Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller, Mort Castle (Ed) Page B

are talking?”
    “Yes.”
    “But in the meantime, she’ll eventually love someone else and adopt a child?”
    “Yes.”
    “For fifteen years, I was her companion. All I want is for her to be happy. Even if it means not sharing her happiness . . .”
    Frank at last felt something: the sting of tears on his cheeks.
    “I’ll be glad to be a different sort of companion to her for the rest of her life.”
     
    About “The Companions”
    I intended “The Companions” as a reverse take on Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd.” The story is very personal. Everything that occurs in the first part of the story, all the events at the opera, actually happened to my wife and me. It was one of the eeriest evenings of my life, hurrying from L.A. to go to the opera, battling storms, meeting the old and young man (the younger man from Christ in the Desert) at the dinner, then sitting next to them at the opera, and then leaving the opera because of them, only to find that their car was parked next to ours. I began to think that perhaps my wife and I had guardian angels, that we were meant to leave the opera early to escape the storms, that I was in the land of Ray Bradbury.
     
    —David Morrell

THE EXCHANGE
    Thomas F. Monteleone
    J im Holloway was on fire.
    Burning with the inexhaustible fuel of youth, fired by the bellows of imagination. Actor, writer, magician, inventor—his ambitions and his dreams as scattered as the stars in a midnight sky. At the advanced age of fifteen, he’d somehow managed to drag the sense of wonder about the world from his earliest years into adolescence, and he attacked each morning with a need to do something special—that day, and every other to follow. Something new and different before nightfall.
    Every day.
    The kids in his high school mostly thought he was an odd duck, but he didn’t care. His sun-bright blond hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses gave him a striking, memorable appearance, but it was when he spoke that people tended to pay closer attention. Jim had a . . . a reverence in his voice when he talked about the world he perceived. His curiosity stretched from the magic life in a drop of water to the mysteries of Mars.
    He’d realized that life was an endless quest, full of discovery and adventure, if he would only allow it to be so.
    Alone in an unfamiliar city, he walked its avenues in search of the shop of none other than Maestro the Magician. Ads in the back pages of Amazing Stories promised miracles of illusion from an address in Providence, Rhode Island, and from that arcane location, Jim had received “The Secret of the Oriental Rings.” Because of a family trip, he now had the chance of a lifetime—to actually roam the shop’s shadowy aisles, to uncover its treasures firsthand.
    Other than a January wind to drive him through the streets, he had no idea where he was going. The cold air cut through him like an assassin’s blade, but he didn’t care. It was 1937 and Jim Holloway was on an adventure!
    Turning a corner, pulling the collar of his coat closer to his neck, he encountered a palace of dreams—the Majestic Theater on Washington Street. A massive statement of stone, like a temple from a forgotten age, its marquee spoke to Jim: THINGS TO COME. He’d seen the film when it premiered in Los Angeles, but encountering it here in this cold New England town made his pulse jump. Yes, he thought with a smile, there are certainly things to come—good things, wondrous and full of magic. He surged past the box office empowered by his endless optimism.
    But things changed when he spotted the thin man.
    At the far corner, a willowy figure struggled to step up onto the curb, then collapsed like a wind-beaten scarecrow. It happened so quickly, James reacted without thinking. He rushed along the sidewalk to where the man lay motionless, his pipe-stem legs folded beneath him at alarming angles.
    “Are you all right?” said James, leaning down to touch the man’s bony