Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (4 page)

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

 
          
Jeffers
exhaled. “Don’t follow after her! 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 that!”

 
          
Leiber
shook his head. “
Alice
heard things at night, moving in the halls.
You want to know what made those noises,
Doctor?
They
were made by the baby.
Four months old, moving in the dark,
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 so
small. It can hide behind furniture, a door, against a wall—below eye-level.”

 
          
“I
want you to stop this!” said 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 into pneumonia? The baby! And when Alice didn’t die,
then he tried killing me. It was simple; leave a toy on the stairs, cry in the
night until your father goes downstairs to fetch your milk, and stumbles.
A crude trick, but effective.
It didn’t get me. But it
killed Alice 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 all the time. Not this one. He stayed awake, thinking.”

 
          
“Babies
don’t think.”

 
          
“He
stayed awake doing whatever he
could
do with his brain, then. What in hell do we know about a baby’s mind? 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 run, yes. You know, of course, how babies kill
their mothers at birth. Why? Could it be resentment at being forced into a
lousy world like this one?”

 
          
Leiber
leaned toward 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. Insects are born self-sufficient. In a few weeks most mammals and
birds adjust. But children take years to speak and learn to stumble around on
their weak legs.

 
          
“But
suppose one child in a billion is—strange?
Born perfectly
aware, able to think, instinctively.
Wouldn’t it be a perfect setup, 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 the 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
maneuvers 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 work in a bloody darkness we can’t even guess at.
Elemental little brains,
aswarm
with
racial memory, 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!”

 
          
Jeffers
scowled and shook his head, helplessly.

 
          
Leiber
dropped his cigarette down. “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. But murder must be motivated. What
motive had the child?”

 
          
Leiber
was ready with the answer. “What is more at peace,
more
dreamfully
content, at ease, at rest, fed,
comforted,
unbothered
, than an unborn child?
Nothing.
It floats in a sleepy, timeless wonder of
nourishment and silence. Then, suddenly, it is asked to give up its berth, is
forced to vacate, rushed out into a noisy, uncaring, selfish 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
child
resents
it! Resents the cold
air, the huge spaces,
the
sudden departure from
familiar things. And in the tiny filament of brain the only thing the child
knows is selfishness and hatred because the spell has been rudely shattered.
Who is responsible for this disenchantment, this rude breaking of the spell?
The mother.
So here the new child has someone to hate with
all its
unreasoning 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 baby as something to dread,
something to wonder about.”

 
          
“And why not?
Hasn’t the child a perfect alibi? A thousand
years of accepted medical belief protects 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
the 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 small power slip
rapidly, forever away, never to return. Why shouldn’t it grasp 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.”

 
          
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 slowly 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 waited until he was moving deep into sleep,
then
left the house.

 
          
Leiber
, alone, drifted down, down.

 
          
He
heard a noise. “What’s—
what’s
that
?”
he
demanded, feebly.

 
          
Something
moved in the hall.

 
          
David
Leiber
slept.

 
          
Very
early the next morning, Dr. Jeffers drove up to the house. It was a good
morning, and he was here to drive
Leiber
to 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 were probably not up. Jeffers tried
the front door, found it open,
stepped
in. He put his
medical kit on the nearest chair.

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

 
          
The
smell of gas was in the house.

 
          
Jeffers
ran upstairs, crashing into
Leiber’s
bedroom.
Leiber
lay motionless on the bed, 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 on the gas 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 to the crib.

 
          
The
crib was empty.

 
          
He
stood swaying by 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 on 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, he thought. Now I guess I can
operate to take you out of it. . . .

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

 
          
“See, baby!
Something bright—something
pretty!”

 
          
A scalpel.

 
          
I
t was a little caricature of a town square.
In it were the following fresh ingredients: a candy-box of a bandstand where
men stood on Thursday and Sunday nights exploding music; fine, green-
patinated
bronze-copper benches all scrolled and
flourished; fine blue and pink tiled walks—blue as women’s newly lacquered
eyes, pink as women’s hidden wonders; and fine French-clipped trees in the
shapes of exact hatboxes. The whole, from your hotel window, had the fresh
ingratiation and unbelievable fantasy one might expect of a French villa in the
nineties. But no, this was
Mexico
! and this a plaza in a small colonial
Mexican town, with a fine State Opera House (in which movies were shown for two
pesos admission:
Rasputin and the
Empress, The Big House, Madame Curie, Love Affair, Mama Loves Papa).

