Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page B

there. It was a day of sun and
water and being alive. I wanted to hold it all still in my hands. I didn't want
it to go away, ever. Yet there, as the fish fell and the waters moved over it
white and then green, there it went.. . ."
                 By
that time, we were at the lobby level and the elevator doors opened and I
stepped out with the cage labeled mother and walked quickly across the lobby
and out to a taxicab.
                 The
trickiest business—and my greatest danger—remained. I knew that by the time I
got to the airport, the guards and the Castro militia would have been alerted.
I wouldn't put it past Shelley Capon to tell them that a national treasure was
getting away. He might even cut Castro in on some of the Book-of-the-Month Club
revenue and the movie rights. I had to improvise a plan to get through customs.
                 I
am a literary man, however, and the answer came to me quickly. I had the taxi
stop long enough for me to buy some shoe polish. I began to apply the disguise
to El C6rdoba. I painted him black all over.
                 "Listen,"
I said, bending down to whisper into the cage as we drove across Havana . "Nevermore."
                 I
repeated it several times to give him the idea. The sound would be new to him,
because, I guessed, Papa would never have quoted a middleweight contender he
had knocked out years ago. There was silence under the shawl while the word was
recorded.
                 Then,
at last, it came back to me. "Nevermore," in Papa's old, familiar,
tenor voice, "nevermore," it said.

  The Burning Man
 
 
                  
                 The
rickety Ford came along a road that plowed up dust in yellow plumes which took
an hour to lie back down and move no more in that special slumber that stuns
the world in mid-July. Far away, the lake waited, a cool-blue gem in a
hot-green lake of grass, but it was indeed still far away, and Neva and Doug
were bucketing along in their barrelful of red-hot bolts with lemonade slopping
around in a thermos on the back seat and deviled-ham sandwiches fermenting on
Doug's lap. Both boy and aunt sucked in hot air and talked out even hotter.
                 "Fire-eater,"
said Douglas . "I'm eating fire. Heck, I can hardly wait for that lake!"
                 Suddenly,
up ahead, there was a man by the side of the road.
                 Shirt
open to reveal his bronzed body to the waist, his hair ripened to wheat color
by July, the man's eyes burned fiery blue in a nest of sun wrinkles. He waved,
dying in the heat, tromped on the brake. Fierce dust clouds rose to make the
man vanish. When the golden dust sifted away his hot yellow eyes glared
balefully, like a cat's, defying the weather and the burning wind.
                 He
stared at Douglas .
                 Douglas glanced away, nervously.
                 For
you could see where the man had come across a field high with yellow grass
baked and burnt by eight weeks of no rain. There was a path where the man had
broken the grass and cleaved a passage to the road. The path went as far as one
could see down to a dry swamp and an empty creek bed with nothing but baked hot
stones in it and fried rock and melting sand.
                 "I'll
be damned, you stopped!" cried the man, angrily.
                 ' Til be damned, I did," Neva yelled back. "Where you going?"
                 "I'll
think of someplace." The man hopped up like a cat and swung into the
rumble seat. "Get going. It's after us!
The sun, I mean, of coursel " He pointed straight
up. " Git ! Or we'll all go mad!"
                 Neva stomped on the gas. The car left gravel and
glided on pure white-hot dust, coming down only now and then to careen off a
boulder or lass a stone. They cut the land in half with racket. Above it, the
man shouted:
                 "Put
'