 and good evening and happy Halloween. Tonight is a vital night of a great deal of importance for many people in the horror tradition. It's a great night of magic, a night of mystery, it's the night where for a lot of us all kinds of possibilities are open. And in honor of that I'd like to celebrate the great poet of Halloween, the great American artist of darkness, the magisterial, the splendid Ray Bradbury. I'm gonna start reading some of him in just a little bit, but first I want to give you all some time to join us, to sit with us, and in fact I'm going to invite some people who I haven't made it here yet, so I'm gonna share this out across social media. But to begin with, I think for a lot of people they encounter Ray Bradbury as kids, they encounter Ray Bradbury when they are just starting to read literature, perhaps they're just starting to read short stories when they encounter darkness. And in many ways, Bradbury is their guide, their lyrical avatar, their Virgil into a world of beauty and darkness. Now let me invite people on Twitter to join us. For me, I think it may have been Martian Chronicles which gave me my start, which introduced me to Ray Bradbury, that heartbreaking, shining collection of stories, offering a vision of space exploration, a vision of humanity, a vision of the future that I'd never seen before, even as a kid. It moved me, it upset me. It gave me all kinds of possibilities. I think for other people, it's his great horror stories that appeared in books like The October Country or The Illustrated Man. For some later on, it may have been seeing some stories. For more than a few, it's the bits of his that got sampled in great literature textbooks. I've seen all summer and a day that way, for example. Now, to invite people on Facebook. But for a career that's spanned decades, so much creativity, of so much production, I think it's in many ways just impossible to avoid Bradbury. And I would invite even people on LinkedIn. Of course, on Facebook I'm going to have to do this twice to make one to make sure that it gets past their algorithms. Now, I've asked people what they would like to read, what they would like to hear, which stories would engage them the most. And I think right now, I'd like to start with a classic glimpse of technology and how it could go wrong. So this is a story from The Illustrated Man, very, very old copy of the book. The story called The Velt. George, I wish you'd look at the nursery. What's wrong with it? I don't know. I don't know 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 the nursery? You know very well what he'd want. His wife, Paul, is in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four. It's just the nursery is different now than it was. All right, let's have a look. They bucked down the hall of their soundproofed happy life home, which would cost them $30,000 installed. This house was clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized to switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within 10 feet of it. Similarly, behind them in the halls lights went off and on as they left the mind with a soft automaticity. Well, said George Hadley, they stood on the thatched roof of the nursery. It was 40 feet across by 40 feet long and 30 feet high. It 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 as 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 belt 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 starting to sprout. Let's get out of the sun, he said. This is a little too real. But I don't see anything wrong. Wait a moment, you'll see his wife. Now the hidden odor of phonics are beginning to blow wind of odor the two people in the middle of the baked velvet land, baked velled land. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell, the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And all the sounds, the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures, a shadow pass through the sky, the shadow flickered on George Hadley's upturned sweating face. Filthy creatures, he heard his wife say, the vultures. You see, they're 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 up his hand to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. Zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe. Are you sure? His wife sounded particularly tense. No, it's a little late to be sure, he said amused. Nothing over there. I can see a clean bone and the vultures dropping for what's left. Did you hear that scream? She said, no, about a minute ago. Sorry, no, the lions are 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. Occasionally 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 jump to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was. And here were the lions now 15 feet away, so real, so feverishly and startling only real that you could feel the prickling fur in your mouth, the stuff in your dusty holstery smell their heated belts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes, like the yellow and exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noon tide, and the smell of meat from the panting dripping mouths. The lion stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green yellow eyes. Watch scream, Lydia. The lions came running at them. Lydia bolted and ran. Instinctively, George sprang after her outside in the hall when the door slammed, he was laughing, and she was crying. And they both stood appalled 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. Although they look real, I must admit, Africa and your parlor. But it's all dimensional, super reactionary, super sensitive 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 in 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 he 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 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 water-reied nodding. And sweep the house? Yes, yes. Oh, yes. I thought it's when we bought this house, it wouldn't have to do anything. That's just it. I feel like I don't belong here. The house's wife and mother now in nursemaid. Can I compete with an African belt? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can? I cannot. And 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 eat 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 wrote 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 living room, the dining room table produce warm dishes of food from his 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 for a while. Too much of anything isn't good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated the children had been spending a little too much time in Africa. That son, he could feel on his neck still like a hot paw in 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. Son, son, drafts, drafts. Death and death, that last. He chewed tastelessly in the meat the table had 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 belt, the awful death from the jaws of a lion, and repeated again and again. Where are you going? He didn't answer Lydia. Preoccupied, he let the lights glow softly on the head of him, extinguished behind him as he patted to the nursery door. He listened against a far away a lion roar. 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 the door and found Wonderland, Alice, the mock turtle, or Aladdin at his magic clamp, or Jack Pumpkin head of Oz, or Dr. Dolittle, 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 sealing, 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 is growing a little too real for 10-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'd heard lions roaring and smelled their strong odor seeping as far away as his study door, but being busy he had paid no attention. George Hadley stood in 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 distractedly. 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 a laden on his lamp, he snapped. The felt land remained, the lions remained. Come on, Rome, I demand a laden, he said. Nothing happened. The lions mumbled in their baked pelts. A laden, he went back to dinner. The fool worms out of order, he said, I won't respond, or what, or I can't respond, said Lydia. Because their children have fought about Africa and lions and killing so many days of the rooms in a rut. Good be. Or Peter said it to remain that way. Said it? He may have got into the machinery and fixed something. Peter doesn't know machinery. He's a wise one for ten, that IQ of his, 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. The 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 of 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 at each other. Nursery? All about Africa and everything, said the father with false triviality. I don't understand, said Peter. Your mother and I were just traveling through Africa with rod and reel. Tom Swift in 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, shoe bait. 