Ray Bradbury: The October Country

THE OCTOBER COUNTRY

RAY BRADBURY

Dedication Dedication Homesteading the October Country October Country The Dwarf The Next in Line The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse Skeleton The Jar The Lake The Emissary Touched with Fire The Small Assassin The Crowd Jack-in-the-Box The Scythe Uncle Einar The Wind The Man Upstairs There Was an Old Woman The Cistern Homecoming The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone Keep Reading About the Author Also by the Author Copyright About the Publisher

For who else but

August Derleth

Contents

Dedication Dedication Dedication Homesteading the October Country October Country The Dwarf The Next in Line The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse Skeleton The Jar The Lake The Emissary Touched with Fire The Small Assassin The Crowd Jack-in-the-Box The Scythe Uncle Einar The Wind The Man Upstairs There Was an Old Woman The Cistern Homecoming The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone Keep Reading About the Author Also by the Author Copyright About the Publisher For who else but August Derleth

Homesteading the October Country

October Country

The Dwarf

The Next in Line

The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse

Skeleton

The Jar

The Lake

The Emissary

Touched with Fire

The Small Assassin

The Crowd

Jack-in-the-Box

The Scythe

Uncle Einar

The Wind

The Man Upstairs

There Was an Old Woman

The Cistern

Homecoming

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Homesteading the October Country

An Introduction

Well, now, how do you do that—homestead an autumn landscape that won’t stand still, all whispers, shadows, and dousing rains?

It all began the day I was born. Oh my god, I can hear you say, here comes the flim-flam. No, no, I say, here comes a consequential truth: I remember being born.

Can’t be done, you counter. Never happened.

Did, is my response.

I found out many, many years later the reason for my remembrance: I was a ten-month baby. Which means what? That snugged away for an extra twenty-eight or thirty days I had a serene opportunity to develop my sight, hearing, and taste. I came forth wide-eyed, aware of everything I saw and felt. Especially the dreadful shock of being propelled out into a cooler environment, leaving my old home forever, to be surrounded by strangers.

All because I had lingered for that extra month and sharpened my senses.

You must admit that gave me an advantage few other humans have had, to emerge with my retina in full register to recall from Instant One a lifetime of metaphors, large and small.

From that moment on I can recollect my life.

When I was three my mother, a maniac for silent movies, toted me to the cinema to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney riding the bells and raining hot liquid lead on the villains below the church.

I did not encounter the Hunchback again until I was seventeen, when some unholy friends took me to a theatre in Hollywood for a late-on-in-life review. Before we entered I told my friends I remembered the entire film, last seen when I was three. They snorted and laughed. I described the most important scenes. We then went in and there were all the scenes I had described.

The Phantom of the Opera. Same experience. 1925. Imbedded in the dark place at the back of my head.

The Lost World. Same year. The dinosaurs lingered into my thirties when I wrote them down and did a film with the fabulous animator of dinosaurs, Ray Harryhausen, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Add them all up, being born aware, climbing Notre Dame with the Hunchback, shadowing the Opera with the Phantom, falling off prehistoric cliffs with brontosaurs, and you arrive at the age of twelve to begin writing.

Along the way you illustrate skeletons for your school because skeletons are wondrous ramshackle items that birth themselves when the humans they wore go away.

Along the way you discover you are alive—age twelve. Discover you can die—age fourteen. Plus the funerals of your grandfather and sister and a few friends, waking you up midnight.

And THE OCTOBER COUNTRY is inevitable.

When I finished my first short story in the seventh grade I knew I was on the right path to immortality. Or the sort of immortality that counts, being remembered here and there in your time while alive, existing a few years after your death beyond all that.

From the age of twelve I knew I was in a life and death match, winning every time I finished a new story, threatened with extinction on those days I did not write. The only answer, then, was: write. I have written every day of my life since my twelfth year. Death has not caught me yet. He will, eventually, of course, but for the time being the sound of my IBM Wheelwriter Number Ten electric typewriter puts him off his feed.

There you have the noon at midnight platform for a writing life. Once established hiding behind the towering bastion of my IBM machine, I hurled fireballs at the Dark Presence, daring him to try again.

The contest has resulted in all that you will read here. “The Small Assassin” is, of course, me. “The Homecoming” family is my Waukegan hometown family, surrounding me in my youth, prolonging themselves into shadows and haunts when I reached maturity. “Skeleton” resulted from my discovering the bones within my flesh, plus seeing the pale skull ghost of myself in an X-ray film.

“Uncle Einar” is a love story. I so loved my favorite loud, brash Swedish uncle that I named and wrote a story about him, adding wings.

“The Next in Line” recites my terror of being trapped in Mexico, in a corridor of mummies I hope never to see again.

“The Jar” was a display I witnessed at a seaside carnival when I was fourteen. A whole series of jars, in which mysterious objects floated, haunted me for years until I wrote about them.

Finally, on the threshold of puberty, “Mr. Electrico,” the carnival magician, summoned me away from graveyards and funerals, touched me with the St. Elmo’s fire sword and shouted sound advice: “Live forever!”

I did just that.

And here I am.

And here it is.

THE OCTOBER COUNTRY.

I bid you welcome.

RAY BRADBURY

Los Angeles, California

January 1999

October Country

… that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain… .

THE DWARF

Aimee watched the sky, quietly.

Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.

Two customers had passed through an hour before. Those two lonely people were now in the roller coaster, screaming murderously as it plummeted down the blazing night, around one emptiness after another.

Aimee moved slowly across the strand, a few worn wooden hoopla rings sticking to her wet hands. She stopped behind the ticket booth that fronted the MIRROR MAZE. She saw herself grossly misrepresented in three rippled mirrors outside the Maze. A thousand tired replicas of herself dissolved in the corridor beyond, hot images among so much clear coolness.