I thought: Nobody in the world knows this! Maybe I should write a short story about it. Which is what I did.
‘The Drummer Boy of Shiloh’ had its genesis in an obituary in the Los Angeles Times concerning a bit player in motion pictures named Olin Howland. I’d seen him in scores of films over the years and now I was reading his death notice, which mentioned the fact that his grandfather had been the drummer boy at Shiloh. Those words were so magical, so evocative, so sad, that I was shocked into going immediately to my typewriter and putting those words down. This short story followed within the next hour.
‘Darling Adolf’ was caused very simply. Crossing a Universal Studios lot one afternoon I encountered a movie extra dressed in a Nazi uniform and wearing a Hitler mustache. I wondered what might happen to him wandering around the studio or out in the street, what kind of reaction there might be to a person who resembles Hitler. The story was written that night.
I’ve never been in charge of my stories, they’ve always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I’ve followed the advice I’ve shared with other writers over the years: Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
Over a period of more than sixty years I’ve jumped off many cliffs and struggled wildly on my typewriter to finish a story so as to make a soft landing. And, during the last few years I’ve looked back at the time when I was a teenager standing on a street corner, selling newspapers, and writing every day, not realizing how terrible my efforts were. Why did I do it, why did I keep jumping off those cliffs?
The answer is an immense cliché: Love.
I was so busy rushing headlong into the future, loving libraries and books and authors with all my heart and soul, was so consumed with becoming myself that I simply didn’t notice that I was short, homely, and untalented. Perhaps, in some corner of my mind, I did know. But I persisted – the need to write, to create, coursed like blood through my body, and still does.
I always dreamed of someday going into a library and looking up and seeing a book of mine leaning against the shoulder of L. Frank Baum or Edgar Rice Burroughs, and down below my other heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne. My wild love for them and their worlds, and for others like Somerset Maugham and John Steinbeck kept me so invigorated with passion that I could not see that I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame in their grand company.
But as the years passed I slipped my skins, one by one, and finally became a short story writer, an essayist, a poet, and a playwright. It took all those years to leave my other selves behind, but love was the thing that called me on.
Within this collection you will find representative tales from the many years of my long career. For all those years and for that great love that has kept me going, I am deeply grateful. My eyes fill with tears as I review the table of contents of this volume – all my dear, dear friends – the monsters and angels of my imagination.
Here they all are. A grand collection. I hope you will agree.
Ray Bradbury
DECEMBER 2002
The courthouse clock chimed seven times. The echoes of the chimes faded.
Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.
In the drugstore fans whispered in the high ceiling. In the rococo shade of porches, a few invisible people sat. Cigars glowed pink, on occasion. Screen doors whined their springs and slammed. On the purple bricks of the summer-night streets, Douglas Spaulding ran; dogs and boys followed after.
‘Hi, Miss Lavinia!’
The boys loped away. Waving after them quietly, Lavinia Nebbs sat all alone with a tall cool lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, sipping, waiting.
‘Here I am, Lavinia.’
She turned and there was Francine, all in snow white, at the bottom steps of the porch, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus.
Lavinia Nebbs locked her front door and, leaving her lemonade glass half empty on the porch, said, ‘It’s a fine night for the movie.’
They walked down the street.
‘Where you going, girls?’ cried Miss Fern and Miss Roberta from their porch over the way.
Lavinia called back through the soft ocean of darkness: ‘To the Elite Theater to see CHARLIE CHAPLIN!’
‘Won’t catch us out on no night like this,’ wailed Miss Fern. ‘Not with the Lonely One strangling women. Lock ourselves up in our closet with a gun.’
‘Oh, bosh!’ Lavinia heard the old women’s door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not unpleasant sense of invasion.
‘Lavinia, you don’t believe all that about the Lonely One, do you?’
‘Those women like to see their tongues dance.’
‘Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell’s disappeared.…’
‘Hattie McDollis was a silly girl, walked off with a traveling man, I bet.’
‘But the others, all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say.’
They stood upon the edge of the ravine that cut the town half in two. Behind them were the lit houses and music, ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies and dark.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t go to the show tonight,’ said Francine. ‘The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don’t like that ravine. Look at it, will you!’
Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse, of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands. And always the black dynamo humming, with sparkles like great electricity where fireflies moved on the air.
‘It won’t be me coming back through this old ravine tonight late, so darned late; it’ll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over the bridge and maybe the Lonely One there.’
‘Bosh!’ said Lavinia Nebbs.
‘It’ll be you alone on the path, listening to your shoes, not me. You all alone on the way back to your house. Lavinia, don’t you get lonely living in that house?’
‘Old maids love to live alone.’ Lavinia pointed at the hot shadowy path leading down into the dark. ‘Let’s take the short cut.’
‘I’m afraid!’
‘It’s early. Lonely One won’t be out till late.’ Lavinia took the other’s arm and led her down and down the crooked path into the cricket warmth and frog sound and mosquito-delicate silence. They brushed through summer-scorched grass, burs prickling at their bare ankles.
‘Let’s run!’ gasped Francine.
‘No!’
They turned a curve in the path – and there it was.
In the singing deep night, in the shade of warm trees, as if she had laid herself out to enjoy the soft stars and the easy wind, her hands at either side of her like the oars of