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 she'd forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last inspection. Wendy will 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 on 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, looking in the trees with colorful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her long hair. The African Veltland was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful it brought tears to your eyes. George Hadley looked in at the change scene. Go to bed, he said to the children. The children opened their mouths. You heard me, he said. They went off to the air closet, where winds stuck them like brown leaves up the flute of 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. It's 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 drops of saliva on 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 it last in the dark room. Of course. Made it from a Veltland to a forest. They 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, it's supposed to help them work off their neuroses in a healthful way. And I'm starting to wonder, he stared at the ceiling. We've given the children everything they wanted. Is this our reward? Secrecy? Disobedience? When was it who said children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally? We 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 towards us since. I think I'll have David McLean come tomorrow morning and look at Africa. But it's not Africa now, it's Green Mansions country in Rima. I have a feeling it'll be Africa again before then. Moment later, they heard the screams. Two screams, two people screaming from downstairs, and then a roar of lions. Wendy and Peter are in their rooms, said his wife. He leaned his bed with his beating heart. No, he said. They broke 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 anymore, nor his mother. You weren't going to lock up the nursery for good, are you? That all depends. On what, said Peter? On you and your sister. If you'd dispersed 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've been conjuring up Africa, do you? I wouldn't want that 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 carefree, one for all existence. That sounds dreadful. Where would I have to tie my, why would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tire do it? And brush my teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath? It'd be fun for a change, don't you think? No, it'd be hard. I didn't like it when you took out the picture painter last month. That's because you wanted 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 better consider it any more, father. I won't have any threats for my son. Very well. And Peter strolled off to the nursery. Am I on time? Said David McClain. Breakfast, asked George Hadley. Thanks, had some. What's the trouble? David, you're a psychologist. I should hope so. Well, then have a look at the 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 or a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there. Usual children because they feel persecuted with parents constantly, but really nothing. They walked down the hall. I locked the nursery up, explained the father, and the children broke down 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 wrapping. The screams had faded. The lions were feeding. Right outside of moment, children, said George Hadley. No, don't change the mental combination. Just leave the walls as they are. Get. The children gone, the two of them stood studying the lions, clustered at a distance, eating with great relish wherever it was they caught. I wish I could see what it was, said George Hadley. Sometimes I could almost see. Do you think I brought high-powered binoculars here? And David McLean laughed drivly. Hardly. He turned to study all four walls. How long has this been going on? A little over a month. Certainly doesn't feel good. I want facts, not feelings. But 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 that we could study the patterns up in 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. So they were released 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 me down in some way. What way? I would nothing 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 a few days to show them at business. Uh-huh? Does that mean anything? Everything. Where before they did Santa Claus, now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You've let this room and this house replace you and your wife and your children's affections. This room is their mother and father. Far more important than their lives and their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. Don't wonder this 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 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. Won't the shock be too much for the children? Shrink the rope up properly for good? I don't want them going any deeper into this. That's all. The lions are 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 McLean. Let's get out of here. I never cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous. The lions look real, don't they? Said George Hadley. I don't suppose there's any way what they could become real. What did 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. Haranoia is thick around here today, said David McLean. He could have followed like a spore. Hello? He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. This yours? No, George Hadley's face was rigid. It belonged 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! No, children. The children flung themselves onto the couch, weeping. George, said Lydia Hadley, turned on the nursery just for a few moments. You can't be so abrupt. No. You can't be so cruel. Lydia, it's often it stays off and the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see her the mess we 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. He marched through the house, turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lasers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine he 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 weighing into function 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 time. Now we're really going to start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we're going to live. When he 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 we're only just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then we'll all forever. Daddy, daddy, daddy! Saying to the children, smiling with wet faces. Then we'll go into the kitchen. David McLean 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. The three of them went babbling off, while he let himself be vacuumed upstairs to the air flu, and said about dressing himself. A minute later, Lydia appeared. I'll be glad when we get away, she said. Did you leave them in the nursery? I want to dress, too. Oh, that hard Africa. What can they see in it? Well, in five minutes we'll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how do we ever get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare? Pride? Money? Foolishness? I think we better get downstairs before these kids get engrossed in these damn beasts again. Just then they heard their children calling. Daddy, mommy, come quick, quick! They went downstairs, and the air flew around down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. Wendy, Peter! They ran into the nursery. The Veltland was empty, save for the lions waiting, looking at them. Peter? Wendy? The door slammed. Wendy! Peter! George Hadley and his wife, world, they ran back to the door. Open the door! cried George Hadley, trying the knob. Why they have locked it from the outside! Peter! He beat up the door. Open up! He heard Peter's voice outside against the door. Don't let them switch off the nursery and the house, he was saying. Mr. and Mrs. George Hadley beat up the door. Now, don't be ridiculous, children. It's time to go. Mr. McClain will be here in a minute. And then they heard the sounds. The lions on three sides of them in the yellow-velled grass, patting through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats. The lions. Mr. Hadley looked at his wife, and they turned and looked back at the beasts, edging slowly forward, crouching, tail stiff. Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed, and suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar. Well, here I am! said David McClain in the nursery doorway. Oh, hello! He stared the two children in the center of the open glade, eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the waterhole and the yellow-velled land. Above was the hot sun. He began to perspire. Where are your father and mother? The children looked up and smiled. Oh, they'll be here directly. Good, we must get going. At a distance, Mr. McClain saw the lions fighting and clawing and then quieting down to feed and silence under the shitty trees. He squinted the lions with his hand up to his eyes. Now the lions are done feeding. They move to the waterhole to drink. A shadow flickered over Mr. McClain's hot face. Many shadows flickered. The vultures were dropping down the blazing sky. A cup of tea asked Wendy in the silence. If that story is new to you, you can see I think why it's so famous. It gives us an early 1950s glimpse of virtual reality. It touches on a whole series of issues, including parenting and childhood. And on top of that, there's the little subtle joke about Peter Pan after all the children called Wendy and Peter. So that's one story. That's one glimpse of the darkness for this Halloween night. Now, if you're listening in the chat, I'd like to hear your suggestions for what you'd like to hear. I have some ideas, but I would love to hear your votes as well. And while you're thinking about that, while you're thinking about that, I'm going to prep one other story. And let me take a look in social media and see what people have said, to see if there are any requests or if there are any hints as well. Please feel free to use the chat box to type in your own comments and your own questions. Bradbury is famous for a whole series of stories, a whole ton of them. And in fact, I want to make sure I get one of the darkest. This one took us to the future, to virtual reality, but now let me take you into the past. Hang on one second. Bradbury's life and work spanned the 20th century and covers a lot of ground. And his fiction does as well. He