Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Ray Bradbury
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‘No friend of anyone, ever!’
I tried to look through her eyes and thought: my God, has it always been this way, forever some man in that house, forty, eighty, a hundred years ago! Not the same man, no, but all dark twins, and this lost girl on the road, with snow in her arms for love, and frost in her heart for comfort, and nothing to do but whisper and croon and mourn and sob until the sound of her weeping stilled at sunrise but to start again with the rising of the moon.
‘That’s my friend in there,’ I said, again.
‘If that be true,’ she whispered fiercely, ‘then you are my enemy!’
I looked down the road where the wind blew dust through the graveyard gates.
‘Go back where you came from,’ I said.
She looked at the same road and the same dust, and her voice faded. ‘Is there to be no peace, then?’ she mourned. ‘Must I walk here, year on year, and no comeuppance?’
‘If the man in there,’ I said, ‘was really your Will, your William, what would you have me do?’
‘Send him out to me,’ she said, quietly.
‘What would you do with him?’
‘Lie down with him,’ she murmured, ‘and ne’er get up again. He would be kept like a stone in a cold river.’
‘Ah,’ I said, and nodded.
‘Will you ask him, then, to be sent?’
‘No. For he’s not yours. Much like. Near similar. And breakfasts on girls and wipes his mouth on their silks, one century called this, another that.’
‘And no love in him, ever?’
‘He says the word like fishermen toss their nets in the sea,’ I said.
‘Ah, Christ, and I’m caught!’ And here she gave such a cry that the shadow came to the window in the great house across the lawn. ‘I’ll stay here the rest of the night,’ she said. ‘Surely he will feel me here, his heart will melt, no matter what his name or how deviled his soul. What year is this? How long have I been waiting?’
‘I won’t tell you,’ I said. ‘The news would crack your heart.’
She turned and truly looked at me. ‘Are you one of the good ones, then, the gentle men who never lie and never hurt and never have to hide? Sweet God, I wish I’d known you first!’
The wind rose, the sound of it rose in her throat. A clock struck somewhere far across the country in the sleeping town.
‘I must go in,’ I said. I took a breath. ‘Is there no way for me to give you rest?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘for it was not you that cut the nerve.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘You don’t. But you try. Much thanks for that. Get in. You’ll catch your death.’
‘And you—?’
‘Ha!’ she cried. ‘I’ve long since caught mine. It will not catch again. Get!’
I gladly went. For I was full of the cold night and the white moon, old time, and her. The wind blew me up the grassy knoll. At the door, I turned. She was still there on the milky road, her shawl straight out on the weather, one hand upraised.
‘Hurry,’ I thought I heard her whisper, ‘tell him he’s needed!’
I rammed the door, slammed into the house, fell across the hall, my heart a bombardment, my image in the great hall mirror a shock of colorless lightning.
John was in the library drinking yet another sherry, and poured me some. ‘Someday,’ he said, ‘you’ll learn to take anything I say with more than a grain of salt. Jesus, look at you! Ice cold. Drink that down. Here’s another to go after it!’
I drank, he poured, I drank. ‘Was it all a joke, then?’
‘What else?’ John laughed, then stopped.
The croon was outside the house again, the merest fingernail of mourn, as the moon scraped down the roof.
‘There’s your banshee,’ I said, looking at my drink, unable to move.
‘Sure, kid, sure, unh-huh,’ said John. ‘Drink your drink, Doug, and I’ll read you that great review of your book from the London Times again.’
‘You burned it, John.’
‘Sure, kid, but I recall it all as if it were this morn. Drink up.’
‘John,’ I said, staring into the fire, looking at the hearth where the ashes of the burned paper blew in a great breath. ‘Does … did … that review really exist?’
‘My God, of course, sure, yes. Actually.…’ Here he paused and gave it great imaginative concern. ‘The Times knew my love for you, Doug, and asked me to review your book.’ John reached his long arm over to refill my glass. ‘I did it. Under an assumed name, of course, now ain’t that swell of me? But I had to be fair, Doug, had to be fair. So I wrote what I truly felt were the good things, the not-so-good things in your book. Criticized it just the way I would when you hand in a lousy screenplay scene and I make you do it over. Now ain’t that A-one double absolutely square of me? Eh?’
He leaned at me. He put his hand on my chin and lifted it and gazed long and sweetly into my eyes.
‘You’re not upset?’
‘No,’ I said, but my voice broke.
‘By God, now, if you aren’t. Sorry. A joke, kid, only a joke.’ And here he gave me a friendly punch on the arm.
Slight as it was, it was a sledgehammer striking home.
‘I wish you hadn’t made it up, the joke, I wish the article was real,’ I said.
‘So do I, kid. You look bad. I—’
The wind moved around the house. The windows stirred and whispered.
Quite suddenly I said, for no reason that I knew:
‘The banshee. It’s out there.’
‘That was a joke, Doug. You got to watch out for me.’
‘No,’ I said, looking at the window. ‘It’s there.’
John laughed. ‘You saw it, did you?’
‘It’s a young and lovely woman with a shawl on a cold night. A young woman with long black hair and great green eyes and a complexion like snow and a proud Phoenician prow of a nose. Sound like anyone you ever in your life knew, John?’
‘Thousands.’ John laughed more quietly now, looking to see the weight of my joke. ‘Hell—’
‘She’s waiting for you,’ I said. ‘Down at the bottom of the drive.’
John glanced, uncertainly, at the window.
‘That was the sound we heard,’ I said. ‘She described you or someone like you. Called you Willy, Will, William. But I knew it was you.’
John mused. ‘Young, you say, and beautiful, and out there right this moment …?’
‘The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’
‘Not carrying a knife—?’
‘Unarmed.’
John exhaled. ‘Well, then, I think I should just go out there and have a chat with her, eh, don’t you think?’
‘She’s waiting.’
He moved toward the front door.
‘Put on your coat, it’s a cold night,’ I said.
He was putting on his coat