Free Quicker Than the Eye by Ray Bradbury Page A

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.

 THAT WOMAN ON THE LAWN
    Very late at night he heard the weeping on the lawn in front of his house. It was the sound of a woman crying. By its sound he knew it was not a girl or a mature woman, but the crying of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. It went on, then faded and stopped, and again started up, now moving this way or that on the late-summer wind.
    He lay in bed listening to it until it made his eyes fill with tears. He turned over, shut his eyes, let the tears fall, but could not stop the sound. Why should a young woman be weeping long after midnight out there?
    He sat up and the weeping stopped.
    At the window, he looked down. The lawn was empty but covered with dew. There was a trail of footsteps across the lawn to the middle where someone had stood turning, and another trail going off toward the garden around the house.
    The moon stood full in the sky and filled the lawn with its light, but there was no more sadness and only the footprints there.
    He stepped back from the window, suddenly chilled, and went down to heat and drink a cup of chocolate.
    He did not think of the weeping again until dusk the next day, and even then thought that it must be some woman from a house nearby, unhappy with life, perhaps locked out and in need of a place to let her sadness go.
    Yet . . .?
    As the twilight deepened, coming home he found himself hurrying from the bus, at a steady pace which astonished him. Why, why all this?
    Idiot, he thought. A woman unseen weeps under your window, and here at sunset the next day, you almost run.
    Yes, he thought, but her  voice!
    Was it beautiful, then?
    No. Only familiar.
    Where had he heard such a voice before, wordless in crying?
    Who could he ask, living in an empty house from which his parents had vanished long ago?
    He turned in at his front lawn and stood still, his eyes shadowed.
    What had he expected? That whoever she was would be waiting here? Was he that lonely that a single voice long after midnight roused all his senses?
    No. Simply put: he must know who the crying woman was.
    And he was certain she would return tonight as he slept.
    He went to bed at eleven, and awoke at three, panicked that he had missed a miracle. Lightning had destroyed a nearby town or an earthquake had shaken half the world to dust,