A Pleasure to Burn (18 page)

Long After Midnight

M
R
. M
ONTAG DREAMED
.

He was an old man hidden with six million dusty books. His hands crawled, trembling, over yellow pages, and his face was a smashed mirror of wrinkles by candlelight.

Then, an eye at the keyhole!

In his dream, Mr. Montag yanked the door. A boy fell in.

“Spying!”

“You got books!” cried the boy. “It's against the law! I'll tell my father!”

He grabbed the boy, who writhed, screaming.

“Don't, boy,” pleaded Mr. Montag. “Don't tell. I'll give you money, books, clothes, but don't tell!”

“I seen you reading!”

“Don't!”

“I'll tell!” The boy ran, shrieking.

A crowd rushed up the street. Health officials burst in, followed by police, fierce with silver badges. And then himself! Himself as a young man, in a Fire uniform, with a torch. The room swarmed while the old man pleaded with himself as a young man. Books crashed down. Books were stripped and torn. Windows crashed inward, drapes fell in sooty clouds.

Outside, staring in, was the boy who had turned him in.

“No! Please!”

Flame crackled. They were charring out the room, with controlled, scientific fire. A vast wind of flame devoured the walls. Books exploded in a million live kernels.

“For the love of God!”

The ancient lawn of the room sizzled.

The hooks became black ravens, fluttering.

Mr. Montag fell shrieking to the far end of the dream.

He opened his eyes.

“Blackjack,” said Mr. Leahy.

Mr. Montag stared at the playing cards in his cold hand. He was awake. He was in the Fire House. And they were dealing Blackjack at one-thirty in the dark morning.

“You're doing badly, Montag.”

“What?” Montag shivered.

“What's eating him?” Everyone raised their black eyebrows.

A radio was playing in the smoky ceiling over their heads. “War may be declared any hour. This country is ready to defend its destiny. War may be declared …”

The room shook. Some planes were flying over, filling the sky with invisible vibration. The men played their cards.

They sat in their black uniforms, trim men, with the look of thirty years in their blue-shaved faces and their receding hair, and the blue veins on the back of their hands becoming more prominent. On the table in the corner in neat rows lay auxiliary helmets and thick overcoats. On the walls, in precise sharpness, hung gold-plated hatchets, with inscriptions under them from famous fires. Under their nervous feet, under the wooden floor, stood the silent huge fire apparatus, the boa-constrictor hoses, the pumps, the glittery brass and silver, the crimson and gold. The brass pole, distorting their game, stood mirror-shiny through the floor-hole.

“I've been thinking about that last job,” said Mr. Montag.

“Don't,” said Mr. Leahy, putting down the cards.

“That poor man, when we burned his library.”

“He had it coming to him,” said Black.

“Right,” said Stone.

The four men played another game. Montag watched the calendar on the wall which was mechanical and which now read five minutes after one
A.M.
Thursday October 4th, in the year 2052 A.D.

“I was wondering how it'd feel if Firemen broke in my house and burned my books.”

“You haven't any books.” Leahy smiled.

“But if I did have some.”

“You got some?” The men turned their faces to him.

“No,” he said.

Yes, Mr. Montag's mind said. He had some books, hidden away, unread. In the last year, in the crashing and breaking, in burning confusion, his hand, like a separate thief, had snatched a volume here, a volume there, hid it in his fat coat, or under his pompous helmet, and, trembling, he had gone home to hide it before drinking his nightly glass of milk, and so to bed with Mildred, his wife.

“No,” he said, looking at his cards, not the men. He glanced at the wall suddenly. And there hung the long lists of a million forbidden books. The names leaped out in fire, he saw the names burning down the years, under his ax, under his hose that sprayed not water but kerosene!

“Was it always like this?” asked Mr. Montag. “The Fire House, our duties, the city, was it?”

“I don't know,” said Leahy. “Do you, Black?”

“No. Do you, Stone?”

Stone smiled at Mr. Montag.

“I mean,” said Montag, “that once upon a time—”

“Once upon a time?” said Leahy, quietly. “What kind of language is that?”

Fool! cried Mr. Montag to himself. You'll give it away. That book. The last fire. A book of fairy tales. He had dared to read a line or so …

“Old fancy language here,” said Leahy, looking at the ceiling.

“Yeah,” said Black.

“I mean, once there were fires in the town, houses burnt down. That was before houses were completely fireproof, I guess. And Fire Men went to fires to put them out, not start them.”

“Oh?” said Leahy.

“I never knew that.” Stone drew forth a rule card from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table where Montag, though knowing its message by heart, could read it:

 

RULE ONE: ANSWER THE ALARM QUICKLY.

TWO: START THE FIRE SWIFTLY.

THREE: BE SURE YOU BURN EVERYTHING.

FOUR: REPORT BACK TO THE FIRE HOUSE RAPIDLY.

FIVE: STAY ALERT FOR ANOTHER ALARM.

 

“Well, well,” said Mr. Stone.

They watched Montag.

Montag said, “What will they do to that old man we caught last night?”

“Thirty years in the insane asylum.”

“But he wasn't insane.”

“Any man's insane to think he can fool the government or us.” Leahy began to shuffle the cards.

The alarm sounded.

The bell kicked itself thirty times in five seconds. The next thing Mr. Montag knew there were three empty chairs, the cards in a kind of snow flurry on the air, the brass pole trembling and empty, the men gone, their hats gone with them. He still sat. Below, the mighty engine coughed to life.

