062242129
03 04 05 06 07 POLIO/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
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