Free Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories by Charles Beaumont

nourished? What will we do?"

"The world's all dead," a child moaned. "Dead as dead, the whole world…" .

"Todo el mund-"

"Monsieur Kroner, Monsieur Kroner, what will we do?"

Kroner smiled, "Do?" He looked up through the still-hanging poison cloud, the dun blanket, up to where the moon was now risen in full coldness. His voice was steady, but it lacked life. "What some of us have done before," he said. "We'll go back and wait. It ain't the first time. It ain't the last."

A little fat bald man with old eyes sighed and began to waver in the October dusk. The outline of his form wavered and disappeared in the shadows under the trees where the moonlight did not reach. Others followed him as Kroner talked.

"Same thing we'll do again and likely keep on doing. We'll go back and-sleep. And we'll wait. Then it'll start all over again and folks'll build their cities-new folks with new blood-and then we'll wake up. Maybe a long time yet. But it ain't so bad; it's quiet, and time passes." He lifted a small girl of fifteen or sixteen with pale cheeks and red lips. "Come on, now! Why, just think of the appetite you'll have all built up!"

The girl smiled. Kroner faced the crowd and waved his hands, large hands, rough from the stone of midnight pyramids and the feel of muskets, boil-speckled from night hours in packing plants and trucking lines; broken by the impact of a tomahawk and machine-gun bullet; but white where the dirt was not caked, and bloodless. Old hands, old beyond years.

As he waved, the wind came limping back from the mountains. It blew the heavy iron bell high in the steepled white barn, and set the signboards creaking, and lifted ancient dusts and hissed again through the dead trees.

Kroner watched the air turn black. He listened to it fill with the flappings and the flutterings and the squeakings. He waited; then he stopped waving and sighed and began to walk.

He walked to a place of vines and heavy brush. Here he paused for a moment and looked out at the silent place of high dark grass, of hidden huddled tombs, of scrolls and stone-frozen children stained silver in the night's wet darkness; at the crosses he did not look. The people were gone, the place was empty.

Kroner kicked away the foliage. Then he got into the coffin and closed the lid.

Soon he was asleep.
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    Introduction to
THE DEVIL, YOU SAY?

by Howard Browne
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In 1951, as the then editor of the Ziff-Davis Fiction Group, I bought "The Devil, You Say?"-Charles Beaumont's first story sale. This obviously made me the first to recognize his unique talents as a writer.

Not true. As I recall, TDYS came into our editorial offices via the "slush pile," i.e. the daily raft of unsolicited submissions to the several fiction magazines the company published at the time, It was the staff's job to go through the pile in the unlikely chance of coming across something we could use.

At the time Lila Shaffer-a gifted young woman with an unerring ability to separate the occasional grain of wheat from all that chaff-was associate editor of both Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures.

As I recall, she plunked the Beaumont story on the desk in front of me, said something like, "This is the best thing I've come across in I don't know how long. You've got to read it. Right now!", and sat down.

I said, "Since you put it that way," and began reading.

After the first four or five pages, 1 looked up at her, said, "You know damned well I don't like stories that open with someone saying 'Let me tell you what happened to me a while back.' Lacks immediacy."

"Read," she said.

I read the rest of it, handed her the pages, said, "Who is this guy?"

She said, "I don't know. I never heard of him before."

"Send a check," I said. "And a letter saying we want first crack at anything else he Writes,"

Unfortunately nothing came of it. Playboy and Rogue paid better rates than we did.

A few years later I was brought to Hollywood to write for motion pictures and television.