A Ghost story

I TOOK a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years, until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its lazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.

I was glad enough when I reached my room and locked out the mould and the darkness. A cheery fire was burning in the grate, and I sat down before it with a comforting sense of relief. For two hours I sat there, thinking of bygone times; recalling old scenes, and summoning half-forgotten faces out of the mists of the past; listening, in fancy, to voices that long ago grew silent for all time, and to once familiar songs that nobody sings now. And as my reverie softened down to a sadder and sadder pathos, the shrieking of the winds outside softened to a wail, the angry beating of the rain against the panes diminished to a tranquil patter, and one by one the noises in the street subsided, until the hurrying footsteps of the last belated straggler died away in the distance and left no sound behind.

The fire had burned low. A sense of loneliness crept over me. I arose and undressed, moving on tiptoe about the room, doing stealthily what I had to do, as if I were environed by sleeping enemies whose slumbers it would be fatal to break. I covered up in bed, and lay listening to the rain and wind and the faint creaking of distant shutters, till they lulled me to sleep.

I slept profoundly, but how long I do not know. All at once I found myself awake, and filled with a shuddering expectancy. All was still. All but my own heart -- I could hear it beat. Presently the bedclothes began to slip away slowly toward the foot of the bed, as if some one were pulling them! I could not stir; I could not speak. Still the blankets slipped deliberately away, till my breast was uncovered. Then with a great effort I seized them and drew them over my head. I waited, listened, waited. Once more that steady pull began, and once more I lay torpid a century of dragging seconds till my breast was naked again. At last I roused my energies and snatched the covers back to their place and held them with a strong grip. I waited. By and by I felt a faint tug, and took a fresh grip. The tug strengthened to a steady strain -- it grew stronger and stronger. My hold parted, and for the third time the blankets slid away. I groaned. An answering groan came from the foot of the bed! Beaded drops of sweat stood upon my forehead. I was more dead than alive. Presently I heard a heavy footstep in my room -- the step of an elephant, it seemed to me -- it was not like anything human. But it was moving FROM me -- there was relief in that. I heard it approach the door -- pass out without moving bolt or lock -- and wander away among the dismal corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it passed -- and then silence reigned once more.

When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself , "This is a dream -- simply a hideous dream." And so I lay thinking it over until I convinced myself that it WAS a dream, and then a comforting laugh relaxed my lips and I was happy again. I got up and struck a light; and when I found that the locks and bolts were just as I had left them, another soothing laugh welled in my heart and rippled from my lips. I took my pipe and lit it, and was just sitting down before the fire, when -- down went the pipe out of my nerveless fingers, the blood forsook my cheeks, and my placid breathing was cut short with a gasp! In the ashes on the hearth, side by side with my own bare footprint, was another, so vast that in comparison mine was but an infant's'! Then I had HAD a visitor, and the elephant tread was explained.

I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear. I lay a long time, peering into the darkness , and listening. Then I heard a grating noise overhead, like the dragging of a heavy body across the floor; then the throwing down of the body, and the shaking of my windows in response to the concussion. In distant parts of the building I heard the muffled slamming of doors. I heard, at intervals , stealthy footsteps creeping in and out among the corridors, and up and down the stairs. Sometimes these noises approached my door, hesitated, and went away again. I heard the clanking of chains faintly, in remote passages, and listened while the clanking grew nearer -- while it wearily climbed the stairways, marking each move by the loose surplus of chain that fell with an accented rattle upon each succeeding step as the goblin that bore it advanced. I heard muttered sentences; half-uttered screams that seemed smothered violently; and the swish of invisible garments, the rush of invisible wings. Then I became conscious that my chamber was invaded -- that I was not alone. I heard sighs and breathings about my bed, and mysterious whisperings. Three little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceiling directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment, and then dropped -- two of them upon my face and one upon the pillow. They spattered, liquidly, and felt warm. Intuition told me they had turned to gouts of blood as they fell -- I needed no light to satisfy myself of that. Then I saw pallid faces, dimly luminous, and white uplifted hands, floating bodiless in the air -- floating a moment and then disappearing. The whispering ceased, and the voices and the sounds, and a solemn stillness followed. I waited and listened. I felt that I must have light or die. I was weak with fear. I slowly raised myself toward a sitting posture, and my face came in contact with a clammy hand! All strength went from me ap- parently, and I fell back like a stricken invalid. Then I heard the rustle of a garment -- it seemed to pass to the door and go out.

When everything was still once more, I crept out of bed, sick and feeble, and lit the gas with a hand that trembled as if it were aged with a hundred years. The light brought some little cheer to my spirits. I sat down and fell into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the ashes. By and by its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up and the broad gas flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I heard that elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned. The tread reached my very door and paused -- the light had dwindled to a sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and presently was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me. I watched it with fascinated eyes. A pale glow stole over the Thing; gradually its cloudy folds took shape -- an arm appeared, then legs, then a body, and last a great sad face looked out of the vapor. Stripped of its filmy housings, naked, muscular and comely, the majestic Cardiff Giant loomed above me!

All my misery vanished -- for a child might know that no harm could come with that benignant countenance. My cheerful spirits returned at once, and in sympathy with them the gas flamed up brightly again. Never a lonely outcast was so glad to welcome company as I was to greet the friendly giant. I said:

"Why, is it nobody but you? Do you know, I have been scared to death for the last two or three hours? I am most honestly glad to see you. I wish I had a chair -- Here, here, don't try to sit down in that thing!

