And it was in that time, in one of those lonely years when the fogs never ended and the winds never stopped their laments, that riding the old red trolley, the high-bucketing thunder, one night I met up with Death’s friend and didn’t know it.
It was a raining night, with me reading a book in the back of the old, whining, roaring railcar on its way from one empty confetti-tossed transfer station to the next. Just me and the big, aching wooden car and the conductor up front slamming the brass controls and easing the brakes and letting out the hell-steam when needed.
And the man down the aisle who somehow had got there without my noticing.
I became aware of him finally because of him swaying, swaying, standing there behind me for a long time, as if undecided because there were forty empty seats and late at night it is hard with so much emptiness to decide which one to take. But finally I heard him sit and I knew he was there because I could smell him like the tidelands coming in across the fields. On top of the smell of his clothes, there was the odor of too much drink taken in too little time.
I did not look back at him. I learned long ago, looking only encourages.
I shut my eyes and kept my head firmly turned away. It didn’t work.
“Oh,” the man moaned.
I could feel him strain forward in his seat. I felt his hot breath on my neck. I held on to my knees and sank away.
“Oh,” he moaned, even louder. It was like someone falling off a cliff, asking to be saved, or someone swimming far out in the storm, wanting to be seen.
“Ah!”
It was raining hard now as the big red trolley bucketed across a midnight stretch of meadow-grass and the rain banged the windows, drenching away the sight of open fields. We sailed through Culver City without seeing the film studio and ran on, the great car heaving, the floorboard whining underfoot, the empty seats creaking, the train whistle screaming.
And a blast of terrible air from behind me as the unseen man cried, “Death!”
The train whistle cut across his voice so he had to start over.
“Death—”
Another whistle.
“Death,” said the voice behind me, “is a lonely business.”
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Halloween night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous invitation leads him from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.
Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glades cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead.
As the lights went out and the motions stopped and the wind that blew around the corners of the studio buildings cooled, an incredible melancholy seemed to sweep from the front gate of the living all the way along through twilight avenues toward that high brick wall that separated the two cities within a city. And suddenly the streets were filled with something one could speak of only as remembrance. For while the people had gone away, they left behind them architectures that were haunted by the ghosts of incredible happenings.
For indeed it was the most outrageous city in the world, where anything could happen and always did. Ten thousand deaths had happened here, and when the deaths were done, the people got up, laughing, and strolled away. Whole tenement blocks were set afire and did not burn. Sirens shrieked and police cars careened around corners, only to have the officers peel off their blues, cold-cream their orange pancake makeup, and walk home to small bungalow court apartments out in that great and mostly boring world.
Dinosaurs prowled here, one moment in miniature, and the next looming fifty feet tall above half-clad virgins who screamed on key. From here various Crusades departed to peg their armor and stash their spears at Western Costume down the road. From here Henry the Eighth let drop some heads. From here Dracula wandered as flesh to return as dust. Here also were the Stations of the Cross and a trail of ever-replenished blood as screenwriters groaned by to Calvary carrying a back-breaking load of revisions, pursued by directors with scourges and film cutters with razor-sharp knives. It was from these towers that the Muslim faithful were called to worship each day at sunset as the limousines whispered out with faceless powers behind each window, and peasants averted their gaze, fearing to be struck blind.
This being true, all the more reason to believe that when the sun vanished the old haunts rose up, so that the warm city cooled and began to resemble the marbled orchardways across the wall. By midnight, in that strange peace caused by temperature and wind and the voice of some far church clock, the two cities were at last one. And the night watchman was the only motion prowling along from India to France to prairie Kansas to brownstone New York to Piccadilly to the Spanish Steps, covering twenty thousand miles of territorial incredibility in twenty brief minutes. Even as his counter-part across the wall punched the time clocks around among the monuments, flashed his light on various Arctic angels, read names like credits on tombstones, and sat to have his midnight tea with all that was left of some Keystone Kop. At four in the morning, the watchmen asleep, the two cities, folded and kept, waited for the sun to rise over withered flowers, eroded tombs, and elephant India ripe for overpopulation should God the Director decree and Central Casting deliver.
And so it was on All Hallows Eve, 1954.
Halloween.
My favorite night in all the year.
About the Author
RAY BRADBURY is one of the most celebrated fiction writers of our time. Among his best-known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He has written for the theater and the cinema, including the screenplay for John Huston’s classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and has been nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television’s “The Ray Bradbury Theater” and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. In 2000, Mr. Bradbury was honored by the National Book Foundation with a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Among his most recent works is the critically acclaimed novel From the Dust Returned, which the Los Angeles Times named as “one of the best books of the year.” Mr. Bradbury lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Marguerite.
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Praise for
RAY BRADBURY
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ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD
“Bradbury is an authentic original.”
