Ray Bradbury



                    The Finnegan

    

    To say that I have been haunted for the rest of my life by the 

affair Finnegan is to grossly understate the events leading up to that 

final melancholy. Only now, at threescore and ten, can I write these 

words for an astonished constabulary who may well run with picks and 

shovels to unearth my truths or bury my lies.

    The facts are these:

    Three children went astray and were missed. Their bodies were 

found in the midst of Chatham Forest and each bore no marks of 

criminal assassination, but all had suffered their lifeblood to be 

drained. Only their skin remained like that of some discolored 

vineyard grapes withered by sunlight and no rain.

    From the withered detritus of these innocents rose fresh rumors of 

vampires or similar beasts with similar appetites. Such myths always 

pursue the facts to stun them in their tracks. It could only have been 

a tombyard beast, it was said, that fed on and destroyed three lives 

and ruined three dozen more.

    The children were buried in the most holy ground. Soon after, Sir 

Robert Merriweather, pretender to the throne of Sherlock Holmes but 

modestly refusing the claim, moved through the ten dozen doors of his 

antique house to come forth to search for this terrible thief of life. 

With myself, I might add, to carry his brandy and bumbershoot and warn 

him of underbrush pitfalls in that dark and mysterious forest.

    Sir Robert Merriweather, you say?

    Just that. Plus the ten times ten plus twelve amazing doors in his 

shut-up house.

    Were the doors used? Not one in nine. How had they appeared in Sir 

Robert's old manse? He had shipped them in, as a collector of doors, 

from Rio, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and mid-America. Once collected, he had 

stashed them, hinged, to be seen from both sides, on the walls of his 

upper and lower chambers. There he conducted tours of these odd 

portals for such antique fools as were ravished by the sight of the 

curiously overdone, the undersimplified, the rococo, or some First 

Empire cast aside by Napoleon's nephews or seized from Hermann 

Goering, who had in turn ransacked the Louvre. Others, pelted by 

Oklahoma dust storms, were jostled home in flatbeds cushioned by 

bright posters from carnivals buried in the windblown desolations of 

1936 America. Name your least favorite door, it was his. Name the best 

quality, he owned it also, hidden and safe, true beauties behind 

oblivion's portals.

    I had come to see his doors, not the deaths. At his behest, which 

was a command, I had bought my curiosity a steamship ticket and 

arrived to find Sir Robert involved not with ten dozen doors, but some 

great dark door. A mysterious portal, still un-found. And beneath? A 

tomb.

    Sir Robert hurried the grand tour, opening and shutting panels 

rescued from Peking, long buried near Etna, or filched from Nantucket. 

But his heart, gone sick, was not in this, what should have been 

delightful, tour.

    He described the spring rains that drenched the country to make 

things green, only to have people to walk out in that fine weather and 

one week find the body of a boy emptied of life through two incisions 

in his neck, and in the next weeks, the bodies of the two girls. 

People shouted for the police and sat drinking in pubs, their faces 

long and pale, while mothers locked their children home where fathers 

lectured on the dooms that lay in Chatham Forest.

    "Will you come with me," said Sir Robert at last, "on a very 

strange, sad picnic?"

    "I will," I said.

    So we snapped ourselves in weather-proofs, lugged a hamper of 

sandwiches and red wine, and plunged into the forest on a drear 

Sunday.

    There was time, as we moved down a hill into the dripping gloom of 

the trees, to recall what the papers had said about the vanished 

children's bloodless flesh, the police thrashing the forest ten dozen 

times, clueless, while the surrounding estates slammed their doors 

drum-tight at sunset.

    "Rain. Damn. Rain!" Sir Robert's pale face stared up, his gray 

mustache quivering over his thin mouth. He was sick and brittle and 

old. "Our picnic will be ruined!"

    "Picnic?" I said. "Will our killer join us for eats?"

    "I pray to God he will," Sir Robert said. "Yes, pray to God he 

will."

    We walked through a land that was now mists, now dim sunlight, now 

forest, now open glade, until we came into a silent part of the woods, 

a silence made of the way the trees grew wetly together and the way 

the green moss lay in swards and hillocks. Spring had not yet filled 

the empty trees. The sun was like an arctic disk, withdrawn, cold, and 

almost dead.

    "This is the place," said Sir Robert at last.

    "Where the children were found?" I inquired.

    "Their bodies empty as empty can be."

    I looked at the glade and thought of the children and the people 

who had stood over them with startled faces and the police who had 

come to whisper and touch and go away, lost.

    "The murderer was never apprehended?"

    "Not this clever fellow. How observant are you?" asked Sir Robert.

    "What do you want observed?"

