Рэй Брэдбери - The Exiles

Their eyes were fire and the breath flamed out the witches' mouths as they bent to probe the caldron with greasy stick and bony finger.

They danced drunkenly on the shore of an empty sea, fouling the air with their three tongues, and burning it with their cats eyes malevolently aglitter:

They paused and cast a glance about. «Where's the crystal? Where the needles?»

«Here!»

«Good!»

«Is the yellow wax thickened?»

«Yes!»

«Pour it in the iron mold!»

«Is the wax figure done?» They shaped it like molasses adrip on their green hands.

«Shove the needle through the heart!» «The crystal, the crystal; fetch it from the tarot bag. Dust it off; have a look!» They bent to the crystal, their faces white.

A rocket ship moved through space from the planet Earth to the planet Mars. On the rocket ship men were dying.

The captain raised his head, tiredly. «We'll have to use the morphine.»

«But, Captain―»

«You see yourself this man's condition.» The captain lifted the wool blanket and the man restrained beneath the wet sheet moved and groaned. The air was full of sulphurous thunder.

«I saw it-1 saw it.» The man opened his eyes and stared at the port where there were only black spaces, reeling stars, Earth far removed, and the planet Mars rising large and red. «I saw it-a bat, a huge thing, a bat with a man's face, spread over the front port. Fluttering and fluttering, fluttering and fluttering.»

«Pulse?» asked the captain.

The orderly measured it. «One hundred and thirty.»

«He can't go on with that. Use the morphine. Come along, Smith.»

They moved away. Suddenly the floor plates were laced with bone and white skulls that screamed. The captain did not dare look down, and over the screaming he said, «Is this where Perse is?» turning in at a hatch.

A white-smocked surgeon stepped away from a body. «I just don't understand it.»

«How did Perse die?»

«We don't know, Captain. It wasn't his heart, his brain, or shock. He just-died.»

The captain felt the doctor's wrist, which changed to a hissing snake and bit him. The captain did not flinch. «Take care of yourself. You've a pulse too.»

The doctor nodded. «Perse complained of pains-needles, he said-in his wrists and legs. Said he felt like wax, melting. He fell. I helped him up. He cried like a child. Said he had a silver needle in his heart. He died. Here he is. We can repeat the autopsy for you. Everything's physically normal.»

«That's impossible! He died of something―»

The captain walked to a port. He smelled of menthol and iodine and green soap on his polished and manicured hands. His white teeth were dentifriced, and his ears scoured to a pinkness, as were his cheeks. His uniform was the color of new salt, and his boots were black mirrors shining below him. His crisp crewcut hair smelled of sharp alcohol. Even his breath was sharp and new and clean. There was no spot to him. He was a fresh instrument, honed and ready, still hot from the surgeon's oven.

The men with him were from the same mold. One expected huge brass keys spiraling slowly from their backs. They were expensive, talented, well-oiled toys, obedient and quick.

The captain watched the planet Mars grow very large in space.

«We'll be landing in an hour on that damned place. Smith, did you see any bats, or have other nightmares?»

«Yes, sir. The month before our rocket took off from New York, sir. White rats biting my neck, drinking my blood. I didn't tell. I was afraid you wouldn't let me come on this trip.»

«Never mind,» sighed the captain. «I had dreams too. In all of my fifty years I never had a dream until that week before we took off from Earth. And then every night I dreamed I was a white wolf. Caught on a snowy hill. Shot with a silver bullet. Buried with a stake in my heart.» He moved his head toward Mars. «Do you think, Smith, they know we're coming?»

«We don't know if there are Martian people, sir.»

«Don't we? They began frightening us off eight weeks ago, before we started. They've killed Perse and Reynolds now. Yesterday they made Grenville go blind. How? I don't know. Bats, needles, dreams, men dying for no reason. I'd call it witchcraft in another day. But this is the year 2120, Smith. We're rational men. This all can't be happening. But it is! Whoever they are, with their needles and their bats, they'll try to finish us all.»

He swung about. «Smith, fetch those books from my file. I want them when we land.»

Two hundred books were piled on the rocket deck.

«Thank you, Smith. Have you glanced at them? Think I'm insane? Perhaps. It's a crazy hunch. At that last moment I ordered these books from the Historical Museum. Because of my dreams. Twenty nights I was stabbed, butchered, a screaming bat pinned to a surgical mat, a thing rotting underground in a black box; bad, wicked dreams. Our whole crew dreamed of witch-things and were-things, vampires and phantoms, things they couldn 't know anything about. Why? Because books on such ghastly subjects were destroyed a century ago. By law. Forbidden for anyone to own the grisly volumes. These books you see here are the last copies, kept for historical purposes in the locked museum vaults.»

Smith bent to read the dusty titles:

«Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving. Rappaccini's Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood. The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. The Weird Shadow Over Inns-mouth, by H. P. Lovecraft. And more! Books by Walter de la Mare, Wakefield, Harvey, Wells, Asquith, Huxley-all forbidden authors. All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned! But, sir, what good are these to us on the rocket?»

«I don't know,» sighed the captain, «yet.»

The three hags lifted the crystal where the captain's image flickered, his tiny voice tinkling out of the glass:

«I don't know,» sighed the captain, «yet.»

The three witches glared redly into one another's faces.

«We haven't much time,» said one.

«Better warn Them in the City.»

«They'll want to know about the books. It doesn't look good. That fool of a captain!»

«In an hour they'll land their rocket.»

The three hags shuddered and blinked up at the Emerald City by the edge of the dry Martian sea. In its highest window a small man held a blood-red drape aside. He watched the wastelands where the three witches fed their caldron and shaped the waxes. Farther along, ten thousand other blue fires and laurel incenses, black tobacco smokes and fire weeds, cinnamons and bone dusts rose soft as moths through the Martian night. The man counted the angry, magical fires. Then, as the three witches stared, he turned. The crimson drape, released, fell, causing the distant portal to wink, like a yellow eye.

Mr. Edgar Allan Poe stood in the tower window, a faint vapor of spirits upon his breath. «Hecate's friends are busy tonight,» he said, seeing the witches, far below.

A voice behind him said, «I saw Will Shakespeare at the shore earlier, whipping them on. All along the sea Shakespeare's army alone, tonight, numbers thousands: the three witches, Oberon, Hamlet's father. Puck-all, all of them-thousands! Good Lord, a regular sea of people.»