Ray Bradbury - Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

The rain rained down on the illuminated scene. The rain fell upon tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and thin noses. The rain beat on hunched shoulders. I stared. The rabbit ran. The dogs ran. At the finish, the rabbit popped into its electric hatch. The dogs collided into each other, barking. The lights went out.

In the dark, I turned to stare at the director as I knew he must be turning to stare at me.

I was thankful for the dark, the rain, so Heber Finn could not see our faces.

‘Come on, now,’ he shouted, ‘place your bets!’

We were back in Galway, speeding, at ten o’clock. The rain was still raining, the wind was still blowing. The highway was a river working to erase the stone beneath as we drew up in a great tidal spray before my hotel.

‘Well, now,’ said Heber Finn, not looking at us, but at the windscreen wiper beating, palpitating there. ‘Well.’

The director and I had bet on five races and had lost between us two or three pounds. It worried Heber Finn.

‘I won a great deal,’ he said, ‘and some of it I put down in your names. That last race, I swear to God, I bet and won for all of us. Let me pay you.’

‘No, Heber Finn, thanks,’ I said, my numb lips moving.

He took my hand and pressed two shillings into it. I didn’t fight him. ‘That’s better,’ he said.

Wringing out his cap in the hotel lobby my director looked at me and said, ‘It was a wild Irish night, wasn’t it?’

‘A wild night,’ I said. He left.

I hated to go up to my room. So I sat for another hour in the reading lounge of the damp hotel and took the traveler’s privilege, a glass and a bottle provided by the dazed hall porter.

I sat alone, listening to the rain and the rain on the cold hotel roof, thinking of Ahab’s coffin-bed waiting for me up there under the drumbeat weather.

I thought of the only warm thing in the hotel, in the town, in all the land of Eire this night, the script in my typewriter this moment, with its sun of Mexico, its hot winds blowing from the Pacific, its mellow papayas, its yellow lemons, its fiery sand, and its women with dark charcoal-burning eyes.

And I thought of the darkness beyond the town, the light flashing on, the electric rabbit running, the dogs running, and the rabbit gone, and the light going out, and the rain falling down on the dank shoulders and the soaked caps, and trickling off the noses and seeping through the tweeds.

Going upstairs I glanced through a streaming window. There, riding by under a streetlight, was a man on a bicycle. He was terribly drunk, for the bike weaved back and forth across the road. He kept pumping on unsteadily, blearily. I watched him ride off into the raining dark.

Then I went on up to die in my room.

The phone rang at five-thirty that evening. It was December, and long since dark as Thompson picked up the phone.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Herb ?’

‘Oh, it’s you, Allin.’

‘Is your wife home, Herb?’

‘Sure. Why?’

‘Damn it.’

Herb Thompson held the receiver quietly. ‘What’s up? You sound funny.’

‘I wanted you to come over tonight.’

‘We’re having company.’

‘I wanted you to spend the night. When’s your wife going away?’

‘That’s next week,’ said Thompson. ‘She’ll be in Ohio for about nine days. Her mother’s sick. I’ll come over then.’

‘I wish you could come over tonight.’

‘Wish I could. Company and all, my wife’d kill me.’

‘I wish you could come over.’

‘What’s it? the wind again?’

‘Oh, no. No.’

‘Is it the wind?’ asked Thompson.

The voice on the phone hesitated. ‘Yeah. Yeah, it’s the wind.’

‘It’s a clear night, there’s not much wind.’

‘There’s enough. It comes in the window and blows the curtains a little bit. Just enough to tell me.’

‘Look, why don’t you come and spend the night here?’ said Herb Thompson looking around the lighted hall.

‘Oh, no. It’s too late for that. It might catch me on the way over. It’s a damned long distance. I wouldn’t dare, but thanks, anyway. It’s thirty miles, but thanks.’

‘Take a sleeping-tablet.’

‘I’ve been standing in the door for the past hour, Herb. I can see it building up in the west. There are some clouds there and I saw one of them kind of rip apart. There’s a wind coming, all right.’

‘Well, you just take a nice sleeping-tablet. And call me anytime you want to call. Later this evening if you want.’

‘Any time?’ said the voice on the phone.

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll do that, but I wish you could come out. Yet I wouldn’t want you hurt. You’re my best friend and I wouldn’t want that. Maybe it’s best I face this thing alone. I’m sorry I bother you.’

‘Hell, what’s a friend for? Tell you what you do, sit down and get some writing done this evening,’ said Herb. Thompson, shifting from one foot to the other in the hall. ‘You’ll forget about the Himalayas and the Valley of the Winds and this preoccupation of yours with storms and hurricanes. Get another chapter done on your next travel book.’

‘I might do that. Maybe I will, I don’t know. Maybe I will. I might do that. Thanks a lot for letting me bother you.’

‘Thanks, hell. Get off the line, now, you. My wife’s calling me to dinner.’

Herb Thompson hung up.

He went and sat down at the supper table and his wife sat across from him. ‘Was that Allin?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘Him and his winds that blow up and winds that blow down and winds that blow hot and blow cold,’ she said, handing him his plate heaped with food.

‘He did have a time in the Himalayas, during the war,’ said Herb Thompson.

‘You don’t believe what he said about that valley, do you?’

‘It makes a good story.’

‘Climbing around, climbing up things. Why do men climb mountains and scare themselves?’

‘It was snowing,’ said Herb Thompson.

‘Was it?’

‘And raining and hailing and blowing all at once, in that valley. Allin’s told me a dozen times. He tells it well. He was up pretty high. Clouds, and all. The valley made a noise.’

‘I bet it did,’ she said.

‘Like a lot of winds instead of just one. Winds from all over the world.’ He took a bite. ‘So says Allin.’

‘He shouldn’t have gone there and looked, in the first place,’ she said. ‘You go poking around and first thing you know you get ideas. Winds start getting angry at you for intruding, and they follow you.’

‘Don’t joke, he’s my best friend,’ snapped Herb Thompson.

‘It’s all so silly!’

‘Nevertheless he’s been through a lot. That storm in Bombay, later, and the typhoon off New Guinea two months after that. And that time, in Cornwall.’

‘I have no sympathy for a man who continually runs into wind storms and hurricanes, and then gets a persecution complex because of it.’

The phone rang just then.

‘Don’t answer it,’ she said.

‘Maybe it’s important.’

‘It’s only Allin, again.’

They sat there and the phone rang nine times and they didn’t answer. Finally, it quieted. They finished dinner. Out in the kitchen, the window curtains gently moved in the small breeze from a slightly opened window.

The phone rang again.

‘I can’t let it ring,’ he said, and answered it. ‘Oh, hello, Allin.’

‘Herb! It’s here! It got here!’

‘You’re too near the phone, back up a little.’

‘I stood in the open door and waited for it. I saw it coming down the highway, shaking all the trees, one by one, until it shook the trees just outside the house and it dived down toward the door and I slammed the door in its face!’