Bradbury Stories (87 page)

Most of his words ran unfamiliarly into the washed and unwashed ears of Arnold, Newell, Bowers and Company. But the tone inspired one to dread. The little girls lay back in their seats, against their pigtails, lest he yank them like bell ropes, to summon the dark angels. All stared at Mr. Howard, as if hypnotized.

“You are another race entirely, your motives, your beliefs, your disobediences,” said Mr. Howard. “You are not human. You are—children. Therefore, until such time as you are adults, you have no right to demand privileges or question your elders, who know better.”

He paused, and put his elegant rump upon the chair behind the neat, dustless desk.

“Living in your world of fantasy,” he said, scowling darkly. “Well, there'll be no fantasy here. You'll soon discover that a ruler on your hand is no dream, no faerie frill, no Peter Pan excitement.” He snorted. “Have I frightened you? I have. Good! Well and good. You deserve to be. I want you to know where we stand. I'm not afraid of you, remember that. I'm not afraid of you.” His hand trembled and he drew back in his chair as all their eyes stared as him. “Here!” He flung a glance clear across the room. “What're you whispering about, back there? Some necromancy or other?”

A little girl raised her hand, “What's necromancy?”

“We'll discuss that when our two young friends, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bowers, explain their whispers. Well, young men?”

Donald Bowers arose. “We don't like you. That's all we said.” He sat down again.

Mr. Howard raised his brows, “I like frankness, truth. Thank you for your honesty. But, simultaneously, I do not tolerate flippant rebellion. You'll stay an hour after school tonight and wash the boards.”

After school, walking home, with autumn leaves falling both before and after his passing, Mr. Howard caught up with four of his students. He rapped his cane sharply on the sidewalk. “Here, what are you children doing?”

The startled boys and girls jerked as if struck upon their shoulders by his cane. “Oh,” they all said.

“Well,” demanded the man. “Explain. What were you doing here when I came up?”

William Arnold said, “Playing poison.”

“Poison!” Their teacher's face twisted. He was carefully sarcastic. “Poison, poison, playing poison. Well. And how does one play poison?”

Reluctantly, William Arnold ran off.

“Come back here!” shouted Mr. Howard.

“I'm only showing you,” said the boy, hopping over a cement block of the sidewalk. “How we play poison. Whenever we come to a dead man we jump over him.”

“One does, does one?” said Mr. Howard.

“If you jump on a dead man's grave, then you're poisoned and fall down and die,” expained Isabel Skelton, much too brightly.

“Dead men, graves poisoned,” Mr. Howard said, mockingly. “Where do you get this dead man idea?”

“See?” said Clara Parris, pointing with her arithmetic. “On this square, the names of the two dead men.”

“Ridiculous,” retorted Mr. Howard, squinting down. “Those are simply the names of the contractors who mixed and laid the cement sidewalk.”

Isabel and Clara both gasped wildly and turned accusing eyes to the boys. “You said they were gravestones!” they cried, almost together.

William Arnold looked at his feet. “Yeah. They are. Well, almost. Anyway.” He looked up. “It's late. I gotta go home. So long.”

Clara Parris looked at the two little names cut into the sidewalk. “Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill,” she read the names. “Then these aren't graves? Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill aren't buried here? See, Isabel, that's what I told you, a dozen times I did.”

“You did not,” sulked Isabel.

“Deliberate lies,” Mr. Howard tapped his cane in an impatient code. “Falsification of the highest caliber. Good God, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Bowers, there'll be no more of this, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” mumbled the boys.

“Speak up!”

“Yes, sir,” they replied, again.

“Mr. Howard swung off swiftly down the street. William Arnold waited until he was out of sight before he said, “I hope a bird drops something right smack on his nose—”

“Come on, Clara, let's play poison,” said Isabel, hopefully.

Clara pouted. “It's been spoiled. I'm going home.”

“I'm poisoned!” cried Donald Bowers, falling to the earth and frothing merrily. “Look, I'm poisoned! Gahhh!”

“Oh,” cried Clara, angrily, and ran away.

