Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (44 page)

“I said to him, ‘You’re going to have to explain.’ And so he did, and now we’re back at the part where Liam and his mother moved into the installation.”

“This story isn’t like the other stories,” Maureen said.

“You know, I’ve never told this story before,” Sisi said. “The rest of it, I’m not even sure that I know how to tell it.”

“Liam and his mother moved into the installation,” Portia prompted.

“Yeah. Liam’s mummy picked a ranch house, and they moved in. Liam’s just a baby, practically. And there are all these weird rules, like they aren’t allowed to eat any of the food on the shelves in the cupboard. Because that’s part of the installation. Instead Liam’s mummy is allowed to have a mini-fridge in the closet in her bedroom. Oh, and there are clothes in the closets in the bedrooms. And there’s a TV, but it’s an old one and the artist has got it set up so that it only plays shows that were current in the early nineties in the U.S., which was the last time that this house was occupied.

“And there are weird stains on the carpets in some of the rooms. Big brown stains, the kind that fade but don’t ever come out.

“But Liam doesn’t care so much about that. He gets to pick his own bedroom, which is clearly meant for a boy maybe a year or two older than Liam is. There’s a model train set on the floor, which Liam can play with, as long as he’s careful. And there are comic books, good ones, that Liam hasn’t read before. There are cowboys on the sheets. There’s a stain here, in the corner, under the window.

“And he’s allowed to go into the other bedrooms, as long as he doesn’t mess anything up. There’s a pink bedroom, with two beds in it. Lots of boring girls’ clothes, and a diary, which Liam doesn’t see any point in reading. There’s a room for an older boy, too, with posters of actresses that Liam doesn’t recognize, and lots of American sports stuff. Football, but not the right kind.

“Liam’s mother sleeps in the pink bedroom. You would expect her to take the master bedroom here, but she doesn’t like the bed. She says it isn’t comfortable. Anyway, there’s a stain on it that goes right through the comforter, through the sheets. It’s as if the stain came up
through
the mattress.”

“I think I’m beginning to see the shape of this story,” Gwenda says.

“You bet,” Sisi says. “But remember, there are two houses. Liam’s mummy is responsible for looking after both of them for part of the day. The rest of the day she spends volunteering at the church down in the village. Liam goes to the village school. For the first two weeks, the other boys beat him up, and then they lose interest and after that everyone leaves him alone. In the afternoons he comes back and plays in his two houses. Sometimes he falls asleep in one house, watching TV, and when he wakes up he isn’t sure where he is. Sometimes his uncle comes by to invite him to go for a walk on the estate, or to go fishing. He likes his uncle. Sometimes they walk up to the manor house and play billiards. His uncle arranges for him to have riding lessons, and that’s the best thing in the world. He gets to pretend that he’s a cowboy.

“Sometimes he plays cops and robbers. He used to know some pretty bad guys, back before his mother got religion, and Liam isn’t exactly sure which he is yet, a good guy or a bad guy. He has a complicated relationship with his mother. Life is better than it used to be, but religion takes up about the same amount of space as the drugs did. It doesn’t leave much room for Liam.

“Anyway, there are some cop shows on the TV. After a few months he’s seen them all at least once. There’s one called
CSI
, and it’s all about fingerprints and murder and blood. And Liam starts to get an idea about the stain in his bedroom, and the stain in the master bedroom, and the other stains, the ones in the living room, on the plaid sofa and over behind the La-Z-Boy that you mostly don’t notice at first, because it’s hidden. There’s one stain up on the wallpaper in the living room, and after a while it starts to look a lot like a handprint.

“So Liam starts to wonder if something bad happened in his house. He’s older now, maybe ten or eleven. He wants to know why are there two houses, exactly the same, next door to each other? How could there have been a murder—okay, a series of murders, where everything happened exactly the same way twice? He doesn’t want to ask his mother, because lately when he tries to talk to her, all she does is quote Bible verses at him. He doesn’t want to ask his uncle about it either, because the older Liam gets, the more he can see that even when his uncle is being super nice, he’s still kind of a jerk.

