A Pleasure to Burn (14 page)

“My Lord, you have an imagination, haven't you?”

They stood and watched five others die, one in the mouth of a dragon, the others thrown off into the black tarn, sinking and vanishing.

“Would you like to see what we have planned for you?” asked Stendahl.

“Certainly,” said Garrett. “What's the difference? We'll blow the whole thing up, anyway. You're nasty.”

“Come along then. This way.”

And he led Garrett down into the floor, through numerous passages and down again upon spiral stairs into the earth, into the catacombs.

“What do you want to show me down here?” said Garrett.

“Yourself killed.”

“A duplicate?”

“Yes. And also something else.”

“The Amontillado,” said Stendahl, going ahead with a blazing lantern which he held high. Skeletons froze half out of coffin lids. Garrett held his hand to his nose, face disgusted.

“The what?”

“Haven't you ever heard of the Amontillado?”

“No!”

“Don't you recognize this?” Stendahl pointed to a cell.

“Should I?”

“Or this?” Stendahl produced a trowel from under his cape, smiling.

“What's that thing?”

“Come,” said Stendahl.

They stepped into the cell. In the dark, Stendahl 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. It's not 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.”

“Where's my duplicate? Don't we see him killed?”

“There is 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, Montresor!'” said Stendahl. “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 ‘For the love of God, Montresor!'”

“I won't, you idiot. Get me out of here.” He was sober now.

“Here. Put this on.” Stendahl tossed in something that belled and rang.

“What is it?”

“A cap and bells. Put it on and I might let you out.”

“Stendahl!”

“Put it on, I said!”

Garrett obeyed. The bells tinkled.

“Don't you have a feeling that this has all happened before?” inquired Stendahl, setting to work with trowel and mortar and brick now.

“What're you doing?”

“Walling you in. Here's one row. 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 pounding and a crying out from within the darkening place. The bricks rose higher. “More thrashing, please,” said Stendahl. “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 Stendahl softly. Garrett silenced himself. “Garrett,” said Stendahl. “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 we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.”

Garrett was silent.

“I want this to be perfect,” said Stendahl, holding his lantern up so its light penetrated in upon the slumped 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 face came up in the light. There was a hesitation. Then, grotesquely, the man asked, “For the love of God, Montresor.”

“Ah,” said Stendahl, eyes closed. He shoved the last brick into place and mortared it tight. “
Requiescat in pace,
dear friend.”

He hastened from the catacomb.

 

In the seven rooms, the sound of midnight clock brought everything to a halt.

The Red Death appeared.

Stendahl turned for a moment, at the door, to watch. And 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. It began to crack down the middle, as with an earthquake, and as Stendahl watched the magnificent sight, he heard Pikes reciting behind him in a low, cadenced voice:

“‘—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.'”

The helicopter rose over the steaming lake and flew into the west.

Bonfire

T
HE THING THAT BOTHERED
W
ILLIAM
P
ETERSON MOST
was Shakespeare and Plato, and Aristotle, and Jonathan Swift and William Faulkner and the poems of Weller, Robert Frost perhaps and John Donne and Robert Herrick. All of these, mind you, tossed into the Bonfire. Then he got to thinking of certain paintings at the museum, or in the books in his den, the good Picassos, not the bad ones, but the really rare good ones; the good Dalís (there had been some, you know); and the best of Van Gogh; the lines in certain Matisses, not to mention color, and the way Monet had with rivers and streams, and the rare haze that moved upon the Renoir peach-women's faces in the summer shadows. Or, to go back, there were the wonderful El Grecos in lightning illumination, the saints' bodies elongated by some heavenly gravity toward white, sulphurous thunderclouds. After he thought of these bits of kindling (for that's what they would become) he thought of the massive Michelangelo sculptures, the boy David with his youth-swelled wrists and tendoned neck, the sensitive hands and eyes, the soft mouth; the passionately combined Rodins; the soft dimple in the back of the nude female statue in the rear of the Museum of Modern Art, that cool dimple where he might in passing press his hand to congratulate Lembroocke for his artistry…

William Peterson lay with the lights out in his study very late at night, with only the soft pinkish glow of his record player touching upon his bony face. The music filtered across the room with the softest motion, a locust chorus from Beethoven's
Jena
, a raining pizzicato amidst Tchaikovsky's
Fourth
, a brass charge across Shostakovich's
Sixth
, a ghost from
La Valse.
Sometimes William Peterson would touch his face with his hand and discover a wetness beneath each lower eyelid. It's not really self-pity is it? he thought. It's just not being able to do anything about all this. For centuries their thoughts had gone on and on, living. For tomorrow, they would be dead. Shakespeare, Frost, Huxley, Dalí, Picasso, Beethoven, Swift, really dead. Until now they had never died, even though their bodies had been with the worms. Tomorrow that would be attended to.

