The
Foghorn
Ray
Bradbury
OUT there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every
night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery
and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the grey
sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again,
to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was
always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the
rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make
the waves turn high and foam.
It's a lonely life, but you're used to it now, aren't you?
asked McDunn.
Yes, I said. You're a good talker, thank the Lord.
Well, it's your turn on land tomorrow, he said, smiling,
to dance the ladies and drink gin.
What do you think McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?
On the mysteries of the sea. McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold
November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred
directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn't
a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road, which came lonely
through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of
cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.
The mysteries of the sea, said McDunn thoughtfully. You
know, the ocean's the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a
thousand shapes and colours, no two alike. Strange.
One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea
surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of
trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across
them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big
peacock's tail, moving out there until
I shivered. I looked out at the long grey lawn of the sea
stretching away into nothing and nowhere.
Oh, the sea's full. McDunn puffed his pipe nervously,
blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn't said why. For all our engines
and so called submarines, it'll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on
the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real
terror. Think of it, it's still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under
there. While we've paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other's
countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep
and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet.
Yes, it's an old world.
Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell
you.
We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At
the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there'd be no reflection in the
plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its
oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.
Sounds like an animal, don't it? McDunn nodded to himself.
A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here
on the edge of ten billion years calling out to the Deeps, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I better
prepare you. About this time of year, he said, studying the murk and fog,
something comes to visit the lighthouse.
The swarms of fish like you said?
No, this is something else. I've put off telling you
because you might think I'm daft. But tonight's the latest I can put it off,
for if my calendar's marked right from last year,
tonight's the night it comes. I won t go into detail, you'll have to see it
yourself. Just sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel
and take the motorboat into land and get your car parked there at the dinghy
pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your
lights burning nights. I won't question or blame you. It's happened three years
now, and this is the only time anyone's been here with me to verify it. You
wait and watch.
Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When
we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had
some theories about the Fog Horn itself.
One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the
sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We
need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make
a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice
that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house
when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like
November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound
that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in
their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to
all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and
they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of
eternity and the briefness of life. '
The Fog Horn blew.
I made up that story, said McDunn quietly, to try to
explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The Fog
Horn calls, I think, it comes.. .
But- I said.
Sssst! said McDunn. There! He nodded out to the Deeps.
Something was swimming towards the lighthouse tower.
It was a cold night, as I have said; the high tower was
cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through
the ravelling mist. You couldn't see far and you couldn't see plain, but there
was the deep sea moving on its way about the night earth, flat and quiet, the
colour of grey mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and
there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble,
a bit of froth. And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large
head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck. And thennot a
bodybut more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on
a slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a little island
of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There
was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the
monster at ninety or a hundred feet.
I don't know what I said. I said something.
Steady, boy, steady, whispered McDunn.
It's impossible! I said.
No, Johnny, we're impossible. It's like it always was ten
million years ago. It hasn't changed. It's us and the land that've changed,
become impossible. Us!
It swam slowly and with a great dark majesty out in the icy
waters, far away. The fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its
shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense
light, red, white, red, white, like a disc held high and sending a message in
primaeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.
It's a dinosaur of some sort I crouched down, holding to
the stair rail.
Yes, one of the tribe.
But they died out!
No, only hid away in the Deeps. Deep,
deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn't that a word now, Johnny, a real
word, it says so much: the Deeps. There's all the
coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that.
What'll we do?
Do? We got our job, we can't leave. Besides, we're safer
here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing's as big as a destroyer
and almost as swift.
But here, why does it come here?
The next moment I had my answer.
The Fog Horn blew.
And the monster answered.
A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my
body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster
roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and
the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of
isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.
Now, whispered McDunn, do you know why it comes here?
I nodded.
All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far
out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time,
perhaps it's a million years old, this one creature. Think
of it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe it's the last
of its kind. I sort of think that's true. Anyway, here come men on land and
build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it
and sound it out towards the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea
memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you're
alone, all alone in a world not made for you, a world where you have to hide.
But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and
goes, and you stir from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like
the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean
sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles
of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you
begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slakes of cod and minnow,
on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through
September when the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn
still calling you on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself
day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still
alive, You've got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once you'd explode. So it
takes you all of three months to surface, and then a number of days to swim
through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the
night, Johnny, the biggest damn monster in creation. And here's the lighthouse
calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the
water, and a body like your body, and, most important of all, a voice like your
voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you understand?
The Fog Horn blew.
The monster answered.
I saw it all, I knew it allthe million years of waiting
alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of
isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies
cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths
and sabre-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white
ants upon the hills.
The Fog Horn blew.
Last year, said McDunn, that creature swam round and
round, round and round, all night. Not coming too near, puzzled, I'd say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry after
coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the
sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off
away from the heat and the silence and didn't come back. I suppose it's been
brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way.
The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog
Horn crying at each other. As the lights hit them, the monster's eyes were fire
and ice, fire and ice.
That's life for you, said McDunn. Someone
always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving
some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to
destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.
The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.
The Fog Horn blew.
Let's see what happens, said McDunn.
He switched the Fog Horn off.
The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could
hear our hearts pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow
greased turn of the light.
The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes
blinked. Its mouth gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched
its head this way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the
fog. It peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It
reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with
angry torment.
McDunn! I cried. Switch on the horn!
McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it
on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fish-skin
glittering in webs between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The
huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a
cauldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn
cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which
shattered in upon us.
McDunn seized my arm. Downstairs!
The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog
Horn and the monster roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs.
Quick!
We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down towards us. We
ducked under the stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand
concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The
monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and
I, holding tight, while our world exploded.
Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and the
wash of the sea on the raw stones.
That and the other sound.
Listen, said McDunn quietly. Listen.
We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a
great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the
loneliness of the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the
sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone's thickness away from our
cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The
thing that had called to it across a million years was gone. And the monster
was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. The
sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding
the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night,
must've thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the
And so it went for the rest of that night.
The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the
rescuers came out to dig us from our stoned-under cellar.
It fell apart, is all, said Mr. McDunn gravely. We had a
few bad knocks from the waves and it just crumbled. He pinched my arm.
There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The
only thing was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the
fallen tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed
empty on the shore.
The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time
I had a job in the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that
glowed yellow on autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke. As
for McDunn, he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own
specifications out of steel-reinforced concrete. Just in case, he said.
The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone
one evening late and parked my car and looked across the grey waters and
listened to the new horn sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far
out there, by itself.
The monster?
It never came back.
It's gone away, said McDunne It's gone back to the Deeps.
It's learned you can't love anything too much in this world. It's gone into the
deepest Deeps to wait another million years. Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out
there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little
planet. waiting and waiting.
I sat in my car, listening. I couldn't see the lighthouse or
the light standing out in
I sat there wishing there was something I could say.