“The kids in the school who beat Liam up remind him a little of his uncle. His uncle has shown him some of the other pieces in his art collection, and he’s told Liam that he envies him, getting to be a part of an actual installation. Liam knows his house came from America. He knows the name of the artist who designed the installation. So that’s enough to go online and find out what’s going on, which is that, sure enough, the original house, the one the artist bought and brought over, is a murder house. Some high school kid went nuts and killed his whole family with a hammer in the middle of the night. And this artist, his idea was based on what rich Americans used to do at the turn of the last century, which was buy up some impoverished U.K. family’s castle and have it brought over stone by stone to be rebuilt in Texas, or upstate Pennsylvania, or wherever. And if there was some history, if there was supposed to be a ghost, they paid even more money.

“So that was idea number one, to reverse all of that. But then he had an even bigger idea, idea number two, which was, What’s a haunted house? How can you buy one? If you transport it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, does the ghost (or ghosts, in this case) come with it, if you put it back together again exactly the way it was? And if you can put a haunted house back together again, piece by piece by piece, then why can’t you build your own from scratch, with the right ingredients? And idea number three, forget the ghosts: Can the real live people who go and walk around in one house or the other, or even better, the ones who live in a house without knowing which house is which, will the experience be any different for them? Will they still be haunted?”

“You are blowing my mind,” Portia said. “No, really. I don’t know if I like this story.”

“I’m with Portia,” Aune said. “It isn’t a good story. Not for us, not here.”

“Let her finish it,” Sullivan said. “It’s going to be worse if she doesn’t finish it. Which house were they living in?”

“Does it really matter which house they were living in?” Sisi said. “I mean, Liam spent time in both of the houses. He said he never knew which was which. The artist was the only one who had that piece of information. He even used blood to re-create the stains. Cow blood, I think. So I guess this is another story with cows in it, Maureen.

“I’ll tell the rest of the story as quick as I can. So by the time Liam brought me to see his ancestral home, one of the installation houses had burned down. Liam’s mother did it in a fit of religious mania. Liam was kind of vague about why. I got the feeling it had to do with his teenage years. They went on living there, you see. Liam got older, and I’m guessing his mother caught him fooling around with a girl or something, in the house that they didn’t live in. By this point she had become convinced that one of the houses was occupied by unquiet spirits, but she couldn’t make up her mind which. And in any case, it didn’t do much good. If there were ghosts in the other house, they just moved in next door once it burned down. I mean, why not? Everything was already set up exactly the way that they liked it.”

“Wait, so there were ghosts?” Gwenda said.

“Liam said there were. He said he never saw them, but later on, when he lived in other places, he realized that there must have been ghosts. In both places. Both houses. Other places just felt empty to him. He said to think of it like maybe there was this kid who grew up in the middle of an eternal party, or a bar fight, one that went on for years, or somewhere where the TV was always on. And then you leave the party, or you get thrown out of the bar, and all of a sudden you realize you’re all alone. Like, you just can’t get to sleep without that TV on. You don’t sleep as well. He said he was always on high alert when he was away from the murder house, because something was missing and he couldn’t figure out what. I think that’s what I picked up on. That extra vibration, that twitchy radar.”

“That’s sick,” Sullivan said.

“Yeah,” Sisi said. “That relationship was over real quick. So that’s my ghost story.”

Mei said, “How long were you in the house?”

“I don’t know, about two hours? He’d brought a picnic dinner. Lobster and champagne and the works. We sat and ate at the kitchen table while he told me about his rotten childhood. Then he gave me the whole tour. Showed me the stains and all, like they were holy relics. I kept looking out the window and seeing the sun get lower and lower. I didn’t want to be in that house after it got dark.”

“So you think you could describe one of the rooms, the living room, maybe, to Maureen? So she could re-create it?”

“I could try,” Sisi said. “Seems like a bad idea, though.”

