Silence.

Snow fell in silent whirls and cornucopias, heaped itself in lavish quietness upon the lawn. She was now alone.

Stumbling to the window, she unlocked it, forced it up, unhooked the storm window beyond, pushed it out. Then she straddled, half in the silent warm world of the house, half out into the snowing night. She sat a long moment, gazing at the locked library door. The brass knob twisted once.

Fascinated, she watched it turn. Like a bright eye it fixed her.

She almost wanted to walk over, undo the latch, and with a bow, beckon in the night, the shape of terror, so as to know the face of such a one who, with hardly a knock, had razed an island fort. She found the gun in her hand, raised it, pointed it at the door, shivering.

The brass knob turned clockwise, counterclockwise. Darkness stood in darkness beyond, blowing. Clockwise, counterclockwise. With an unseen smile above.

Eyes shut she fired three times!

When she opened her eyes she saw that her shots had gone wide. One into the wall, another at the bottom of the door, a third at the top. She stared a moment at her coward’s hand, and flung the gun away.

The doorknob turned this way, that. It was the last thing she saw. The bright doorknob shining like an eye.

Leaning out, she fell into the snow.

RETURNING WITH THE POLICE hours later, she saw her footsteps in the snow, running away from silence.

She and the sheriff and his men stood under the empty trees, gazing at the house.

It seemed warm and comfortable, once again brightly lighted, a world of radiance and cheer in a bleak landscape. The front door stood wide to the blowing snows.

“Jesus,” said the sheriff. “He must have just opened up the front door and strolled out, damn, not caring who saw! Christ, what nerve!”

Alice moved. A thousand white moths flicked her eyes. She blinked and her eyes

fixed in a stare. Then slowly, softly, her throat fluttered.

She began a laugh that ended with a muffled sobbing.

“Look!” she cried. “Oh, look!”

They looked, and then saw the second path of footprints which came neatly down the front porch stairs into the white soft velvet snow. Evenly spaced, with a certain serenity, these footprints could be seen where they marched off across the front yard, confident and deep, vanishing away into the cold night and snowing town.

“His footsteps.” Alice bent and put out her hand. She measured then tried to cover them with a thrust of her numb fingers. She cried out.

“His footsteps. Oh God, what a little man! Do you see the size of them, do you see! My God, what a little man!”

And even as she crouched there, on hands and knees, sobbing, the wind and the winter and the night did her a gentle kindness. Even as she watched, the snow fell into and around and over the footprints, smoothing and filling and erasing them until at last, with no trace, with no memory of their smallness, they were gone.

Then, and only then, did she stop crying.

SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN

1950

IT WAS THE CRYING LATE AT NIGHT, perhaps, the hysteria, and then the sobbing violently, and after it had passed away into a sighing, I could hear the husband’s voice through the wall. “There, there,” he would say, “there, there.”

I would lie upon my back in my night bed and listen and wonder, and the calendar on my wall said August 2002. And the man and his wife, young, both about thirty, and fresh-looking, with light hair and blue eyes, but lines around their mouths, had just moved into the rooming house where I took my meals and worked as a janitor in the downtown library.

Every night and every night it would be the same thing, the wife crying, and the husband quieting her with his soft voice beyond my wall. I would strain to hear what started it, but I could never tell. It wasn’t anything he said, I was positive of this, or anything he did. I was almost certain, in fact, that it started all by itself, late at night, about two o’clock. She would wake up, I theorized, and I would hear that first terrorized shriek and then the long crying. It made me sad. As old as I am, I hate to hear a woman cry.

I remember the first night they came here, a month ago, an August evening here in this town deep in Illinois, all the houses dark and everyone on the porches licking ice-cream bars. I remember walking through the kitchen downstairs and standing in the old smells of cooking and hearing but not seeing the dog lapping water from the pan under the stove, a nocturnal sound, like water in a cave. And I walked on through to the parlor and in the dark, with his face devilish pink from exertion, Mr. Fiske, the landlord, was fretting over the air conditioner, which, damned thing, refused to work. Finally in the hot night he wandered outside onto the mosquito porch—it was made for mosquitoes only, Mr. Fiske averred, but went there anyway.

I went out onto the porch and sat down and unwrapped a cigar to fire away my own special mosquitoes, and there were Grandma Fiske and Alice Fiske and Henry Fiske and Joseph Fiske and Bill Fiske and six other boarders and roomers, all unwrapping Eskimo pies.

Tags: Ray Bradbury Science Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net