Ray Bradbury - The Illustrated Man

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The Illustrated ManThe Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury
Contents
Prologue: The Illustrated Man
The Veldt
Kaleidoscope
The Other Foot
The Highway
The Man
The Long Rain
The Rocket Man
The Fire Balloons
The Last Night of the World
The Exiles
No Particular Night or Morning
The Fox and the Forest
The Visitor
The Concrete Mixer
Marionettes, Inc.
The City
Zero Hour
The Rocket
Epilogue
[About this etext]
PROLOGUE: The Illustrated Man
IT was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man.
Walking along an asphalt road, I was or the final leg of a two weeks’ walking
tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a
doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man
walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky.
I didn’t know he was Illustrated then. I only knew that he was tall, once well
muscled, but now, for some reason, going to fat. I recall that his arms were
long, and the hands thick, but that his face was like a child’s, set upon a
massive body.
He seemed only to sense my presence, for he didn’t look directly at me when he
spoke his first words:
“Do you know where I can find a job?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said.
“I haven’t had a job that’s lasted in forty years,” he said.
Though it was a hot late afternoon, he wore his wool shirt buttoned tight about
his neck. His sleeves were rolled and buttoned down over his thick wrists.
Perspiration was streaming from his face, yet he made no move to open his shirt.
“Well,” he said at last, “this is as good a place as any to spend the night. Do
you mind company?”
“I have some extra food you’d be welcome to,” I said.
He sat down heavily, grunting. “You’ll be sorry you asked me to stay,” he said.
“Everyone always is. That’s why I’m walking. Here it is, early September, the
cream of the Labor Day carnival season. I should be making money hand over fist
at any small town side show celebration, but here I am with no prospects.”
He took off an immense shoe and peered at it closely. “I usually keep a job
about ten days. Then something happens and they fire me. By now every carnival
in America won’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”
“What seems to be the trouble?” I asked.
For answer, he unbuttoned his tight collar, slowly. With his eyes shut, he put a
slow hand to the task of unbuttoning his shirt all the way down. He slipped his
fingers in to feel his chest. “Funny,” he said, eyes still shut. “You can’t feel
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them but they’re there. I always hope that someday I’ll look and they'll be
gone. I walk in the sun for hours on the hottest days, baking, and hope that my
sweat’ll wash them off, the sun’ll cook them off, but at sundown they’re still
there.” He turned his head slightly toward me and exposed his chest. “Are they
still there now?”
After a long while I exhaled. “Yes,” I said. “They’re still there.”
The Illustrations.
“Another reason I keep my collar buttoned up,” he said, opening his eyes, “is
the children. They follow me along country roads. Everyone wants to see the
pictures, and yet nobody wants to see them.”
He took his shirt off and wadded it in his hands. He was covered with
Illustrations from the blue tattooed ring about his neck to his belt line.
“It keeps right on going,” he said, guessing my thought. “All of me is
Illustrated. Look.” He opened his hand. On his palm was a rose, freshly cut,
with drops of crystal water among the soft pink petals. I put my hand out to
touch it, but it was only an Illustration.
As for the rest of him, I cannot say how I sat and stared, for he was a riot of
rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you
could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited
his body. When his flesh twitched, the tiny mouths flickered, the tiny
green-and-gold eyes winked, the tiny pink hands gestured. There were yellow
meadows and blue rivers and mountains and stars and suns and planets spread in a
Milky Way across his chest. The people themselves were in twenty or more odd
groups upon his arms, shoulders, back, sides, and wrists, as well as on the flat
of his stomach. You found them in forests of hair, lurking among a constellation
of freckles, or peering from armpit caverns, diamond eyes aglitter. Each seemed
intent upon his own activity; each was a separate gallery portrait.
“Why, they’re beautiful!” I said.
