Dark Carnival by Ray Bradbury Page A

stairs into the cellar where he opened the furnace door and built the fire steadily and expertly into wonderful flame.
        Walking upstairs again he looked about. He'd have cleaners come and clean the empty house, re-decorators pull down the dull drapes and hoist new shimmery banners up. New thick Oriental rugs purchased for the floors would subtly ensure the silence he desired and would need at least for the next month, if not for the entire year.
        He put his hands to his ears. What if Alice Jane made noise moving about the house? Some noise, somehow, some place!
        Then, he laughed. It was quite a joke. That problem was already solved. He need fear no noise from Alice. It was all absurdly simple. He would have all the pleasure of Alice Jane and none of the dream-destroying distractions and uncomfortables.
        There was one other addition needed to the quality of silence. Upon the tops of the doors that the wind sucked shut with a bang at frequent intervals he would install modern air-compression brakes, those kind they have on library doors that hiss gently as their levers seal.
        He passed through the dining-room. The figures had not moved from their tableau. Their hands remained affixed in familiar positions, and their indifference to him was not impoliteness.
        He climbed the hall stairs to change his clothing, preparatory to the task of moving the family. Taking the links from his fine cuffs he swung his head to one side.
        Music.
        First, he paid it no mind. Then, slowly, his face lifting to the ceiling, the colour drained from his cheeks.
        At the very apex of the house the music sounded, note by note, tone following tone, and it terrified him.
        Each tone came like a plucking of one single harp thread. In the complete silence the small sound of it was made larger until it grew out of proportion to itself, gone mad with all this soundlessness to stretch about in.
        The door opened in an explosion from his hands, the next thing his feet were trying the stairs to the third level of the house, the banister twisted in a long polished snake under his tightening, relaxing, sliding, reaching-up, pulling hands! The steps went under to be replaced by longer, higher, darker steps. He had started the game at the bottom with a slow stumbling. Now he was running with full impetus and if a wall had suddenly confronted him he'd not have stopped for it until he saw blood on it and fingernail scratches where he tried to pass through.
        He felt like a mouse running in a great clear space of a bell. High in the bell sphere the one harp thread hummed. It drew him on, caught him up with an umbilical of sound, gave his fear sustenance and life, mothered him. Fears passed between mother and groping child. He sought to shear away the connection with his hands, could not. He fell, as if someone'd given a heave on the cord, wriggling.
        Another clear threaded tone. And another .
        'No, keep quiet!' he shouted. 'There can't be noise in my house. Not since two weeks ago. I said there'd be no more noise. So there can't be — it's impossible! Keep quiet!'
        He burst upwards into the attic.
        Relief can be hysteria.
        Rain-drops, falling from a vent in the roof, struck shattering upon a tall cut-glass Swedish flower vase, with resonant tone.
        He destroyed the vase with one violent kick.
       
        Putting on an old shirt and old pair of pants in his room, he chuckled. The music was gone, the vent plugged, the vase in a thousand pieces, the silence again ensured.
        There are silences and silences. Each with its own identity. There were summer night silences, which weren't silences at all, but layer on layer of insect chorals and the sound of electric lamps swaying in lonely small orbits on lonely country roads, casting out feeble rings of illumination upon which the night fed — summer night silence which, to be a silence, demanded an indolence and a