The Sinful Ones

by Fritz Leiber

  But still he stood there, staring at the dark-engulfed image of a tall, rather slightly-built man with light hair and small, regular features. A trivial experience had taken on a new meaning, had caused a crystallization of emotion and thought.

  There he was—Carr Mackay. And all around him was an unknown universe. And just want, in the universe, did Carr Mackay mean or matter? What was the real significance of the routine, the dark rhythm, that was rushing him through life at an ever-hastening pace toward a grave somewhere? Did it have any significance—that is, any significance a man could accept or endure—especially when any break in the rhythm, like this afternoon’s events, could make it seem so dead and purposeless, an endless marching and counter-marching of marionettes?

  He ran blindly past the reflection up the stairs.

  In the hall above it was darker still. A bulb had burned out and not been replaced. He felt his way down the corridor and opened the door of his own room.

  It was high-ceilinged and comfortable, with rich old woodwork that countless layers of cheap paint couldn’t quite obliterate, and there was an old brass bed with rods and knobs like a fancy birdcage. Starting in at once to change his clothes, Carr tried to let the place take him and cradle him in its suggestion of the familiar and of his life with Marcia and her crowd, make him forget that lost Carr Mackay down there in the mirror. There were his golf clubs in the corner, the books on sailing, the case of poker chips on the mantelpiece, the box for shirt studs with the theater program beside it, and the sleek military hairbrushes Marcia had given him. But tonight they seemed as arbitrary and poignantly useless an assortment of objects as those placed in an old Egyptian grave, to accompany their owner on his long trek through the underworld.

  They were not as alive, even, as the two dusty books on metaphysics he had bought in college and never waded more than a quarter through, or the little plaster plaque of the masks of comedy and tragedy presented fifteen years ago to the members of the college dramatic association, or the long-unopened box of chessmen, or the tarnished silver half-pint flask.

  He slung his brown suit on a hanger, took it in the closet, and reached down his blue suit, still in its wrapper from the cleaner’s.

  There in the gloom he seemed again to see the face of the frightened girl. His hand holding the weighted hanger stopped halfway down from 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.

  With an angry exhalation of held breath, Carr jerked back into the room. What could he be thinking? It was only in wistful, half-baked books that men of thirty-nine fell in love with moody, mysterious, coltish college girls. Or were caught up in glamorously sinister intrigues that existed solely in such girls’ hot-house brains.

  He put on his blue suit, then started to transfer to it the stuff in the pockets of the brown one. He came upon the note the frightened girl had scribbled. He must have shoved it into his pocket when the dumpy man had started misbehaving. He turned it over and saw that he hadn’t read all of it.

  If you want to meet me again in spite of dangers, I’ll be by the lion’s tail near the five sisters tonight at eight.

  His lips twisted in a wry, incredulous smile. Then he spat out a laugh. That tore it! If that didn’t prove that she’d been suckled on The Prisoner of Zenda and weaned on Graustark, he’d like to know. Lion’s tail and five sisters! She probably carried the Rajah’s ruby in a bag around her neck and wrote love letters with a black swan’s quill. In short, she went in for a brand of melodrama and high mystification that had gone out with the bustle. Here was the key to her antics, and she could stop haunting his imagination right now.

  Why, there was no question but that Marcia was the right woman for him, even I at times she was a little too eager to change his life. Capable, charming, successful, mature. An executive with an important publishing firm. Competent at both business and pleasure. His kind. Sailed and golfed with him and the crowd, playing a shrewd game of poker, went to theaters and interesting parties, knew important people. He and Marcia would reach some satisfying understanding soon, maybe even get married. What competition could be offered by a mere maladjusted girl?

  “But,” something reminded him quickly, “didn’t you decided at the office that it wasn’t anything like love that was the bond between you and the frightened girl? Aren’t you trying to dodge the problem by shifting it to an entirely different emotional level?”

  He hurried into the bathroom, rubbing his chin. Marcia liked him to be well-groomed and his beard felt pretty conspicuous. He looked into the mirror to confirm his suspicious and once again he saw a different Carr Mackay.

  The one down there on the stairs had seemed lost. This one, framed in surgical white, looked trapped. A neat, wooden little Mackay who went trudging through life without inquiring what any of the signposts meant, who always grabbed at pleasures he didn’t want, who kept selling himself this, that, and the other thing—customer Jekyll and salesman Hyde. A stupid Mackay, who always stuck to the ordained routine. A dummy.