How can I explain about his Illustrations? If El Greco had painted miniatures in
his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with all his
sulphurous color, elongation, and anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s
body for his art. The colors burned in three dimensions. They were windows
looking in upon fiery reality. Here, gathered on one wall, were all the finest
scenes in the universe; the man was a walking treasure gallery. This wasn’t the
work of a cheap carnival tattoo man with three colors and whisky on his breath.
This was the accomplishment of a living genius, vibrant, clear, and beautiful.
“Oh yes,” said the Illustrated Man. “I’m so proud of my Illustrations that I’d
like to burn them off. I’ve tried sandpaper, acid, a knife . . .”
The sun was setting. The moon was already up in the East.
“For, you see,” said the Illustrated Man, “these Illustrations predict the
future.”
I said nothing.
“It’s all right in sunlight” he went on. “I could keep a carnival day job. But
at night—the pictures move. The pictures change.”
I must have smiled. “How long have you been Illustrated?”
“In 1900, when I was twenty years old and working a carnival, I broke my leg. It
laid me up; I had to do something to keep my hand in, so I decided to get
tattooed.”
“But who tattooed you? What happened to the artist?”
“She went back to the future,” he said. "I mean it. She was an old woman in a
little house in the middle of Wisconsin here somewhere not far from this place.
A little old witch who looked a thousand years old one moment and twenty years
old the next, but she said she could travel in time. I laughed. Now, I know
better.”
“How did you happen to meet her?”
He told me. He had seen her painted sign by the road: SKIN ILLUSTRATION!
Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic! So he had sat all night while her
magic needles stung him wasp stings and delicate bee stings. By morning he
looked like a man who had fallen into a twenty-color print press and been
squeezed out, all bright and picturesque.
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“I’ve hunted every summer for fifty years,” he said, putting his hands out on
the air. "When I find that witch I’m going to kill her.”
The sun was gone. Now the first stars were shining and the moon had brightened
the fields of grass and wheat. Still the Illustrated Man’s pictures glowed like
charcoals in the half light, like scattered rubies and emeralds, with Rouault
colors and Picasso colors and the long, pressed-out El Greco bodies.
“So people fire me when my pictures move. They don’t like it when violent things
happen in my Illustrations. Each Illustration is a little story. If you watch
them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could
see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and
think thoughts. It’s all here, just waiting for you to look. But most of all,
there’s a special spot on my body.” He bared his back. “See? There’s no special
design on my right shoulder blade, just a jumble.”
“Yes.”
“When I’ve been around a person long enough, that spot clouds over and fills in.
If I’m with a woman, her picture comes there on my back, in an hour, and shows
her whole life—how she’ll live, how she’ll die, what she’ll look like when she’s
sixty. And if it’s a man, an hour later his picture’s here on my back. It shows
him falling off a cliff, or dying under a train. So I’m fired again.”
All the time he had been talking his hands had wandered over the Illustrations,
as if to adjust their frames, to brush away dust—the motions of a connoisseur,
an art patron. Now he lay back, long and full in the moonlight. It was a warm
night. There was no breeze and the air was stifling. We both had our shirts off.
“And you’ve never found the old woman?”
“Never.”
“And you think she came from the future?”
“How else could she know these stories she painted on me?” He shut his eyes
tiredly. His voice grew fainter. “Sometimes at night I can feel them, the
pictures, like ants, crawling on my skin. Then I know they’re doing what they
have to do. I never look at them any more. I just try to rest. I don’t sleep
much. Don’t you look at them either, I warn you. Turn the other way when you
sleep.”
I lay back a few feet from him. He didn’t seem violent and the pictures were
beautiful. Otherwise I might have been tempted to get out and away from such
babbling. But the Illustrations . . . I let my eyes fill up on them. Any person
would go a little mad with such things upon his body.
The night was serene. I could hear the Illustrated Man’s breathing in the
moonlight. Crickets were stirring gently in the distant ravines. I lay with my
body sidewise so I could watch the Illustrations. Perhaps half an hour passed.
