Terror in the Modern Vein by Wollheim Donald A

Author:Wollheim, Donald A [Wollheim, Donald A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories & Novellas, Collection.Anthology, Fiction.Horror
Amazon: B0018VAIFW
Publisher: Digit
Published: 1961-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

THE CROWD by Ray Bradbury

When his remarkable career was in its earliest period, Ray Bradbury produced some of his most unusual ideas about people and the world we live in. His skill has smoothed and grown since then, but we do not believe that his ideas of that first flowering phase have been surpassed. Take this story, from his first published collection. We challenge you to produce another that so touches the heart of a rather hideous experience that must be common to all at one time or another.

MR. SPALLNER put his hands over his face.

There was the feeling of movement in space, the beautifully tortured scream, the impact and tumbling of the car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy, and him hurled out of it. Then - silence.

The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard them running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and on the lined sidewalk, and over the asphalt street, and picking through the cluttered bricks to where his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with a senseless centrifuge.

Where the crowd came from he didn't know. He struggled to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon him, hung over him like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees. They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a moondial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing any more ever.

How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere.

A siren. A police voice. Movement. Blood trickled from his lips and he was being moved into an ambulance. Someone said, "Is he dead?" And someone else said, "No, he's not dead." And a third person said, "He won't die, he's not going to die." And he saw the faces of the crowd beyond him in the night, and he knew by their expressions that he wouldn't die. And that was strange. He saw a man's face, thin, bright, pale; the man swallowed and bit his lips, very sick. There was a small woman, too, with red hair and too much red on her cheeks and lips. And a little boy with a freckled face. Others' faces. An old man with a wrinkled upper lip, an old woman, with a mole upon her chin. They had all come from - where? Houses, cars, alleys, from the immediate and the accident-shocked world. Out of alleys and out of hotels and out of street-cars and seemingly out of nothing they came.

The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it.

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