Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

CHILDREN OF THE BEDTIME MACHINE Robert McCammon

It was a lonely house in a lonely land.

The wind blew from here to there and stirred up whorls of lonely dust. Fields burned under a gray sun. When any of the few birds still living passed by, always going somewhere else, the spindly trees seemed sad in their rejection, for no nests ever thrived amid the branches, and no sweet song of youth was ever sung.

The woman who lived in the house was hard. She had to be. It was a hard world now. She could look out across a landscape the color of rust and see in the hazed distance the oil and natural gas pumps that no longer moved. They hadn’t moved for a long time. Their day was finished. And so too had died the wires, after the great storms and the winter heat waves and the upheavals that had cracked the dry earth and the dusty roads and had nearly, to the woman’s hard blue eyes, rearranged the ridges all the long twenty miles to Douglasville.

The woman went about her chore of living, from day to day. She raised a few chickens and ate bitter eggs. She ate a lot of canned pork-’n’-beans and soup. She grew some dwarf tomatoes that were the color of the land and almost tasteless, but at least they were tomatoes, and she was proud of them. She had a shed full of bottled water, enough to last until Jesus came.

She was all right.

But sometimes at night, after she lit her candles with their tin reflectors and arranged them just so and chose from the special trunk an ancient yellowed book to read that reminded her of the world that was, her hardness cracked just a little bit. Just a little bit, like the shell of a bitter egg.

And there in that room with its candlelight and the smell of old paper and old ideas and the sound of the lonely wind searching outside the windows, the woman felt her heart become slowly crushed… slowly, slowly… until she had trouble breathing, and the tears bloomed behind her glasses and she had to put the book down for fear a wet drop might blur the words.

She was a hard woman, but she was not made of stone.

Oh, this world. Oh, this sad and brutal world. This careless world. This world of lost opportunities and crushed hearts.

The woman had been married once. She and her husband had had a son. But both of them, killed in a war. Before the satellites fell flaming from the sky. Before the buildings crashed down and the weather changed, summer in winter, and the oil burned in its millions of gallons upon the black-choked sea. Before so many of the fish and the birds and the animals God had commanded man to protect had died. So many.

So many.

The woman in her young days had wished for a large family. She and her husband had talked about that, long before the wedding bells. There was such strength in a large family. There was such happiness. But in the end they’d just had the one child, and he had died first in that foreign land. Then her husband, because he was a patriot.

This sad and broken world.

And when everything seemed to be over and everything was changed and nothing worked anymore, and even after no one knew who had won but everyone said they were the winners so they started fighting again to prove it until the world itself heaved and cracked… even after that… it was still not the end.

The woman sat at the center of her circle of candles. She took off her glasses and she rubbed her tired eyes.

No, still it was not the end. For though people wished for the end and roadside preachers shouted their prophesies and madmen and madwomen dragged themselves across the sunburned earth wearing upon their backs wooden crosses and upon their heads crowns of barbed wire… still it was not the end, and no suffering human being could say when the battered old world would stop its tormented turning and fall apart into the dust of ages.

The woman decided she would go to town tomorrow morning. She needed some more pork-’n’-beans and soup. She could take some eggs and tomatoes to trade. She needed to see people. So be it.

She put her book back into the special trunk with all the others, and then she blew out every candle but one and lay in bed for a long time staring at the ceiling until her blue eyes closed.

The next day was hot. Hot, hot… hotter than hot. Same as every day. The clouds were painted upon the sky. The sun was somewhere. The woman rode her green bicycle, the color of May. It was her little joke.

Douglasville wasn’t much of a town, but it was a place. It had some buildings and a few houses. It had some people living there. It wasn’t all empty. The woman pedaled her May-colored bike past the dump where all the car bodies had blistered and rusted and rotted. She didn’t even look at them anymore, didn’t even care how they used to work. She directed herself to the big store.

Now, this was an exciting place because the woman never knew what she might find there. She thought it had once been a grocery store—the size was about right, and so were the shelves—but now it was a little-of-anything store. The men who worked there wore guns, so nobody tried to steal anything a second time. But they were good men, and they knew her there, and even the tasteless tomatoes in her backpack were better than none at all because the texture and aroma counted for something. And the eggs… well, the yolks were yellow.

