Ray Bradbury - A Graveyard for Lunatics

“I think he means it ,” Manny said to the ceiling. “Hell.” He turned and went to sit in the chair. “How’s it feel?” I asked.

“Not bad.” Eyes shut, he felt his whole body sink down into his seat. “A man could get used.”

At the door I looked back at his smallness frozen in so much bigness.

“You still hate me?” he asked, eyes shut.

“Yes,” I said. “You me?”

“Yeah,” he said.

I went out and shut the door.

I walked across the street from the tenement, Henry paced me, guided by the sound of my footsteps and the jolting of his valise in my hand.

“We got everything, Henry?” I said.

“My whole life in one suitcase? Sure.”

At the curb on the far side we turned.

Someone, somewhere fired an invisible and soundless cannon. Half of the tenement, gunshot, fell.

“Sounds like the Venice pier being torn down,” said Henry.

“Yeah.”

“Sounds like the roller-coaster coming apart.”

“Yeah.”

“Or the day they tore up the big red train trolley-car tracks.”

“Yeah.”

The rest of the tenement fell. “C’mon, Henry,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“Home,” Blind Henry said and nodded, pleased. “I never had one of those. Sounds nice.”

I had Crumley and Roy and Fritz and Maggie and Constance over for a last go-round before Henry’s relatives arrived to take him back to New Orleans.

The music was loud, the beer was copious, blind Henry was officiating at the discovery of the empty tomb for the fourteenth time, and Constance, half loaded and half-undressed, was biting my ear when the door to my small house burst wide.

A voice cried: “I got an early flight! Traffic was awful. There you are! And I know you, you, and you .”

Peg stood in the door pointing.

“But who,” she shouted, “is that half-naked woman !?”

The Toynbee Converter

Death Is a Lonely Business

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns

Long After Midnight

Dandelion Wine

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

The Halloween Tree

The October Country

I Sing the Body Electric!

Switch on the 'tight

The Illustrated Man

The Martian Chronicles

R Is for Rocket

Dark Carnival

The Machineries of Joy

The Anthem Sprinters

A Medicine for Melancholy

Moby Dick (screenplay)

Fahrenheit

Golden Apples of the Sun

S Is for Space

A Division of the Collins Publishing Group 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA

Published by Grafton Books 1990

Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1990

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-246-13744-4

Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc

Chatham, Kent

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.