    "There's the catch. The police slipped up. They were stupidly 

anthropomorphic about the whole bloody mess, seeking a killer with two 

arms, two legs, a suit of clothes, and a knife. So hypnotized with 

their human concept of the killer that they overlooked one obvious 

unbelievable fact about this place. So!"

    He gave his cane a quick light tap on the earth.

    Something happened. I stared at the ground. "Do that again," I 

whispered.

    "You saw it?"

    "I thought I saw a small trapdoor open and shut. May I have your 

cane?"

    He gave me the cane. I tapped the ground. It happened again.

    "A spider!" I cried. "Gone! God, how quick!"

    "Finnegan," Sir Robert muttered.

    "What?"

    "You know the old saying: in again, out again, Finnegan. Here."

    With his penknife, Sir Robert dug in the soil to lift an entire 

clod of earth, breaking off bits to show me the tunnel. The spider, in 

panic, leaped out its small wafer door and fell to the ground.

    Sir Robert handed me the tunnel. "Like gray velvet. Feel. A model 

builder, that small chap. A tiny shelter, camouflaged, and him alert. 

He could hear a fly walk. Then pounce out, seize, pop back, slam the 

lid!"

    "I didn't know you loved Nature."

    "Loathe it. But this wee chap, there's much we share. Doors. 

Hinges. Wouldn't consider other arachnids. But my love of portals drew 

me to study this incredible carpenter." Sir Robert worked the trap on 

its cobweb hinges. "What craftsmanship! And it all ties to the 

tragedies!"

    "The murdered children?"

    Sir Robert nodded. "Notice any special thing about this forest?"

    "It's too quiet."

    "Quiet!" Sir Robert smiled weakly. "Vast quantities of silence. No 

familiar birds, beetles, crickets, toads. Not a rustle or stir. The 

police didn't notice. Why should they? But it was this absence of 

sound and motion in the glade that prompted my wild theory about the 

murders."

    He toyed with the amazing structure in his hands.

    "What would you say if you could imagine a spider large enough, in 

a hideout big enough, so that a running child might hear a vacuumed 

sound, be seized, and vanish with a soft thud below. How say you?" Sir 

Robert stared at the trees. "Poppycock and bilge? Yet, why not? 

Evolution, selection, growth, mutations, and-pfft!"

    Again he tapped with his cane. A trapdoor flew open, shut.

    "Finnegan," he said.

    The sky darkened.

    "Rain!" Casting a cold gray eye at the clouds, he stretched his 

frail hand to touch the showers. "Damn! Arachnids hate rain. And so 

will our huge dark Finnegan."

    "Finnegan!" I cried irritably.

    "I believe in him, yes."

    "A spider larger than a child?!"

    "Twice as large."

    The cold wind blew a mizzle of rain over us. "Lord, I hate to 

leave. Quick, before we go. Here."

    Sir Robert raked away the old leaves with his cane, revealing two 

globular gray-brown objects.

    "What are they?" I bent. "Old cannonballs?"

    "No." He cracked the grayish globes. "Soil, through and through."

    I touched the crumbled bits.

    "Our Finnegan excavates," said Sir Robert. "To make his tunnel. 

With his large rakelike chelicerae he dislodges soil, works it into a 

ball, carries it in his jaws, and drops it beyond his hole."

    Sir Robert displayed half a dozen pellets on his trembling palm. 

"Normal balls evicted from a tiny trapdoor tunnel. Toy-size." He 

knocked his cane on the huge globes at our feet. "Explain those!"

    I laughed. "The children must've made them with mud!"

    "Nonsense!" cried Sir Robert irritably, glaring about at trees and 

earth. "By God, somewhere, our dark beast lurks beneath his velvet 

lid. We might be standing on it. Christ, don't stare! His door has 

beveled rims. Some architect, this Finnegan. A genius at camouflage."

    Sir Robert raved on and on, describing the dark earth, the 

arachnid, its fiddling legs, its hungry mouth, as the wind roared and 

the trees shook.

    Suddenly, Sir Robert flung up his cane.

    "No!" he cried.

    I had no time to turn. My flesh froze, my heart stopped.

    Something snatched my spine.

    I thought I heard a huge bottle uncorked, a lid sprung. Then this 

monstrous thing crawled down my back.

    "Here!" cried Sir Robert. "Now!"

    He struck with his cane. I fell, dead weight. He thrust the thing 

from my spine. He lifted it.

    The wind had cracked the dead tree branch and knocked it onto my 

back.

    Weakly, I tried to rise, shivering. "Silly," I said a dozen times. 

"Silly. Damn awful silly!"

    "Silly, no. Brandy, yes!" said Sir Robert. "Brandy?"

    The sky was very black now. The rain swarmed over us.

