Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 by The Small Assassin (v2.1) Read Free Book Online Page A

simple screaming of
muscles, senor. This senorita, here, hers is the muerte horrible. ”
                 Marie
walked, scuffling her shoes, turning first this way,
then that. Naked bodies. Long ago the clothes had
whispered away. The fat women’s breasts were lumps of yeasty dough left in the
dust. The men’s loins were indrawn, withered orchids.
                 “Mr.
Grimace and Mr. Gape,” said Joseph.
                 He
pointed his camera at two men who seemed in conversation, mouths in
mid-sentence, hands gesticulant and stiffened over
some long-dissolved gossip.
                 Joseph
clicked the shutter, rolled the film, focused the camera on another body,
clicked the shutter, rolled the film, walked on to
another.
                 Eighty-one, eight-two, eighty-three. Jaws
down, tongues out like jeering children, eyes pale brown- irised in upclenched sockets. Hairs, waxed and prickled
by sunlight, each sharp as quills embedded on the lips, the cheeks, the
eyelids, the brows. Little beards on chins and bosoms and loins. Flesh like
drumheads and manuscripts and crisp bread dough. The women,
huge ill-shaped tallow things, death-melted. The insane hair of them,
like nests made and unmade and remade. Teeth, each single, each fine, each
perfect, in jaw. Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight. A rushing of Marie’s eyes. Down the corridor,
flicking. Counting, rushing, never stopping. On! Quick!
Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three! Here was a man, his stomach open, like a
tree hollow where you dropped your child love letters when you were eleven! Her
eyes entered the hole in the space under his ribs. She peeked in. He looked
like an Erector set inside. The spine, the pelvic plates. The rest was tendon, parchment, bone, eye, beardy jaw, ear, stupefied nostril.
And this ragged eaten cincture in his navel into which a pudding might be
spooned. Ninety-seven, ninety-eight! Names, places, dates, things!
                 “This
woman died in childbirth!”
                 Like
a little hungry doll, the prematurely born child was wired, dangling, to her
wrist.
                 “This
was a soldier. His uniform still half on him—”
                 Marie’s
eyes slammed the furthest wall after a back-forth, back-forth swinging from
horror to horror, from skull to skull, beating from rib to rib, staring with
hypnotic fascination at paralyzed, loveless, fleshless loins, at men made into
women by evaporation, at women made into dugged swine. The fearful ricochet of vision, growing, growing, taking impetus from
swollen breast to raving mouth, wall to wall, wall to wall, again, again, like
a ball hurled in a game, caught in the incredible teeth, spat in a scream
across the corridor to be caught in claws, lodged between thin teats, the whole
standing chorus invisibly chanting the game on, on, the wild game of sight
recoiling, rebounding, reshuttling on down the
inconceivable procession, through a montage of erected horrors that ended
finally and for all time when vision crashed against the corridor ending with
one last scream from all present!
                 Marie
turned and shot her vision far down to where the spiral steps walked up into
sunlight. How talented was death. How many expressions and
manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. They stood like the
naked pipes of a vast derelict calliope, their mouths cut into frantic vents.
And now the great hand of mania descended upon all keys at once, and the long
calliope screamed upon one hundred-throated, unending scream.
                 Click
went the camera and Joseph rolled the film. Click went the camera and Joseph
rolled the film.
                 Moreno , Morelos , Cantine , Gomez, Gutierrez, Villanousul , Ureta , Licon , Navarro, Iturbi ; Jorge, Filomena , Nena , Manuel, Jose, Tomas, Ramona. This man walked and this man sang and this
man had three wives; and this