Ray Bradbury - Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

‘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.’

‘I got to try anyway. Oh God, Ralph, this is all my fault! I shouldn’t have phoned Billie Fine! I shouldn’t’ve ordered a mirror and got you so mad you did this! It’s me should’ve gone to Mr Big, not a crazy thing like I bought! I’m going to find him if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.’

Swinging about slowly, her cheeks wet, she saw the quivery mirrors that stood in front of the Maze, Ralph’s reflection was in one of them. She could not take her eyes away from the image; it held her in a cool and trembling fascination, with her mouth open.

‘Aimee, what’s wrong? What’re you—’

He sensed where she was looking and twisted about to see what was going on. His eyes widened.

He scowled at the blazing mirror.

A horrid, ugly little man, two feet high, with a pale, squashed face under an ancient straw hat, scowled back at him. Ralph stood there glaring at himself, his hands at his sides.

Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.

We were far out at the tip of Ireland, in Galway, where the weather strikes from its bleak quarters in the Atlantic with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain. You go to bed sad and wake in the middle of the night thinking you heard someone cry, thinking you yourself were weeping, and feel your face and find it dry. Then you look at the window and turn over, sadder still, and fumble about for your dripping sleep and try to get it back on.

We were out, as I said, in Galway, which is gray stone with green beards on it, a rock town, and the sea coming in and the rain falling down; and we had been there a month solid working with our film director on a script which was, with immense irony, to be shot in the warm yellow sun of Mexico sometime in January. The pages of the script were full of fiery bulls and hot tropical flowers and burning eyes, and I typed it with chopped-off frozen fingers in my gray hotel room where the food was criminal’s gruel and the weather a beast at the window.

On the thirty-first night, a knock at the door, at seven. The door opened, my film director stepped nervously in.

‘Let’s get the hell out and find some wild life in Ireland and forget this damn rain,’ he said, all in a rush.

‘What rain?’ I said, sucking my fingers to get the ice out. ‘The concussion here under the roof is so steady I’m shellshocked and have quite forgot the stuff’s coming down!’

‘Four weeks here and you’re talking Irish,’ said the director.

‘Hand me my clay pipe,’ I said. And we ran from the room.

‘Where?’ said I.

‘Heber Finn’s pub,’ said he.

And we blew along the stony street in the dark that rocked gently as a boat on the black flood because of the tilty-dancing streetlights above which made the shadows tear and fly, uneasy.