And So Died Riabouchinska, 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 under water.

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 them 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? I mean, Mr. Ockham.”

Fabian said, “You’d better go to sleep now, Rio.”

“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 flat. “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 thing, 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