Moving in total numb shock now, I reached her body and turned it over. I think I tried to scream as soon as I had done it, as soon as I saw. If I did, no sound came out; I could not make a sound. The woman was still breathing, you see, gentlemen. Her chest was heaving up and down in quick, light, shallow breaths. Ice pattered down on her open coat and her blood-drenched dress. And I could hear a high, thin whistling noise. It waxed and waned like a teakettle which can't quite reach the boil. It was air being pulled into her severed wind-pipe and then exhaled again; little screams of air through the crude reed of vocal cords which no longer had a mouth to shape their sounds.
I wanted to run but I had no strength; I fell on my knees beside her on the ice, one hand cupped to my mouth. A moment later I was aware of fresh blood seeping through the lower part of her dress ... and of movement there. I became suddenly, frenziedly convinced that there was still a chance to save the baby.
I believe that as I yanked her dress up to her waist I began laughing. I believe I was mad. Her body was still warm. I remember that. I remember the way it heaved with her breathing. One of the ambulance attendants came up, weaving like a drunk, one hand clapped to the side of his head. Blood trickled through his fingers.
I was still laughing, still groping. My hands had found her fully dilated.
The attendant stared down at Sandra Stansfield's headless body with wide eyes. I don't know if he realized the corpse was still breathing or not. Perhaps he thought it was merely a thing of the nerves--a kind of final reflex action. If he did think such a thing, he could not have been driving an ambulance long. Chickens may walk around for awhile with their heads cut off, but people only twitch once or twice ... if that.
"Stop staring at her and get me a blanket," I snapped at him.
He wandered away, but not back toward the ambulance. He was pointed more or less toward Times Square. He simply walked off into the sleety night. I have no idea what became of him. I turned back to the dead woman who was somehow not dead, hesitated a moment, and then stripped off my overcoat. Then I lifted her hips so I could get it under her. Still I heard that whistle of breath as her headless body did "locomotive" breathing. I sometimes hear it still, gentlemen. In my dreams.
Please understand that all of this had happened in an extremely short time--it seemed longer to me, but only because my perceptions had been heightened to a feverish pitch. People were only beginning to run out of the hospital to see what had happened, and behind me a woman shrieked as she saw the severed head lying by the edge of the street.
I yanked open my black bag, thanking God I hadn't lost it in my fall, and pulled out a short scalpel. I opened it, cut through her underwear, and pulled it off. Now the ambulance driver approached--he came to within fifteen feet of us and then stopped dead. I glanced over at him, still wanting that blanket. I wasn't going to get it from him, I saw; he was staring down at the breathing body, his eyes widening until it seemed they must slip from their orbits and simply dangle from their optic nerves like grotesque seeing yo-yos. Then he dropped to his knees and raised his clasped hands. He meant to pray, I am quite sure of that. The attendant might not have known he was seeing an impossibility, but this fellow did. The next moment he had fainted dead away.
I had packed forceps in my bag that night; I don't know why. I hadn't used such things in three years, not since I had seen a doctor I will not name punch through a newborn's temple and into the child's brain with one of those infernal gadgets. The child died instantly. The corpse was "lost" and what went on the death certificate was stillborn.
But, for whatever reason, I had mine with me that night.
Miss Stansfield's body tightened down, her belly clenching, turning from flesh to stone. And the baby crowned. I saw the crown for just a moment, bloody and membranous and pulsing. Pulsing. It was alive, then. Definitely alive.
Stone became flesh again. The crown slipped back out of sight. And a voice behind me said: "What can I do, doctor?"
It was a middle-aged nurse, the sort of woman who is so often the backbone of our profession. Her face was as pale as milk, and while there was terror and a kind of superstitious awe on her face as she looked down at that weirdly breathing body, there was none of that dazed shock which would have made her difficult and dangerous to work with.
"You can get me a blanket, stat," I said curtly. "We've still got a chance, I think." Behind her I saw perhaps two dozen people from the hospital standing on the steps, not wanting to come any closer. How much or how little did they see? I have no way of knowing for sure. All I know is that I was avoided for days afterwards (and forever by some of them), and no one, including this nurse, ever spoke to me of it.