“I guess I’m just wondering about how that artist made a haunted house,” Mei said. “If we could do the same here. We’re so far away from home, you know? Do ghosts travel this far? I mean, say we find some nice planet. If the conditions are suitable, and we grow some trees and some cows, do we get the table with the ghosts sitting around it? Are they here now?”

Maureen said, “It would be an interesting experiment.”

The Great Room began to change around them. The couch came first.

“Maureen!” Gwenda said. “Don’t you dare!”

Portia said, “But we don’t need to run that experiment. I mean, isn’t it already running?” She appealed to the others, to Sullivan, to Aune. “You know. I mean, you know what I mean?”

“What?” Gwenda said. “What are you trying to say?” Sisi reached for her hand, but Gwenda pushed away from her. She wriggled away like a fish, her arms extended to catch the wall.

On the one hand,
The House of Secrets
and on the other,
The House of Mystery
.

About “Two Houses”

When I was ten or so, I was a student at Westminster Christian Academy in Miami, Florida. There was a school library, and I remember discovering
The Illustrated Man
there, on a spinning rack. I’d read fantasy novels before—Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Le Guin—and I’d read the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. But I’d never read stories like this before. They took place in a world that I recognized. The characters’ lives were familiar to me. But the things that happened to them were marvelous, terrifying, haunting. Those stories have lived inside my head ever since. They’re part of my DNA. I love Ray Bradbury’s stories, his language, his ideas, his characters—the married couple who run away from the war, the murderous baby, the lodger with the mysterious insides. I love his astronauts, and the mortal boy born into an immortal family. I love his witches, his Martians, his psychologists, and all of his characters who make regrettable bargains.

It was hard to start writing a story for this anthology, because once I started to revisit some of my favorite Bradbury stories, I wanted to keep on reading. I don’t have much to say about “Two Houses.” One of the ghost stories was told to me by the writer Christopher Rowe. The other was lent to me by the writer Gwenda Bond. Thanks to both of them, and of course, and always, to Ray Bradbury.

—Kelly Link

WEARINESS

Harlan Ellison
^®

V
ery near the final thaw of the Universe, the last of them left behind, the last three of the most perfect beings who had ever existed, stood waiting for the transitional moment. The neap tide of all time. The eternal helix sang its silent song in stone; and the glow of What Was to Come had bruised itself to a ripe plumness.

The ostren fanned itself. Melancholia had shortened it; one entire set of faculties could do nothing but sigh. And it had grown uncommonly warm for her, in sight of the end.

The velv could not contain his trepidation, peering out around the perplexing curvature of space.

But the tismess, that being who had summoned the helix, knew boldness was required, here and now at the final moments. And it stood boldly forth, waiting for the inevitable. All three—there were no others—were at the terminus of uncountable multiple trillions of aeons, and weary.

Heaviness hung, a dire swaddling.

“What is there to fear?” the tismess said, rather more nastily than it had intended.
Reify,
it had thought, urgently.

Heaviness hung, undiminished.

“What is there to fear?” Again, trying to flense the tone of nastiness, chagrined at its incivility, the velv whimpered and stared at the great helix, receptors clouding as the brightness fattened. The point of alarm had been reached and abandoned long since. “I am the last,” it said.

“As is each of us,” thought the ostren. “We are, each of us, you and you each, we are, each of us, the end of the line. Out of time, all time, the last. But why are you frightened?”

“Because . . . it is the end. The question at last answered. There will be no more. No more I, no more you, no more of any living species. Does that not terrify you?”

“Yes,” thought the ostren. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

The tismess was silent.

And the great helix solidified, its colors steadied, and the last three stared as only they were able, looking into the future, for the past and present were now gone, looking to see what would overwhelm them as they were vaporized, gone like their kind, gone forever, not even motes, not even memories. And they saw, the three last, absolutely perfect beings; they saw what was to come.

“Oh, how good,” whispered the velv, her tissues roiling most golden. “How wonderful. And I’m not afraid . . . not now.”

