Ray Bradbury
http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal
The Dwarf
1953
Aimee watched the sky, quietly.
Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier
empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above
the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like
melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.
Two customers had passed through an hour before. Those two lonely people
were now in the roller coaster, screaming murderously as it plummeted down the
blazing night, around one emptiness after another.
Aimee moved slowly across the strand, a few worn wooden hoopla rings
sticking to her wet hands. She stopped behind the ticket booth that fronted the
MIRROR MAZE. She saw herself grossly misrepresented in three rippled mirrors
outside the Maze. A thousand tired replicas of herself dissolved in the corridor
beyond, hot images among so much clear coolness.
She stepped inside the ticket booth and stood looking a long while at Ralph
Banghart's thin neck. He clenched an unlit cigar between his long uneven yellow
teeth as he laid out a battered game of solitaire on the ticket shelf.
When the roller coaster wailed and fell in its terrible avalanche again,
she was reminded to speak.
"What kind of people go up in roller coasters?"
Ralph Banghart worked his cigar a full thirty seconds. "People wanna die.
That rollie coaster's the handiest thing to dying there is." He sat listening to
the faint sound of rifle shots from the shooting gallery. "This whole damn carny
business's crazy. For instance, that dwarf. You seen him? Every night, pays his
dime, runs in the Mirror Maze all the way back through to Screwy Louie's Room.
You should see this little runt head back there. My God!"
"Oh, yes," said Aimee, remembering. "I always wonder what it's like to be a
dwarf. I always feel sorry when I see him."
"I could play him like an accordion."
"Don't say that!"
"My Lord." Ralph patted her thigh with a free hand. "The way you carry on
about guys you never even met." He shook his head and chuckled. "Him and his
secret. Only he don't know I know, see? Boy howdy!"
"It's a hot night." She twitched the large wooden hoops nervously on her
damp fingers.
"Don't change the subject. He'll be here, rain or shine."
Aimee shifted her weight.
Ralph seized her elbow. "Hey! You ain't mad? You wanna see that dwarf,
don't you? Sh!" Ralph turned. "Here he comes now!"
The Dwarf's hand, hairy and dark, appeared all by itself reaching up into
the booth window with a silver dime. An invisible person called, "One!" in a
high, child's voice.
Involuntarily, Aimee bent forward.
The Dwarf looked up at her, resembling nothing more than a dark-eyed,
dark-haired, ugly man who has been locked in a winepress, squeezed and wadded
down and down, fold on fold, agony on agony, until a bleached, out-raged mass is
left, the face bloated shapelessly, a face you know must stare wide-eyed and
awake at two and three and four o'clock in the morning, lying flat in bed, only
the body asleep.
Ralph tore a yellow ticket in half. "One!"
The Dwarf, as if frightened by an approaching storm, pulled his black
coat-lapels tightly about his throat and waddled swiftly. A moment later, ten
thousand lost and wandering dwarfs wriggled between the mirror flats, like
frantic dark beetles, and vanished.
"Quick!"
Ralph squeezed Aimee along a dark passage behind the mirrors. She felt him
pat her all the way back through the tunnel to a thin partition with a peekhole.
"This is rich," he chuckled. "Go on—look."
Aimee hesitated, then put her face to the partition. "You _see_ him?" Ralph
whispered.
Aimee felt her heart beating. A full minute passed.
There stood the Dwarf in the middle of the small blue room. His eyes were
shut. He wasn't ready to open them yet. Now, now he opened his eyelids and
looked at a large mirror set before him. And what he saw in the mirror made him
smile. He winked, he pirouetted, he stood sidewise, he waved, he bowed, he did a
little clumsy dance.
And the mirror repeated each motion with long, thin arms, with a tall, tall
body, with a huge wink and an enormous repetition of the dance, ending in a
gigantic bowl
"Every night the same thing," whispered Ralph in Aimee's ear. "Ain't that
rich?"
Aimee turned her head and looked at Ralph steadily out of her motionless
face, for a long time, and she said nothing. Then, as if she could not help
herself, she moved her head slowly and very slowly back to stare once more
through the opening. She held her breath. She felt her eyes begin to water.
Ralph nudged her, whispering.
"Hey, what's the little gink doin' _now_?'
They were drinking coffee and not looking at each other in the ticket booth
half an hour later, when the Dwarf came out of the mirrors. He took his hat off
and started to approach the booth, when he saw Aimee and hurried away.
