Read Online The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online

glanced around, fearfully, cried aloud.
    ‘Cecy, Cecy, come home, child, I need you!’
    A silence, while sunlight faded from the room.
    ‘Cecy, come home, child!’
    The dead man’s lips moved. A high clear voice sprang from them.
    ‘Here!I’ve been here for days! I’m the fear he had in him: and he never guessed. Tell Father what I’ve done. Maybe he’ll think me worthy now…’
    The dead man’s lips stopped. A moment later, Cecy’s body on the bed stiffened like a stocking with a leg thrust suddenly into it, inhabited again. ‘
    ‘Supper, Mother,’ said Cecy, rising from bed.

The Lake
    They cut the sky down to my size and threw it over the Michigan lake, put some kids yelling on yellow sand with bouncing balls, a gull or two, a criticizing parent, and me breaking out of a wet wave, finding this world very bleary and moist.
    I ran up on the beach.
    Mama swabbed me with a furry towel. ‘Stand there and dry,’ she said.
    I stood there, watching the sun take away the water beads on my arms. I replaced them with goose-pimples.
    ‘My, there’s a wind,’ said Mama. ‘Put on your sweater.’
    ‘Wait’ll I watch my goose-bumps,’ I said.
    ‘Harold,’ said Mama.
    I put the sweater on and watched the waves come up and fall down on the beach. But not clumsily. On purpose, with a green sort of elegance. Even a drunken man could not collapse with such elegance as those waves.
    It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason. The beach was so long and lonely with only about six people on it. The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn come along the endless shore.
    All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins. One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Schabold’s feet, down by the water curve.
    Sand blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing teeth, galloping on. With only the wind for music, slipping through canvas.
    I stood there. Everyone else was in school. I was not. Tomorrow I would be on my way west across the United States on a train. Mom and I had come to the beach for one last brief moment.
    There was something about the loneliness that made me want to get away by myself. ‘Mama. I want to run up the beach a ways,’ I said.
    ‘All right, but hurry back, and don’t go near the water.’
    I ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running, arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind. Like wings.
    Mama withdrew into the distance, sitting. Soon she was only a brown speck and I was all alone.
    Being alone is a newness to a twelve-year-old child. He is so used to people about. The only way he can be alone is in his mind. There are so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has to run off down a beach, even if it’s only in his head, to get by himself in his own world, with his own miniature values.
    So now I was really alone.
    I went down to the water and let it cool up to my stomach. Always before, with the crowd, I hadn’t dared to look, to come to this spot and search around in the water and call a certain name. But now—
    Water is like a magician. Sawing you in half. It feels as if you were cut half in two, part of you, the lower part, sugar, melting, dissolving away. Cool water, and once in a while a very elegantly stumbling wave that falls with a flourish of lace.
    I called her name. A dozen times