Bradbury Stories 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Part 104

For a sound had come from above.

It was a small itch of a sound at first. Then it scratched. Then it gave a thump like a heart.

Something moved in the attic.

Timmons blinked up at the shut trapdoor and snorted.

"Hey!"

Clara Peck nodded, satisfied, pulled on her gloves, adjusted her hat, watching.

"It sounds like-" drawled Mr. Timmons.

"Yes?"

"Did a sea captain ever live in this house?" he asked, at last.

The sound came again, louder. The whole house seemed to drift and whine with the weight which was shifted above.

"Sounds like cargo." Timmons shut his eyes to listen. "Cargo on a ship, sliding when the ship changes course." He broke into a laugh and opened his eyes.

"Good G.o.d," said Clara, and tried to imagine that.

"On the other hand," said Mr. Timmons, half-smiling up at that ceiling, "you got a greenhouse up there, or something? Sounds like plants growing. Or a yeast, maybe, big as a doghouse, getting out of hand. I heard of a man once, raised yeast in his cellar. It-"

The front screen door slammed.

Clara Peck, outside glaring in at his jokes, said: "I'll be back in an hour. Jump!"

She heard his laughter follow her down the walk as she marched. She hesitated only once to look back.

The d.a.m.n fool was standing at the foot of the ladder, looking up. Then he shrugged, gave a what-the-h.e.l.l gesture with his hands, and- Scrambled up the stepladder like a sailor.

When Clara Peck marched back an hour later, the Ratzaway truck still stood silent at the curb.

"h.e.l.l," she said to it. "Thought he'd be done by now. Strange man tromping around, swearing-"

She stopped and listened to the house.

Silence.

"Odd," she muttered.

"Mr. Timmons!?" she called.

And realizing she was still twenty feet from the open front door, she approached to call through the screen.

"Anyone home?"

She stepped through the door into a silence like the silence in the old days before the mice had begun to change to rats and the rats had danced themselves into something larger and darker on the upper attic decks. It was a silence that, if you breathed it in, smothered you.

She swayed at the bottom of the flight of stairs, gazing up, her groceries hugged like a dead child in her arms.

"Mr. Timmons-?"

But the entire house was still.

The portable ladder still stood waiting on the landing.

But the trapdoor was shut.

Well, he's obviously not up in there! she thought. He wouldn't climb and shut himself in. d.a.m.n fool's just gone away.

She turned to squint out at his truck abandoned in the bright noon's glare.

Truck's broke down, I imagine. He's gone for help.

She dumped her groceries in the kitchen and for the first time in years, not knowing why, lit a cigarette, smoked it, lit another, and made a loud lunch, banging skillets and running the can opener overtime.

The house listened to all this, and made no response.

By two o'clock the silence hung about her like a cloud of floor polish.

"Ratzaway," she said, as she dialed the phone.

The Pest Team owner arrived half an hour later, by motorcycle, to pick up the abandoned truck. Tipping his cap, he stepped in through the screen door to chat with Clara Peck and look at the empty rooms and weigh the silence.

"No sweat, ma'am," he said, at last. "Charlie's been on a few benders, lately. He'll show up to be fired, tomorrow. What was he doing here?"

With this, he glanced up the stairs at the stepladder.

"Oh," said Clara Peck, quickly, "he was just looking at-everything."

"I'll come, myself, tomorrow," said the owner.

And as he drove away in the afternoon, Clara Peck slowly moved up the stairs to lift her face toward the ceiling and watch the trapdoor.

"He didn't see you, either," she whispered.

Not a beam stirred, not a mouse danced, in the attic.

She stood like a statue, feeling the sunlight shift and lean through the front door.

Why? she wondered. Why did I lie?

Well, for one thing, the trapdoor's shut, isn't it?

And, I don't know why, she thought, but I won't want anyone going up that ladder, ever again. Isn't that silly? Isn't that strange?

She ate dinner early, listening.

She washed the dishes, alert.

She put herself to bed at ten o'clock, but in the old downstairs maid's room, for long years unused. Why she chose to lie in this downstairs room, she did not know, she simply did it, and lay there with aching ears, and the pulse moving in her neck and in her brow.

Rigid as a tomb carving under the sheet, she waited.

Around midnight, a wind pa.s.sed, shook a pattern of leaves on her counterpane. Her eyes flicked wide.

The beams of the house trembled.

She lifted her head.

Something whispered ever so softly in the attic.

She sat up.

The sound grew louder, heavier, like a large but shapeless animal, prowling the attic dark.

She placed her feet on the floor and sat looking at them. The noise came again, far up, a scramble like rabbits' feet here, a thump like a large heart there.

THE SWAN.

