Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (8 page)

 
          
 
"A lovely bit of ceramics, Acton. Go
ahead—handle it."

 
          
 
He took out the linen and wiped it and wiped
the chairs and tables and doorknobs and windowpanes and ledges and drapes and
wiped the floor and found the kitchen, panting, breathing violently, and took
off his vest and adjusted his gloves and wiped the glittering chromium. ...
"I want to show you my house, Acton," said Huxley. "Come along.
. . ." And he wiped all the utensils and the silver faucets and the mixing
bowls, for now he had forgotten what he had touched and what he had not. Huxley
and he had lingered here, in the kitchen, Huxley prideful of its array,
covering his nervousness at the presence of a potential killer, perhaps wanting
to be near the knives if they were needed. They had idled, touched this, that,
something else—there was no remembering what or how much or how many—and he
finished the kitchen and came through the hall into the room where Huxley lay.

 
          
 
He cried out.

 
          
 
He had forgotten to wash the fourth wall of
the room! And while he was gone the little spiders had popped from the fourth
unwashed wall and swarmed over the already clean walls, dirtying them again! On
the ceilings, from the chandelier, in the corners, on the floor, a million
little whorled webs hung billowing at his scream! Tiny, tiny little webs, no
bigger than, ironically, your—finger!

 
          
 
As he watched, the webs were woven over the
picture frame, the fruit bowl, the body, the floor. Prints wielded the paper
knife, pulled out drawers, touched the table top, touched, touched, touched
everything everywhere.

 
          
 
He polished the floor wildly, wildly. He
rolled the body over and cried on it while he washed it, and got up and walked
over and polished the fruit at the bottom of the bowl. Then he put a chair
under the chandelier and got up and polished each little hanging fire of it,
shaking it like a crystal tambourine until it tilted bellwise in the air. Then
he leaped off the chair and gripped the doorknobs and got up on other chairs
and swabbed the walls higher and higher and ran to the kitchen and got a broom
and wiped the webs down from the ceiling and polished the bottom fruit of the
bowl and washed the body and doorknobs and silverware and found the hall
banister and followed the banister upstairs.

 
          
 
Three o'clock! Everywhere, with a fierce,
mechanical intensity, clocks ticked! There were twelve rooms downstairs and
eight above. He figured the yards and yards of space and time needed. One
hundred chairs, six sofas, twenty-seven tables, six radios.
And
under and on top and behind.
He yanked furniture out away from walls
and, sobbing, wiped them clean of years-old dust, and staggered and followed
the banister up, up the stairs, handling, erasing, rubbing, polishing, because
if he left one little print it would reproduce and make a million more!—and the
job would have to be done all over again and now it was four o'clock! —and his
arms ached and his eyes were swollen and staring and he moved sluggishly about,
on strange legs, his head down, his arms moving, swabbing and rubbing, bedroom
by bedroom, closet by closet. . . .

 
          
 
They found him at six-thirty that morning.

 
          
 
In the attic.

 
          
 
The entire house was polished to a brilliance.
Vases shone like glass stars. Chairs were burnished. Bronzes, brasses, and
coppers were all aglint. Floors sparkled. Banisters gleamed.

 
          
 
Everything glittered. Everything shone,
everything was bright!

           
 
They found him in the attic, polishing the old
trunks and the old frames and the old chairs and the old carriages and toys and
music boxes and vases and cutlery and rocking horses and dusty Civil War coins.
He was half through the attic when the police officer walked up behind him with
a gun.

 
          
 
"Done!"

 
          
 
On the way out of the house Acton polished the
front doorknob with his handkerchief and slammed it in triumph!

 
          
 
She took the great iron spoon and the
mummified frog and gave it a bash and made dust of it, and talked to the dust
while she ground it in her stony fists quickly. Her beady gray bird-eyes
flickered at the cabin. Each time she looked, a head in the small thin window
ducked as if she'd fired off a shotgun.

 
          
 
"Charlie!" cried Old Lady. "You
come outa there! I'm fixing a lizard magic to unlock that rusty door! You come
out now and I won't make the earth shake or the trees go up in fire or the sun
set at high noon!"

 
          
 
The only sound was the warm mountain light on
the high turpentine trees, a tufted squirrel chittering around and around on a
green-furred log, the ants moving in a fine brown line at Old Lady's bare,
blue-veined feet.

 
          
 
“You been starving in there two days, dam
you!" she panted, chiming the spoon against a flat rock, causing the plump
gray miracle bag to swing at her waist. Sweating sour, she rose and marched at
the cabin, bearing the pulverized flesh. "Come out, now!" She flicked
a pinch of powder inside the lock. "All right, I'll come get you!"
she wheezed.

