Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09

by The Small Assassin (v2. 1)

  Whispering.

  He hoped the neighbours hadn't heard him shrieking like a fool.

  A faint whispering.

  Now, about silences. . . The best silence was one conceived in every aspect by an individual, himself, so that there could be no bursting of crystal bonds, no electric-insect hummings; the human mind could cope with each sound, each emergency, until such a complete silence was achieved that one could hear one's cells adjust in one's hand.

  A whispering.

  He shook his head. There was no whispering. There could be none in his house. Sweat began to seep down his body, his jaw loosened, his eyes were turned free in their sockets.

  Whisperings. Low rumours of talk.

  'I tell you I'm getting married,' he said, weakly, loosely.

  'You're lying,' said the whispers.

  His head fell forward on its neck as if hung, chin on chest.

  'Her name is Alice Jane — ' he mouthed it between soft, wet lips and the words were formless. One of his eyes began to jitter its lid up and down as if blinking out a code to some unseen guest. 'You can't stop me from loving her. I love her — '

  Whispering.

  He took a blind step forward.

  The cuff of his pants leg quivered as he reached the floor grille of the ventilator. A hot rise of air hollowed his cuffs. Whispering.

  The furnace.

  He was on his way downstairs when someone knocked on the front door.

  He leaned against it. 'Who is it?'

  'Mr. Greppin?'

  Greppin drew in his breath. 'Yes?'

  'Will you let us in, please?'

  'Who is it?'

  'The police,' said the man outside.

  'What do you want? I'm just sitting down to supper!'

  'Just want a talk with you. The neighbours phoned. Said they hadn't seen your aunt and uncle for two weeks. Heard a noise a while ago — '

  'I assure you everything is all right.' He forced a laugh.

  'Well, then,' continued the voice outside, 'we can talk it over in friendly style if you'll only open the door.'

  'I'm sorry,' insisted Greppin. 'I'm tired and hungry, come back tomorrow. I'll talk to you then, if you want.'

  'I'll have to insist, Mr. Greppin.'

  They began to beat against the door.

  Grippin turned automatically, stiffly, walked down the hall past the cold clock, into the dining-room, without a word. He seated himself without looking at any one in particular and then he began to talk, slowly at first, then more rapidly.

  'Some pests at the door. You'll talk to them, won't you, Aunt Rose? You'll tell them to go away, won't you, we're eating supper? Everyone else go on eating and look pleasant and they'll go away, if they do come in. Aunt Rose, you will talk to them, won't you? And now that things are happening I have something to tell you.' A few hot tears fell for no reason. He looked at them as they soaked and spread in the white linen, vanishing. 'I don't know anyone named Alice Jane Bellerd. I never knew anyone named Alice Jane Bellerd! It was all — all — I don't know. I said I loved her and wanted to marry her to get around somehow to make you smile. Yes, I said it because I planned to make you smile, that was the only reason. I'm never going to have a woman, I always knew for years I never would have. Will you please pass the potatoes, Aunt Rose?'

  The front door splintered and fell. A heavy, softened rushing filled the hall. Men broke into the dining-room.

  A hesitation.

  The police inspector hastily removed his hat.

  'Oh, I beg your pardon,' he apologized. 'I didn't mean to intrude upon your supper, I — '

  The sudden halting of the police was such that their movement shook the room. The movement catapulted the bodies of Aunt Rose and Uncle Dimity straight away to the carpet, where they lay, their throats severed in a half-moon from ear to ear — which caused them, like the children seated at the table, to have what was the horrid illusion of a smile under their chins; ragged smiles that welcomed in the late arrivals and told them everything with a simple grimace. . .

  The Handler

  Mr. Benedict came out of his little house. He stood on the porch, painfully shy of the sun and inferior to people. A little dog trotted by with clever eyes; so clever that Mr. Benedict could not meet its gaze. A small child peered through the wrought-iron gate around the graveyard, near the church, and Mr. Benedict winced at the pale penetrant curiosity of the child.

  'You're the funeral man,' said the child.

  Cringing within himself, Mr. Benedict did not speak.

  'You own the church?' asked the child, finally.

  'Yes,' said Mr. Benedict.

