Dark Carnival (14 page)

    The doctor shook him.

    'Doc, doc, doc,' said Leiber, hazily. 'Funny thing. Funny. I — I finally thought of a name for the baby.'

    The doctor said nothing.

    Leiber put his head back in his trembling hands and spoke the words. 'I'm going to have him christened next Sunday. Know what name I'm giving him? I'm — I'm going to call him —
Lucifer!
'

    It was eleven at night. A lot of strange people had come and gone through the house, taking the essential flame with them — Alice.

    David Leiber sat across from the doctor in the library.

    'Alice wasn't crazy,' he said, slowly. 'She had good reason to fear the baby.'

    Jeffers exhaled. 'Now you're following in her pattern. She blamed the child for her sickness, now
you
blame it for her death. She stumbled on a
toy
, remember that. You can't blame the child.'

    'You mean Lucifer?'

    'Stop calling him Lucifer!'

    Leiber shook his head. 'Alice heard things at night. Things moving in the halls. As if someone spied on us. You want to know what those noises were, doctor? I'll tell you. They were made by the baby! Yes,
my
son! Four months old, creeping around the dark halls at night, listening to us talk. Listening to
every word!
' He held to the sides of the chair. 'And if I turned the lights on, a baby is a small object. It can conveniently hide behind furniture, a door, against a wall — below eye-level.'

    'I want you to stop this!' demanded Jeffers.

    'Let me say what I think or I'll go crazy. When I went to Chicago, who was it kept Alice awake, tiring her, weakening her into pneumonia? The baby! And when Alice didn't die, then he tried killing me. It was simple; leave a toy doll on the stairs, then cry in the night until your father rouses up, tired of listening to you cry, and goes downstairs to fetch you warm milk, and stumbles. A crude trick, but effective. It didn't get me. But it killed Alice quite dead.'

    David Leiber stopped long enough to light a cigarette. 'I should have caught on. I'd turn on the lights in the middle of the night, many nights, and the baby'd be lying there, eyes wide. Most babies sleep constantly, all the time. Not
this
one. He stayed awake — thinking.'

    'Babies don't think,' countered Jeffers.

    'He stayed awake doing whatever he
could
do with his brain, then. What in hell do we know about a baby's brain? He had every reason to hate Alice; she suspected him for what he was — certainly not a normal child. Something — different. What do you know of babies, doctor? The general knowledge, yes. You know, of course, how babies kill their mothers at birth. Why? In resentment at being forced into a lousy world like this one!'

    Leiber leaned towards the doctor, tiredly. 'It all ties up. Suppose that a few babies out of all the millions born are instantaneously able to move, see, hear, think, like many animals and insects can. Many insects are self-sufficient when born. In a few days most mammals and birds are adjusted. Little man-children take years to speak, faltering around on rubbery legs.

    'But, suppose one child in a million is — strange? Born perfectly aware, able to think, instinctively. Wouldn't it be a perfect set-up, a perfect blind for anything the baby might want to do? He could pretend to be ordinary, weak, crying, ignorant. With just a
little
expenditure of energy he could crawl about a darkened house, listening. And how easy to place obstacles at the top of stairs. How easy to cry all night and tire a mother into pneumonia. How easy, right at birth, to be so close to the mother that
a few deft manœuvres might cause peritonitis!
'

    'For God's sake!' Jeffers was on his feet. 'That's a repulsive thing to say!'

    'It's a repulsive thing I'm speaking of. How many mothers have died at the birth of their children? How many have suckled strange little improbabilities who cause death one way or another? Strange, red little creatures with brains that function in a scarlet darkness we can't even guess at. Elemental little brains, aswarm with racial memory and hatred and raw cruelty, with no more thought than self-preservation. And self-preservation in this case consisted of eliminating a mother who realized what a horror she had birthed. I ask you, doctor, what is there in the world more selfish than a baby? Nothing! Nothing is so self-centred, unsocial, selfish, nothing!'

    Jeffers scowled and shook his head, helplessly, and shrugged.