Saturday morning Mr. Howard glanced out his front window and swore when he saw Isabel Skelton making chalk marks on his sidewalk and then hopping about, making a monotonous sing-song with her voice.

“Stop that!”

Rushing out, he almost flung her to the pavement in his emotion. He grabbed her and shook her violently and let her go and stood over her and the chalk marks.

“I was only playing hopscotch,” she sobbed, hands over her eyes.

“I don't care, you can't play it here,” he declared. Bending, he erased the chalk marks with his handkerchief, muttering. “Young witch. Pentagrams. Rhymes and incantations, and all looking perfectly innocent, God, how innocent. You little
fiend
!” He made as if to strike her, but stopped. Isabel ran off, wailing. “Go ahead, you little fool!” he screamed furiously. “Run off and tell your little cohorts that you've failed. They'll have to try some other way! They won't get around me, they won't, oh, no!”

He stalked back into his house and poured himself a stiff drink of brandy and drank it down. The rest of the day he heard the children playing kick-the-can, hide-and-seek, Over-Annie-Over, jacks, tops, mibs, and the sound of the little monsters in every shrub and shadow would not let him rest. “Another week of this,” he thought, “and I'll be stark staring.” He flung his hand to his aching head. “God in heaven, why weren't we all born adults?”

Another week, then. And the hatred growing between him and the children. The hate and the fear growing apace. The nervousness, the sudden tantrums over nothing, and then—the silent waiting, the way the children climbed the trees and looked at him as they swiped late apples, the melancholy smell of autumn settling in around the town, the days growing short, the night coming too soon.

“But they won't touch me, they won't
dare
touch me,” thought Mr. Howard sucking down one glass of brandy after another. “It's all very silly anyhow, and there's nothing to it. I'll soon be away from here, and—them. I'll soon—”

There was a white skull at the window.

It was eight o'clock of a Thursday evening. It had been a long week, with the angry flares and the accusations. He had had to continually chase the children away from the water-main excavation in front of his house. Children loved excavations, hiding places, pipes and conduits and trenches, and they were ever ascramble over and on and down in and up out of the holes where the new pipes were being laid. It was all finished, thank the Lord, and tomorrow the workmen would shovel in the earth and tamp it down and put in a new cement sidewalk, and that would eliminate the children. But, right now—

There was a white skull at the window!

There could be no doubt that a boy's hand held the skull against the glass, tapping and moving it. There was a childish tittering from outside.

Mr. Howard burst from the house. “Hey, you!” He exploded into the midst of the three running boys. He leaped after them, shouting and yelling. The street was dark, but he saw the figures dart beyond and below him. He saw them sort of bound and could not remember the reason for this, until too late.

The earth opened under him. He fell and lay in a pit, his head taking a terrific blow from a laid water-pipe, and as he lost consciousness he had an impression as of an avalanche, set off by his fall, cascading down cool moist pellets of dirt upon his pants, his shoes, upon his coat, upon his spine, upon the back of his neck, his head, filling his mouth, his ears, his eyes, his nostrils . . .

The neighbor lady with the eggs wrapped in a napkin, knocked on Mr. Howard's door the next day for five minutes. When she opened the door, finally, and walked in, she found nothing but specules of rugdust floating in the sunny air, the big halls were empty, the cellar smelled of coal and clinkers, and the attic had nothing in it but a rat, a spider, and a faded letter. “Funniest thing,” she said many times in the following years, “what ever happened to Mr. Howard.”

And adults, being what they are, never observant, paid no attention to the children playing “Poison” on Oak Bay Street, in all the following autumns. Even when the children leaped over one particular square of cement, twisted about and glanced at the marks on it which read:

“M. HOWARD—R.I.P.”

“Who's Mr. Howard, Billy?”

“Aw, I guess he's the guy who laid the cement.”

“What does R.I.P. mean?”

“Aw, who knows? You're poison! You stepped on it!”

“Get along, get along, children; don't stand on Mother's path! Get along now!”

“G
OOD
G
OD IN HEAVEN, WHAT'S THAT?”

“What's what?”

“Are you blind, man, look!”

