The Lost Bradbury (2 page)

Then they set the pendulum swinging and stood back. Slowly, very slowly, it rocked back and forth, increasing in speed. Layeville pounded futilely at the glass, screaming. The faces became blurred, were only tearing pink blobs before him.

On and on like this—for how long?

He hadn’t minded it so much at first, that first night. He couldn’t sleep, but it was not uncomfortable. The lights of the city were comets with tails that pelted from right to left like foaming fireworks. But as the night wore on, he felt a gnawing in his stomach, that grew worse. He got very sick and vomited. The next day he couldn’t eat anything.

They never stopped the pendulum, not once. Instead of letting him eat quietly, they slid the food down the stem of the pendulum in a special tube, in little round parcels that plunked at his feet. The first time he attempted eating he was unsuccessful, it wouldn’t stay down. In desperation, he hammered against the cold glass with his fists until they bled, crying hoarsely, but he heard nothing but his own weak, fear-wracked words muffled in his ears.

After some time had elapsed he got so that he could eat, even sleep while traveling back and forth this way. They allowed him small glass loops on the floor and leather thongs with which he tied himself down at night and slept a soundless slumber without sliding.

People came to look at him. He accustomed his eyes to the swift flight and followed their curiosity-etched faces, first close by in the middle, then far away to the right, middle again, and to the left.

He saw the faces gaping, speaking soundless words, laughing and pointing at the prisoner of time traveling forever nowhere. But after awhile the town people vanished and it
was only tourists who came and read the sign that said: THIS IS THE PRISONER OF TIME—JOHN LAYEVILLE—WHO KILLED THIRTY OF THE WORLD’S FINEST SCIENTISTS! The school children, on the electrical moving sidewalk, stopped to stare in childish awe. THE PRISONER OF TIME!

Often he thought of that title. God, but it was ironic, that he should invent a time machine and have it converted into a clock, and that he, in its pendulum, would mete out the years—traveling
with
time.

He couldn’t remember how long it had been. The days and nights ran together in his memory. His unshaven cheeks had developed a short beard and then ceased growing. How long a time? How long?

Once a day they sent down a
tube after he ate and vacuumed up the cell, disposing of any wastes. Once in a great while they sent him a book, but that was all.

* * * *

The robots took care of him now. Evidently the humans thought it a waste of time to bother over their prisoner. The robots brought the food, cleaned the pendulum cell, oiled the machinery, worked tirelessly from dawn until the sun crimsoned westward. At this rate it could keep on for centuries.

But one day as Layeville stared at the city and its people in the blur of ascent and descent, he perceived a swarming darkness that expanded in the heavens. The city rocket ships that crossed the sky on pillars of scarlet flame darted helplessly, frightenedly for shelter. The people ran like water splashed on tiles, screaming soundlessly. Alien creatures fluttered down, great gelatinous masses of black that sucked out the life of all. They clustered thickly over everything, glistening momentarily upon the pendulum and its body above, over the whirling wheels and roaring bowels of the metal creature once a Time Machine. An hour later they dwindled away over the horizon and never came back. The city was dead.

Up and down, Layeville went on his journey to nowhere, in his prison, a strange smile etched his lips. In a week or more, he knew, he would be the only man alive on earth.

Elation flamed within him. This was
his
victory! Where the other men had planned the pendulum as a prison it had been an asylum against annihilation now!

Day after day the robots still came, worked, unabated by the visitation of the black horde. They came every week, brought food, tinkered, checked, oiled, cleaned. Up and down, back and forth—THE PENDULUM!…a thousand years must have passed before the sky again showed life over the dead earth. A silvery bullet of space dropped from the clouds, steaming, and hovered over the dead city where now only a few solitary robots performed their tasks. In the gathering dusk the lights of the metropolis glimmered on. Other automations appeared on the rampways like spiders on twisting webs, scurrying about, checking, piling, working in their crisp mechanical manner.