Time
“He is a wonderful storyteller.... Nearly everything
he has written is sheer poetry.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Almost no one can imagine a time or place without
the fiction of Ray Bradbury. It’s as if he’s always been
with us, his books always fresh on the shelf....
[Bradbury’s] stories and novels are part of the
American language.... Generations of young
readers have been seduced by his
language and imagination.”
Washington Post
“Affecting, voluble, exuberant—by a writer who
feels life’s even better than he can imagine.”
“His collection of twenty-five new short stories ranks
up there with classics such as Fahrenheit 451....
Bradbury is still boldly going where
few writers have gone before.”
Maxim
“Short stories featuring all the Bradbury trade
marks,
including the eerie, the strange, the nostalgic, the
bittersweet, the searching, and the speculative …
One of the country’s most celebrated authors …
Bradbury’s intention here is to focus on simple
truths, enabling the reader to view the world
from fresh perspectives.”
Salt Lake City Deseret News
“Bradbury shines … An author who can turn a
literate phrase like no one else.”
Dallas Morning News
“In this new volume of stories … he maintains his
unflinching dedication to the magic of everyday
life … The pure joy of earthly existence is
something Bradbury has never forgotten.”
Publishers Weekly
“Bradbury spins a gossamer tapestry
with his language.”
Omaha World-Herald
“One of the greats.”
Newsday
“Bradbury is the best author in the entire world.”
Anchorage Daily News
“Ray Bradbury’s still in his prime … a writer whose
fantasies are attuned to that perfect season between
childlike wonder and the age of reason … whose
prose often walks up to the edge of a majestic purple
mountain range or straddles a fence separating
lush fields of prairie grass from the trampled
lawns of suburbia … Instead of resting on
his laurels, Bradbury is riding his
third wind into a creative vortex.”
Denver Post
“Bradbury has a style all his own, much imitated but
never matched.... After writing for more than
fifty years, Bradbury has become more than pretty
good at it. He has become a master.”
Portland Oregonian
“An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose,
and mature understanding of human character
have won him an international reputation.”
New York Times
“Time has not dimmed his eloquent and elegant voice
or his lively imagination that asks
‘what if’ and then answers.”
San Antonio Express-News
“One of America’s rarest dreamers and thinkers …
Bradbury is a living legend.”
Orange County Register
Also by Ray Bradbury
Ahmed & The Oblivion Machines
Dandelion Wine
Dark Carnival
Death Is a Lonely Business
Driving Blind
Fahrenheit 451
From the Dust Returned
The Golden Apples of the Sun
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Green Shadows, White Whale
The Halloween Tree
I Sing the Body Electric!
The Illustrated Man
Journey to Far Metaphor
Kaleidoscope
Long After Midnight
The Martian Chronicles
The Machineries of Joy
A Medicine for Melancholy
The October Country
One Timeless Spring
Quicker Than the Eye
R Is for Rocket
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
S Is for Space
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Toynbee Convector
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Yestermorrow
Zen in the Art of Writing
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organization, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AVON BOOKS
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, New York 10022-5299
Copyright © 2002 by Ray Bradbury
Excerpts from Dandelion Wine copyright © 1946, 1947, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1957, copyright © 1956, 1957 by The Curtis Publishing Company; The Illustrated Man copyright © 1951; The Martian Chronicles copyright © 1946, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1958; The October Country copyright © 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1954, 1955; Something Wicked This Way Comes copyright © 1962, 1997; Death Is a Lonely Business copyright © 1999; A Graveyard for Lunatics copyright © 1990 by Ray Bradbury
ISBN: 0-06-103203-4
Epub Edition © April 2013 ISBN: 9780062242150
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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Avon Books paperback printing: January 2003
First William Morrow hardcover printing: April 2002
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HarperCollins ® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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The following serves as a continuation of the copyright page:
“Time Intervening” was first published under the title “Interim” in the fall 1947 issue of Epoch; copyright © 1947 by Ray Bradbury
“Heart Transplant” first appeared in the January 1981 issue of Playboy; copyright © 1981 by Ray Bradbury
“Quid Pro Quo” first appeared in the October/November 2000 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; copyright © 2000 by Ray Bradbury
“The Dragon Danced at Midnight” first appeared in the July 1966 issue of Cavalier under the title “The Year the Glop Monster Won the Golden Lion at Cannes,” copyright © 1966 by Fawcett Publications; copyright renewed 1994 by Ray Bradbury
“The Laurel and Hardy Alpha Centauri Farewell Tour” first appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of Amazing Stories; copyright © 2000 by Ray Bradbury
“With Smiles as Wide as Summer” first appeared in the November 1961 issue of Clipper; copyright © 1961; copyright renewed 1989 by Ray Bradbury
“The Enemy in the Wheat” first appeared in the August 1984 issue of New Rave; copyright © 1984 by Ray Bradbury
“Fore!” first appeared in the October/November 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; copyright © 2001 by Ray Bradbury
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