famously went as far back into prehistory into dinosaurs, which he loved. He also went into the far future of science fiction, like Martian Chronicles, other stories. But he also wrote about his own time. And this is a story about the Great Depression. It's a story about more than that. It's a kind of secret history of the 20th century. It's called The Scythe. Quite suddenly, there was no more road. It ran down the valley like any other road between slopes of barren, stony ground and live oak trees and then passed a broad field of wheat standing alone in the wilderness. It came up beside the small white house that belonged to the wheat field and then just faded out, as if there was no more use for it. It didn't matter much because just there the last of the gas was gone. Drew Erickson broke the ancient car to a stop and sat there, not speaking, staring at his big, rough farmer's hands. Molly spoke without moving where she lay in the corner beside him. We must have took the wrong fork back yonder. Drew nodded. Molly's lips were almost as white as her face. When they were dry, where her skin was damp with sweat, her voice was flat with no expression of it. Drew, she said, Drew, what are we going to do now? Drew stared at his hands, a farmer's hands, with a farm blown out from under them by a dry, hungry wind that never got enough good loam to eat. The kids in the back seat woke up and pried themselves out of the dusty litter of bundles and bedding. They poked their heads over the back of the seat and said, what are we stopping for, Pa? Are we going to eat now, Pa? Pa, we're awful hungry. Can we eat now, Pa? Drew closed his eyes. He hated the sight of his hands. Molly's fingers touched his wrist. Very light, very soft. Drew, maybe in the house there, they'd spare something to eat. A white line showed around his mouth. Begging, he said harshly. Ain't none of us ever begged before. Ain't none of us ever gonna. Molly's hand tight on his wrist. He turned and saw her eyes. He saw the eyes of Susie and little Drew looking at him. Slowly, all the stiffness went out of his neck and his back. His face got loose and blank, shapeless like a thing that had been beaten too hard and too long. He got out of the car and went up the pass of the house. He walked uncertainly, like a man who was sick when nearly blind. The door of the house was open. Drew not three times. There was nothing inside but silence. And a white window curtain moving in the slow, hot air. He knew it before he went in. He knew there was death in the house. It was that kind of silence. He went through a small, clean living room and down a little hall. He wasn't thinking anything. He was past thinking. He was going toward the kitchen, unquestioningly, like an animal. Then he looked through the open door and saw the dead man. He was an old man lying out in a clean white bed. He had been dead long, not long enough to lose the last quiet look of peace. He must have known he was gonna die because he wore his grave clothes, an old black suit brushed underneath, a clean white shirt and a black tie. A scythe leaned against the wall beside the bed. Between the old man's hands, there was a blade of wheat. Still fresh, a ripe blade, golden and heavy in the tassel. Drew went into the bedroom, walking soft. There was a coldness on him. He took off his broken, dusty hat and sat by the bed, stood by the bed, looking down. The paper lay open on the pillow beside the old man's hand. It was meant to be red, maybe a request for burial or a call to a relative. Drew was scowled over the words, moving his pale, dry lips. To him who stands beside me at my deathbed, being of sound mind and alone in the world as it has been decreed, I, John Bure, do give and bequeath this farm with all pertaining to it to the man who is to come. Whatever his name or origin shall be, it will not matter. The farm is his and the wheat, the scythe and the tassel ordained there too. Let him take them freely without question and remember that I, John Bure, am only the giver, not the ordainer, to which I set my hand and seal this third day of April, 1938, signed John Bure, Kyrie Ellison. Drew walked back through the house and opened the screen door. He said, Molly, you come in, kids, you stay in the car. Molly came inside. He took her to the bedroom. She looked at the wheel, the scythe, the wheat field moving in a hot wind outside the window. Her white face tightened up and she bit her lips and held on to him. It's too good to be true. There must be some trick to it, Drew said. Our luck's changing, that's all. We'll have work to do, stuff to eat, something over our heads to keep the rain off. He touched the scythe. He gleamed like a half moon. Words were scratched on its blade. Who wields me wields the world. It didn't mean much to him, right, that moment. Drew, Molly asked, staring at the old man's clasped hands. Why, why is he holding that wheat stalk so hard in his fingers? Just then the heavy silence was broken by the sound of the kid scrambling at the front porch. Molly gasped. They lived in the house. They buried the old man on a hill and said some words over him and then came back down and swept the house and all over the car and had something to eat because there was food, lots of it in the kitchen. And they did nothing but for three days but fixed the house, looked at the land and lying in the good beds and look at one another in surprise. This is all happening this way. And the stomachs were full and there was even a cigar everything was smoking in the evenings. There was a small barn behind the house and in the barn a bowl and three cows. And there was a well house, a spring house under some big trees that kept it cool. Inside the well house were big sides of beef and bacon and pork and mutton. Enough to feed a family five times their size for a year, two years, maybe three. There was a churn and a box of cheese there and big metal cans for the milk. On the fourth morning, Drew Erickson lay in bed looking at the sides and he knew it was time for him to work because there was ripe green in the long field. He had seen it with his eyes and he did not want to get soft. Three days sitting were enough for any man. He roused himself in the fresh first smell of dawn and took the sides and held it before him as he walked out into the field. He held up in his hands and swung it down. It was a big field of grain, too big for one man to ten and yet one man had ten of it. At the end of the first day of work, he walked in with the sides writing his shoulder quietly. And there was a look on his face of a puzzled man. It was a wheat field, the leg of which he had never seen. It ripened only in separate clusters. Each set off from the others. Wheat shouldn't do that. He didn't tell Molly, nor did he tell her the other things about the field. About how, for instance, the wheat rotted within a few hours after he cut it down. Wheat shouldn't do that either. He was not greatly worried. After all, there was food at hand. The next morning, the wheat he left rotten, cut down, had taken hold and come in little green sprouts with tiny roots all born again. True Ericsson rubbed his chin. Wondered what and why and how it acted that way and what good it would be up to him. He couldn't sell it. A couple of times during the day, he walked far up in the hills to where the old man's grave was. Just to be sure the old man was there, maybe with some notion, he might get an idea about the field. He looked down and he saw how much land he owned. The wheat stretched three miles in one direction toward the mountains. That was about two acres wide, patches of its seedlings, patches of its golden, patches of its green, patches of its fresh cut by his hand. But the old man said nothing concerning this. There were a lot of stones and dirt in his face now. The grave was in the sun and the wind in the silence. So True Ericsson walked back down to use the scythe, curious and enjoying it because it seemed important. He didn't know just why, but it was very, very important. He couldn't just let the wheat stand. There were always new patches of it ripened and his figuring out loud to know in a particular, he said, If I cut the wheat for the next 10 years, just as it ripens up, I don't think I'll pass the same spot twice. It's a damn big field, he shook his head. That wheat ripens just so. There were too much of it, so I can't cut all the ripe stuff each day. That leaves nothing but green grain. Next morning, sure enough, another patch of ripe stuff. It was damn foolish to cut the grain when it rotted as quick as it fell. At the end of the week, he decided to let it go a few days. He lay in bed late, just listening to the silence in the house that wasn't anything like death silence, but a silence of things living well and happily. He got up, dressed, ate his breakfast slowly. He wasn't going to work. He went out to milk the cows, stood in the porch, smoking a cigarette, walked about the backyard a little, and then came back in and asked Molly what he had and asked Molly what he had gone out to do. Milked the cows, she said. Oh yes, he said, it went out again. He found the cows waiting in full, and milked them and put the milk cans in the spring house, but thought of other things, the wheat, the scythe. All through the morning, he sat in the back porch, rolling cigarettes. He made a toy boat for little Drew, and one for Susie. Then he churned some of the milk into butter, and drew off the buttermilk, but the sun was in his head, aching. It burned there. He wasn't hungry for lunch. He kept looking at the wheat, and the wind bending, and tipping and ruffling it. His arms flexed. His fingers resting on his knees, he sat again in the porch, made a kind of grip in the empty air, itching. The pads of his palms itched and burned. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants, and sat down and tried to roll another cigarette, and got mad at the mixings, and threw it all away with a muttering. He had a feeling as if a third arm had been cut off of him, or he had lost something of himself. It had to do with his hands and his arms. He heard the wind whisper in the field. By one o'clock, he was going in and out of the house, getting underfoot, thinking about digging an irrigation ditch, but all the time really thinking about the wheat, and how ripe and beautiful it was, aching to be cut. Damn it to hell! He threw it into the bedroom, took the scythe down off the wall pegs. He stood holding it. He felt cool. His hands stopped itching. His head didn't ache. The third arms returned to him. He was intact again. It was instinct. Ethnological as lightning striking and not hurting. Every day, the grain must be cut. It had to be cut. Why? Well, it just did. That was all. He laughed at the scythe in his big hands. Then whistling, he took it out to the ripe and waiting field and did the work. He thought himself a little mad. Hell, it wasn't ordinary enough wheat field, really. Wasn't it? Almost. The days loped away like gentle horses. Drew Erickson began to understand his work as a sort of dry ache and hunger and need. Things built in his head. One noon, Susie and little Drew giggled and played with the scythe while their father lunched in the kitchen. He heard them. He came out and took it away from them. He didn't yell at them. He just looked very concerned and locked the scythe up after that when it wasn't being used. He never missed a day, scything. Up, down, up, down and across. Back and up and down and across. Cutting. Up, down, up. Think about the old man the wheat in his hands when he died. Down. Think about this dead land with the wheat living on it. Up. Think about the crazy patterns of ripe and green wheat. The way it grows. Down. Think about the wheat world in a full yellow tide his ankles. The sky blackened. Drew Erickson dropped the scythe and bent over to hold his stomach. His eyes running blindly. The world reeled. I've killed somebody. He gasped, choking. Holding to his chest. Falling to his knees beside the blade. I've killed a lot. The sky revolved like a merry blue merry go round at the county fair in Kansas. But no music. Only a ring in his ears. Molly was sitting at the blue kitchen table peeling potatoes when he blundered around the kitchen dragging the scythe behind him. Molly! She swam around on the wet of his eyes. She sat there. Her hands falling open waiting for him to finally get it out. Get the things packed. He said, looking at the floor. Why? We're leaving. He said, Dolly. We're leaving? She said. That old man. You know what he did here? It's the wheat, Molly, and the scythe. Every time you use the scythe on the wheat, a thousand people die. You cut them across and Molly got up and put the knife down in the potatoes to one side and said, understandingly, we travel a lot and we haven't eaten good until the last month here. And you've been working every day and you're tired. I heard voices. Sad voices out there in the wheat. Telling me to stop. Telling me not to kill them. Drew, he didn't hear her. The field grows crooked. Wow, look at crazy thing. I didn't tell you, but it's wrong. She stared at him. His eyes are blue glass. Nothing else. You think I'm crazy, he said. But just wait till I tell you. Oh, God, Molly, help me. I just killed my mother. Stop it, she said firmly. I cut down one stalk of wheat and I killed her. I felt her dying. That's how I found out just now. Drew, her voice was like a crack across the face, angry and afraid now. Shut up, he mumbled. Oh, Molly. The scythe dropped from his hands, clambered on the floor. She picked it up with a step of anger and set it one quarter. Ten years I've been with you, she said. Sometimes we had nothing but dust and prayers in our mouths. Now all this good luck's sudden and you can't bear up under it. She brought the Bible and wrote it in her. She rustled its pages over. They sounded like the wheat rustling in a small, slow wind. You sit down and listen, she said. The sound came in from the sunshine, the kids laughing in the shade of a large live oak beside the house. She read from the Bible, looking up now and again to see what happened to Drew's face. She read from the Bible each day after that. The following Wednesday, a week later, when Drew walked down to the distant town to see if there was any general deliver all mail, there was a letter. He came home looking 200 years old. He held the letter out to Molly and told her what it said in a cold, uneven house. Mother passed away one o'clock Tuesday afternoon, her heart. All the Drew Erickson had to say was, get the kids in the car, load up the food. We're going on to California. Drew said his wife holding the letter. You know yourself, he said. This is poor, grain land. Yet look how ripe it grows. I ain't told you all the things. It ripens and patches a little each day. It ain't right. And when I cut it, it rots. And next morning, it comes up without any help, growing again. Last Tuesday, a week ago, when I cut the grain, it was like ripping my own flesh. I heard somebody scream. It sounded just like, and now today, this letter. She said, we're staying here. Molly, we're staying here. We're sure of eating and sleeping and living decent and living long. I'm not starving my children down ever again. The sky was blue from the windows. The sun slanted in, touching half on Molly's calm face, shining one light bright blue. Four or five water drops hung and fell from the kitchen deposit, slowly shining for Drew's side. The sigh with rust was husky and resigned and tired. He nodded, looking away. All right, he said, we'll stay. He picked up the sigh weekly. The words in the metal leaped up with a sharp glitter. Who wields me, wields the world. We'll stay. Next morning, he walked the old man's grave. There was a single fresh sprout of wheat growing in the center of it. The same sprout reborn, the old man had held in his hands weeks before. He talked to the old man, getting no answers. He worked the field all your life because you had to, and one day you came across your own life growing there. You knew it was yours. You cut it, and you went home, put on your grave clothes, and your heart gave out and you died. That's how it was, wasn't it? He passed land on to me. When I die, I'm supposed to hand over to someone else. Drew, his voice had on it. How long a time has this been going on? With nobody knowing about this field and its use, except the man with the scythe. Quite suddenly, he felt very old. The valley seemed ancient, mummified, secretive, dried, and bent, and powerful. When the Indians danced in the prairie, it had been here, this field. The same sky, the same wind, the same wheat. And before the Indians, some Cro-Magnon, gnarled and shag-haired, wielding a crude wooden scythe, perhaps prowling down through the living wheat. Drew returned to work. Up, down, up, down. Obsessed with the idea of being the wielder of the scythe. He himself, it burst upon him in a mad wild surge of strength and horror. Up, who wields me, down wields the world. He had to accept a job with some sort of philosophy. It was simply his way of getting food and housing for his family. They deserved eating and living decent, he thought, after all those years. Up and down, each grain of life, he cut nearly into two pieces. He planted carefully, he looked at the wheat, why he and Molly and the kids could live forever. Once he found more of the place where the grain grew, that was Molly and Susie and little Drew, he would never cut it. And then, like a signal, it came quietly, right there before him. Another sweep of the scythe, and he had cut them away. Molly drew Susie, it was certain, trembling. He not looked at the few grains of wheat, they glowed at his touch. He groaned with relief, what if he had cut them down, never guessing. He blew out his breath and got up and took the scythe and stood back away from the wheat and stood for a long while looking down. Molly thought awfully strange, but it came home early and kissed her in the cheek for no reason at all. At dinner, Molly said, he quit early today. Does the wheat still spoil when it falls? He nod and took more meat. She said, do you ought to write to the agriculture people and have them come look at it? No, he said. I was just suggesting, she said. His eyes dilated. I got to stay here all my life. Can't nobody else mess with that wheat? They wouldn't know where to cut and not to cut. They might cut the wrong parts. What wrong parts? Nothing, he said, chewing slowly. Nothing at all. He slapped his fork down hard. Who knows what they might want to do? Those government men, they might even, might even want to plow the whole field under. Molly nodded. That's just what it needs, she said. And start all over again with new seed. He didn't finish eating. I'm not writing any government and I'm not hanging this field over. No stranger to cut. And that's that. And the screen door banged behind him. He detoured around the place with lies of his children and his wife grew up in the sun and used his side in the far end of the field where he knew he could make no mistakes. But he no longer liked the work. At the end of an hour, he knew he had brought death to three of his old love friends in Missouri. He read their names like cut grain and couldn't go on. He locked the scythe