And the creatures in the alien projectile found the time mechanism, the pendulum swinging up and down, back and forth, up and down. The robots still cared for it, oiled it, tinkering.

A thousand years this pendulum had swung. Made of glass the round disc at the bottom was, but now when food was lowered by the robots through the tube it lay untouched. Later, when the vacuum tube came down and cleaned out the cell it took that very food with it.

Back and forth—up and down.

The visitors saw something inside the pendulum. Pressed closely to the glass side of the cell was the face of a whitened skull—a skeleton visage that stared out over the city with empty sockets and an enigmatic smile wreathing its lipless teeth.

Back and forth—up and down.

The strangers from the void stopped the pendulum in its course, ceased its swinging and cracked open the glass cell, exposing the skeleton to view. And in the gleaming light of the stars, the skull face continued its weird grinning as if it knew that it had conquered something. Had conquered time.

The Prisoner of Time, Layeville, had indeed traveled along the centuries.

And the journey was at an end.

 
LUANA THE LIVING

“Luana the Living”
was first published in 1940 in
Polaris
, a piece that editors identified as one of the few serious fantasies that Bradbury published before he came to discover his own writing style. It was later on included in the 1973 British anthology of
Horrors in Hiding
.

* * * *

Before I conclude this mundane existence, bid the terrors of the alien farewell, and take my leave of all things light and dark, I must tell to someone the reason for my suicide. A horror clings malignantly to my brain, and far back in the recesses of the subconscious it burns like the pale flame of a candle in the tombs of the dead. It steals my strength and leaves me weak and trembling like a child. Try as I will, I can not rid myself of it, for the night of the full Moon forces its return.

I am seated here in the dark, silent room waiting. A few feet distant stands the huge grandfather clock that has been in the family for generations, its gaunt face glowing faintly in the blackness, striking out the hours with a low and gentle tone. The ancient timepiece shall accomplish the action I dare not trust to my shaking hand, for at the last stroke of midnight, fifteen minutes hence, a lever shall press the trigger of the revolver bolted to its side, and send a bullet crashing through my heart. While I wait I shall—I must—unburden myself of my tale.

I am an adventurer, my life not one of common experience. But now, at one score and ten, I am an old man, with silver hair and trembling fingers. Fear has chiseled its effects in my face through sunken eye and wrinkles like those in the skin of a mummy. I am a spent and tired ancient, ready to close my coffin lid down and rest for eternity.

Let me go back a year. Let me seek out the days that have passed, so short a time away, yet so hellishly removed by the constant torture that has made twelve months seem like a century.

In India, back along the mountainous spine of the Himalayas, in a dark region where tigers prowled, I had been deserted by my natives who had babbled of some superstitious legend about “Luana.” As I broke my way through a thick wall of brambles, I came across a hirsute individual who squatted cross-legged beneath a tree, puffing gently on his opium pipe. Hoping to gain a guide, I accosted him, but received no answer.

I looked into his eyes, small almond holes in the midst of converging wrinkles, and saw no iris or pupil, just a small expanse of leaden flesh as if the eyeballs had been rolled back in hypnotic sleep by the opium. And he said no word, but swung gently from side to side like a sapling in the summer wind, spurts of smoke blowing from his lips. In a rage at his silence, I shook him until the pipe fell from his mouth. His jaw sprang down and his lips curled back revealing a row of sharp, yellow teeth. My stomach revolted at what I saw. He could not talk, this stranger, for his tongue was blue and shriveled like a dried fig which someone had slit open, its blood withdrawn. A dreamlike gibberish issued from far in his throat and I let him loose. Immediately the hands fumbled about on the ground, recovered the pipe, and replaced it in the mouth. He continued his tranquil puffing, blind and speechless, and I withdrew from the vicinity in haste.

