by Ann
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 into 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.
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 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’t 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 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 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 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 this all 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 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 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 way 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 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. 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 from 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!
‘Well 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.
A familiar voice said, ‘Is – is he dead?’
Another voice, a memorable 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 rights 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 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.
The Long Sheet
William Sansom
William Sansom (1912–1976) was an idiosyncratic English writer known for applying a surrealist’s sensibilities to the weird tale. Obscure today, Sansom enjoyed a brief period of acclaim in the 1940s and 1950s, when the fresh originality of his stories earned him a place in leading British literary magazines. A firefighter in London during the Blitz of World War II, Sansom managed to transform his experiences in a way that garnered him comparisons to Franz Kafka. Sophisticated yet passionate, his stories reward repeated readings. ‘The Long Sheet’ (1944) was published before the English translation of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and yet in their use of weird ritual to illuminate society the two stories share some similarities.
Have you ever wrung dry a wet cloth? Wrung it bone white dry – with only the grip of your fingers and the muscles of your arms? If you have done this, you will understand better the situation of the captives at Device Z when the warders set them the task of the long sheet.
You will remember how, having stretched the cloth between your hands, you begin by twisting one end – holding the other firm so that the water is corkscrewed from its hiding place. At first the water spurts out easily. But later you will find yourself screwing with both hands in different directions, whitening your knuckles, straining every fibre of your diaphragm – and all to extract the smallest drop of moisture! The muscle of your arm swells like an egg – yet the wet drop remains a pinhead! As you work the cloth will gradually change from a grey colour to the whiteness of dried bone. Yet even then the cloth will be wet! Still you will knot your muscles; still you will wrench away at the furtive damp. Then – at last! – you will believe the cloth to be dry…but in the next second the tip of a finger will quiver tragically as it touches some cold, hidden veil of damp clinging deep down in the interlaced threads.
Such, then, was the task of the captives.
They were placed in a long steel box of a room with no windows and no doors. The room was some six feet wide and six feet high; but it ran one hundred feet in length. It resembled thus a rectangular tunnel with no entrance and no exit. Yet the sensation inside was not really that of a tunnel. For instance, a quantity of light flowed through thick glass panels set at intervals along the ceiling. These were the skylights, and through these the captives had been dropped into the box. Again, the impression of living in a tunnel was offset by a system of cubicle walls that separated the captives into groups. These cubicle walls were made from the same riveted steel as the main walls: there was no communication from cubicle to cubicle except through a half foot of space left between the top of the wall and the ceiling. Thus each group of captives occupied, as it were, a small room. There were twenty-two captives. They were grouped in unequal number within four cubicles.
Through the entire length of this system, raised three feet from the ground, passing through the very centre of each room, ran a long wound sheet. It was made from coarse white linen bundled into a loose cylinder of cloth some six inches in diameter.
When the captives were first thrown into their cubicles, the long sheet was heavy
with water. The warders had soaked the material so thoroughly that in the folds the water had gathered into lakes. The warders then issued their instructions. The captives were to wring the sheet dry. It would not do to wring the sheet to what we would normally call a ‘dry’ state – as of clothes ready for airing. On the contrary – this sheet must be purged of every moisture. It must be wrung as dry as a bone. This, the warders concluded, might take a long time. It might even take months of hard work. In fact, they had taken special care to treat the linen so that it would be durable over a lengthy period. But when the task was finally completed, then the men and women would be granted their freedom. They would be released.
As the grave faces of the warders disappeared and the glass skylights slid shut, the captives smiled for the first time. For months they had lived with the fear of death, they had shrunk in ceaseless apprehension of the terrible devices that awaited them. And now that future had devolved into the wringing of a simple sheet! A long sheet, it was true. But child’s play in comparison with what they had expected. Thus they sank to the steel floor in relief. Few laid a hand on the sheet that day.
But after three months the captives began to realize the true extent of their task. By this time each group in each cubicle had wrung the worst water from their section of the sheet. Yet with all their sweating and straining they could not rid the cloth of its last dampness.
It was apparent that the warders had no intention of presenting them with a simple task. For, through vents near the roof, hot steam was injected mechanically into the cubicles as long as daylight lasted. This steam naturally moistened the sheet afresh. The steam was so regulated that it hindered rather than prevented the fulfilment of the wringing. Thus there was always less steam entering than moisture wrung from the sheet at a normal rate of working. The steam injection merely meant that for every ten drops of water wrung seven new drops would settle upon the sheet. So that eventually the captives would still be able to wring the sheet dry. This device of the warders was introduced solely to complicate the task. It seemed that the warders were acting in two ways. Daily they encouraged the efforts of the captives with promises of release; but daily they turned on the steam cocks.