The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Another Fine Mess

Ray Bradbury

Location:  Vendome Heights, Los Angeles.

Time:  Midsummer, 1995.

Eyewitness Description:  “At first there was only a creaking of wheels down in the dark, like crickets, and then a moan of wood and a hum of piano strings, and then one voice lamenting about this job, and the other voice claiming it had nothing to do with it, and then the thumps as two derby hats fell . . .”

Author:  Ray Douglas Bradbury (1920—) was born in the small town of Waukegan, Illinois, but later moved with his family to Los Angeles where much of his fiction has reflected his interest in rural life and the wonder-world of films. His early stories were written for the legendary horror magazine, Weird Tales – several featuring the supernatural – but he later turned to Science Fiction to create the books that made his name, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1951) and The Illustrated Man (1951), all of which have been filmed with varying degrees of success. Few writers have better captured the magic of film making in Hollywood on paper than Ray, although his own experiences as a scriptwriter with producers and directors in trying to bring his imaginative words to the screen have often been fraught. His love of old movies and their stars is evident in many of his books and short stories, but rarely more deeply felt than in this ghost story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in April 1995. The title of Ray’s story all but gives away the stars of this little comedy masterpiece – though nothing will prepare you for its moving and poignant finale.

The sounds began in the middle of summer in the middle of the night.

Bella Winters sat up in bed about three a.m. and listened and then lay back down. Ten minutes later she heard the sounds again, out in the night, down the hill.

Bella Winters lived in a first-floor apartment on top of Vendome Heights, near Effie Street in Los Angeles, and had lived there now for only a few days, so it was all new to her, this old house on an old street with an old staircase, made of concrete, climbing steeply straight up from the low-lands below, one hundred and twenty steps, count them. And right now . . .

“Someone’s on the steps,” said Bella to herself.

“What?” said her husband, Sam, in his sleep.

“There are some men out on the steps,” said Bella. “Talking, yelling, not fighting, but almost. I heard them last night, too, and the night before, but . . .”

“What?” Sam muttered.

“Shh, go to sleep. I’ll look.”

She got out of bed in the dark and went to the window, and yes, two men were indeed talking out there, grunting, groaning, now loud, now soft. And there was another noise, a kind of bumping, sliding, thumping, like a huge object being carted up the hill.

“No one could be moving in at this hour of the night, could they?” asked Bella of the darkness, the window, and herself.

“No,” murmured Sam.

“It sounds like . . .”

“Like what?” asked Sam, fully awake now.

“Like two men moving—”

“Moving what, for God’s sake?”

“Moving a piano. Up those steps.”

“At three in the morning!?”

“A piano and two men. Just listen.”

The husband sat up, blinking, alert.

Far off, in the middle of the hill, there was a kind of harping strum, the noise a piano makes when suddenly thumped and its harp strings hum.

“There, did you hear?”

“Jesus, you’re right. But why would anyone steal—”

“They’re not stealing, they’re delivering.”

“A piano?”

“I didn’t make the rules, Sam. Go out and ask. No, don’t; I will.”

And she wrapped herself in her robe and was out the door and on the sidewalk.

“Bella,” Sam whispered fiercely behind the porch screen. “Crazy.”

“So what can happen at night to a woman fifty-five, fat, and ugly?” she wondered.

Sam did not answer.

She moved quietly to the rim of the hill. Somewhere down there she could hear the two men wrestling with a huge object. The piano on occasion gave a strumming hum and fell silent. Occasionally one of the men yelled or gave orders.

“The voices,” said Bella. “I know them from somewhere,” she whispered and moved in utter dark on stairs that were only a long pale ribbon going down, as a voice echoed:

“Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.”

Bella froze. Where have I heard that voice, she wondered, a million times!

“Hello,” she called.

She moved, counting the steps, and stopped.

And there was no one there.

Suddenly she was very cold. There was nowhere for the strangers to have gone to. The hill was steep and a long way down and a long way up, and they had been burdened with an upright piano, hadn’t they?

How come I know upright? she thought. I only heard. But – yes, upright! Not only that, but inside a box!

She turned slowly and as she went back up the steps, one by one, slowly, slowly, the voices began to sound again, below, as if, disturbed, they had waited for her to go away.

“What are you doing?” demanded one voice.

“I was just—” said the other.

“Give me that!” cried the first voice.

That other voice, thought Bella, I know that, too. And I know what’s going to be said next!

“Now,” said the echo far down the hill in the night, “just don’t stand there, help me!”

“Yes!” Bella closed her eyes and swallowed hard and half fell to sit on the steps, getting her breath back as black-and-white pictures flashed in her head. Suddenly it was 1929 and she was very small, in a theater with dark and light pictures looming above the first row where she sat, transfixed, and then laughing, and then transfixed and laughing again.

She opened her eyes. The two voices were still down there, a faint wrestle and echo in the night, despairing and thumping each other with their hard derby hats.

Zelda, thought Bella Winters. I’ll call Zelda. She knows everything. She’ll tell me what this is. Zelda, yes!

Inside, she dialed Z and E and L and D and A before she saw what she had done and started over. The phone rang a long while until Zelda’s voice, angry with sleep, spoke half-way across L.A.

“Zelda, this is Bella!”

“Sam just died?”

“No, no, I’m sorry—”

“You’re sorry?”