Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09

by The Small Assassin (v2. 1)

  The husband laughed with gratitude. “Glad to get rid of the damned thing. Wheel her out!”

  Mr. Whetmore directed two brawny workmen into the room. He was almost breathless with anticipation. “The most amazing thing. This morning I was lost, beaten, dejected—but a miracle happened.” The tombstone was loaded onto a small coaster truck. “Just an hour ago, I heard, by chance, of a Mr. White who had just died of pneumonia. A Mr. White, mind you, who spells his name with an I instead of a Y. I have just contacted his wife, and she is delighted that the stone is all prepared. And Mr. White not cold more than sixty minutes, and spelling his name with an I, just think of it. Oh, I’m so happy!”

  The tombstone, on its truck, rolled from the room, while Mr. Whetmore and the Oklahoma man laughed, shook hands, and Leota watched with suspicion as the commotion came to an end. “Well, that’s now all over,” grinned her husband as he closed the door on Mr. Whetmore, and began throwing the canned flowers into the sink and dropping the tin cans into a waste-basket. In the dark, he climbed into bed again, oblivious to her deep and solemn silence. She said not a word for a long while, but just lay there, alone-feeling. She felt him adjust the blankets with a sigh. “Now we can sleep. The damn old thing’s took away. It’s only ten thirty. Plenty of time for sleep.” How he enjoyed spoiling her fun.

  Leota was about to speak when a rapping came from down below again. “There! There!” she Cried, triumphantly, holding her husband. “There it is again, the noises, like I said. Hear them!”

  Her husband knotted his fists and clenched his teeth. “How many times must I explain. Do I have to kick you in the head to make you understand, woman! Let me alone. There’s nothing—”’

  “Listen, listen, oh, listen,” she begged in a whisper.

  They listened in the square darkness.

  A rapping on a door came from downstairs.

  A door opened. Muffled and distant and faint, a woman’s voice said, sadly, “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Whetmore.”

  And deep down in the darkness underneath the suddenly shivering bed of Leota and her Oklahoma husband, Mr. Whetmore’s voice replied: “Good evening again, Mrs. White. Here. I brought the stone.”

  The Smiling People

  IT was the sensation of silence that was the most notable aspect of the house. As Mr. Greppin came through the front door the oiled silence of the door opening and swinging close behind him was like an opening and shutting dream, a thing accomplished on rubber pads, bathed in lubricant, slow and unmaterialistic. The double carpet in the hall, which he himself had so recently laid, gave off no sound from his movements. And when the wind shook the house late of nights there was not a rattle of eave or tremor of loose sash. He had, himself, checked the storm windows. The screen doors were securely hooked with bright new, firm hooks, and the furnace did not knock but sent a silent whisper of warm wind up the throats of the heating system that sighed ever so quietly, moving the cuffs of his trousers as he stood, now, warming himself from the bitter afternoon.

  Weighing the silence with the remarkable instruments of pitch and balance in his small ears, he nodded with satisfaction that the silence was so unified and finished. Because there had been nights when rats had walked between wall-layers and it had taken baited traps and poisoned food before the walls were mute. Even the grandfather clock had been stilled, its brass pendulum hung frozen and gleaming in its long cedar, glass-fronted coffin.

  They were waiting for him in the dining-room.

  He listened. They made no sound. Good. Excellent, in fact. They had learned, then, to be silent. You had to teach people, but it was worth while — there was not a stir of knife or fork from the dining-table. He worked off his thick grey gloves, hung up his cold armour of overcoat and stood there with an expression of urgency and indecisiveness. . . thinking of what had to be done.

  Mr. Greppin proceeded with familiar certainty and economy of motion into the dining-room, where the four individuals seated at the waiting table did not move or speak a word. The only sound was the merest allowable pad of his shoes on the deep carpet.

  His eyes, as usual, instinctively fastened upon the lady heading the table. Passing, he waved a finger near her cheek. She did not blink.

  Aunt Rose sat firmly at the head of the table, and if a mote of dust floated lightly down out of the ceiling spaces, did her eye trace its orbit? Did the eye revolve in its shellacked socket, with glassy cold precision? And if the dust mote happened upon the shell of her wet eye did the eye batten? Did the muscles clinch, the lashes close?

  No.

  Aunt Rose's hand lay on the table like cutlery, rare and fine and old; tarnished. Her bosom was hidden in a salad of fluffy linen. The breasts had not been exhumed for years; either for love or child-sucking. They were mummies wrapped in cerements and put away for all time. Beneath the table her stick legs in high button shoes went up into a sexless pipe of dress. You felt that the legs terminated at the skirt line and from there on she was a department store dummy, all wax and nothingness. You felt that her husband, years ago, must have handled her in just such a way as one handled window mannequins, and she responded with the same chill waxen movements, with as much enthusiasm and response as a mannequin; and the husband, beaten off with no blows and no words, had turned over under the bedding and lain trembling with a feeding passion for many nights and then, finally, silently, taken to evening walks and little places across town, beyond the ravine, where a pink curtained window glowed with fresher electricity and a young lady answered when he tapped the bell.

  So here was Aunt Rose, staring straight at Mr. Greppin, and — he choked out a laugh and clapped hands derisively shut — there were the first hints of a dust moustache gathering across her upper lip!

  'Good evening, Aunt Rose,' he said, bowing. 'Good evening, Uncle Dimity,' he said, graciously. 'No, not a word,' he held up his hand. 'Not a word from any of you.' He bowed again. 'Ah, good evening, cousin Lila, and you, cousin Lester.'

  Lila sat upon the left, her hair like golden shavings from a tube of lathed brass. Lester, opposite her, told all directions with his hair. They were both young, he fourteen, she sixteen. Uncle Dimity, their father (but 'father' was a nasty word!) sat next to Lila, placed in this secondary niche long long ago because Aunt Rose said the window draught might get his neck if he sat at the head of the table. Ah, Aunt Rose!

  Mr. Greppin drew the chair under his tight-clothed little rump and put a casual elbow to the linen.

  'I've something to say,' he said. 'It's very important. This has gone on for weeks now. It can't go any further. I'm in love. Oh, but I told you that long ago. On the day I made you all smile. Remember?'

  The eyes of the four seated people did not blink, the hands did not move.

  Greppin became introspective. The day he had made them smile. Two weeks ago it was. He had come home, walked in, looked at them and said, 'I'm to be married!'

  They had all whirled with expressions as if someone had just smashed the window.

  'You're to be what!' cried Aunt Rose.

  'To Alice Jane Bellerd!' he had said, stiffening somewhat.

  'Congratulations,' said Uncle Dimity. 'I guess,' he added, looking at his wife. He cleared his throat. 'But isn't it a little early, son?' He looked at his wife again. 'Yes. Yes, I think it is a little early. I wouldn't advise it yet, not just yet, no.'

  'The house is in a terrible way,' said Aunt Rose. 'We won't have it fixed for a year yet.'

  'That's what you said last year and the year before,' said Mr. Greppin. 'And anyway,' he said, bluntly, 'this is my house.'

  Aunt Rose's jaw had clamped at that. 'After all these years, for us to be bodily thrown out, why I — '

  'You won't be thrown out, don't be idiotic!' said Greppin, furiously.

  'Now, Rose — ' said Uncle Dimity in a pale tone.

  Aunt Rose dropped her hands. 'After all I've done — '

  In that instant Greppin had known they would have to go, all of them. First he would make them silent, the
n he would make them smile, then, later, he would move them out like luggage. He couldn't bring Alice Jane into a house full of grims such as these, where Aunt Rose followed wherever you went even when she wasn't following you, and the children performed indignities upon you at a glance from their maternal parent, and the father, no better than a third child, carefully rearranged his advice to you on being a bachelor. Greppin stared at them. It was their fault that his loving and living was all wrong. If he did something about them — then his warm, luminous dreams of soft bodies glowing with an anxious perspiration of love might become tangible and near. Then he would have the house for himself and — and Alice Jane. Yes, Alice Jane.

  Aunt, Uncle and cousins would have to go. Quickly. If he told them to go, as he had often done, twenty years might pass as Aunt Rose gathered sun-bleached sachets and Edison phonographs. Long before then, Alice Jane herself would be moved and gone.

  Greppin looked at them as he picked up the carving-knife.

  Greppin's head snapped with tiredness. He flicked his eyes open. Eh? Oh, he had been drowsing, thinking.

  All that had occurred two weeks ago. Two weeks ago this very night that conversation about marriage, moving, Alice Jane, had come about. Two weeks ago it had been. Two weeks ago he had made them smile.

  Now, recovering from his reverie, he smiled around at the silent and motionless figures. They smiled back in a peculiarly pleasing fashion.

  'I hate you. You are an old bitch,' he said to Aunt Rose, directly. 'Two weeks ago I wouldn't have dared to say that. Tonight, ah, well — ' He lazed his voice, turning. 'Uncle Dimity, let me give you a little advice, old man — '

  He talked small talk, picked up a spoon, pretended to eat peaches from an empty dish. He had already eaten downtown in a restaurant, pork, potatoes, pie, coffee. But now he made dessert-eating motions because he enjoyed this little act. He made as if he were chewing.

  'So — tonight you're finally, once and for all, moving out. I've waited two weeks, thinking it all over. In a way, I guess I've kept you here this long because I wanted to keep an eye on you. Once you're gone, I can't be sure — ' And here his eyes gleamed with fear. 'You might come prowling around, making noises at night, and I couldn't stand that. I can't ever have noises in this house, not even when Alice moves in. . .'

  The double carpet was thick and soundless underfoot, reassuring.

  'Alice wants to move in day after tomorrow. We're getting married.'

  Aunt Rose winked evilly, doubtfully at him.

  'Ah!' he cried, leaping up. Then, staring, he sank down, mouth convulsing. He released the tension in him, laughing. 'Oh, I see. It was a fly.' He watched the fly crawl with slow precision on the ivory cheek of Aunt Rose and dart away. Why did it have to pick that instant to make her eye appear to blink, to doubt? 'Do you doubt I ever will marry, Aunt Rose? Do you think me incapable of marriage, of love and love's duties? Do you think me immature, unable to cope with a woman and her methods? Do you think me a child, only day dreaming? Well!' He calmed himself with an effort, shaking his head. 'Man, man,' he argued to himself, 'it was only a fly. And does a fly make doubt of love, or did you make it into a fly and a wink? Damn it!' He pointed at the four of them. 'I'm going to fix the furnace hotter. In an hour I'll be moving you out of the house once and for all. You comprehend? Good. I see you do.'

  Outside, it began to rain, a cold nuzzling downpour that drenched the house. A look of irritation came to Greppin's face. The rain sound was one thing he couldn't stop, the one thing that couldn't be helped. No way to buy new hinges or lubricants or hooks for that. You might tent the housetop with lengths of cloth to soften the sound, mightn't you? That'd be going a bit far. No. No way of preventing the rain sounds.

  He wanted silence now, where he had never wanted it in his life so much. Each sound was a fear. So each sound had to be muffled, gotten to and eliminated.

  The drum of rain was like the knuckles of an impatient man on a surface. He lapsed again into remembering.

  He recalled the rest of it. The rest of that hour on that day two weeks ago when he had made them smile. . .

  He had taken up the carving-knife, prepared to cut the bird upon the table. As usual, the family had been gathered, all wearing their solemn, puritanical masks. If the children smiled the smiles were stepped on like nasty bugs by Aunt Rose.

  Aunt Rose criticized the angle of Greppin's elbows as he cut the bird. The knife, she made him understand also, was not sharp enough. Oh yes, the sharpness of the knife. At this point in his memory he stopped, roll-tilted his eyes, and laughed. Dutifully, then, he had crisped the knife on the sharpening rod, and again set upon the fowl. He had severed away much of it in some minutes before he slowly looked up at their solemn, critical faces, like puddings with agate eyes, and after staring at them a moment, as if discovered with a naked woman instead of a naked-limbed partridge, he lifted the knife and yelled hoarsely, 'Why in God's name can't you, any of you, ever smile? I'll make you smile!'

  He raised the knife a number of times like a magician's wand.