Whether the Illustrated Man slept I could not tell, but suddenly I heard him
whisper, “They’re moving, aren’t they?”
I waited a minute.
Then I said, “Yes.”
The pictures were moving, each in its turn, each for a brief minute or two.
There in the moonlight, with the tiny tinkling thoughts and the distant sea
voices, it seemed, each little drama was enacted. Whether it took an hour or
three hours for the dramas to finish, it would be hard to say. I only know that
I lay fascinated and did not move while the stars wheeled in the sky.
Eighteen Illustrations, eighteen tales. I counted them one by one.
Primarily my eyes focused upon a scene, a large house with two people in it. I
saw a flight of vultures on a blazing flesh sky, I saw yellow lions, and I heard
voices.
The first Illustration quivered and came to life. . . .
The Veldt
“George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
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“I don’t know.”
“Well, then.”
“I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at
it.”
“What would a psychologist want with a nursery?”
“You know very well what he’d want.” His wife paused in the middle of the
kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.
“It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.”
“All right, let’s have a look.”
They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost
them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and
rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach
sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came
within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and
off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.
“Well,” said George Hadley.
They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by
forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest
of the house. “But nothing’s too good for our children,” George had said.
The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The
walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in
the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline
distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three
dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of
straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.
George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.
“Let’s get out of this sun,” he said. “This is a little too real. But I don’t
see anything wrong.”
“Wait a moment, you’ll see,” said his wife.
Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two
people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass,
the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals,
the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the
thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A
shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley’s upturned,
sweating face.
“Filthy creatures,” he heard his wife say.
“The vultures.”
“You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to
the water hole. They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t know what.”
“Some animal.” George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light
from his squinted eyes. “A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.”
“Are you sure?” His wife sounded peculiarly tense.
“No, it’s a little late to be sure,” be said, amused. “Nothing over there I can
see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.”
“Did you hear that scream?” she asked.
“No.”
“About a minute ago?”
“Sorry, no.”
The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with admiration for
the mechanical genius who had conceived this room. A miracle of efficiency
selling for an absurdly low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally
they frightened you with their clinical accuracy, they startled you, gave you a
twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone, not only your own son and
daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick jaunt to a foreign land, a
quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!
And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and
startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your
mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the
yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry,
the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs
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exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting,
dripping mouths.
The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow
eyes.
“Watch out!” screamed Lydia.
The lions came running at them.
Lydia bolted and ran. Instinctively, George sprang after her. Outside, in the
hall, with the door slammed he was laughing and she was crying, and they both
stood appalled at the other’s reaction.
“George!”
“Lydia! Oh, my dear poor sweet Lydia!”
“They almost got us!”
“Walls, Lydia, remember; crystal walls, that’s all they are. Oh, they look real,
I must admit—Africa in your parlor—but it’s all dimensional, superreactionary,
supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens. It’s all
odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here’s my handkerchief.”
“I’m afraid.” She came to him and put her body against him and cried steadily.
“Did you see? Did you feel? It’s too real.”
“Now, Lydia . . .”
“You’ve got to tell Wendy and Peter not to read any more on Africa.”
“Of course—of course.” He patted her.
“Promise?”
“Sure.”
“And lock the nursery for a few days until I get my nerves settled.”
“You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by
locking the nursery for even a few hours—the tantrum be threw! And Wendy too.
They live for the nursery.”
“It’s got to be locked, that’s all there is to it.”
“All right.” Reluctantly he locked the huge door. “You’ve been working too hard.
You need a rest.”
“I don’t know—I don’t know,” she said, blowing her nose, sitting down in a chair
that immediately began to rock and comfort her. “Maybe I don’t have enough to
do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don’t we shut the whole house off
for a few days and take a vacation?”
“You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?”
“Yes.” She nodded.
“And darn my socks?”
“Yes.” A frantic, watery-eyed nodding.
“And sweep the house?”
“Yes, yes—oh, yes!”