She now turned and started back toward the hospital.
"Nurse!" I called. "No time for that. Get one from the ambulance. This baby is coming now."
She changed course, slipping and sliding through the slush in her white crepe-soled shoes. I turned back to Miss Stansfield.
Rather than slowing down, the locomotive breathing had actually begun to speed up ... and then her body turned hard again, locked and straining. The baby crowned again. I waited for it to slip back but it did not; it simply kept coming. There was no need for the forceps after all. The baby all but flew into my hands. I saw the sleet ticking off his naked bloody body--for it was a boy, his sex unmistakable. I saw steam rising from him as the black, icy night snatched away the last of his mother's heat. His blood-grimed fists waved feebly; he uttered a thin, wailing cry.
"Nurse!" I bawled, "move your ass, you bitch!" It was perhaps inexcusable language, but for a moment I felt I was back in France, that in a few moments the shells would begin to whistle overhead with a sound like that remorselessly ticking sleet; the machine-guns would begin their hellish stutter; the Germans would begin to materialize out of the murk, running and slipping and cursing and dying in the mud and smoke. Cheap magic, I thought, seeing the bodies twist and turn and fall. But you're right, Sandra, it's all we have. It was the closest I have ever come to losing my mind, gentlemen.
"NURSE, FOR GOD'S SAKE!"
The baby wailed again--such a tiny, lost sound!--and then he wailed no more. The steam rising from his skin had thinned to ribbons. I put my mouth against his face, smelling blood and the bland, damp aroma of placenta. I breathed into his mouth and heard the jerky susurrus of his breathing resume. Then the nurse was there, the blanket in her arms. I held out my hand for it.
She started to give it to me, and then held it back. "Doctor, what ... what if it's a monster? Some kind of monster?"
"Give me that blanket," I said. "Give it to me now, Sarge, before I kick your asshole right up to your shoulderblades."
"Yes, doctor," she said with perfect calmness (we must bless the women, gentlemen, who so often understand simply by not trying to), and gave me the blanket. I wrapped the child and gave him to her.
"If you drop him, Sarge, you'll be eating those stripes."
"Yes, doctor."
"It's cheap fucking magic, Sarge, but it's all God left us with."
"Yes, doctor."
I watched her half-walk, half-run back to the hospital with the child and watched the crowd on the steps part for her. Then I rose to my feet and backed away from the body. Its breathing, like the baby's, hitched and caught ... stopped ... hitched again ... stopped ...
I began to back away from it. My foot struck something. I turned. It was her head. And obeying some directive from outside of me, I dropped to one knee and turned the head over. The eyes were open--those direct hazel eyes that had always been full of such life and such determination. They were full of determination still. Gentlemen, she was seeing me.
Her teeth were clenched, her lips slightly parted. I heard the breath slipping rapidly back and forth between those lips and through those teeth as she "locomotived." Her eyes moved; they rolled slightly to the left in their sockets so as to see me better. Her lips parted. They mouthed four words: Thank you, Dr. McCarron. And I heard them, gentlem
en, but not from her mouth. They came from twenty feet away. From her vocal cords. And because her tongue and lips and teeth, all of which we use to shape our words, were here, they came out only in unformed modulations of sound. But there were seven of them, seven distinct sounds, just as there are seven syllables in that phrase, Thank you, Dr. McCarron.
"You're welcome, Miss Stansfield," I said. "It's a boy."
Her lips moved again, and from behind me, thin, ghostly, came the sound boyyyyyy--
Her eyes lost their focus and their determination. They seemed now to look at something beyond me, perhaps in that black, sleety sky. Then they closed. She began to "locomotive" again ... and then she simply stopped. Whatever had happened was now over. The nurse had seen some of it, the ambulance driver had perhaps seen some of it before he fainted, and some of the onlookers might have suspected something. But it was over now, over for sure. There was only the remains of an ugly accident out here ... and a new baby in there.
