Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09

by The Small Assassin (v2. 1)

  So Mr. Benedict moved from body to body in his mortuary that afternoon, talking to all the sheeted figures, telling them his every secret. The final body for the day was the body of one Merriwell Blythe, an ancient man afflicted with spells and comas. Mr. Blythe had been brought in for dead several times, but each time had revived in time to prevent premature burial.

  Mr. Benedict pulled back the sheet from Mr. Blythe's face.

  Mr. Merriwell Blythe fluttered his eyes.

  'Ah!' and Mr. Benedict let fall the sheet.

  'You!' screamed the voice under the sheet.

  Mr. Benedict fell against the slab, suddenly shaken and sick.

  'Get me up from here!' cried the voice of Mr. Merriwell Blythe.

  'You're alive!' said Mr. Benedict, jerking aside the sheet.

  'Oh, the thing's I've heard, the things I've listened to the last hour!' wailed the old man on the slab, rolling his eyes about in his head in white orbits. 'Lying here, not able to move, and hearing you talk the things you talk! Oh, you dark, dark thing, you awful thing, you fiend, you monster, get me up from here. I'll tell the mayor and the council and everyone, oh, you dark, dark thing! You defiler and sadist, you perverted scoundrel, you terrible man, wait'll I tell, I tell on you!' shrieked the old man, frothing. 'Get me up from here!' 'No!' said Mr. Benedict, falling to his knees, 'Oh, you terrible man!' sobbed Mr. Merriwell Blythe. 'To think this has gone on in our town all these years and we never knew the things you did to people! Oh, you monstrous monster!' 'No,' whispered Mr. Benedict, trying to get up, falling down, palsied and in terror. 'The things you said,' accused the old man in dry contempt. 'The things you do!' 'Sorry,' whispered Mr. Benedict.

  The old man tried to rise. 'Don't!' said Mr. Benedict, and held on to him. 'Let go of me!' said the old man. 'No,' said Mr. Benedict. He reached for a hypodermic and stabbed the old man in the arm with it. 'You!' cried the old man, wildly, to all the sheeted figures. 'Help me!' He squinted blindly at the window, at the churchyard below with the leaning stones. 'You, out there, too, under the stones, help! Listen!' The old man fell back, whistling and frothing. He knew he was dying. 'All, listen,' he babbled. 'He's done this to me, and you, and you, all of you, he's done too much, too long. Don't take it! Don't, don't let him do any more to anyone!' The old man licked away the stuff from his lips, growing weaker. 'Do something to him!'

  Mr. Benedict stood there, shocked, and said, 'They can't do anything to me. They can't. I say they can't.'

  'Out of your graves!' wheezed the old man. 'Help me! Tonight, or tomorrow or soon, but jump up and fix him, oh, this horrible man!' And he wept many tears.

  'How foolish,' said Mr. Benedict numbly. 'You're dying and foolish.' Mr. Benedict could not move his lips. His eyes were wide. 'Go on and die, now, quickly.'

  'Everybody up!' shouted the old man. 'Everybody out! Help!'

  'Please don't talk any more,' said Mr. Benedict. 'I really don't like to listen.'

  The room was suddenly very dark. It was night. It was getting late. The old man raved on and on, getting weaker. Finally, smiling, he said, 'They've taken a lot from you, horrible man. Tonight, they'll do something.'

  The old man died.

  People say there was an explosion that night in the graveyard. Or rather, a series of explosions, a smell of strange things, a movement, a violence, a raving. There was much light and lightning, and a kind of rain, and the church bells hammered and slung about in the belfry, and stones toppled, and things swore oaths, and things flew through the air, and there was a chasing and a screaming, and many shadows and all the lights in the mortuary blazing on, and things moving inside and outside in swift jerks and shamblings, windows broke, doors were torn from hinges, leaves from trees, iron gates clattered, and in the end there was a picture of Mr. Benedict running about, running about, vanishing, the lights out, suddenly, and a tortured scream that could only be from Mr. Benedict himself.

  After that — nothing. Quiet.

  The town people entered the mortuary the next morning. They searched the mortuary building and the church, and then they went out into the graveyard.

  And they found nothing but blood, a vast quantity of blood, sprinkled and thrown and spread everywhere you could possibly look, as if the heavens had bled profusely in the night.

