The Small Assassin Read online

  She was through. She collapsed inward on herself and finally slept. David Leiber stood for a long time over her, not able to move. His blood was frozen in his body, not a cell stirred anywhere, anywhere at all.

  The next morning there was only one thing to do. He did it. He walked into Dr. Jeff ers' office and told him the whole thing, and listened to Jeff ers' tolerant replies:

  «Let's take this thing slowly, son. It's quite natural for mothers to hate their children, sometimes. We have a label for it―ambivalence. The ability to hate, while loving. Lovers hate each other, frequently. Children detest their mothers―»

  Leiber interrupted. «I never hated my mother.»

  «You won't admit it, naturally. People don't enjoy admitting hatred for their loved ones.»

  «So Alice hates her baby.»

  «Better say she has an obsession. She's gone a step further than plain, ordinary ambivalence. A Caesarian operation brought the child into the world and almost took Alice out of it. She blames the child for her near-death and her pneumonia. She's projecting her troubles, blaming them on the handiest object she can use as a source of blame. We _all_ do it. We stumble into a chair and curse the furniture, not our own clumsiness. We miss a golf-stroke and damn the turf or our club, or the make of ball. If our business fails we blame the gods, the weather, our luck. All I can tell you is what I told you before. Love her. Finest medicine in the world. Find little ways of showing your affection, give her security. Find ways of showing her how harmless and innocent the child is. Make her feel that the baby was worth the risk. After awhile, she'll settle down, forget about death, and begin to love the child. If she doesn't come around in the next month or so, ask me. I'll recommend a good psychiatrist. Go on along now, and take that look off your face.»

  When summer came, things seemed to settle, become easier. Dave worked, immersed himself in office detail, but found much time for his wife. She, in turn, took long walks, gained strength, played an occasional light game of badminton. She rarely burst out any more. She seemed to have rid herself of her fears.

  Except on one certain midnight when a sudden summer wind swept around the house, warm and swift, shaking the trees like so many shining tambourines. Alice wakened, trembling, and slid over into her husband's arms, and let him console her, and ask her what was wrong.

  She said, «Something's here in the room, watching us.»

  He switched on the light. «Dreaming again,» he said. «You're better, though. Haven't been troubled for a long time.»

  She sighed as he clicked off the light again, and suddenly she slept. He held her, considering what a sweet, weird creature she was, for about half an hour.

  He heard the bedroom door sway open a few inches.

  There was nobody at the door. No reason for it to come open. The wind had died.

  He waited. It seemed like an hour he lay silently, in the dark.

  Then, far away, wailing like some small meteor dying in the vast inky gulf of space, the baby began to cry in his nursery.

  It was a small, lonely sound in the middle of the stars and the dark and the breathing of this woman in his arms and the wind beginning to sweep through the trees again.

  Leiber counted to one hundred, slowly. The crying continued.

  Carefully disengaging Alice's arm he slipped from bed, put on his slippers, robe, and moved quietly from the room.

  He'd go downstairs, he thought, fix some warm milk, bring it up, and―.

  The blackness dropped out from under him. His foot slipped and plunged. Slipped on something soft. Plunged into nothingness.

  He thrust his hands out, caught frantically at the railing. His body stopped falling. He held. He cursed.

  The «something soft» that had caused his feet to slip, rustled and thumped down a few steps. His head rang. His heart hammered at the base of his throat, thick and shot with pain.

  Why do careless people leave things strewn about a house? He groped carefully with his fingers for the object that had almost spilled him headlong down the stairs.

  His hand froze, startled. His breath went in. His heart held one or two beats.

  The thing he held in his hand was a toy. A large cumbersome, patchwork doll he had bought as a joke, for―.

  _For the baby_.

  Alice drove him to work the next day.

  She slowed the car halfway downtown; pulled to the curb and stopped it. Then she turned on the seat and looked at her husband.

