“ 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
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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. This is one helluva
town to drive in. Got an accident up ahead. Want me to
detour?”
“ Yes. No. No! Wait. Go ahead. Let’s—let’s take a look.”
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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 toward him as he sat in the
rear of the cab. With its back toward 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.
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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-colored 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 ru n nin g-
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 color on her cheeks and lips.
“ There!” He turned wildly to Morgan. “ Did you see
her?”
“ See w hoT'
“ 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.
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Ray Bradbury
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
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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 m e.”
“ 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.”
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“ 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
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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.
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Ray Bradbury
A familiar voice said, “ Is—is he dead?”
Another voice, a mem
orable 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.
And that’s the way it’s been since time began, when crowds
gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very
simple; you didn’t know it was dangerous to move a hurt
man. You didn’t mean to hurt him.
He looked at them, above him, and he was curious as a
man under deep water looking up at people on a bridge. Who
are you? Where do you come from and how do you get here
so soon? You’re the crowd that’s always in the way, using up
good air that a dying man’s lungs are in need of, using up
space he should be using to lie in, alone. Tramping on people
to make sure they die, that’s you. I know all of you.
It was like a polite monologue. They said nothing. Faces.
The old man. The red-haired woman.
Someone picked up his briefcase. “ Whose is this?” they
asked.
It’s mine! It’s evidence against all of you!
Eyes, inverted over him. Shiny eyes under tousled hair or
under hats.
Faces.
Somewhere—a siren. The ambulance was coming.
But, looking at the faces, the construction, the cast, the
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form of the faces, Spallner saw it was too late. He read it in
their faces. They knew.
He tried to speak. A little bit got out:
“ It—looks like I ’ll—be joining up with you. I—guess I ’ll
be a member of your—group—now. ’ ’
He closed his eyes then, and waited for the coroner.
Michael Shea
The Autopsy
Michael Shea's science fiction has twice been nominated for the Nebula Award (once for the story herein) and he has won the World Fantasy Award for his book,
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 32
