A Pleasure to Burn by Ray Bradbury Page A

until that week before we took off from Earth. And then, every night, I dreamed I was a white wolf. Caught on a snowy hill. Shot with a silver bullet. Buried with a stake in my heart.” He moved his head toward Mars. “Do you think, Smith, they know we’re coming?”
    â€œWe don’t know if there are Martian people, sir.”
    â€œDon’t we? They began frightening us off, eight weeks ago, before we started. They’ve killed Perse and Reynolds now. Yesterday, they made Grenville go blind. How? I don’t know. Bats, needles, dreams, men dying for no reason. I’d call it witchcraft in another day. But this is the year 2120, Smith. We’re rational men. This all can’t be happening. But it is. Whoever they are, with their needles and their bats, they’ll try to finish all of us.” He swung about. “Smith, fetch those books from my file. I want them when we land.”
    Two hundred books were piled on the rocket deck.
    â€œThank you, Smith. Have you glanced at them? Think I’m insane? Perhaps. It’s a crazy hunch. At the last moment, I ordered these books from the Historical Museum. Because of my dreams. Twenty nights I was stabbed, butchered, a screaming bat pinned to a surgical mat, a thing rotting underground in a black box; bad, wicked dreams. Our whole crew dreamed of witch-things and were-things, vampires and phantoms, things they couldn’t know anything about. Why? Because books on such ghastly subjects were destroyed a century ago. By law. Forbidden for anyone to own the grisly volumes. These books you see here are the last copies, kept for historical purposes in the locked Museum vaults.”
    Smith bent to read the dusty titles:
    Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving. Rappacini’s Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood. The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth, by H. P Lovecraft. And more! Books by Walter De La Mare, Wakefield, Harvey, Wells, Asquith, Huxley, all forbidden authors. All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned! But, sir, what good are these to us on the rocket?”
    â€œI don’t know,” sighed the captain, “yet.”
    Â 
    T HE THREE HAGS LIFTED THE CRYSTAL where the captain’s image flickered, tiny voice tinkling out of the glass:
    â€œI don’t know,” sighed the captain, “yet.”
    The three witches glared redly into each other’s faces.
    â€œWe haven’t much time,” said one.
    â€œBetter warn Them up at the House.”
    â€œThey’ll want to know about the books. It doesn’t look good. That fool of a captain!”
    â€œIn an hour they’ll land their rocket.”
    The three hags shuddered and blinked up at the castle by the edge of the dry Martian sea. In its highest window, a small man held a blood-red drape aside. He watched the wastelands where the three witches fed their cauldron and shaped the waxes. Farther along, ten thousand other blue fires and laurel incenses, black tobacco smokes and fir-weeds, cinnamons and bone-dusts rose soft as moths through the Martian night. The man counted the angry magical fires. Then, as the witches stared, he turned. The crimson drape, released, fell causing the distant portal to wink, like a yellow eye.
    Mr. Edgar Allan Poe stood in the tower window, a faint vapor of spirits upon his breath. “Hecate’s friends are busy tonight,” he said, seeing the witches, far below.
    A voice behind him said, “I saw Will Shakespeare on the shore, earlier, whipping them on. All along the sea, Shakespeare’s army alone, tonight, numbers thousands; the three Witches, Oberon,