  «I want to go away on a vacation. I don't know if you can make it now, darling, but if not, please let me go alone. We can get someone to take care of the baby, I'm sure. But I just have to get away. I thought I was growing out of this―this _feeling_. But I haven't. I can't stand being in the room with him. He looks up at me as if he hates me, too. I can't put my finger on it; all I know is I want to get away before something happens.»

  He got out on his side of the car, came around, motioned to her to move over, got in. «The only thing you're going to do is see a good psychiatrist. And if he suggests a vacation, well, okay. But this can't go on; my stomach's in knots all the time.» He started the car. «I'll drive the rest of the way.»

  Her head was down; she was trying to keep back tears. She looked up when they reached his office building. «All right. Make the appointment. I'll go talk to anyone you want, David.»

  He kissed her. «Now, you're talking sense, lady. Think you can drive home okay?»

  «Of course, silly.»

  «See you at supper, then. Drive carefully.»

  «Don't I always? 'Bye.»

  He stood on the curb, watching her drive off, the wind taking hold of her long, dark, shining hair. Upstairs, a minute later, he phoned Jeffers and arranged an appointment with a reliable neuropsychiatrist.

  The day's work went uneasily. Things fogged over; and in the fog he kept seeing Alice lost and calling his name. So much of her fear had come over to him. She actually had him convinced that the child was in some ways not quite natural.

  He dictated long, uninspired letters. He checked some shipments downstairs. Assistants had to be questioned, and kept going. At the end of the day he was exhausted, his head throbbed, and he was very glad to go home.

  On the way down in the elevator he wondered, What if I told Alice about the top―that patchwork doll―I slipped on on the stairs last night? Lord, wouldn't _that_ back her off? No, I won't ever tell her. Accidents are, after all, accidents.

  Daylight lingered in the sky as he drove home in a taxi. In front of the house he paid the driver and walked slowly up the cement walk, enjoying the light that was still in the sky and the trees. The white colonial front of the house looked unnaturally silent and uninhabited, and then, quietly, he remembered this was Thursday, and the hired help they were able to obtain from time to time were all gone for the day.

  He took a deep breath of air. A bird sang behind the house. Traffic moved on the boulevard a block away. He twisted the key in the door. The knob turned under his fingers, oiled, silent.

  The door opened. He stepped in, put his hat on the chair with his briefcase, started to shrug out of his coat, when he looked up.

  Late sunlight streamed down the stairwell from the window near the top of the hall. Where the sunlight touched it took on the bright color of the patchwork doll sprawled at the bottom of the stairs.

  But he paid no attention to the toy.

  He could only look, and not move, and look again at Alice.

  Alice lay in a broken, grotesque, pallid gesturing and angling of her thin body, at the bottom of the stairs, like a crumpled doll that doesn't want to play any more, ever.

  Alice was dead.

  The house remained quiet, except for the sound of his heart.

  She was dead.

  He held her head in his hands, he felt her fingers. He held her body. But she wouldn't live. She wouldn't even try to live. He said her name, out loud, many times, and he tried, once again, by holding her to him, to give her back some of the warmth she had lost
, but that didn't help.

  He stood up. He must have made a phone call. He didn't remember. He found himself, suddenly, upstairs. He opened the nursery door and walked inside and stared blankly at the crib. His stomach was sick. He couldn't see very well.

  The baby's eyes were closed, but his face was red, moist with perspiration, as if he'd been crying long and hard.

  «She's dead,» said Leiber to the baby. «She's dead.»

  Then he started laughing low and soft and continuously for a long time until Dr. Jeff ers walked in out of the night and slapped him again and again across his face.

  «Snap out of it! Pull yourself together!»

  «She fell down the stairs, Doctor. She tripped on a patchwork doll and fell. I almost slipped on it the other night, myself. And now―»

  The doctor shook him.

  «Doc, Doc, Doc,» said Dave, hazily. «Funny thing. Funny. I―I finally thought of a name for the baby.»

  The doctor said nothing.

  Leiber put his head back in his trembling hands and spoke the words. «I'm going to have him christened next Sunday. Know what name I'm giving him? I'm going to call him Lucifer.»