The phone rang. William Peterson put his hand through the dark air and picked up the receiver.

“Bill?”

“Oh. Hello, Mary.”

“What're you doing?”

“Listening to music.”

“Aren't you going to do anything special tonight?”

“What's there to do?” he said.

“God knows where we'll all be tomorrow night, I just thought—”

“There won't be any tomorrow night,” he interrupted. “There'll just be the Bonfire is all.”

“What an odd way to put it. What a shame,” she said, remotely. “I've been thinking, what a waste. Here my mother goes and has me and raises me and my father puts me through school. The same with you, Bill. The same with all 2 billion of us on Earth tonight. And then this has to happen.”

“Not only that,” he thought, eyes shut, the phone to his mouth. “But all the million years it took for us to get here. Oh, you might ask, ‘What have we got, where did we go? Did we arrive? And where are we?' But here we are anyway, for better or worse. And it took millions of years for man to creep up. It simply galls me that a few men in high places can snap their fingers and raze it all. The only consolation is that they'll burn too.” He opened his eyes. “Do you believe in Hell, Mary?”

“I didn't. I do now. They say that once started, Earth should burn for a billion years, like a small sun.”

“Yes, that's Hell all right, and us in it. I never thought about it, but our souls will be roasted in the air here, kept on Earth long after it's nothing else but a bonfire.”

She began to cry, across the city, in her apartment.

“Don't cry, Mary,” he said. “It hurts me more to hear you do that than any other thing about the mess.”

“I can't help it,” she said. “I'm really in a rage. To think that we've all
wasted
our lives, spent our time, you to write three of the finest books of our age, and it comes to nothing. And all the other people, the thousands of hours of writing and building and thinking we've put in, my God, the total is frightening, and then to have someone to strike a match.

He allowed her a long minute of silent hysteria.

“Do you think everyone hasn't thought of it,” he said. “We all have our little stake. We think, ‘Jesus, is this what grandfather crossed the plains for, is this what Columbus discovered America for, is this what Galileo dropped the weights off Pisa for, is this what Moses crossed the Red Sea for?' Suddenly this erases the whole equation and makes everything we ever did silly because it totals up to CANCEL, CANCEL on the machine.”

“Isn't there anything we can do?”

“I belonged to every organization, I talked, I banged tables, I voted, I was thrown in jail, and now I'm silent,” he said. “We've done everything. It got away from us all. Someone threw the steering wheel out the window back in the 1940s somewhere, and no one thought to check the brakes.”

“Why did we bother doing anything?” she said.

“I don't know. I want to go back now and tell myself in the year 1939, ‘Look, young fellow, don't rush, don't hurry, don't be excited, don't rack your brain, don't create your stories or your books, it's no good, it's for nothing, in 1960 they'll poke you and it in the incinerator!' And I'd like to tell Mr. Matisse, ‘Stop making those beautiful lines,' and Mr. Picasso, ‘Don't bother with
Guernica
,' and Mr. Franco, ‘Don't bother with conquering your own people, everyone don't bother about anything!'”

“But we had to bother, we had to go on.”

“Yes,” he said. “That's the wonderful and the silly part of it. We went on even when we knew we were walking into the kiln. That's one thing we can say right up to the last, almost, we were fiddling and painting and reproducing and talking and acting as if this might go on forever. Once I kidded myself that, somehow, part of Earth might remain, that a few fragments might carry over, Shakespeare, Blake, a few busts, a few tidbits, perhaps one of my short stories, remnants. I thought we'd go and leave the world to the Islanders or the Asiatics. But this is different. This is
en toto.
”

“What time do you think it will happen?”

“Any hour now.”

“They don't even know what the bomb'll do, do they?”

“There's an even chance either way. Forgive my pessimism, I happen to think they have miscalculated.”

“Why don't you come over to my place?” she asked.

“Why?”

“We could at least talk—”

“Why?”

“It would be something to do—”

“Why?”

“It would give us something to talk about.”

“Why, why, why!”

She waited a minute.

“Bill?”

Silence.

“Bill!”

No answer.

He was thinking of a poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, he was thinking of a scrap of film from an old picture called
Citizen Kane
, he was thinking of the white feather-soft haze in which the Degas ballerinas poised, he was thinking of a Braque mandolin, a Picasso guitar, a Dalí watch, a line from Houseman, he was thinking of a thousand mornings splashing cold water on his face, he was thinking of a billion mornings and a billion people splashing cold water on their faces and going out to their work in the last ten thousand years. He was thinking of fields of grass and wheat and dandelions. He was thinking of women.

 

“B
ILL, ARE YOU THERE
?”

No answer.

At last, swallowing, he said, “Yes, I'm here.”

“I—” she said.

“Yes?”

“I want—” she said.

The earth blew up and burned steadily for a thousand million centuries…