The woman enjoyed walking through the big store. Sometimes, when she was particularly lonely, she came here and just walked. Didn’t barter at all. She looked at old clothes and their labels. She looked at old shoes and old hats, and she tried to picture in her mind who’d worn them. Infrequently she found a book or two there. Or parts of books, because the sun and heat were not kind to paper. It had been a long time since there’d been any new books. Long before her son had died. In fact, she couldn’t remember exactly when. War wiped everything away, even happy memories.

But she did enjoy the big store. All the things in there. The items, the men called them. A toothbrush, a flowerpot, a welcome mat, a Scrabble game—you never knew what the people who passed by, like the last birds, had left behind for trade. Sometimes she found letters. But they were always very sad, so she had learned to leave them alone.

And there at the very back of the big store was the large pile of yesterday.

It never ceased to amaze her. All that, in one place. All that, and all useless.

“I just keep it,” said one of the men, standing beside her. “Call me sentimental.”

The woman nodded.

All those computers. All those—what were they called?—laptops and notebooks and cell phones of every small and smaller size and bright plastic color. Gizmos, she called them. The electronic book readers. The ones that read books for you, in any language and in any voice. The screens that showed the moving pictures called… what was that?… Oh, yes: 3-D. She figured the man kept them because they were, after all, pretty. And they had meant so much, once upon a time. Now they sat in dusty rows and heaps. The cell phones lay in laundry baskets. Was the man a collector? Possibly the batteries and innards had been of some use, many years ago. His father may have taken them as barter. Who could say where all these came from? They were just here, as they might be anywhere.

But without the wires both visible and invisible, they were all dead. Even the fanciest of the fancy, the brightest of the bright, the streamlined beauty and the pocket-sized powerhouse—all dead.

“Are you doing all right?” the man asked her, because though he was a much younger man, he did like her.

“I am,” she said. But then she decided to tell him the truth. “I’m having trouble sleeping just lately. You know. Things get in.”

“Sure. I know.” He shrugged. His shoulders were thin, but he had a large pistol on the holster at his hip. “Everybody has trouble now and again.”

“Yeah,” she said.

And he said, “Yeah,” as he stared at the linoleum tiles on the floor.

“I guess I need some canned stuff,” she said after a little while. “Anything new in?”

“No,” he told her. “Just the same.”

People had stopped eating so much. Everybody was thin. It was just something you got used to. A piece of bread could be a dinner; soak it in soup and you had a feast. But most people helped one another and shared when they could. There was no panic, and there was very little violence. The ones who had lived by that code were long dead. Now the remaining ones had taken on the thinness, the attitude and the patience of saints, as they waited for the end.

“Do you have anything new?” the woman asked, a question she’d not planned on asking. It had just come out, because she was thinking of the lonely house.

“Oh!” the man suddenly said. His eyebrows went up. “Yes, I do!” He went back amid the dead electronics, and he bent down to a cardboard box on the floor. “It doesn’t work, of course, but—”

“None of that works,” said the woman, feeling like he thought her a fool.

“It doesn’t need wires,” he told her. “Or didn’t need wires, I mean. Take a look at this.”

What he brought her looked like a brushed-aluminum urn, pointed at the top and flat at its base, with a small black hole at its center and a crank handle on its side.

“Do you know what it is?” the man asked.

“Somebody’s ashes in there? Or is it an oversized pepper grinder?”

The man gave her a lopsided smile. “It’s a bedtime machine,” he said.

“Bedtime machine,” the woman repeated.

“Sure is. I’ve only seen pictures in a magazine—a long time ago—but I remember my granddad telling me about them. He was a big…” The man paused, calling up a half-forgotten phrase. “Computer geek,” he announced.

“You must have a good memory,” the woman said. Her blue eyes were examining the object. There were no seams. Just the small black hole and the hand crank. “It doesn’t look like much to me. Can you open it up and use it as a planter?”

“No.” He’d almost laughed on that one. Then his voice became serious. “Hey… this was created for just your problem.”

“My problem? What problem?”