The ostren made the sound that very little children had once made when they had truly learned where the puppy farm is. But there was no fear, either, in the ostren.

For the tismess, as it was all coming to an end, suddenly there was what there was to be seen.

What was on the other side.

Before him, immediately before him, was the darkness. Heavy, breathing yet silent, it seemed to go on forever. But that
was
the other side. And beyond that darkness was something: something he could
call
the “other side.” Could he see it, could he even imagine it, there had to
be
another side beyond this side. He reveled in the moment of knowledge that all there had ever been would go on, would start anew perhaps, would roll on through the final night, no matter how long. There
was
an “other side.”

But of course, in truth, what he was seeing was only another aspect of the only darkness—and not even darkness; nothing.

What he was seeing was every thought he had ever had, every song he had ever sung, everyone he had ever known, every moment of his trillion aeons never knowing he had nowhere else to go, all and everything of memory; where he had stood, what he had done and what had been done around him, what there was and what there could ever have been.

In that instant, he saw backward into memory, backward into the night that had preceded the first thought.

Far away, a galaxy became as dust and vanished, leaving no print, no recollection, no residue. Then, one by one, in correct stately procession, the solitary stars went blind.

The question was answered:
Sat çi sat bene
.

“A painting is a sum of destructions.”

—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

About “Weariness”

Running the unacceptable risk of writing an afterword oh by the way “note” a thousand times longer than the story itself, I sit down to explicate the “Bradbury connection” to this, perhaps my last-published story. Like Ray, I am now old, and there is an infinitude more to recollect and savor of links between Bradbury and Ellison. Truly, it should suffice for even the most marrow-sucking obsessive fan that Ray and I have known each other close on forever.

Ray contends that in very short order he and I will be sitting down together cutting up touches with Dickens and Dorothy Parker, shuckin’ ’n’ jivin’ with Aesop and Melville.

Uh . . . well, okay, Ray, if you say so.

(I am rather less condolent with that Hereafter stuff than is Ray. As has averred Nat Hentoff, I come from, and remain as one with, a grand and glorious tradition of stiff-necked Jewish atheists. Ray and I have a long-standing wager on this one, which of us is on the money and which is betting on a lame pony. Sadly, the winner will never collect.)

La dee dah. Back where we began. Too many words, yet I’ll attempt that undanceable rigadoon.

These days of the electronic babble, every doofus with some handheld device calls every other male he knows
brother
.

“Hey, Bro! Whussup, Bro? Howzit goin’, Bro?”

Strangers: brother. Casual acquaintances: brother. Same-skin-color supermarket bagger: brother. Other-skin-colored guy who tipped you when you parked his Beamer: brother. Much like the oafishly careless, empty, and repetitious whomping of the once-specific, cherished, and singular word
awesome
, the sacred word
BROTHER
has become, in inept mouths, a dull and wearisome trope. (
Awesome
is the word one uses for Eleanor Roosevelt, Mount Kilimanjaro, and pitching a no-hit no-run ball game. Not available for the crappy cheese quesadilla you had this afternoon, or for anybody who Dances with the Stars. With or without a wooden leg.) Same goes for yo
bruth
-thuh.

I had only one sib, my late sister. The men of my lifelong existence whom I would countenance as my brother are less than the number of dactyls on my left hand, and they know who they are.

Apparently, Ray Bradbury and I are
brothers
.

Not in some absurd catchall absurdity of vacuous gibber, but actually and really, “we are brothers.”

Whence cometh this assertion?

From Ray Bradbury. That’s whence.

“You know, Harlan,” he said to me, leaning in and grinning that Midwestern just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck grin, “we are brothers, y’know. You and I, together.”

I grinned back at him with
my
hayseed Midwestern mien, onaccounta we are both paid liars, one from Waukegan and one from Cleveland, and I played his straight man by responding, “How’s that, Ray?”

(The players freeze in situ as the Bloviating Narrator fills in the background data, thus slowing the movie and thus shamefacedly doing the necessary bricklaying.)