in the cellar to put the key away. Lock the scythe in the cellar. He just done with it in the key away. Done for good and all. He smoked his pipe in the evening on the front porch and he told the kids stories to hear them laugh. But they didn't laugh much. They seemed withdrawn, tired and funny, like they weren't his children anymore. While he complained of a headache, dragged around the house little, went to bed early, fell to a deep sleep. That was funny too. Molly always stayed up late and was full of vinegar. The weed field rippled with moonlight on it, making it into a sea. It wanted cutting, certain parts of it cutting now. Drew Erickson sat, swallowing quietly, trying not to look at it. What had happened to the world if he never went into the field again? What had happened to people ripe for death who waited the coming of the scythe? He'd wait and see. Molly was breathing softly when he blew out the oil lamp and got to bed. He couldn't sleep. He heard the wind and the wheat. Felt the hunger due to the work in his arms and fingers. In the middle of the night, he found himself walking in the field, the scythe in his hands, walking like a crazy man, walking in a frayed half-awake. He didn't remember unlocking the cellar door, getting the scythe, but here he was in the moonlight, walking in the grain. Among those grains are many who are old, weary, wanting so very much to sleep, the long, quiet, moonless sleep. The scythe held him, grew into his palms, forced him to walk. Somehow struggling, he got free of it. He threw it down, ran off into the wheat, where he stopped and went down in his knees. I don't want to kill anymore, he said. If I work with the scythe, I'll have to kill Molly and the kids. Don't ask me to do that. The stars only sat in the sky, shining behind him, your dull, thumping sound. Something shot up over the hill into the sky. It was like a living thing with arms of red color looking at the stars. Sparks fell into his face. The thick, hot odor of fire came with it. The house. Crying out, he got sluggishly, hopelessly to his feet, looking at the big fire. The little white house, live oaks is roaring up in one savage bloom of fire. He rolled over the hill and he swam at it and went down on it, stumbling, drowning over his head. By the time he got down the hill, there was not a single bolter threshold of it that wasn't alive with flame. It made blistering, crackling, fumbling noises. No one screamed inside. No one ran around or shouted. He yelled in the yard, Molly, Susie, Drew! He got no answer. He ran close in until his eyebrows withered and his skin crawled, hot like paper burning, crisping, curling up in tight little curls. Molly, Susie! The fire settled contently down into feet. Drew ran around the house a dozen times, all alone, trying to find a way in. They sat where the fire roasted his body and waded until all the walls had shrunken down with fluttering crashes. Into the last ceiling bent, lanking the floors with molten plaster and scorched lathing. Until the flames died and smoke coughed up and the new day came slowly. There was nothing but embering ashes and acid smoldering. Disregarding the heat, fanning from the leveled frames, Drew walked into the ruin. It was still too dark to see much. Red light glowed on his sweating throat. He saw the Castranger in a new and different land. Here the kitchen, charred tables, chairs, the iron stove, the cupboards. Here the hall, here the parlor. And then over there was the bedroom where Molly was still alive. She slept among fallen timbers and angry colored pieces of wire spring and metal. She slept as if nothing had happened. Her small white hands laid her sides, flaked with sparks. Her calm face slept like a flaming laugh across one cheek. Drew stopped and didn't believe it. In the ruin of her smoking bedroom she lay in a glittering bed of sparks, her skin intact, her breast rising, falling, taking air. Molly alive and sleeping after the fire after the walls had roared down and her ceilings had collapsed upon her and flame had lived all about her. His shoes smoked as he pushed through piles of fuming litter. He would have seared his feet off of the ankles and he wouldn't have known. Molly. He bent over her. She didn't move or hear him. She didn't speak. She wasn't dead. She wasn't alive. She just lay there with a fire surrounding her and not touching her, not harming her in any way. Her cotton nightgown was streaked with ashes but not burnt. Her brown hair was piled in a tumble of red hot coals. He touched her cheek and it was cold, cold in the middle of hell. Tiny breaths trembled her half-smalling lips. The children were there too. Behind a veil of smoke he made out two smaller figures huddled in the ashes, sleeping. He carried all three of them out to the edge of the wheat field. Molly. Molly, wake up. Kids. Kids, wake up. They breathed and didn't move and went on sleeping. Kids, wake up. Your mother is dead. No, not dead. But he shook the kids if they were to blame. They paid no attention. They were busy with their dreams. He put them back down, stood over them. His face cut with lines. He knew why they slept through the fire and continued to sleep now. He knew why Molly just lay there, never wanting to laugh again. The power of the wheat and the scythe. Their lives supposed to end yesterday, May 30, 1938. They've been prolonged simply because he refused to cut the grain. They should have died in the fire. That was the way it was meant to be. But since he had not used the scythe, nothing could hurt them. A house had flamed and fallen and still they lived, caught halfway. Not dead, not alive, simply waiting. And all over the world, thousands more like them. Victims of accidents, fires, disease, suicide, waited. Slept just like Molly and her children slept. Not able to die, not able to live. All because a man was afraid of harvesting the ripe grain. All because one man thought he could stop working with the scythe and never work with that scythe again. He looked down upon the children. The job had to be done every day. And every day, we've never stopping or going on. We've never a pause, but always the harvesting, forever and forever and forever. All right, he thought. All right, I'll use the scythe. He didn't say goodbye to his family. He turned with a slow feeding anger and found the scythe and walked rapidly. They began to trot. Then he ran with long dolting strides into the field, raving, feeling the hunger in his arms as the wheat whipped and flailed his legs. He pouted through it, shouting. He stopped. Molly, he cried and raised the blade and swung it down. Susie, he cried. True. And swung the blade down again. Somebody screamed. He didn't turn to look back to the fire ruined house. And then sobbing, sobbing wildly. He rose above the grain again to the left and the right and to the left and to the right and to the left and to right over and over, slicing out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat with no selection, no care. Cursing over and over, swearing, laughing. The blade swinging up in the sun and falling in the sun with a singing whistle. Down! Bombs shattered London, Moscow, Tokyo. The blade swung insanely. And the kilns of Belsin and Wuchenwald took fire. The blade sang crimson wet. And mushrooms vomited out blind suns at white sands, Hiroshima, Bikini, and up through an incontinental Siberian skies. The grain wept in a green rain falling. Korea, Indochina, Egypt, India trembled. Asia stirred. Africa woke in the night. And the blade went on a rising, crashing, severing with a fury and rage of a man who was lost and lost so much that he no longer cares about what he does to the world. Just a few short miles off the main highway, down a rough dirt road that used to nowhere. Just a few short miles from a highway jammed with traffic bound for California. Once in a while, during the long years, a jalopy gets off the main highway, pulled up steaming in front of the charred ruin, the little white house at the end of the dirt road, to ask instructions from the farmer they see just beyond. The one who works insanely, wildly, without ever stopping, night and day, in the endless fields of wheat. But they get no help and no answer. The farmer in the field is too busy, even after all these years, too busy slashing and chopping the green wheat instead of the ripe. And true Erickson moves on with his scythe, with a light of blind suns and a look of white fire in his never sleeping eyes, on and on and on. That's one of Bradbury's lesser known stories. But I found one of them was powerful, one of them was astonishing that he ever wrote. I'll give you all some time to think about it. Joe Hastings recommends the color out of space. That's a good choice. That's a really good choice. That takes us away from our Bradbury theme, but it is a great story. That takes us over to Lovecraft Country. Joe, I may have to do that for another night. We do a bunch of Lovecraft in a row, possibly the greatest horror writer in the 20th century. Now, I've got almost 10 o'clock here, Eastern time. I've got time for one more story. This is going to be one more slice of Bradbury. And this is one that takes us into the future. This is one for the Martian Chronicles. If you haven't read them, you absolutely have to. The Martian Chronicles is a short story collection, a fix-up book that is a series of little stories mostly, imagining a future human settlement of Mars. It's not like anything else you've ever read. It's lyrical. It's poetic. It's haunting. It's despairing. It's dreamy. Every story is a different angle, a different surprise. And you won't be quite sure where it's