A Pleasure to Burn by Ray Bradbury Page B

Hamlet’s father, Othello, Lear, all of them, thousands! Good Lord, a regular sea of people.”
    â€œGood William.” Poe turned. He let the crimson drape fall shut. He stood for a moment to observe the raw stone room, the black-timbered table, the candle flame, the other man, Mr. Ambrose Bierce, seated peering desolately into the flame.
    â€œWe’ll have to tell Mr. Hawthorne now,” said Mr. Poe. “We’ve put it off too long. It’s a matter of hours. Will you go down to his home with me, Bierce?”
    Bierce glanced up. “What will happen to us? God save us!”
    â€œIf we can’t kill the rocket men off, frighten them away, then we’ll have to leave, of course. We’ll go on to Jupiter, and when they come to Jupiter, we’ll go to Saturn, and when they come to Saturn we’ll go to Uranus, or Neptune, and then on out to Pluto—”
    â€œWhere then?”
    Mr. Poe’s face was weary, there were coals of fire remaining, fading, in his eyes, and a sad wildness in the way he talked, and a uselessness of his hands and the way his hair fell over his amazing white brow. He was like a satan of some lost dark cause, a general arrived from a derelict invasion. His silky soft black mustache was worn away by his musing lips. He was so small that his brow seemed to float, vast and phosphorescent by itself, in the dark room.
    â€œWe have the advantage of superior forms of travel,” he said. “We can always hope for one of their atomic wars, dissolution, the dark ages come again. The return of superstition. We could go back then to Earth, all of us, in one night.” Mr. Poe’s black eyes brooded under his round and illuminant brow. He looked at the ceiling. “So they’re coming to ruin this world, too? They won’t leave anything undefiled, will they?”
    â€œDoes a wolf pack stop until it’s killed its prey and eaten the guts?”
    Poe swayed, faintly drunk with wine. “What did we do? Did we have a fair trial before a company of literary critics? No! Our books were plucked by neat, sterile surgeon’s pliers, and flung into vats, to boil!”
    They were interrupted by a hysterical shout from the tower stair.
    â€œMr. Poe, Mr. Bierce!”
    â€œYes, yes, we’re coming!” Poe and Bierce descended to find a man gasping against the stone passage wall.
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    â€œH AVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS !” he cried, immediately, clawing at them like a man about to fall over a cliff. “In an hour they’ll land! They’re bringing books with them, old books, the witches said! What’re you doing in the tower at a time like this? Why aren’t you acting?”
    Poe said, “We’re doing everything we can, Blackwood. You’re new to this. Come along, we’re going to Mr. Hawthorne’s place—”
    â€œâ€”to contemplate our doom, our black doom,” said Mr. Bierce.
    They moved down the echoing throats of the castle, level after dim, green level, down into mustiness and decay and spiders and dreamlike webbing.
    â€œDon’t worry,” said Poe, his brow like a huge white lamp before them, descending, sinking. “All along the dead sea tonight I’ve called the Others. Your friends and mine, Blackwood, Bierce. They’re all there. The animals and the old women and the tall men with the sharp white teeth. The traps are waiting, the pits, yes, and the pendulums. The Red Death.” Here he laughed quietly.
    â€œYes, even the Red Death. I never thought, no, I never thought the time would come when a thing like the Red Death would actually be. But they— ” he poked his finger at the sky “—asked for it, and they shall have it!”
    â€œBut are we strong enough?” wondered Blackwood. “How strong is strong? They won’t be prepared for us, at least. They haven’t the imagination. Those clean young rocket men with their antiseptic