Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“My father didn’t either. He didn’t realise the people he was satirising had so much power. The media man made sure nobody would stock the book, and then he used one of his companies to buy up all the copies and destroy them. My father sent out the ones he had left to the media the man didn’t own, but nobody so much as mentioned them. He kept just that one copy and hid himself here. He didn’t want anyone to find out where he was living. He was afraid they might try and do away with him as well as the book.”

“But you told someone in the village he lived here.”

“Not while my father was alive.”

Ewan felt he’d already known that answer. He shut the cover, which bore just the author’s name split by the title on a black background. The letters were in various fonts, the most prominent of which could be read as spelling TO SEE GOD. He turned the book over and gazed at the photograph on the back. “That’s the man I saw chasing the page on the beach.”

“I believe you.” Francesca Dartmouth took a long breath and said “He used to say he wouldn’t really be destroyed while there was still even one of his books.”

At once Ewan realised “The last line needn’t mean there’s no God. It could be saying there’s no end.”

“I never thought of that before.” Even more gratefully she said “I think you’ve seen the truth.”

Ewan was making to replace the page in the book when she said “Why don’t you keep that? I’d say you’ve made it your own.”

In some confusion he protested “Don’t you think—”

“I think you should have it when you’ve given it a meaning. Maybe it means something special to you, or it will.” She held Ewan’s gaze while she said “If it does, my father won’t be altogether gone.”

Ewan could find nothing to say to this. As she saw him onto the drive he said awkwardly “You won’t be short of olives.”

“Would you like some? They used to sell ours in the village till the shop turned into a bar.” She went into a side room and returned with a little wicker basket heaped with chubby olives. “You and your wife enjoy them,” she said. “And your lives.”

She waved as the gates met behind him, and he was hurrying past the railings when he seemed to glimpse a man among the trees. In a moment the figure was gone, as if it had needed only to turn sideways to vanish. Ewan looked for it as the villas gave way to apartments, but there was no further sign of it. The page from the book lay quiet against his heart.

He thought better of knocking at the door of the apartment in case Joyce was asleep, and eased it open, lifting the wicker trophy to show her if she was awake. He needn’t have taken so much care, because she wasn’t in the room.

The balcony was deserted too. He called her number, only to hear the phone start to ring in the room. It was next to her bed, pinning down a scrap of paper on which she’d written Gone for swim followed by a single X with one bar practically upright. He ran to the balcony and peered between the hotels. Far out to sea a figure no larger than a charm on a bracelet was swimming. Except for the orange swimsuit he wouldn’t have known who it was.

He closed the window and stood the basket on Joyce’s bedside table. He read Jethro Dartmouth’s last words as he laid the page in the safe, and then he made for the beach. Though the little swimming charm was as distant as ever, the sight seemed to concentrate a peace he hardly dared express to himself. He left his sandals next to Joyce’s under the sun-bed occupied by her book. Every step took him deeper, but ripples kissed his skin. “There’s none,” he murmured as he forged onwards to tell Joyce. “There’s none.”

Which tale of Ray’s first pierced me with a sense of loneliness and loss? It may well have been “The Fog Horn” or “Kaleidoscope” or “The Dwarf” or “The Lake”—I can’t now remember the order in which (precocious child) I read his first few books when I was no more than eight years old. I was borrowing adult fiction from the local public library on my mother’s tickets, and Ray quickly became one of her favourite authors too. Now I think about it, perhaps that poignant jewel “The Smile” initially alerted us when it was reprinted in our local newspaper. Each of these stories affected me as some of Hans Andersen’s fairy tales had—they were inescapably moving and disturbing as well. I think I was already also able to appreciate the poetry of Ray’s prose.

On a Bradbury panel at the 2010 British Fantasy Convention, Joel Lane rightly celebrated him for rooting his fiction in the most crucial human experiences. The various panellists named their choice of Ray’s tales, and some of the above were mine. An hour wasn’t enough to let us say everything we should have, but here’s my opportunity to cite a favourite theme of mine in his work—the death of books. While it’s most fully explored in Fahrenheit 451 , I’ve never forgotten two other treatments: “The Exiles” (mysteriously missing from the British edition of The Illustrated Man ) and “Pillar of Fire,” which I first encountered in August Derleth’s anthology The Other Side of the Moon . In the latter story I was especially haunted by the last dead man’s eulogy for our beloved fears. Back then I didn’t know about the carnival magician who bade the twelve-year-old Ray to live forever, nor that Ray had embraced the exhortation by becoming a writer, but the information came as no surprise in the wake of his tales. Believe me, Ray—you’ll live that long in the souls of your readers and in the work of the writers you’ve influenced. I believe that like others—Pete Crowther and Caitlín Kiernan among them—I learned lyricism from you.

For me Ray’s achievement is inimitable, and so when Mort Castle asked me to write a tale for this book I vowed to avoid trying to imitate. In the course of my career I’ve come to believe in the happy coincidence, one of which was the source of “The Page.” A few weeks after Mort’s request my wife and I spent two weeks in Rhodes. As we sunbathed I turned over ideas in my mind for a Bradbury tribute, and on a windy day one blew along—the sight of a man in pursuit of a page that a gust had torn out of the book he was reading on the beach. Thank heaven I always take a notebook with me! I was instantly reminded of “The Exiles” and its relatives, and it didn’t take me long to sketch my tale. It’s pretty personal, but isn’t that the best kind of homage? I hope it contains a little of Ray’s poignancy, and perhaps it has some of the redemptive quality you can often find in his work (from the list above, “The Lake,” for instance). One final thought: if a character in any of his early stories had a mobile phone, it would be science fiction. Sometimes I feel we’re all inhabiting the future he envisioned.

Because you know the story, you might

see in the photograph an element of drama,

perhaps even pathos.

That is only your thought, your

projection onto this banal image.

A washed-out snapshot.

Hard to judge the light. You cannot tell if it is a sunny day.

She seems a sunny child.

She is three years old.

She wears a striped bathing suit.

Her eyes do not squint.

It is you she sees.

Her mouth is as wide as the blade of a toy shovel. Unattractive really.

She holds out her arms.

Does she want you to pick her up, embrace her, take her away?

Is she asking, Will you love me?

—Will you love me?

—Will you love me?

Because you know the story…

“Nobody really liked her much back then. She was always pretending to be a movie star, even though she had a face like a white tomato. She used to skip school a lot and go to the movies.