The October Country. Ray Bradbury

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СКАЧАТЬ up the little house, the wasp’s nest, and every postage-stamp mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff!

      “It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, ‘I want you to meet the little woman!’”

      Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she handed it to Ralph. “You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It’s all right. But don’t you see? That little man. That little man.”

      Ralph tossed the magazine aside and lit a cigarette lazily. “I like Westerns better.”

      ’Ralph, you got to read it. He needs someone to tell him how good he is and keep him writing.”

      Ralph looked at her, his head to one side. “And guess who’s going to do it? Well, well, ain’t we just the Saviour’s right hand?”

      “I won’t listen!”

      “Use your head, damn it! You go busting in on him he’ll think you’re handing him pity. He’ll chase you screamin’ outa his room.”

      She sat down, thinking about it slowly, trying to turn it over and see it from every side. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Oh, it’s not just pity, Ralph, honest. But maybe it’d look like it to him. I’ve got to be awful careful.”

      He shook her shoulder back and forth, pinching softly, with his fingers. “Hell, hell, lay off him, is all I ask; you’ll get nothing but trouble for your dough. God, Aimee, I never seen you so hepped on anything. Look, you and me, let’s make it a day, take a lunch, get us some gas, and just drive on down the coast as far as we can drive; swim, have supper, see a good show in some little town—to hell with the carnival, how about it? A damn nice day and no worries. I been savin’ a coupla bucks.”

      “It’s because I know he’s different,” she said, looking off into darkness. “It’s because he’s something we can never be—you and me and all the rest of us here on the pier. It’s so funny, so funny. Life fixed him so he’s good for nothing but carny shows, yet there he is on the land. And life made us so we wouldn’t have to work in the carny shows, but here we are, anyway, way out here at sea on the pier. Sometimes it seems a million miles to shore. How come, Ralph, that we got the bodies, but he’s got the brains and can think things we’ll never even guess?”

      “You haven’t even been listening to me!” said Ralph.

      She sat with him standing over her, his voice far away. Her eyes were half shut and her hands were in her lap, twitching.

      “I don’t like that shrewd look you’re getting on,” he said, finally.

      She opened her purse slowly and took out a small roll of bills and started counting. “Thirty-five, forty dollars. There. I’m going to phone Billie Fine and have him send out one of those tall-type mirrors to Mr. Bigelow at the Ganghes Arms. Yes, I am!”

      “What!”

      “Think how wonderful for him, Ralph, having one in his own room any time he wants it. Can I use your phone?”

      “Go ahead, be nutty.”

      Ralph turned quickly and walked off down the tunnel. A door slammed.

      Aimee waited, then after a while put her hands to the phone and began to dial, with painful slowness. She paused between numbers, holding her breath, shutting her eyes, thinking how it might seem to be small in the world, and then one day someone sends a special mirror by. A mirror for your room where you can hide away with the big reflection of yourself, shining, and write stories and stories, never going out into the world unless you had to. How might it be then, alone, with the wonderful illusion all in one piece in the room. Would it make you happy or sad, would it help your writing or hurt it? She shook her head back and forth, back and forth. At least this way there would be no one to look down at you. Night after night, perhaps rising secretly at three in the cold morning, you could wink and dance around and smile and wave at yourself, so tall, so tall, so very fine and tall in the bright looking-glass.

      A telephone voice said, “Billie Fine’s.”

      “Oh, Billie!” she cried.

      

      Night came in over the pier. The ocean lay dark and loud under the planks. Ralph sat cold and waxen in his glass coffin, laying out the cards, his eyes fixed, his mouth stiff. At his elbow, a growing pyramid of burnt cigarette butts grew larger. When Aimee walked along under the hot red and blue bulbs, smiling, waving, he did not stop setting the cards down slow and very slow. “Hi, Ralph!” she said.

      “How’s the love affair?” he asked, drinking from a dirty glass of iced water. “How’s Charlie Boyer, or is it Cary Grant?”

      “I just went and bought me a new hat,” she said, smiling. “Gosh, I feel good! You know why? Billie Fine’s sending a mirror out tomorrow! Can’t you just see the nice little guy’s face?”

      “I’m not so hot at imagining.”

      “Oh, Lord, you’d think I was going to marry him or something.”

      “Why not? Carry him around in a suitcase. People say, Where’s your husband? all you do is open your bag, yell, Here he is! Like a silver cornet. Take him outa his case any old hour, play a tune, stash him away. Keep a little sandbox for him on the back porch.”

      “I was feeling so good,” she said.

      “Benevolent is the word.” Ralph did not look at her, his mouth tight. “Ben-eve-o-lent. I suppose this all comes from me watching him through that knothole, getting my kicks? That why you sent the mirror? People like you run around with tambourines, taking the joy out of my life.”

      “Remind me not to come to your place for drinks any more. I’d rather go with no people at all than mean people.”

      Ralph exhaled a deep breath. “Aimee, Aimee. Don’t you know you can’t help that guy? He’s bats. And this crazy thing of yours is like saying, Go ahead, be batty, I’ll help you, pal.”

      “Once in a lifetime anyway, it’s nice to make a mistake if you think it’ll do somebody some good,” she said.

      “God deliver me from do-gooders, Aimee.”

      “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, СКАЧАТЬ