October 18, 2025 • 25 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Mine. We welcome to a half hour of mind Wegg
Short Stories from the world is Speculator section. This is
(00:46):
Michael Hanson. The story of this half hour is The
Foghorn by Ray Bradbury, copyright nineteen fifty one by the
Curtis Publishing Company.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Out there in the cool water, far from land, they
waited every night. They got into the fog that came,
and we oiled the brass machine, ringing like the fucking way.
The stone tower became like two birds and the gray sky,
and mcdone and I sent the light, touching up the reds,
then lights the right again, the lights in the ships.
(01:41):
And if they did not see our lights, and there
was always our voice, the great deep cry of our foghorn,
shuddering through the rags and mist to startle the goulds
away like neck, some scattered cards, and like the wavester
nigh and the fault.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
It's a lonely life. But you're used to But now,
aren't you, asked mcdonn Yes, I said, yes, you're a
good talker. Thanks Lord well S, you're turn on land tomorrow.
You're turned to dance the ladies and drink gin. What
do you think? Mcdonne what do you think when I
leave you out here alone on the mysteries of the sea?
(02:24):
Mcdonn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven
of the 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 one hundred miles along the coast, just
a road which came lonely through that country to the sea,
with a few cars on it, a stretch of two
(02:46):
miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare
few ships. I think about the mysteries of the sea.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
You know.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
The ocean's the biggest damn snowflake ever. It rolls and
swells a thousand shapes and colors, no to alike. Strange.
One night years ago I was here alone when all
the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made
them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of
(03:19):
trembling and staring up at the tower, light going red
whites 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 midnight, and then without
so much as a sound, they slipped away. The million
(03:41):
of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in
some sort of way, they came all those miles to
worship strange. But think how the tower must look to them,
standing seventy feet above the water, the godlight flashing out
from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monstrous voice.
(04:05):
They never came back, these fish, But don't you think
for a while they thought they were in the presence.
I shivered, and I looked out at the long gray
lawn of the sea, stretching away into nothing and nowhere,
oh the sea's four. Mcdunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking.
(04:29):
You had been nervous all day, and I hadn't said
why we're 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 no real terror, I think of it. It's still
(04:51):
the year three hundred thousand before Christ. Down under there.
While we've paraded around with trumpets lopping off each other's
countries and heads, they've 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,
(05:13):
all right. Come on, I got something special. I've been
shaving up to tell you. We ascended the eighties steps,
talking and taking our time at the top of the
gun switched off the room like so, there'd been no
reflection on the lake glass. The great eye of the
light was humming, turning easily in its oiled sockets. The
(05:38):
fog horn was blowing steadily once every fifteen seconds. Sounds
like an animal, don't, 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,
(05:58):
and the deeps dew sir, Yes they do. You've been
here now for three months, Johnny July. Better prepare you
about this time of year, something something comes to visit
the lighthouse. And he studied the murk and fog, the
(06:23):
swarms of fish like you said McDonald, No, 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. Worth My calendar is marked right from
last year. Tonight's the night it comes, and I won't
go into the tail. You'll have to see it for yourself.
(06:45):
Just sit down there. If you want. Tomorrow you can
pack your duffel and take the motor boat into land
and get your car park there at the Dingy Pierre
and the cape, and drive on back to some little
inmand town and keep your lights burning nights. I won't question,
never blame you. It's happened three years now, and this
is the only time anyone's been here with me to
(07:08):
verify it. You wait and watch half an hour pasts
with only a few whispers between us. When we grew
tired of waiting, mcdonn began describing some of his ideas
to me. He had some theories on the Foghorn itself.
One day, many years ago, a man walked along and
(07:31):
stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold,
sunless shore, and said, we need a voice to crawl
across the water to warn ships. I'll make one. I'll
make a voice like all the 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,
(07:53):
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 and the hard cold shore.
