Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (2 page)

It had all begun on the elevated. There was a particular little sea of roofs he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the normal smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by ghostly windblown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow; and it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive, almost beautifully ugly, though in no sense picturesque; dreary but meaningful. Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and Fascist wars. The quick, daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life. Oddly, he never saw it in the morning, for it was then his habit to sit on the other side of the car, his head buried in the paper.

One evening toward winter he noticed what seemed to be a shapeless black sack lying on the third roof from the tracks. He did not think about it. It merely registered as an addition to the well-known scene and his memory stored away the impression for further reference. Next evening, however, he decided he had been mistaken in one detail. The object was a roof nearer than he had thought. Its color and texture, and the grimy stains around it, suggested that it was filled with coal dust, which was hardly reasonable. Then, too, the following evening it seemed to have been blown against a rusty ventilator by the wind—which could hardly have happened if it were at all heavy. Perhaps it was filled with leaves. Catesby was surprised to find himself anticipating his next daily glance with a minor note of apprehension. There was something unwholesome in the posture of the thing that stuck in his mind—a bulge in the sacking that suggested a misshapen head peering around the ventilator. And his apprehension was justified, for that evening the thing was on the nearest roof, though on the farther side, looking as if it had just flopped down over the low brick parapet.

Next evening the sack was gone. Catesby was annoyed at the momentary feeling of relief that went through him, because the whole matter seemed too unimportant to warrant feelings of any sort. What difference did it make if his imagination had played tricks on him, and he’d fancied that the object was crawling and hitching itself slowly closer across the roofs? That was the way any normal imagination worked. He deliberately chose to disregard the fact that there were reasons for thinking his imagination was by no means a normal one. As he walked home from the elevated, however, he found himself wondering whether the sack was really gone. He seemed to recall a vague, smudgy trail leading across the gravel to the nearer side of the roof. For an instant an unpleasant picture formed in his mind—that of an inky, humped creature crouched behind the nearer parapet, waiting. Then he dismissed the whole subject.

The next time he felt the familiar grating lurch of the car, he caught himself trying not to look out. That angered him. He turned his head quickly. When he turned it back, his compact face was definitely pale. There had only been time for a fleeting rearward glance at the escaping roof. Had he actually seen in silhouette the upper part of a head of some sort peering over the parapet? Nonsense, he told himself. And even if he had seen something, there were a thousand explanations which did not involve the supernatural or even true hallucination. Tomorrow he would take a good look and clear up the whole matter. If necessary, he would visit the roof personally, though he hardly knew where to find it and disliked in any case the idea of pampering a whim of fear.

He did not relish the walk home from the elevated that evening, and visions of the thing disturbed his dreams and were in and out of his mind all next day at the office. It was then that he first began to relieve his nerves by making jokingly serious remarks about the supernatural to Miss Millick, who seemed properly mystified. It was on the same day, too, that he became aware of a growing antipathy to grime and soot. Everything he touched seemed gritty, and he found himself mopping and wiping at his desk like an old lady with a morbid fear of germs. He reasoned that there was no real change in his office, and that he’d just now become sensitive to the dirt that had always been there, but there was no denying an increasing nervousness. Long before the car reached the curve, he was straining his eyes through the murky twilight determined to take in every detail.

Afterward he realized that he must have given a muffled cry of some sort, for the man beside him looked at him curiously, and the woman ahead gave him an unfavorable stare. Conscious of his own pallor and uncontrollable trembling, he stared back at them hungrily, trying to regain the feeling of security he had completely lost. They were the usual reassuringly wooden-faced people everyone rides home with on the elevated. But suppose he had pointed out to one of them what he had seen—that sodden, distorted face of sacking and coal dust, that boneless paw which waved back and forth, unmistakably in his direction, as if reminding him of a future appointment—he involuntarily shut his eyes tight. His thoughts were racing ahead to tomorrow evening. He pictured this same windowed oblong of light and packed humanity surging around the curve—then an opaque monstrous form leaping out from the roof in a parabolic swoop—an unmentionable face pressed close against the window, smearing it with wet coal dust—huge paws fumbling sloppily at the glass.