AND OUT THERE IN THE MIDDLE of the first day of August, just getting into his car, was Bill Forrester, who shouted he was going downtown for some extraordinary ice cream or other and would anyone join him? So, not five minutes later, jiggled and steamed into a better mood, Douglas found himself stepping in off the fiery pavements and moving through the grotto of soda-scented air, of vanilla freshness at the drugstore, to sit at the snow-marble fountain with Bill Forrester. They then asked for a recital of the most unusual ices and when the fountain man said, "Old fashioned lime-vanilla ice . . ."

"That's it!" said Bill Forrester.

"Yes, sir!" said Douglas.

And, while waiting, they turned slowly on their rotating stools. The silver spigots, the gleaming mirrors, the hushed whirl-around ceiling fans, the green shades over the small windows, the harp-wire chairs, pa.s.sed under their moving gaze. They stopped turning. Their eyes had touched upon the face and form of Miss Helen Loomis, ninety-five years old, ice-cream spoon in hand, ice cream in mouth.

"Young man," she said to Bill Forrester, "you are a person of taste and imagination. Also, you have the will power of ten men; otherwise you would not dare veer away from the common flavors listed on the menu and order, straight out, without quibble or reservation, such an unheard-of thing as lime-vanilla ice."

He bowed his head solemnly to her.

"Come sit with me, both of you," she said. "We'll talk of strange ice creams and such things as we seem to have a bent for. Don't be afraid; I'll foot the bill."

Smiling, they carried their dishes to her table and sat.

"You look like a Spaulding," she said to the boy. "You've got your grandfather's head. And you, you're William Forrester. You write for the Chronicle, a good enough column. I've heard more about you than I'd care to tell."

"I know you," said Bill Forrester. "You're Helen Loomis." He hesitated, then continued. "I was in love with you once," he said.

"Now that's the way I like a conversation to open." She dug quietly at her ice cream. "That's grounds for another meeting. No-don't tell me where or when or how you were in love with me. We'll save that for next time. You've taken away my appet.i.te with your talk. Look there now! Well, I must get home anyway. Since you're a reporter, come for tea tomorrow between three and four; it's just possible I can sketch out the history of this town, since it was a trading post, for you. And, so we'll both have something for our curiosity to chew on, Mr. Forrester, you remind me of a gentleman I went with seventy, yes, seventy years ago."

She sat across from them and it was like talking with a gray and lost quivering moth. The voice came from far away inside the grayness and the oldness, wrapped in the powders of pressed flowers and ancient b.u.t.terflies.

"Well." She arose. "Will you come tomorrow?"

"I most certainly will," said Bill Forrester.

And she went off into the town on business, leaving the young boy and the young man there, looking after her, slowly finishing their ice cream.

William Forrester spent the next morning checking some local news items for the paper, had time after lunch for some fishing in the river outside town, caught only some small fish which he threw back happily, and, without thinking about it, or at least not noticing that he had thought about it, at three o'clock he found his car taking him down a certain street. He watched with interest as his hands turned the steering wheel and motored him up a vast circular drive where he stopped under an ivy-covered entry. Letting himself out, he was conscious of the fact that his car was like his pipe-old, chewed-on, unkempt in this huge green garden by this freshly painted, three-story Victorian house. He saw a faint ghostlike movement at the far end of the garden, heard a whispery cry, and saw that Miss Loomis was there, removed across time and distance, seated alone, the tea service glittering its soft silver surfaces, waiting for him.

"This is the first time a woman has ever been ready and waiting," he said, walking up. "It is also," he admitted, "the first time in my life I have been on time for an appointment."

"Why is that?" she asked, propped back in her wicker chair.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"Well." She started pouring tea. "To start things off, what do you think of the world?"

"I don't know anything."

"The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen."

"You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years."

"It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it's an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn't life a play? Don't I play it well?"

They both laughed quietly. He sat back and let the laughter come naturally from his mouth for the first time in many months. When they quieted she held her teacup in her two hands and looked into it. "Do you know, it's lucky we met so late. I wouldn't have wanted you to meet me when I was twenty-one and full of foolishness."

"They have special laws for pretty girls twenty-one."

"So you think I was pretty?"

He nodded good-humoredly.

"But how can you tell?" she asked. "When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? That's what it is-a body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven't seen her for years. I can't even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She's safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn't changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I'll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I'll swim in the lake, or I'll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I'm in this old and ruined dragon. I'm the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming."

"You should have written books."

"My dear boy, I have written. What else was there for an old maid? I was a crazy creature with a headful of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend."

They drank their tea.

"Oh, such a rush of self-pity," she said good-naturedly. "About yourself, now. You're thirty-one and still not married?"

"Let me put it this way," he said. "Women who act and think and talk like you are rare."