The table across which Ray was leaning was in a booth at one of my and Ray’s all-time favorite restaurants, the Pacific Dining Car in downtown Los Angeles. The night was in 1965. Our dining companions had both gone off to the toilets. That is to say,
she
had gone off to one; her husband had gone off to another. Her name was Leigh Bracket; his name was Edmond Hamilton. The queen of fantasy writing. Great movies based on Hammett and Chandler. A legend in this life. The Eric John Stark stories. A kind and imperially gracious woman. One of the best people ever known to me. Ed looked like something out of
American Gothic
. They called him Galaxy Smasher—the true creator of the space opera. Dozens and dozens of stories all the way back to the advent of Gernsbach: The Star Kings series. All those great comic books, and the Captain Future pulp novelettes. Droll, cosmically smart, one helluva plotter, and kind to tots like me and Ray. They were the Strophe and Antistrophe of our literary infancy.

So, they’re gone, Bradbury and I are alone, grinnin’ & schmoozin’, and he proceeds to explain to me that he and I are
brothers
. Not my word,
his
word. (Not to make this too clear, but I have a chasmlike abomination of bloviating sf fans who, upon the death of someone they once met in an elevator, begin to leak like WikiAnything, just to buy themselves the face time at a memorial. “Oh, yes, I knew Isaac as if he were my brother . . .” “Oh, lawdy, I pluckt up rootabuggas with Cliff Simak in de fields . . .” “Yes, Octavia Butler and I were ever so close . . .”) This unlikely story I tell actually happened. Go ask Bradbury if you think I’m fudging it. But better hurry . . .

Anyhow, I says back to him, “How’s that, Ray?”

And he says back to me, “Them.”

And I says to him, “Ed and Leigh?”

And he says back to me, “Our father and mother. They raised us.” I have no memory of the rest of the actual verbiage.

Well, Sir, wasn’t that a keen moment!

You see, I was working at Paramount at the time, on one or another of the crippled creations Rouse and Greene had hired me to do for vast sums of money (I was in my “hot 15” at the time). And Leigh, whom I’d known since my teens in Ohio, was writing a dog for Howard Hawks called
Red Line 7000
, starring James Caan (who, coincidentally, played the role of Harlan Ellison in an
Alfred Hitchcock Hour
based on my
Memos from Purgatory
only a year or so earlier). Also at Paramount.

Our offices were near to hand.

Ray doesn’t drive. I drive. Every time we both got booked into the same lecture gig at some jerkwater literary potlatch, I drove. Bradbury lectured.

Me, he lectured. (Our politics are about as close as our faiths.)

So, I was always the wheelman on the caper.

Leigh didn’t have (what she used to call, to mock James M. Cain) a “short” that night, and I can’t remember what Ed’s story was. But I wound up doing the driving down to the Pacific Dining Car, and we left straight from the studio. Ray must’ve come by cab; he met us at the Bronson Gate, and I did my thing downtown for a good big T-bone dinner. Also Bermuda onion, Rondo Hatton’s jaw-sized tomatoes with Roquefort dressing, and Zucchini Florentine. Ray drank; I never touch the stuff. We had an absolutely nova-squooshing dinner.

Thus, before I run on at greater length, the answer to the question “Can you reminisce a bit about your Ray Bradbury connection?” is frozen in Ray’s asserveration: We’re brothers.

He said so.

But, not to make a big foofaraw of it, Ray has trouble remembering who I am, and who Harlan Ellison is. And then he’ll remember, howl “Live Forever!” or some such impossibility at me, and recall me as “Ah, yes, the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang.” And I’ll smile wanly, and scream back at him, “
Nothing
lives forever, Ray, you crazy old coot! Not the Great Pyramid of Giza, not the polar ice caps, not a single blade of green grass, you nut-bag!”

And that is the link between us, the “connection.” Nobody ever writ it large on the northern massif of Mount Shazam . . . you gotta
agree
with your brother.

You just got to love him.

—Harlan Ellison