"He wanted something," said Aimee.
"Yeah." Ralph squashed out his cigarette, idly. "I know what, too. But he
hasn't got the nerve to ask. One night in this squeaky little voice he says, 'I
bet those mirrors are expensive.' Well, I played dumb. I said yeah they were. He
sort of looked at me, waiting, and when I didn't say any more, he went home, but
next night he said, 'I bet those mirrors cost fifty, a hundred bucks.' I bet
they do, I said. I laid me out a band of solitaire."
"Ralph," she said.
He glanced up. "Why you look at me that way?"
"Ralph," she said, "why don't you sell him one of your extra ones?"
"Look, Aimee, do I tell you how to run your hoop circus?"
"How much do those mirrors cost?"
"I can get 'em secondhand for thirty-five bucks."
"Why don't you tell him where he can buy one, then?"
"Aimee, you're not smart." He laid his hand on her knee. She moved her knee
away. "Even if I told him where to go, you think he'd buy one? Not on your life.
And why? He's self-conscious. Why, if he even knew I knew he was flirtin' around
in front of that mirror in Screwy Louie's Room, he'd never come back. He plays
like he's goin' through the Maze to get lost, like everybody else. Pretends like
he don't care about that special room. Always waits for business to turn bad,
late nights, so he has that room to himself. What he does for entertainment on
nights when business is good. God knows. No, sir, he wouldn't dare go buy a
mirror anywhere. He ain't got no friends, and even if he did he couldn't ask
them to buy him a thing like that. Pride, by God, pride. Only reason he even
mentioned it to me is I'm practically the only guy he knows. Besides, look at
him—he ain't got enough to buy a mirror like those. He might be savin' up, but
where in hell in the world today can a dwarf work? Dime a dozen, drug on the
market, outside of circuses."
"I feel awful. I feel sad." Aimee sat staring at the empty boardwalk.
"Where does he live?"
"Flytrap down on the waterfront. The Ganghes Arms. Why?"
"I'm madly in love with him, if you must know."
He grinned around his cigar. "Aimee," he said. "You and your very funny
jokes."
A warm night, a hot morning, and a blazing noon. The sea was a sheet of
burning tinsel and glass.
Aimee came walking, in the locked-up carnival alleys out over the warm sea,
keeping in the shade, half a dozen sun-bleached magazines under her arm. She
opened a flaking door and called into hot darkness. "Ralph?" She picked her way
through the black hall behind the mirrors, her heels tacking the wooden floor.
"Ralph?"
Someone stirred sluggishly on the canvas cot. "Aimee?"
He sat up and screwed a dim light bulb into the dressing table socket. He
squinted at her, half blinded. "Hey, you look like the cat swallowed a canary."
"Ralph, I came about the midget!"
"Dwarf, Aimee honey, dwarf. A midget is in the cells, born that way. A
dwarf is in the glands. . . ."
"Ralph! I just found out the most wonderful thing about him!"
"Honest to God," he said to his hands, holding them out as witnesses to his
disbelief. "This woman! Who in hell gives two cents for some ugly little——"
"Ralph!" She held out the magazines, her eyes shining. "He's a writer!
Think of that!"
"It's a pretty hot day for thinking." He lay back and examined her, smiling
faintly.
"I just happened to pass the Ganghes Arms, and saw Mr. Greeley, the
manager. He says the typewriter runs all night in Mr. Big's room!"
"Is _that_ his name?" Ralph began to roar with laughter.
"Writes just enough pulp detective stories to live. I found one of his
stories in the secondhand magazine place, and, Ralph, guess what?"
"I'm tired, Aimee."
"This little guy's got a soul as big as all outdoors; he's got _everything_
in his head!"
"Why ain't he writin' for the big magazines, then, I ask you?"
"Because maybe he's afraid—maybe he doesn't know he can do it. That
happens. People don't believe in them-selves. But if he only tried, I bet he
could sell stories any-where in the world."
"Why ain't he rich, I wonder?"
"Maybe because ideas come slow because he's down in the dumps. Who wouldn't
be? So small that way? I bet it's hard to think of anything except being so
small and living in a one-room cheap apartment."
"Hell!" snorted Ralph. "You talk like Florence Nightingale's grandma."
