Mark Twain's Medieval Romance (25 page)

She looked. She gazed out the window for a full half-minute.

“Why there’s no one there at all! Nobody! There was no one following me at all. Nobody running after me.” She caught her breath and almost laughed at herself. “It stands to reason. If a man
had
been following me, he’d have
caught
me. I’m not a fast runner. There’s no one on the porch or in the yard. How silly of me! I wasn’t running from anything except
me
. That ravine was safer than safe. Just the same, though, it’s nice to be home. Home’s the really good warm safe place, the
only
place to be.”

She put her hand out to the light switch and stopped.

“What?” she asked. “What,
what?”

Behind her, in the black living room, someone cleared his throat …

AT MIDNIGHT, IN THE MONTH OF JUNE

R
AY
B
RADBURY

It is Frederic Dannay, one half of the Ellery Queen collaboration, who we have to thank for the following story. After reading “The Whole Town’s Sleeping,” Dannay suggested that Bradbury write a sequel for
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
. This was a daunting request, according to the author.

Having brought the story to the point where the reader expected the usual denouement, Bradbury deliberately left it hanging, leaving it to the reader to decide if The Lonely One will strangle Lavinia, as he apparently had strangled other young women, or even, come to think of it, if The Lonely One is a man, since the figure is described merely as “someone.” And what was his demented motive for committing these horrible crimes? Bradbury doesn’t help us here, either.

So should we anticipate a nice, tidy, ending, as creators of traditional detective stories have taught us to expect, or will we still be left in the dark, as befits a tale set at midnight. Read on and find out.

“At Midnight, in the Month of June” was first published in the June 1954 issue of
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
.

AT MIDNIGHT, IN THE MONTH OF JUNE

BY
R
AY
B
RADBURY

H
E HAD BEEN WAITING
a long time in the summer night, as the darkness pressed warmer to the earth and the stars turned slowly over the sky. He sat in total darkness, his hands lying easily on the arms of the Morris chair. He heard the town clock strike 9 and 10 and 11, and then at last 12. The breeze from an open back window flowed through the midnight house in an unlit stream, that touched him like a dark rock where he sat silently watching the front door—silently watching.

At midnight, in the month of June
…

The cool night poem by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe slid over his mind like the waters of a shadowed creek.

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep
,

Which is enduring, so be deep!

He moved down the black shapeless halls of the house, stepped out of the back window, feeling the town locked away in bed, in dream, in night. He saw the shining snake of garden hose coiled resiliently in the grass. He turned on the water. Standing alone, watering the flower bed, he imagined himself a conductor leading an orchestra that only night-strolling dogs might hear, passing on their way to nowhere with strange white smiles. Very carefully he planted both feet and his tall weight into the mud beneath the window, making deep, well-outlined prints. He stepped inside again and walked, leaving mud, down the absolutely unseen hall, his hands seeing for him.

Through the front-porch window he made out the faint outline of a lemonade glass, one-third full, sitting on the porch rail where
she
had left it. He trembled quietly.

Now, he could feel her coming home. He could feel her moving across town, far away, in the summer night. He shut his eyes and put his mind out to find her; and felt her moving along in the dark; he knew just where she stepped down from a curb and crossed a street, and up on a curb and tack-tacking, tack-tacking along under the June elms and the last of the lilacs, with a friend. Walking the empty desert of night, he was she. He felt a purse in his hands. He felt long hair prickle his neck, and his mouth turn greasy with lipstick. Sitting still, he was walking, walking, walking on home after midnight.

“Good night!”

He heard but did not hear the voices, and she was coming nearer, and now she was only a mile away and now only a matter of a thousand yards, and now she was sinking, like a beautiful white lantern on an invisible wire, down into the cricket and frog and water-sounding ravine. And he knew the texture of the wooden ravine stairs as if, a boy he was rushing down them, feeling the rough grain and the dust and the leftover heat of the day …

He put his hands out on the air, open. The thumbs of his hands touched, and then the fingers, so that his hands made a circle, enclosing emptiness, there before him. Then, very slowly, he squeezed his hands tighter and tighter together, his mouth open, his eyes shut.