  He really ought to shave, yes, but the way he was feeling, the sooner he and Marcia got started drinking, the better. He’d skip shaving this once.

  As he made this decision, he was conscious of a disproportionate feeling of guilt.

  But everyone, at some time or another, finds himself attaching grotesque importance to some trivial action. Like stepping on, or not stepping on, a crack in the sidewalk.

  He’d probably been reading too many “Five O’Clock Shadow” ads.

  Forget it.

  He hurried into the rest of his clothes, started toward the door, stopped by the bureau, pulled open the top drawer, looked for a moment at the three flat pints of whiskey nestling inside it. Then he shut the drawer quickly and hurried into the hall, down the stairs, averting his eyes from the mirror, passed quickly through the still shadowy hall, and out into the street.

  It was a relief to know he’d be with Marcia in a few minutes. But eight dark blocks are eight dark blocks, and they have to be walked, and to walk them takes time no matter how rapidly you stride. Time for your sense of purpose and security to dwindle to nothing. Time for the familiar to become the chillingly unfamiliar. Time for the patterns you live by to lose their neat outlines. Time to get away from the ads and the pink lights and the television voices and to think a little bit about the universe—to realize that it’s a place of mystification and death, with no more feeling than a sausage grinder for the life oozing through it.

  The buildings to either side became the walls of a black runway, and the occasional passers-by, shadow-swathed automatons.

  He became conscious of the dark rhythm of existence as a nerve-twisting, insistent thing that tugged at him like a marionette’s string, trying to drag him back to some pattern from which he had departed. A compound of hurrying footsteps, roaring engines, screeching streetcars, drumming propellers, surging oceans, spinning planets, plunging stars, and still something more.

  Just a mood, he told himself, a very intense mood. But wasn’t that saying enough? Wasn’t the essence of a mood one’s inability to combat it? And the more intelligent you were, the more readily you could see through all dodges and rationalizations back to the cold, harsh, unfathomable reality of the mood itself.

  Being with Marcia could fix him up, he told himself, as the dark facades crept slowly by. She at least couldn’t ever become a stranger. There was too much between them. Once with her, he would snap back to normal.

  But he had forgotten her face.

  A trivial thing. It is always easy momentarily to forget a face, no matter how familiar. Like a name, or the place where you’ve put something for safe-keeping. And the more you try to remember it, the more the precise details elude you.

  Carr tried. A hundred faces
blinked and faded in his mind, some hauntingly suggestive of Marcia, some grotesquely dissimilar. Girls he had know in college, job applicants of months ago whom he had never thought of since, pictures in magazines, faces glimpsed for a moment in a crowded street, others with no source-tag at all.

  Light from a first-story window spilled on the face of a girl in a blue slicker just as she passed him. His heart pounded as he walked on. He had almost grabbed her and said, “Marcia!” And she hadn’t been Marcia’s type at all.

  He walked faster. The apartment tower where Marcia lived edged into view, grew threateningly tall.

  He hurried up the flagstone walk flanked by shrubbery. The lobby was a long useless room furnished in some supposedly Spanish style, with lots of carved wood and red leather. He stopped at the desk. The clerk was at the back of the cubicle, talking to someone over the phone. Carr waited, but the clerk seemed determined to prolong the conversation. Carr cleared his throat. The clerk yawned and languorously flexed the arm that held the receiver, as if to call attention to the gold seal-ring and cuff-linked wrist.

  The automatic elevator was waiting, the door open, the cage dark. Carr delayed no longer. He stepped in and pushed the seven button.

  Nothing happened.

  After jabbing the button a couple of more times, he decided he’d better tell the clerk it was out of order.

  But just then the door closed, the light blinked on, and the cage started upward.

  It was a small cage. Vermillion panels, brass fittings, a carpet of darkest red. A small placard said that it could safely carry 1,500 pounds. The vermillion was darkened where people had learned, and worn spots showed where packages had been rested on the brass rail and things stuck behind it.

  The cage stopped at seven. The door opened. A fat man in a thick overcoat took his finger off the outside button and stepped inside without waiting. Carr squeezed past his paunch, turned around as soon as he was through the door and snapped, “I beg your pardon!” But the door was already closing and the boorish fat man made no rejoinder.

  Carr walked down the red-carpeted hall. In front of Marcia’s door he hesitated. She mightn’t like him barging in this way. But who could be expected always to wait the pleasure of that prissy clerk?

  Behind him he heard the cage stop at the ground floor.

