The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page B

insistently. ‘Cecy, come home!’
    There was no word from the body. Cecy lay there, not moving, for as long as her mother waited.
    Uncle Jonn walked through the fresh open country and into the streets of Mellin Town, looking for Cecy in every child that licked an ice-pop and in every little white dog that padded by on its way to some eagerly anticipated nowhere.
    The town spread out like a fancy graveyard. Nothing more than a few monuments, really—edifices to lost arts and pastimes. It was a great meadow of elms and deodars and hackmatack trees, laid out with wooden walks you could haul into your barn at night if the hollow sound of walking people irked you. There were tall old maiden houses, lean and narrow and wisely wan, in which were spectacles of colored glass, upon which the thinned golden hair of age-old bird nests sprouted. There was a drug shop full of quaint wire-rung soda-fountain stools with plywood bottoms, and the memorious clear sharp odor that used to be in drug stores but never is any more. And there was a barber emporium with a red-ribboned pillar twisting around inside a chrysalis of glass in front of it. And there was a grocery that was all fruity shadow and dusty boxes and the smell of an old Armenian woman, which was like the odor of a rusty penny. The town lay under the deodar and mellow-leaf trees, in no hurry, and somewhere in the town was Cecy, the one who Traveled.
    Uncle John stopped, bought himself a bottle of Orange Crush, drank it, wiped his face with his handkerchief, his eyes jumping up and down, like little kids skipping rope. I’m afraid, he thought. I’m afraid.
    He saw a code of birds strung dot-dash on the high telephone wires. Was Cecy up there laughing at him out of sharp bird eyes, shuffling her feathers, singing at him? He suspicioned the cigar-store Indian. But there was no animation in that cold, carved, tobacco-brown image.
    Distantly, like on a sleepy Sunday morning, he heard the bells ringing in a valley of his head. He was stone blind. He stood in blackness. White, tortured faces drifted through his inturned vision.
    ‘Cecy!’ he cried, to everything, everywhere. ‘I know you can help me! Shake me like a tree! Cecy!’
    The blindness passed. He was bathed in a cold sweating that didn’t stop, but ran like a syrup.
    ‘I know you can help,’ he said. ‘I saw you help Cousin Marianne years ago. Ten years ago, wasn’t it?’ He stood, concentrating.
    Marianne had been a girl shy as a mole, her hair twisted like roots on her round ball of head. Marianne had hung in her skirt like a clapper in a bell, never ringing when she walked; just swithering along, one heel after another. She gazed at weeds and the sidewalk under her toes, she looked at your chin if she saw you at all—and never got as far as your eyes. Her mother despaired of Marianne’s ever marrying or succeeding.
    It was up to Cecy, then. Cecy went into Marianne like fist into glove.
    Marianne jumped, ran, yelled, glinted her yellow eyes. Marianne flickered her skirts, unbraided her hair and let it hang in a shimmery veil on her half-nude shoulders. Marianne giggled and rang like a gay clapper in the tolling bell of her dress. Marianne squeezed her face into many attitudes of coyness, merriment, intelligence, maternal bliss, and love.
    The boys raced after Marianne. Marianne got married.
    Cecy withdrew.
    Marianne had hysterics; her spine was gone!
    She lay like a limp corset all one day. But the habit was in her now. Some of Cecy had stayed on like a fossil imprint on soft shale rock: and Marianne began tracing the habits and thinking them over and remembering what it was like to have Cecy inside her, and pretty soon she was running and shouting and giggling all by herself; a corset animated, as it were, by a memory!
    Marianne had lived joyously thereafter.
    Standing with the cigar-store Indian for conversation, Uncle Jonn now shook his head violently. Dozens of bright bubbles floated in his eyeballs, each