I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one
(08:15):
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
(08:38):
of life. The fog horn blew. I made up that
story to try to explain why this thing keeps coming
back to the lighthouse every year. The fog horn calls it,
I think, and it comes. But and mcdunn knotted out
(09:03):
to the deeps. Something was swimming toward the last tower.
It was a cold night, as I have said, The
high Tower was cold, the light coming and going in,
the fog horn calling and calling through the raveling mist.
You couldn't see far, and you couldn't see plane. But
there was the deep sea moving on its way about
(09:25):
the night. Earth flat and quiet, the color of gray, 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, arising a bubble, a bit of froth.
And then from the surface of the cold sea came
ahead a large head, dark colored, with immense eyes, and
(09:48):
then a neck, and then not a body, but 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 on the subterranean.
(10:09):
There was a flicker of tail, and all from head
to tip of tail. Eye estimated the monster at ninety
or a hundred feet. I don't know what I said.
I said something. Mcdunn whispered, Steady, boy, steady, it's impossible. No, Johnny,
we're impossible. It's like it always was ten million years ago.
(10:34):
It hasn't changed. It's us and the land that have changed.
Become impossible. Hush. 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.
(10:55):
One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed
back our immense lights, red whites, red whites, like a disk,
held high and sending the message in plinyful code. It
was a silence as the fog through which it swam.
I crouched down, holding to the stair rail. I it's
a dinosaur some sort, Yes, one of the tribe. But
(11:20):
they died out, No, only hid away in the deep,
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 a word
(11:42):
like that. What do we do do? Hm? We've got
our job and 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
(12:03):
I had my answer the fog horn, 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
(12:23):
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 foghorn itself, lonely and vast and far away,
(12:45):
the sound of isolation, a bueless sea, a cold night,
a partness. That was the sound. Now you know why
it comes here. I nodded all year long, Johnny, that
(13:06):
poor monster. They're 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 celastoid's kind. I sort of think that's true. Anyway,
(13:27):
here come men on land and build this lighthouse five
years ago, and stet up their fog horn and sound it,
and sound it out toward the place where you bury
yourself and sleep and see memories of a world where
there were thousands like yourself. But now now you are alone,
all alone, in a world not made for you, a
world where you have to hide. But the sound of
(13:51):
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 with thousands miles of water, faint and familiar, and
(14:15):
the furnace in your berry stokes up and you begin
to rise slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slikes
of cod and minnow and rivers of jellyfish, and you
rise slow through the autumn months through September when the
fog started, through October with more fog, and the horns
(14:36):
still calling you on, and then laid 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,
(14:58):
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,
(15:21):
a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny?
Do you understand the foregorn blue? The monster answered, I
saw it all. I knew it all. The million years
(15:41):
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 saber tooths had their day
in saying and carpets, and men ran like white ants
(16:03):
upon the hills. The fog horn blue last year, last year,
that creature swam round and round and round all night,
not coming too near puddled. I'd say, afraid, maybe, and
a bit angry after coming all this way. But the
(16:24):
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 in 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 one hundred yards off now,
(16:50):
It and the fog horn crying at each other as
the lights hit the monster's eyes with fire, and I fire,
and I that's life for you someone always waiting for,
someone who never comes home, always someone loving something more
(17:12):
than that thing loves lamb and after a while you
want to destroy whatever that thing is so it can't
hurt you anymore. The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.
The fog horn blue. Let's see what happens. Mcdunn switched
(17:36):
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 where the slow, greased
turn of the light. The monster stopped and froze. Its
great lantern eyes blinked, its mouth gaped. It gave a
(17:58):
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
(18:19):
filled with angry torment. Mcdone switch on the horn. McDon
fumbled with a switch, but even as he flicked on,
the monster was wearing 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,
(18:42):
like the cauldron into which I might drop screaming. The
tower shook, the fog horn cried, the monster tried, it
seized the tower and mashed at the glass, which shattered
in upon us. Macdone seized my arms dumbly. Downstairs, the
tower rocked, trembled and started to give the fog horn,
(19:06):
and the monster roared, and we stumbled and half fell
down the stairs quick Johnny, we reached the bottom as
the tower buckled down toward 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,
(19:31):
the monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell, and
we knelt together mcdonn and I, holding tight while our
world exploded. Then it was over. It was over, and
there was nothing but darkness in the wash of the
sea and the raw stones that and the other sound listen, listen.
