His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. But now tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.
Fahrenheit 451 annotations skin#
Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. He had felt that a moment prior to his making the turn someone had been there. The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. Before he reached the corner, however, he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from nowhere, as if someone had called his name. He walked toward the corner, thinking little at all about nothing in particular. Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway where the silent air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air onto the cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb. He slid to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from the concrete floor downstairs. At the last moment, when disaster seemed positive, he pulled his hands from his pockets and broke his fall by grasping the golden pole. He hung up his black beetle-colored helmet and shined it he hung his flameproof jacket neatly he showered luxuriously, and then, whistling, hands in pockets, walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down the hole. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.
With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.
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