“But I thought that’s why we bought this house, so we wouldn’t have to do
anything?”
“That’s just it. I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother
now, and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and
scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can? I
cannot. And it isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately.”
“I suppose I have been smoking too much.”
“You look as if you didn’t know what to do with yourself in this house, either.
You smoke a little more every morning and drink a little more every afternoon
and need a little more sedative every night. You’re beginning to feel
unnecessary too.”
“Am I?” He paused and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there.
“Oh, George!” She looked beyond him, at the nursery door. “Those lions can’t get
out of there, can they?”
He looked at the door and saw it tremble as if something had jumped against it
from the other side.
“Of course not,” he said.
At dinner they ate alone, for Wendy and Peter were at a special plastic carnival
across town and had televised home to say they’d be late, to go ahead eating. So
George Hadley, bemused, sat watching the dining-room table produce warm dishes
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of food from its mechanical interior.
“We forgot the ketchup,” he said.
“Sorry,” said a small voice within the table, and ketchup appeared.
As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won’t hurt for the children to be
locked out of it awhile. Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone. And it was
clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on
Africa. That sun. He could feel it on his neck, still, like a hot paw. And the
lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic
emanations of the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire.
The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras,
and there were zebras. Sun—sun. Giraffes—giraffes. Death and death.
That last. He chewed tastelessly on the meat that the table bad cut for him.
Death thoughts. They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death thoughts.
Or, no, you were never too young, really. Long before you knew what death was
you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were
shooting people with cap pistols.
But this—the long, hot African veldt—the awful death in the jaws of a lion. And
repeated again and again.
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer Lydia. Preoccupied, be let the lights glow softly on ahead of
him, extinguish behind him as he padded to the nursery door. He listened against
it. Far away, a lion roared.
He unlocked the door and opened it. Just before he stepped inside, he heard a
faraway scream. And then another roar from the lions, which subsided quickly.
He stepped into Africa. How many times in the last year had he opened this door
and found Wonderland, Alice, the Mock Turtle, or Aladdin and his Magical Lamp,
or Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, or Dr. Doolittle, or the cow jumping over a very
real-appearing moon—all the delightful contraptions of a make-believe world. How
often had he seen Pegasus flying in the sky ceiling, or seen fountains of red
fireworks, or heard angel voices singing. But now, this yellow hot Africa, this
bake oven with murder in the heat. Perhaps Lydia was right. Perhaps they needed
a little vacation from the fantasy which was growing a bit too real for
ten-year-old children. It was all right to exercise one’s mind with gymnastic
fantasies, but when the lively child mind settled on one pattern . . . ? It
seemed that, at a distance, for the past month, he had heard lions roaring, and
smelled their strong odor seeping as far away as his study door. But, being
busy, he had paid it no attention.
George Hadley stood on the African grassland alone. The lions looked up from
their feeding, watching him. The only flaw to the illusion was the open door
through which he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed
picture, eating her dinner abstractedly.
“Go away,” he said to the lions.
They did not go.
He knew the principle of the room exactly. You sent out your thoughts. Whatever
you thought would appear. “Let’s have Aladdin and his lamp,” he snapped. The
veldtland remained; the lions remained.
“Come on, room! I demand Aladdin!” he said.
Nothing happened. The lions mumbled in their baked pelts.
“Aladdin!”
He went back to dinner. “The fool room’s out of order,” he said. “It won’t
respond.”
“Or—“
“Or what?”
“Or it can’t respond,” said Lydia, “because the children have thought about
Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room’s in a rut.”
“Could be.”
“Or Peter’s set it to remain that way.”
“Set it?”
“He may have got into the machinery and fixed something.”
“Peter doesn’t know machinery.”
“He’s a wise one for ten. That I.Q. of his—“
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“Nevertheless—“
“Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad.”
The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming in the front door, cheeks like
peppermint candy, eyes like bright blue agate marbles, a smell of ozone on their
jumpers from their trip in the helicopter.