“Insomnia,” said the man. “You’ve never heard of a bedtime machine?”

“Never.”

“Well,” he began, as he turned the object between his hands and also eyeballed the surface, “I think I remember. They were created mostly for people in the cities. They were very expensive. Only rich people could afford them. I’m talking millions of euros. They were… like… magic lamps, in a way.”

“Magic lamps,” she repeated, thinking he needed to stay out of the sun for a few days.

“Yeah. You turned the crank. See?” The brushed-metal crank did turn, smoothly and soundlessly. “That builds up the electrical energy. Then… I guess when it’s ready, it switches itself on.”

“And does what?” She corrected herself: “Did what?”

“Showed you something that was programmed just for you. A hologram, is what it was. You know about holograms, right?”

“I’m old but I’m not stupid.”

“Okay, no offense meant. It showed a hologram that was designed at the tech plant just for its owner. That’s why it was so expensive. The holograms—I remember my granddad saying this—were supposed to be of some peaceful image. Like nature or whatever. Something to help its owner sleep. I guess the cities were pretty noisy and chaotic twenty-four hours a day, huh?”

“People had too much stimulation,” the woman told him. “They were addicted to it. Like any drug. That’s what I remember.”

“Right,” the man said, as if—impossibly—he remembered it too.

“Okay.” The woman was ready to go. “Let’s see what cans you’ve got. We can talk a trade.”

“Take it,” said the man.

“Take what?”

“This.” He held the bedtime machine out toward her. It must have been light, because he held it with one hand. “I’ve been cranking it for two nights. Nothing.”

“And I would want that piece of junk why?”

“It’s something pretty. Don’t you think?”

“It’s junk,” the woman answered. “I’m here for food, not garbage.”

“It’s art,” he replied, on a lame note. “Looks like an old rocket ship, I think. Hey, maybe it’ll work for you. Maybe you can get it to turn itself on.”

“Why would it?” she asked, her voice hardening. This was foolish. A foolish relic from a foolish time. “How’d it get here, anyway?”

“Came in a box with other stuff. A trader passing by. Where does any of it come from?”

“It’s useless,” she told him, and then she turned away.

“Take it if you want to,” he said to her back. “It’ll just sit here.”

“Let it sit,” she said.

She went to her task of trading. Bartering the tomatoes and the eggs for some canned food. The men always let her think she was getting a good deal, because she was a regular and they liked her. But they weren’t pushovers, that was for certain. She exchanged her goods for the two cans of pork-’n’-beans and two cans of ham spread she put into her backpack, and that would have to last her for a while.

It was time to go back home.

She took one more turn around the big store. Checking the shelves for what she might have missed, though she had nothing left to trade. She saw a woman she knew, and the woman’s little boy. She stopped to speak for a few minutes, just to be neighborly. Then she went on, with her backpack on her back, and she found herself at the rear of the big store where the old junk was piled up, and she stared at the shiny brushed-aluminum rocket ship of the bedtime machine on a card table with two warped legs.

Art, he’d called it.

She gave a little snort that made her nostrils flare.

It was pretty, if you thought about objects that way.

Maybe she could take the hand crank off and find a use for it?

Junk, she thought. But still… these days it was best not to turn down whatever was offered to you. Next time it might be something of value.

The woman picked up the bedtime machine—and it was as light as a dream, must not have any workings inside it at all—and shoved it into her backpack.

She said goodbye to the men, to the woman and the little boy, and then she got on her green bike and pedaled her way home.

It took her a while to actually put the thing on the chest of drawers in her bedroom. She tried to peer into the black hole. Tried to poke it with a finger. There was a lens of some kind deep within, almost too deep to touch. As the wind blew dust out in the dark and candles burned around her, the woman angled the machine so that the black hole was aimed into the room. She stood back for a few minutes, deciding what she should do next.

Well, it was pretty damned obvious, she thought.

She cranked.

And cranked.

And cranked.

It was a smooth motion, hardly any friction at all. Still, cranking was cranking. After a time she released the hand crank and stepped back and thought she was the biggest fool in this sad, broken world.

Nothing happened.

Nothing was going to happen.

The thing was dead.

