The doctor shook him.
‘Doc, doc, doc,’ said Leiber, 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 — 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. ‘Now you’re following in her pattern. 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 Lucifer!’
Leiber shook his head. ‘Alice heard things at night. Things moving in the halls. As if someone spied on us. You want to know what those noises were, doctor? I’ll tell you. They were made by the baby! Yes, my son! Four months old, creeping around the dark halls at night, 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 a small object. It can conveniently hide behind furniture, a door, against a wall — below eye-level.’
‘I want you to stop this!’ demanded 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, weakening her into pneumonia? The baby! And when Alice didn’t die, then he tried killing me. It was simple; leave a toy doll on the stairs, then cry in the night until your father rouses up, tired of listening to you cry, and goes downstairs to fetch you warm milk, and stumbles. A crude trick, but effective. It didn’t get me. But it killed Alice quite 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 constantly, all the time. Not this one. He stayed awake — thinking.’
‘Babies don’t think,’ countered Jeffers.
‘He stayed awake doing whatever he could do with his brain, then. What in hell do we know about a baby’s brain? 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 knowledge, yes. You know, of course, how babies kill their mothers at birth. Why? In resentment at being forced into a lousy world like this one!’
Leiber leaned towards 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. Many insects are self-sufficient when born. In a few days most mammals and birds are adjusted. Little man-children take years to speak, faltering around on rubbery legs.
‘But, suppose one child in a million is — strange? Born perfectly aware, able to think, instinctively. Wouldn’t it be a perfect set-up, 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 manœuvres 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 function in a scarlet darkness we can’t even guess at.
Elemental little brains, aswarm with racial memory and hatred and raw cruelty, with no more thought than self-preservation. 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! Nothing is so self-centred, unsocial, selfish, nothing!’
Jeffers scowled and shook his head, helplessly, and shrugged.
Leiber dropped his cigarette down, weakly. ‘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. And murder must have a motivation. Name a motivation for the child.’
Leiber was ready with the answer. ‘What is more at peace, more dreamfully happy, content, at ease, at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered than an unborn child? Nothing. It floats in a sleepy dark effluvium of timeless wonder and warm nourishment and silence.
All is an enclosed dream. Then, suddenly, it is asked to give up its berth, is forced to vacate, propelled out into a noisy, uncaring, selfish, swift and merciless 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 newborn resents it! Resents it with all the soft, small fibres of its miniature body.
Resents the raw cold air, the huge spaces, the sudden departure from familiar things. And in the tiny filament of brain the only thing that the child knows is selfishness and hatred because the spell has been rudely shattered. And who is responsible for this disenchantment, this rude breakage of the spell? The mother. And so the new child has someone to hate, and hate with all the tiny fabric of its 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 newborn as something to dread, something to wonder about, to shudder at.’
‘And why not? Hasn’t the child a perfect alibi? He has a thousand years of accepted medical belief to protect 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 great power.
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 little power slipping rapidly, forever away from it, never to return. Why shouldn’t it grasp for 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.
And later, this child, secretly aware, becoming more aware each and every day, would learn new things — about position, money, security. The child would see that through money it might eventually provide itself with a self-built womb of comforts, warmth and aloneness.
And naturally, then, it might pay to destroy the father whose insurance policies for twenty thousand dollars are made out to the wife and baby. Again, I admit the baby isn’t old enough for that motivation yet. Money is something beyond it. But hatred is not. The money angle might come later, not now. But it would come from the same desire, the desire to return to warm comfort and let-aloneness.’
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 tediously, achingly slow, 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 said good night and left the house.
Leiber, alone, drifted towards sleep.
He heard a noise. ‘What’s — what’s that?’ he demanded, feebly.
Something moved in the hall.
David Leiber slept.
The next morning, Dr. Jeffers drove up to the Leiber house. It was a good morning, and he was here to tell Leiber to get out into the country for a rest. Leiber would still be asleep upstairs. Jeffers had given him enough sedative to knock him out for at least fifteen hours.
He rang the doorbell. No answer. The servants hadn’t returned, it was too early. Jeffers tried the front door, found it open, stepped in. He put his medical kit on the nearest chair.
Something white moved out of view at the top of the stairs. Just a suggestion of a movement. Jeffers hardly noticed it.
The odour of gas was in the house.
Jeffers ran up the stairs, crashed into Leiber’s bedroom.
Leiber lay on the bed, not moving, and the room billowed with gas, which hissed from
