The Emissary by Ray Bradbury

 

The Emissary
by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury / El emisario

    Martin knew it was autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees. In dark clock-springs of hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acornhusk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees. Dog jumped. Showers of brittle fern, blackberry vine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted. No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!

The Lake by Ray Bradbury

The Lake
by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury / El lago

    The wave shut me off from the world, from the birds in the sky, the children on the beach, my mother on the shore. There was a moment of green silence. Then the wave gave me back to the sky, the sand, the children yelling. I came out of the lake and the world was waiting for me, having hardly moved since I went away.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

The Veldt

by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury / La pradera

1

    ‘George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.’
    ‘What’s wrong with it?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Well, then.’
    ‘I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.’
    ‘What would a psychologist want with a nursery?’
    ‘You know very well what he’d want.’ His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.
    ‘It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.’
    ‘All right, let’s have a look.’

The Long Rain by Ray Bradbury

 

  

The Long Rain

by Ray Bradbury 

Ray Bradbury / La lluvia

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury

 

Kaleidoscope

by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury / Calidoscopio

    The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

The End of the Beginning by Ray Bradbury

 

The End of the Beginning

by Ray Bradbury

    He stopped the lawn mower in the middle of the yard, because he felt that the sun at just that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut grass that had showered his face and body died softly away. Yes, the stars were there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He heard the porch screen door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as he watched the night.

Grant Snider / The Three Rays

THE THREE RAYS

By Grant Snider

FEB. 28, 2014

Grant Snider, an illustrator and cartoonist, draws the weekly online strip “Incidental Comics.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Ray Bradbury / Fahrenheit 451 / An introduction

RAY BRADBURY: FAHRENHEIT 451 – AN INTRODUCTION

October 19, 2019

In his book Seekers of Tomorrow, Sam Moskowitz writes that when Ray Bradbury was young, he advocated a political philosophy called technocracy, which predicted that the national economy was going to collapse in 1945. At that point a group of technocrats calling themselves Technocracy, Inc. (TI), would step forward and a series of appointed scientists would run the country according to scientific principles. Bradbury was later horrified to discover that TI was involved in Nazi book burning in Europe (a zealous attempt to enforce Nazi “scientific” principles). As an author, he took book burning personally, as he suggests in these lines from Fahrenheit 451:

“It’s not just the woman that died,” said Montag. “Last night I thought about all the kerosene that I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper.”

Ray Bradbury / Fahrenheit 451 / The Plot

RAY BRADBURY: FAHRENHEIT 451 – THE PLOT

July 26, 2019

The novel opens with “fireman” Guy Montag exulting in his job of burning books: “It was a pleasure to burn.” In his futuristic society, where houses are built to be fireproof and firemen are no longer needed as firefighters, almost all books (with the exception of a few manuals and other material considered necessary) are outlawed. Firemen burn hooks, along with the interiors of the homes of the people who illegally possess them.

Firemen work at night, since the spectacle of burning—intended to be both lesson and entertainment for the citizenry— makes a more impressive show in the dark. Thus it is still dark as he is going home from work. Walking along the sidewalk near his house, he meets Clarisse, a young girl who demonstrates an extraordinary characteristic in this totalitarian state: tireless curiosity. She takes the time to stop and observe; as she observes Montag, he sees himself in her eyes, not the fireman who frightens most people, but “just a man, after all.”

Neil Gaiman / A man who won't forget Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

A man who won't forget Ray Bradbury

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman remembers his friend Ray Bradbury who has died at the age of 91

Neil Gaiman
Wed 6 jun 2012

Y

esterday afternoon I was in a studio recording an audiobook version of a short story I had written for Ray Bradbury's 90th birthday. It's a monologue called The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, and was a way of talking about the impact that Ray Bradbury had on me as a boy, and as an adult, and, as far as I could, about what he had done to the world. And I wrote it last year as a love letter and as a thank you and as a birthday present for an author who made me dream, taught me about words and what they could accomplish, and who never let me down as a reader or as a person as I grew up.