Somehow he managed to turn off his wife’s anxious inquiries. Next morning he reached a decision and made an appointment for that evening with a psychiatrist a friend had told him about. It cost him a considerable effort, for Catesby had a peculiarly great and very well-grounded distaste for anything dealing with psychological abnormality. Visiting a psychiatrist meant raking up an episode in his past which he had never fully described even to his wife and which Miss Millick only knew of as “something impressively abnormal about Mr. Wran’s childhood.” Once he had made the decision, however, he felt considerably relieved. The doctor, he told himself, would clear everything up. He could almost fancy the doctor saying,“Merely a bad case of nerves. However, you must consult the oculist whose name I’m writing down for you, and you must take two of these pills in water every hour,” and so on. It was almost comforting, and made the coming revelation he would have to make seem less painful.

But as the smoky dusk rolled in, his nervousness returned and he let his joking mystification of Miss Millick run away with him until he realized that he wasn’t frightening anyone but himself.

He would have to keep his imagination under better control, he told himself, as he continued to peer out restlessly at the massive, murky shapes of the downtown office buildings. Why, he had spent the whole afternoon building up a kind of neomedieval cosmology of superstition. It wouldn’t do. He realized then that he had been standing at the window much longer than he’d thought, for the glass panel in the door was dark and there was no noise coming from the outer office. Miss Millick and the rest must already have gone home.

It was then he made the discovery that there would have been no special reason for dreading the swing around the curve that night. It was, as it happened, a horrible discovery. For, on the shadowed roof across the street and four stories below, he saw the thing huddle and roll across the gravel and, after one upward look of recognition, merge into the blackness beneath the water tank.

As he hurriedly collected his things and made for the elevator, fighting the panicky impulse to run, he began to think of hallucination and mild psychosis as very desirable conditions. For better or for worse, he pinned all his hopes on the doctor.

“So you find yourself growing nervous and… er… jumpy, as you put it,” said Dr. Trevethick, smiling with dignified geniality. “Do you notice any more definite physical symptoms? Pain? Headache? Indigestion?”

Catesby shook his head and wet his lips. “I’m especially nervous while riding in the elevated,” he murmured swiftly.

“I see. We’ll discuss that more fully. But I’d like you first to tell me about something you mentioned earlier. You said there was something about your childhood that might predispose you to nervous ailments. As you know, the early years are critical ones in the development of an individual’s behavior pattern.”

Catesby studied the yellow reflections of frosted globes in the dark surface of the desk. The palm of his left hand aimlessly rubbed the thick nap of the armchair. After a while he raised his head and looked straight into the doctor’s small brown eyes.