  It was eleven at night. A lot of strange people had come and gone through the house, taking the essential flame with them―Alice.

  David Leiber sat across from the doctor in the library.

  «Alice wasn't crazy,» he said, slowly. «She had good reason to fear the baby.»

  Jeffers exhaled. «Don't follow after her! She blamed the child for her sickness, now you blame it for her death. She stumbled on a toy, remember that. You can't blame the child.»

  «You mean Lucifer?»

  «Stop calling him that!»

  Leiber shook his head. «Alice heard things at night, moving in the halls. You want to know what made those noises, Doctor? They were made by the baby. Four months old, moving in the dark, listening to us talk. Listening to every word!» He held to the sides of the chair. «And if I turned the lights on, a baby is so small. It can hide behind furniture, a door, against a wall―below eye-level.»

  «I want you to stop this!» said Jeffers.

  «Let me say what I think or I'll go crazy. When I went to Chicago, who was it kept Alice awake, tiring her into pneumonia? The baby! And when Alice didn't die, then he tried killing me. It was simple; leave a toy on the stairs, cry in the night until your father goes downstairs to fetch your milk, and stumbles. A crude trick, but effective. It didn't get me. But it killed Alice dead.»

  David Leiber stopped long enough to light a cigarette. «I should have caught on. I'd turn on the lights in the middle of the night, many nights, and the baby'd be lying there, eyes wide. Most babies sleep all the time. Not this one. He stayed awake, thinking.»

  «Babies don't think.»

  «He stayed awake doing whatever he _could_ do with his brain, then. What in hell do we know about a baby's mind? He had every reason to hate Alice; she suspected him for what he was―certainly not a normal child. Something―different. What do you know of babies, Doctor? The general run, yes. You know, of course, how babies kill their mothers at birth. Why? Could it be resentment at being forced into a lousy world like this one?»

  Leiber leaned toward the doctor, tiredly. «It all ties up. Suppose that a few babies out of all the millions born are instantaneously able to move, see, hear, think, like many animals and insects can. Insects are born self-sufficient. In a few weeks most mammals and birds adjust. But children take years to speak and learn to stumble around on their weak legs.

  «But suppose one child in a billion is―strange? Born perfectly aware, able to think, instinctively. Wouldn't it be a perfect setup, a perfect blind for anything the baby might want to do? He could pretend to be ordinary, weak, crying, ignorant. With just a _little_ expenditure of energy he could crawl about a darkened house, listening. And how easy to place obstacles at the top of stairs. How easy to cry all night and tire a mother into pneumonia. How easy, right at birth, to be so close to the mother that _a few deft maneuvers might cause peritonitis!_»

  «For God's sake!» Jeffers was on his feet. «That's a repulsive thing to say!»

  «It's a repulsive thing I'm speaking of. How many mothers have died at the birth of their children? How many have suckled strange little improbabilities who cause death one way or another? Strange, red little creatures with brains that work in a bloody darkness we can't even guess at. Elemental little brains, as warm with racial memory, hatred, and raw cruelty, with no more thought than selfpreservation. And self-preservation in this case consisted of eliminating a mother who realized what a horror she had birthed. I ask you, doctor, what is there in the world more selfish than a baby? Nothing!»

  Jeffers scowled and shook his head, helplessly.

  Leiber dropped his cigarette down. «I'm not claiming any great strength for the child. Just enough to crawl around a little, a few months ahead of schedule. Just enough to listen all the time. Just enough to cry late at night. That's enough, more than enough.»

  Jeffers tried ridicule. «Call it murder, then. But murder must be motivated. What motive had the child?»

  Leiber was ready with the answer. «What is more at peace, more dreamfully content, at ease, at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered, than an unborn child? Nothing. It floats in a sleepy, timeless wonder of nourishment and silence. Then, suddenly, it is asked to give up its berth, is forced to vacate, rushed out into a noisy, uncaring, selfish world where it is asked to shift for itself, to hunt, to feed from the hunting, to seek after a vanishing love that once was its unquestionable right, to meet confusion instead of inner silence and conservative slumber! And the child _resents_ it! Resents the cold air, the huge spaces, the sudden departure from familiar things. And in the tiny filament of brain the only thing the child knows is selfishness and hatred because the spell has been rudely shattered. Who is responsible for this disenchantment, this rude breaking of the spell? The mother. So here the new child has someone to hate with all its unreasoning mind. The mother has cast it out, rejected it. And the father is no better, kill him, too! He's responsible in _his_ way!»

  Jeffers interrupted. «If what you say is true, then every woman in the world would have to look on her baby as something to dread, something to wonder about.»

  «And why not? Hasn't the child a perfect alibi? A thousand years of accepted medical belief protects him. By all natural accounts he is helpless, not responsible. The child is born hating. And things grow worse, instead of better. At first the baby gets a certain amount of attention and mothering. But then as time passes, things change. When very new, a baby has the power to make parents do silly things when it cries or sneezes, jump when it makes a noise. As the years pass, the baby feels even that small power slip rapidly, forever away, never to return. Why shouldn't it grasp all the power it can have? Why shouldn't it jockey for position while it has all the advantages? In later years it would be too late to express its hatred. _Now_ would be the time to strike.»

  Leiber's voice was very soft, very low.

  «My little boy baby, lying in his crib nights, his face moist and red and out of breath. From crying? No. From climbing slowly out of his crib, from crawling long distances through darkened hallways. My little boy baby. I want to kill him.»

  The doctor handed him a water glass and some pills. «You're not killing anyone. You're going to sleep for twenty-four hours. Sleep'll change your mind. Take this.»

  Leiber drank down the pills and let himself be led upstairs to his bedroom, crying, and felt himself being put to bed. The doctor waited until he was moving deep into sleep, then left the house.

  Leiber, alone, drifted down, down.

  He heard a noise. «What's―what's _that?_» he demanded, feebly.

  Something moved in the hall.

  David Leiber slept.

  Very early the next morning, Dr. Jeffers drove up to the house. It was a good morning, and he was here to drive Leiber to the country for a rest. Leiber would still be asleep upstairs. Jeffers had gi
ven him enough sedative to knock him out for at least fifteen hours.

  He rang the doorbell. No answer. The servants were probably not up. Jeffers tried the front door, found it open, stepped in. He put his medical kit on the nearest chair.

  Something white moved out of sight at the top of the stairs. Just a suggestion of a movement. Jeffers hardly noticed it.

  The smell of gas was in the house.

  Jeffers ran upstairs, crashed into Leiber's bedroom.

  Leiber lay motionless on the bed, and the room billowed with gas, which hissed from a released jet at the base of the wall near the door. Jeffers twisted it off, then forced up all the windows and ran back to Leiber's body.

  The body was cold. It had been dead quite a few hours.

  Coughing violently, the doctor hurried from the room, eyes watering. Leiber hadn't turned on the gas himself. He _couldn't_ have. Those sedatives had knocked him out, he wouldn't have wakened until noon. It wasn't suicide. Or was there the faintest possibility?

  Jeffers stood in the hall for five minutes. Then he walked to the door of the nursery. It was shut. He opened it. He walked inside and to the crib.

  The crib was empty.

  He stood swaying by the crib for half a minute, then he said something to nobody in particular.

  «The nursery door blew shut. You couldn't get back into your crib where it was safe. You didn't plan on the door blowing shut. A little thing like a slammed door can ruin the best of plans. I'll find you somewhere in the house, hiding, pretending to be something you are not.» The doctor looked dazed. He put his hand to his head and smiled palely. «Now I'm talking like Alice and David talked. But, I can't take any chances. I'm not sure of anything, but I can't take chances.»

  He walked downstairs, opened his medical bag on the chair, took something out of it and held it in his hands.

  Something rustled down the hall. Something very small and very quiet. Jeffers turned rapidly.

  I had to operate to bring you into this world, he thought. Now I guess I can operate to take you out of it.