Last week, at dinner, a friend told me that when he was a boy of 11 or 12 he met Ray Bradbury. When Bradbury found out that he wanted to be a writer, he invited him to his office and spent half a day telling him the important stuff: if you want to be a writer, you have to write. Every day. Whether you feel like it or not. That you can't write one book and stop. That it's work, but the best kind of work. My friend grew up to be a writer, the kind who writes and supports himself through writing.

Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.

I encountered Ray Bradbury's stories as a boy. The first one I read was Homecoming, about a human child in a world of Addams Family-style monsters, who wanted to fit in. It was the first time anyone had ever written a story that spoke to me personally. There was a copy of The Silver Locusts (the UK title of The Martian Chronicles) knocking about my house. I read it, loved it, and bought all the Bradbury books I could from the travelling bookshop that set up once a term in my school. I learned about Poe from Bradbury. There was poetry in the short stories, and it didn't matter that I was missing so much as a boy: what I took from the stories was enough.

Some authors I read and loved as a boy disappointed me as I aged. Bradbury never did. His horror stories remained as chilling, his dark fantasies as darkly fantastic, his science fiction (he never cared about the science, only about the people, which was why the stories worked so well) as much of an exploration of the sense of wonder, as they had when I was a child.

He was a good writer, and he wrote well in many disciplines. He was one of the first science fiction writers to escape the "pulp" magazines and to be published in the "slicks". He wrote scripts for Hollywood films. Good films were made from his novels and stories. Long before I was a writer, Bradbury was one of the writers that other writers aspired to become. And none of them ever did.

A Ray Bradbury story meant something on its own – it told you nothing about what the story would be about, but it told you about atmosphere, about language, about some sort of magic escaping into the world. Death is a Lonely Business, his detective novel, is as much a Bradbury story as Something Wicked This Way Comes or Fahrenheit 451 or any of the horror, or science fiction, or magical realism, or realism you'll find in the short story collections. He was a genre on his own, and on his own terms. A young man from Waukegan, Illinois, who went to Los Angeles, educated himself in libraries, and wrote until he got good, then transcended genre and became a genre of one; often emulated, absolutely inimitable.

Ray Bradbury
by Richard Wyatt

I met him first when I was a young writer and he was in the UK for his 70th birthday celebrations, held at the Natural History Museum. We became friends in an odd, upside-down way, sitting beside each other at book-signings, at events. I would be there when Ray spoke in public over the years. Sometimes I'd introduce him to the audience. I was the master of ceremonies when Ray was given his grand master award, by the Science Fiction Writers of America: he told them about a child he had watched, teased by his friends for wanting to enter a toy shop because they said it was too young for him, and how much Ray had wanted to persuade the child to ignore his friends and play with the toys.

He'd speak about the practicalities of a writer's life ("You have to write!" he would tell people. "You have to write every day! I still write every day!") and about being a child inside (he said he had a photographic memory, going back to babyhood, and perhaps he did) about joy, about love.

He was kind, and gentle, with that midwestern niceness that's a positive thing rather than an absence of character. He was enthusiastic, and it seemed that that enthusiasm would keep him going forever. He genuinely liked people. He left the world a better place, and left better places in it: the red sands and canals of Mars, the midwestern Halloweens and small towns and dark carnivals. And he kept writing.

"Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything," Ray said once, in an interview.

He gave people so many reasons to love him. And we did.

THE GUARDIAN

Darkness in literature / Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes

Darkness in literature

Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes

Bradbury illuminates the night in this darkness-obsessed 1962 novel about a sinister carnival that pulls into a small US town

David Barnett
Friday 14 December 2012 11.56 GMT

Let's get something out of the way. Yes, I know that Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is essentially a Halloween book. But now that the season of the witch has been subsumed into a spendstravaganza of candy-floss ghosts and supermarket zombie masks, we must strip back this 50-year-old novel into its essential components: deep darkness, approaching night, and the fear of the unknown.

