Bradbury, Ray - Chapbook 18 (4 page)

 
          
Harris felt his jaw pressed violently
in all directions, his tongue depressed as with a spoon, his throat clogged. He
gasped for breath. Whistle. He couldn’t breathe! Something squirmed,
corkscrewed his cheeks out, bursting his jaws. Like a hot-water douche, something
squirted into his sinuses, his ears clanged! ‘
Ahhhh
!’
shrieked Harris, gagging. His head, its carapaces
riven
,
shattered, hung loose. Agony shot fire through his lungs.

 
          
Harris could breathe again,
momentarily. His watery eyes sprang wide. He shouted. His ribs, like sticks
picked up and bundled, were loosened in him. Pain! He fell to the floor,
wheezing out his hot breath.

 
          
Lights flickered in his senseless
eyeballs,
he felt his limbs swiftly cast loose and free.
Through streaming eyes he saw the parlor.

 
          
The room was empty.

 
          
‘M.
Munigant
?
In God’s name, where are you, M.
Munigant
? Come help
me!’

 
          
M.
Munigant
was gone.

 
          
‘Help!’

 
          
Then he heard it.

 
          
Deep down in the subterranean
fissures of his body, the minute, unbelievable noises; little
smackings
and
twistings
and
little dry chippings and grindings and nuzzling sounds—like a tiny hungry mouse
down in the red-blooded dimness, gnawing ever so earnestly and expertly at what
might have been, but was not, a submerged timber…!

 
          
Clarisse, walking along the sidewalk,
held her head high and marched straight toward her house on
St
James Place
. She was thinking of the Red Cross as
she turned the corner and almost ran into this little dark man who smelled of
iodine.

 
          
Clarisse would have ignored him if it
were not for the fact that as she passed, he took something long, white and
oddly familiar from his coat and proceeded to chew on it, as on a peppermint
stick. Its end devoured, his extraordinary tongue darted within the white
confection, sucking out the filling, making contented noises. He was still
crunching his goody as she proceeded up the sidewalk to her house, turned the
doorknob and walked in.

 
          
‘Darling?’ she called, smiling
around. ‘Darling, where are you?’ She shut the door, walked down the hall and into
the living room. ‘Darling…’

 
          
She stared at the floor for twenty
seconds, trying to understand.

 
          
She screamed.

 
          
Outside in the sycamore darkness, the
little man pierced a long white stick with intermittent holes; then, softly, sighing,
his lips puckered, played a little sad tune upon the improvised instrument to
accompany the shrill and awful singing of Clarisse’s voice as she stood in the
living room.

 
          
Many times as a little girl Clarisse
had run on the beach sands, stepped on a jellyfish and screamed. It was not so
bad, finding an intact, gelatin-skinned jellyfish in one’s living room. One
could step back from it.

 
          
It was when the jellyfish
called
you by name…