Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (25 page)

As he swung around he had the disconcerting notion that he still wouldn’t be able to see her. She was gazing down at him with amused impatience from a table in the Philosophia. Before he’d finished clambering up the path he gasped “What on earth are you doing in there?”

“I fancied some olives, since you didn’t get any.” Quite as defiantly she said “It’s like being away all on my own.”

He mustn’t argue. Too many of their recent disagreements were so trivial that he felt they were reducing him and Joyce, shrivelling their intelligence and drying up their affection. “Are you ready for lunch, then?”

“I’ve been ready for a while. Were you looking at your bit of paper all this time?”

“No, finding out about it.”

A waiter bringing olives interrupted him. Ewan thought Joyce was content to be quiet once they’d ordered lunch until she said “Get it over with if you’re so anxious to tell me.”

“The author wrote just that one book. I wouldn’t be surprised if he published it himself.”

“What’s it supposed to be about?”

“Nobody was saying.”

“Do you even know who it’s by?”

“A person by the name of Jethro Dartmouth.”

“Never heard of him.”

“I got the impression pretty well nobody has.”

“Excuse me, some have, yes.”

This came from the waiter, and Ewan thought one of them must have misheard. “Sorry, I don’t think I caught what you said.”

“Mr. Dartmouth came to live here in Ikonikos.”

“How do you know that?” Joyce asked or objected.

“His daughter told us who he was.”

Ewan waited while the man poured two glasses of wine and set down the carafe. “Would you happen to know which his house is?”

“He called it Villa Biblion,” the waiter said, gesturing beyond the village.

Joyce emitted a snort at the name. Otherwise she was silent until the waiter moved away, and then she murmured “You aren’t thinking of giving him that bit of paper.”

“If you’d seen him you’d understand how much he wants it.”

“Well, I don’t understand,” Joyce said, making sure Ewan knew this included him.

During lunch he felt as though Dartmouth was loitering close by, all the more insistent for being unseen—the subject of him and his page, at any rate. It followed them to the beach in the form of their uneasy silence. Joyce spent some time in arranging herself and her various items on and around the sunbed before glancing at Ewan as if she’d forgotten he was there. “Go on your mission if you’re going.”

“I don’t like to leave you down here by yourself.”

“For pity’s sake,” she cried and dragged her legs so vigorously off the bed that it almost toppled over. “Take me to the room if you need to think I’m safe.”

He hadn’t meant that, or perhaps he had. On the uphill road he thought she resented having to take his arm. As he let them into the apartment he caught sight of the safe at the back of the doorless wardrobe. For an instant he was certain the display above the keypad said
ERROR.
The letters vanished as he stepped into the room. “Did you see that?” he blurted.

“What now, Ewan?”

“It looked as if someone just tried to open the safe.”

“I didn’t see anything like that at all.”

Perhaps the sunlight had outlined the message, although when he tried to recapture the illusion it stayed stubbornly invisible. He typed the year of their marriage and opened the safe. Hadn’t he laid the page flat? Part of it was resting against the door, and unfolded to meet him. Rather than point this out to Joyce he said “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come with me?”

“I’m very sure, Ewan. You do whatever you feel you have to.”

“I’ll try not to be long.”

“We’ve plenty of time. We’ve eleven days yet.” With a frown that seemed to tug the corners of her lips towards a smile she said “Just stop worrying about me.”

When he glanced back from the doorway she looked defiant, close to insulted by his concern. As he made all the speed he could uphill the page fluttered in his hand. He might have imagined someone was trying to snatch it, and he slipped it into his breast pocket, where it struggled to unfold before lying still.

The Villa Biblion wasn’t on the outskirts of Ikonikos. Every house he passed took him another minute’s walk or more from Joyce. He was on the edge of going back to her when he saw the name on the gatepost of a villa in an olive grove beyond high spiky railings. He thumbed the bellpush below the nameplate, and in time a grille emitted a metallic rattle and a woman’s voice. “Hello?”

“I’ve something that belongs to Mr. Dartmouth.”