Bradbury's story tells of an October night when a sinister travelling carnival pulls into a midwestern town, and the lives of two young boys, on a fire-breathing dragon of a train. Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, crisscrossing the land, holds up a distorting sideshow mirror to the hopes and fears of small-town America.

The novel is drenched in darkness, every character a slice of night. Even the boys' names reflect it: adventurous, reckless Jim Nightshade – a night-blooming flower, for sure – and bookish Will Halloway, almost Halloween in name. Then there's Mr Dark, a moustache-twirling villain dressed in black, straight from the inky, monochrome illustrations of melodramas.

Most of the book is set in the dead hours of night, as Jim and Will investigate the arrival of the mysterious carnival and the effect it has on the townsfolk, lured by its bright lights but quickly drawn into shadows: the teacher who grows young again, the boy aged beyond all sense, the man who becomes his dwarfish reflection in the hall of mirrors. Even in daytime, the threat of darkness is present; the book opens with the itinerant lightning-rod seller Tom Fury blowing into town just ahead of "a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth".

Bradbury described the night like no one else. "Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt." "Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in high attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics and stirring up dreams about clocks in all the beds where children slept." "The night was sweet with the dust of autumn leaves that smelled as if the fine sands of ancient Egypt were drifting to dunes beyond the town."

As poetic as Bradbury's descriptions of the literal darkness are, it's the unspoken yet irrepressibly approaching night that is at the core of the book. Will and Jim are only half of the story; the characters I focused on in my first reading of the book when I was their age. Upon rereading recently, after Bradbury's death at the age of 91 in June, it was Will's father, Charles Halloway, whom I paid attention to.

Charles is 10 years older than his wife, and feels too old to be a proper father to Will: "Hell, I was 40 years old when he was born!" Halloway says to his wife, in bed, while Will listens through the wall. "And you. Who's your daughter? people say."

Something Wicked This Way Comes is about the approaching night of Jim and Will's adulthood: hotheaded Jim rushing headlong into it, Will more wary as the long summers of their youth give way to something unknown.

But more heartbreakingly, it's about the darkness that Charles Halloway can't see a path through, the final darkness of creaking bones and forgetfulness, and ultimately death. Older than his wife, impossibly older than his son, he hides in the dark shadows of the library, watching life speed up like the whirring calliope tunes of the sinister carnival.

And it is the night people who come with the sideshows, stripping away artifice and heightening desire, who force the boys and the older Halloway to confront their fears; to face up to the darkness and, in the case of Will's father, to gaze into the black abyss of old age and realise that, although nothing will stop the night approaching, he does not have to go gentle into it.

THE GUARDIAN

Ray Bradbury / A brief survey of the short story

Ray Bradbury by Mayerik

A brief survey of the short story part 19

 Ray Bradbruy 

A prodigiously inventive writer, the sprawling breadth of his output is a true marvel

Chris Power
Wednesday 15 July 2009 08.00 BST

The publication earlier this year of Ray Bradbury's latest short story collection, We'll Always Have Paris, marked a remarkable 71 years of production by one of the more inventive literary imaginations of the past century.

Ray Bradbury / Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson

RICHARD MATHESON
BIOGRAPHY

by Ray Bradbury

He is one of the most important writers of the 20th Century.

Ray Bradbury / A Medicine for Melancholy

Picture by Rebecca Dautremer

 A MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY

By Ray Bradbury

"Send for some leeches; bleed her," said Doctor Gimp.

"She has no blood left!" cried Mrs. Wilkes. "Oh, Doctor, what ails our

Camillia?"

"She's not right."

"Yes, yes?"

"She's poorly." The good doctor scowled.

"Go on, go on!"

"She's a fluttering candle flame, no doubt."

"Ah, Doctor Gimp," protested Mr. Wilkes. "You but tell us as you go out what we told you when you came in!"