“From perhaps my third to my ninth year,” he began, choosing the words with care, “I was what you might call a sensory prodigy.”
The doctor’s expression did not change. “Yes?” he inquired politely.
“What I mean is that I was supposed to be able to see through walls, read letters through envelopes and books through their covers, fence and play Ping-Pong blindfolded, find things that were buried, read thoughts.” The words tumbled out.
“And could you?” The doctor’s expression was toneless.
“I don’t know. I don’t suppose so,” answered Catesby, long-lost emotions flooding back into his voice. “It’s all so confused now. I thought I could, but then they were always encouraging me. My mother… was… well… interested in psychic phenomena. I was… exhibited. I seem to remember seeing things other people couldn’t. As if most opaque objects were transparent. But I was very young. I didn’t have any scientific criteria for judgment.”
He was reliving it now. The darkened rooms. The earnest assemblages of gawking, prying adults. Himself sitting alone on a little platform, lost in a straight-backed wooden chair. The black silk handkerchief over his eyes. His mother’s coaxing, insistent questions. The whispers. The gasps. His own hate of the whole business, mixed with hunger for the adulation of adults. Then the scientists from the university, the experiments, the big test. The reality of those memories engulfed him and momentarily made him forget the reason why he was disclosing them to a stranger.
“Do I understand that your mother tried to make use of you as a medium for communicating with the… er… other world ?”
Catesby nodded eagerly.
“She tried to, but she couldn’t. When it came to getting in touch with the dead, I was a complete failure. All I could do—or thought I could do—was see real, existing, three-dimensional objects beyond the vision of normal people. Objects they could have seen except for distance, obstruction, or darkness. It was always a disappointment to Mother,” he finished slowly.
He could hear her sweetish, patient voice saying, “Try again, dear, just this once. Katie was your aunt. She loved you. Try to hear what she’s saying.” And he had answered, “I can see a woman in a blue dress standing on the other side of Jones’ house.” And she had replied, “Yes, I know, dear. But that’s not Katie. Katie’s a spirit. Try again. Just this once, dear.” For a second time the doctor’s voice gently jarred him back into the softly gleaming office.
“You mentioned scientific criteria for judgment, Mr. Wran. As far as you know, did anyone ever try to apply them to you?”
Catesby’s nod was emphatic.
“They
did. When I was eight, two young psychologists from the university here got interested in me. I guess they considered it a joke at first, and I remember being very determined to show them I amounted to something. Even now I seem to recall how the note of polite superiority and amused sarcasm drained out of their voices. I suppose they decided at first that it was very clever trickery, but somehow they persuaded Mother to let them try me out under controlled conditions. There were lots of tests that seemed very businesslike after Mother’s slipshod little exhibitions. They found I was still clairvoyant—or so they thought. I got worked up and on edge. They were going to demonstrate my supernormal sensory powers to the university psychology faculty. For the first time I began to worry about whether I’d come through. Perhaps they kept me going at too hard a pace, I don’t know. At any rate, when the test came, I couldn’t do a thing. Everything became opaque. I got desperate and made things up out of my imagination. I lied. In the end I failed utterly, and I believe the two young psychologists lost their jobs as a result.”
He could hear the brusque, bearded man saying, “You’ve been taken in by a child, Flaxman, a mere child. I’m greatly disturbed. You’ve put yourself on the same plane as common charlatans. Gentlemen, I ask you to banish from your minds this whole sorry episode. It must never be referred to.” He winced at the recollection of his feeling of guilt. But at the same time he was beginning to feel exhilarated and almost light-hearted. Unburdening his long-repressed memories had altered his whole viewpoint. The episodes on the elevated began to take on what seemed their proper proportions as merely the bizarre workings of overwrought nerves, and an overly suggestible mind. The doctor, he anticipated confidently, would disentangle the obscure subconscious causes, whatever they might be. And the whole business would be finished off quickly, just as his childhood experience—which was beginning to seem a little ridiculous now—had been finished off.
“From that day on,” he continued, “I never exhibited a trace of my supposed powers. My mother was frantic, and tried to sue the university. I had something like a nervous breakdown. Then the divorce was granted, and my father got custody of me. He did his best to make me forget it. We went on long outdoor vacations, and did a lot of athletics, associated with normal, matter-of-fact people. I went to business college eventually. I’m in advertising now. But,” Catesby paused, “now that I’m having nervous symptoms, I’m wondering if there mightn’t be a connection. It’s not a question of whether I really was clairvoyant or not. Very likely my mother taught me a lot of unconscious deceptions, good enough even to fool young psychology instructors. But don’t you think it may have some important bearing on my present condition?”
For several moments the doctor regarded him with a slightly embarrassing professional frown. Then he said quietly, “And is there some… er… more specific connection between your experiences then and now? Do you by any chance find that you are once again beginning to… er… see things?”