    Leiber dropped his cigarette down, weakly. 'I'm not claiming any great strength for the child. Just enough to crawl around a little, a few months ahead of schedule. Just enough to listen all the time. Just enough to cry late at night. That's enough, more than enough.'

    Jeffers tried ridicule. 'Call it murder, then. And murder must have a motivation. Name a motivation for the child.'

    Leiber was ready with the answer. 'What is more at peace, more dreamfully happy, content, at ease, at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered than an unborn child? Nothing. It floats in a sleepy dark effluvium of timeless wonder and warm nourishment and silence. All is an enclosed dream. Then, suddenly, it is asked to give up its berth, is forced to vacate, propelled out into a noisy, uncaring, selfish, swift and merciless world where it is asked to shift for itself, to hunt, to feed from the hunting, to seek after a vanishing love that once was its unquestionable right, to meet confusion instead of inner silence and conservative slumber! And the newborn
resents
it! Resents it with all the soft, small fibres of its miniature body. Resents the raw cold air, the huge spaces, the sudden departure from familiar things. And in the tiny filament of brain the only thing that the child knows is selfishness and hatred because the spell has been rudely shattered. And who is responsible for this disenchantment, this rude breakage of the spell? The mother. And so the new child has someone to hate, and hate with all the tiny fabric of its mind. The mother has cast it out, rejected it. And the father is no better, kill him, too! He's responsible in
his
way!'

    Jeffers interrupted. 'If what you say is true, then every woman in the world would have to look on her newborn as something to dread, something to wonder about, to shudder at.'

    'And why not? Hasn't the child a perfect alibi? He has a thousand years of accepted medical belief to protect him. By all natural accounts he is helpless, not responsible. The child is born hating. And things grow worse, instead of better. At first the baby gets a certain amount of attention and mothering. But then as time passes, things change. When very new, a baby has great power. Power to make parents do silly things when it cries or sneezes, jump when it makes a noise. As the years pass, the baby feels even that little power slipping rapidly, forever away from it, never to return. Why shouldn't it grasp for all the power it can have, why shouldn't it jockey for position while it has all the advantages? In later years it would be too late to express its hatred.
Now
would be the time to strike. And later, this child, secretly aware, becoming more aware each and every day, would learn new things — about position, money, security. The child would see that through money it might eventually provide itself with a self-built womb of comforts, warmth and aloneness. And naturally, then, it might pay to destroy the father whose insurance policies for twenty thousand dollars are made out to the wife and baby. Again, I admit the baby isn't old enough for
that
motivation yet. Money is something beyond it. But
hatred
is not. The money angle might come later, not now. But it would come from the same desire, the desire to return to warm comfort and let-aloneness.'

    Leiber's voice was very soft, very low.

    'My little boy baby, lying in his crib nights, his face moist and red and out of breath. From crying? No. From climbing tediously, achingly slow, out of his crib, from crawling long distances through darkened hallways. My little boy baby. I want to kill him.'

    The doctor handed him a water glass and some pills. 'You're not killing anyone. You're going to sleep for twenty-four hours. Sleep'll change your mind. Take this.'

    Leiber drank down the pills and let himself be led upstairs to his bedroom, crying, and felt himself being put to bed.

    The doctor said good night and left the house.

    Leiber, alone, drifted towards sleep.

    He heard a noise. 'What's — what's
that?
' he demanded, feebly.

    Something moved in the hall.

    David Leiber slept.

    The next morning, Dr. Jeffers drove up to the Leiber house. It was a good morning, and he was here to tell Leiber to get out into the country for a rest. Leiber would still be asleep upstairs. Jeffers had given him enough sedative to knock him out for at least fifteen hours.

    He rang the doorbell. No answer. The servants hadn't returned, it was too early. Jeffers tried the front door, found it open, stepped in. He put his medical kit on the nearest chair.

    Something white moved out of view at the top of the stairs. Just a suggestion of a movement. Jeffers hardly noticed it.

    The odour of gas was in the house.

    Jeffers ran up the stairs, crashed into Leiber's bedroom.

    Leiber lay on the bed, not moving, and the room billowed with gas, which hissed from a released jet at the base of the wall near the door. Jeffers twisted it off, then forced up all the windows, and ran back to Leiber's body.

