Ray Bradbury - And So Died Riabouchinska

The cellar was cold cement and the dead man was cold stone and the air was filled with an invisible fall of rain, while the people gathered to look at the body as if it had been washed in on an empty shore at morning. The gravity of the earth was drawn to a focus here in this single basement room - a gravity so immense that it pulled their faces down, bent their mouths at the corners and drained their cheeks. Their hands hung weighted and their feet were planted so they could not move without seeming to walk underwater.

A voice was calling, but nobody listened.

The voice called again and only after a long time did the people turn and look, momentarily, into the air. They were at the seashore in November and this was a gull crying over their heads in the gray color of dawn. It was a sad crying, like the birds going south for the steel winter to come. It was an ocean sounding the shore so far away that it was only a whisper of sand and wind in a seashell.

The people in the basement room shifted their gaze to a table and a golden box resting there, no more than twenty-four inches long, inscribed with the name RIABOUCHINSKA. Under the lid of this small coffin the voice at last settled with finality, and the people stared at the box, and the dead man lay on the floor, not hearing the soft cry.

'Let me out, let me out, oh, please, please, someone let me out.'

And finally Mr Fabian, the ventriloquist, bent and whispered to the golden box, 'No, Ria, this is serious business. Later. Be quiet, now, that's a good girl.' He shut his eyes and tried to laugh.

From under the polished lid her calm voice said, 'Please don't laugh. You should be much kinder now after what's happened.'

Detective Lieutenant Krovitch touched Fabian's arm. 'If you don't mind, we'll save your dummy act for later. Right now there's all this to clean up.' He glanced at the woman, who had now taken a folding chair. 'Mrs Fabian.' He nodded to the young man sitting next to her. 'Mr Douglas, you're Mr Fabian's press agent and manager?'

The young man said he was. Krovitch looked at the face of the man on the floor. 'Fabian, Mrs Fabian, Mr Douglas - all of you say you don't know this man who was murdered here last night, never heard the name Ockham before. Yet Ockham earlier told the stage manager he knew Fabian and had to see him about something vitally important.'

The voice in the box began again quietly.

Krovitch shouted. 'Damn it, Fabian!'

Under the lid, the voice laughed. It was like a muffled bell ringing.

'Pay no attention to her, Lieutenant,' said Fabian.

'Her? Or you, damn it! What is this? Get together, you two!'

'We'll never be together,' said the quiet voice, 'never again after tonight.'

Krovitch put out his hand. 'Give me the key, Fabian.'

In the silence there was the rattle of the key in the small lock, the squeal of the miniature hinges as the lid was opened and laid back against the table top.

'Thank you,' said Riabouchinska.

Krovitch stood motionless, just looking down and seeing Riabouchinska in her box and not quite believing what he saw.

The face was white and it was cut from marble or from the whitest wood he had ever seen. It might have been cut from snow. And the neck that held the head which was as dainty as a porcelain cup with the sun shining through the thinness of it, the neck was also white. And the hands could have been ivory and they were thin small things with tiny fingernails and whorls on the pads of the fingers, little delicate spirals and lines.

She was all white stone, with light pouring through the stone and light coming out of the dark eyes with blue tones beneath like fresh mulberries. He was reminded of milk glass and of cream poured into a crystal tumbler. The brows were arched and black and thin and the cheeks were hollowed and there was a faint pink vein in each temple and a faint blue vein barely visible above the slender bridge of the nose, between the shining dark eyes.

Her lips were half parted and it looked as if they might be slightly damp, and the nostrils were arched and modeled perfectly, as were the ears. The hair was black and it was parted in the middle and drawn back of the ears and it was real - he could see every single strand of hair. Her gown was as black as her hair and draped in such a fashion as to show her shoulders, which were carved wood as white as a stone that has lain a long time in the sun. She was very beautiful. Krovitch felt his throat move and then he stopped and did not say anything.

