The Watchers, Ray Bradbury

The Watchers

In this room the sound of the tapping of the typewriter keys is like knuckles on wood, and my perspiration falls down upon the keys that are being punched unceasingly by my trembling fingers.

And over and above the sound of my writing comes the ironical melody of a mosquito circling over my bent head, and a number of flies buzzing and colliding with the wire screen.

And around the naked filament-skeleton of the yellow bulb in the ceiling a bit of torn white paper that is a moth, flutters. An ant crawls up the wall; I watch it—I laugh with a steady, unceasing bitterness.

How ironical the shining flies and the red ants and the armored crickets. How mistaken we three were: Susan and I and William Tinsley.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, if you do happen upon this, do not ever again crush the ants upon the sidewalk, do not smash the bumblebee that thunders by your window, do not annihilate the cricket upon your hearth!

That’s where Tinsley made his colossal error. You remember William Tinsley, certainly? The man who threw away a million dollars on fly-sprays and insecticides and ant pastes?

There was never a spot for a fly or a mosquito in Tinsley’s office. Not a white wall or green desk or any immaculate surface where a fly might land before Tinsley destroyed it with an instantaneous stroke of his magnificent flyswatter.

I shall never forget that instrument of death. Tinsley, a monarch, ruled his industry with that flyswatter as a scepter.

I was Tinsley’s secretary and right-hand man in his kitchenware industry; sometimes I advised him on his many investments.

Tinsley carried the flyswatter to work with him under his arm in July, 1944. By the week’s end, if I happened to be in one of the filing alcoves out of sight when Tinsley arrived, I could always tell of his arrival when I heard the swicking, whistling passage of the flyswatter through the air as Tinsley killed his morning quota.

As the days passed, I noted Tinsley’s preoccupied alertness. He’d dictate to me, but his eyes would be searching the north-southeast-west walls, the rug, the bookcases, even my clothing.

Once I laughed and made some comment about Tinsley and Clyde Beatty being fearless animal trainers, and Tinsley froze and turned his back on me. I shut up. People have a right, I thought, to be as damned eccentric as they please.

“Hello, Steve.” Tinsley waved his flyswatter one morning as I poised my pencil over my pad. “Before we start, would you mind cleaning away the corpses.”

Spread in a rumpled trail over the thick sienna rug were the fallen conquered, the flies; silent, mashed, dewinged. I threw them one by one in the waste-bin, muttering.

“To S. H. Little, Philadelphia. Dear Little: Will invest money in your insect spray. Five thousand dollars—”
“Five thousand?” I complained. I stopped writing.

Tinsley ignored me. “Five thousand dollars. Advise immediate production as soon as war conditions permit. Sincerely.” Tinsley twisted his flyswatter. “You think I’m crazy,” he said.
“Is that a P.S., or are you talking to me?” I asked.

The phone rang and it was the Termite Control Company, to whom Tinsley told me to write a thousand-dollar check for having termite-proofed his house. Tinsley patted his metal chair. “One thing I like about my offices—all iron, cement, solid; not a chance for termites.”

He leaped from his chair, the swatter shone swiftly in the air.
“Damn it, Steve, has THAT been here all this time!”

Something buzzed in a small arc somewhere, into silence. The four walls moved in around us in that silence, it seemed, the blank ceiling stared over us and Tinsley’s breath arched through his nostrils. I couldn’t see the infernal insect anywhere. Tinsley exploded. “Help me find it! Damn you, help me!”

“Now, hold on—” I retorted.
Somebody rapped on the door.

“Stay out!” Tinsley’s yell was high, afraid. “Get away from the door, and stay away!” He flung himself headlong, bolted the door with a frantic gesture and lay against it, wildly searching the room. “Quickly now, Steve, systematically! Don’t sit there!”

Desk, chairs, chandelier, walls. Like an insane animal, Tinsley searched, found the buzzing, struck at it. A bit of insensate glitter fell to the floor where he crushed it with his foot in a queerly triumphant sort of action.

He started to dress me down, but I wouldn’t have it. “Look here,” I came back at him. “I’m a secretary and right-hand stooge, not a spotter for high-flying insects. I haven’t got eyes in the back of my head!”

“Either have they!” cried Tinsley. “So you know what They do?”
“They? Who in hell are They?”