And the woman realized she could cry over this. Could really let a sob go, if she wasn’t guarding herself so tightly. Because though she’d never expected anything to happen, she was still disappointed. The bedtime machine. A magic lamp. Something new, amid the old chore of day-to-day living. She had let herself believe that maybe—maybe—she really could wake the machine up. And from it might bloom a meadow of flowers under a star-strewn sky, and grass just soft enough for sleeping. Or a holographic waterfall, flowing across smooth, dark, beautiful stones right in the corner of the room. Or a beach at night, with the waves rolling in and the distant lights of ships blinking out at sea. Or a canopy of trees above her, with darkness laced through them like velvet, and from one of them a night bird singing sweetly, for her ears alone.

The woman did begin to cry. But just a little tear, because she knew disappointment and heartbreak as an old presence in life.

She had let herself feel hope. That had been her mistake.

She wiped her eyes, she got herself ready for bed, and she opened the special trunk and from it took a fragile book whose strength she counted on to lift her spirits during long nights like this, when the wind blew from here to there amid the spindly trees outside.

She put on her glasses, climbed into her bed, and opened the book to the first page. She always did this exactly the same way, because of what was inscribed there.

It said, Live Forever!

Underneath that was the author’s name, faded and ghostly.

There was a month and day, almost illegible. A year: 1988.

A long time ago, forty years before her birth.

The woman always wondered about that inscription. That nearly shouted, joyful Live Forever! She wondered if it was a special message of some kind. She wondered if it ever had been said to the author, and he was passing it along. It seemed like the kind of statement you didn’t keep to yourself. It seemed like the kind of thing you hollered out at the top of your lungs, to the very soul of the world.

The woman found a story she wanted to read. It was about a day in the life of an automated house, when no people were there to love it or be loved by it. She began reading, but on this sad night of nights she wanted to hear a voice… a voice raised against the lonely wind… and so she adjusted her glasses, she cleared her throat, and she began to read the words aloud.

And she had been speaking the author’s words for only a few sentences when she abruptly looked up from the book.

Because something was happening to the bedtime machine.

She felt it, before she saw it.

A tremor? A breath, inhaled or exhaled? A heartbeat?

Maybe all those.

She saw the black hole turn electric blue.

Where the lens was aimed, a blue shadow formed in the air.

It shivered, and breathed, and smiled as it took shape and substance.

And suddenly in the room stood a little boy about ten years old, with brown hair and brown eyes and apple-plump cheeks. He was wearing a dark red sweater and white chino trousers with patches on the knees. He was wearing sneakers stained with playground dirt. His smile broadened.

He said, in his little-boy voice, “Would you read to me until you get sleepy?”

The woman did not move. Did not speak.

Could not move. Could not speak.

“Just one story?” the little boy prompted.

Her mouth was wide open, yet no sound emerged. She saw that he was not real. She saw that he wore a blue body-halo, and that for all his seeming solidity a little static occasionally disturbed his smile and for an instant warped his features as if he were reacting to a mosquito bite in an unscratchable place. But, of course, mosquitoes were now as rare as birds.

“One story,” he repeated, not petulantly but expectantly.

The woman spoke in a hushed and trembling voice.

“One story,” she said.

The little boy sat on the floor beside her bed and crossed his legs beneath him. He put his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on his palms and waited. He was all brown eyes and fixed attention.

“I’m… just going to keep reading this story,” said the woman, and the little boy gave a quick nod that said Just fine.

She read the rest of it aloud. Her voice cracked a few times. It roughened and rebelled, but she kept going. And at the end of the story, when the last sentence had been read and the woman looked up from the words, the little boy on the floor frowned slightly and said, “I hate that the house burned up. But I guess that’s how it had to end. The house wasn’t happy, was it?”

“No,” the woman said. “Not happy.”

“Are you sleepy yet?”

“No,” the woman said. “Not sleepy.”

“Will you read me another story?” the little boy asked, and he smiled again.

“Yes,” the woman answered. “I will.”

The next story was about a spaceship traveling south toward the sun. The little boy really liked that one, and he asked her to read it again.