  But not a sign of Mr. Benedict.

  'Where could he be?' everybody wondered.

  'How should we know?' everybody replied, confounded.

  And then they had the answer.

  Walking through the graveyard they stood in deep tree shadows where the stones, row on row, were old and time-erased and leaning. No birds sang in the trees. The sunlight which finally managed to pierce the thick leaves, was like a light bulb illumination, weak, frail, unbelievable, theatrical, thin.

  They stopped by one tombstone. 'Here, now!' they exclaimed.

  Others paused and bent over the greyish, moss-flecked stone, and cried out.

  Freshly scratched, as if by feebly, frantic, hasty fingers (in fact, as if scratched by fingernails, the writing was that new) was the name: MR. BENEDICT.

  'Look over here!' someone else cried. Everybody turned. 'This one, this stone, and this one, and this one, too!' cried the villager, pointing to five other gravestones.

  Everybody hurried around, looking and recoiling.

  Upon each and every stone, scratched by fingernail scratchings, the same message appeared:

  MR. BENEDICT —

  The town people were stunned.

  'But that's impossible,' objected one of them, faintly. 'He couldn't be buried under all these gravestones!'

  They stood there for one long moment. Instinctively they all looked at one another nervously in the silence and the tree darkness. They all waited for an answer. With fumbling, senseless lips, one of them replied, simply:

  'Couldn't he?'

  Let's Play 'Poison'

  'WE hate you!' cried the sixteen boys and girls rushing and crowding about Michael in the schoolroom. Michael screamed. Recess was over, Mr. Howard, the teacher, was still absent from the filling room. 'We hate you!' and the sixteen boys and girls, bumping and clustering and breathing, raised a window. It was three flights down to the pavement. Michael flailed.

  They took hold of Michael and pushed him out the window.

  Mr. Howard, their teacher, came into the room. 'Wait a minute!' he shouted.

  Michael fell three flights. Michael died.

  Nothing was done about it. The police shrugged eloquently. These children were all eight or nine, they didn't understand what they were doing. So.

  Mr. Howard's breakdown occurred the next day. He refused, ever again, to teach! 'But, why?' asked his friends. Mr. Howard gave no answer. He remained silent and a terrible light filled his eyes, and later he remarked that if he told them the truth they would think him quite insane.

  Mr. Howard left Madison City. He went to live in a small nearby town, Green Bay, for seven years, on an income managed from writing stories and poetry.

  He never married. The few women he approached always desired — children.

  In the autumn of his seventh year of self-enforced retirement, a good friend of Mr. Howard's, a teacher, fell ill. For lack of a proper substitute, Mr. Howard was summoned and convinced that it was his duty to take over the class. Because he realized the appointment could last no longer than a few weeks, Mr. Howard agreed, unhappily.

  'Sometimes,' announced Mr. Howard, slowly pacing the aisles of the schoolroom on that Monday morning in September, 'sometimes, I actually believe that children are invaders from another dimension.'

  He stopped, and his shiny dark eyes snapped from face to face of his small audience. He held one hand behind him, clenched. The other hand, like a pale animal, climbed his lapel as he talked and later climbed back down to toy with his ribboned glasses.

  'Sometimes,' he continued, looking at William Arnold and Russell Newell, and Donald Bowers and Charlie Hencoop, 'sometimes I believe children are little monsters thrust out of
hell, because the devil could no longer cope with them. And I certainly believe that everything should be done to reform their uncivil little minds.'

  Most of his words ran unfamiliarly into the washed and unwashed ears of Arnold, Newell, Bowers and Company. But the tone inspired one to dread. The little girls lay back in their seats, against their pigtails, lest he yank them like bell-ropes, to summon the dark angels. All stared at Mr. Howard, as if hypnotized.

  'You are another race entirely, your motives, your beliefs, your disobediences,' said Mr. Howard. 'You are not human. You are — children. Therefore, until such time as you are adults, you have no right to demand privileges or question your elders, who know better.'

  He paused, and put his elegant rump upon the chair behind the neat, dustless desk.