"No, more! Give her these pills at dawn, high noon, and sunset. A sovereignremedy!"

"Damn, she's stuffed with sovereign remedies now!"

"Tut-tut! That's a shilling as I pass downstairs, sir."

"Go down and send the Devil up!"

Mr. Wilkes shoved a coin in the good doctor's hand.

Whereupon the physician, wheezing, taking snuff, sneezing, stamped down into theswarming streets of London on a sloppy morn in the spring of 1762.

Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes turned to the bed where their sweet Camillia lay pale, thin, yes, but far from unlovely, with large wet lilac eyes, her hair a creek of gold upon her pillow.

"Oh," she almost wept. "What's to become of me? Since the start of spring, three weeks, I've been a ghost in my mirror; I frighten me. To think I'll die without seeing my twentieth birthday."

"Child," said the mother. "Where do you hurt?"

"My arms. My legs. My bosom. My head. How many doctors - six? - have turned me like a beef on a spit. No more. Please, let me pass away untouched."

"What a ghastly, what a mysterious illness," said the mother. "Oh, do something,Mr. Wilkes!"

"What?" asked Mr. Wilkes angrily. "She won't have the physician, the apothecary,or the priest! - and Amen to that! - they've wrung me dry! Shall I run in the street then and bring the Dustman up?"

"Yes," said a voice.

"What!" All three turned to stare.

They had quite forgotten her younger brother, Jamie, who stood picking his teeth at a far window, gazing serenely down into the drizzle and the loud rumbling of the town.

"Four hundred years ago," he said serenely, "it was tried, it worked. Don't bring the Dustman up, no, no. But let us hoist Camillia, cot and all, maneuver her downstairs, and set her up outside our door."

"Why? What for?"

"In a single hour" - Jamie's eyes jumped, counting - "a thousand folk rush by our gate. In one day, twenty thousand people run, hobble, or ride by. Each might eye my swooning sister, each count her teeth, pull her ear lobes, and all, all, mind you, would have a sovereign remedy to offer! One of them would just have to be right!"

"Ah," said Mr. Wilkes, stunned.

"Father!" said Jamie breathlessly. "Have you ever known one single man who didn't think he personally wrote Materia Medica? This green ointment for sour throat, that ox-salve for miasma or bloat? Right now, ten thousand self-appointed apothecaries sneak off down there, their wisdom lost to us!"

"Jamie boy, you're incredible!"

"Cease!" said Mrs. Wilkes. "No daughter of mine will be put on display in this or any street-"

"Fie, woman!" said Mr. Wilkes. "Camillia melts like snow and you hesitate to move her from this hot room? Come, Jamie, lift the bed!"

"Camillia?" Mrs. Wilkes turned to her daughter.

"I may as well die in the open," said Camlila, "where a cool breeze might stir my locks as I…"

"Bosh!" said the father. "You'll not die. Jamie, heave! Ha! There! Out of the way, wife! Up, boy, higher!"

"Oh," cried Camillia faindy. "I fly, I fly…!"

Quite suddenly a blue sky opened over London. The population, surprised by the weather, hurried out into the streets, panicking for something to see, to do, to buy. Blind men sang, dogs jigged, clowns shuffled and tumbled, children chalked games and threw balls as if it were carnival time.

Down into all this, tottering, their veins bursting from their brows, Jamie and Mr. Wilkes carried Camillia like a lady Pope sailing high in her sedan-chair cot, eyes clenched shut, praying.

"Careful!" screamed Mrs. Wilkes. "Ah, she's dead! No. There. Put her down. Easy …"

And at last the bed was tilted against the house front so that the River of Humanity surging by could see Camillia, a large pale artolemy Doll put out like a prize in the sun.

"Fetch a quill, ink, paper, lad," said the father. "I'll make notes as to symptoms spoken of and remedies offered this day. Tonight we'll average them out. Now-"

But already a man in the passing crowd had fixed Camillia with a sharp eye.

