The men were silent.
“What must it be on Earth,” wondered Hawthorns, “without Christmas? No hot chestnuts, no tree, nor ornaments or drums or candies, nothing; nothing but the snow and the wind and the lonely, factual people—”
They all looked at the thin little old man with the scraggly beard and faded red velvet suit.
“Have you heard his story?”
“I can imagine it. The glitter-eyed psychologist, the clever sociologist, the resentful, froth-mouthed educationist, the antiseptic parents—”
“Has Dickens seen him?”
“Dickens!” Mr. Poe spat. “Him! He came for a visit! A visit, understand! How are you? he cried! A cozy place you have here! Dickens popped in and out of here. Why? Because the only book of his burned in the Great Fire was ‘A Christmas Carol’ and a few other of his ghost stories. He’ll live forever on Earth. He wrote such a wealth of uncensorable material.”
“It’s not fair,” protested Hawthorne. “For him to stay and me to be here.”
“A dreadful mistake,” agreed everyone.
“A man’s remembered for his sensational things,” observed Mr. Bierce. “Me for ‘Owl-Creek Bridge,’ Mr. Poe for his corpses and terrors instead of his serious essays. And—”
Bierce did not continue. He fell forward with a sigh. And as all watched, horrified, his body burned into blue dust and charred bone, the ashes of which fled through the air in black tatters, settling about their shocked faces like terrible snow.
“Bierce, Bierce!”
“Gone.”
They looked up at the cold high clusters of stars.
“His last book gone. Someone, somewhere on Earth, just now, burned it.”
“God rest him, nothing of him left now. For what are we but books, and when those are gone, nothing’s to be seen.”
A rushing sound filled the sky.
They cried out wildly and looked up. In the sky, dazzling it with sizzling fire-clouds, was the Rocket! Around the men on the seashore, lanterns bobbed, there was a squealing and a bubbling and an odor of cooking smells. Candle-eyed pumpkins lifted into the cold clear air. Thin fingers clenched into fists and a witch screamed from her withered mouth:
“Ship, ship, break, fall!
Ship, ship, burn all!
Crack, flake, shake, melt!
Mummy-dust, cat-pelt!”
“Time to go,” murmured Hawthorne. “On to Jupiter, on to Saturn or Pluto.”
“Run away?” shouted Poe in the wind. “Never!”
“I’m a tired old man.”
Poe gazed into the old man’s face and believed him. He climbed atop a huge boulder and faced the ten thousand grey shadows and green lights and yellow eyes on the hissing wind.
“The needles!” he cried.
The rocket flashed over.
“The powders!” he shouted.
A thick hot smell of bitter almond, civet, cumin, wormseed and orris!
The rocket came down—steadily down, with the shriek of a damned spirit! Poe raged at it! He flung his fists up and the orchestra of heat and smell and hatred answered in symphony! Like stripped tree fragments, bats flew upward! Burning hearts, flung like missiles, burst in bloody fireworks on the singed air. Down, down, relentlessly down, like a pendulum the rocket came! And Poe howled furiously and shrank back with every sweep and sweep of the rocket cutting and ravening the air! All the dead sea seemed a pit in which, trapped, they waited the sinking of the dread machinery, the glistening axe; they were people under the avalanche!
“The snakes!” screamed Poe.
And luminous serpentines of undulant green hurtled toward the rocket. But it came down, a sweep, a fire, a motion, and it lay panting out exhaustions of red plumage on the sand, a mile away.
“At it!” shrieked Poe. “The plan’s changed! Only one chance! Run! At it! At it! Drown them with our bodies! Kill them!”
And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself free from primeval beds, the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea sands, down the empty river deltas, shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the furthest hollow. As if a great charred cauldron of sparkling lava had been overturned, the boiling people and snapping animals churned down the dry fathoms!
“Kill them!” screamed Poe, running. “Perhaps,” murmured Mr. Hawthorne, left behind, alone, at the edge of the ancient sea.
THE ROCKET MEN LEAPED OUT of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about, sniffing the air like hounds. They saw nothing. They relaxed.
The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered, kindled, and a fire leapt up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a half circle about him.
“A new world,” he said, forcing himself to speak deliberately, though he glanced nervously, now and again, over his shoulder at the empty sea. “The old world left behind. A new start. What more symbolic than that we here dedicate ourselves all the more firmly to science and progress.” He nodded crisply to his lieutenant. “The books.”
The ancient books were brought forth.
Firelight limned the faded gilt titles: The Willows, The Outsider, Behold the Dreamer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Land of Oz, Pellucidar, The Land That Time Forgot, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the monstrous names of Machen and Edgar Allan Poe and Cabell and Dunsany and Blackwood and Lewis Carroll; the names, the old names, the evil names, the black names, the blasphemous names.
“A new world. With a gesture, we burn the last of the old!”
The captain ripped pages from the books. Leaf by seared leaf, he fed them into the fire.
A scream!
Leaping back, the men stared beyond the firelight at the edges of the encroaching and uninhabited sea.
Another scream! A high and wailing thing, like the death of a dragon and the thrashing of a bronzed whale left gasping when the waters of a leviathan’s sea drain down the shingles and evaporate.
It was the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, where, a moment before, was something.
The clean rocket men faced the directions from which the scream had come rushing forward like a tide.
The captain neatly disposed of the last book.
The air stopped quivering.
Silence.
The rocket men leaned and listened.
“Captain, did you hear it?”
“No.”
“Like a wave, sir. On the sea bottom! I thought I saw something. Over there. A black wave. Big. Running at us.”
“You were mistaken.”
“But the sound?”
“I say you heard nothing.”
“There, sir!”
“What!”
“See it? There! The castle! Way over! That black castle, near that lake! It’s splitting in half. It’s falling!”
The men stared. “I don’t see it.”
“Yes, it’s falling! It’s all fire and rock.”
The men squinted and shuffled forward.
Smith stood trembling among them. He put his hand to his head as if to find a thought there. “I remember. Yes, now I do. A long time back. When I was a child. A book I read. A story. Usher, I think it was. Yes, Usher. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’—”
“By whom?”
“I—I can’t remember.”
“Usher? Never heard of it.”
“Yes, Usher, that’s what it was. I saw it fall again, just now, like in the story.”
“Smith!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Report for psychoanalysis tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir!” A brisk salute.
“Be careful.”
The men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship’s aseptic light to gaze at the long sea and the low hills.
“Why,” whispered Smith, disappointed, “there’s no one here at all, is there? No one here at all.”
The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.
The End
