Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (13 page)

 
          
The
crowd had gathered so fast.

 
          
He
saw a woman’s body a moment before the crowd swallowed it up.

 
          
Morgan
said, “You look lousy. Here. Finish your drink.”

 
          
“I’m
all right, I’m all right. Let me alone. I’m all right. Can you see those
people? Can you see any of them? I wish we could see them closer.”

 
          
Morgan
cried out, “Where in hell are you going?”

 
          
Spallner
was out the door, Morgan after him, and down the
stairs, as rapidly as possible. “Come along, and hurry.”

 
          
“Take
it easy, you’re not a well man!”

 
          
They
walked out on to the street.
Spallner
pushed his way
forward. He thought he saw a red-haired woman with too much red color on her
cheeks and lips.

 
          
“There!”
He turned wildly to Morgan. “Did you see her?”

 
          
“See
who?”

 
          
“Damn
it; she’s gone. The crowd closed in!”

 
          
The
crowd was all around, breathing and looking and shuffling and mixing and
mumbling and getting in the way when he tried to shove through. Evidently the
red-haired woman had seen him coming and run off.

 
          
He
saw another familiar face!
A little freckled boy.
But
there are many freckled boys in the world. And, anyway, it was no use, before
Spallner
reached
him,
this little
boy ran away and vanished among the people.

 
          
“Is
she dead?” a voice asked. “Is she dead?”

 
          
“She’s
dying,” someone else replied. “She’ll be dead before the ambulance arrives.
They shouldn’t have moved her. They shouldn’t have moved her.”

 
          
All
the crowd faces—familiar, yet unfamiliar, bending over, looking down, looking
down.

 
          
“Hey,
mister, stop pushing.”

 
          
“Who
you
shovin
’, buddy?”

 
          
Spallner
came back out, and Morgan caught hold of him
before he fell. “You damned fool. You’re still sick. Why in
hell’d
you have to come down here?” Morgan demanded.

 
          
“I don’t know, I really don’t.
They moved her, Morgan,
someone moved her. You should never move a traffic victim. It kills them. It
kills them.”

 
          
“Yeah.
That’s the way with people.
The
idiots.”

 
          
Spallner
arranged the newspaper clippings carefully.

 
          
Morgan
looked at them. “What’s the idea? Ever since your accident you think every
traffic scramble is part of you. What are these?”

 
          
“Clippings of motor-car crackups, and photos.
Look at them.
Not at the cars,” said
Spallner
, “but at the crowds
around the cars.” He pointed. “Here. Compare this photo of a wreck in the
Wilshire District with one in Westwood. No resemblance. But now take this
Westwood picture and align it with one taken in the Westwood District ten years
ago.” Again he motioned. “This woman is in both pictures.”

 
          
Coincidence.
The woman happened to be there once in 1936,
again in 1946.”

 
          
“A coincidence once, maybe.
But twelve times over a period
of ten years, when the accidents occurred as much as three miles from one
another, no. Here.” He dealt out a dozen photographs. “She’s in
all
of these!”

 
          
“Maybe
she’s perverted.”

 
          
“She’s
more than that. How does she
happen
to be there so quickly after each accident? And why does she wear the same
clothes in pictures taken over a period of a decade?”

 
          
“I’ll
be damned, so she does.”

 
          
“And,
last of all, why was she standing over
me
the night of my accident, two weeks ago!”

 
          
They
had a drink. Morgan went over the files. “What’d you do, hire a clipping
service while you were in the hospital to go back through the newspapers for
you?”
Spallner
nodded. Morgan sipped his drink. It
was getting late. The street lights were coming on in the streets below the
office. “What does all this add up to?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” said
Spallner
, “except that there’s a universal
law about accidents.
Crowds gather.
They always gather. And like you and me, people have wondered year after year,
why they gathered so quickly, and how? I know the answer. Here it is!”

 
          
He
flung the clippings down. “It frightens me.”

 
          
“These
people—mightn’t they be thrill-hunters, perverted sensationalists with a carnal
lust for blood and morbidity?”

 
          
Spallner
shrugged. “Does that explain their being at all
the accidents? Notice, they stick to certain territories. A
Brentwood
accident will bring out one group. A
Huntington
Park another. But there’s a norm for faces,
a certain percentage appear at each wreck.”