He stopped squeezing and put his hands, trembling, back on the arms of the chair. He kept his eyes shut.

Long ago, he had climbed, one night, to the top of the courthouse tower fire-escape, and looked out at the silver town, at the town of the moon, and the town of summer. And he had seen all the dark houses with two things in them, people and sleep, the two elements joined in bed and all their tiredness and terror breathed upon the still air, siphoned back quietly, and breathed out again, until that element was purified, the problems and hatreds and horrors of the previous day exorcised long before morning and done away with forever.

He had been enchanted with the hour, and the town, and he had felt very powerful, like the magic man with the marionettes who strung destinies across a stage on spider-threads. On the very top of the courthouse tower he could see the least flicker of leaf turning in the moonlight five miles away; the last light, like a pink pumpkin eye, wink out. The town did not escape his eye—it could do nothing without his knowing its every tremble and gesture.

And so it was tonight. He felt himself a tower with the clock in it pounding slow and announcing hours in a great bronze tone, and gazing upon a town where a woman, hurried or slowed by fitful gusts and breezes of now terror and now self-confidence, took the chalk-white midnight sidewalks home, fording solid avenues of tar and stone, drifting among fresh-cut lawns, and now running, running down the steps, through the ravine, up, up the hill, up the hill!

He heard her footsteps before he really heard them. He heard her gasping before there was a gasping. He fixed his gaze to the lemonade glass outside, on the banister. Then the real sound, the real running, the gasping, echoed wildly outside. He sat up. The footsteps raced across the street, the sidewalk, in a panic. There was a babble, a clumsy stumble up the porch steps, a key racheting the door, a voice yelling in a whisper, praying to itself. “Oh, God, dear God!” Whisper! Whisper! And the woman crashing in the door, slamming it, bolting it, talking, whispering, talking to herself in the dark room.

He felt, rather than saw, her hand move toward the light switch.

He cleared his throat.

S
HE STOOD AGAINST
the door in the dark. If moonlight could have struck in upon her, she would have shimmered like a small pool of water on a windy night. He felt the fine sapphire jewels come out upon her face, and her face all glittering with brine. “Lavinia,” he whispered. Her arms were raised across the door like a crucifix. He heard her mouth open and her lungs push a warmness upon the air. She was a beautiful dim white moth: with the sharp needle point of terror he had her pinned against the wooden door. He could walk all around the specimen, if he wished, and look at her, look at her.

“Lavinia,” he whispered. He heard her heart beating. She did not move.

“It’s me,” he whispered.

“Who?” she said, so faint it was a small pulse-beat in her throat.

“I won’t tell you,” he whispered. He stood perfectly straight in the center of the room. God, but he felt
tall!
Tall and dark and very beautiful to himself, and the way his hands were out before him was as if he might play a piano at any moment, a lovely melody, a waltzing tune. The hands were wet, they felt as if he had dipped them into a bed of mint and cool menthol.

“If I told you who I am, you might not be afraid,” he whispered. “I want you to be afraid. Are you afraid?”

She said nothing. She breathed out and in, out and in, a small bellows which, pumped steadily, blew upon her fear and kept it going, kept it alight.

“Why did you go to the show tonight?” he whispered.
“Why
did you go to the show?”

No answer.

He took a step forward, heard her breath take itself like a sword hissing in its sheath.

“Why did you come back through the ravine, alone?” he whispered. “You
did
come back alone, didn’t you? Did you think you’d meet me in the middle of the bridge? Did you hope you’d meet me in the middle of the bridge? Why did you go to the show tonight? Why did you come back through the ravine, alone?”

“I—” she gasped.

“You,” he whispered.

“No—” she cried, in a whisper.

“Lavinia,” he said. He took another step.

“Please,” she said.

“Open the door. Get out. And run,” he whispered.

She did not move.

“Lavinia, open the door.”

She began to whimper in her throat.

“Run,” he said.

