Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

‘Shut up, shut up!’ she cried, and then said nothing more.

He let the silence lie awhile, and then got up, putting his finger-printed glass aside. ‘Mind the booth for me?’

‘Sure. Why?’

She saw ten thousand cold white images of him stalking down the glassy corridors, between mirrors, his mouth straight and his fingers working themselves.

She sat in the booth for a full minute and then suddenly shivered. A small clock ticked in the booth and she turned the deck of cards over, one by one, waiting. She heard a hammer pounding and knocking and pounding again, far away inside the Maze; a silence, more waiting, and then ten thousand images folding and refolding and dissolving, Ralph striding, looking out at ten thousand images of her in the booth. She heard his quiet laughter as he came down the ramp.

‘Well, what’s put you in such a good mood?’ she asked, suspiciously.

‘Aimee,’ he said carelessly, ‘we shouldn’t quarrel. You say tomorrow Billie’s sending that mirror to Mr Big’s?’

‘You’re not going to try anything funny?’

‘Me?’ He moved her out of the booth and took over the cards, humming, his eyes bright. ‘Not me, oh no, not me.’ He did not look at her, but started quickly to slap out the cards. She stood behind him. Her right eye began to twitch a little. She folded and unfolded her arms. A minute ticked by. The only sound was the ocean under the night pier, Ralph breathing in the heat, the soft ruffle of the cards. The sky over the pier was hot and thick with clouds. Out at sea, faint glows of lightning were beginning to show.

‘Ralph,’ she said at last.

‘Relax, Aimee,’ he said.

‘About that trip you wanted to take down the coast—’

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Maybe next month. Maybe next year. Old Ralph Banghart’s a patient guy. I’m not worried, Aimee. Look.’ He held up a hand. ‘I’m calm.’

She waited for a roll of thunder at sea to fade away.

‘I just don’t want you mad, is all. I just don’t want anything bad to happen, promise me.’

The wind, now warm, now cool, blew along the pier. There was a smell of rain in the wind. The clock ticked. Aimee began to perspire heavily, watching the cards move and move. Distantly, you could hear targets being hit and the sound of the pistols at the shooting gallery.

And then, there he was.

Waddling along the lonely concourse, under the insect bulbs, his face twisted and dark, every movement an effort. From a long way down the pier he came, with Aimee watching. She wanted to say to him, This is your last night, the last time you’ll have to embarrass yourself by coming here, the last time you’ll have to put up with being watched by Ralph, even in secret. She wished she could cry out and laugh and say it right in front of Ralph. But she said nothing.

‘Hello, hello!’ shouted Ralph. ‘It’s free, on the house, tonight! Special for old customers!’

The Dwarf looked up, startled, his little black eyes darting and swimming in confusion. His mouth formed the word thanks and he turned, one hand to his neck, pulling his tiny lapels tight up about his convulsing throat, the other hand clenching the silver dime secretly. Looking back, he gave a little nod, and then scores of dozens of compressed and tortured faces, burned a strange dark color by the lights, wandered in the glass corridors.

‘Ralph,’ Aimee took his elbow. ‘What’s going on?’

He grinned. ‘I’m being benevolent, Aimee, benevolent.’

‘Ralph,’ she said.

‘Sh,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

They waited in the booth in the long warm silence.

Then, a long way off, muffled, there was a scream.

‘Ralph!’ said Aimee.

‘Listen, listen!’ he said.

There was another scream, and another and still another, and a threshing and a pounding and a breaking, a rushing around and through the Maze. There, there, wildly colliding and ricocheting, from mirror to mirror, shrieking hysterically and sobbing, tears on his face, mouth gasped open, came Mr Bigelow. He fell out in the blazing night air, glanced about wildly, wailed, and ran off down the pier.

‘Ralph, what happened?’

Ralph sat laughing and slapping at his thighs.

She slapped his face. ‘What’d you do?’

He didn’t quite stop laughing. ‘Come on. I’ll show you!’

And then she was in the Maze, rushed from white-hot mirror to mirror, seeing her lipstick all red fire a thousand times repeated on down a burning silver cavern where strange hysterical women much like herself followed a quick-moving, smiling man. ‘Come on!’ he cried. And they broke free into a dust-smelling tiny room.

‘Ralph!’ she said.

They both stood on the threshold of the little room where the Dwarf had come every night for a year. They both stood where the Dwarf had stood each night, before opening his eyes to see the miraculous image in front of him.

Aimee shuffled slowly, one hand out, into the dim room.

The mirror had been changed.

This new mirror made even tall people little and dark and twisted smaller as you moved forward.

And Aimee stood before it thinking and thinking that if it made big people small, standing here, God, what would it do to a dwarf, a tiny dwarf, a dark dwarf, a startled and lonely dwarf?

She turned and almost fell. Ralph stood looking at her. ‘Ralph,’ she said. ‘God, why did you do it?’

‘Aimee, come back!’

She ran out through the mirrors, crying. Staring with blurred eyes, it was hard to find the way, but she found it. She stood blinking at the empty pier, started to run one way, then another, then still another, then stopped. Ralph came up behind her, talking, but it was like a voice heard behind a wall late at night, remote and foreign.

‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said.

Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr Kelly from the shooting gallery. ‘Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol from my place, loaded, run off before I’d get a hand on him! You help me find him?’

And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.

Aimee rocked back and forth and took a step.

‘Aimee, where you going?’

She looked at Ralph as if they had just turned a corner, strangers passing, and bumped into each other. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘I’m going to help search.’

‘You won’t be able to do nothing.’