           
 
She spun the knob with one walnut-colored
hand, first one way, then the other. "O Lord," she intoned,
"fling this door wide!"

 
          
 
When nothing flung, she added yet another
philter and held her breath. Her long blue untidy skirt rustled as she peered
into her bag of darkness to see if she had any scaly monsters there, any charm
finer than the frog she'd killed months ago for such a crisis as this.

 
          
 
She heard Charlie breathing against the door.
His folks had pranced off into some Ozark town early this week, leaving him,
and he'd run almost six miles to Old Lady for company—she was by way of being
an aunt or cousin or some such, and he didn't mind her fashions.

 
          
 
But then, two days ago. Old Lady, having
gotten used to the boy around, decided to keep him for convenient company. She pricked
her thin shoulder bone, drew out three blood pearls, spat wet over her right
elbow, tromped on a crunch-cricket, and at the same instant clawed her left
hand at Charlie, crying, "My son you are, you are my son, for all
eternity!"

 
          
 
Charlie, bounding like a startled hare, had
crashed off into the bush, heading for home.

 
          
 
But Old Lady, skittering quick as a gingham
lizard, cornered him in a dead end, and Charlie holed up in this old hermit's
cabin and wouldn't come out, no matter how she whammed door, window, or
knothole with amber-colored fist or trounced her ritual fires, explaining to
him that he was certainly her son now, all right.

 
          
 
"Charlie, you there?" she asked,
cutting holes in the door planks with her bright little slippery eyes.

 
          
 
"I'm all of me here," he replied
finally, very tired.

 
          
 
Maybe he would fall out on the ground any
moment. She wrestled the knob hopefully. Perhaps a pinch too much frog powder
had grated the lock wrong. She always overdid or underdid her miracles, she
mused angrily, never doing them just exact, Devil take it!

 
          
 
"Charlie, I only wants someone to
night-prattle to, someone to warm hands with at the fire. Someone to fetch
kindling for me mornings, and fight off the spunks that come creeping of early
fogs! I ain't got no fetchings on you for myself, son, just for your
company." She smacked her lips. "Tell you what, Charles, you come out
and I teach you things!"

 
          
 
"What things?" he suspicioned.

 
          
 
"Teach you how to buy cheap, sell high.
Catch a snow weasel, cut off its head, carry it warm in your hind pocket.
There!"

 
          
 
"Aw," said Charlie.

 
          
 
She made haste. "Teach you to make
yourself shotproof. So if anyone bangs at you with a gun, nothing
happens."

 
          
 
When Charlie stayed silent, she gave him the
secret in a high fluttering whisper. "Dig and stitch mouse-ear roots on
Friday during full moon, and wear 'em around your neck in a white silk."

 
          
 
"You're crazy!" Charlie said.

 
          
 
"Teach you how to stop blood or make
animals stand frozen or make blind horses see, all them things I'll teach you!
Teach you to cure a swelled-up cow and unbewitch a goat. Show you how to make
yourself invisible!"

 
          
 
"Oh," said Chariee.

 
          
 
Old Lady's heart beat like a Salvation
tambourine.

 
          
 
The knob turned from the other side.

 
          
 
"You," said Charlie, "are
funning me."

 
          
 
"No, I'm not," exclaimed Old Lady.
"Oh, Charlie, why, I'll make you like a window, see right through you.
Why, child, you'll be surprised!"

 
          
 
"Real invisible?"

 
          
 
"Real invisible!"

 
          
 
"You won't fetch onto me if I walk
out?"

 
          
 
"Won't touch a bristle of you, son."

 
          
 
"Well," he drawled reluctantly,
"all right."

 
          
 
The door opened. Charlie stood in his bare
feet, head down, chin against chest. "Make me invisible," he said.

 
          
 
"First we got to catch us a bat,"
said Old Lady. "Start lookin'!"

 
          
 
She gave him some jerky beef for his hunger
and watched him climb a tree. He went high up and high up and it was nice
seeing him there and it was nice having him here and all about after

 
          
 
So many years alone with nothing to say good
morning to but bird-droppings and silvery snail tracks.

 
          
 
Pretty soon a bat with a broken wing fluttered
down out of the tree. Old Lady snatched it up, beating warm and shrieking
between its porcelain white teeth, and Charlie dropped down after it, hand upon
clenched hand, yelling.

 
          
 
That night, with the moon nibbling at the
spiced pine cones. Old Lady extracted a long silver needle from under her wide
blue dress. Gumming her excitement and secret anticipation, she sighted up the dead
bat and held the cold needle steady-steady.