(20:01):
We waited a moment, and then I began to hear it. First,
a great vacuum, 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 stones thickness away from
(20:23):
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
(20:47):
far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything,
but passing and hearing. Late that night must have thought,
there it is the lonely sound, the lonesome bay horn.
All's well, We've rounded the cape. And so it went
for the rest of the night. The sun was hot
(21:12):
and yellow. The next afternoon, when the rescuers came out
to vegas from our it fell apart as all. We
had a few bad knocks from the waves, and the
just crumbled. Mcdunne pinched my arm. There was nothing to see.
The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing
(21:33):
was a great oltjake 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.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
But by that time I had a job in the
little town, and a wife, and a good, small, warm
house that good yellow.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
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 of steel reinforced concrete just
in case. He said. The new lighthouse was ready in November,
I drove down alone when evening late.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
And parked my car and looked across the.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Great Waters and listened to the new horn sounding once twice, three,
four times a minute, whar out there by itself, the monster.
It never came back. It's gone away. Mcgunn said, it's
(22:41):
gone away. 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. Await another million years, Ah,
poor thing waiting not there, waiting, not there, while man
(23:02):
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 lonesome Bay.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
I could only hear the horn, the horn, the horn.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
It sounded like the monster calling. I sat there wishing
there was something I could say. You've heard Ray Bradberry's
(24:18):
The fog Orn copyright nineteen fifty one by the Curtis
Publishing Company. This is Michael Hanson Technical operation for this
program by Bob Chan. Mind webs is a production of
WHA Radio in Madison, a service of the University of
Wisconsin Extension. Also
Mine. We welcome to a half hour of mind Wegg
Short Stories from the world is Speculator section. This is
(00:46):
Michael Hanson. The story of this half hour is The
Foghorn by Ray Bradbury, copyright nineteen fifty one by the
Curtis Publishing Company.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Out there in the cool water, far from land, they
waited every night. They got into the fog that came,
and we oiled the brass machine, ringing like the fucking way.
The stone tower became like two birds and the gray sky,
and mcdone and I sent the light, touching up the reds,
then lights the right again, the lights in the ships.
(01:41):
And if they did not see our lights, and there
was always our voice, the great deep cry of our foghorn,
shuddering through the rags and mist to startle the goulds
away like neck, some scattered cards, and like the wavester
nigh and the fault.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
It's a lonely life. But you're used to But now,
aren't you, asked mcdonn Yes, I said, yes, you're a
good talker. Thanks Lord well S, you're turn on land tomorrow.
You're turned to dance the ladies and drink gin. What
do you think? Mcdonne what do you think when I
leave you out here alone on the mysteries of the sea?
(02:24):
Mcdonn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven
of the 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 one hundred miles along the coast, just
a road which came lonely through that country to the sea,
with a few cars on it, a stretch of two
(02:46):
miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare
few ships. I think about the mysteries of the sea.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
You know.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
The ocean's the biggest damn snowflake ever. It rolls and
swells a thousand shapes and colors, no to alike. Strange.
One night years ago I was here alone when all
the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made
them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of
(03:19):
trembling and staring up at the tower, light going red
whites 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 midnight, and then without
so much as a sound, they slipped away. The million
(03:41):
of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in
some sort of way, they came all those miles to
worship strange. But think how the tower must look to them,
standing seventy feet above the water, the godlight flashing out
from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monstrous voice.
(04:05):
They never came back, these fish, But don't you think
for a while they thought they were in the presence.