    The body was cold. It had been dead quite a few hours.

    Coughing violently, the doctor hurried from the room, eyes watering. Leiber hadn't turned the gas on himself. He
couldn't
have. Those sedatives had knocked him out, he wouldn't have wakened until noon. It wasn't suicide. Or was there the faintest possibility?

    Jeffers stood in the hall for five minutes. Then he walked to the door of the nursery. It was shut. He opened it. He walked inside and over to the crib.

    The crib was empty.

    He stood swaying over the crib for half a minute, then he said something to nobody in particular.

    'The nursery door blew shut. You couldn't get back into your crib where it was safe. You didn't plan on the door blowing shut. A little thing like a slammed door can ruin the best of plans. I'll find you somewhere in the house, hiding, pretending to be something you are not.' The doctor looked dazed. He put his hand to his head and smiled palely. 'Now I'm talking like Alice and David talked. But, I can't take any chances. I'm not sure of anything, but I can't take any chances.'

    He walked downstairs, opened his medical bag upon the chair, took something out of it and held it in his hands.

    Something rustled down the hall. Something very small and very quiet. Jeffers turned rapidly.

    'I had to operate to bring you into this world. Now I guess I can operate to take you out of it. . .'

    He took half a dozen, quick, sure steps forward into the hall. He raised his hand into the sunlight.

    'See, baby! Something bright — something pretty!'

    A scalpel.

Mr. Spallner put his hands over his face.

    There was the feeling of movement in space, the beautifully tortured scream, the impact and tumbling of the car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy, and him hurled out of it. Then — silence.

    The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard them running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and on the lined pavement, and over the asphalt street, and picking through the cluttered bricks to where his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with a senseless centrifuge.

    Where the crowd came from he didn't know. He struggled to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon him, hung over him like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees. They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a moon-dial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing any more ever.

    How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere.

    A siren. A police voice. Movement. Blood trickled from his lips and he was being moved into an ambulance. Someone said, 'Is he dead?' And someone else said, 'No, he's not dead.' And a third person said, 'He won't die, he's not going to die.' And he saw the faces of the crowd beyond him in the night, and he knew by their expressions that he wouldn't die. And that was strange. He saw a man's face, thin, bright, pale; the man swallowed and bit his lips, very sick. There was a small woman, too, with red hair and too much red on her cheeks and lips. And a little boy with a freckled face. Others' faces. An old man with a wrinkled upper lip, an old woman, with a mole upon her chin. They had all come from — where? Houses, cars, alleys, from the immediate and the accident-shocked world. Out of alleys and out of hotels and out of street-cars and seemingly out of nothing they came.

    The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.

    The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man's agony by their frank curiosity.

    The ambulance drove off. He sank back and their faces still stared into his face, even with his eyes shut.

    The car wheels spun in his mind for days. One wheel, four wheels, spinning, spinning, and whirring, around and around.

    He knew it was wrong. Something wrong with the wheels and the whole accident and the running of feet and the curiosity. The crowd faces mixed and spun into the wild rotation of the wheels.

    He awoke.

    Sunlight, a hospital room, a hand taking his pulse.

    'How do you feel?' asked the doctor.

    The wheels faded away. Mr. Spallner looked around.

    'Fine — I guess.'

    He tried to find words. About the accident. 'Doctor?'

    'Yes?'

    'That crowd — was it last night?'

    'Two days ago. You've been here since Thursday. You're all right, though. You're doing fine. Don't try and get up.'

    'That crowd. Something about wheels, too. Do accidents make people, well, a — little off.'

    'Temporarily, sometimes. It wears off.'

    He lay staring up at the doctor. 'Does it hurt your time sense?'

    'Panic sometimes does.'

    'Makes a minute seem like an hour, or maybe an hour seem like a minute?'

    'Yes.'

    'Let me tell you then.' He felt the bed under him, the sunlight on his face. 'You'll think I'm crazy. I was driving too fast, I know. I'm sorry now. I jumped the curb and hit that wall. I was hurt and numb, I know, but I still remember things. Mostly — the crowd.' He waited a moment and then decided to go on, for he suddenly knew what it was that bothered him. 'The crowd got there too quickly. Thirty seconds after the smash they were all standing over me and staring at me. . . it's not right they should run that fast, so late at night. . .'