“You’re just in time for supper,” said both parents.
“We’re full of strawberry ice cream and hot dogs,” said the children, holding
hands. “But we’ll sit and watch.”
“Yes, come tell us about the nursery,” said George Hadley.
The brother and sister blinked at him and then at each other. “Nursery?”
“All about Africa and everything,” said the father with false joviality.
“I don’t understand,” said Peter.
“Your mother and I were just traveling through Africa with rod and reel; Tom
Swift and his Electric Lion,” said George Hadley.
“There’s no Africa in the nursery,” said Peter simply.
“Oh, come now, Peter. We know better.”
“I don’t remember any Africa,” said Peter to Wendy. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Run see and come tell.”
She obeyed.
“Wendy, come back here!” said George Hadley, but she was gone. The house lights
followed her like a flock of fireflies. Too late, he realized he had forgotten
to lock the nursery door after his last inspection.
“Wendy’ll look and come tell us,” said Peter.
“She doesn’t have to tell me. I’ve seen it.”
“I’m sure you’re mistaken, Father.”
“I’m not, Peter. Come along now.”
But Wendy was back. “It’s not Africa,” she said breathlessly.
“We’ll see about this,” said George Hadley, and they all walked down the hall
together and opened the nursery door.
There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices
singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with colorful
flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her long hair. The
African veldtland was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing
a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.
George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. “Go to bed,” he said to the
children.
They opened their mouths.
“You heard me,” he said.
They went off to the air closet, where a wind sucked them like brown leaves up
the flue to their slumber rooms.
George Hadley walked through the singing glade and picked up something that lay
in the corner near where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife.
“What is that?” she asked.
“An old wallet of mine,” he said.
He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a lion.
There were drops of saliva on it, it had been chewed, and there were blood
smears on both sides.
He closed the nursery door and locked it, tight.
In the middle of the night he was still awake and he knew his wife was awake.
“Do you think Wendy changed it?” she said at last, in the dark room.
“Of course.”
“Made it from a veldt into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But it’s staying locked until I find out.”
“How did your wallet get there?”
“I don’t know anything,” he said, “except that I’m beginning to be sorry we
bought that room for the children. If children are neurotic at all, a room like
that—“
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“It’s supposed to help them work off their neuroses in a healthful way.”
“I’m starting to wonder.” He stared at the ceiling.
“We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our
reward—secrecy, disobedience?”
“Who was it said, ‘Children are carpets, they should be stepped on
occasionally’? We’ve never lifted a hand. They’re insufferable—let’s admit it.
They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring. They’re
spoiled and we’re spoiled.”
“They’ve been acting funny ever since you forbade them to take the rocket to New
York a few months ago.”
“They’re not old enough to do that alone, I explained.”
“Nevertheless, I’ve noticed they’ve been decidedly cool toward us since.”
“I think I’ll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at
Africa.”
“But it’s not Africa now, it’s Green Mansions country and Rima.”
“I have a feeling it’ll be Africa again before then.”
A moment later they heard the screams.
Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.
“Wendy and Peter aren’t in their rooms,” said his wife.
He lay in his bed with his beating heart. “No,” he said. “They’ve broken into
the nursery.”
“Those screams—they sound familiar.”
“Do they?”
“Yes, awfully.”
And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to
sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.
“Father?” said Peter.
“Yes.”
Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his
mother. “You aren’t going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?”
“That all depends.”
“On what?” snapped Peter.
“On you and your sister. If you intersperse this Africa with a little
variety—oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China—“
“I thought we were free to play as we wished.”
“You are, within reasonable bounds.”
“What’s wrong with Africa, Father?”
“Oh, so now you admit you have been conjuring up Africa, do you?”
“I wouldn’t want the nursery locked up,” said Peter coldly. “Ever.”
“Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a
month. Live sort of a carefree one-for-all existence.”