But it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him, and down he went -- I never saw a chair shivered so in my life.

"Stop, stop, You'll ruin ev--"

Too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved into its original elements.

"Confound it, haven't you got any judgment at all? Do you want to ruin all the furniture on the place? Here, here, you petrified fool--"

But it was no use. Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed, and it was a melancholy ruin.

"Now what sort of a way is that to do? First you come lumbering about the place bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry me to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume which would not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people except in a respectable theater, and not even there if the nudity were of YOUR sex, you repay me by wrecking all the furniture you can find to sit down on. And why will you? You damage yourself as much as you do me. You have broken off the end of your spinal column, and littered up the floor with chips of your hams till the place looks like a marble yard. You ought to be ashamed of yourself -- you are big enough to know better."

"Well, I will not break any more furniture. But what am I to do? I have not had a chance to sit down for a century." And the tears came into his eyes.

"Poor devil," I said, "I should not have been so harsh with you. And you are an orphan, too, no doubt. But sit down on the floor here -- nothing else can stand your weight -- and besides, we cannot be sociable with you away up there above me; I want you down where I can perch on this high counting-house stool and gossip with you face to face."

So he sat down on the floor, and lit a pipe which I gave him, threw one of my red blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sitz-bath on his head, helmet fashion, and made himself picturesque and comfortable. Then he crossed his ankles, while I renewed the fire, and exposed the flat, honey-combed bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth.

"What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your legs, that they are gouged up so?"

"Infernal chillblains -- I caught them clear up to the back of my head, roosting out there under Newell's farm. But I love the place; I love it as one loves his old home. There is no peace for me like the peace I feel when I am there."

We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired, and spoke of it. "Tired?" he said. "Well, I should think so. And now I will tell you all about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the Museum. I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again. Now what was the most natural thing for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it! -- haunt the place where the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other spirits to help me. But it did no good, for nobody ever came to the museum at midnight. Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that perdition could furnish. Night after night we have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering, tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost worn out. But when I saw a light in your room to-night I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am tired out -- entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope!"

I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:

"This transcends everything -- everything that ever did occur! Why you poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing -- you have been haunting a PLASTER CAST of yourself -- the real Cardiff Giant is in Albany!

[Footnote by Twain: A fact. The original fraud was ingeniously and fraudfully duplicated, and exhibited in New York as the "only genuine" Cardiff Giant (to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real colossus) at the very same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a museum in Albany.]

Confound it, don't you know your own remains?"

I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation, overspread a countenance before.

The Petrified Man rose slowly to his feet, and said:

"Honestly, IS that true?"

"As true as I am sitting here."

He took the pipe from his mouth and laid it on the mantel, then stood irresolute a moment (unconsciously, from old habit, thrusting his hands where his pantaloons pockets should have been, and meditatively dropping his chin on his breast), and finally said:

"Well -- I NEVER felt so absurd before. The Petrified Man has sold everybody else, and now the mean fraud has ended by selling its own ghost! My son, if there is any charity left in your heart for a poor friendless phantom like me, don't let this get out. Think how YOU would feel if you had made such an ass of yourself."

I heard his, stately tramp die away, step by step down the stairs and out into the deserted street, and felt sorry that he was gone, poor fellow -- and sorrier still that he had carried off my red blanket and my bath tub.

By: Mark Twain

There Will Come Soft Rain

In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to
get up, seven o'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The
clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time,
seven-nine!
In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior
eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two
coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.
"Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of
Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr.
Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are
the water, gas, and light bills."
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But
no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The
weather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…"
And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.
Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait
the door swung down again.
At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge
scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and
flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and
emerged twinkling dry.
Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.
Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small
cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached
runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they
popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.
Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of
rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a
radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air
with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west
side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the
house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here,
as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood
in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball,
and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.
The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest
was a thin charcoaled layer.
The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.

Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "Who
goes there? What's the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it
had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old maidenly preoccupation with self-protection
which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.
It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade
snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!
The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in
choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.
Twelve noon.
A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but
now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind
it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.
For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the
copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel
jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped
into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.
The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house
realized, that only silence was here.
It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making
pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.
The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran
wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.
Two o'clock, sang a voice.
Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray
leaves in an electrical wind.
Two-fifteen.
The dog was gone.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.
Two thirty-five.
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of
pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.
But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.
At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.
Four-thirty.
The nursery walls glowed.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in
crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films
docked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to
resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot
still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There
was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a
purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like
other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of

parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and
water holes.
It was the children's hour.
Five o'clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.
Six, seven, eight o'clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study
a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped
out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.
Nine o'clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.
Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:
"Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?"
The house was silent.
The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random."
Quiet music rose to back the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite….
"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
if mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone."
The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its
tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.
At ten o'clock the house began to die.
The wind blew. A failing tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning
solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!
"Fire!" screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the
ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the
voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"
The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by
the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.
The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease
from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls,
pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.
But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased.
The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.
The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like
delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.
Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!

And then, reinforcements.
From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green
chemical.
The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were
twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.
But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the
pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze
shrapnel on the beams.
The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its
wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries
quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winter
ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high,
low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their
sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.
In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The
panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished
off toward a distant steaming river....
Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses,
oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control
mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a
thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or
after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning
mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard
for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the
wires withered and the circuits cracked.
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making
breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips,
which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into
sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a
cluttered mound deep under.
Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.
Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall,
a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped
rubble and steam:
"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…"

By Ray Bradbury