    

    Door after door after door, and at last into Sir Robert's country 

house study. A warm, rich room, where a fire smoldered on a drafty 

hearth. We devoured our sandwiches, waiting for the rain to cease. Sir 

Robert estimated that it would stop by eight o'clock, when, by 

moonlight, we might return, ever so reluctantly, to Chatham Forest. I 

remembered the fallen branch, its spidering touch, and drank both wine 

and brandy.

    "The silence in the forest," said Sir Robert, finishing his meal. 

"What murderer could achieve such a silence?"

    "An insanely clever man with a series of baited, poisoned traps, 

with liberal quantities of insecticide, might kill off every bird, 

every rabbit, every insect," I said.

    "Why should he do that?"

    "To convince us that there is a large spider nearby. To perfect 

his act."

    "We are the only ones who have noticed this silence; the police 

did not. Why should a murderer go to all that trouble for nothing?"

    "Why is a murderer? you might well ask."

    "I am not convinced." Sir Robert topped his food with wine. "This 

creature, with a voracious mouth, has cleansed the forest. With 

nothing left, he seized the children. The silence, the murders, the 

prevalence of trapdoor spiders, the large earth balls, it all fits."

    Sir Robert's fingers crawled about the desktop, quite like a 

washed, manicured spider in itself. He made a cup of his frail hands, 

held them up.

    "At the bottom of a spider's burrow is a dustbin into which drop 

insect remnants on which the spider has dined. Imagine the dustbin of 

our Grand Finnegan!"

    I imagined. I visioned a Great Legged thing fastened to its dark 

lid under the forest and a child running, singing in the half-light. A 

brisk insucked whisk of air, the song cut short, then nothing but an 

empty glade and the echo of a softly dropped lid, and beneath the dark 

earth the spider, fiddling, cabling, spinning the stunned child in its 

silently orchestrating legs.

    What would the dustbin of such an incredible spider resemble? What 

the remnants of many banquets? I shuddered.

    "Rain's letting up." Sir Robert nodded his approval. "Back to the 

forest. I've mapped the damned place for weeks. All the bodies were 

found in one half-open glade. That's where the assassin, if it was a 

man, arrives! Or where the unnatural silk-spinning, earth-tunneling 

architect of special doors abides his tomb."

    "Must I hear all this?" I protested.

    "Listen more." Sir Robert downed the last of his burgundy. "The 

poor children's prolapsed corpses were found at thirteen-day 

intervals. Which means that every two weeks our loathsome eight-legged 

hide-and-seeker must feed. Tonight is the fourteenth night after the 

last child was found, nothing but skin. Tonight our hidden friend must 

hunger afresh. So! Within the hour, I shall introduce you to Finnegan 

the great and horrible!"

    "All of which," I said, "makes me want to drink."

    "Here I go." Sir Robert stepped through one of his Louis the 

Fourteenth portals. "To find the last and final and most awful door in 

all my life. You will follow."

    Damn, yes! I followed.

    

    The sun had set, the rain was gone, and the clouds cleared off to 

show a cold and troubled moon. We moved in our own silence and the 

silence of the exhausted paths and glades while Sir Robert handed me a 

small silver pistol.

    "Not that that would help. Killing an outsize arachnid is sticky. 

Hard to know where to fire the first shot. If you miss, there'll be no 

time for a second. Damned things, large or small, move in the 

instant!"

    "Thanks." I took the weapon. "I need a drink."

    "Done." Sir Robert handed me a silver brandy flask. "Drink as 

needed."

    I drank. "What about you?"

    "I have my own special flask." Sir Robert lifted it. "For the 

right time."

    "Why wait?"

    "I must surprise the beast and mustn't be drunk at the encounter. 

Four seconds before the thing grabs me, I will imbibe of this dear 

Napoleon stuff, spiced with a rude surprise.

    "Surprise?"

    "Ah, wait. You'll see. So will this dark thief of life. Now, dear 

sir, here we part company. I this way, you yonder. Do you mind?"

    "Mind when I'm scared gutless? What's that?"

    "Here. If I should vanish." He handed me a sealed letter. "Read it 

aloud to the constabulary. It will help them locate me and Finnegan, 

lost and found."

    "Please, no details. I feel like a damned fool following you while 

Finnegan, if he exists, is underfoot snug and warm, saying, 'Ah, those 

idiots above running about, freezing. I think I'll let them freeze.' "

    "One hopes not. Get away now. If we walk together, he won't jump 

up. Alone, he'll peer out the merest crack, glom the scene with a huge 

bright eye, flip down again, ssst, and one of us gone to darkness."

    "Not me, please. Not me."

    We walked on about sixty feet apart and beginning to lose one 

another in the half moonlight.

    "Are you there?" called Sir Robert from half the world away in 

leafy dark.

    "I wish I weren't," I yelled back.

    "Onward!" cried Sir Robert. "Don't lose sight of me. Move closer. 