“That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the
shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a
bath?”
“It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?”
“No, it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter
last month.”
“That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”
“I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there
to do?”
“All right, go play in Africa.”
“Will you shut off the house sometime soon?”
“We’re considering it.”
“I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father.”
“I won’t have any threats from my son!”
“Very well.” And Peter strolled off to the nursery.
“Am I on time?” said David McClean.
“Breakfast?” asked George Hadley.
“Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?”
“David, you’re a psychologist.”
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“I should hope so.”
“Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped
by; did you notice anything peculiar about it then?”
“Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here
or there, usual in children because they feel persecuted by parents constantly,
but, oh, really nothing.”
They walked down the ball. “I locked the nursery up,” explained the father, “and
the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could
form the patterns for you to see.”
There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.
“There it is,” said George Hadley. “See what you make of it.”
They walked in on the children without rapping.
The screams had faded. The lions were feeding.
“Run outside a moment, children,” said George Hadley. “No, don’t change the
mental combination. Leave the walls as they are. Get!”
With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions clustered at a
distance, eating with great relish whatever it was they had caught.
“I wish I knew what it was,” said George Hadley. “Sometimes I can almost see. Do
you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and—“
David McClean laughed dryly. “Hardly.” He turned to study all four walls. “How
long has this been going on?”
“A little over a month.”
“It certainly doesn’t feel good.”
“I want facts, not feelings.”
“My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears
about feelings; vague things. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust my
hunches and my instincts. I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My
advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought
to me every day during the next year for treatment.”
“Is it that bad?”
“I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we could
study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind, study at our leisure,
and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a channel
toward—destructive thoughts, instead of a release away from them.”
“Didn’t you sense this before?”
“I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re
letting them down in some way. What way?”
“I wouldn’t let them go to New York.”
“What else?”
“I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with
closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few
days to show I meant business.”
“Ah, ha!”
“Does that mean anything?”
“Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge.
Children prefer Santas. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your
wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far
more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along
and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming
out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too
many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d starve
tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to tap
an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll
make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.”
“But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up
abruptly, for good?”
“I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all.”
The lions were finished with their red feast.
The lions were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.
“Now I’m feeling persecuted,” said McClean. “Let’s get out of here. I never have
cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous.”
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“The lions look real, don’t they?” said George Hadley. I don’t suppose there’s
any way—“
“What?”
“—that they could become real?”
“Not that I know.”
“Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?”
“No.”
They went to the door.
“I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,” said the father.
“Nothing ever likes to die—even a room.”
“I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?”
“Paranoia is thick around here today,” said David McClean. “You can follow it
like a spoor. Hello.” He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. “This yours?”
“No.” George Hadley’s face was rigid. “It belongs to Lydia.”
They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.
The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things.
They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.
“You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!”
“Now, children.”
The children flung themselves onto a couch, weeping.
“George,” said Lydia Hadley, “turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You
can’t be so abrupt.”
“No.”
“You can’t be so cruel . . .”
“Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and
now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me.
We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God,
how we need a breath of honest air!”
And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the
heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and
massagers, and every other machine be could put his hand to.
The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical
cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to
function at the tap of a button.
“Don’t let them do it!” wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the
house, the nursery. “Don’t let Father kill everything.” He turned to his father.
“Oh, I hate you!”
“Insults won’t get you anywhere.”
“I wish you were dead!”
“We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of
being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.”
Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. “Just a moment, just one
moment, just another moment of nursery,” they wailed.
“Oh, George,” said the wife, “it can’t hurt.”
“All right—all right, if they’ll just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then
off forever.”
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” sang the children, smiling with wet faces.
“And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an
hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn
the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.”
And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be vacuumed
upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself. A minute later
Lydia appeared.
“I’ll be glad when we get away,” she sighed.
“Did you leave them in the nursery?”
“I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?”
“Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in
this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?”
“Pride, money, foolishness.”
“I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with those
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