Mr. Montag slid down the pole like a man returning to a dream.

“Hey, Montag, you forgot your hat!”

And they were off, the night wind hammering about their siren noise and their mighty metal thunder.

 

I
T WAS A TWO-STORY HOUSE
in the old district of town. A century old it was, if it was a day, but it, like many others had been given a thin fireproof coating fifty years ago, and as a result the thin preservative layer seemed to be holding it up. One sneeze and …

“Here we are, boys!”

Leahy and Stone and Black clubbered across the sidewalk making the ridiculous wet rubber sounds of men in thick soft boots, suddenly odious and fat because of their thick coats, suddenly childlike and full of games because of the thick huge hats on their heads. Mr. Montag followed.

“Is this the right place?”

“Voice on the phone said 757 Oak Knoll, name of Skinner.”

“This is it.”

They walked through the front door.

A woman was running. They caught her.

“I didn't do anything,” she said. “What did I do? I didn't harm anyone!”

“Where is it?” Leahy glared about as if the walls were poisonous. “Come on now, fessup, where are they?”

“You wouldn't take an old woman's pleasures from her.”

“Save that. It'll go easier with you if you tell.”

She said nothing but simply swayed before them.

“Let's have the report, Stone.” Stone produced the telephone alarm card with the complaint signed in telephone duplicate on the back. “It says here, you've an attic full of books. All right, men!”

Next thing they were up in the musty blackness, clumping with their boots and swinging hatchets at doors that were unlocked, tumbling through like children at a playpool in summer, all rollick and shout. “Hey!” A fountain of books leaped down upon Montag as he climbed shuddering up the steep stair well. Books struck his head, his shoulders, his upturned, lined, pale face. He held his hands up and a book landed obediently in them, like an open flower! In the dim light a page fell open and it was like a petal with words delicately flourished there. In all the fervor and rushing he had only time to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute, as if he had been stamped with a hot bronze iron. He dropped the book, but almost immediately another fell into his hand.

“Hey, there, you, come on!”

Montag closed his hand like a trap on the book, he crushed it to his breast. Another fount descended, a gush of books, a torrent of literature, Stone and Black seizing and hurling them down in shovelfuls from above, down down through dusty space, through the echoing house toward Montag and the woman who stood like a small girl under the collecting ruin. “Come on, Montag!”

And he was forced to clump up and in to lend a hand, though he fell twice.

“In here!”

“This too shall pass away.”

“What?” Leahy glared at him.

Montag stopped, blinking, in the dark.

“Did I say something?”

“Don't stand there, idiot, move!”

The books lay in piles like fishes left to dry, and the air was so thick with a gunpowdery dust that at any instant it might blow them through the roof into the stars. “Trash! Trash!” The men kicked books. They danced among them. Titles glittered like golden eyes, gone, falling.

“Kerosene!”

Stone and Black pumped out the fluid from the white hose they had carried up the stairs. They coated each remaining book with the shining stuff. They pumped it into rooms.

“This is better than the old man's place last night, eh?”

That had been different. The old man had lived in an apartment house with other people. They had had to use controlled fire there. Here, they could rampage the whole house.

When they ran downstairs, with Montag reeling after them, the house was aflame with kerosene. The walls were drenched.

“Come on, woman!”

“My books,” she said, quietly. She stood among them now, kneeling down to touch them, to run fingers over the leather, reading the golden titles with fingers instead of eyes, by touch in this instant, while her eyes accused Montag. “You can't take my books. They're my whole life.”

“You know the law,” said Leahy.

“But …”

“Confusion. People who never existed. Fantasy, pure fantasy all of it. No two books alike, none agreeing. Come on now, lady, out of your house, it'll burn.”

“No,” she said.

“The whole thing'll go up in one bloom.”

“No.”

The three men went to the door. They looked at Montag who stood near the woman. “Okay, Montag.”

“You're not going to leave her here?” he protested.

“She won't come.”

“But you must force her!”

Leahy raised his hand. It contained the concealed igniter to start the fire. “No time. Got to get back to the station. Besides, she'd cost us a trial, money, months, jail, all that.” He examined his wristwatch. “Got to get back on the alert.”

Montag put his hand on the woman's arm. “You can come with me. Here, let me help you.”

“No.” She actually saw him for a moment. “Thank you, anyway.”

“I'm counting to ten,” said Leahy. “Outside, Montag! Stone. Black.” He began counting. “One. Two.”

“Lady,” said Montag.

“Go on,” she said.

“Three,” said Leahy.

“Come on,” said Montag, tugging at her.

“I like it here,” she said.

“Four. Five,” said Leahy.

He tried to pull her, but she twisted, he slipped and fell. She ran up the stairs and stood there, with the books at her feet.

“Six. Seven. Montag,” said Leahy.

Montag did not move. He looked out the door at that man there with the apparatus in his hand. He felt the book hidden against his chest.

“Go get him,” said Leahy.

Stone and Black dragged Montag yelling from the house.

Leahy backed out after them, leaving a kerosene trail down the walk. When they were a hundred feet from the house, Montag was still kicking at the two men. He glanced back wildly.

In the front door where she had come to look out at them quietly, her quietness a condemnation, staring straight into Mr. Leahy's eyes, was the woman. She had a book in one hand.