"She's sick!" he said.

"Ah," said Mr. Wilkes, gleefully. "It begins. The quill boy. There. Go on, sir!"

"She's not well." The man scowled. "She does poorly."

"Does poorly-" Mr. Wilkes wrote, then froze. "Sir?" He looked up suspiciously.

"Are you a physician?"

"I am, sir."

"I thought I knew the words! Jamie, take my cane, drive him off! Go, sir, be gone!"

But the man hastened off, cursing, mightily exasperated.

"She's not well, she does poorly… pah!" mimicked Mr. Wilkes, but stopped. For now a woman, tall and gaunt as a specter fresh risen from the tomb, was pointing a finger at Camillia Wilkes.

"Vapors," she intoned.

"Vapors," wrote Mr. Wilkes, pleased.

"Lung-flux," chanted the woman.

"Lung-flux!" Mr. Wilkes wrote, beaming. "Now, that's more like it!"

"A medicine for melancholy is needed," said the woman palely. "Be there mummy ground to medicine in your house? The best mummies are: Egyptian, Arabian, Hirasphatos, Libyan, all of great use in magnetic disorders. Ask for me, the Gypsy, at the Flodden Road. I sell stone parsley, male frankincense-"

"Flodden Road, stone parsey - slower, woman!"

"Opobalsam, pontic valerian-"

"Wait, woman! Opobalsam, yes! Jamie, stop her!"

But the woman, naming medicines, glided on.

A girl, no more than seventeen, walked up now and stared at Camillia Wilkes.

"She-"

"One moment!" Mr. Wilkes scribbled feverishly. "-magnetic disorders – pontic valerian - drat! Well, young girl, now. What do you see in my daughter's face? You fix her with your gaze, you hardly breathe. So?"

"She-" The strange girl searched deep into Camillia's eyes, flushed, and stammered. "She suffers from … from…"

"Spit it out!"

"She . . . she . . . oh!"

And the girl, with a last look of deepest sympathy, darted off through the crowd.

"Silly girl!"

"No, Papa," murmured Camillia, eyes wide. "Not silly. She saw. She knew. Oh, Jamie, run fetch her, make her tell!"

"No, she offered nothing! Whereas, the Gypsy, see her list!"

"I know it, Papa." Camillia, paler, shut her eyes.

Someone cleared his throat.

A butcher, his apron a scarlet battleground, stood bristling his fierce mustaches there.

"I have seen cows with this look," he said. "I have saved them with brandy and three new eggs. In winter I have saved myself with the same elixir-"

"My daughter is no cow, sir!" Mr. Wilkes threw down his quill. "Nor is she a butcher, nor is it January! Step back, sir, others wait!"

And indeed, now a vast crowd clamored, drawn by the others, aching to advise their favorite swig, recommend some country site where it rained less and shone more sun than in all England or your South of France. Old men and women, especial doctors as all the aged are, clashed by each other in bristles of canes, in phalanxes of crutches and hobble sticks.

"Back!" cried Mrs. Wilkes, alarmed. "They'll crush my daughter like a spring berry!"

"Stand off!" Jamie seized canes and crutches and threw them over the mob, which turned on itself to go seek their missing members.

"Father, I fail, I fail," gasped Camillia.

"Father!" cried Jamie. "There's but one way to stop this riot! Charge them! Make them pay to give us their mind on this ailment!"

"Jamie, you are my son! Quick, boy, paint a sign! Listen, people! Tuppence! Queue up please, a line! Tuppence to speak your piece! Get your money out, yes! That's it. You, sir. You, madame. And you, sir. Now, my quill! Begin!"

The mob boiled in like a dark sea.

Camlia opened one eye and swooned again.

Sundown, the streets almost empty, only a few strollers now. Camillia

moth-fluttered her eyelids at a famiiar clinking jingle.