    'You only think it was thirty seconds,' said the doctor. 'It was probably three or four minutes. Your senses — '

    'Yeah, I know — my senses, the accident. But I was conscious! I remember one thing that puts it all together and makes it funny, God, so damned funny. The wheels of my car, upside down. The wheels were still spinning when the crowd got there!'

    The doctor smiled.

    The man in bed went on. 'I'm positive! The wheels were spinning and spinning fast — the front wheels! Wheels don't spin very long, friction cuts them down. And these were really spinning!'

    'You're confused,' said the doctor.

    'I'm not confused. That street was empty. Not a soul in sight. And then the accident and the wheels still spinning and all those faces over me, quick, in no time. And the way they looked down at me, I
knew
I wouldn't die. . .'

    'Simple shock,' said the doctor, walking away into the sunlight.

    They released him from the hospital two weeks later. He rode home in a taxi. People had come to visit him during his two weeks on his back, and to all of them he had told his story, the accident, the spinning wheels, the crowd. They had all laughed with him concerning it, and passed it off.

    He leaned forward and tapped on the taxi window.

    'What's wrong?'

    The cabbie looked back. 'Sorry, boss town to drive in. Got an accident up detour!'

    'Yes. No, no! Wait. Go ahead. Let's — let's take a look.'

    The cab moved forward, honking.

    'Funny damn thing,' said the cabbie. 'Hey,
you!
Get that fleatrap out the way!' Quieter. 'Funny thing — more damn people. Nosy people.'

    Mr. Spallner looked down and watched his fingers tremble on his knee. 'You noticed that, too?'

    'Sure,' said the cabbie. 'All the time. There's always a crowd. You'd think it was their own mother got killed.'

    'They come running awfully fast,' said the man in the back of the cab.

    'Same way with a fire or an explosion. Nobody around. Boom. Lotsa people around. I dunno.'

    'Ever seen an accident — at night?'

    The cabbie nodded. 'Sure. Don't make no difference. There's always a crowd.'

    The wreck came in view. A body lay on the pavement. You knew there was a body even if you couldn't see it. Because of the crowd. The crowd with its back towards him as he sat in the rear of the cab. With its back towards him. He opened the window and almost started to yell. But he didn't have the nerve. If he yelled they might turn around.

    And he was afraid to see their
faces
.

    'I seem to have a penchant for accidents,' he said, in his office. It was late afternoon. His friend sat across the desk from him, listening. 'I got out of the hospital this morning and first thing on the way home, we detoured around a wreck.'

    'Things run in cycles,' said Morgan.

    'Let me tell you about my accident.'

    'I've heard it. Heard it all.'

    'But it was funny, you must admit.'

    'I must admit. Now how about a drink.'

    They talked on for half an hour or more. All the while they talked at the back of Spallner's brain a small watch ticked, a watch that never needed winding. It was the memory of a few little things. Wheels and faces.

    At about five-thirty there was a hard metal noise in the street. Morgan nodded and looked out and down. 'What'd I tell you? Cycles. A truck and a cream-coloured Cadillac. Yes, yes.'

    Spallner walked to the window. He was very cold and as he stood there, he looked at his watch, at the small minute hand. One two three four five seconds — people running — eight nine ten eleven twelve — from all over, people came running — fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen seconds — more people, more cars, more horns blowing. Curiously distant, Spallner looked upon the scene as an explosion in reverse, the fragments of the detonation sucked back to the point of impulsion. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one seconds and the crowd was there. Spallner made a gesture down at them, wordless.

    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 colour 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 dumb saps.'

    Spallner arranged the newspaper clippings carefully.

    Morgan looked at them. 'What's the idea? Ever since your wreck 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
is
.'

    '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 people, like you and I, have wondered from 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 brief-case. Morgan got up and slipped into his coat. Spallner clicked the brief-case shut. 'Or, I just happened to think of it. . .'