The response was a clatter that sounded ominously final. As Ewan looked for a security camera to show the page, the door of the villa opened and a woman strode down the wide marble drive. She was tall and thin with a long face and cropped pale hair. She wore shorts with many pockets and a T-shirt that bestowed on her small breasts the slogan
NET ASSETS
. Ewan was swallowing a giggle when she demanded “What was it you said?”

“I found this on the beach. I brought it back.”

She gazed at the page and then at him for some moments before opening the gates. “Come and tell me about it,” she said, extending a hand several degrees cooler than the afternoon. “I’m Francesca Dartmouth.”

“Ewan Hargreaves.” As he followed her up the drive he said “Your father must be doing well to live here.”

“I bought it.” She turned to point at the words on her T-shirt. “There’s a fortune to be made in properties abroad.”

She led the way through a broad marble hall into a large white room furnished with a plump black leather suite. “What will you have to drink?”

“Do you mind if I don’t? I’d rather not leave my wife on her own longer than I have to.”

“Just let me hear your tale, then.”

“I saw someone chasing this on the beach in all that wind and later on I found it. Am I right to think he was your father? I believe his book’s quite rare.”

“Pardon me a minute,” Francesca Dartmouth said and hurried out of the room.

Ewan heard her open a door across the hall and utter a muffled cry. A window slid shut, and her footsteps hesitated before she reappeared, carrying a book as carefully as she might have handled a baby. The bulk of the pages had been torn away from the rear flyleaf, exposing their bandaged spine. “The wind got in,” she said almost to herself. “It blew this off his desk.”

Ewan held out the loose page, hoping it might lessen her distress. “Your father can get it bound again, can’t he?”

She gazed at the page and clutched the book harder. “He can’t, Mr. Hargreaves.”

Ewan wasn’t sure he wanted to establish why. Instead he asked “What’s the book about?”

Francesca Dartmouth raised her eyes to his and held out the book. “See for yourself.”

Ewan was moved to be trusted with it. He laid the page on a low table before carefully leafing through the book. It was the tale of Tom Read, a man with a mission to change those who were doing most harm to the world—to persuade them or, failing that, execute them. Was he inspired by God or deranged or both? Some of his intended victims were political leaders, others ruled religions, and one was a media mogul. Read never learned who sent an assassin to kill him in the end, where Ewan thought another page might be missing, but there was only the one he’d retrieved. “I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

“My father didn’t either. He didn’t realise the people he was satirising had so much power. The media man made sure nobody would stock the book, and then he used one of his companies to buy up all the copies and destroy them. My father sent out the ones he had left to the media the man didn’t own, but nobody so much as mentioned them. He kept just that one copy and hid himself here. He didn’t want anyone to find out where he was living. He was afraid they might try and do away with him as well as the book.”

“But you told someone in the village he lived here.”

“Not while my father was alive.”

Ewan felt he’d already known that answer. He shut the cover, which bore just the author’s name split by the title on a black background. The letters were in various fonts, the most prominent of which could be read as spelling TO SEE GOD. He turned the book over and gazed at the photograph on the back. “That’s the man I saw chasing the page on the beach.”

“I believe you.” Francesca Dartmouth took a long breath and said “He used to say he wouldn’t really be destroyed while there was still even one of his books.”

At once Ewan realised “The last line needn’t mean there’s no God. It could be saying there’s no end.”

“I never thought of that before.” Even more gratefully she said “I think you’ve seen the truth.”

Ewan was making to replace the page in the book when she said “Why don’t you keep that? I’d say you’ve made it your own.”

In some confusion he protested “Don’t you think—”

“I think you should have it when you’ve given it a meaning. Maybe it means something special to you, or it will.” She held Ewan’s gaze while she said “If it does, my father won’t be altogether gone.”

Ewan could find nothing to say to this. As she saw him onto the drive he said awkwardly “You won’t be short of olives.”

“Would you like some? They used to sell ours in the village till the shop turned into a bar.” She went into a side room and returned with a little wicker basket heaped with chubby olives. “You and your wife enjoy them,” she said. “And your lives.”