 
          
Joseph
came out on the sun-heated balcony in the morning and knelt by the grille,
pointing his little box Brownie. Behind him, in the bath, the water was running
and Marie’s voice came out:

 
          
“What’re
you doing?”

 
          
He
muttered “—a picture.” She asked again. He clicked the shutter, stood up, wound
the spool inside, squinting, and said, “Took a picture of the town square. God,
didn’t those men shout last night? I didn’t sleep until two-thirty. We would
have to arrive when the local Rotary’s having its
whingding
.”

 
          
“What’re
our plans for today?” she asked.

 
          
“We’re
going to see the mummies,” he said.

 
          
“Oh,”
she said. There was a long silence.

 
          
He
came in, set the camera down, and lit himself a cigarette.

 
          
“I’ll
go up and see them alone,” he said, “if you’d rather.”

 
          
“No,”
she said, not very loud. “I’ll go along. But I wish we could forget the whole
thing. It’s such a lovely little town.”

 
          
“Look
here!” he cried, catching a movement from the corner of his eyes. He hurried to
the balcony, stood there, his cigarette smoking and forgotten in his fingers.
“Come quick, Marie!”

 
          
“I’m
drying myself,” she said.

 
          
“Please,
hurry,” he said, fascinated, looking down into the street.

 
          
There
was movement behind him, and then the odor of soap and water-rinsed flesh, wet
towel, fresh cologne; Marie was at his elbow. “Stay right there,” she cautioned
him, “so I can look without exposing myself. I’m stark. What
is
it?”

 
          
“Look!”
he cried.

 
          
A
procession traveled along the street. One man led it, with a package on his
head. Behind him came women in black
rebozos
, chewing
away the peels of oranges and spitting them on the cobbles; little children at
their elbows, men ahead of them. Some ate sugar cane, gnawing away at the outer
bark until it split down and they pulled it off in great hunks to get at the
succulent pulp, and the juicy sinews on which to suck. In all, there were fifty
people.

 
          
“Joe,”
said Marie behind him, holding his arm.

 
          
It
was no ordinary package the first man in the procession carried on his head,
balanced delicately as a chicken-plume. It was covered with silver satin and
silver fringe and silver rosettes. And he held it gently with one brown hand,
the other hand swinging free.

 
          
This
was a funeral and the little package was a coffin.

 
          
Joseph
glanced at his wife.

 
          
She
was the color of fine, fresh milk. The pink color of the bath was gone. Her
heart had sucked it all down to some hidden vacuum in her. She held fast to the
french
doorway and watched the traveling people go,
watched them eat fruit, heard them talk gentle, laugh gently. She forgot she
was naked.

 
          
He
said, “Some little girl or boy gone to a happier place.”

 
          
“Where are they taking—her?”

 
          
She
did not think it unusual, her choice of the feminine pronoun. Already she had
identified herself with that tiny fragment parceled like an unripe variety of
fruit. Now, in this moment, she was being carried up the hill within
compressing darkness, a stone in a peach, silent and terrified,
the
touch of the father against the coffin material outside;
gentle and noiseless and firm inside.

 
          
“To
the graveyard, naturally; that’s where they’re taking her,” he said, the
cigarette making a filter of smoke across his casual face.

 
          
“Not
the
graveyard?”

 
          
“There’s
only one cemetery in these towns, you know that. They usually hurry it. That
little girl had probably been dead only a few hours.”

 
          
“A
few hours—”

 
          
She
turned away, quite ridiculous, quite naked, with only the towel supported by
her limp,
untrying
hands. She walked toward the bed.
“A few hours ago she was alive, and now—”

 
          
He
went on, “Now they’re hurrying her up the hill. The climate isn’t kind to the
dead. It’s hot, there’s no embalming. They have to finish it quickly.”

 
          
“But
to
that
graveyard, that horrible
place,” she said, with a voice from a dream.

 
          
“Oh,
the mummies,” he said. “Don’t let that bother you.”

 
          
She
sat on the bed, again and again stroking the towel laid across her lap. Her
eyes were blind as the brown
paps
of her breasts. She
did not see him or the room. She knew that if he snapped his fingers or
coughed, she wouldn’t even look up.