For the remainder of the day I cut my way through jungle never explored by white man. Perishing from thirst and hunger, I tried unsuccessfully to follow barely discernible animal paths to a water hole. When I tried to return to the point where I had hacked my way through the bramble barrier, both my path and the strange blind man had vanished. It was almost as if the brambles had grown together in the few scant hours. And when I saw the cut I had made in a tree earlier, I realized the brambles had grown, for the cut had moved upward visibly. This was a land of insanely growing jungle, where plants sprouted, grew, and died in a week or two. The carpet of vegetation was feet thick and strangely resilient, and the unpleasant jungle was hot and broad and quiet. Not even the bestial cry of a tiger broke the oppressive silence, which pressed its fingers in upon me until I shouted to please my ears, to shock myself back into sanity. When I could no longer stand the strange lack of noise, I would run through brush and mire, slipping and falling and sliding until I was bathed in perspiration, then I would sit and rest and watch the mud on my shoes dry and form into crooked cakes.

And still no sound. There was some grim thing that fettered this tree-bounded terrain in soundless monotony.

As the sun floated briefly on the ocean of leaves and branches and vanished in the West, I realized that this was a place apart, undisturbed by the outer world which it repulsed by its wall of thorns. There were few water holes and animals in the land of silence, and the natives were furtive and rarely seen. I dimly recalled strange tales of them and this region, about practices that took place in the light of the full Moon.

As twilight came the cavern of space sprouted points of light that were the stars. Hours passed and the hushed night became sprinkled with more and more of the silver points until a veritable blanket of light diffused the dome of heaven. As I sat and gazed upward through the trees toward them, I sensed a movement about me. It seemed that the whole forest was stirring to life. Little leaves slithered under foot, slender saplings wavered and shook, and the mighty jungle giants themselves bestirred and fluttered their leaves to the ground. In the dark it seemed that things grew threefold the speed of daylight, shot up and bloomed by some mysterious means. The trees broke the silence with a faint rustling and the underbrush writhed with evil life. I arose and moved on as
through a bog, the rot under foot hindering me until I fell forward and sprawled with my face in the soil.

Suddenly as I lay there, it seemed that tendrils swept up and clung to me, caressed my neck in an unrelenting grip until I strangled and gasped for air. Knotted vines wrapped swiftly on my forehead and pressed my temples until a stabbing pain flickered through me. I tore at my throat, freeing it with feeble gestures of the clutching things, and staggered to my feet. Desperately I stumbled on, until my foot struck water unexpectedly, and I ventured forward until the chill liquid reached my knees.

My terrors was forgotten as I dropped to my knees in the scummy water and brushed aside the web-like debris. Ripples quivered under hand, and as I bent I saw the stars reflected in its surface like dancing fireflies. I gulped in huge mouthfuls and wetted my forehead and my temples to ease the heated pain that dwelt there. Then I lay back and floated in the pool, watching the water caress my tattered boots and puttees.

How long I lay and relaxed I know not. When I emerged, dripping, I had found a new strength that grew by the minute. I stripped the torn shirt from me and soaked it in the water, then twisted it and tied it about my head so that its moisture would keep me comfortable for a while. The water clung to my skin, shimmering like a grayish slime.

Intrigued by the dark now, my terror vanished, and I moved forward among the leaping tendrils. Tiny rustlings, the secretive murmuring of water and soil, the high-pitched crackle of branches sounded and the jungle was a living, breathing creature that I walked upon. Then before me I could see a clearing where dark shapes poised in a circle in its gloomy depth.

I stopped suddenly, as if frozen by a sudden blast of wintry wind. I squinted at the shapes crouching on the ground in the clearing. It seemed that I saw a double score of stone statues imbedded in the soil, squatting and waiting, malignant. In the center crouched another presence, alone on the sodden surface.

A light flecked the tree tops a moment later. As the seconds passed by the full sphere of the Moon ascended the star-sprinkled vault inch by inch. It saturated the clearing with silver and brought forth the crouching shapes like silhouettes on the jungle floor.