  'And the funeral place?'

  'Yes,' said Mr. Benedict bewilderedly.

  'And the yards and the stones and the graves?' wondered the child.

  'Yes,' said Mr. Benedict, with some show of pride. And it was true. An amazing thing it was. A stroke of business luck really, that had kept him busy and humming nights over long years. First he had landed the church and the churchyard, with a few green-mossed tombs, when the Baptist people moved up-town. Then he had built himself a fine little mortuary, in Gothic style, of course, and covered it with ivy, and then added a small house for himself, way in back. It was very convenient to die for Mr. Benedict. He handled you in and out of buildings with a minimum of confusion and a maximum of synthetic benediction. No need of a funeral procession! declared his large advertisements in the morning paper. Out of the church and into the earth, slick as a whistle. Nothing but the finest preservatives used!

  The child continued to stare at him and he felt like a candle blown out in the wind. He was so very inferior. Anything that lived or moved made him feel apologetic and melancholy. He was continually agreeing with people, never daring to argue or shout or say no. Whoever you might be, if Mr. Benedict met you on the street he would look up your nostrils or perceive your ears or examine your hairline with his little shy, wild eyes and never look you straight in your eyes and he would hold your hand between his cold ones as if your hand was a precious gift as he said to you:

  'You are definitely, irrevocably, believably correct.'

  But, always, when you talked to him, you felt he never heard a word you said.

  Now, he stood on his porch and said, 'You are a sweet little child,' to the little staring child, in fear that the child might not like him.

  Mr. Benedict walked down the steps and out the gate, without once looking at his little mortuary building. He saved that pleasure for later. It was very important that things took the right precedence. It wouldn't pay to think with joy of the bodies awaiting his talents in the mortuary building. No, it was better to follow his usual day-after-day routine. He would let the conflict begin.

  He knew just where to go to get himself enraged. Half of the day he spent travelling from place to place in the little town, letting the superiority of the living neighbours overwhelm him, letting his own inferiority dissolve him, bathe him in perspiration, tie his heart and brain into trembling knots.

  He spoke with Mr. Rodgers, the druggist, idle, senseless morning talk. And he saved and put away all the little slurs and intonations and insults that Mr. Rodgers sent his way. Mr. Rodgers always had some terrible thing to say about a man in the funeral profession. 'Ha, ha,' laughed Mr. Benedict at the latest joke upon himself, and he wanted to cry with miserable violence. 'There you are, you cold one,' said Mr. Rodgers on this particular morning. 'Cold one,' said Mr. Benedict. 'Ha, ha!'

  Outside the drug-store, Mr. Benedict met up with Mr. Stuyvesant, the contractor. Mr. Stuyvesant looked at his watch to estimate just how much time he dared waste on Benedict before trumping up some appointment. 'Oh, hello, Benedict,' shouted Stuyvesant. 'How's business? I bet you're going at it tooth and nail. Did you get it? I said, I bet you're going at it tooth and — ' 'Yes, yes,' chuckled Mr. Benedict vaguely. 'And how is your business, Mr. Stuyvesant?' 'Say, how do your hands get so cold, Benny old man? That's a cold shake you got there. You just get done embalmin
g a frigid woman? Hey, that's not bad. You heard what I said?' roared Mr. Stuyvesant, pounding him on the back. 'Good, good!' cried Mr. Benedict, with a fleshless smile. 'Good day.'

  On it went, person after person. Mr. Benedict, pummelled on from one to the next, was the lake into which all refuse was thrown. People began with little pebbles and then when Mr. Benedict did not ripple or protest, they heaved a stone, a brick, a boulder. There was no bottom to Mr. Benedict, no splash and no settling. The lake did not answer.

  As the day passed he became more helpless and enraged with them, and he walked from building to building and had more little meetings and conversations and hated himself with a very real, masochistic pleasure. But the thing that kept him going most of all was the thought of the night pleasures to come. So he inflicted himself again and again with these stupid, pompous bullies and bowed to them and held his hands like little biscuits before his stomach, and asked no more than to be sneered at.

  'There you are, meat-chopper,' said Mr. Flinger, the delicatessen man. 'How are all your corned beeves and pickled brains?'