She held up the magazine. "I'll read you part of his crime story. It's got
all the guns and tough people, but it's told by a dwarf. I bet the editors never
guessed the author knew what he was writing about. Oh, please don't sit there
like that, Ralph! Listen."
And she began to read aloud.
"I am a dwarf and I am a murderer. The two things can-not be separated. One
is the cause of the other.
"The man I murdered used to stop me on the street when I was twenty-one,
pick me up in his arms, kiss my brow, croon wildly to me, sing Rock-a-bye Baby,
haul me into meat markets, toss me on the scales and cry, 'Watch it. Don't weigh
your thumb, there, butcher!"
"Do you _see_ how our lives moved toward murder? This fool, this persecutor
of my flesh and soul!
"As for my childhood: my parents were small people, not quite dwarfs, not
quite. My father's inheritance kept us in a doll's house, an amazing thing like
a white-scrolled wedding cake—little rooms, little chairs, miniature paintings,
cameos, ambers with insects caught inside, everything tiny, tiny, tiny! The
world of Giants far away, an ugly rumor beyond the garden wall. Poor mama, papa!
They meant only the best for me. They kept me, like a porcelain vase, small and
treasured, to themselves, in our ant world, our beehive rooms, our microscopic
library, our land of beetle-sized doors and moth windows. Only now do I see the
magnificent size of my parents' psychosis! They must have dreamed they would
live forever, keeping me like a butterfly under glass. But first father died,
and then fire ate up the little house, the wasp's nest, and every postage-stamp
mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching
the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a
landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff!
"It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There
seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came
into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, 'I
want you to meet the little woman!' "
Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she
handed it to Ralph. "You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It's all right.
But don't you see? That little man. That little man."
Ralph tossed the magazine aside and lit a cigarette lazily. "I like
Westerns better."
"Ralph, you got to read it. He needs someone to tell him how good he is and
keep him writing."
Ralph looked at her, his head to one side. "And guess who's going to do it?
Well, well, ain't we just the Saviour's right hand?"
"I won't listen!"
"Use your head, damn it! You go busting in on him he'll. think you're
handing him pity. He'll chase you screamin' outa his room."
She sat down, thinking about it slowly, trying to turn it over and see it
from every side. "I don't know. Maybe you're right. Oh, it's not just pity,
Ralph, honest. But maybe it'd look like it to him. I've got to be awful
careful."
He shook her shoulder back and forth, pinching softly, with his fingers.
"Hell, hell, lay off him, is all I ask; you'll get nothing but trouble for your
dough. God, Aimee, I never _seen_ you so hepped on anything. Look, you and me,
let's make it a day, take a lunch, get us some gas, and just drive on down the
coast as far as we can drive; swim, have supper, see a good show in some little
town—to hell with the carnival, how about it? A damn nice day and no worries. I
been savin' a coupla bucks."
"It's because I know he's different," she said, looking off into darkness.
"It's because he's something we can never be—you and me and all the rest of us
here on the pier. It's so funny, so funny. Life fixed him so he's good for
nothing but carny shows, yet there he is on the land. And life made us so we
wouldn't have to work in the carny shows, but here we are, anyway, way out here
at sea on the pier. Some-times it seems a million miles to shore. How come,
Ralph, that we got the bodies, but he's got the brains and can think things
we'll never even guess?"
"You haven't even been listening to me!" said Ralph.
She sat with him standing over her, his voice far away. Her eyes were half
shut and her hands were in her lap, twitching.
"I don't like that shrewd look you're getting on," he said, finally.
She opened her purse slowly and took out a small roll of bills and started
counting. "Thirty-five, forty dollars. There. I'm going to phone Billie Fine and
have him send out one of those tall-type mirrors to Mr. Bigelow at the Ganghes
Arms. Yes, I am!"
"What!"
"Think how wonderful for him, Ralph, having one in his own room any time he
wants it. Can I use your phone?"
"Go ahead, _be_ nutty."
Ralph turned quickly and walked off down the tunnel. A door slammed.
Aimee waited, then after a while put her hands to the phone and began to
dial, with painful slowness. She paused between numbers, holding her breath,
shutting her eyes, thinking how it might seem to be small in the world, and then
one day someone sends a special mirror by. A mirror for your room where you can
hide away with the big reflection of yourself, shining, and write stories and
stories, never going out into the world unless you had to. How might it be then,
alone, with the wonderful illusion all in one piece in the room. Would it make
you happy or sad, would it help your writing or hurt it? She shook her head back
and forth, back and forth. At least this way there would be no one to look down
at you. Night after night, perhaps rising secretly at three in the cold morning,
you could wink and dance around and smile and wave at your-self, so tall, so
tall, so very fine and tall in the bright looking-glass.