"Three hundred and ninety-nine, four hundred pennies!" Mr. Wilkes counted the last money into a bag held by his grinning son. "There!"

"It will buy me a fine black funeral coach," said the pale girl.

"Hush! Did you imagine, family, so many people, two hundred, would pay to give us their opinion?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Wilkes. "Wives, husbands, children, are deaf to each other. So people gladly pay to have someone listen. Poor things, each today thought he and he alone knew quinsy, dropsy, glanders, could tell the slaver from the hives. So tonight we are rich and two hundred people are happy, having unloaded their full medical kit at our door."

"Gods, instead of quelling the riot, we had to drive them off snapping like pups."

"Read us the list, Father," said Jamie, "of two hundred remedies. Which one is true?"

"I care not," whispered Carillia, sighing. "It grows dark. My stomach is queasy from listening to the names! May I be taken upstairs?"

"Yes, dear. Jamie, lift!"

"Please," said a voice.

Half-bent, the men looked up.

There stood a Dustman of no particular size or shape, his face masked with soot from which shone water-blue eyes and a white slot of an ivory smile. Dust sifted from his sleeves and his pants as he moved, as he talked quietly, nodding.

"I couldn't get through the mob earlier," he said, holding his dirty cap in his hands. "Now, going home, here I am. Must I pay?"

"No, Dustman, you need not," said Camillia gently.

"Hold on-" protested Mr. Wilkes.

But Camillia gave him a soft look and he grew silent.

"Thank you, ma'am." The Dustman's smile flashed like warm sunlight in the growing dusk. "I have but one advice."

He gazed at Camillia. She gazed at him.

"Be this Saint Bosco's Eve, sir, ma 'am?"

"Who knows? Not me, sir!" said Mr. Wilkes.

"I think it is Saint Bosco's Eve, sir. Also, it is the night of the Full Moon. So," said the Dustman humbly, unable to take his eyes from the lovely hauntedgirl, "you must leave your daughter out in the light of that rising moon."

"Out under the moon!" said Mrs. Wilkes.

"Doesn't that make the lunatic?" asked Jamie.

"Beg pardon, sir." The Dustman bowed. "But the full moon soothes all sick animal, be they human or plain field beast. There is a serenity of color, a quietude of touch, a sweet sculpturing of mind and body in full moonlight."

"It may rain-" said the mother uneasily.

"I swear," said the Dustman quickly. "My sister suffered this same swooning paleness. We set her like a potted lily out one spring night with the moon. She lives today in Sussex, the soul of reconstituted health!"

"Reconstituted! Moonlight! And will cost us not one penny of the four hundred we collected this day, Mother, Jamie, Camillia."

"No!" said Mrs. Wilkes. "I won't have it!"

"Mother," said Camillia.

She looked earnestly at the Dustman.

From his grimed face the Dustman gazed back, his smile like a little scimitar in the dark.

"Mother," said Camillia. "I feel it. The moon will cure me, it will, it will."

The mother sighed. "This is not my day, nor night. Let me kiss you for the last time, then. There."

And the mother went upstairs.

Now the Dustman backed off, bowing courteously to all.

"All night, now, remember, beneath the moon, not the slightest disturbance until dawn. Sleep well, young lady. Dream, and dream the best. Good night."

Soot was lost in soot; the man was gone.

Mr. Wilkes and Jamie kissed Camillia's brow.

"Father, Jamie," she said. "Don't worry."

And she was left alone to stare off where at a great distance she thought she saw a smile hung by itself in the dark blink off and on, then go round a corner, vanishing.

She waited for the rising of the moon.

Night in London, the voices growing drowsier in the inns, the slamming of doors, drunken farewells, clocks chiming. Camillia saw a cat like a woman stroll by in her furs, saw a woman like a cat stroll by, both wise, both Egyptian, both smelling of spice. Every quarter hour or so a voice drifted down from above:

"You all right, child?"

"Yes, Father."

"Camillia?"

"Mother, Jamie, I'm fine."