In moving he felt something touch his knee. He pushed, something tilted in space and fell over, a table, a basket, and a half-dozen unseen balls of yarn tumbled like cats in the dark, rolling softly. In the one moonlit space on the floor beneath the window, like a metal sign pointing, lay the sewing shears. They were winter ice in his hand. He held them out to her suddenly, through the still air. “Here,” he whispered. He touched them to her hand. She snatched her hand back. “Here,” he urged.

“Take this,” he said, after a pause.

He opened her fingers that were already dead and cold to the touch, and stiff and strange to manage, and he pressed the scissors into them. “Now,” he said.

He looked out at the moonlit sky for a long moment, and when he glanced back it was some time before he could see her in the dark.

“I waited,” he said. “But that’s the way it’s always been. I waited for the others, too. But they all came looking for me, finally. It was that easy. Five lovely ladies in the last two years. I waited for them in the ravine, in the country, by the lake, everywhere I waited, and they came out to find me, and found me. It was always nice, the next day, reading the newspapers. And you went looking tonight, I know, or you wouldn’t have come back alone through the ravine. Did you scare yourself there, and run? Did you think I was down there waiting for you? You should have
heard
yourself running up the walk! Through the door! And
locking
it! You thought you were safe inside, home at last, safe, safe, safe, didn’t you?”

She held the scissors in one dead hand, and she began to cry. He saw the merest gleam, like water upon the wall of a dim cave. He heard the sounds she made.

“No,” he whispered. “You have the scissors. Don’t cry.”

She cried. She did not move at all. She stood there, shivering, her head back against the door, beginning to slide down the length of the door toward the floor.

“Don’t cry,” he whispered.

“I don’t like to hear you cry,” he said. “I can’t stand to hear that.”

He held his hands out and moved them through the air until one of them touched her cheek. He felt the wetness of that cheek, he felt her warm breath touch his palm like a summer moth. Then he said only one more thing:

“Lavinia,” he said, gently, “Lavinia.”

H
OW CLEARLY HE
remembered the old nights in the old times, in the times when he was a boy and them all running, and running, and hiding and hiding, and playing hide-and-seek. In the first spring nights and in the warm summer nights and in the late summer evenings and in those first sharp autumn nights when doors were shutting, early and porches were empty except for blowing leaves. The game of hide-and-seek went on as long as there was sun to see by, or the rising snow-crusted moon. Their feet upon the green lawns were like the scattered throwing of soft peaches and crabapples, and the counting of the Seeker with his arms cradling his buried head, chanting to the night: five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty … And the sound of thrown apples fading, the children all safely closeted in tree or bush-shade, under the latticed porches with the clever dogs minding not to wag their tails and give their secret away. And the counting done: eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five, a hundred!

Ready or not, here I come!
And the Seeker running out through the town wilderness to find the Hiders, and the Hiders keeping their secret laughter in their mouths, like precious June strawberries, with the help of clasped hands. And the Seeker seeking after the smallest heartbeat in the high elm tree or the glint of a dog’s eye in a bush, or a small water sound of laughter which could not help but burst out as the Seeker ran right on by and did not see the shadow within the shadow …

He moved into the bathroom of the quiet house, thinking all this, enjoying the clear rush, the tumultuous gushing of memories like a water-falling of the mind over a steep precipice, falling and falling toward the bottom of his head.

God, how secret and tall they had felt, hidden away. God, how the shadows mothered and kept them, sheathed in their own triumph. Glowing with perspiration how they crouched like idols and thought they might hide
forever!
While the silly Seeker went pelting by on his way to failure and inevitable frustration.

Sometimes the Seeker stopped right
at
your tree and peered up at you crouched there in your invisible warm wings, in your great colorless windowpane bat wings, and said, “I
see
you there!” But you said nothing. “You’re
up
there all right.” But you said nothing. “Come on
down!
But not a word, only a victorious Cheshire smile. And doubt coming over the Seeker below. “It is
you
, isn’t it?” The backing off and away. “Aw, I
know
you’re up there!” No answer. Only the tree sitting in the night and shaking quietly, leaf upon leaf. And the Seeker, afraid of the dark within darkness, loping away to seek easier game, something to be named and certain of. “All right for
you!”