A Graveyard for Lunatics

A GRAVEYARD

FOR LUNATICS

Another Tale of Two Cities

RAY BRADBURY

GRAFTON BOOKS

A Division of the Collins PublishingGroup

LONDON GLASGOW TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

ALSO BY RAY BRADBURY

The Toynbee Converter

Death Is a Lonely Business

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns

Long After Midnight

Dandelion Wine

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

The Halloween Tree

The October Country

I Sing the Body Electric!

Switch on the 'tight

The Illustrated Man

The Martian Chronicles

R Is for Rocket

Dark Carnival

The Machineries of Joy

The Anthem Sprinters

A Medicine for Melancholy

Moby Dick (screenplay)

Fahrenheit

Golden Apples of the Sun

S Is for Space

Grafton Books

A Division of the Collins Publishing Group 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA

Published by Grafton Books 1990

Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1990

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-246-13744-4

Printed in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham plc

Chatham, Kent

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

With love, to the living:

SID STEBEL,

who showed me how to solve

my own mystery;

ALEXANDRA, my daughter,

who cleaned up after us.

GEORGE BURNS,

who told me that I was a writer

when I was fourteen.

And to the dead:

ROUBEN MAMOULIAN,

GEORGE CUKOR,

JOHN HUSTON,

BILL SKALL,

FRITZ LANG,

and JAMES WONG HOWE.

And to RAY HARRYHAUSEN, for obvious reasons.

1

Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glades cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead.

As the lights went out and the motions stopped and the wind that blew around the corners of the studio buildings cooled, an incredible melancholy seemed to sweep from the front gate of the living all the way along through twilight avenues toward that high brick wall that separated the two cities within a city. And suddenly the streets were filled with something one could speak of only as remembrance. For while the people had gone away, they left behind them architectures that were haunted by the ghosts of incredible happenings.

For indeed it was the most outrageous city in the world, where anything could happen and always did. Ten thousand deaths had happened here, and when the deaths were done, the people got up, laughing, and strolled away. Whole tenement blocks were set afire and did not burn. Sirens shrieked and police cars careened around corners, only to have the officers peel off their blues, cold-cream their orange pancake makeup, and walk home to small bungalow court apartments out in that great and mostly boring world.

Dinosaurs prowled here, one moment in miniature, and the next looming fifty feet tall above half-clad virgins who screamed on key. From here various Crusades departed to peg their armor and stash their spears at Western