I shivered, and I looked out at the long gray
lawn of the sea, stretching away into nothing and nowhere,
oh the sea's four. Mcdunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking.
(04:29):
You had been nervous all day, and I hadn't said
why we're 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 no real terror, I think of it. It's still
(04:51):
the year three hundred thousand before Christ. Down under there.
While we've paraded around with trumpets lopping off each other's
countries and heads, they've 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,
(05:13):
all right. Come on, I got something special. I've been
shaving up to tell you. We ascended the eighties steps,
talking and taking our time at the top of the
gun switched off the room like so, there'd been no
reflection on the lake glass. The great eye of the
light was humming, turning easily in its oiled sockets. The
(05:38):
fog horn was blowing steadily once every fifteen seconds. Sounds
like an animal, don't, 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,
(05:58):
and the deeps dew sir, Yes they do. You've been
here now for three months, Johnny July. Better prepare you
about this time of year, something something comes to visit
the lighthouse. And he studied the murk and fog, the
(06:23):
swarms of fish like you said McDonald, No, 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. Worth My calendar is marked right from
last year. Tonight's the night it comes, and I won't
go into the tail. You'll have to see it for yourself.
(06:45):
Just sit down there. If you want. Tomorrow you can
pack your duffel and take the motor boat into land
and get your car park there at the Dingy Pierre
and the cape, and drive on back to some little
inmand town and keep your lights burning nights. I won't question,
never blame you. It's happened three years now, and this
is the only time anyone's been here with me to
(07:08):
verify it. You wait and watch half an hour pasts
with only a few whispers between us. When we grew
tired of waiting, mcdonn began describing some of his ideas
to me. He had some theories on the Foghorn itself.
One day, many years ago, a man walked along and
(07:31):
stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold,
sunless shore, and said, we need a voice to crawl
across the water to warn ships. I'll make one. I'll
make a voice like all the 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,
(07:53):
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 and the hard cold shore.
I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one
(08:15):
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
(08:38):
of life. The fog horn blew. I made up that
story to try to explain why this thing keeps coming
back to the lighthouse every year. The fog horn calls it,
I think, and it comes. But and mcdunn knotted out
(09:03):
to the deeps. Something was swimming toward the last tower.
It was a cold night, as I have said, The
high Tower was cold, the light coming and going in,
the fog horn calling and calling through the raveling mist.
You couldn't see far, and you couldn't see plane. But
there was the deep sea moving on its way about
(09:25):
the night. Earth flat and quiet, the color of gray, 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, arising a bubble, a bit of froth.
And then from the surface of the cold sea came
ahead a large head, dark colored, with immense eyes, and
(09:48):
then a neck, and then not a body, but 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 on the subterranean.
(10:09):
There was a flicker of tail, and all from head
to tip of tail. Eye estimated the monster at ninety
or a hundred feet. I don't know what I said.
I said something. Mcdunn whispered, Steady, boy, steady, it's impossible. No, Johnny,
we're impossible. It's like it always was ten million years ago.
(10:34):
It hasn't changed. It's us and the land that have changed.
Become impossible. Hush. 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.
(10:55):
One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed
back our immense lights, red whites, red whites, like a disk,
held high and sending the message in plinyful code. It
was a silence as the fog through which it swam.
I crouched down, holding to the stair rail. I it's
a dinosaur some sort, Yes, one of the tribe. But
(11:20):
they died out, No, only hid away in the deep,
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 a word
(11:42):
like that. What do we do do? Hm? We've got
our job and 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
(12:03):
I had my answer the fog horn, 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
(12:23):
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 foghorn itself, lonely and vast and far away,
(12:45):
the sound of isolation, a bueless sea, a cold night,
a partness. That was the sound. Now you know why
it comes here. I nodded all year long, Johnny, that
(13:06):
poor monster. They're 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 celastoid's kind. I sort of think that's true. Anyway,
(13:27):
here come men on land and build this lighthouse five
years ago, and stet up their fog horn and sound it,
and sound it out toward the place where you bury
yourself and sleep and see memories of a world where
there were thousands like yourself. But now now you are alone,
all alone, in a world not made for you, a
world where you have to hide. But the sound of
(13:51):
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 with thousands miles of water, faint and familiar, and
(14:15):
the furnace in your berry stokes up and you begin
to rise slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slikes
of cod and minnow and rivers of jellyfish, and you
rise slow through the autumn months through September when the
fog started, through October with more fog, and the horns
(14:36):
still calling you on, and then laid 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,
(14:58):
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,
(15:21):
a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny?