I looked up at the statue of Harriet White and there she still stood, looking stonily away toward the Garden across the way, as if nothing of any particular note had happened, as if such determination in a world as hard and as senseless as this one meant nothing ... or worse still, that it was perhaps the only thing which meant anything, the only thing that made any difference at all.
As I recall, I knelt there in the slush before her severed head and began to weep. As I recall, I was still weeping when an intern and two nurses helped me to my feet and inside.
McCarron's pipe had gone out.
He re-lit it with his bolt-lighter while we sat in perfect, breathless silence. Outside, the wind howled and moaned. He snapped his lighter closed and looked up. He seemed mildly surprised to find us still there.
"That's all," he said. "That's the end! What are you waiting for? Chariots of fire?" he snorted, then seemed to debate for a moment. "I paid her burial expenses out of my own pocket. She had no one else, you see." He smiled a little. "Well . . . there was Ella Davidson, my nurse. She insisted on chipping in twenty-five dollars, which she could ill afford. But when Davidson insisted on a thing--" He shrugged, and then laughed a little.
"You're quite sure it wasn't a reflex?" I heard myself demanding suddenly. "Are you quite sure--"
"Quite sure," McCarron said imperturbably. "The first contraction, perhaps. But the completion of her labor was not a matter of seconds but of minutes. And I sometimes think she might have held on even longer, if it had been necessary. Thank God it was not."
"What about the baby?" Johanssen asked.
McCarron puffed at his pipe. "Adopted," he said. "And you'll understand that, even in those days, adoption records were kept as secret as possible."
"Yes, but what about the baby?" Johanssen asked again, and McCarron laughed in a cross way.
"You never let go of a thing, do you?" he asked Johanssen.
Johanssen shook his head. "Some people have learned it to their sorrow. What about the baby?"
"Well, if you've come with me this far, perhaps you'll also understand that I had a certain vested interest in knowing how it all came out for that child. Or I felt I did, which comes to the same. I did keep track, and I still do. There was a young man and his wife--their name was not Harrison, but that is close enough. They lived in Maine. They could have no children of their own. They adopted the child and named him ... well, John's good enough, isn't it? John will do you fellows, won't it?"
He puffed at his pipe but it had gone out again. I was faintly aware of Stevens hovering behind me, and knew that somewhere our coats would be at the ready. Soon we would slip back into them ... and back into our lives. As McCarron had said, the tales were done for another year.
"The child I delivered that night is now head of the English Department at one of the two or three most respected private colleges in the country," McCarron said. "He's not forty-five yet. A young man. It's early for him, but the day may well come when he will be President of that school. I shouldn't doubt it a bit. He is handsome, intelligent, and charming.
"Once, on a pretext, I was able to dine with him in the private faculty club. We were four that evening. I said little and so was able to watch him. He has his mother's determination, gentlemen ...
". . . and his mother's hazel eyes."
III.
The Club
Stevens saw us out as he always did, holding coats, wishing men the happiest of happy Christmases, thanking them for their generosity. I contrived to be the last, and Stevens looked at me with no surprise when I said:
"I have a question I'd like to ask, if you don't mind."
He smiled a little. "I suppose you should," he said. "Christmas is a fine time for questions."
Somewhere down the hallway to our left--a hall I had never been down--a grandfather clock ticked sonorously, the sound of the age passing away. I could smell old leather and oiled wood and, much more faintly than either of these, the smell of Stevens's aftershave.
"But I should warn you," Stevens added as the wind rose in a gust outside, "it's better not to ask too much. Not if you want to keep coming here."
"People have been closed out for asking too much?" Closed out was not really the phrase I wanted, but it was as close as I could come.
"No," Stevens said, his voice as low and polite as ever. "They simply choose to stay away."
I returned his gaze, feeling a chill prickle its way up my back--it was as if a large, cold, invisible hand had been laid on my spine. I found myself remembering that strangely liquid thump I had heard upstairs one night and wondered (as I had more than once before) exactly how many rooms there really were here.
"If you still have a question, Mr. Adley, perhaps you'd better ask it. The evening's almost over--"
"And you have a long train-ride ahead of you?" I asked, but Stevens only looked at me impassively. "All right," I said.