We're near on the site. I can intuit, I almost feel-"

    As a final cloud shifted, moonlight glowed brilliantly to show Sir 

Robert waving his arms about like antennae, eyes half shut, gasping 

with expectation.

    "Closer, closer," I heard him exhale. "Near on. Be still. Perhaps 

. .

    He froze in place. There' was something in his aspect that made me 

want to leap, race, and yank him off the turf he had chosen.

    "Sir Robert, oh, God!" I cried. "Run!"

    He froze. One hand and arm orchestrated the air, feeling, probing, 

while his other hand delved, brought forth his silver-coated flask of 

brandy. He held it high in the moonlight, a toast to doom. Then, 

afflicted with need, he took one, two, three, my God, four incredible 

swigs!

    Arms out, balancing the wind, tilting his head back, laughing like 

a boy, he swigged the last of his mysterious drink.

    "All right, Finnegan, below and beneath!" he cried. "Come get me!"

    He stomped his foot.

    Cried out victorious.

    And vanished.

    It was all over in a second.

    A flicker, a blur, a dark bush had grown up from the earth with a 

whisper, a suction, and the thud of a body dropped and a door shut.

    The glade was empty.

    "Sir Robert. Quick!"

    But there was no one to quicken.

    Not thinking that I might be snatched and vanished, I lurched to 

the spot where Sir Robert had drunk his wild toast.

    I stood staring down at earth and leaves with not a sound save my 

heart beating while the leaves blew away to reveal only pebbles, dry 

grass, and earth.

    I must have lifted my head and bayed to the moon like a dog, then 

fell to my knees, fearless, to dig for lids, for tunneled tombs where 

a voiceless tangle of legs wove themselves, binding and mummifying a 

thing that had been my friend. This is his final door, I thought 

insanely, crying the name of my friend.

    I found only his pipe, cane, and empty brandy flask, flung down 

when he had escaped night, life, everything. 

    Swaying up, I fired the pistol six times here into the unanswering 

earth, a dumb thing gone stupid as I finished and staggered over his 

instant graveyard, his locked-in tomb, listening for muffled screams, 

shrieks, cries, but heard none. I ran in circles, with no ammunition 

save my weeping shouts. I would have stayed all night, but a downpour 

of leaves, a great spidering flourish of broken branches, fell to 

panic and suffer my heart. I fled, still calling his name to a silence 

lidded by clouds that hid the moon.

    At his estate, I beat on the door, wailing, yanking, until I 

recalled: it opened inward, it was unlocked.

    Alone in the library, with only liquor to help me live, I read the 

letter that Sir Robert had left behind:

    

    My dear Douglas:

    I am old and have seen much but am not mad. Finnegan exists. My 

chemist had provided me with a sure poison that I will mix in my 

brandy for our walk. I will drink all. Finnegan, not knowing me as a 

poisoned morsel will give me a swift invite. Now you see me, now you 

don't. I will then be the weapon of his death, minutes after my own. I 

do not think there is another outsize nightmare like him on earth. 

Once gone, that's the end.

    Being old, I am immensely curious. I fear not death, for my 

physicians tell me that f no accidents kill me, cancer will.

    I thought of giving a poisoned rabbit to our nightmare assassin. 

But then I'd never know where he was or if he really existed. Finnegan 

would die unseen in his monstrous closet, and I never the wiser. This 

way, for one victorious moment, I will know. Fear for me. Envy me. 

Pray for me. Sorry to abandon you without farewells. Dear friend, 

carry on.

    

    I folded the letter and wept.

    No more was ever heard of him.

    Some say Sir Robert killed himself, an actor in his own melodrama, 

and that one day we shall unearth his brooding, lost, and Gothic body 

and that it was he who killed the children and that his preoccupation 

with doors and hinges, and more doors, led him, crazed, to study this 

one species of spider, and wildly plan and build the most amazing door 

in history, an insane burrow into which he popped to die, before my 

eyes, thus hoping to perpetuate the incredible Finnegan.

    But I have found no burrow. I do not believe a man could construct 

such a pit, even given Sir Robert's overwhelming passion for doors.

    I can only ask, would a man murder, draw his victims' blood, build 

an earthen vault? For what motive? Create the finest secret exit in 

all time? Madness. And what of those large grayish balls of earth 

supposedly tossed forth from the spider's lair?

    Somewhere, Finnegan and Sir Robert lie clasped in a velvet-lined 

unmarked crypt, deep under. Whether one is the paranoiac alter ego of 

the other, I cannot say. But the murders have ceased, the rabbits once 

more rush in Chatham Forest, and its bushes teem with butterflies and 

birds. It is another spring, and the children run again through a loud 

glade, no longer silent.

    Finnegan and Sir Robert, requiescat in peace.