Author: Ray Bradbury
Category: Christian
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/42954_20
* * *
The house was full of sounds late that night. People talking in locked rooms. Arguments. Once he thought he heard Cousin William sobbing. Feet climbed stairs, lights clicked on and off. Finally everyone was in bed, and Johnny sat up, throwing back the covers. That clicking was Cousin William double-locking his door. Why?…Because someone or something was walking around in the house?
Johnny started. His doorknob was turning. The door pushed open a few inches. Someone was standing there in the darkness, looking in. A heart is an erratic thing. Like mercury. It scurries all over a person’s insides. Johnny’s heart was like mercury.
The door remained open. The shadow remained standing in the doorway, staring, looking in. Johnny said nothing. Then, very matter-of-factly, the shadow withdrew, and the door closed.
Rapping the lock home hard, Johnny threw his breath out and lay trembling on the door. Pressure from outside a moment later, from that withdrawn shadow, could not force the bolt. Johnny listened. The shadow went away.
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Very weakly Johnny returned to bed, trembling. “Mom! Mom,” he said to himself, “are you mad at me for making a scene before all of society? Would you kill me, Mom? Was there something about the Trunk Lady and Dad, something you didn’t like, and did you kill her because of it? Now, when I come around, in the way, what will you do to me? Oh, Mom, it can’t be you!”
“Dad,” he said, the same way, “you made me hang up the phone. Are you afraid it will get out too? Afraid of your business, your money, your reputation at the club, huh, Dad? Was that you standing in the door, silent and dark and thinking? You’ve been my favorite in the family. But now, today, you’re so quiet and you don’t even look at me.”
Cousin William. He could have changed the bodies, tried to fool Johnny. He could have put one of the mannequins in the trunk instead. Was she Cousin William’s girlfriend? Was she causing trouble somehow? Or was Cousin William just afraid for his reputation? Him and his mannequins and his famous, expensive dresses for expensive women. Was it him, twisting the doorknob a moment ago?
Maybe it was Uncle Flinny, with his bedtime stories and his quiet ways. He loved Mother so much—his sister. He’d do anything for her or Dad or Grandma or Cousin William. Would he kill for her or Dad or the others to keep this house whole, intact and untouched?
Grandma. Played her cold game of chess day by day and drank her brandy neat. Her whole life was keeping the house moving together. Her whole life was society and position and taste. What if someone came into the house and tried to do all the ordering instead of her? What would she do to her?
All of them! All of them!
Johnny sank shivering back on the springs. A woman walked into a big mothballed old mansion like this and suddenly everyone was afraid. Just one woman.
On the table beside his bed Johnny groped and found the note he’d discovered in the attic dust. He felt of it, and read it again in his mind:
—you’ve got to make it up to me, the way I’ve been treated. It shouldn’t be difficult. I could be Johnny’s teacher. That would explain my presence in the house to everyone. ELLIE.
Johnny turned over.
“Ellie, my teacher, where are you now?” he asked the darkness. “Lonely and resting in Cousin William’s studio with all the other stiffened mannequins? Playing chess with Grandma, only not moving? In the cold, dark basement like the wine casks put away for all the years? Somewhere in this big house tonight. But maybe not tomorrow. Unless I find you before then.…”
* * *
There was a huge back yard with many acres to it, fruit trees, a flower garden, the swimming pool, the bathhouse, servants’ quarters immediately behind the big house. Sunlight caught between a row of sycamore trees and a high green fence that shielded all this from the street. There was an oak tree to dangle from in the afternoon, and a policeman who walked his beat just under that tree on the sidewalk beyond the fence. Johnny climbed up and waited.
The policeman walked below. Johnny rattled leaves.
“Hi, son.” The policeman looked up. “Better watch out. You’ll fall.”
“I don’t care,” said Johnny. “We got a dead lady in our house and everybody keeps it secret.”
The policeman made a smile. “You have, have you?”
Johnny shifted himself. “I found her in a trunk. Somebody killed her. I tried to call the police last night, but Dad wouldn’t let me. I tipped the trunk over, and she fell downstairs but she turned out to be a wax doll. It wasn’t the lady after all.”
“So.” The policeman chuckled, enjoying it.
“But the other lady was real,” insisted Johnny.
“What other lady?”
“The first one I found. Cousin William’s a dress designer. He changed bodies. You should have seen everyone at breakfast this morning. Trying to be happy. Like in the movies. But they can’t fool me. They’re not happy. Mother looks tired, and she’s real touchy. I wonder how long they can go around like this without yelling?”
The policeman scowled. “Honest to God, you sound just like my kid. Him and his Buck Rogers disintegrators and his comic books. Honest to God, it’s a crime what they give the younger generation to read. Ruin their minds with it. Killing. Corpses. Ah!”
“But it’s true!”
“See you later,” said the policeman, and walked on.