Рэй Брэдбери: The Man Upstairs

Now a blue world, a blue sky, blue people, blue streetcars and blue trotting dogs.

He shifted panes. Now-an amber world! Two lemonish women glided by, resembling the daughters of Fu Manchu! Douglas giggled. This pane made even the sunlight more purely golden.

It was eight A.M. Mr. Koberman strolled by below, on the sidewalk, returning from his night's work, his cane looped over his elbow, straw hat glued to his head with patent oil.

Douglas shifted panes again. Mr. Koberman was a red man walking through a red world with red trees and red flowers and- something else.

Something about-Mr. Koberman.

Douglas squinted.

The red glass _did_ things to Mr. Koberman. His face, his suit, his hands. The clothes seemed to melt away. Douglas almost believed, for one terrible instant, that he could see _inside_ Mr. Koberman. And what he saw made him lean wildly against the small red pane, blinking.

Mr. Koberman glanced up just then, saw Douglas, and raised his cane-umbrella angrily, as if to strike. He ran swiftly across the red lawn to the front door.

«Young man!» he cried, running up the stairs. «What were you doing?»

«Just looking,» said Douglas, numbly.

«That's all, is it?» cried Mr. Koberman.

«Yes, sir. I look through all the glasses. All kinds of worlds. Blue ones, red ones, yellow ones. All different.»

«All kinds of worlds, is it!» Mr. Koberman glanced at the little panes of glass, his face pale. He got hold of himself. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and pretended to laugh. «Yes. All kinds of worlds. All different.» He walked to the door of his room. «Go right ahead; play,» he said.

The door closed. The hall was empty. Mr. Koberman had gone in.

Douglas shrugged and found a new pane.

«Oh, everything's violet!»

Half an hour later, while playing in his sandbox behind the house, Douglas heard the crash and the shattering tinkle. He leaped up.

A moment later, Grandma appeared on the back porch, the old razor strop trembling in her hand.

«Douglas! I told you time and again never fling your basketball against the house! Oh, I could just cry!»

«I been sitting right here,» he protested.

«Come see what you've done, you nasty boy!»

The great colored window panes lay shattered in a rainbow chaos on the upstairs landing. His basketball lay in the ruins.

Before he could even begin telling his innocence, Douglas was struck a dozen stinging blows upon his rump. Wherever he landed, screaming, the razor strop struck again.

Later, hiding his mind in the sandpile like an ostrich, Douglas nursed his dreadful pains. He knew who'd thrown that basketball. A man with a straw hat and a stiff umbrella and a cold, gray room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He dribbled tears. Just wait. Just _wait_.

He heard Grandma sweeping up the broken glass. She brought it out and threw it in the trash bin. Blue, pink, yellow meteors of glass dropped brightly down.

When she was gone, Douglas dragged himself, whimpering, over to save out three pieces of the incredible glass. Mr. Koberman disliked the colored windows. These-he clinked them in his fingers- would be worth saving.

Grandfather arrived from his newspaper office each night, shortly ahead of the other boarders, at five o'clock. When a slow, heavy tread filled the hall, and a thick, mahogany cane thumped in the cane-rack, Douglas ran to embrace the large stomach and sit on Grandpa's knee while he read the evening paper.

«Hi, Grampa!»

«Hello, down there!»

«Grandma cut chickens again today. It's fun watching,» said Douglas.

Grandpa kept reading. «That's twice this week, chickens. She's the chickenist woman. You like to watch her cut 'em, eh? Coldblooded little pepper! Ha!»

«I'm just curious.»

«You are,» rumbled Grandpa, scowling. «Remember that day when that young lady was killed at the rail station? You just walked over and looked at her, blood and all.» He laughed. «Queer duck. Stay that way. Fear nothing, ever in your life. I guess you get it from your father, him being a military man and all, and you so close to him before you came here to live last year.» Grandpa returned to his paper.

A long pause. «Gramps?»

«Yes?»

«What if a man didn't have a heart or lungs or stomach but still walked around, alive?»

«That,» rumbled Gramps, «would be a miracle.»

«I don't mean a-a miracle. I mean, what if he was all _different_ inside? Not like me.»

«Well, he wouldn't be quite human then, would he, boy?»

«Guess not, Gramps. Gramps, you got a heart and lungs?»

Gramps chuckled. «Well, tell the truth, I don't _know_. Never seen them. Never had an X-ray, never been to a doctor. Might as well be potato-solid for all I know.»

«Have _I_ got a stomach?»

«You certainly have!» cried Grandma from the parlor entry. «'Cause I feed it! And you've lungs, you scream loud enough to wake the crumblees. And you've dirty hands, go wash them! Dinner's ready. Grandpa, come on. Douglas, git!»

In the rush of boarders streaming downstairs, Grandpa, if he intended questioning Douglas further about the weird conversation, lost his opportunity. If dinner delayed an instant more, Grandma and the potatoes would develop simultaneous lumps.

The boarders, laughing and talking at the table-Mr. Koberman silent and sullen among them-were silenced when Grandfather cleared his throat. He talked politics a few minutes and then shifted over into the intriguing topic of the recent peculiar deaths in the town.

«It's enough to make an old newspaper editor prick up his ears,» he said, eying them all. «That young Miss Larson, lived across the ravine, now. Found her dead three days ago for no reason, just funny kinds of tattoos all over her, and a facial expression that would make Dante cringe. And that other young lady, what was her name? Whitely? She disappeared and _never did_ come back.»

«Them things happen alla time,» said Mr. Britz, the garage mechanic, chewing. «Ever peek inna Missing Peoples Bureau file? It's _that_ long.» He illustrated. «Can't tell _what_ happens to most of 'em.»

«Anyone want more dressing?» Grandma ladled liberal portions from the chicken's interior. Douglas watched, thinking about how that chicken had had two kinds of guts-God-made and Manmade.

Well, how about _three_ kinds of guts?

Eh?

Why not?

Conversation continued about the mysterious death of so-andso, and, oh, yes, remember a week ago, Marion Barsumian died of heart failure, but maybe that didn't connect up? or did it? you're crazy! forget it, why talk about it at the dinner table? So.

«Never can tell,» said Mr. Britz. «Maybe we got a vampire in town.»

Mr. Koberman stopped eating.

«In the year 1927?» said Grandma. «A vampire? Oh go on, now.»

«Sure,» said Mr. Britz. «Kill 'em with silver bullets. Anything silver for that matter. Vampires _hate_ silver. I read it in a book somewhere, once. Sure, I did.»

Douglas looked at Mr. Koberman who ate with wooden knives and forks and carried only new copper pennies in his pocket.

«It's poor judgment,» said Grandpa, «to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it: people who _do_ things.»

«Excuse me,» said Mr. Koberman, who got up and went out for his evening walk to work.

The stars, the moon, the wind, the clock ticking, and the chiming of the hours into dawn, the sun rising, and here it was another morning, another day, and Mr. Koberman coming along the sidewalk from his night's work. Douglas stood off like a small mechanism whirring and watching with carefully microscopic eyes.