She waved as the gates met behind him, and he was hurrying past the railings when he seemed to glimpse a man among the trees. In a moment the figure was gone, as if it had needed only to turn sideways to vanish. Ewan looked for it as the villas gave way to apartments, but there was no further sign of it. The page from the book lay quiet against his heart.

He thought better of knocking at the door of the apartment in case Joyce was asleep, and eased it open, lifting the wicker trophy to show her if she was awake. He needn’t have taken so much care, because she wasn’t in the room.

The balcony was deserted too. He called her number, only to hear the phone start to ring in the room. It was next to her bed, pinning down a scrap of paper on which she’d written
Gone for swim
followed by a single
X
with one bar practically upright. He ran to the balcony and peered between the hotels. Far out to sea a figure no larger than a charm on a bracelet was swimming. Except for the orange swimsuit he wouldn’t have known who it was.

He closed the window and stood the basket on Joyce’s bedside table. He read Jethro Dartmouth’s last words as he laid the page in the safe, and then he made for the beach. Though the little swimming charm was as distant as ever, the sight seemed to concentrate a peace he hardly dared express to himself. He left his sandals next to Joyce’s under the sun-bed occupied by her book. Every step took him deeper, but ripples kissed his skin. “There’s none,” he murmured as he forged onwards to tell Joyce. “There’s none.”

About “The Page”

Which tale of Ray’s first pierced me with a sense of loneliness and loss? It may well have been “The Fog Horn” or “Kaleidoscope” or “The Dwarf” or “The Lake”—I can’t now remember the order in which (precocious child) I read his first few books when I was no more than eight years old. I was borrowing adult fiction from the local public library on my mother’s tickets, and Ray quickly became one of her favourite authors too. Now I think about it, perhaps that poignant jewel “The Smile” initially alerted us when it was reprinted in our local newspaper. Each of these stories affected me as some of Hans Andersen’s fairy tales had—they were inescapably moving and disturbing as well. I think I was already also able to appreciate the poetry of Ray’s prose.

On a Bradbury panel at the 2010 British Fantasy Convention, Joel Lane rightly celebrated him for rooting his fiction in the most crucial human experiences. The various panellists named their choice of Ray’s tales, and some of the above were mine. An hour wasn’t enough to let us say everything we should have, but here’s my opportunity to cite a favourite theme of mine in his work—the death of books. While it’s most fully explored in
Fahrenheit 451
, I’ve never forgotten two other treatments: “The Exiles” (mysteriously missing from the British edition of
The Illustrated Man
) and “Pillar of Fire,” which I first encountered in August Derleth’s anthology
The Other Side of the Moon
. In the latter story I was especially haunted by the last dead man’s eulogy for our beloved fears. Back then I didn’t know about the carnival magician who bade the twelve-year-old Ray to live forever, nor that Ray had embraced the exhortation by becoming a writer, but the information came as no surprise in the wake of his tales. Believe me, Ray—you’ll live that long in the souls of your readers and in the work of the writers you’ve influenced. I believe that like others—Pete Crowther and Caitlín Kiernan among them—I learned lyricism from you.

For me Ray’s achievement is inimitable, and so when Mort Castle asked me to write a tale for this book I vowed to avoid trying to imitate. In the course of my career I’ve come to believe in the happy coincidence, one of which was the source of “The Page.” A few weeks after Mort’s request my wife and I spent two weeks in Rhodes. As we sunbathed I turned over ideas in my mind for a Bradbury tribute, and on a windy day one blew along—the sight of a man in pursuit of a page that a gust had torn out of the book he was reading on the beach. Thank heaven I always take a notebook with me! I was instantly reminded of “The Exiles” and its relatives, and it didn’t take me long to sketch my tale. It’s pretty personal, but isn’t that the best kind of homage? I hope it contains a little of Ray’s poignancy, and perhaps it has some of the redemptive quality you can often find in his work (from the list above, “The Lake,” for instance). One final thought: if a character in any of his early stories had a mobile phone, it would be science fiction. Sometimes I feel we’re all inhabiting the future he envisioned.