  Things worked to a crescendo of inferiority. With a final kettle-drumming of insult and terrible self-effacement, Mr. Benedict, seeking wildly the correct time from his wrist watch, turned and ran back through the town. He was at his peak, he was all ready now, ready to work, ready to do what must be done, and enjoy himself. The awful part of the day was over, the good part was now to begin! He ran eagerly up the steps to his mortuary.

  The room waited like a fall of snow. There were white hummocks and pale delineations of things recumbent under sheets in the dimness.

  The door burst open.

  Mr. Benedict, framed in a flow of light, stood in the door, head back, one hand upraised in dramatic salute, the other hand upon the door-knob in unnatural rigidity.

  He was the puppet-master come home.

  He stood a long minute in the very centre of his theatre. In his head applause, perhaps, thundered. He did not move, but lowered his head in abject appreciation of this kind, kind applauding audience.

  He carefully removed his coat, hung it up, got himself into a fresh white smock, buttoned the cuffs with professional crispness, then washed his hands together as he looked around at his very good friends.

  It had been a fine week; there were any number of family relics lying under the sheets, and as Mr. Benedict stood before them he felt himself grow and grow and tower and stretch over them.

  'Like Alice!' he cried to himself in surprise. 'Taller, taller. Curiouser and curiouser!' He flexed his hands straight out and up.

  He had never gotten over his initial incredulity when in the room with the dead. He was both delighted and bewildered to discover that here he was master of peoples, here he might do what he wished with men, and they must, by necessity, be polite and co-operative with him. They could not run away. And now, as on other days, he felt himself released and resilient, growing, growing like Alice. 'Oh, so tall, oh, so tall, so very tall. . . until my head. . . bumps. . . the ceiling.'

  He walked about among the sheeted people. He felt the same he did when coming from a picture show late at night, very strong, very alert, very certain of himself. He felt that everyone was watching him as he left a picture show, and that he was very handsome and very correct and brave and all the things that the picture hero was, his voice oh, so resonant, persuasive, and he had the right lilt to his left eyebrow and the right tap with his cane — and sometimes this movie-induced hypnosis lasted all the way home and persisted into sleep. Those were the only two times in his living he felt miraculous and fine, at the picture show, or here — in his own little theatre of the cold.

  He walked along the sleeping rows, noting each name on its white card.

  'Mrs. Walters. Mr. Smith. Miss Brown. Mr. Andrews. Ah, good afternoon, one and all!'

  'How are you today, Mrs. Shellmund?' he wanted to know, lifting a sheet as if looking for a child under a bed. 'You're looking splendid, dear lady.'

  Mrs. Shellmund had never spoken to him in her life; she'd always gone by like a large white statue with roller skates hidden under her skirts, which gave her an elegant gliding, imperturbable rush.

  'My dear Mrs. Shellmund,' he said, pulling up a chair and regarding her through a magnifying-glass. 'Do you realize, my lady, that you have a sebaceous condition of the pores? You were quite waxen in life. Pore trouble. Oil and grease and pimples. A rich, rich diet, Mrs. Shellmund, there was your trouble. Too many frosties and spongie cakes and cream candies. You always prided yourself on your brain, Mrs. Shellmund, and thought I was like a dime under your toe, or a penny, really. But you kept that wonderful priceless brain of yours afloat in parfaits and fizzes and limeades and sodas and were so very superior to me that now, Mrs. Shellmund, here is what shall happen. . .'

  He did a neat operation on her. Cutting the scalp in a circle, he lifted it off, then lifted out the brain. Then he prepared a cake-confectioner's little sugar-bellows and squirted her empty head full of little whipped cream and crystal ribbons, stars and frollops, in pink, white and green, and on top he printed in a fine pink scroll SWEET DREAMS and put the skull back on and sewed it in place and hid the marks with wax and powder. 'So there,' he said, finished.

  He walked on to the next table.

