Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page A

the corner where we turn for the firehouse."

                "Who is it?"
                "Who would it be?" said Montag, leaning back against the closed door in the dark.
                His wife said, at last, "Well, put on the light."
                "I don't want the light."
                "Come to bed."
                He heard her roll impatiently; the bedsprings squealed.
                "Are you drunk?" she said.
                So it was the hand that started it all. He felt one hand and then the other work his coat free and let it slump to the floor. He held his pants out into an abyss and let them fall into darkness. His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms. He could feel the poison working up his wrists and into his elbows and his shoulders, and then the jump-over from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade like a spark leaping a gap. His hands were ravenous. And his eyes were beginning to feel hunger, as if they must look at something, anything, everything.
                His wife said, "What are you doing?"
                He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
                A minute later she said, "Well, just don't stand there in the middle of the floor."
                He made a small sound.
                "What?" she asked.
                He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet.

                Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the air, her Seashell was tamped in her ear again and she was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the fathoms of blackness above her in the ceiling.
                Wasn't there an old joke about the wife who talked so much on the telephone that her desperate husband ran out to the nearest store and telephoned her to ask what was for dinner? Well, then, why didn't he buy himself an audio-Seashell broadcasting station and talk to his wife late at night, murmur, whisper, shout, scream, yell? But what would he whisper, what would he yell? What could he say?
                And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those other jokes people told of the gentleman, drunk, coming home late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and neither of them the wiser.
                "Millie. . . .?" he whispered.
                "What?"
                "I didn't mean to startle you. What I want to know is. . . ."
                "Well?"
                "When did we meet. And where? "
                "When did we meet for what? " she asked.
                "I meanoriginally."
                He knew she must be frowning in the dark.
                He clarified it. "The first time we ever met, where was it, and when?"
                "Why, it was at ―"
                She stopped.
                "I don't know," she said.
                He was