Read Online A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online Page B

first half of “Ozymandias.”
    I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
    Shadows moved over Roy’s face. “Read the rest,” he said. I read:
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
    When I finished, Roy let two or three long dark blocks pass. “Turn around, let’s go home,” I said.
    “Why?”
    “This poem sounds just like the studio
and
the graveyard. You ever have one of those crystal balls you shook and the snow lifted in blizzards inside? That’s how my bones feel now.”
    “Bushwah,” was Roy’s comment.
    I glanced over at his great hawk’s profile, which cleaved the night air, full of that optimism that only craftsmen seem to have about being able to build a world just the way they want it, no matter what.
    I remembered that when we were both thirteen King Kong fell off the Empire State and landed on us. When we got up, we were never the same. We told each other that one day we would write and move a Beast as great, as magnificent, as beautiful as Kong, or simply die.
    “Beast,” whispered Roy. “Here we
are
.”
    And we pulled up near the Brown Derby, a restaurant with no huge Brown Derby on top, like a similar restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, five miles across town, capped with a derby large enough to fit God at Easter, or any studio bigwig on Friday afternoon. The only way you knew this Brown Derby was important was by the 999 cartoon-caricature portraits on every wall inside. Outside was quasi-Spanish nothing. We braved the nothing to step in and face the 999.
    The maitre d’ of the Brown Derby lifted his left eyebrow as we arrived. A former dog lover, he now only loved cats. We smelled funny.
    “Of course you have no reservations?” he observed, languidly.
    “About
this
place?” said Roy. “Plenty.”
    That rippled the fur on the maitre d’s neck, but he let us in anyway.
    The restaurant was almost empty. People sat at a few tables, finishing dessert and cognac. The waiters had already begun to renapkin and reutensil some of the tables.
    There was a sound of laughter ahead, and we saw three women standing near a table, bending toward a man who was obviously leafing out cash to pay the night’s bills. The young women laughed, saying they would be outside window-shopping while he paid up, then, in a flourish of perfume, they turned and ran past me and Roy, who stood nailed in place, staring at the man in the booth.
    Stanislau Groc.
    “God,” cried Roy. “You/”
    “Me?!”
    Groc’s eternal flame snapped shut.
    “What are you doing here?” he exclaimed.
    “We were invited.”
    “We were looking for someone,” I said.
    “And found me and were severely put out,” observed Groc.
    Roy was edging back, suffering from his Siegfried syndrome, dearly remembered. Promised a dragon, he beheld a mosquito. He could not take his eyes off Groc.
    “Why do you look at me that way?” snapped the little man.
    “Roy,” I warned.
    For I could see that Roy was thinking my thought. It was all a joke. Someone, knowing that Groc ate here some nights, had sent us on a fool’s errand. To embarrass us, and Groc. Still, Roy was eying the little man’s ears and nose and chin.
    “Naw,” said Roy, “you won’t
do
.”
    “For
what
? Hold on! Yes! Is it the
Search
?” A quiet little machine gun of laughter started in his chest and at last erupted from his thin lips.
    “But why the Brown Derby? The people who come here are not your kind of fright. Nightmares, yes. And myself, this patchwork monkey’s paw? Who