"There are books in this library that I can't find anywhere else--not in the New York Public Library, not in the catalogues of any of the antiquarian book-dealers I've checked with, and certainly not in Books in Print. The billiard table in the Small Room is a Nord. I'd never heard of such a brand, and so I called the International Trademark Commission. They have two Nords--one makes cross-country skis and the other makes wooden kitchen accessories. There's a Seafront jukebox in the Long Room. The ITC has a Seeburg listed, but no Seafront."
"What is your question, Mr. Adley?"
His voice was as mild as ever, but there was something terrible in his eyes suddenly ... no; if I am to be truthful, it was not just in his eyes; the terror I felt had infused the atmosphere all around me. The steady tock-tock from down the lefthand hall was no longer the pendulum of a grandfather clock; it was the tapping foot of the executioner as he watches the condemned led to the scaffold. The smells of oil and leather turned bitter and menacing, and when the wind rose in another wild whoop, I felt momentarily sure that the front door would blow open, revealing not Thirty-fifth Street but an insane Clark Ashton Smith landscape where the bitter shapes of twisted trees stood silhouetted on a sterile horizon below which double suns were setting in a gruesome red glare.
Oh, he knew what I had meant to ask; I saw it in his gray eyes.
Where do all these things come from? I had meant to ask. Oh, I know well enough where you come from, Stevens; that accent isn't Dimension X, it's pure Brooklyn. But where do you go? What has put that timeless look in your eyes and stamped it on your face? And, Stevens--
--whereare we RIGHT THIS SECOND?
But he was waiting for my question.
I opened my mouth. And the question that came out was: "Are there many more rooms upstairs?"
"Oh, yes, sir," he said, his eyes never leaving mine. "A great many. A man could become lost. In fact, men have become lost. Sometimes-it seems to me that they go on for miles. Rooms and corridors."
"And entrances and exits?"
His eyebrows went up slightly. "Oh yes. Entrances and exits."
He waited, but
I had asked enough, I thought--I had come to the very edge of something that would, perhaps, drive me mad.
"Thank you, Stevens."
"Of course, sir." He held out my coat and I slipped into it.
"There will be more tales?"
"Here, sir, there are always more tales."
That evening was some time ago, and my memory has not improved between then and now (when a man reaches my age, the opposite is much more likely to be true), but I remember with perfect clarity the stab of fear that went through me when Stevens swung the oaken door wide--the cold certainty that I would see that alien landscape, cracked and hellish in the bloody light of those double suns, which might set and bring on an unspeakable darkness of an hour's duration, or ten hours, or ten thousand years. I cannot explain it, but I tell you that world exists--I am as sure of that as Emlyn McCarron was sure that the severed head of Sandra Stansfield went on breathing. I thought for that one timeless second that the door would open and Stevens would thrust me out into that world and I would then hear that door slam shut behind me ... forever.
Instead, I saw Thirty-fifth Street and a radio-cab standing at the curb, exhaling plumes of exhaust. I felt an utter, almost debilitating relief.
"Yes, always more tales," Stevens repeated. "Goodnight, sir."
Always more tales.
Indeed there have been. And, one day soon, perhaps I'll tell you another.
Afterword
Although "Where do you get your ideas?" has always been the question I'm most frequently asked (it's number one with a bullet, you might say), the runner-up is undoubtedly this one: "Is horror all you write?" When I say it isn't, it's hard to tell if the questioner seems relieved or disappointed.
Just before the publication of Carrie, my first novel, I got a letter from my editor, Bill Thompson, suggesting it was time to start thinking about what we were going to do for an encore (it may strike you as a bit strange, this thinking about the next book before the first was even out, but because the pre-publication schedule for a novel is almost as long as the post-production schedule on a film, we had been living with Carrie for a long time at that point--nearly a year). I promptly sent Bill the manuscripts of two novels, one called Blaze and one called Second Coming. The former had been written immediately after Carrie, during the six-month period when the first draft of Carrie was sitting in a desk drawer, mellowing; the latter was written during the year or so when Carrie inched, tortoiselike, closer and closer to publication.