Catesby swallowed. He had felt an increasing eagerness to unburden himself of his fears, but it was not easy to make a beginning, and the doctor’s shrewd question rattled him. He forced himself to concentrate. The thing he thought he had seen on the roof loomed up before his inner eye with unexpected vividness. Yet it did not frighten him. He groped for words.
Then he saw that the doctor was not looking at him but over his shoulder. Color was draining out of the doctor’s face and his eyes did not seem so small. Then the doctor sprang to his feet, walked past Catesby, threw open the window and peered into the darkness. As Catesby rose, the doctor slammed down the window and said in a voice whose smoothness was marred by a slight, persistent gasping, “I hope I haven’t alarmed you. I saw the face of… er… a Negro prowler on the fire escape. I must have frightened him, for he seems to have gotten out of sight in a hurry. Don’t give it another thought. Doctors are frequently bothered by
voyeurs…
er… Peeping Toms.”
“A Negro?” asked Catesby, moistening his lips.
The doctor laughed nervously. “I imagine so, though my first odd impression was that it was a white man in blackface. You see, the color didn’t seem to have any crown in it. It was dead-black.”
Catesby moved toward the window. There were smudges on the glass. “It’s quite all right, Mr. Wran.” The doctor’s voice had acquired a sharp note of impatience, as if he were trying hard to get control of himself and reassume his professional authority. “Let’s continue our conversation. I was asking you if you were”—he made a face—“seeing things.”
Catesby’s whirling thoughts slowed down and locked into place. “No, I’m not seeing anything… other people don’t see, too. And I think I’d better go now. INegrve been keeping you too long.” He disregarded the doctor’s half-hearted gesture of denial. “I’ll phone you about the physical examination. In a way you’ve already taken a big load off my mind.” He smiled woodenly. “Good night, Dr. Trevethick.”
Catesby Wran’s mental state was a peculiar one. His eyes searched every angular shadow and he glanced sideways down each chasmlike alley and barren basement passageway and kept stealing looks at the irregular line of the roofs, yet he was hardly conscious of where he was going in a general way. He pushed away the thoughts that came into his mind, and kept moving. He became aware of a slight sense of security as he turned into a lighted street where there were people and high buildings and blinking signs. After a while he found himself in the dim lobby of the structure that housed his office. Then he realized why he couldn’t go home—because he might cause his wife and baby to see it, just as the doctor had seen it. And the baby, only two years old.
“Hello, Mr. Wran,” said the night elevator man, a burly figure in blue overalls, sliding open the grillwork door to the old-fashioned cage. “I didn’t know you were working nights now.”
Catesby stepped in automatically. “Sudden rush of orders,” he murmured inanely. “Some stuff that has to be gotten out.”
The cage creaked to a stop at the top floor. “Be working very late, Mr. Wran?”
He nodded vaguely, watched the car slide out of sight, found his keys, swiftly crossed the outer office, and entered his own. His hand went out to the light switch, but then the thought occurred to him that the two lighted windows, standing out against the dark bulk of the building, would indicate his whereabouts and serve as a goal toward which something could crawl and climb. He moved his chair so that the back was against the wall and sat down in the semidarkness. He did not remove his overcoat.
For a long time he sat there motionless, listening to his own breathing and the faraway sounds from the streets below; the thin metallic surge of the crosstown streetcar, the farther one of the elevated, faint lonely cries and honkings, indistinct rumblings. Words he had spoken to Miss Millick in nervous jest came back to him with the bitter taste of truth. He found himself unable to reason critically or connectedly, but by their own volition thoughts rose up into his mind and gyrated slowly and rearranged themselves, with the inevitable movement of planets.
Gradually his mental picture of the world was transformed. No longer a world of material atoms and empty space, but a world in which the bodiless existed and moved according to its own obscure laws or unpredictable impulses. The new picture illuminated with dreadful clarity certain general facts which had always bewildered and troubled him and from which he had tried to hide: the inevitability of hate and war, the diabolically timed mischances which wrecked the best of human intentions, the walls of willful misunderstanding that divided one man from another, the eternal vitality of cruelty and ignorance and greed. They seemed appropriate now, necessary parts of the picture. And superstition only a kind of wisdom.
Then his thoughts returned to himself, and the question he had asked Miss Millick came back, “What would such a thing want from a person? Sacrifices? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?” It had now become a purely practical question.
With an explosive jangle, the phone began to ring. “Cate, I’ve been trying everywhere to get you,” said his wife. “I never thought you’d be at the office. What are you doing? I’ve been worried.”
He said something about work.
“You’ll be home right away?” came the faint anxious question. “I’m a little frightened. Ronny just had a scare. It woke him up. He kept pointing to the window saying, ‘Black man, black man.’ Of course it’s something he dreamed. But I’m frightened. You will be home? What’s that, dear? Can’t you hear me?”
“I will. Right away,” he said. Then he was out of the office, buzzing the night bell and peering down the shaft.