going, even through the end. I could read every single story in that book. But tonight I want to read one, because it's a Halloween themed story. And this is one that I love to read every year. Because this is one that's also about horror stories. It's about scary stories. And it's a tribute to them. And the more horror stories you know, the more scary stories you know, the richer and more tasty the story becomes. Some of you might guess the one I'm talking about. Some of you may already have a suggestion in mind. But I am reading, of course, Usher 2. And in the book he dates, this is taking place in April 2036. And if you know his great classic novel, Fahrenheit 451, this is in the same universe. During the whole of the dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low on the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself as the shades of evening drew on within view of the melancholy house of Usher. Mr. William Stendall paused in his quotation. There upon a low black hill stood the house, its cornerstone bearing the inscription 2368D. Mr. Bigelow, the architect said, and it's completed as the key, Mr. Stendall. The two men stood together silently in the great autumn afternoon. Blueprints rustled on the raven grass of their feet. The house of Usher, said Mr. Stendall's pleasure, planned, built, bought, and paid for. Would Mr. Poe be delighted? Mr. Bigelow squinted. Is it everything you wanted, sir? Yes. Is the color right? Is it desolate and terrible? Very desolate, very terrible. The walls are bleak. Amazingly so. The tarn. Is it black and lurid enough? Most incredibly black and lurid. And the sedge. We've died it, you know. Is it the proper gray and ebb and hideous? Mr. Bigelow consulted his architectural plans. From these he quoted in part, quote, does the whole structure cause, quote, an iciness, a sickening of a heart, a dreariness of thought, unquote. The house, the lake, the land, Mr. Stendall. Mr. Bigelow, it's worth every penny. My God, it's beautiful. Thank you. I had to work in total ignorance. Thank the Lord. You had your own private rockets, so we'd have never been allowed to bring most of the equipment through. You know, it's always twilight here. This land. It's always October. Here's the rest of the dead. Took a bit of doing. We killed everything. 10,000 tons of DDT. A snake, frog, or martian fly left. Twilight always, Mr. Stendall. I'm proud of that. There are machines hidden, which blot out the sun. It's always properly dreary. Stendall drank it in. The dreariness, the oppression, the fetid vapors, the whole atmosphere, so delicately contrived and fitted. And that house, that crumbling horror, that evil lake, the fungi, the extensive decay, plastic or otherwise, who could guess? Killed to the autumn sky. Somewhere above, beyond, far off, was the sun. Somewhere it was the month of April on the planet Mars, a yellow month with a blue sky. Somewhere above, the rockets burned down to civilize a beautifully dead planet. The sound of their screaming passage was muffled by this dim, soundproof world, this ancient autumn world. Now that my job's done, said Mr. Bigelow uneasily, I feel free to ask you what you're going to do with all this. With Usher? Have you guessed? No. Does the name Usher mean nothing to you? Nothing. What about this name? Edgar Allen Poe. Mr. Bigelow shook his head. Of course, Stendall snorted delicately a combination of dismay and contempt. How could I expect you to know? Bless your Mr. Poe. He died a long while ago before Lincoln. All his books were burned to the great fire. That's 30 years ago, 2006. Ah, said Mr. Bigelow wisely. One of those. Yes, one of those, Bigelow. He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Beer snore all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror. And for that matter, tales of the future were burned. Heartlessly, they passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1999, it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books. And of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, whether just prejudice, union pressures. There was always a minority afraid of something and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves, and shadows of themselves. I see. Afraid of the word politics, which again became a synonym for communism among the more reactionary elements. So I hear it was worth your life to use the word. And with a screw tightened here, a bolt tightened there, a push, a pull, a yank. Art and literature were soon like a great toy in a taffy string about. Being twisted in braids and tie-in knots and thrown in all directions until there was no more resiliency and no more savor to it. And the film cameras chopped short and the theaters turned dark and the print pressals trickled down from a great nag or a reading matter to a mere innocuous dripping of pure material. Oh, the word escape was radical, I tell you. Was it? It was. Every man, they said, must face reality, must face the here and now. Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in midair. So they lined up against the library wall one Sunday morning, 30 years ago in 2006. They lined them all up. Miss St. Nicholas and the headless horsemen, Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose. Oh, what a wailing and shot them down and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and the old kings and the people who lived happily ever after. For of course, it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after. And once upon a time became no more. And they spread the ashes of the friend and Richard, the rubble, the land of Oz. They filleted the bones of Glidden of the Good and Osba and shattered polychrominous spectroscope and served Jap pumpkin head with meringue at the biologist's ball. The beanstalk dyed the bramble of red tape, sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired of the fatal puncture at his syringe. And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry curious or incurious or, and they gave a looking glass, one hammer blow to smash it and every red king and oyster away. He clenched his fists. Lord, how immediate it was. His face was red and he was gasping for breath. That's for Mr. Bigelow. He was astounded at this long explosion. He blinked and said at last, sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. Just names to me. From what I hear at the burning was a good thing. Get out! Screams tend all. You've done your job. Now let me alone, you idiot! Mr. Bigelow was somewhat as carpenter's and went away. Mr. Stendall stood alone before the house. Listen here, he said to the unseen rockets. I came to Mars to get away from you clean-minded people, but you're flocking in thicker every day like flies to awful. So I'm going to show you. I'm going to teach you a fine lesson for what you did to Mr. Poe on Earth. As of this day, beware. The house of Usher was open for business. He pushed his fist to the sky. The rocket landed. A man stepped out jointly. He glanced at the house and his gray eyes were displeased and vexed. He strode across the moat to confront the small man there. Your name, Stendall? Yes, I'm Garrett, investigator of moral climates. So you finally got to Mars, you moral climate people. I wondered when you'd appear. We arrived last week. We'll soon have things as neat and tidy as earth. The man waved an identification card irritably toward the house. Suppose you tell me about this place, Stendall? It's a haunted castle, if you like. I don't like, Stendall. I don't like. The sound of that word haunted. Simple enough. In this year of our lord, 2036, I've built the mechanical sanctuary. In it, copper bats, flying electronic beams, brass rats, scuttle and plastic cellars, robot skeletons danced, robot vampires, harlequins, wolves and white phantoms, compounded with chemical ingenuity all live here. That's what I was afraid of, said Garrett, smiling quietly. I'm afraid we'll have to tear your whole place down. I knew you'd come out as soon as you discovered what went on. I'd have come sooner, but we at moral climates wanted to be sure of your intentions before we moved in. We can have the dismantlers and burning crew here by supper. By midnight, your place will be razed to the cellar. Mr. Stendall, I consider you somewhat of a fool, sir, spending harder money on a folly. I must have cost you three million dollars. Four million? But Mr. Garrett, I inherited 25 million when I was very young. I can't afford to throw it about. Seems a dreadful shame, though, to have the house finished only an hour and have you race out with your dismantlers. Couldn't you possibly let me play with my toy for just, well, 24 hours? You know the law, strict to the letter. No books, no houses, nothing to be produced, which in any way are just ghosts, vampires, fairies or any creature of the imagination. You'll be burning babbits next! You caused us to love a trouble, Mr. Stendall. It's on the record. 20 years ago, on earth, you and your library. Yes, me and my library. And a few others like me. All opposed been forgotten for many years now, and Oz and the other creatures. But I had my little cash. We had our libraries, a few private citizens, until you sent your men around with tortures and incinerators and tore my 50,000 books up and burned them. Just as you put a stake through the heart of Halloween. And told your film producers that if they made anything at all, they'd have to remake Earth Hemingway. My God, how many times have I seen for whom the bell toll's done? Thirty different versions. All realistic. Realism. Oh, here. Oh, and now. Oh, hell! It doesn't pay to be bitter. Mr. Garrett, you must turn in a full report. Mustn't you? Yes. And for curiosity's sake, you better come in and look around. I'd only take a minute. All right. Leave the way. I have no tricks. I have a gun with me. The door to the house of Usher creaked wide. A moist wind issued forth. There was an immense sighing and moaning, like a sotringium bellow is breathing in the lost catacombs. A rat pranced across the floor stones. Garrett, crying out, gave it a kick. It fell over. The rat did. And from its nylon fur, streamed an incredible horde of metal fleas. Amazing, Garrett bent to sea. An old witch sat in a niche, quivering her wax hands over some orange and blue tarot cards. She jerked her head and hissed through her toothless mouth at Garrett, tapping her greasy cards. Yes! She cried. Now that's the sort of thing I mean, said Garrett. Deplorable. I'll let you burn her personally. Will you really? Garrett was pleased. Then he frowned. I must say you're taking this all so well. It was enough just to be able to create this place, to be able to say I did it, to say I nurtured a medieval atmosphere in a modern and credulous world. I have a somewhat reluctant admiration for your genius myself, sir. Garrett watched as a mist drifted by, whispering and whispering, shaped like a beautiful and nebulous woman, down a moist corridor, a machine world, like the stuff from a cotton candy centrifuge. Mists flung up and floated, murmuring in the silent halls. An ape appeared out of nowhere. Hold on! Cried Garrett. Don't be afraid. Stendall tapped the animal's black chest. A robot, copper-scaled and all, like the witch. See? He stroked the fur and underneath it, metal tubing came to light. Yes. Garrett put out a timid hand to pet the thing. But why, Mr. Stendall? Why all this? What obsessed you? Bureaucracy, Mr. Garrett. But I haven't time to explain. The government will discover soon enough. He nodded to the ape. All right, now. The ape killed Mr. Garrett. We're almost ready, pikes. Pikes looked up from the table. Yes, sir. You've done a splendid job. Well, I'm paid for it, Mr. Stendall. Said pikes softly as he lifted the plastic eyelid of the robot and inserted the glass eyeball to fasten the rubber-weighted muscles neatly. There. The spitting image of Mr. Garrett. What do we do with him, sir? Pikes started to slab where the real Mr. Garrett lay dead. Better burn him, pikes. We wouldn't want to, Mr. Garrett, would we? Pikes wheeled Mr. Garrett to the brick incinerator. Goodbye. He pushed Mr. Garrett in and slammed the door. Stendall confronted the robot, Garrett. You have your orders, Garrett? Yes, sir. The robot set up. I'm to return to moral climates. I'll follow a complementary report. Delay action for at least 48 hours. Same, investigating more fully. Right, Garrett. Stay good-bye. The robot hurried out to Garrett's rocket, got in and flew away. Stendall turned. Now, pikes, we send the reminder of the invitations for tonight. I think we'll have a jolly time, don't you? Considering we waited 20 years, quite jolly. They went to each other. Seven o'clock, Stendall signed his watch. Almost time. He swirled the sherry glass in his hand. He sat quietly. Above him, among the oaken beams, the bats, their delicate copper bodies hidden under river flesh, blinked at him and shrieked. He raised his glass to them. To our success, they leaned back, closed his eyes, and considered the entire affair. How he would savor this in his old age. This paying back of the antiseptic government for its literary terrors and conflagrations. Oh, how the anger and hatred had grown at him through the years. Oh, how the planet had taken his slow shape in his numb mind until that day, three years ago, when he had met pikes. Ah, yes, pikes. Pikes with a bitterness in him, as deep as a black charred well of green acid. Who is pikes? Only the greatest of them all. Pikes, the man of 10,000 faces of fury, a smoke, a blue fog, a white rain, a bat, a gargoyle, a monster. That was pikes. Better than Lon Cheney, the father? Stend all ruminated. Night after night, he had watched Cheney in the old, old films. Yes, better than Cheney. Better than that other ancient mummer? What was his name? Karloff? Far better. The gocy? The comparison was odious. No, there was only one pikes, and he was a man stripped of his fantasies now. No place left to go, no one to show off to. Forbidden even to perform him for himself before a mirror. Poor, impossible defeated pikes. How it must have felt. Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads, as stuff flipping through a stove to burn away. Did it feel as bad as having some 50,000 books annihilated with no recompense? Yes, yes. Stend all felt his hands grow cold with a senseless anger. So more natural than they had one day talk over endless coffee pots into innumerable midnight that of all the talk and the bitter brooings would come the house of Usher. A great church bell rang, the guests were arriving, smiling, he went to greet them. Full grown without memory, the robots waited. In green silks the color of forest pools. In silks the color of frog and fern they waited. In yellow hair the color of the sun and sand, the robots waited. Oiled with two bones cut from bronze and sucking gelatin, the robots lay. In coffins for the not dead and not a lie, in planked boxes the metronome was waiting to be set in motion. There was a smell of lubrication and lathe brass. There was a silence of the tomb yard, sexed but sexless the robots. Named but unnamed, and borrowing from humans everything but humanity, the robots stared the nail lids at the robots FOB boxes. And a death that was not even a death for their been alive. And now there was a vast screaming of yank nails and there was a lifting of lids. Now there were shadows in the boxes and the pressure of a hand struck one of his hands. Now one clock was set in motion, a faint ticking. Now another and another until this was an immense clock shop purring. The marble eyes rolled wide, the rubber lids, the nostrils winked. The robots clothed in hair of ape and white arabic arose. Tweedledum following tweedledee, mock turtle, door mouse, drown bodies from the sea compounded salt and whiteweed swaying. Hanging blue-throated men with turned up clam flesh eyes and creatures of ice and burning tinsel, loam dwarfs and pepper elves, tic-tac, rugidow, St. Nicholas with the self-made snow flooring blowing on before him, blue beard with whiskers like a settling flame, and sulfur clouds from which green fire is now protruded and scaly and gigantic turpentine, a dragon with a furnace in its belly, reeled out the door with a scream, a tic, a bellow, a silence, a rush, a wind, 10,000 lids fell back. The clock shop moved out into usher. The night was enchanted. A warm breeze came over the land. The guest rockets burning the sky and turning the weather from autumn to spring arrived. The men stepped out in evening clothes and the women stepped out after them. Their hair quaffed up in elaborate detail. So that's usher. But where's the door? At this moment, Stendhal appeared. The women laughed and shattered. Mr. Stendhal raised a hand to quiet them, turning. He looked up to a high castle window and called Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. And from above, a beautiful maiden leaned out upon the night wind and let down her golden hair. And the hair twined in blue and became a ladder upon which the guest might ascend, laughing into the house. What eminence sociologists, what clever psychologists, what tremendously important politicians, bacteriologists, and neurologists. There they stood within the dank walls. Welcome, all of you. Mr. Trion, Mr. Olin, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Lang, Mr. Steffens, Mr. Fletcher, and a double dozen more. Come in, come in. Ms. Gibbs, Ms. Polk, Ms. Churchill, Ms. Blunt, Ms. Drummond, and a score of other women glittering. Eminent, eminent people, one and all. Members of the Society for the Prevention of Fantasy, advocates for the banishment of Halloween and Guy Fawkes, killers of bats, burners or books, bearers of torches, good clean citizens, everyone who waited until the rough men had coped and buried the Martians and cleaned the cities and built the towns or repaired the highways and made everything safe. And then, with everything well on its way to safety, the spoil funds, the people with Mercura Chrome for blood and iodine-colored eyes, came now to set up their moral climates and dole of goodness to everyone. And they were his friends. Yes, carefully, carefully, he had met and befriended each of them on earth in the last year. Welcome to the Vasty Halls of Death, he cried. And I would stand to all, what is all this? You'll see. Everyone off with their clothes. You'll find booths to one side there, changing the costumes you find there. Man, this side, women on that. The people who stood uneasily about. I don't know if we should stay, said Ms. Plubb, said Ms. Pope. I don't like the looks of this. It verges on blasphemy. Nonsense, like costume ball. Seems quite illegal, Mr. Stephens sifted about. Come off it, stand all left. Enjoy yourselves. Tomorrow it'll be a ruin. Get in the booths. The house blazed with life and color. Harlequins rang by with belled caps and white mice danced miniature quadrees to the music of dwarfs who tickled tiny fiddles with tiny bows and flags rippled from scorched beams while bats flew in clothes and clouds about gargoyle mouths which spattered down wine, cruel, wild, and foaming. A creek meandered through the seven rooms, the masked ball, guests sipped about to be sherry. Guests poured from the booth, transformed from one age into another. Their faces covered with