  'Good afternoon, Mr. Wren. Good afternoon. And how is the master of the racial hatreds today, Mr. Wren? Pure, white, laundered Mr. Wren. Clean as snow, white as linen, Mr. Wren you are. The man who hated Jews and negroes. Minorities, Mr. Wren, minorities.' He pulled back the sheet. Mr. Wren stared up with glassy cold eyes. 'Mr. Wren, look upon a member of a minority. Myself. The minority of inferiors, those who speak not above a whisper, those afraid of talking aloud, those frightened little nonentities, mice. Do you know what I am going to do with you, Mr. Wren? First, let us draw your blood from you, intolerant friend.' The blood was drawn off 'Now — the injection of, you might say, embalming fluid.'

  Mr. Wren, snow-white, linen-pure, lay with the fluid going in him.

  Mr. Benedict laughed.

  Mr. Wren turned black; black as dirt, black as night.

  The embalming fluid was — ink.

  'And hello to you, Edmund Worth!'

  What a handsome body Worth had. Powerful, with muscles pinned from huge bone to huge bone, and a chest like a boulder. Women had grown speechless when he walked by, men had stared with envy and hoped they might borrow that body some night and ride home in it to the wife and give her a nice surprise. But Worth's body had always been his own, and he had applied it to those tasks and pleasures which made him a conversational topic among all people who enjoyed sin.

  'And now, here you are,' said Mr. Benedict, looking down at the fine body with pleasure. For a moment he was lost in memory of his own body in his own past.

  He had once tried strangling himself with one of those apparatuses you nail in a doorway and chuck under your jawbone and pull yourself up on, hoping to add an inch to his ridiculously short frame. To counteract his deadly pale skin he had lain in the sun, but he boiled and his skin fell off in pink leaflets, leaving only more pink, moist, sensitive skin. And what could he do about the eyes from which his mind peered, those close-set, glassy little eyes and the tiny wounded mouth? You can repaint houses, burn trash, move from the slum, shoot your mother, buy new clothes, get a car, make money, change all those outer environmentals for something new. But what's the brain to do when caught like cheese in the throat of a mouse? His own environment thus betrayed him; his own skin, body, colour, voice gave him no chance to extend out into that vast bright world where people tickled ladies' chins and kissed their mouths and shook hands with friends and traded aromatic cigars.

  Thinking in this fashion, Mr. Benedict stood over the magnificent body of Edmund Worth.

  He severed Worth's head, put it in a coffin on a small satin pillow, facing up, then he placed one hundred and ninety pounds of bricks in the coffin and arranged some pillows inside a black coat and a white shirt and tie to look like the up
per body, and covered the whole with a blanket of blue velvet, up to the chin. It was a fine illusion.

  The body itself he placed in a refrigerating vault.

  'When I die, I shall leave specific orders, Mr. Worth, that my head be severed and buried, joined to your body. By that time I shall have acquired an assistant willing to perform such a rascally act, for money. If one cannot have a body worthy of love in life, one can at least gain such a body in death. Thank you.'

  He slammed the lid on Edmund Worth.

  Since it was a growing and popular habit in the town for people to be buried with the coffin lids closed over them during the service, this gave Mr. Benedict great opportunities to vent his repressions on his hapless guests. Some he locked in their boxes upside down, some face down, or making obscene gestures. He had the most utterly wondrous fun with a group of old maiden ladies who were mashed in a car on their way to an afternoon tea. They were famous gossips, always with heads together over some choice bit. What the onlookers at the triple funeral did not know (all three casket lids were shut) was that, as in life, all three were crowded into one casket, heads together in eternal, cold, petrified gossip. The other two caskets were filled with pebbles and shells and ravels of gingham. It was a nice service. Everybody cried. 'Those three inseparables, at last separated,' everybody sobbed.

  'Yes,' said Mr. Benedict, having to hide his face in his grief.

  Not lacking for a sense of justice, Mr. Benedict buried one rich man stark naked. A poor man he buried wound in gold cloth, with five-dollar gold pieces for buttons and twenty-dollar coins on each eyelid. A lawyer he did not bury at all, but burnt him in the incinerator — his coffin contained nothing but a polecat, trapped in the woods one Sunday.

  An old maid, at her service one afternoon, was the victim of a terrible device. Under the silken comforter, parts of an old man had been buried with her. There she lay, insulted by cold organs, being made cold love to by hidden hands, hidden and planted other things. The shock showed on her face, somewhat.