by Fritz Leiber
An Invitation to Danger
There in the gloom he seemed again to see the face of the frightened girl. His hand holding the weighted hanger stopped halfway down the rack. He could make out the serious, hunted eyes, the thin features, the nervous lips.
She had the key, the password to the hidden world. She knew the answer to the question that dark-engulfed Mackay had been asking.
The imagined lips parted nervously, as if she were about to speak….
The Sinful Ones
Fritz Leiber
All characters in this work are wholly fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Copyright 1950 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co., Inc
ISBN: 0-671-83575-0
Chapter One
The Frightened Girl
WHEN CARR MACKEY first caught sight of the frightened girl, he was feeling exceptionally bored. The offices of General Employment seemed a jail, time an unclimbable wall, life a straitjacket, the very air a slow-setting invisible cement. Even thoughts of Marcia failed to put any color in his gray mood.
He had just finished up with an applicant. The empty wire basket on his desk meant that he had nothing to do for a while.
The other interviewers were still busy with their share of the horde of job-seekers who trickled into Chicago’s Loop, converged on General Employment, and then went their ways again, as aimlessly as ants trailing into and out of a hole, and as defenseless in the long run against the turn of a giant heel.
Anything was more interesting than people, Carr felt. Yet a glance at the big clock told him it was only three-thirty, and the prospect of an empty hour-and-a-half seemed almost worse than one filled with people, no matter how stupid and lifeless.
It was just then that the frightened girl came into the waiting room. Without looking around she sat down on one of the benches, wooden and high-backed, rather like church pews.
Carr watched her through the huge glass panel that made everything in the waiting room silent and slightly unreal. Just a girl in a cardigan. College type, a bug affected, dark hair falling untidily to her shoulders. And nervous—in fact, frightened. Still, just an ordinary girl. Nothing tremendously intriguing or pretty about her.
And yet….it was as if Carr had been sitting for hours in front of a curtain that he had become quite certain would never rise, when suddenly something (who knows what?—a scrape of feet in the orchestra pit, a slight dimming of the light, the sense of an actor peering through one of the eyeholes in the ponderous cloth) made him feel that it might not be to painful to wait a little longer.
“Ow, my feet!”
Carr looked around. Miss Zabel’s features were contorted into a simulation of intense pain as she picked up the record cards on his desk.
“Shoes hurt?” he inquired sympathetically.
She nodded. Her topknot of unruly hair bobbed decisively. “You’re lucky,” she told him. “You can sit at a desk.”
“That can be painful too.”
She looked at him skeptically and teetered off.
Carr’s gaze flipped back to the frightened girl. There had been a change. Whatever she’d been doing—biting her lip, twisting her fingers—she wasn’t any longer. She sat quite still, looking straight ahead, arms close to her sides.
Another woman had come into the waiting room. A big blonde, rather handsome in a poster-ish way, with a stunningly perfect hairdo. Yet her tailored suit gave her a mannish look, she had a cruel mouth, and there was something queer about her eyes. Several job-categories jumped into Carr’s mind: receptionist, model (a shade heavy for that), buyer, private detective. She stood inside the door, looking around. She saw the frightened girl. She started toward her.
The phone on Carr’s desk buzzed.
As he picked it up, he noticed the big blonde had stopped in front of the frightened girl and was looking down at her. The frightened girl seemed rather pathetically trying to ignore her.
“That you, Carr?” came over the phone.
He felt a rush of pleasure. Odd, what the mere sound of a desired woman’s voice will do to you, when all your thoughts about her have left you cold.
“Oh, hello, Marcia dear,” he said quickly.
“Darling, Keaton’s given me some more details on the new business he’s planning. I think it’s a really sharp idea. And he’s all set to go ahead.”
“It did sound rather clever from the bit you told me,” Carr said cautiously, his first bit of warmth a bit dashed. As he searched his mind for the best way to put Marcia off, his gaze went idly back to the little drama beyond the glass wall. The big blonde had sat herself down beside the frightened girl and had taken her hand, seemed to be stroking it. The frightened girl was still staring straight ahead—desperately, Carr thought.
“And so of course I told Keaton about you. Darling, he’s very interested. He definitely wants to see you some time this week. It means a real job for you, Carr.”
Carr felt a not unfamiliar sag of dismay. “But Marcia…”
The fast, confident voice cut him off. “We’ll talk it over tonight. It’s really a marvelous chance. Goodbye, darling.”
He heard a click. He put back the phone and prepared to feel depressed as well as bored—God, if Marcia would only stop trying to make a success of him—a job for the job-purveyor, what a laugh!—when a flurry of footsteps made him look up.
The frightened girl was approaching his desk.
The big blonde had followed her as far as the door in the glass wall and was watching her from it.
The frightened girl sat down in the applicant’s chair. She half turned to Carr, but she didn’t look him in the eye. She gathered her wool jacket at the throat in a way that struck Carr as almost comically melodramatic, as I she were about to say, “I’m half frozen,” or “They wouldn’t hang me…would they?” or “Darling, your hands—I’m afraid of them,” or just “My God! Gas!”