Fabian took Riabouchinska from her box. 'My lovely lady,' he said. 'Carved from the rarest imported woods. She's appeared in Paris, Rome, Istanbul. Everyone in the world loves her and thinks she's really human, some sort of incredibly delicate midget creature. They won't accept that she was once part of many forests growing far away from cities and idiotic people.'

Fabian's wife, Alyce, watched her husband, not taking her eyes from his mouth. Her eyes did not blink once in all the time he was telling of the doll he held in his arms. He in turn seemed aware of no one but the doll; the cellar and its people were lost in a mist that settled everywhere.

But finally the small figure stirred and quivered. 'Please, don't talk about me! You know Alyce doesn't like it.'

'Alyce never has liked it.'

'Shh, don't!' cried Riabouchinska. 'Not here, not now.' And then, swiftly, she turned to Krovitch and her tiny lips moved. 'How did it all happen? Mr Ockham, I mean, Mr Ockham.'

Fabian said, 'You'd better go to sleep now, Ria.'

'But I don't want to,' she replied. 'I've as much right to listen and talk, I'm as much a part of this murder as Alyce or - or Mr Douglas even!'

The press agent threw down his cigarette. 'Don't drag me into this, you - ' And he looked at the doll as if it had suddenly become six feet tall and were breathing there before him.

'It's just that I want the truth to be told.' Riabouchinska turned her head to see all of the room. 'And if I'm locked in my coffin there'll be no truth, for John's a consummate liar and I must watch after him, isn't that right. John?'

'Yes,' he said, his eyes shut, 'I suppose it is.'

'John loves me best of all the women in the world and I love him and try to understand his wrong way of thinking.'

Krovitch hit the table with his fist. 'God damn, oh, God damn it, Fabian! If you think you can - '

'I'm helpless,' said Fabian.

'But she's - '

'I know, I know what you want to say,' said Fabian quietly, looking at the detective. 'She's in my throat, is that it? No, no. She's not in my throat. She's somewhere else. I don't know. Here, or here.' He touched his chest, his head.

'She's quick to hide. Sometimes there's nothing I can do. Sometimes she is only herself, nothing of me at all. Sometimes she tells me what to do and I must do it. She stands guard, she reprimands me, is honest where I am dishonest, good when I am wicked as all the sins that ever were. She lives a life apart. She's raised a wall in my head and lives there, ignoring me if I try to make her say improper things, co-operating if I suggest the right words and pantomime.' Fabian sighed. 'So if you intend going on I'm afraid Ria must be present. Locking her up will do no good, no good at all.'

Lieutenant Krovitch sat silently for the better part of a minute, then made his decision. 'All right. Let her stay. It just may be, by God, that before the night's over I'll be tired enough to ask even a ventriloquist's dummy questions.'

Krovitch unwrapped a fresh cigar, lit it and puffed smoke. 'So you don't recognize the dead man, Mr Douglas?'

'He looks vaguely familiar. Could be an actor.'

Krovitch swore. 'Let's all stop lying, what do you say? Look at Ockham's shoes, his clothing. It's obvious he needed money and came here tonight to beg, borrow or steal some. Let me ask you this, Douglas. Are you in love with Mrs Fabian?'

'Now, wait just a moment!' cried Alyce Fabian.

Krovitch motioned her down. 'You sit there, side by side, the two of you. I'm not exactly blind. When a press agent sits where the husband should be sitting, consoling the wife, well! The way you look at the marionette's coffin, Mrs Fabian, holding your breath when she appears. You make fists when she talks. Hell, you're obvious.'

'If you think for one moment I'm jealous of a stick of wood!'

'Aren't you?'

'No, no, I'm not!'

Fabian moved. 'You needn't tell him anything, Alyce.'

'Let her!'

They all jerked their heads and stared at the small figurine, whose mouth was now slowly shutting. Even Fabian looked at the marionette as if it had struck him a blow.

After a long while Alyce Fabian began to speak.

'I married John seven years ago because he said he loved me and because I loved him and I loved Riabouchinska. At first, anyway. But then I began to see that he really lived all of his life and paid most of his attentions to her and I was a shadow waiting in the wings every night.

'He spent fifty thousand dollars a year on her wardrobe - a hundred thousand dollars for a dollhouse with gold and silver and platinum furniture. He tucked her in a small satin bed each night and talked to her. I thought it was all an elaborate joke at first and I was wonderfully amused. But when it finally came to me that I was indeed merely an assistant in his act I began to feel a vague sort of hatred and distrust - not for the marionette, because after all it wasn't her doing, but I felt a terrible growing dislike and hatred for John, because it was his fault. He, after all, was the control, and all of his cleverness and natural sadism came out through his relationship with the wooden doll.

'And when I finally became very jealous, how silly of me! It was the greatest tribute I could have paid him and the way he had gone about perfecting the art of throwing his voice. It was all so idiotic, it was all so strange. And yet I knew that something had hold of John, just as people who drink have a hungry animal somewhere in them, starving to death.

'So I moved back and forth from anger to pity, from jealousy to understanding. There were long periods when I didn't hate him at all, and I never hated the thing that Ria was in him, for she was the best half, the good part, the honest and the lovely part of him. She was everything that he never let himself try to be.'

Alyce Fabian stopped talking and the basement room was silent.

'Tell about Mr Douglas,' said a voice, whispering.

Mrs Fabian did not look up at the marionette. With an effort she finished it out. 'When the years passed and there was so little love and understanding from John, I guess it was natural I turned to - Mr Douglas.'

Krovitch nodded. 'Everything begins to fall into place. Mr Ockham was a very poor man, down on his luck, and he came to this theater tonight because he knew something about you and Mr Douglas. Perhaps he threatened to speak to Mr Fabian if you didn't buy him off. That would give you the best of reasons to get rid of him.'

'That's even sillier than all the rest,' said Alyce Fabian tiredly. 'I didn't kill him.'

'Mr Douglas might have and not told you.'

'Why kill a man?' said Douglas. 'John knew all about us.'

'I did indeed,' said John Fabian, and laughed.

He stopped laughing and his hand twitched, hidden in the snowflake interior of the tiny doll, and her mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. He was trying to make her carry the laughter on after he had stopped, but there was no sound, save the little empty whisper of her lips moving and gasping, while Fabian stared down at the little face and perspiration came out, shining, upon his cheeks.

The next afternoon Lieutenant Krovitch moved through the theater darkness backstage, found the iron stairs and climbed with great thought, taking as much time as he deemed necessary on each step, up to the secondlevel dressing rooms. He rapped on one of the thin-paneled doors.

'Come in,' said Fabian's voice from what seemed a great distance.

Krovitch entered and closed the door and stood looking at the man who was slumped before his dressing mirror. 'I have something I'd like to show you,' Krovitch said. His face showing no emotion whatever, he opened a manila folder and pulled out a glossy photograph, which he placed on the dressing table.

John Fabian raised his eyebrows, glanced quickly up at Krovitch and then settled slowly back in his chair. He put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and massaged his face carefully, as if he had a headache. Krovitch turned the picture over and began to read from the typewritten data on the back. 'Name, Miss Ilyana Riamonova. One hundred pounds. Blue eyes. Black hair. Oval face. Born 1914, New York City. Disappeared 1934. Believed a victim of amnesia. Of Russo-Slav parentage. Etcetera. Etcetera.'

Fabian's lip twitched.

Krovitch laid the photograph down, shaking his head thoughtfully. 'It was pretty silly of me to go through police files for a picture of a marionette. You should have heard the laughter at headquarters. God. Still, here she is - Riabouchinska. Not papier-mache, not wood, not a puppet, but a woman who once lived and moved around and - disappeared.' He looked steadily at Fabian. 'Suppose you take it from there?'

Fabian half smiled. 'There's nothing to it at all. I saw this woman's picture a long time ago, liked her looks and copied my marionette after her.'

'Nothing to it at all.' Krovitch took a deep breath and exhaled, wiping his face with a huge handkerchief. 'Fabian, this very morning I shuffled through a stack of Billboard magazines that high. In the year 1934 I found an interesting article concerning an act which played on a second-rate circuit, known as Fabian and Sweet William. Sweet William was a little boy dummy. There was a girl assistant - Ilyana Riamonova. No picture of her in the article, but I at least had a name, the name of a real person, to go on. It was simple to check police files then and dig up this picture. The resemblance, needless to say, between the live woman on one hand and the puppet on the other is nothing short of incredible. Suppose you go back and tell your story over again, Fabian.'

'She was my assistant, that's all. I simply used her as a model.'

'You're making me sweat,' said the detective. 'Do you think I'm a fool? Do you think I don't know love when I see it? I've watched you handle the marionette, I've seen you talk to it, I've seen how you make it react to you. You're in love with the puppet naturally, because you loved the original woman very, very much. I've lived too long not to sense that. Hell, Fabian, stop fencing around.'

Fabian lifted his pale slender hands, turned them over, examined them and let them fall.

'All right. In 1934 I was billed as Fabian and Sweet William. Sweet William was a small bulb-nosed boy dummy I carved a long time ago. I was in Los Angeles when this girl appeared at the stage door one night. She'd followed my work for years. She was desperate for a job and she hoped to be my assistant...'

He remembered her in the half light of the alley behind the theatre and how startled he was at her freshness and eagerness to work with and for him and the way the cool rain touched softly down through the narrow alleyway and caught in small spangles through her hair, melting in dark warmness, and the rain beaded upon her white porcelain hand holding her coat together at her neck.

He saw her lips' motion in the dark and her voice, separated off on another sound track, it seemed, speaking to him in the autumn wind, and he remembered that without his saying yes or no or perhaps she was suddenly on the stage with him, in the great pouring bright light, and in two months he, who had always prided himself on his cynicism and disbelief, had stepped off the rim of the world after her, plunging down a bottomless place of no limit and no light anywhere.

Arguments followed, and more than arguments - things said and done that lacked all sense and sanity and fairness. She had edged away from him at last, causing his rages and remarkable hysterias. Once he burned her entire wardrobe in a fit of jealousy. She had taken this quietly. But then one night he handed her a week's notice, accused her of monstrous disloyalty, shouted at her, seized her, slapped her again and again across the face, bullied her about and thrust her out the door, slamming it!

She disappeared that night.

When he found the next day that she was really gone and there was nowhere to find her, it was like standing in the center of a titanic explosion. All the world was smashed flat and all the echoes of the explosion came back to reverberate at midnight, at four in the morning, at dawn, and he was up early, stunned with the sound of coffee simmering and the sound of matches being struck and cigarettes lit and himself trying to shave and looking at mirrors that were sickening in their distortion.

He clipped out all the advertisements that he took in the papers and pasted them in neat rows in a scrapbook - all the ads describing her and telling about her and asking for her back. He even put a private detective on the case. People talked. The police dropped by to question him. There was more talk.

But she was gone like a piece of white incredibly fragile tissue paper, blown over the sky and down. A record of her was sent to the largest cities, and that was the end of it for the police. But not for Fabian. She might be dead or just running away, but wherever she was he knew that somehow and in some way he would have her back.

One night he came home, bringing his own darkness with him, and collapsed upon a chair, and before he knew it he found himself speaking to Sweet William in the totally black room.

'William, it's all over and done. I can't keep it up!'

And William cried, 'Coward! Coward!' from the air above his head, out of the emptiness. 'You can get her back if you want!'

Sweet William squeaked and clappered at him in the night. 'Yes, you can! Think!' he insisted. 'Think of a way. You can do it. Put me aside, lock me up. Start all over.'

'Start all over?'

'Yes,' whispered Sweet William, and darkness moved within darkness. 'Yes. Buy wood. Buy fine new wood. Buy hard-grained wood. Buy beautiful fresh new wood. And carve. Carve slowly and carve carefully. Whittle away. Cut delicately. Make the little nostrils so. And cut her thin black eyebrows round and high, so, and make her cheeks in small hollows. Carve, carve...'

'No! It's foolish. I could never do it!'

'Yes, you could. Yes you could, could, could, could...'

The voice faded, a ripple of water in an underground stream. The stream rose up and swallowed him. His head fell forward. Sweet William sighed. And then the two of them lay like stones buried under a waterfall.

The next morning, John Fabian bought the hardest, finest-grained piece of wood that he could find and brought it home and laid it on the table, but could not touch it. He sat for hours staring at it. It was impossible to think that out of this cold chunk of material he expected his hands and his memory to re-create something warm and pliable and familiar. There was no way even faintly to approximate that quality of rain and summer and the first powderings of snow upon a clear pane of glass in the middle of a December night. No way, no way at all to catch the snowflake without having it melt swiftly in your clumsy fingers.

And yet Sweet William spoke out, sighing and whispering, after midnight, 'You can do it. Oh, yes, yes, you can do it!'

And so he began. It took him an entire month to carve her hands into things as natural and beautiful as shells lying in the sun. Another month and the skeleton, like a fossil imprint he was searching out, stamped and hidden in the wood, was revealed, all febrile and so infinitely delicate as to suggest the veins in the white flesh of an apple.

And all the while Sweet William lay mantled in dust in his box that was fast becoming a very real coffin. Sweet William croaking and wheezing some feeble sarcasm, some sour criticism, some hint, some help, but dying all the time, fading, soon to be untouched, soon to be like a sheath molted in summer and left behind to blow in the wind.

As the weeks passed and Fabian molded and scraped and polished the new wood, Sweet William lay longer and longer in stricken silence, and one day as Fabian held the puppet in his hand Sweet William seemed to look at him a moment with puzzled eyes and then there was a death rattle in his throat.

And Sweet William was gone.

Now as he worked, a fluttering, a faint motion of speech began far back in his throat, echoing and re-echoing, speaking silently like a breeze among dry leaves. And then for the first time he held the doll in a certain way in his hands and memory moved down his arms and into his fingers and from his fingers into the hollowed wood and the tiny hands flickered and the body became suddenly soft and pliable and her eyes opened and looked up at him.

And the small mouth opened the merest fraction of an inch and she was ready to speak and he knew all of the things that she must say to him, he knew the first and the second and the third things he would have her say. There was a whisper, a whisper, a whisper.

The tiny head turned this way gently, that way gently. The mouth half opened again and began to speak. And as it spoke he bent his head and he could feel the warm breath - of course it was there! - coming from her mouth, and when he listened very carefully, holding her to his head, his eyes shut, wasn't it there, too, softly, gently - the beating of her heart?

Krovitch sat in a chair for a full minute after Fabian stopped talking. Finally he said, 'I see. And your wife?'

'Alyce? She was my second assistant, of course. She worked very hard and, God help her, she loved me. It's hard now to know why I ever married her. It was unfair of me.'

'What about the dead man - Ockham?'

'I never saw him before you showed me his body in the theater basement yesterday.'

'Fabian,' said the detective.

'It's the truth!'

'Fabian.'

'The truth, the truth, damn it, I swear it's the truth!'

'The truth.' There was a whisper like the sea coming in on the gray shore at early morning. The water was ebbing in a fine lace on the sand. The sky was cold and empty. There were no people on the shore. The sun was gone. And the whisper said again, 'The truth.'

Fabian sat up straight and took hold of his knees with his thin hands. His face was rigid. Krovitch found himself making the same motion he had made the day before - looking at the gray ceiling as if it were a November sky and a lonely bird going over and away, gray within the cold grayness.

'The truth.' Fading. 'The truth.'

Krovitch lifted himself and moved as carefully as he could to the far side of the dressing room where the golden box lay open and inside the box the thing that whispered and talked and could laugh sometimes and could sometimes sing. He carried the golden box over and set it down in front of Fabian and waited for him to put his living hand within the gloved delicate hollowness, waited for the fine small mouth to quiver and the eyes to focus. He did not have to wait long.

'The first letter came a month ago.'

'No.'

'The first letter came a month ago.'

'No, no!'

'The letter said. "Riabouchinska, born 1914, died 1934. Born again in 1935." Mr Ockham was a juggler. He'd been on the same bill with John and Sweet William years before. He remembered that once there had been a woman, before there was a puppet.'

'No, that's not true!'

'Yes,' said the voice.

Snow was falling in silences and even deeper silences through the dressing room. Fabian's mouth trembled. He stared at the blank walls as if seeking some new door by which to escape. He half rose from his chair. 'Please...'

'Ockham threatened to tell about us to everyone in the world.'

Krovitch saw the doll quiver, saw the fluttering of the lips, saw Fabian's eyes widen and fix and his throat convulse and tighten as if to stop the whispering.

'I - I was in the room when Mr Ockham came. I lay in my box and I listened and heard, and I know.' The voice blurred, then recovered and went on. 'Mr Ockham threatened to tear me up, burn me into ashes if John didn't pay him a thousand dollars. Then suddenly there was a falling sound. A cry. Mr Ockham's head must have struck the floor. I heard John cry out and I heard him swearing, I heard him sobbing. I heard a gasping and a choking sound.'

'You heard nothing! You're deaf, you're blind! You're wood!' cried Fabian.

'But I hear!' she said, and stopped as if someone had put a hand to her mouth.

Fabian had leaped to his feet now and stood with the doll in his hand. The mouth clapped twice, three times, then finally made words. 'The choking sound stopped. I heard John drag Mr Ockham down the stairs under the theater to the old dressing rooms that haven't been used in years. Down, down, down, I heard them going away and away - down...'

Krovitch stepped back as if he were watching a motion picture that had suddenly grown monstrously tall. The figures terrified and frightened him, they were immense, they towered! They threatened to inundate him with size. Someone had turned up the sound so that it screamed.

He saw Fabian's teeth, a grimace, a whisper, a clenching. He saw the man's eyes squeeze shut.

Now the soft voice was so high and faint it trembled toward nothingness.

'I'm not made to live this way. This way. There's nothing for us now. Everyone will know, everyone will. Even when you killed him and I lay asleep last night, I dreamed. I knew, I realized. We both knew, we both realized that these would be our last days, our last hours. Because while I've lived with your weakness and I've lived with your lies, I can't live with something that kills and hurts in killing. There's no way to go on from here. How can I live alongside such knowledge?...'

Fabian held her into the sunlight which shone dimly through the small dressing-room window. She looked at him and there was nothing in her eyes. His hand shook and in shaking made the marionette tremble, too. Her mouth closed and opened, closed and opened, closed and opened, again and again and again. Silence.

Fabian moved his fingers unbelievingly to his own mouth. A film slid across his eyes. He looked like a man lost in the street, trying to remember the number of a certain house, trying to find a certain window with a certain light. He swayed about, staring at the walls, at Krovitch, at the doll, at his free hand, turning the fingers over, touching his throat, opening his mouth. He listened.

Miles away in a cave, a single wave came in from the sea and whispered down in foam. A gull moved soundlessly, not beating its wings - a shadow.

'She's gone. She's gone. I can't find her. She's run off. I can't find her. I can't find her. I try, I try, but she's run away off far. Will you help me? Will you help me find her? Will you help me find her? Will you please help me find her?'

Riabouchinska slipped bonelessly from his limp hand, folded over and glided noiselessly down to lie upon the cold floor, her eyes closed, her mouth shut.

Fabian did not look at her as Krovitch led him out the door.