The small assassin

Includes The Small Assassin; The Next in Line; The Lake; The Crowd; Jack in the Box; The Man Upstairs; The Cistern; The Tombstone; The Smiling People; The Handler; Let's Play Poison; The Night; The Dead Man

David and Alice Leiber are a happily married couple living in Los Angeles, but when Alice gives birth to a healthy baby boy, she fears the baby is somehow abnormal and will kill her. She expresses her fears to her husband, who dismisses them and tries to comfort her. Their family doctor, Dr. Jeffers, explains that it is not unusual for some women to experience such feelings after the birth of a child—especially in Alice's case, as she almost died of complications of a Caesarean section during delivery. David leaves for a business trip in Chicago and is gone for a few days. On his sixth day away he receives an emergency phone call from Dr. Jeffers, telling him Alice is seriously ill with pneumonia; David rushes home, and a frightened Alice tells him, "It was the baby again." She claims she got pneumonia because the baby cried all night to keep her from sleeping; she believes he is deliberately trying to weaken and kill her. One night David hears the baby crying and gets up to fetch milk from the kitchen. At the top of the stairs he slips on a soft object, but he manages to catch the railing and does not fall downstairs. He finds a large patchwork doll at the top of the stairs, an object he had bought for the baby as a joke. Neither he nor Alice had placed it there. He begins to wonder whether Alice is right about their child. When David comes home from work the next day he finds Alice dead, sprawled and broken at the bottom of the stairs. The patchwork doll lies beside her. Horrified, David tells Dr. Jeffers about his suspicions, believing that the child was born with the awareness and intelligence of an adult but with the inherent selfishness of a baby; the child hates the mother for removing him from the womb (where all his needs were attended to) an