And then, in defiance of all sense and wonder and human and electric mystery, the woman at long last yawned and felt the weight of her eyelids.

“You can rest now,” she heard the little boy say. “But you’d better blow out some of those candles first, because we don’t want this house burning down, do we?” He grinned. “This is a happy house.”

He waited for her to blow out all the candles but one.

“Good night,” he said, as if from a distance. He was already going away.

And after the little boy was just a blue sparkle in the air the woman turned over in her bed and sobbed, and the sob became a wrenching torrent, and the torrent swept her away from this world into the realm of sleep.

The woman was up early, cranking.

She tended to her chickens and to her tomatoes. Under the hot gray sun she carried out the day-to-day chore of living. She ate pork-’n’-beans and had a little ham spread on a cracker and drank bottled water from a plastic cup.

Then she cranked the bedtime machine some more.

Panic set in when she lit the candles and got into bed with the book again. The very same book, with the very same inscription.

What if the little boy didn’t appear tonight? How had she made him appear? What had she done to the machine to wake it up? She didn’t know, but she decided she would start reading aloud again.

This story was about an April witch who wanted to be in love.

Three sentences in, and the bedtime machine breathed. Its heart beat. Its eye opened, and the little boy in the dark red sweater and the white chinos with patched knees was there.

“Will you read to me until you get sleepy?” he asked, smiling.

“I will,” said the woman.

“Good!” the little boy said. “I brought a friend!”

And a little girl with blond hair and freckles grew from his blue glow, and in her pink dress she was so very pretty. She had a nice smile, too.

The woman said, “I hope… this story doesn’t scare you. Either one of you.”

“Oh, no, it won’t!” the little boy answered.

“No, ma’am!” the little girl said, and she shook her head in a very serious way.

They sat down on the floor, and they waited to hear.

Oh, this strange world. This world we cannot understand. This world that turns and turns through torments, trials, and tribulations, yet goes on like any person must… day by day.

They liked the story about the foghorn. They really did. The idea of the monster from the deep, falling in love with the call of what it thought was another monster… it made some laugh and some cry. But they all really did like it.

All the children. All of them, sitting on the floor. The boys and girls, and none of them looking alike and all dressed differently, and some Hispanic and some Asian and some from other places but they could all speak English and of course understand the stories.

And more of them, every night. Growing from the blue glow. Gathering together on the floor to listen. To hear the stories about the jar, and the lake, and the skeleton and the Earth men and the crowd and the sound of thunder. They did like their dinosaurs.

And then one night when the wind was silent, the little boy appeared and said, “Would you read to us until you get sleepy, Momma?”

“I sure will, you rascal, you,” said the woman, whose eyes were blue and soft. “You bring them all in, and we’ll get started.”

During the day, the woman took her books to Douglasville. She allowed the sun to touch them. She read to people there, and they built a shaded place for her to sit. The people and their children came from all around to listen. The woman could not want for anything, because they needed her and loved her and she needed and loved them, too. Her newfound energy and life were contagious, in a good way. There was no time to sit and wait for the end. That would come someday, if it was coming at all. There was too much to do, to figure out, to build back. To try to make right.

But at night…

She had her children.

How many?

Hundreds? Thousands?

Very, very many.

The woman allowed herself to sometimes wonder if they were more than holograms and sparks. She wondered if they were the spirits of children yet to be born. She wondered if when they came to real life, they would not have some memory of the stories, some feeling that they knew them even before they heard them the first time. Because she was sure that through these children the stories would live forever.

The wind didn’t sound so lonely anymore. Life was a pleasure, not a chore. Maybe the birds would come back someday, and maybe the trees would grow strong. Maybe they would build nests again, and maybe from them would come the sweet song of youth.

But in the meantime, from the house came the sweet music of children’s laughter. From the house came the awed rush of electric breath. From the house came the voice of a woman, strong and steady and joyful to live because there were so many stories yet to be read.

So many.

And the house?

The house itself was never lonely again.

The house stood firm against any wind.

At night its blue glow lit up the land like a world full of candles.

The house was happy.

And so too were the woman and her children, both of the present and those yet to be born, in the towns she reached with her backpack of books and her green bicycle the color of May.