Рэй Брэдбери: Jack-In-The-Box

«In the Beginning was God, Who created the Universe, and the Worlds within the Universe, the Continents within the Worlds and the Lands within the Continents, and shaped from His mind and hand His loving wife and a child who in time would he God Himself…»

Teacher nodded slowly. The fire fell softly away to slumbering coals. Edwin read on.

Down the banister, breathless, he slid into the Parlor. «Mom, Mom!»

She lay in a plump maroon chair, breathless, as if she, too, had run a great way.

«Mom, Mom, you're soaking wet!»

«Am I?» she said, as if it was his fault she'd been rushing about. «So I am, so I am.» She took a deep breath and sighed. Then she took his hands and kissed each one. She looked at him steadily, her eyes dilating. «Well now, listen here, I've a surprise! Do you know what's coming tomorrow? You can't guess! Your birthday!»

«But it's only been ten months!»

«Tomorrow it is! Do us wonders, I say. And anything I _say_ is so is _really_ so, my dear.»

She laughed.

«And we open another secret room?» He was dazed.

«The fourteenth room, yes! Fifteenth room next year, sixteenth, seventeenth, and so on and on till your twenty-first birthday, Edwin! Then, oh, then we'll open up the triple-locked doors to the most important room and you'll be Man of the House, Father, God, Ruler of the Universe!»

«Hey,» he said. And, «Hey!» He tossed his books straight up in the air. They exploded like a great burst of doves, whistling. He laughed. She laughed. Their laughter flew and fell with the books. He ran to scream down the banister again.

At the bottom of the stairs, she waited, arms wide, to catch him.

Edwin lay on his moonlit bed and his fingers pried at the Jack-in-the-Box, but the lid stayed shut; he turned it in his hands, blindly, but did not look down at it. Tomorrow, his birthday-but why? Was he _that_ good? No. Why then, should the birthday come so soon? Well, simply because things had gotten, what word could you use? Nervous? Yes, things had begun to shimmer by day as well as by night. He saw the white tremor, the moonlight sifting down and down of an invisible snow in his mother's face. It would take yet another of his birthdays to quiet her again.

«My birthdays,» he said to the ceiling, «will come quicker from now on. I know, I know. Mom laughs so loud, so much, and her eyes are funny…»

Would Teacher be invited to the party? No. Mother and Teacher had never met. «Why not?» «Because,» said Mom. «Don't you _want_ to meet Mom, Teacher?» «Some day,» said Teacher, faintly, blowing off like cobwebs in the hall. «Some… day…»

And where did Teacher go at night? Did she drift through all those secret mountain countries high up near the moon where the chandeliers were skinned blind with dust, or did she wander out beyond the trees that lay beyond the trees that lay beyond the trees? No, hardly that!

He twisted the toy in his sweating hands. Last year, when things began to tremble and quiver, hadn't Mother advanced his birthday several months, too? Yes, oh, yes, yes.

Think of something else. God. God building cold midnight cellar, sun-baked attic, and all miracles between. Think of the hour of His death, crushed by some monstrous beetle beyond the wall. Oh, how the Worlds must have rocked with His passing!

Edwin moved the Jack-in-the-Box to his face, whispered against the lid. «Hello! Hello! Hello, hello…»

No answer save the sprung-tight coiled-in tension there. I'll get you out, thought Edwin. Just wait, just wait. It may hurt, but there's only one way. Here, here…

And he moved from bed to window and leaned far out, looking down to the marbled walk in the moonlight. He raised the box high, felt the sweat trickle from his armpit, felt his fingers clench, felt his arm jerk. He flung the box out, shouting. The box tumbled in the cold air, down. It took a long time to strike the marble pavement.

Edwin bent still further over, gasping.

«Well?» he cried. «Well?» and again, «You there!» and «You!»

The echoes faded. The box lay in the forest shadows. He could not see if the crash had broken it wide. He could not see if the Jack had risen, smiling, from its hideous jail or if it bobbed upon the wind now this way, that, this way, that, its silver bells jingling softly. He listened. He stood by the window for an hour staring, listening, and at last went back to bed.

Morning. Bright voices moved near and far, in and out the Kitchen World and Edwin opened his eyes. Whose voices, now whose could they he? Some of God's workmen? The Dali people? But Mother hated them; no. The voices faded in a humming roar. Silence. And from a great distance, a running, running grew louder and still louder until the door burst open.

«Happy Birthday!»

They danced, they ate frosted cookies, they bit lemon ices, they drank pink wines, and there stood his name on a snow-powdered cake as Mother chorded the piano into an avalanche of sound and opened her mouth to sing, then whirled to seize him away to more strawberries, more wines, more laughter that shook chandeliers into trembling rain. Then, a silver key flourished, they raced to unlock the fourteenth forbidden door.

«Ready! Hold on!»

The door whispered into the wall.

«Oh,» said Edwin.

For, disappointingly enough, this fourteenth room was nothing at all but a dusty dull-brown closet. It promised nothing as had the rooms given him on other anniversaries! His sixth birthday present, now, had been the schoolroom in the Highlands. On his seventh birthday he had opened the playroom in the Lowlands. Eighth, the music room; ninth, the miraculous hell-fired kitchen! Tenth was the room where phonographs hissed in a continuous exhalation of ghosts singing on a gentle wind. Eleventh was the vast green diamond room of the Garden with a carpet that had to be cut instead of swept!

«Oh, don't be disappointed; move!» Mother, laughing, pushed him in the closet. «Wait till you see how magical! Shut the door!»

She thrust a red button flush with the wall.

Edwin shrieked. «No!»

For the room was quivering, working, like a mouth that held them in iron jaws; the room moved, the wall slid away below.

«Oh, hush now, darling,» she said. The door drifted down through the floor, and a long insanely vacant wall slithered by like an endlessly rustling snake to bring another door and another door with it that did not stop but traveled on while Edwin screamed and clutched his mother's waist. The room whined and cleared its throat somewhere; the trembling ceased, the room stood still. Edwin stared at a strange new door and heard his mother say go on, open it, there, now, there. And the new door gaped upon still further mystery. Edwin blinked.

«The Highlands! This is the Highlands! How did we get here? Where's the Parlor, Mom, where's the Parlor?»

She fetched him out through the door. «We jumped straight up, and we flew. Once a week, you'll fly to school instead of running the long way around!»

He still could not move, but only stood looking at the mystery of Land exchanged for Land, of Country replaced by higher and further Country.

«Oh, Mother, Mother…» he said.

It was a sweet long time in the deep grass of the garden where they idled most deliciously, sipped huge cupfuls of apple cider with their elbows on crimson silk cushions, their shoes kicked off, their toes bedded in sour dandelions, sweet clover. Mother jumped twice when she heard Monsters roar beyond the forest. Edwin kissed her cheek. «It's all right,» he said, «I'll protect you.»

«I know you will,» she said, but she turned to gaze at the pattern of trees, as if any moment the chaos out there might smash the forest with a blow and stamp its Titan's foot down and grind them to dust.