Excerpt

The Reincarnate by Ray Bradbury

After a while you will get over being afraid. There's nothing you can do, just be careful to walk at night. The sun is terrible; summer nights are no help. You must wait for cold weather. The first six months are your prime. In the seventh month the water will seep through with dissolution. In the eighth month your usefulness will fade. By the tenth month you'll lie weeping the sorrow without tears, and you will know then that you will never move again.

But before that happens there is so much to be finished. Many likes and dislikes must be turned in your mind before your mind melts.

It is new to you. You are reborn. And your birthplace is silk-lined and smelling of tuberoses and linens, and there is no sound before your birth except the beating of the earth's billion insect hearts. This place is wood and metal and satin, offering no sustenance, but only an implacable slot of close air, a pocket within the earth. There is only one way you can live, now. There must be an anger to slap you awake, to make you move. A desire, a want, a need. Then you quiver and rise to strike your head against satin-lined wood. Life calls you. You grow with it. You claw upward, slowly, and find ways to displace earth an inch at a time, and one night you crumble the darkness, the exit is complete, and you burst forth to see the stars.

Now you stand, letting the emotion burn you. You take a step, like a child, stagger, clutch for support—and find a marble slab. Beneath your fingers the carved story of your life is briefly told: Born—Died.

You are a stick of wood, trying to walk. You go outward from the land of monuments, into twilight streets, alone on the pale sidewalks.

You feel something is left undone. Some flower yet unseen somewhere you must see, some lake waiting for you to swim, some wine untouched. You are going somewhere, to finish whatever stays undone.

The streets have grown strange. You walk in a town you have never seen, a dream on the rim of a lake. You grow more certain of your walking, you go quite swiftly. Memory returns.

You know every lawn of this street, every place where asphalt bubbled from cement cracks in the oven weather. You know where the horses were tethered, sweating in the green spring at these iron waterfonts so long ago it is a fading mist in your brain. This cross street, where a light hangs like a bright spider spinning light across darkness. You escape its web into sycamore shadows. A picket fence sounds under your fingers. Here, as a child, you rushed by with a stick raising a machine-gun racket, laughing.

These houses, with the people and memories in them. The lemon odor of old Mrs. Hanlon who lived here, a lady with withered hands who gave you a withered lecture on trampling her petunias. Now she is completely withered like an ancient paper burned.

The street is quiet except for the sound of someone walking. You turn a corner and unexpectedly collide with a stranger.

You both stand back. For a moment, examining one another, you understand something about one another.

The stranger's eyes are deep-seated fires. He is tall, thin, and wears a dark suit. There is a fiery whiteness in his cheekbones. He smiles. "You're a new one," he says.

You know then what he is. He is walking and "different," like yourself.

"Where are you going in such a hurry?" he asks.

"I have no time," you say. "I am going somewhere. Step aside."

He holds your elbow firmly. "Do you know what I am?" He bends close. "Do you not realize we are the same? We are as brothers."

"I—I have no time."

"No," he agrees, "nor have I, to waste."

You brush past, but he walks with you. "I know where you're going."

"Yes?"

"Yes," he says. "To some childhood place. Some river. Some house. Some memory. Some woman, perhaps. To some old friend's bed. Oh, I know, I know everything about our kind. I know." He nods at the passing light and dark.

"Do you?"

"That is always why we lost one's walk. Strange, when you consider all the books written about ghosts and lost walkers, and never once did the authors of those worthy volumes touch the true secret of why we walk. But it's always for—a memory, a friend, a woman, a house, a drink of wine, everything and anything connected with life and—LIVING!" He made a fist to hold the words tight. "Living! REAL living!"

Wordless, you increase your stride, but his whisper follows:

"You must join me later, friend. We will meet with the others, tonight, tomorrow, and all the nights until at last, we win!"

"Who are the others?"

"The dead. We join against"—a pause—"intolerance."

"Intolerance?"

"We newly dead and newly interred are a minority, a persecuted minority. They make laws against us!"

You stop walking. "Minority?"

"Yes." He grasps your arm. "Are we wanted? No! Feared! Driven like sheep into a quarry, screamed at, stoned, like the Jews. Wrong, I tell you, unfair!" He lifts his hands in a fury and strikes down. "Fair, fair, is it fair? Fair that we melt in our graves while the rest of the world sings, laughs, dances? Fair, is it fair, they love while we lie cold, that they touch while our hands become stone? No! I say down with them, down! Why should we die? Why not the others?"

"Maybe …"

"They slam the earth in our faces and carve a stone to weigh us, and shove flowers in an old tin and bury it. Once a year! Sometimes not that! Oh, how I hate the living. The fools. The damn fools! Dancing all night and loving, while we are abandoned. Is that right?"

"I hadn't thought."

"Well," he cries, "we'll fix them."

"How?"

"There are thousands of us tonight in the Elysian grove. I lead. We will kill! They have neglected us too long. If we can't live, then they won't! And you will come, friend? I have spoken with many. Join us. The graveyards will open tonight and the Lost Ones will pour out to drown the unbelievers. You will come?"

"Yes. Perhaps. But I must go. I must find some place ahead. I will join you."

"Good," he says. You walk off, leaving him in shadow. "Good, good, good!"