Right there Carr got the feeling, “It’s started.” Though he hadn’t the faintest idea what had started. The big curtain hadn’t lifted an inch, but someone had darted out in front of it.
Another part of his mind was thinking that this was merely a rather odd applicant—as how many of them weren’t?—and he’d better get busy with her.
He twitched her a smile. “I don’t believe I have your application blank yet, Miss…?”
The frightened girl did not answer.
To put her at east, Carr rattled on, “Not that it matters. We can talk things over while we wait for the clerk to bring it.”
Still she didn’t look at him.
“I suppose you did fill out an application blank and that you were sent to me?” he added, a bit sharply.
Then he saw that she was trembling and he became aware of a hush that had nothing whatever to do with ordinary noises. There still came the rat-ta-ta-tat of typing, the murmur of conversation from the applicant-interviewer pairs at the other desks, the click of slides from the curtained cubicle where someone was getting an eye-test—all the usual small sounds of General Employment. And behind them Chicago’s unceasing mutter, rising and falling with the passing El trains.
But the other silence continued. Even the resounding click of the big minute clock on the wall, that sometimes caught Carr up with a jerk, did not break it.
It was if those sounds—the whole office—Chicago—everything—had become mere lifeless background for a chalk-faced girl in a sloppy cardigan, arms huddled tight around her, hands gripping her thin elbows, staring at him horror-struck.
For some incredible reason, she seemed to be frightened of him.
She shrank down in the chair, her white-circled eyes fixed on his. As his gaze followed her movements, another shudder went through her. The tip of
her tongue licked her upper lip. Then she said in a small, terrified voice, “All right, you’ve got me. But don’t draw it out. Don’t play with me. Get it over with.”
Carr checked the impulse to grimace incredulously. He chuckled and said, “I know how you feel. Coming into a big employment office does seem an awful plunge. But we won’t chain you to a rivet gun,” he went on, with a wild attempt at humor, “or send you to Buenos Aires. It’s still a free country.”
She did not react. Carr looked away uneasily. The queer hush was eating at his nerves—a dizzy, tight-skinned feeling, as if he were coming down with a chill. He groped for the change in his mood. He knew there had been one, but it was so all-embracing that he couldn’t put his finger on it. The big names on the maps are always the hardest to find.
The blonde was still watching from the doorway, her manner implying that she owned the place, or any other she might stalk into. Her eyes looked whiter than they should be and they didn’t seem quite to focus, although that didn’t diminish, but rather intensified, the impression of hungry, hostile peering.
He looked back at the frightened girl. Her hands still gripped her elbows, but she was leaning forward now and studying his face, as if everything in the world depended on what she saw there.
“You’re not one of them?”
He frowned puzzledly. “Them? Who?”
“You’re not?” she repeated, still watching his face.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Don’t you know what you are?” she asked with a sudden fierceness. “Don’t you know whether you’re one of them or not?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he assured her, “and I haven’t the faintest idea of whom you mean by ‘them.’”
Slowly her hands loosened their hold on her elbows and trailed into her lap. “No,” she said, “I guess you’re not. You haven’t their filthy look. But then…” her lips twitched, “…I must have been fated to come here at this exact moment. And say just these words. Oh, what a crazy, crazy joke.” She was trembling again. “Or else you really are…?” and there came into her eyes an important, but quite incomprehensible question.
“Look,” Carr said gently, “you’d better explain things from the beginning. Just what…”
“Please, not now,” she said evenly.
Carr realized suddenly that her shaking was that of repressed hysteria and that she was asking for time to get herself under control.
He looked away, trying to fathom his reactions. By all rights he should type this girl as belonging to the lunatic fringe of the unemployables that clutter up every employment office. Probably her application blank, if she’d filled one out, was being held up because Miss Zabel or one of the other girls had noticed some weird discrepancies in it. He should be thinking of a smooth way to terminate the interview and ease her out.
But instead his mind was searching for a more logical pattern than psychosis underlying her actions, as if convinced that such a pattern existed and he must discover it.
All at once the smudge on her left hand, the intellectual pursing of her features, the uneasy hunch of her shoulders, and the long, irregular curves in which her brown hair fell to them, seemed to suggest a thousand things.
Somehow he had become involved.
Love? That might do in a romantic novel. Here some vastly more plausible explanation was required.
A sense of lifelessness in his surroundings continued to oppress him, had even deepened. Somewhere in the past few minutes he had crossed the boundary that separated the ordinary from the extraordinary. But how could he know, when there was not one iota of concrete evidence and he had only intuition to back him up?
“Who’s that woman following you?” he asked her quietly. “Is she one of ‘them?’”
The terror returned to her face. “I can’t tell you that. Please don’t ask me. And please don’t look at her. It’s terribly important that she doesn’t think I’ve seen her.”
“But how could she possibly think otherwise after the way she planked herself down beside you?”
“Please, oh please!” She was almost whimpering. “I can’t tell you why. It’s just terribly important that we act naturally, that we seem to be doing whatever it is that we’re supposed to be doing. Can we?”
Carr studied her. She was obviously close to actual hysteria. “Sure,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, smiled at her, and raised his voice a trifle. “Just what sort of job do you feel would make the best use of your abilities, Miss…?”