A telephone voice said, "Billie Fine's."
"Oh, _Billie_!" she cried.
Night came in over the pier. The ocean lay dark and loud under the planks.
Ralph sat cold and waxen in his glass coffin, laying out the cards, his eyes
fixed, his mouth stiff. At his elbow, a growing pyramid of burnt cigarette butts
grew larger. When Aimee walked along under the hot red and blue bulbs, smiling,
waving, he did not stop setting the cards down slow and very slow. "Hi, Ralph!"
she said.
"How's the love affair?" he asked, drinking from a dirty glass of iced
water. "How's Charlie Boyer, or is it Cary Grant?"
"I just went and bought me a new hat," she said, smiling. "Gosh, I feel
_good_! You know why? Billie Fine's sending a mirror out tomorrow! Can't you
just see the nice little guy's face?"
"I'm not so hot at imagining."
"Oh, Lord, you'd think I was going to marry him or something."
"Why not? Carry him around in a suitcase. People say, Where's your husband?
all you do is open your bag, yell, Here he is! Like a silver comet. Take him
outa his case any old hour, play a tune, stash him away. Keep a little sandbox
for him on the back porch."
"I was feeling so good," she said.
"Benevolent is the word." Ralph did not look at her, his mouth tight.
"Ben-ev-o-_lent_. I suppose this all comes from me watching him through that
knothole, getting my kicks? That why you sent the mirror? People like you run
around with tambourines, taking the joy out of my life."
"Remind me not to come to your place for drinks any more. I'd rather go
with no people at all than mean people."
Ralph exhaled a deep breath. "Aimee, Aimee. Don't you know you can't help
that guy? He's bats. And this crazy thing of yours is like saying, Go ahead, be
batty, I'll help you, pal."
"Once in a lifetime anyway, it's nice to make a mistake if you think it'll
do somebody some good," she said.
"God deliver me from do-gooders, Aimee."
"Shut up, shut up!" she cried, and then said nothing more.
He let the silence lie awhile, and then got up, putting his finger-printed
glass aside. "Mind the booth for me?"
"Sure. Why?"
She saw ten thousand cold white images of him stalking down the glassy
corridors, between mirrors, his mouth straight and his fingers working
themselves.
She sat in the booth for a full minute and then suddenly shivered. A small
clock ticked in the booth and she turned the deck of cards over, one by one,
waiting. She heard a hammer pounding and knocking and pounding again, far away
inside the Maze; a silence, more waiting, and then ten thousand images folding
and refolding and dissolving, Ralph striding, looking out at ten thousand images
of her in the booth. She heard his quiet laughter as he came down the ramp.
"Well, what's put you in such a good mood?" she asked, suspiciously.
"Aimee," he said, carelessly, "we shouldn't quarrel. You say tomorrow
Billie's sending that mirror to Mr. Big's?"
"You're not going to try anything funny?"
"Me?" He moved her out of the booth and took over the cards, humming, his
eyes bright. "Not me, oh no, not me." He did not look at her, but started
quickly to slap out the cards. She stood behind him. Her right eye began to
twitch a little. She folded and unfolded her arms. A minute ticked by. The only
sound was the ocean under the night pier, Ralph breathing in the heat, the soft
ruffle of the cards. The sky over the pier was hot and thick with clouds. Out at
sea, faint glows of lightning were beginning to show.
"Ralph," she said at last.
"Relax, Aimee," he said.
"About that trip you wanted to take down the coast"
"Tomorrow," he said. "Maybe next month. Maybe next year. Old Ralph
Banghart's a patient guy. I'm not worried, Aimee. Look." He held up a hand. "I'm
calm."
She waited for a roll of thunder at sea to fade away. "I just don't want
you mad, is all. I just don't want anything bad to happen, promise me."
The wind, now warm, now cool, blew along the pier. There was a smell of
rain in the wind. The clock ticked. Aimee began to perspire heavily, watching
the cards move and move. Distantly, you could hear targets being hit and the
sound of the pistols at the shooting gallery.
And then, there he was.