And Garrity, elevator operator, looked out to see what the hall porter was staring at.

And in out of the Dublin morn, sweeping through the front doors of the Royal Hibernian Hotel, along the entryway and to the registry was a tall willowy man of some forty years followed by five short willowy youths of some twenty years, a burst of bird song, their hands flapping all about on the air as they passed, their eyes squinching, batting, and flickering, their mouths pursed, their brows enlightened and then dark, their color flushed and then pale, or was it both?, their voices now flawless piccolo, now flute, now melodious oboe but always tuneful. Carrying six monologues, all sprayed forth upon each other at once, in a veritable cloud of self-commiseration, peeping and twitting the discouragements of travel and the ardors of weather, the
corps de ballet
as it were flew, cascaded, flowed eloquently in a greater bloom of cologne by astonished hall porter and transfixed elevator man. They collided deliciously to a halt at the desk where the manager glanced up to be swarmed over by their music. His eyes made nice round o's with no centers in them.

“What,” whispered Garrity, “was that?”

“You may well ask,” said the porter.

At which point the elevator lights flashed and the buzzer buzzed. Garrity had to tear his eyes off the summery crowd and heft himself skyward.

“We,” said the tall slender man with a touch of gray at the temples, “should like a room, please.”

The manager remembered where he was and heard himself say, “Do you have reservations, sir?”

“Dear me, no,” said the older man as the others giggled. “We flew in unexpectedly from Taormina,” the tall man with the chiseled features and the moist flower mouth continued. “We were getting so awfully bored, after a long summer, and someone said, Let's have a complete change, let's do something wild. What? I said. Well, where's the most improbable place in the world? Let's name it and go there. Somebody said the North Pole, but that was silly. Then I cried, Ireland! Everyone fell down. When the pandemonium ceased we just scrambled for the airport. Now sunshine and Sicilian shorelines are like yesterday's lime sherbet to us, all melted to nothing. And here we are to do . . . something
mysterious
!”

“Mysterious?” asked the manager.

“We don't know what it is,” said the tall man. “But we shall know it when we see it, or it happens, or perhaps we shall have to make it happen, right, cohorts?”

The cohorts responded with something vaguely like tee-hee.

“Perhaps,” said the manager, with good grace, “if you gave me some idea what you're looking for in Ireland, I could point out—”

“Goodness, no,” said the tall man. “We shall just plummet forth with our intuitions scarved about our necks, taking the wind as 'twere and see what we shall tune in on. When we solve the mystery and find what we came to find, you will know of our discovery by the ululations and cries of awe and wonder emanating from our small tourist group.”

“You can say
that
again,” said the hall porter, under his breath.

“Well, comrades, let us sign in.”

The leader of the encampment reached for a scratchy hotel pen, found it filthy, and flourished forth his own absolutely pure 14-carat solid gold pen with which in an obscure but rather pretty cerise calligraphy he inscribed the name
DAVID
followed by
SNELL
followed by dash and ending with
ORKNEY
. Beneath, he added “and friends.”

The manager watched the pen, fascinated, and once more recalled his position in all this. “But, sir, I haven't said if we have space—”

“Oh, surely you must, for six miserable wanderers in sore need of respite from overfriendly airline stewardesses—one room would do it!”

“One?” said the manager, aghast.

“We wouldn't mind the crowd, would we, chums?” asked the older man, not looking at his friends.

No, they wouldn't mind.

“Well,” said the manager, uneasily fumbling at the registry. “We just happen to have two adjoining—”

“Perfecto!”
cried David Snell-Orkney.

And the registration finished, the manager behind the desk and the visitors from a far place stood regarding each other in a prolonged silence. At last the manager blurted, “Porter! Front! Take these gentlemen's luggage—”

But just then the hall porter ran over to look at the floor.

Where there was no luggage.

“No, no, none.” David Snell-Orkney airily waved his hand. “We travel light. We're here only for twenty-four hours, or perhaps only twelve, with a change of underwear stuffed in our overcoats. Then back to Sicily and warm twilights. If you want me to pay in advance—”