 
          
“They
were eating fruit at her funeral, and laughing,” she said.

 
          
“It’s
a long climb to the cemetery.”

 
          
She
shuddered, a convulsive motion, like a fish trying to free itself from a
deep-swallowed hook. She lay back and he looked at her as one examines a poor
sculpture; all criticism, all quiet and easy and uncaring. She wondered idly
just how
much his hands
had had to do with the
broadening and flattening and
changement
of her body.
Certainly this was not the body he’d started with. It was past saving now. Like
clay which the sculptor has carelessly impregnated with water, it was
impossible to shape again. In order to shape clay you warm it with your hands,
evaporate the moisture with heat. But there was no more of that fine summer
weather between them. There was no warmth to bake away the aging moisture that
collected and made pendant now her breasts and body. When the heat is gone, it
is marvelous and unsettling to see how quickly a vessel stores self-destroying
water in its cells.

 
          
“I
don’t feel well,” she said. She lay there, thinking it over. “I don’t feel
well,” she said again, when he made no response. After another minute or two
she lifted herself. “Let’s not stay here another night, Joe.”

 
          
“But
it’s a wonderful town.”

 
          
“Yes,
but we’ve seen everything.” She got up. She knew what came next.
Gayness, blitheness, encouragement, everything quite false and
hopeful.
“We could go on to
Patzcuaro
. Make it
in no time. You won’t have to pack, I’ll do it all myself, darling! We can get
a room at the Don Posada there. They say it’s a beautiful little town—”

 
          
“This,”
he remarked, “is a beautiful little town.”

 
          
“Bougainvillea
climb all over the buildings—” she said.

 
          
“These—”
he pointed to some flowers at the window”—are bougainvillea.”

 
          
“—and
we’d fish, you like fishing,” she said in bright haste. “And I’d fish, too, I’d
learn, yes, I would, I’ve always
wanted
to learn! And they say the
Tarascan
Indians there are
almost Mongoloid in feature, and don’t speak much Spanish, and from there we
could go to
Paracutin
, that’s near
Uruapan
, and they have some of the finest lacquered
boxes there, oh, it’ll be fun, Joe. I’ll pack. You just take it easy, and—”

 
          
“Marie.”

 
          
He
stopped her with one word as she ran to the bathroom door.

 
          
“Yes?”

 
          
“I
thought you said you didn’t feel well?”

 
          
“I
didn’t. I don’t. But, thinking of all those swell places—”

 
          
“We
haven’t seen one-tenth of this town,” he explained logically. “There’s that
statue of
Morelos
on the hill, I want a shot of that,
and some of that French architecture up the
street .
 . .
we’ve traveled three hundred miles and we’ve been here one day and now want to
rush off somewhere else. I’ve already paid the rent for another
night. . . .”

 
          
“You
can get it back,” she said.

 
          
“Why
do you want to run away?” he said, looking at her with an attentive simplicity.
“Don’t you like the town?”

 
          
“I
simply adore it,” she said, her cheeks white, smiling. “It’s so green and
pretty.”

 
          
“Well,
then,” he said.
“Another day.
You’ll love it. That’s
settled.”

 
          
She
started to speak.

 
          
“Yes?”
he asked.

 
          
“Nothing.”

 
          
She
closed the bathroom door. Behind it she rattled open a medicine box. Water
rushed into a tumbler. She was taking something for her stomach.

 
          
He
came to the bathroom door.

 
          
“Marie,
the mummies don’t bother you, do they?”

 
          
“Unh-unh,”
she said.

 
          
“Was
it the funeral, then?”

 
          
“Unh.”

 
          
“Because,
if you were really afraid, I’d pack in a moment, you know that, darling.”

 
          
He
waited.

 
          
“No,
I’m not afraid,” she said.

 
          
“Good
girl,” he said.

 
          
The
graveyard was enclosed by a thick adobe wall, and at its four corners small
stone angels tilted out on stony wings, their grimy heads capped with bird
droppings, their hands gifted with amulets of the same substance, their faces
unquestionably freckled.

 
          
In
the warm smooth flow of sunlight which was like a depthless,
tideless
river, Joseph and Marie climbed up the hill, their
shadows slanting blue behind them. Helping one another, they made the cemetery
gate, swung back the Spanish blue iron grille and entered.