Do you understand the foregorn blue? The monster answered, I
saw it all. I knew it all. The million years
(15:41):
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 saber tooths had their day
in saying and carpets, and men ran like white ants
(16:03):
upon the hills. The fog horn blue last year, last year,
that creature swam round and round and round all night,
not coming too near puddled. I'd say, afraid, maybe, and
a bit angry after coming all this way. But the
(16:24):
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 in 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 one hundred yards off now,
(16:50):
It and the fog horn crying at each other as
the lights hit the monster's eyes with fire, and I fire,
and I that's life for you someone always waiting for,
someone who never comes home, always someone loving something more
(17:12):
than that thing loves lamb and after a while you
want to destroy whatever that thing is so it can't
hurt you anymore. The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.
The fog horn blue. Let's see what happens. Mcdunn switched
(17:36):
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 where the slow, greased
turn of the light. The monster stopped and froze. Its
great lantern eyes blinked, its mouth gaped. It gave a
(17:58):
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
(18:19):
filled with angry torment. Mcdone switch on the horn. McDon
fumbled with a switch, but even as he flicked on,
the monster was wearing 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,
(18:42):
like the cauldron into which I might drop screaming. The
tower shook, the fog horn cried, the monster tried, it
seized the tower and mashed at the glass, which shattered
in upon us. Macdone seized my arms dumbly. Downstairs, the
tower rocked, trembled and started to give the fog horn,
(19:06):
and the monster roared, and we stumbled and half fell
down the stairs quick Johnny, we reached the bottom as
the tower buckled down toward 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,
(19:31):
the monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell, and
we knelt together mcdonn and I, holding tight while our
world exploded. Then it was over. It was over, and
there was nothing but darkness in the wash of the
sea and the raw stones that and the other sound listen, listen.
(20:01):
We waited a moment, and then I began to hear it. First,
a great vacuum, 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 stones thickness away from
(20:23):
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
(20:47):
far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything,
but passing and hearing. Late that night must have thought,
there it is the lonely sound, the lonesome bay horn.
All's well, We've rounded the cape. And so it went
for the rest of the night. The sun was hot
(21:12):
and yellow. The next afternoon, when the rescuers came out
to vegas from our it fell apart as all. We
had a few bad knocks from the waves, and the
just crumbled. Mcdunne pinched my arm. There was nothing to see.
The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing
(21:33):
was a great oltjake 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.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
But by that time I had a job in the
little town, and a wife, and a good, small, warm
house that good yellow.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
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 of steel reinforced concrete just
in case. He said. The new lighthouse was ready in November,
I drove down alone when evening late.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
And parked my car and looked across the.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Great Waters and listened to the new horn sounding once twice, three,
four times a minute, whar out there by itself, the monster.
It never came back. It's gone away. Mcgunn said, it's
(22:41):
gone away. 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. Await another million years, Ah,
poor thing waiting not there, waiting, not there, while man
(23:02):
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 lonesome Bay.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
I could only hear the horn, the horn, the horn.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
It sounded like the monster calling. I sat there wishing
there was something I could say. You've heard Ray Bradberry's
(24:18):
The fog Orn copyright nineteen fifty one by the Curtis
Publishing Company. This is Michael Hanson Technical operation for this
program by Bob Chan. Mind webs is a production of
WHA Radio in Madison, a service of the University of
Wisconsin Extension. Also
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