  'Living in your world of fantasy,' he said, scowling darkly. 'Well, there'll be no fantasy here. You'll soon discover that a ruler on your hand is no dream, no faerie frill, no Peter Pan excitement.' He snorted. 'Have I frightened you? I have. Good! Well and good. You deserve to be. I want you to know where we stand. I'm not afraid of you, remember that. I'm not afraid of you' His hand trembled and he drew back in his chair as all their eyes stared at him. 'Here!' He flung a glance clear across the room. 'What're you whispering about, back there? Some necromancy or other?'

  A little girl raised her hand. 'What's necromancy?'

  'We'll discuss that when our two young friends, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bowers, explain their whispers. Well, young men?'

  Donald Bowers arose. 'We don't like you. That's all we said.' He sat down again.

  Mr. Howard raised his brows. 'I like frankness, truth. Thank you for your honesty. But, simultaneously, I do not tolerate flippant rebellion. You'll stay an hour after school tonight and wash the boards.'

  After school, walking home, with autumn leaves falling both before and after his passing. Mr. Howard caught up with four of his students. He rapped his cane sharply on the pavement. 'Here, what are you children doing?'

  The two startled boys and girls jerked as if struck upon their shoulders by his cane. 'Oh,' they all said.

  'Well,' demanded the man. 'Explain. What were you doing here when I came up?'

  William Arnold said, 'Playing poison.'

  'Poison!' Their teacher's face twisted. He was carefully sarcastic. 'Poison, poison, playing poison. Well. And how does one play poison?'

  Reluctantly, William Arnold ran off.

  'Come back here!' shouted Mr. Howard.

  'I'm only showing you,' said the boy, hopping over a cement block of the pavement, 'how we play poison. Whenever we come to a dead man we jump over him.'

  'One does, does one?' said Mr. Howard.

  'If you jump on a dead man's grave, then you're poisoned and fall down and die,' explained Isabel Skelton, much too brightly.

  'Dead men, graves, poisoned,' Mr. Howard said, mockingly. 'Where do you get this dead man idea?'

  'See?' said Clara Parris, pointing with her arithmetic. 'On this square, the name of the two dead men.'

  'Ridiculous,' retorted Mr. Howard, squinting down. 'Those are simply the names of the contractors who mixed and laid the cement pavement.'

  Isabel and Clara both gasped wildly and turned accusing eyes to the two boys. 'You said they were gravestones!' they cried, almost together.

  William Arnold looked at his feet. 'Yeah. They are. Well, almost. Anyway.' He looked up. 'It's late. I gotta go home. So long.'

  Clara Parris looked at the two little names cut into the pavement. 'Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill,' she read the names. 'Then these aren't graves? Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill aren't buried here? See, Isabel, that's what I told you, a dozen times I did.'

  'You did not,' sulked Isabel.

  'Deliberate lies,' Mr. Howard tapped his cane in an impatient code. 'Falsification of the highest calibre. Good God, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Bowers, there'll be no more of this, do you understand?'

  'Yes, sir,' mumbled the boys.

  'Speak up!'

  'Yes, sir,' they replied, again.

  Mr. Howard swung off swiftly down the street. William Arnold waited until he was out of sight before he said, 'I hope a bird drops something right smack on his nose — '

  'Come on, Clara, let's play poison,' said Isabel, hopefully.

  Clara pouted. 'It's been spoiled. I'm going home.'

  'I'm poisoned!' cried Donald Bowers, falling to the earth and frothing merrily. 'Look, I'm poisoned! Gahhh!'

  'Oh,' cried Clara, angrily, and ran away.

  Saturday morning Mr. Howard glanced out of his front window and swore when he saw Isabel Skelton making chalk marks on his pavement and then hopping about, making a monotonous sing-song with her voice.

  'Stop that!'

  Rushing out, he almost flung her to the pavement in his emotion. He grabbed her and shook her violently and let her go and stood over her and the chalk marks.

  'I was only playing hopscotch,' she sobbed, hands over her eyes.

  'I don't care, you can't play it here,' he declared. Bending, he erased the chalk marks with his handkerchief, muttering. 'Young witch. Pentagrams. Rhymes and incantations, and all looking perfectly innocent, God, how innocent. You little fiend!' he made as if to strike her, but stopped. Isabel ran off, wailing. 'Go ahead, you little fool!' he screamed, furiously. 'Run off and tell your little cohorts that you've failed. They'll have to try some other way! They won't get around me, they won't, oh, no!'

