Charles Beaumont > Quotes

“A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth.

He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them.

But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ("Hunger")”
― Charles Beaumont, Shock!

“He stopped and leaned against a pole and looked up at the deaf and swollen sky. It was a movement of dark shapes, a hurrying, a running.

He closed his eyes. ("Hunger")”
― Charles Beaumont, Shock!

“Then it was horn time. Time for the big solo.

Sonny lifted the trumpet - One! Two! - He got it into sight - Three!

We all stopped dead. I mean we stopped.

That wasn't Sonny's horn. This one was dented-in and beat-up and the tip-end was nicked. It didn't shine, not a bit.

Lux leaned over-you could have fit a coffee cup into his mouth. "Jesus God," he said. "Am I seeing right?"

I looked close and said: "Man, I hope not."

But why kid? We'd seen that trumpet a million times.

It was Spoof's.

Rose-Ann was trembling. Just like me, she remembered how we'd buried the horn with Spoof. And she remembered how quiet it had been in Sonny's room last night...

I started to think real hophead thoughts, like - where did Sonny get hold of a shovel that late? and how could he expect a horn to play that's been under the ground for two years? and -

That blast got into our ears like long knives.

Spoof's own trademark!

Sonny looked caught, like he didn't know what to do at first, like he was hypnotized, scared, almighty scared. But as the sound came out, rolling out, sharp and clean and clear - new-trumpet sound - his expression changed. His eyes changed: they danced a little and opened wide.

Then he closed them, and blew that horn. Lord God of the Fishes, how he blew it! How he loved it and caressed it and pushed it up, higher and higher and higher. High C? Bottom of the barrel. He took off, and he walked all over the rules and stamped them flat.

The melody got lost, first off. Everything got lost, then, while that horn flew. It wasn't only jazz; it was the heart of jazz, and the insides, pulled out with the roots and held up for everybody to see; it was blues that told the story of all the lonely cats and all the ugly whores who ever lived, blues that spoke up for the loser lamping sunshine out of iron-gray bars and every hop head hooked and gone, for the bindlestiffs and the city slicers, for the country boys in Georgia shacks and the High Yellow hipsters in Chicago slums and the bootblacks on the corners and the fruits in New Orleans, a blues that spoke for all the lonely, sad and anxious downers who could never speak themselves...

And then, when it had said all this, it stopped and there was a quiet so quiet that Sonny could have shouted:

'It's okay, Spoof. It's all right now. You get it said, all of it - I'll help you. God, Spoof, you showed me how, you planned it - I'll do my best!'

And he laid back his head and fastened the horn and pulled in air and blew some more. Not sad, now, not blues - but not anything else you could call by a name. Except... jazz. It was Jazz.

Hate blew out of that horn, then. Hate and fury and mad and fight, like screams and snarls, like little razors shooting at you, millions of them, cutting, cutting deep...

And Sonny only stopping to wipe his lip and whisper in the silent room full of people: 'You're saying it, Spoof! You are!'

God Almighty Himself must have heard that trumpet, then; slapping and hitting and hurting with notes that don't exist and never existed. Man! Life took a real beating! Life got groined and sliced and belly-punched and the horn, it didn't stop until everything had all spilled out, every bit of the hate and mad that's built up in a man's heart. ("Black Country")”
― Charles Beaumont, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“The city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were dammed off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.
Until it was no more.
Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone.
The birth of a city... It had become the death of a world.”
― Charles Beaumont, Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

“If one could only discover the unwritten bases of black magic and apply formulae to them, we would find that they were merely another form of science... perhaps less advance, perhaps more.”
― Charles Beaumont, Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

“Honest men make unconvincing liars,' I lied convincingly.”
― Charles Beaumont, The Howling Man

“I took my solo and beat hell out of the skins. Then Spoof swiped at his mouth and let go with a blast and moved it up into that squeal and stopped and started playing. It was all headwork. All new to us.

New to anybody.

I saw Sonny get a look on his face, and we sat still and listened while Spoof made love to that horn.

