Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

He jerked the hall closet door wide and yanked out his great tweed overcoat which smelled of tobacco and fine whiskey. Clutching it in his two monkey hands, he beckoned it like a bullfighter’s cape. ‘Huh, toro! Hah!’

‘John,’ I sighed, wearily.

‘Or are you a coward, Doug, are you yellow? You—’

For this, the fourth, time, we both heard a moan, a cry, a fading murmur beyond the wintry front door.

‘It’s waiting, kid!’ said John, triumphantly. ‘Get out there. Run for the team!’

I was in the coat, anointed by tobacco scent and booze as John buttoned me up with royal dignity, grabbed my ears, kissed my brow.

‘I’ll be in the stands, kid, cheering you on. I’d go with you, but banshees are shy. Bless you, son, and if you don’t come back – I loved you like a son!’

‘Jesus,’ I exhaled, and flung the door wide.

But suddenly John leaped between me and the cold blowing moonlight.

‘Don’t go out there, kid. I’ve changed my mind! If you got killed—’

‘John,’ I shook his hands away. ‘You want me out there. You’ve probably got Kelly, your stable girl, out there now, making noises for your big laugh—’

‘Doug!’ he cried in that mock-insult serious way he had, eyes wide, as he grasped my shoulders. ‘I swear to God!’

‘John,’ I said, half-angry, half-amused, ‘so long.’

I ran out the door to immediate regrets. He slammed and locked the portal. Was he laughing? Seconds later, I saw his silhouette at the library window, sherry glass in hand, peering out at this night theater of which he was both director and hilarious audience.

I spun with a quiet curse, hunched my shoulders in Caesar’s cloak, ignored two dozen stab wounds given me by the wind, and stomped down along the gravel drive.

I’ll give it a fast ten minutes, I thought, worry John, turn his joke inside out, stagger back in, shirt torn and bloody, with some fake tale of my own. Yes, by God, that was the trick—

I stopped.

For in a small grove of trees below, I thought I saw something like a large paper kite blossom and blow away among the hedges.

Clouds sailed over an almost full moon, and ran islands of dark to cover me.

Then there it was again, farther on, as if a whole cluster of flowers were suddenly torn free to snow away along the colorless path. At the same moment, there was the merest catch of a sob, the merest door-hinge of a moan.

I flinched, pulled back, then glanced up at the house.

There was John’s face, of course, grinning like a pumpkin in the window, sipping sherry, toast-warm and at ease.

‘Ohh,’ a voice wailed somewhere. ‘… God.…’

It was then that I saw the woman.

She stood leaning against a tree, dressed in a long, moon-colored dress over which she wore a hip-length heavy woollen shawl that had a life of its own, rippling and winging out and hovering with the weather.

She seemed not to see me or if she did, did not care; I could not frighten her, nothing in the world would ever frighten her again. Everything poured out of her steady and unflinching gaze toward the house, that window, the library, and the silhouette of the man in the window.

She had a face of snow, cut from that white cool marble that makes the finest Irish women; a long swan neck, a generous if quivering mouth, and eyes a soft and luminous green. So beautiful were those eyes, and her profile against the blown tree branches, that something in me turned, agonized, and died. I felt that killing wrench men feel when beauty passes and will not pass again. You want to cry out: Stay. I love you. But you do not speak. And the summer walks away in her flesh, never to return.

But now the beautiful woman, staring only at that window in the far house, spoke.

‘Is he in there?’ she said.

‘What?’ I heard myself say.

‘Is that him?’ she wondered. ‘The beast,’ she said, with quiet fury. ‘The monster. Himself.’

‘I don’t—’

‘The great animal,’ she went on, ‘that walks on two legs. He stays. All others go. He wipes his hands on flesh; girls are his napkins, women his midnight lunch. He keeps them stashed in cellar vintages and knows their years but not their names. Sweet Jesus, and is that him?’

I looked where she looked, at the shadow in the window, far off across the croquet lawn.

And I thought of my director in Paris, in Rome, in New York, in Hollywood, and the millraces of women I had seen John tread, feet printing their skins, a dark Christ on a warm sea. A picnic of women danced on tables, eager for applause and John, on his way out, saying, ‘Dear, lend me a fiver. That beggar by the door kills my heart—’

I watched this young woman, her dark hair stirred by the night wind, and asked:

‘Who should he be?’

‘Him,’ she said. ‘Him that lives there and loved me and now does not.’ She shut her eyes to let the tears fall.

‘He doesn’t live there anymore,’ I said.

‘He does!’ She whirled, as if she might strike or spit. ‘Why do you lie?’

‘Listen.’ I looked at the new but somehow old snow in her face. ‘That was another time.’

‘No, there’s only now!’ She made as if to rush for the house. ‘And I love him still, so much I’d kill for it, and myself lost at the end!’

‘What’s his name?’ I stood in her way. ‘His name?’

‘Why, Will, of course. Willie. William.’

She moved. I raised my arms and shook my head.

‘There’s only a Johnny there now. A John.’

‘You lie! I feel him there. His name’s changed, but it’s him. Look! Feel!’

She put her hands up to touch on the wind toward the house, and I turned and sensed with her and it was another year, it was a time between. The wind said so, as did the night and the glow in that great window where the shadow stayed.

‘That’s him!’

‘A friend of mine,’ I said, gently.