  He stalked back into his house and poured himself a stiff drink of brandy and drank it down. The rest of the day he heard the children playing kick-the-can, hide-and-seek. Over-Annie-Over, jacks, tops, mibs, and the sound of the little monsters in every shrub and shadow would not let him rest. 'Another week of this,' he thought, 'and I'll be stark staring.' He flung his hand to his aching head. 'God in heaven, why weren't we all born adults?'

  Another week, then. And the hatred growing between him and the children. The hate and the fear growing apace. The nervousness, the sudden tantrums over nothing, and then — the silent waiting, the way the children climbed the trees and looked at him as they swiped late apples, the melancholy smell of autumn settling in around the town, the days growing short, the night coming too soon.

  'But they won't touch me, they won't dare touch me,' thought Mr. Howard sucking down one glass of brandy after another. 'It's all very silly anyhow, and there's nothing to it. I'll soon be away from here, and — them. I'll soon — '

  There was a white skull at the window.

  It was eight o'clock of a Thursday evening. It had been a long week, with the angry flares and the accusations. He had had to continually chase the children away from the water-main excavation in front of his house. Children loved excavations, hiding-places, pipes and conduits and trenches, and they were ever ascramble over and on and down in and up out of the holes where the new pipes were being laid. It was all finished, thank the Lord, and tomorrow the workmen would shovel in the earth and tamp it down and put in a new cement pavement, and that would eliminate the children. But, right now —

  There was a white skull at the window!

  There could be no doubt that a boy's hand held the skull against the glass, tapping and moving it. There was a childish tittering from outside.

  Mr. Howard burst from the house. 'Hey, you!' He exploded into the midst of the three running boys. He leaped after them, shouting and yelling. The street was dark, but he saw the figures dart beyond and below him. He saw them sort of bound and could not remember the reason for this, until too late.

  The earth opened under him. He fell and lay in a pit, his head taking a terrific blow from a laid water-pipe, and as he lost consciousness he had an impression as of an avalanche, set off by his fall, cascading down cool moist pellets of dirt upon his pants, his shoes, upon his coat, upon his spine, upon the back of his neck, his head, filling his mouth, his ears, his eyes, his nostrils. . .

  The neighbour lady with the eggs wrapped in a napkin, knocked on Mr. Howard's door the next day for five minutes. Wh
en she opened the door, finally, and walked in, she found nothing but specules of rug-dust floating in the sunny air, the big halls were empty, the cellar smelled of coal and clinkers, and the attic had nothing in it but a rat, a spider, and a faded letter. 'Funniest thing,' she said many times in the following years, 'whatever happened to Mr. Howard.'

  And adults, being what they are, never observant, paid no attention to the children playing 'Poison' on Oak Bay Street, in all the following autumns. Even when the children leaped over one particular square of cement, twisted about and glanced at the marks on it which read:

  'M. HOWARD — R.I.P.'

  'Who's Mr. Howard, Billy?'

  'Aw, I guess he's the guy who laid the cement.'

  'What does R.I.P. mean?'

  'Aw, who knows? You're poison! you stepped on it!'

  'Get along, get along, children; don't stand in Mother's path! Get along now!'

  The Night

  YOU are a child in a small town. You are, to be exact, eight years old, and it is growing late at night. Late, for you, accustomed to bedding in at nine or nine-thirty; once in a while perhaps begging Mom or Dad to let you stay up later to hear Sam and Henry on that strange radio that is popular in this year of 1927. But most of the time you are in bed and snug at this time of night.

  It is a warm summer evening. You live in a small house on a small street in the outer part of town where there are few street lights. There is only one store open, about a block away; Mrs. Singer's. In the hot evening Mother has been ironing the Monday wash and you have been intermittently begging for ice-cream and staring into the dark.

  You and your mother are all alone at home in the warm darkness of summer. Finally, just before it is time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relents and tells you:

  'Run get a pint of ice-cream and be sure she packs it tight.'

  You ask if you can get a scoop of chocolate ice-cream on top, because you don't like vanilla, and mother agrees. You clutch the money and run barefooted over the warm evening cement pavement, under the apple trees and oak trees, towards the store. The town is so quiet and far off, you can only hear the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars.