THE CROWD

Ray Bradbury

After the accident, the crowd gathered swiftly. A ring of faces looking down at Spallner, stirring, shifting, gaping. Where they all came from, he did not know. He had heard their hard heels clattering over the asphalt of the street, heard their shouts and tiny squeals and curses as they saw the new motor car crumpled against the brick wall.

Blood was trickling from a gash on his brow. It swam across his face and he had trouble breathing. And yet he was strangely calm. He couldn’t understand why.

He should be afraid of dying, but death was farthest from his thoughts. He was looking at the crowd that bent over him; a good two dozen people, jammed one in back of the other, looking down, looking down.

There was something in the expression on their faces. He could tell that he wouldn’t die.

He could tell by their expressions

Someone, far back, said, “Is he dead?”

Someone else replied, “No. He’s not dead. He’s not going to die. He’ll be all right.”

Naturally. Of course he wasn’t going to die. They wouldn’t let him. He could read it in their faces, that he would be all right.

The wheels of the car, turned up to the sky, were still spinning dizzily. He heard them whirring, slowing. There was something about the wheels, too. Something.

Gasoline crawled on the asphalt, mixed with blood. Feet moved.

“All right; break it up in there, break it up!” A thick Irish voice shouted its way through the crowd. Blue-serge legs appeared. A red Irish face peered down. “You okay, son?”

Spallner nodded his head weakly. “I’llI’ll be all right.” A swallowing pause. “Ambulance?”

“Be here any minute now. You just take it easy.”

Spallner did take it easy. He rested back against a coat somebody had thoughtfully slipped under his head. He had time to listen and look and smell.

He looked at the faces. A cordon of questioning, shifting faces. What sort of people were they, where were they from, what did they do?

He examined each one. First, a man’s face; thin, bright, alert and pale, staring at him; continually swallowing and wetting his lips as if he were hypnotized.

Beside him stood a small-boned woman with red hair and too much powder on her face. She was a calcimined wren with a high, hysterical voice. She wrung a handkerchief with her thin fingers.

Behind the officer, a little boy with freckles wavered. Tears streamed down his ruddy cheeks. He was barefooted, his eyes were scrouged up tight and he kept opening them and blinking them and closing them again.

A siren split the night wide open at the seams. The crowd craned its neck, as if it were all on a marionette string, activated by one silent will.

A sort of fear raced through Spallner then. The crowd twisted back, to gaze at him. Faces. There was something suggestive about them. Something he could not quite catch with his mind.

What was it

?

Other faces. An old man with a face like a bleached apricot, bald and whimpering in his throat. A young woman whose hands were twitching all by themselves at her sides, as if they did not belong to her. A high school student, pimple-faced, who kept drawing back from the blood, but who always returned, curious, to look again. He couldn’t help himself.

Where had they all come from?

So strange, thought Spallner, how a crowd gathers after an accident. Instantly, with the speed of Mercury, they materialized; young, old, glib and sour and frightened and calm. They came running for blocks, out of side-streets and out of alleys and out of houses and hotels and out of cabs and streetcars and busses. They came quickly. It was impossible that so many people could gather in one place at once.

They came as to the call of Gabriel.

The ambulance shrieked up, and the siren bubbled to a moan, then into silence. White uniforms took the plunge into the throng, wedged a trail through with a carrier.

“What is it?”

The officer told them. The crowd watched and listened. Effectively, the internes shifted Spallner onto the carrier, hoisted him and slid him into the ambulance.

One of the internes hopped in, slammed the doors shut. Through the square glass windows a few faces of the crowd still stared.

There was something wrong with the crowd. Something far worse than what had happened to Spallner. He felt uneasiness in his stomach.

Engines roared to life. The ambulance started. It pulled away from the curb, from the crumpled wreck, the blood and gas, away from the crowd.

The crowd that always came so fast. So strangely fast. To form a circle. A circle; like a ring of Vultures

? Blackness enveloped Spallner. It clipped off everything.

He saw the wheel spinning in his brain as he came to his senses. One wheel. Four wheels. Spinning, spinning and whirring with a relentlessly whining song. Around and around and around again.

He knew it was wrong. Something wrong with the wheels or the whole scene and setup. A vague wrongness which he could not quite fathom. But the auto wheels spun, his brain spun with them, and faces, the faces of the crowd, hurtled in mad dervish fashion at the core of the wheels.

Out of the spiraling nebula came sunlight, a doctor, his voice, his quiet, gentle face and a thin warm hand taking Spallner’s pulse.

Things cleared into crystal sharpness. Spallner discovered the hospital room, with its exact germicidal odor, and a nurse standing behind the doctor.

“There you are,” said the doctor as Spallner’s eyes fluttered open. “How do you feel?”

The wheels had rolled away, taking the crowd and the nausea with them.

Spallner tried a weak smile. “FineI guess.” His head was bandaged. Everything else was intact, under cover.

“I’m Doctor Melchior.”

“Something’s wrong, Doctor. Something’s wrong”

“I should say so. The accident”

“No, no. I’m trying to think.” Spallner lifted himself from the pillow, only to be gently pressed back by Melchior’s hands.

“You can think just as well lying down, Mr. Spallner. Now, tell me what’s wrong. Something about the accident?”

“In a way. Something about a wheel and a crowd.” Spallner shook his head and winced. “Ah, don’t mind me, I’m crazy.”

He bit his lips and looked at the physician. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to commit me to an insane asylum?”

“I promise. What is it?”

Spallner had to force it out, and he seemed embarrassed. “It was the crowd, Doctor Melchior. The crowd last nightII didn’t like it.”

Days of sunshine followed. Five of them. Doctor Melchior told him his stay at the hospital was almost over.

“You’re lucky, Mr. Spallner. If that gash on your brow had been an eighth of an inch deeper”

“There’s something I’d like to know. Accidents do things to people, don’t they?”

“What sort of things?”

“Up here,” replied Spallner. He touched his head. “Doesn’t it wreck your time sense?”

“Sometimes. It all depends.”

“One minute seems like an hour or maybe an hour seems like a minute. Right?”

The physician nodded. “Panic often does that.”

“Wellhere’s how it was. I was driving down a perfectly deserted street. Hitting about sixty. And then the blow-out. I jumped the curb, hit the wall. It was pretty awful. I was shocked, I know, but I still remember lots of things. Mostly, the crowd.

“It got there too quick, Doctor. The crowd got there too quick. About thirty seconds after the smash they were all there, standing over me and staring at me

It’s not right they should have run that fast, so late at night

“

Clearing his throat, Melchior raised his hand. “You can answer your own problem. Your senses, temporarily warped, also threw a bend into time. What you thought was twenty seconds, was, in reality maybe five or six minutes. That’s a normal time for a crowd to gather.”

Spallner fell silent. In his mind he saw the crowd again.

Andand the wheelsall of themspinning around. He jerked.

“Doctor, I’ve got it. I know! It’s impossible to twist the order of things completely if I was conscious all the way through! And I was! I remember; the wheels of the car. They were still spinning when the crowd got there. They were still spinning!”

Melchior said nothing, but frowned.

“I’m positive of that!” exclaimed Spallner, “The wheels were spinning, and spinning fast! You know yourself that the wheels of a car at a certain angle won’t spin fast for a very long time. Friction’d cut it down immediately.

“That’s what it is, I swear it. I saw them bending over me and then I heard the wheels singing around and around. I looked and saw them!”

The physician rose quietly and stood over his patient. “I’ve seen patients like you before. You’re reshuffling your memories to fit a pattern you thought up. You want them to fit the pattern, and they do. You need a few more sedatives, young man. And, later, when you get out of the hospital, try a visit to a psychiatrist. He’ll help you weed out your mind”

“The street was empty, Doctor Melchior. Not a soul in sight. And there’s one other thing. It was the look on the crowd’s faces. Something that told me I wouldn’t die

“

“You’re suffering from shock,” said Melchior.

Released from the hospital, the first thing Spallner did was call a taxi.

“I’m recovering from an accident,” he told the driver. “If I don’t ride now, and ride fast, I’ll never drive again. Take me home at nothing under forty.”

He climbed into the taxi and they were off. He was afraid at first. Calmness and confidence returned slowly as they hurtled homeward, and he finally began to worry, instead, about the night of the accident. About the wheels and the crowd.

Halfway home, traffic thickened.

The cabbie twisted his chunky slab of face around and growled. “Shall I detour? Looks like a wreck up ahead.”

“Yes, detour. INo. No, on the other hand, cabbiepull ahead. Let’slet’s take a look.”

The cabbie grunted. “Okayit’s your dough; if it’s blood you want.” The taxi weaved in and out among parked cars. Sirens were wailing, police cars drove up. “Los Angeles is one helluva town ta drive in,” snorted the cabbie.

He honked his horn, angled out the window, yelling, “Get that flea-trap outa the way, klunkget goin’!” The cab swerved into a notch and idled. “Have ta hold it a sec,” explained the cabbie. He turned, wiping his brow. “Funny, ain’t it, how a crowd gathers when there’s ‘n accident?”

Spallner started. He saw his fingers tremble on his knee, and then he looked at the cabbie and he said, “Have you noticed that, too?”

The cabbie nodded profoundly. “Sure. You find that no matter what happens. A babe pulls a faint on the corner of Wilshire and LaBrea and in five minutes you got a mob big enough they need a convention permit.” The cabbie snorted. “Bunch of morbid guys. What they call ‘em?sadists? Maybe they’re curious, I dunno. Anyway, they come runnin’ as if it was their own relative got beaned. Crazy.”

Spallner sat very quietly, digesting all this. It was a fact. It could be corroborated at any accident. A fire, or a wreck or an explosion. People appeared as if by magic. It all seemed a bit fantastic.

Gingerly, Spallner advanced the subject a step further. “Ever seen an accident late at night?”

“Yeah. Don’t make no difference, though. There’s always a crowd”

With that, the cabbie shifted gears and plowed out around a streetcar. The wreck came to view. Two cars interlocked smashingly, fenders severed and gashed, both of them snarled into the cow-catcher of the streetcar. A body lay on the sidewalk. You knew there was a body there even if you couldn’t see it. Because of the crowd.

The crowd with its back toward Spallner. With its back toward him. Spallner opened the window and almost started to yell. But he didn’t have the nerve.

He didn’t have the nerve.

He was afraid to see their faces.

At the dinner table, alone, Spallner took another glass of port and pulled it down. His butler came in and cleared away the dishes. Pausing at the door, watching Spallner take his fourth glass, he cleared his throat warningly.

Spallner laughed. “It’s all right, Mac. I’ll stay sober.”

“But, sirso soon after the hospital.”

“I need it.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

“Nnn-noyes. Yes, there is, Mac. I’ve got a hunch. I want some newspapers, a lot of them. Buy every paper printed recently.”

“How far back shall I go, sir?”

“Spread it out. Buy one paper every other week for the last two years. And buy all the papers for the last month.” Spallner poured more wine. “I’m going to the office for a brief check-up. I’ll drop you at the newspaper plant and pick you up later.”

“May I ask what you want these papers for, sir?”

“What for?” Spallner put the wine to his lips and savored it. “II’m looking up some pictures of some old friends. Yes, that’s it. Some old friends.”

Spallner drove a new car downtown. He talked and laughed again with his partner, Morgan, up in his private office. This continued for half an hour. All the while they were talking, at the back of his brain a small watch ticked, a watch that never needed winding. It was the memory of a few little things.

“I seem to have a penchant for accidents these days,” said Spallner. “I got out of the hospital this morning and the first thing on the way home, I detoured around one.”

“Things run in cycles,” said Morgan absent-mindedly.

They went on talking for half an hour more, until there was a hard, blunt metal noise, a grinding and rending from the street. Overlooking the intersection from the fourth floor, both Spallner and Morgan had a good view of an accident in birth.

A truck and a cream-colored Cadillac.

“What’d I tell you?” exclaimed Morgan. “Cycles.”

A great bond of ice closed in on Spallner as he stood there, looking at his watch, at the small second hand. One, two, three, four, five secondspeople runningeight, nine, ten, eleven, twelvefrom all over people came runningfifteen, sixteen, seventeen seconds and more people and more cars and more blowing of horns. Spallner shook uncontrollably. He couldn’t stop shaking. He was afraid.

The crowd gathered so fast.

Spallner kept looking down. He saw a woman’s body sprawled a few moments before the cordon of curious people ate it up. He was frozen and shaking and afraid. He kept swallowing hard.

Morgan noticed. “You’d better sit down, old man. You look lousy.”

“I’m all right. I’m all right. Let me alone. I’m all right. Can can you see those people down there? I wish we were closer. I wish”

He strained his eyes to see. The faces were all a blur. He tried to concentrate on one or two of them, but the crowd was jostling and mixing, he couldn’t draw a bead on any one face.

Once he thought he saw a red-haired woman. He couldn’t be positive.

“Have you a pair of binoculars, Morgan?”

“What in hell for?”

“I want to take a look.”

“Sorry. Not here. Now, look, this isn’t good at all for you. You’re pale, you’re shaking”

Spallner tautened himself with an effort and turned. “Will you come along, Morgan? And hurry.”

“What’s the rush? Where’re you going?”

Spallner thrust the door aside, hurried out. Morgan paced after him to the elevator. They waited. Spallner impatiently. “If only I’m there in time”

“Time for what?”

“Don’t mind meI’m insane. Here we are. Come on.”

Elevator doors sliced open, shut behind them, the floor sank, stratas of offices whipped past them. Street floor. Doors opened. Spallner strode out, his head bursting into a fiery ache, the scarred brow throbbing.

The street. Confusion. Spallner vaulted across the mental confusion of the intersection, his dark eyes probing, prodding, demanding.

Momentarily, he glimpsed a face in the crowd. The face of a red-haired woman with too much powder on her face.

“There, Morgan, there! Did you see her?”

“Who?”

“Damn it; she’s gone! The crowd closed in!”

He plunged through bodies, legs, elbows, startled faces, rough voices. The little red-haired woman had been about halfway through. Evidently she had seen him coming. She was gone.

Another recognizable face! A little boy with freckles who was crying. But there are many little boys in the world. They have freckles. And they cry. And anyway, it was no use; this little boy ran off just before Spallner reached him, slipped into nothing.

“Is she dead?” someone asked. “Is she dead?”

That voice. It sounded so very, very familiar. Where had he heard it before?

“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 of the faces in the crowd seemed vaguely familiar. Spallner brushed through them, seeking, hoping; afraid and alert.

“Hey, Mister, stop your pushing!”

“Who you shoving, buddy?”

All different faces, though. He couldn’t be sure of any of them.

The siren was whining as he elbowed back out to Morgan, who caught him as he staggered and almost dropped.

“God, Spallner, you look awful. Better get some rest, quick. Why in hell’d you come down?”

“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 dumb saps.”

“I haven’t much to go on,” said Spallner. “As far as ordinary logic goes, anyway.” He arranged newspaper clippings carefully. Side by side he placed them. Finished, he motioned at them.

“Take a squint at these, Morgan. See what you think.”

Morgan squinted, and then winced impatiently. “What’s gotten into you?” he complained. “Ever since your accident you act as if every traffic scramble was part of your life. What’s the idea of all these clippings of motor car crackups, all these photos?”

“It’s not the cars, Morgan,” Spallner said quietly. “It’s the crowd that gathers after the accident. Look at it. Look at the faces. Compare one picture with another.”

“This is silly.”

“Here. This accident in the Wilshire District. Compare it to this one in Hollywood. No resemblance. But now, let’s align it with another snapped in the Wilshire District ten years ago.”

He pointed. “This woman. She’s in both pictures. She’s the same woman, wouldn’t you say so?”

“Ye-ess. I’d say she was. But what has that to do with your phobia about accidents?”

“Simply this; these pictures were taken ten years apart. And the accidents occurred about three miles from each other.”

“So what? This woman happened coincidentally to be there.”

“Once, maybe. But eight times over a period of ten years, no. Look.” He dealt out six more pictures, each dated about a year apart. “She’s in all of them!”

“Maybe she’s perverted.”

“She’s more than that. I don’t know what. There are two other points. How does she happen to be there so quickly at each accident? And why does she wear the same clothes in pictures taken over a ten-year period?”

“That’s right. She is, isn’t she?”

“And, last of all, she was standing over me the night of the accident a week ago!”

Spallner made a file, putting pictures, and duplicates into the file. He marked crayon rings around familiar faces. This done, he had evidence that almost convinced the skeptic, Morgan.

“What,” asked Morgan, “does this all add up to?”

“I don’t know what it adds up to, except that there’s a universal law about accidents. Crowds gather. They always gather. And people, just like you and I, have wondered from time to time, from time immemorial, why they gathered so quickly. I know the answer. Here it is!”

He flung the clippings down. “It frightens me. I don’t know how to figure it!”

“These peoplemightn’t they be thrill-hunters, perverted sensationalists with a carnal lust for blood and morbidity?”

Spallner shrugged. He sifted the papers through and through. “Does that explain their being at all the accidents? Notice that they stick to one territory. An accident in Hollywood will bring out one group of faces. An accident in Huntington Park another. But there’s a norm for faces, a certain percentage appear at each accident.”

Morgan gaped. “They’re not all the same faces, are they?”

“Of course 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 don’t know. I’ve tried questioning them, tried even getting to them. Someone always gets in my way, or trips me. I’m always too late. They slip into the crowd and vanish. They get away. The crowd offers protection to some of its members. They see me coming!”

“Sounds like some sort of clique.”

“It is. I don’t know what you’d call them. They have one thing in common, I know. 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. I just don’t know. But I’m going to the police about it. It’s gone on long enough. One of them shifted that woman’s body two days ago on Seventh Street. They shouldn’t have moved her. They shouldn’t have interfered. It killed her.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Oh, I just happened to think of it

“

“What?”

“Maybe they wanted her dead.”

Busy stuffing a brief-case full of his clippings, Spallner shivered. “I’m going down to the police station now. Come along?”

“I have an appointment with the wife.”

“Oh, yes. I forgot. See you later, then.”

“Give my regards to the cops. Think they’ll believe you?”

“Oh, they’ll believe me all right. Good night.”

Wilshire Boulevard was dimmed out because of the war restrictions. Huge billboards and neon lights were darkened, street lights themselves had been enfeebled to a sickly illumination.

Spallner took it slow and easy driving downtown.

“I want to get there alive,” he told himself.

Driving depends on two things. Your car and the others. Other cars do quick, fatal things. A huge freight truck just ahead of Spallner suddenly threw on its air-brakes.

It stopped too suddenly.

Spallner shouted, jammed his brakes. Ramming, his new car crashed into the rear of the truck. The windshield hammered back into Spallner’s face. His body was forced back and forth in several lightning jerks. Then all motion stopped, all noise stopped and only pain filled the night-After a long silence, horns began to honk. Somebody screamed. Traffic jolted to shrieking standstills. The car had not turned over this time.

But there was a crowd.

Spallner struggled to climb out of the car. His heart bounded, his lungs caved in and out, wheezing horribly. The car door cracked open and he slipped, fell down onto his face and lay there bleeding.

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Spallner. If that gash had been an eighth of an inch deeper

“

“Never move a traffic victim. You might kill him

“

His head was bleeding thick red blood.

And the crowd gathered out of nowhere.

He tried to move, and he realized something was wrong with his spine. He hadn’t felt much. But it was hurt. He couldn’t move. He didn’t dare move.

He couldn’t speak. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out but gagging.

Someone said, “Give me a hand. We’ll roll him over and lift him into a comfortable position.”

“No! No!” Spallner’s brain burst apart in a scream. “Don’t move me! You idiots, you’ll kill me if you move me! You’ll kill me. Don’t!”

But he could not say any of this. He could only think it.

Hands touched him, grasped him. They started to lift him.

He cried out and nausea overtook him. They straightened him out into a ramrod of horrible agony. Two men did it. One of them who was thin, bright, alert and pale, who stared at Spallner and kept wetting his lips as if he were hypnotized; and another man who was old and wrinkled like an apricot.

He had seen their faces before.

A familiar voice said, “Isis he dead?”

Another voice, a memorable voice replied, “No. Not yet. But he will be before the ambulance gets here.”

“It’s all a mad plot! Like every accident!” cried Spallner hysterically at the solid wall effaces. They were all around him, the judges and jurors, the faces he had seen before.

The freckled boy.

The red-haired woman.

The girl with the arms that twitched at her sides all by themselves.

“I know what you’re here for! You’re here just like you’re at all accidents! To make sure that the right ones live and the right ones die! That’s why you lifted me. You knew it would kill me! You knew I’d live if you left me alone!

“And that’s the way it’s always been since time began, when crowds gather. You can get away with murder easier this way. You can cover up, saying you didn’t know it was dangerous to move a hurt man!”

He gaped at them. “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 valuable air that a dying man’s lungs need, using up the space he needs to lie in, alone, tramping on people to make sure they die, that’s you! I know all of you!”

Faces. The high-school student with the pimpled face. The old man. The red-haired woman.

Someone picked up the brief-case. “Whose is this?” they asked.

“It’s mine! It’s evidence against you all.”

Green eyes, inverted over him. Upside down, green eyes staring at him from under a slouch hat-Faces.

Somewhere a siren wailed. The ambulance was coming.

But, looking at the faces, the construction and cast and form of the faces, Spallner knew it was too late.

He read it in their faces. They knew.

Spallner tried to speak. A few fragments got out.

“Itlooks as if I’d join you now. II guess I’m a member of the band, now.”

He smiled wanly. “Justjust rememberremember one thing” He chuckled painfully. “Atat the next accident whenever it istonight or tomorrow or next week. It’s I who will be the first one there! You’ll find me when you all arrive.”

He closed his eyes then, and waited for the coroner.

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