And at last. "Good night."

"Good night."

The last lights out. London asleep.

The moon rose.

And the higher the moon, the larger grew Camillia's eyes as she watched the alleys, the courts, the streets, until at last, at midnight, the moon moved over her to show her like a marble figure atop an ancient tomb.

A motion in darkness.

Camillia pricked her ears.

A faint melody sprang out on the air.

A man stood in the shadows of the court.

Camillia gasped.

The man stepped forth into moonlight, carrying a lute which he strummed softly.

He was a man well-dressed, whose face was handsome and, now anyway, solemn.

"A troubadour," said Camillia aloud.

The man, his finger on his lips, moved slowly forward and soon stood by her cot.

"What are you doing out so late?" asked the girl, unafraid but not knowing why.

         "A friend sent me to make you well."

He touched the lute strings. They hummed sweetly. He was indeed handsome there in the silver light.

"That cannot be," she said, "for it was told me, the moon is my cure."

"And so it will be, maiden."

"What songs do you sing?"

"Songs of spring nights, aches and ailments without name. Shall I name your fever, maiden?"

"If you know it, yes."

"First, the symptoms: raging temperatures, sudden cold, heart fast then slow,storms of temper, then sweet calms, drunkenness from having sipped only well water, dizziness from being touched only thus-"

He touched her wrist, saw her melt toward delicious oblivion, drew back.

"Depressions, elations," he went on. "Dreams-"

"Stop!" she cried, enthralled. "You know me to the letter. Now, name my ailment!"

"I will." He pressed his lips to the palm of her hand so she quaked suddenly. "The name of the ailment is Camillia Wilkes."

"How strange." She shivered, her eyes glinting lilac fires. "Am I then my own affliction? How sick I make myself! Even now, feel my heart!"

"I feel it, so."

"My limbs, they burn with summer heat!"

"Yes. They scorch my fingers."

"But now, the night wind, see how I shudder, cold! I die, I swear it, I die!"

"I will not let you," he said quietly.

"Are you a doctor, then?"

"No, just your plain, your ordinary physician, like another who guessed your trouble this day. The girl who would have named it but ran off in the crowd."

"Yes, I saw in her eyes she knew what had seized me. But, now, my teeth chatter. And no extra blanket!"

"Give room, please. There. Let me see: two arms, two legs, head and body. I'm all here!"

"What, sir!"

"To warm you from the night, of course."

"How like a hearth! Oh, sir, sir, do I know you? Your name?"

Swiftly above her, his head shadowed hers. From it his merry clear-water eyes glowed as did his white ivory slot of a smile.

"Why, Bosco, of course," he said.

"Is there not a saint by that name?"

"Given an hour, you will call me so, yes."

His head bent closer. Thus sooted in shadow, she cried with joyous recognition to welcome her Dustman back.

"The world spins! I pass away! The cure, sweet Doctor, or all is lost!"

"The cure," he said. "And the cure is this . . ."

Somewhere, cats sang. A shoe, shot from a window, tipped them off a fence. Then all was silence and the moon…

"Shh . . ."

Dawn. Tiptoeing downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes peered into their courtyard.

"Frozen stone dead from the terrible night, I know it!"

"No, wife, look! Alive! Roses in her cheeks! No, more! Peaches, persimmons! She glows all rosy-milky! Sweet Camillia, alive and well, made whole again!"

They bent by the slumbering girl.

"She smiles, she dreams; what's that she says?"

"The sovereign," sighed the girl, "remedy."

"What, what?"

The girl smiled again, a white smile, in her sleep.

"A medicine," she murmured, "for melancholy."

She opened her eyes.

"Oh, Mother, Father!"

"Daughter! Child! Come upstairs!"

"No." She took their hands, tenderly. "Mother? Father?"

"Yes?"

"No one will see. The sun but rises. Please. Dance with me."

They did not want to dance.

But, celebrating they knew not what, they did.