He shut up. He went to his desk and sat down, wearily, and finally said, “Never mind. Forget it. Don’t talk about this to anyone.”
I softened up. “Bill, you should go see a psychiatrist about—”

Tinsley laughed bitterly. “And the psychiatrist would tell his wife, and she’d tell others, and then They’d find out. They’re everywhere, They are. I don’t want to be stopped with my campaign.”

“If you mean the one hundred thousand bucks you’ve sunk in your insect sprays and ant pastes in the last four weeks,” I said. “Someone should stop you. You’ll break yourself, me, and the stockholders. Honest to God, Tinsley—”
“Shut up!” he said. “You don’t understand.”

I guess I didn’t, then. I went back to my office and all day long I heard that damned flyswatter hissing in the air.

I had supper with Susan Miller that evening. I told her about Tinsley and she lent a sympathetically professional ear. Then she tapped her cigarette and lit it and said, “Steve, I may be a psychiatrist, but I wouldn’t have a tinker’s chance in hell, unless Tinsley came to see me.

I couldn’t help him unless he wanted help.” She patted my arm. “I’ll look him over for you, if you insist, though, for old time’s sake. But half the fight’s lost if the patient won’t cooperate.”

“You’ve got to help me, Susan,” I said. “He’ll be stark raving in another month. I think he has delusions of persecution—”
We drove to Tinsley’s house.

The first date worked out well. We laughed, we danced we dined late at the Brown Derby, and Tinsley didn’t suspect for a moment that the slender, soft-voiced woman he held in his arms to a waltz was a psychiatrist picking his reactions apart.

From the table, I watched them, together, and I shielded a small laugh with my hand, and heard Susan laughing at one of his jokes.

We drove along the road in a pleasant, relaxed silence, the silence that follows on the heels of a good, happy evening. The perfume of Susan was in the car, the radio played dimly, and the car wheels whirled with a slight whisper over the highway.

I looked at Susan and she at me, her brows going up to indicate that she’d found nothing so far this evening to show that Tinsley was in any way unbalanced. I shrugged.
At that very instant, a moth flew in the window, fluttering, flickering its velvety white wings upon the imprisoning glass.

Tinsley screamed, wrenched the car involuntarily, struck out a gloved hand at the moth, gabbling, his face pale. The tires wobbled. Susan seized the steering wheel firmly and held the car on the road until we slowed to a stop.

As we pulled up, Tinsley crushed the moth between tightened fingers and watched the odorous powder of it sift down upon Susan’s arm. We sat there, the three of us, breathing rapidly.
Susan looked at me, and this time there was comprehension in her eyes. I nodded.

Tinsley looked straight ahead, then. In a dream he said, “Ninety-nine percent of all life in the world is insect life—”
He rolled up the windows without another word, and drove us home.

Susan phoned me an hour later. “Steve, he’s built a terrific complex for himself. I’m having lunch with him tomorrow. He likes me, I might find out what we want to know. By the way, Steve, does he own any pets?”
Tinsley had never owned a cat or dog. He detested animals.
“I might have expected that,” said Susan. “Well, good-night, Steve, see you tomorrow.”

The flies were breeding thick and golden and buzzing like a million intricately fine electric machines in the pouring direct light of summer noon. In vortexes they whirled and curtained and fell upon refuse to inject their eggs, to mate, to flutter, to whirl again, as I watched them, and in their whirling my mind intermixed.

I wondered why Tinsley should fear them so, should dread and kill them, and as I walked the streets, all about me, cutting arcs and spaces from the sky, omnipresent flies hummed and sizzled and beat their lucid wings. I counted darning needles, mud-daubers and hornets, yellow bees and brown ants. The world was suddenly much more alive to me than ever before, because Tinsley’s apprehensive awareness had set me aware.

Before I knew my actions, brushing a small red ant from my coat that had fallen from a lilac bush as I passed, I turned in at a familiar white house and knew it to be Lawyer Remington’s who had been Tinsley’s family representative for forty years, even before Tinsley was born. Remington was only a business acquaintance to me but there I was, touching his gate and ringing his bell and in a few minutes looking at him over a sparkling good glass of his sherry.

“I remember,” said Remington, remembering. “Poor Tinsley. He was only seventeen when it happened.”

I leaned forward intently. “It happened?” The ant raced in wild frenzies upon the golden stubble on my fingers’ backs, becoming entangled