 
          
Morgan
said, “They’re not
all
the same
faces, are they?”

 
          
“Naturally not.
Accidents draw normal people, too, in the
course of time. But these, I find, are always the
first
ones there.”

 
          
“Who
are they? What do they want? You keep hinting and never telling. Good Lord, you
must have some idea. You’ve scared yourself and now you’ve got me jumping.”

 
          
“I’ve
tried getting to them, but someone always trips me up, I’m always too late.
They slip into the crowd and vanish. The crowd seems to offer protection to
some of its members. They see me coming.”

 
          
“Sounds
like some sort of clique.”

 
          
“They
have one thing in common, they always show up together.
At a
fire or an explosion or on the sidelines of a war, at any public demonstration
of this thing called death.
Vultures, hyenas or saints, I don’t know
which they are, I just don’t know. But I’m going to the police with it, this
evening. It’s gone on long enough. One of them shifted that woman’s body today.
They shouldn’t have touched her. It killed her.”

 
          
He
placed the clippings in a briefcase. Morgan got up and slipped into his coat.
Spallner
clicked the briefcase shut. “Or, I just happened
to
think .
 . .”

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“Maybe
they
wanted
her dead.”

 
          
“Why?”

 
          
“Who
knows.
Come along?”

 
          
“Sorry.
It’s late. See you tomorrow.
Luck.”
They went out
together. “Give my regards to the cops. Think they’ll believe you?”

 
          
“Oh,
they’ll believe me all right. Good night.”

 
          
Spallner
took it slow driving downtown.

 
          
“I
want to get there,” he told himself, “alive.”

 
          
He
was rather shocked, but not surprised, somehow, when the truck came rolling out
of an alley straight at him. He was just congratulating himself on his keen
sense of observation and talking out what he would say to the police in his
mind, when the truck smashed into his car. It wasn’t really his
car, that
was the disheartening thing about it. In a
preoccupied mood he was tossed first this way and then that way, while he
thought, what a shame, Morgan has gone and lent me his extra car for a few days
until my other car is fixed, and now here I go again. The windshield hammered
back into his face. He was forced back and forth in several lightning jerks.
Then all motion stopped and all noise stopped and only pain filled him up.

 
          
He
heard their feet running and running and running. He fumbled with the car door.
It clicked. He fell out upon the pavement drunkenly and
lay
,
ear to the asphalt, listening to them coming. It was like a great rainstorm,
with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a
few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly,
expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked.

 
          
The
crowd was there.

 
          
He
could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking
on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and
sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them
to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum. His head was bleeding very
badly. He tried to move and he realized something was wrong with his spine. He
hadn’t felt much at the impact, but his spine was hurt. He didn’t dare move.

 
          
He
couldn’t speak. Opening his mouth, nothing came out but a gagging.

 
          
Someone
said, “Give me a hand. We’ll roll him over and lift him into a more comfortable
position.”

 
          
Spallner’s
brain burst apart.

 
          
No!
Don’t move me!

 
          
“We’ll
move him,” said the voice, casually.

 
          
You
idiots, you’ll kill me, don’t!

 
          
But
he could not say any of this out loud. He could only think it.

 
          
Hands
took hold of him. They started to lift him. He cried out and nausea choked him
up. They straightened him out into a ramrod of agony. Two men did it. One of
them was thin, bright, pale, alert, a young man. The other man was very old and
had a wrinkled upper lip.

 
          
He
had seen their faces before.

 
          
A
familiar voice said, “Is—is he dead?”

 
          
Another
voice, a memorable voice, responded, “No. Not yet. But he will be dead before
the ambulance arrives.”

 
          
It
was all a very silly, mad plot. Like every accident. He squealed hysterically
at the solid wall of faces. They were all around him, these judges and jurors
with the faces he had seen before. Through his pain he counted their faces.

 
          
The freckled boy.
The old man with the
wrinkled upper lip.

 
          
The red-haired, red-cheeked woman.
An old
woman with a mole on her chin.

 
          
I
know what you’re here for, he thought. You’re here just as you’re at all
accidents. To make certain the right ones live and the right ones die. That’s
why you lifted me. You knew it would kill. You knew I’d live if you left me
alone.