 
          
 
She had long ago realized that her miracles,
despite all perspirations and salts and sulphurs, failed. But she had always
dreamt that one day the miracles might start functioning, might spring up in
crimson flowers and silver stars to prove that God had forgiven her for her
pink body and her pink thoughts and her warm body and her warm thoughts as a
young miss. But so far God had made no sign and said no word, but nobody knew
this except Old Lady.

 
          
 
"Ready?" she asked Charlie, who
crouched cross-kneed, wrapping his pretty legs in long goose-pimpled arms, his
mouth open, making teeth. "Ready," he whispered, shivering.

 
          
 
"There!" She plunged the needle deep
in the bat's right eye. "So!"

 
          
 
"Oh!" screamed Charlie, wadding up
his face.

 
          
 
"Now I wrap it in gingham, and here, put
it in your pocket, keep it there, bat and all. Go on!"

 
          
 
He pocketed the charm.

 
          
 
"Charlie!" she shrieked fearfully.
"Charlie, where are you? I can't see you, child!"

 
          
 
"Here!" He jumped so the light ran
in red streaks up his body. "I'm here. Old Lady!" He stared wildly at
his arms, legs, chest, and toes. "I'm here!"

 
          
 
Her eyes looked as if they were watching a
thousand fireflies crisscrossing each other in the wild night air.

 
          
 
"Charlie, oh, you went fast! Quick as a
hummingbird! Oh, Charlie, come back to me!"

 
          
 
"But I'm here!" he wailed.

 
          
 
"Where?"

 
          
 
"By the fire, the fire! And-and I can see
myself. I'm not m-visible at all!"

 
          
 
Old Lady rocked on her lean flanks.
"Course you can see you! Every invisible person knows himself. Otherwise,
how could you eat, walk, or get around places? Charlie, touch me. Touch me so I
know you."

 
          
 
Uneasily he put out a hand.

 
          
 
She pretended to jerk, startled, at his touch.
"Ah!"

 
          
 
"You mean to say you can't find me?"
he asked. "Truly?"

 
          
 
"Not the least half rump of you!"

 
          
 
She found a tree to stare at, and stared at it
with shining eyes, careful not to glance at him. "Why, I sure did a trick
that time!" She sighed with wonder. "Whooeee. Quickest invisible I
ever made! Charlie. Charlie, how you feel?"

 
          
 
"Like creek water—all stirred."

 
          
 
"You'll settle."

 
          
 
Then after a pause she added, "Well, what
you going to do now, Charlie, since you're invisible?"

 
          
 
All sorts of things shot through his brain,
she could tell. Adventures stood up and danced like hell-fire in his eyes, and
his mouth, just hanging, told what it meant to be a boy who imagined himself
like the mountain winds. In a cold dream he said, "I'll run across wheat
fields, climb snow mountains, steal white chickens off'n farms. I'll kick pink
pigs when they ain't looking. I'll pinch pretty girls' legs when they sleep,
snap their garters in schoolrooms." Charlie looked at Old Lady, and from
the shiny tips of her eyes she saw something wicked shape his face. "And
other things I'll do, I'll do, I will," he said.

 
          
 
"Don't try nothing on me," warned
Old Lady. "I'm brittle as spring ice and I don't take handling."
Then: "What about your folks?"

 
          
 
"My folks?"

 
          
 
“You can't fetch yourself home looking like
that. Scare the inside ribbons out of them. Your mother’d faint straight back
like timber falling. Think they want you about the house to stumble over and
your ma have to call you every three minutes, even though you're in the room
next her elbow?"

 
          
 
Charlie had not considered it. He sort of
simmered down and whispered out a little "Gosh" and felt of his long
bones carefully.

 
          
 
"You'll be mighty lonesome. People
looking through you like a water glass, people knocking you aside because they
didn't reckon you to be underfoot. And women, Charlie, women — "

 
          
 
He swallowed. "What about women?"

 
          
 
“No woman will be giving you a second stare.
And no woman wants to be kissed by a boy's mouth they can't even find!

 
          
 
Charlie dug his bare toe in the soil
contemplatively. He pouted. "Well, I'll stay invisible, anyway, for a
spell. I'll have me some fun. I'll just be pretty careful, is all. I'll stay
out from in front of wagons and horses and Pa. Pa shoots at the nariest
sound." Charlie blinked. "Why, with me invisible, someday Pa might
just up and fill me with buckshot, thinkin' I was a hill squirrel in the
dooryard. Oh . . ."