“Job? Oh yes, that’s why I’d have come here, isn’t it?” For a moment she stared at him helplessly. Then, hurriedly, the words tumbling over each other, she began to talk. “Let’s see, I can play the piano. Not very well. Mostly classical. I’ve studied it a lot, though. I once wanted to become a concert pianist. And I’ve done some amateur acting. And I can read books very fast. Fiction, that is. I know my way around libraries pretty well. And I used to play a mediocre game of tennis—” Her grotesquely animated expression froze. “But that isn’t at all the sort of thing you want to know, is it?”
Carr shrugged. “Helps give me a picture. Did some amateur acting once, in college.” He kept his voice casual. “Have you had any regular jobs?”
“I once read books for a publisher. Just fiction, though. And for a little while I worked in an architect’s office.”
“Did you learn to read blueprints?” he asked.
“Blueprints?” The girl shivered. “Not much, I’m afraid. I hate patterns of all sorts, unless they’re so mixed up that no one but myself knows they’re patterns. Patterns are traps. Once you start living according to a pattern, other people know how to get control of you.” She leaned forward confidently, her fingers hooking onto the edge of the desk. “Oh, and I’m a good judge of people. I have to be. I suppose you have to be too.” The incomprehensible question came back into her eyes. “Don’t you know what you are?” she asked softly. “Haven’t you found out yet? Why, you must be almost forty. Surely in that time…Oh, you must know.”
“I still haven’t the ghost of an idea what you’re talking about,” said Carr. “What am I?”
The girl hesitated.
“Tell me,” he said.
She shook her head. “If you honestly don’t know, I’m not sure I should tell you. As long as you don’t know, you’re safe. Relatively safe, that is. If I had had the opportunity of not knowing, I know how I would have chosen. At least I know how I’d choose now. Oh God, yes.”
Carr began to feel like the anecdotal man to whom a beautiful woman hands a note written in French which no one will translate for him. “Please stop being mysterious,” he said. “Just what is it about me that’s so important? Something I don’t know about my background? Or about my race? My political leanings? My psychological type? My love life?”
“But if you don’t know,” she went on, disregarding his questions, “and if I don’t tell you, then I’m letting you run a blind risk. Not a big one, but very terrible. And with them so close and perhaps suspecting…Oh, it’s so hard to decide.”
“They’re killing me!”
Carr jerked around. Miss Zabel squinted at him in agony, dropped an application folder in the wire basket, and hobbled off. Carr looked at the folder. It wasn’t for a girl at all. It started, “Jimmie Kozacs, Male. Age 43.”
He became aware that the frightened girl was studying his face again, as if she saw something there that she had missed the first time. It seemed to cause her dismay.
“Maybe you never were, until today,” she said, more to herself than him. “That would explain your not knowing. Maybe my bursting in here was what did it. Maybe I was the one who awakened you.”
She clenched her hands, torturing the palms with the long, untapered fingers, and Carr’s sardonic remark about having been awakened quite early in life died before it was born. “To think that I would ever do that to anyone!” she continued. “To think that I would ever cause anyone the
agony that /he/ caused me! Oh, if only there were someone I could talk to, someone who could tell me what to do.’
The black misery in her voice caught at Car. “What is the matter?” he pleaded. “Please tell me.”
The girl looked shocked. “Now?” Her glance half-circled the room, strayed toward the glass wall. “No, not here. I can’t.” The fingers of her right hand rippled as if they were playing a frantic arpeggio. Suddenly they dived into the pocket of her cardigan and came out with a stubby, chewed pencil. She ripped a sheet from Carr’s scratch pad and began to scribble hurriedly.
As Carr watched her doubtfully, a big area of gray cloth swam into view. It was Tom Elvested, come ambling over from the next desk. The girl gave Tome a quick, queer look, then went on scribbling. Tom ignored her.
“Say, Carr,” he began amiably, “Midge and I are going on a date tonight. She’s got a girl-friend I think you’d like. A swell kid, lot of brains, but sort of shy and retiring. We’d like you to come along with us.”
“Sorry, I can’t, I’ve got a date,” Carr told him irritably. It annoyed him that Tom should discuss personal matters in front of an applicant.
“Now, don’t get the idea I’m asking you to do social service work,” Tom went on, a little huffily. “This girl’s darn good-looking and a lot more your type than—” he broke off.
“Than Marcia, you were going to say?” Carr asked him. “At any rate it’s Marcia I’ve got a date with.”
Tom looked at Carr for a moment. Then, “Okay,” he said, fading back. “Sorry you can’t come.”
The frightened girl was still scribbling. The scratch of her pencil seemed to Carr the only real sound in the whole office. He glanced guardedly down the aisle. The big blonde with the queer eyes was still at the door, but she had moved ungraciously aside to make way for a dumpy man in blue jeans, who was looking around uncertainly.
The dumpy man veered toward Miss Zabel. Her top-knot bobbed up from her typewriter and she said something. His uncertainty vanished. He gave her an “I getcha, pal” not and headed for Carr’s desk.