  And, in a short interval — behold! all of them smiled!

  He broke that memory in half, crumpled it, balled it, tossed it down. Rising briskly, he went to the hall, down the hall to the kitchen, and from there down the dim stairs into the cellar where he opened the furnace door and built the fire steadily and expertly into wonderful flame.

  Walking upstairs again he looked about. He'd have cleaners come and clean the empty house, re-decorators pull down the dull drapes and hoist new shimmery banners up. New thick Oriental rugs purchased for the floors would subtly ensure the silence he desired and would need at least for the next month, if not for the entire year.

  He put his hands to his ears. What if Alice Jane made noise moving about the house? Some noise, somehow, some place!

  Then, he laughed. It was quite a joke. That problem was already solved. He need fear no noise from Alice. It was all absurdly simple. He would have all the pleasure of Alice Jane and none of the dream-destroying distractions and uncomfortables.

  There was one other addition needed to the quality of silence. Upon the tops of the doors that the wind sucked shut with a bang at frequent intervals he would install modern air-compression brakes, those kind they have on library doors that hiss gently as their levers seal.

  He passed through the dining-room. The figures had not moved from their tableau. Their hands remained affixed in familiar positions, and their indifference to him was not impoliteness.

  He climbed the hall stairs to change his clothing, preparatory to the task of moving the family. Taking the links from his fine cuffs he swung his head to one side.

  Music.

  First, he paid it no mind. Then, slowly, his face lifting to the ceiling, the colour drained from his cheeks.

  At the very apex of the house the music sounded, note by note, tone following tone, and it terrified him.

  Each tone came like a plucking of one single harp thread. In the complete silence the small sound of it was made larger until it grew out of proportion to itself, gone mad with all this soundlessness to stretch about in.

  The door opened in an explosion from his hands, the next thing his feet were trying the stairs to the third level of the house, the banister twisted in a long polished snake under his tightening, relaxing, sliding, reaching-up, pulling hands! The steps went under to be replaced by longer, higher, darker steps. He had started the game at the bottom with a slow stumbling. Now he was running with full impetus and if a wall had suddenly confronted him he'd not have stopped for it until he saw blood on it and fingernail scratches where he tried to pass through.

  He felt like a mouse running in a great clear space of a bell. High in the bell sphere the one harp thread hummed. It drew him on, caught him up with an umbilical of sound, gave his fear sustenance and life, mothered him. Fears passed between mother and groping child. He sought to shear away the connection with his hands, could not. He fell, as if someone'd given a heave on the cord, wr
iggling.

  Another clear threaded tone. And another.

  'No, keep quiet!' he shouted. 'There can't be noise in my house. Not since two weeks ago. I said there'd be no more noise. So there can't be — it's impossible! Keep quiet!'

  He burst upwards into the attic.

  Relief can be hysteria.

  Rain-drops, falling from a vent in the roof, struck shattering upon a tall cut-glass Swedish flower vase, with resonant tone.

  He destroyed the vase with one violent kick.

  Putting on an old shirt and old pair of pants in his room, he chuckled. The music was gone, the vent plugged, the vase in a thousand pieces, the silence again ensured.

  There are silences and silences. Each with its own identity. There were summer night silences, which weren't silences at all, but layer on layer of insect chorals and the sound of electric lamps swaying in lonely small orbits on lonely country roads, casting out feeble rings of illumination upon which the night fed — summer night silence which, to be a silence, demanded an indolence and a neglect and an indifference upon the part of the listener. Not a silence at all! And there was a winter silence, but it was an encoffined silence, ready to burst free at the first nod of spring; things had a compressed, a not-for-long feel, the silence made a sound unto itself, the freezing was so complete it made chimes of everything or detonations of a single breath or word you spoke at midnight on the diamond air. No, it was not a silence worthy of the name. There were also other silences. For instance — a silence between two lovers, when there need be no words. Colour came in his cheeks, he shut his eyes. It was a most pleasant silence, even if not complete, because women were always spoiling it by complaining of some little pressure or lack of pressure. He smiled. But with Alice Jane even that was eliminated. He had seen to everything. Everything was perfect.