dominoes, the very act of putting on a mask, revoking all their licenses to pick a choral fantasy in horror. The women swept about in red gowns, laughing. The men danced in attendance. And the walls were shadows with no people to throw them. And here they were mirrors in which no women showed. All those vampires laughed, Mr. Fletcher. Dead. There were seven rooms, each a different color, one blue, one purple, one green, one orange, another white, the sixth violet, the seventh shrouded in black velvet. And the black room was an ebony clock which struck the hour loud. And through those rooms, the guests ran, drunk at last, among the robot fantasies, amid the dormice and mad hatters and trolls and the giants, the black cats and white queens. And under their dancing feet, the floor gave off the massive pumping beat of a hidden and telltale heart. Mr. Stendhal. I whispered, Mr. Stendhal. A monster with the face of death stood his elbow. He was pikes. I must see you alone. What is it here? Pikes held out a skeleton hand, and it were a few half-melted charred wheels, knots, cogs, and bolts. Stendhal looked at them for a long moment. They drew pikes into a corridor. Was it Garrett? He whispered. Pikes nodded. He sent a robot in his place, cleaning out the incinerator a moment ago. I found these. They both stared the faithful cogs for a moment. This means the police will be here any moment, said Pikes. Our plan will be ruined. I don't know. Stendhal glanced at the whirling yellow and blue and orange people. The music swept to the misting halls. I should have guessed Garrett wouldn't be full-out-to-con person. But wait, what's the matter? Nothing. There's nothing the matter. Garrett sent a robot to us. Well, we sent one back. Unless he checks closely, he won't notice the switch. Of course. Next time he'll come himself. Now that he thinks it's safe. Well, he might even be at the door in a minute. In person. More wine pikes. Great doll rang. There he is now, I bet you. Go let Mr. Garrett in. Rapunzel let down her golden hair. Mr. Stendhal? Mr. Garrett. The real Mr. Garrett? The same. Garrett eyed the dank walls and the whirling people. I thought I'd better come for myself. He can't depend on robots. Other people's robots, especially. I also took the precaution of summoning the dismantlers. They'll be here in one hour to knock the props out under this horrible place. Stendhal bowed. Thanks for telling me. He waved his hand. In the meantime, you may as well enjoy this. A little wine? No, thank you. What's going on? How low can a man sink? See for yourself, Mr. Garrett. Murder? Said Garrett. Murder must foul, said Stendhal. Omen screamed. Miss Pope ran up. Her face the color of a cheese. The most hard thing just happened. I saw Miss Blunt sprinkled by an ape. The stuff had been chimneying. They looked and saw the long yellow hair trailing down from the flu. Garrett cried out. Horrid saw Miss Pope. Then she's crying. She blinked and turned. Miss Blunt? Yes. Said Miss Blunt, standing there. But I just saw you crammed up the flu. No, I laughed Miss Blunt. I rubbed it myself. A clever facsimile. But, but don't cry, darling. I'm quite all right. Let me look at myself. Well, there's so I am. Up the chimney, like you said. Isn't that funny? Miss Blunt walked away, laughing. Have a drink, Garrett? I believe I will. Then I nerfed me. My God, what a place. This does deserve tearing down. For Omen there, Garrett drank. Another scream. Mr. Stephens, born upon the shoulders of four white rabbits, was carried down a flight of stairs which appeared magically in the floor. Into a pit when Mr. Stephens, where bound and tied, he was left to face the advancing razor-steel of a great pendulum which now whirled down, down, closer and closer to his outraged body. Is that me down there? Said Mr. Stephens, the pure-hand Garrett's elbow, spent over the pit. How strange. How odd to see yourself die. The pendulum made a final stroke. How realistic, said Mr. Stephens, turning away. Another drink, Mr. Garrett? Yes, please. It won't be long. The dispensers will be here. Thank God. And for a third time, a scream. What now? Said Garrett apprehensively. It's my turn. Said Miss Truman. Look. And the second Miss Truman, shrieking, was nailed into a coffin and thrust into the raw earth under the floor. Why? I remember that. Gassed the investigator of moral climates from the old forbidden books, the premature burial, and the others, the pendulum, and the ape, the chimney that murders in the room warg. And the book I burned. Yes. Another drink, Garrett. Here. Hold your glass steady. My lord, you have an imagination, haven't you? They stood and watched five others die. Woying the wrath of a dragon, the earth is thrown off into a black tarn, sinking and vanishing. Would you like to see what we have planned for you? Ask Sendal. Certainly. Said Garrett. What's the difference? We'll blow the whole damn thing up anyway. You're nasty. Come along then. This way. And he laid Garrett down into the floor. Through numerous passages, down again upon spiral stairs, into the earth, into the catacombs. What do you want to shut me down here? Said Garrett. Yourself killed? A duplicate? Yes. And also something else. What? The amontiado, said Sendal, going ahead with a blazing lantern which he held high. Skeletons froze half out of coffin lids. Garrett held his hand to his nose, his face disgusted. The what? Haven't you ever heard of the amontiado? No. Do you recognize this? Sendal pointed to his cell. Should I? Or this? Sendal produced a trowel from under his cape, smiling. What's that thing? Come, said Sendal. They stepped into the cell. In the dark, Sendal affixed the chains to the half-drunken man. For God's sake! What are you doing? shouted Garrett, rattling about. I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic. I saw a polite. There. You've locked me in chains. So I have. What are you going to do? Leave you here. You're joking. A very good joke. But where's my duplicate? Don't we see him killed? There's no duplicate. But the others. The others are dead. The ones you saw killed were the real people. The duplicates, the robots stood by and watched. Garrett said nothing. Now, you're supposed to say, For the love of God, Mantra saw her, says Sendal. And I will reply, Yes, for the love of God. Won't you say it? Come on, say it! You fool. Must I coax you? Say it! Say it for the love of God, Mantra saw her. I won't, you idiot. Get me out of here. He was sober now. Here. Put this on. Sendal tossed in something that belled and rang. What is it? I capped in bells. Put it on. I might let you out. Sendal. Put it on, I said. Garrett obeyed. Bells tingled. Don't you have a feeling that this has all happened before? Inquired Sendal, sitting to work with Trowell and Mortar and Brick now. What are you doing? Well, wallowing you in. Here's one row, no. Here's another. You're insane. I won't argue that point. You'll be prosecuted for this. He tapped a brick and placed it on the wet mortar humming. Now there was a thrashing and a pounding and a crying out from within the darkening place. The bricks rose higher. More thrashing, please, Sendal. Let's make it a good show. Let me out! Let me out! There was one last brick to shove into place. The screaming was continuous. Garrett called Sendal softly. Garrett silenced himself. Garrett says, Sendal, do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise, you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when I came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett. Garrett was silent. Now I want this to be perfect, said Sendal. Holding his lantern up so that it's light penetrated in and a public slump figure. Jingle your bells softly. The bells rustled. Now if you'll please say for the love of God, Montresor, I might let you free. The man's voice came up in the light. There was a hesitation. Then grotesquely, the man said, for the love of God, Montresor. Ah, said Sendal. High as closed. He shoved the last brick into place and mortared it tight. Requisit in Pace, dear friend. He hastened from the catacomb. In the seven rooms, the sound of a midnight clock brought everything to a halt. The red death appeared. Sendal turned for a moment at the door to watch. Then he ran out of the great house, across the moat, to where a helicopter waited. Ready, pikes? Ready. There it goes. They looked at the great house, smiling. Began to crack down the middle, as with an earthquake. And Sendal watched the magnificent sight. He heard pikes per se behind him in a low cadence voice. My brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing the thunder. There was a long, tumultuous, shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters. And the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed silently and silently over the fragments of the house of Usher. The helicopter rose over the steaming lake and flew into the west. I hope some of you enjoyed that. That's one of my favorite red death stories of all time. A very cruel one, one that celebrates horror, one that celebrates fantasy, and one that celebrates revenge. Well, that's it for now. I'm going to run out of time, and I've enjoyed reading these post stories, these Bradbury stories with you tonight. If they're new to you, I'm really glad. I hope you get to hear them again and read them yourself. And if they're not new to you, I hope you enjoyed hearing them. I think they improve with time. Now next time, I may follow Joe Hastings' suggestion and read some Lovecraft. Until then, happy Halloween, everyone. Take care, dream dark, fantastic dreams, be safe, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.