Рэй Брэдбери: The Finnegan

To say that I have been haunted for the rest of my life by the affair Finnegan is to grossly understate the events leading up to that final melancholy. Only now, at threescore and ten, can I write these words for an astonished constabulary who may well run with picks and shovels to unearth my truths or bury my lies.

The facts are these:

Three children went astray and were missed. Their bodies were found in the midst of Chatham Forest and each bore no marks of criminal assassination, but all had suffered their lifeblood to be drained. Only their skin remained like that of some discolored vineyard grapes withered by sunlight and no rain.

From the withered detritus of these innocents rose fresh rumors of vampires or similar beasts with similar appetites. Such myths always pursue the facts to stun them in their tracks. It could only have been a tombyard beast, it was said, that fed on and destroyed three lives and ruined three dozen more.

The children were buried in the most holy ground. Soon after, Sir Robert Merriweather, pretender to the throne of Sherlock Holmes but modestly refusing the claim, moved through the ten dozen doors of his antique house to come forth to search for this terrible thief of life. With myself, I might add, to carry his brandy and bumbershoot and warn him of underbrush pitfalls in that dark and mysterious forest.

Sir Robert Merriweather, you say?

Just that. Plus the ten times ten plus twelve amazing doors in his shut-up house.

Were the doors used? Not one in nine. How had they appeared in Sir Robert's old manse? He had shipped them in, as a collector of doors, from Rio, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and mid-America. Once collected, he had stashed them, hinged, to be seen from both sides, on the walls of his upper and lower chambers. There he conducted tours of these odd portals for such antique fools as were ravished by the sight of the curiously overdone, the undersimplified, the rococo, or some First Empire cast aside by Napoleon's nephews or seized from Hermann Goering, who had in turn ransacked the Louvre. Others, pelted by Oklahoma dust storms, were jostled home in flatbeds cushioned by bright posters from carnivals buried in the windblown desolations of 1936 America. Name your least favorite door, it was his. Name the best quality, he owned it also, hidden and safe, true beauties behind oblivion's portals.

I had come to see his doors, not the deaths. At his behest, which was a command, I had bought my curiosity a steamship ticket and arrived to find Sir Robert involved not with ten dozen doors, but some great dark door. A mysterious portal, still un-found. And beneath? A tomb.

Sir Robert hurried the grand tour, opening and shutting panels rescued from Peking, long buried near Etna, or filched from Nantucket. But his heart, gone sick, was not in this, what should have been delightful, tour.

He described the spring rains that drenched the country to make things green, only to have people to walk out in that fine weather and one week find the body of a boy emptied of life through two incisions in his neck, and in the next weeks, the bodies of the two girls. People shouted for the police and sat drinking in pubs, their faces long and pale, while mothers locked their children home where fathers lectured on the dooms that lay in Chatham Forest.

«Will you come with me,» said Sir Robert at last, «on a very strange, sad picnic?»

«I will,» I said.

So we snapped ourselves in weather-proofs, lugged a hamper of sandwiches and red wine, and plunged into the forest on a drear Sunday.

There was time, as we moved down a hill into the dripping gloom of the trees, to recall what the papers had said about the vanished children's bloodless flesh, the police thrashing the forest ten dozen times, clueless, while the surrounding estates slammed their doors drum-tight at sunset.

«Rain. Damn. Rain!» Sir Robert's pale face stared up, his gray mustache quivering over his thin mouth. He was sick and brittle and old. «Our picnic will be ruined!»

«Picnic?» I said. «Will our killer join us for eats?»

«I pray to God he will,» Sir Robert said. «Yes, pray to God he will.»

We walked through a land that was now mists, now dim sunlight, now forest, now open glade, until we came into a silent part of the woods, a silence made of the way the trees grew wetly together and the way the green moss lay in swards and hillocks. Spring had not yet filled the empty trees. The sun was like an arctic disk, withdrawn, cold, and almost dead.

«This is the place,» said Sir Robert at last.

«Where the children were found?» I inquired.

«Their bodies empty as empty can be.»

I looked at the glade and thought of the children and the people who had stood over them with startled faces and the police who had come to whisper and touch and go away, lost.

«The murderer was never apprehended?»

«Not this clever fellow. How observant are you?» asked Sir Robert.

«What do you want observed?»

«There's the catch. The police slipped up. They were stupidly anthropomorphic about the whole bloody mess, seeking a killer with two arms, two legs, a suit of clothes, and a knife. So hypnotized with their human concept of the killer that they overlooked one obvious unbelievable fact about this place. So!»

He gave his cane a quick light tap on the earth.

Something happened. I stared at the ground. «Do that again,» I whispered.

«You saw it?»

«I thought I saw a small trapdoor open and shut. May I have your cane?»

He gave me the cane. I tapped the ground. It happened again.

«A spider!» I cried. «Gone! God, how quick!»

«Finnegan,» Sir Robert muttered.

«What?»

«You know the old saying: in again, out again, Finnegan. Here.»

With his penknife, Sir Robert dug in the soil to lift an entire clod of earth, breaking off bits to show me the tunnel. The spider, in panic, leaped out its small wafer door and fell to the ground.

Sir Robert handed me the tunnel. «Like gray velvet. Feel. A model builder, that small chap. A tiny shelter, camouflaged, and him alert. He could hear a fly walk. Then pounce out, seize, pop back, slam the lid!»

«I didn't know you loved Nature.»

«Loathe it. But this wee chap, there's much we share. Doors. Hinges. Wouldn't consider other arachnids. But my love of portals drew me to study this incredible carpenter.» Sir Robert worked the trap on its cobweb hinges. «What craftsmanship! And it all ties to the tragedies!»

«The murdered children?»

Sir Robert nodded. «Notice any special thing about this forest?»

«It's too quiet.»

«Quiet!» Sir Robert smiled weakly. «Vast quantities of silence. No familiar birds, beetles, crickets, toads. Not a rustle or stir. The police didn't notice. Why should they? But it was this absence of sound and motion in the glade that prompted my wild theory about the murders.»

He toyed with the amazing structure in his hands.

«What would you say if you could imagine a spider large enough, in a hideout big enough, so that a running child might hear a vacuumed sound, be seized, and vanish with a soft thud below. How say you?» Sir Robert stared at the trees. «Poppycock and bilge? Yet, why not? Evolution, selection, growth, mutations, and-pfft!»

Again he tapped with his cane. A trapdoor flew open, shut.

«Finnegan,» he said.

The sky darkened.

«Rain!» Casting a cold gray eye at the clouds, he stretched his frail hand to touch the showers. «Damn! Arachnids hate rain. And so will our huge dark Finnegan.»

«Finnegan!» I cried irritably.

«I believe in him, yes.»