Рэй Брэдбери - The Man Upstairs

At noon, Grandma went to the store to buy groceries.

As was his custom every day when Grandma was gone, Douglas yelled outside Mr. Koberman's door for a full three minutes. As usual, there was no response. The silence was horrible.

He ran downstairs, got the pass-key, a silver fork, and the three pieces of colored glass he had saved from the shattered window. He fitted the key to the lock and swung the door slowly open.

The room was in half light, the shades drawn. Mr. Koberman lay atop his bedcovers, in slumber clothes, breathing gently, up and down. He didn't move. His face was motionless.

«Hello, Mr. Koberman!»

The colorless walls echoed the man's regular breathing.

«Mr. Koberman, hello!»

Bouncing a golf ball, Douglas advanced. He yelled. Still no answer. «Mr. Koberman!»

Bending over Mr. Koberman, Douglas picked the tines of the silver fork in the sleeping man's face.

Mr. Koberman winced. He twisted. He groaned bitterly.

Response. Good. Swell.

Douglas drew a piece of blue glass from his pocket. Looking through the blue glass fragment he found himself in a blue room, in a blue world different from the world he knew. As different as was the red world. Blue furniture, blue bed, blue ceiling and walls, blue wooden eating utensils atop the blue bureau, and the sullen dark blue of Mr. Koberman's face and arms and his blue chest rising, falling. Also…

Mr. Koherman's eyes were wide, staring at him with a hungry darkness.

Douglas felt back, pulled the blue glass from his eyes.

Mr. Koberman's eyes were shut.

Blue glass again-open. Blue glass away-shut. Blue glass again-open. Away-shut. Funny. Douglas experimented, trembling. Through the glass the eyes seemed to peer hungrily, avidly through Mr. Koberman's closed lids. Without the blue glass they seemed tightly shut.

But it was the rest of Mr. Koberman's body.

Mr. Koberman's bedclothes dissolved off him. The blue glass had something to do with it. Or perhaps it was the clothes themselves, just being on Mr. Koberman. Douglas cried out.

He was looking through the wall of Mr. Koberman's stomach, right _inside_ him!

Mr. Koberman was solid.

Or, nearly so, anyway.

There were strange shapes and sizes within him.

Douglas must have stood amazed for five minutes, thinking about the blue worlds, the red worlds, the yellow worlds side by side, living together like glass panes around the big white stair window. Side by side, the colored panes, the different worlds; Mr. Koberman had said so himself.

So this was why the colored window had been broken.

«Mr. Koberman, wake up!»

No answer.

«Mr. Koberman, where do you work at night? Mr. Koberman, where do you work?»

A little breeze stirred the blue window shade.

«In a red world or a green world or a yellow one, Mr. Koberman?»

Over everything was a blue glass silence.

«Wait there,» said Douglas.

He walked down to the kitchen, pulled open the great squeaking drawer and picked out the sharpest, biggest knife.

Very calmly he walked into the hall, climbed back up the stairs again, opened the door to Mr. Koberman's room, went in, and closed it, holding the sharp knife in one hand.

Grandma was busy fingering a piecrust into a pan when Douglas entered the kitchen to place something on the table.

«Grandma, what's this?»

She glanced up briefly, over her glasses. «I don't know.»

It was square, like a box, and elastic. It was bright orange in color. It had four square tubes, colored blue, attached to it. It smelled funny.

«Ever see anything like it, Grandma?»

«No.»

«That's what _I_ thought.»

Douglas left it there, went from the kitchen. Five minutes later he returned with something else. «How about _this?_»

He laid down a bright pink linked chain with a purple triangle at one end.

«Don't bother me,» said Grandma. «It's only a chain.»

Next time he returned with two hands full. A ring, a square, a triangle, a pyramid, a rectangle, and-other shapes. All of them were pliable, resilient, and looked as if they were made of gelatin. «This isn't all,» said Douglas, putting them down. «There's more where this came from.»

Grandma said, «Yes, yes,» in a far-off tone, very busy.

«You were wrong, Grandma.»

«About what?»

«About all people being the same inside.»

«Stop talking nonsense.»

«Where's my piggy-bank?»

«On the mantel, where you left it.»

«Thanks.»

He tromped into the parlor, reached up for his piggy-bank.

Grandpa came home from the office at five.

«Grandpa, come upstairs.»

«Sure, son. Why?»

«Something to show you. It's not nice; but it's interesting.»

Grandpa chuckled, following his grandson's feet up to Mr. Koberman's room.

«Grandma mustn't know about this; she wouldn't like it,» said Douglas. He pushed the door wide open. «There.»

Grandfather gasped.

Douglas remembered the next few hours all the rest of his life. Standing over Mr. Koberman's naked body, the coroner and his assistants. Grandma, downstairs, asking somebody, «What's going on up there?» and Grandpa saying, shakily, «I'll take Douglas away on a long vacation so he can forget this whole ghastly affair. Ghastly, ghastly affair!»

Douglas said, «Why should it be bad? I don't see anything bad. I don't feel bad.»

The coroner shivered and said, «Koberman's dead, all right.»

His assistant sweated. «Did you see those things in the pans of water and in the wrapping paper?»

«Oh, my God, my God, yes, I saw them.»

«Christ.»

The coroner bent over Mr. Koberman's body again. «This better be kept secret, boys. It wasn't murder. It was a mercy the boy acted. God knows what might have happened if he hadn't.»

«What was Koberman? A vampire? A monster?»

«Maybe. I don't know. Something-not human.» The coroner moved his hands deftly over the suture.

Douglas was proud of his work. He'd gone to much trouble. He had watched Grandmother carefully and remembered. Needle and thread and all. All in all, Mr. Koberman was as neat a job as any chicken ever popped into hell by Grandma.

«I heard the boy say that Koberman lived even after all those _things_ were taken out of him.» The coroner looked at the triangles and chains and pyramids floating in the pans of water. «Kept on _living_. God.»

«Did the boy say that?»

«He did.»

«Then, what _did_ kill Koberman?»

The coroner drew a few strands of sewing thread from their bedding.

«This…» he said.

Sunlight blinked coldly off a half-revealed treasure trove; six dollars and seventy cents' worth of silver dimes inside Mr. Koberman's chest.

«I think Douglas made a wise investment,» said the coroner, sewing the flesh back up over the «dressing» quickly.