Waddling along the lonely concourse, under the insect bulbs, his face
twisted and dark, every movement an effort. From a long way down the pier he
came, with Aimee watching. She wanted to say to him. This is your last night,
the last time you'll have to embarrass yourself by coming here, the last time
you'll have to put up with being watched by Ralph, even in secret. She wished
she could cry out and laugh and say it right in front of Ralph. But she said
nothing.
"Hello, hello!" shouted Ralph. "It's free, on the house, tonight! Special
for old customers!"
The Dwarf looked up, startled, his little black eyes darting and swimming
in confusion. His mouth formed the word thanks and he turned, one hand to his
neck, pulling his tiny lapels tight up about his convulsing throat, the other
hand clenching the silver dime secretly. Looking back, he gave a little nod, and
then scores of dozens of compressed and tortured faces, burnt a strange dark
color by the lights, wandered in the glass corridors.
"Ralph," Aimee took his elbow. "What's going on?"
He grinned. "I'm being benevolent, Aimee, benevolent.
"Ralph," she said.
"Sh," he said. "_Listen_."
They waited in the booth in the long warm silence.
Then, a long way off, muffled, there was a scream.
"Ralph!" said Aimee.
"Listen, listen!" he said.
There was another scream, and another and still another, and a threshing
and a pounding and a breaking, a rushing around and through the maze. There,
there, wildly colliding and richocheting, from mirror to mirror, shrieking
hysterically and sobbing, tears on his face, mouth gasped open, came Mr.
Bigelow. He fell out in the blazing night air, glanced about wildly, wailed, and
ran off down the pier.
"Ralph, what happened?"
Ralph sat laughing and slapping at his thighs.
She slapped his face. "What'd you _do_?"
He didn't quite stop laughing. "Come on. I'll show you!"
And then she was in the maze, rushed from white-hot mirror to mirror,
seeing her lipstick all red fire a thousand times repeated on down a burning
silver cavern where strange hysterical women much like herself followed a
quick-moving, smiling man. "Come on!" he cried. And they broke free into a
dust-smelling tiny room.
"Ralph!" she said.
They both stood on the threshold of the little room where the Dwarf had
come every night for a year. They both stood where the Dwarf had stood each
night, before opening his eyes to see the miraculous image in front of him.
Aimee shuffled slowly, one hand out, into the dim room.
The mirror had been changed.
This new mirror made even normal people small, small, small; it made even
tall people little and dark and twisted smaller as you moved forward.
And Aimee stood before it thinking and thinking that if it made big people
small, standing here, God, what would it do to a dwarf, a tiny dwarf, a dark
dwarf, a startled and lonely dwarf?
She turned and almost fell. Ralph stood looking at her. "Ralph," she said.
"God, why did you do it?"
"Aimee, come back!"
She ran out through the mirrors, crying. Staring with blurred eyes, it was
hard to find the way, but she found it. She stood blinking at the empty pier,
started to run one way, then another, then still another, then stopped. Ralph
came up behind her, talking, but it was like a voice heard behind a wall late at
night, remote and foreign.
"Don't talk to me," she said.
Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr. Kelly from the shooting
gallery. "Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol
from my place, loaded, run off before I'd get a hand on him! You help me find
him?"
And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the
canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.
Aimee rocked back and forth and took a step.
"Aimee, where you going?"
She looked at Ralph as if they had just turned a comer, strangers passing,
and bumped into each other. "I guess," she said, "I'm going to help search."
"You won't be able to do nothing."
"I got to try, anyway. Oh God, Ralph, this is all my fault! I shouldn't
have phoned Billie Fine! I shouldn't've ordered a mirror and got you so mad you
did this! It's _me_ should've gone to Mr. Big, not a crazy thing like I bought!
I'm going to find him if it's the last thing I ever do in my life."
Swinging about slowly, her cheeks wet, she saw the quivery mirrors that
stood in front of the Maze, Ralph's reflection was in one of them. She could not
take her eyes away from the image; it held her in a cool and trembling
fascination, with her mouth open.
"Aimee, what's wrong? What're you——"
He sensed where she was looking and twisted about to see what was going on.
His eyes widened.
He scowled at the blazing mirror.
A horrid, ugly little man, two feet high, with a pale, squashed face under
an ancient straw hat, scowled back at him. Ralph stood there glaring at himself,
his hands at his sides.
Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She
ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot
rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.