Now like a scream, now like a laugh - now we're swinging in the trees, now the white men are coming, now we're in the boat and chains are hanging from our ankles and we're rowing, rowing - Spoof, what is it? - now we're sawing wood and picking cotton and serving up those cool cool drinks to the Colonel in his chair - Well, blow, man! - now we're free, and we're struttin' down Lenox Avenue and State & Madison and Pirate's Alley, laughing, crying - Who said free? - and we want to go back and we don't want to go back - Play it, Spoof! God, God, tell us all about it! Talk to us! - and we're sitting in a cellar with a comb wrapped up in paper, with a skin-barrel and a tinklebox - Don't stop, Spoof! Oh Lord, please don't stop! - and we're making something, something, what is it? Is it jazz? Why, yes, Lord, it's jazz. Thank you, sir, and thank you, sir, we finally got it, something that is ours, something great that belongs to us and to us alone, that we made, and that's why it's important and that's what it's all about and - Spoof! Spoof, you can;t stop now --

But it was over, middle of the trip. And there was Spoof standing there facing us and tears streaming out of those eyes and down over that coaldust face, and his body shaking and shaking. It's the first we ever saw that. It's the first we ever heard him cough, too - like a shotgun going off every two seconds, big raking sounds that tore up from the bottom of his belly and spilled out wet and loud. ("Black Country")”
― Charles Beaumont, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“Came Honker's trip to Slice City along about then: our sax-man got a neck all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker's grease in the worst way. But we'd been together for five years or more, and a new man just didn't play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn't grow the piece back so we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from that wound. ("Black Country")”
― Charles Beaumont, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“One of the wonderful things about beer is that a little bit, sipped at the proper speed, can give one the courage to do and say things one would ordinarily not have the courage to even dream of doing and saying.”
― Charles Beaumont, The Howling Man

“I know that ghosts and demons did exist, they did, if only you thought about them long enough and hard enough.”
― Charles Beaumont, Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

“A codicil to this ability mentioned above - call it the magic of deep focus - is the power to juggle a dozen projects at once, yet make everyone feel you are working for them alone. I can relate to that, too. It's not a personality flaw (I hope) so much as a survival mechanism biased toward getting the job done and segueing on to the next job. Focus and large swaths of concentration are often going to be taken personally as slights by people you love. They may not comprehend or have experienced the ability to think inside the netherzone, the workplace where five hours can vanish like five minutes. -- David J. Schow”
― Charles Beaumont, The Carnival and Other Stories

“Symbolism, to Carnaday, was superstitious nonsense. Psychiatry, though, was worse. It was the purest sort of buncombe, hardly as respectable as spiritualism.”
― Charles Beaumont, Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

“As he navigates to Twitter he has that strange sensation of walking into a house where a huge argument has been raging but the newcomer has not fully understood the dynamics.”
― Charles Beaumont, A Spy Alone

“Ultimately the work has to command the podium. - David J. Schow”
― Charles Beaumont, The Carnival and Other Stories

“I sat there staring dumbly at the expense account and wondering, in a half-stupid way, how such a pretty color as red ever got mixed up with so black a thing as being broke.”
― Charles Beaumont, Twilight Zone: The Original Stories

“And that's the whole point. The mind, Doctor. It's everything. If you think you have a pain in your arm and there's no physical reason for it, you don't hurt any less.”
― Charles Beaumont, Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

“Upon entering the hotel room and glancing at its occupant, Doctor Lenardi assumed that hearty, cheerful manner which is characteristic of all physicians once they have abandoned hope.”
― Charles Beaumont, Perchance to Dream

“A train thunders by late at night, you gaze idly at the dark rushing mass, you see a patch of light and within that patch of light, a face; in a wink of time it is gone - but, having seen it, you know it will never be gone, you know you will see that face in your dreams perhaps forever. Such is the insubstantial stuff of which fiction - or madness - is made.”
― Charles Beaumont, The Carnival and Other Stories