  He noticed that the door he faced was ajar.

  He pushed it open a few inches.

  “Marcia,” he called. “Marcia?” His voice came out huskily.

  He stepped inside, into the living room. The reading lamp with its white, tufted shade showed dull pearl walls, white bookcase, blue over-stuffed sofa with a coat and yellow silk scarf tossed across it, and a faint curl of cigarette smoke from somewhere.

  Marcia wouldn’t go off and leave the door like that.

  The bedroom door was open. He crossed to it, his footsteps soundless on the thick carpet. He stopped.

  Marcia was sitting on an upholstered stool before a big-mirrored dressing table. Over a chair to one side a gray silk dressing gown was thrown. She was wearing absolutely nothing. A squashed cigarette was smoldering in a tiny silver ash tray. She was lacquering her nails.

  That was all. But to Carr it seemed that he had blundered into one of those elaborately realistic department store window displays. He almost expected to see faces peering in the dark window, seven stories up.

  Modern bedroom in rose and smoke. Seated mannequin at vanity table. Perhaps a placard, party in script: “Point up your Pinks with Gray.”

  He stood there stupidly, a step short of the doorway, saying nothing, making no move.

  In the mirror her eyes seemed to meet his. He couldn’t believe that she was unaware of his presence. He had never know her so brazenly immodest.

  She went on lacquering her nails.

  She might be angry with him for coming up without the obligatory phone call. But it wasn’t like Marcia to choose this queer way of showing her displeasure—and herself.

  Or was it? Was she deliberately trying to tease him?

  He watched her face in the mirror. It was this one he had forgotten, all right. There were the firm lips, the cool forehead framed by reddish hair, the fleeting quirks of expression—not the ones he was most used to, but definitely hers.

  Yet recognition did not bring the sense of absolute certainty it should. Something was lacking—the feeling of a reality behind the face, animating it.

  She finished her nails and held them out to dry.

  A sharp surge of uneasiness went through Carr. This was nonsensical, he told himself. He must move or speak.

  She sat more erect and drew back her shoulders. A faint, admiring and self-satisfied smile settled into her lips. With the pads of her fingertips, still being careful about the polish, she lightly stroked her breasts—upward, almost unnecessarily. Her smile grew dreamy.

  The finger-pads closed in on the aureoles and pinched the small nipples. He thought he could see them stiffen.

  He felt himself stiffen.

  His throat was constricted and his legs felt numb. And looking at her, tauntingly nude, teasingly erotic, he took a forward step. She had no right to tempt him so—

  And then all of a sudden it came back: the awful feeling he’d had that afternoon. It stopped him in his tracks.

  What if Marcia weren’t really alive at all, not consciously alive, but just part of the dance of mindless atoms, a clockworks show that included the whole world, except himself? Merely by coming a few minutes ahead of time, merely by omitting to shave, he had broken the clockwork rhythm. That was why the clerk hadn’t spoken to him, that was why the elevator hadn’t worked when he’d first pushed the button, that was why the fat man had ignored him, that was why Marcia didn’t greet him. It wasn’t time yet for those little acts in the clockworks show.

  The creamy telephone tinkled. Lifting it gingerly, fingers stiffly spread, the figure at the vanity held it to her ear a moment and said, “Certainly. Send him up.”

  She inspected her nails, waved them, regarded her reflection in the glass, reached for the gray negligee, and—her smile at herself in the mirror became mischievous and (there was the suggestion of a conspiratorial wink) a touch cruel. She drew back her hand, crossed it over the other across her knees, and sat there primly upright, “marking time.” But her smile continued to dance.

  Through the open door Carr could hear the drone of the rising cage.

  The cage stopped. There was the soft jolt of its automatic door opening. Carr waited for footsteps. They didn’t come.

  That was his elevator, he thought with a shudder, the one he was supposed to come up in.

  Suddenly Marcia turned. “Darling,” she said, rising quickly.

  The hairs on the back of his neck lifted. She wasn’t looking straight at him, he felt, but at something behind him. She was watching him come through the living room. And she seemed to be quietly enjoying the surprise she knew her nakedness would give him.

  Then he realized that she was really looking at him, and that this was Marcia’s face to the life, a face vital with awareness, just as he remembered it, and that everything else had been his stupid imagination, and why the devil had he been surprised at her not noticing him sooner when he’d sneaked in so silently?

  The surge of relief made his knees shake.

  He put out his arms. “Marcia!”

  Chapter Three

  Shadow of Ecstasy

  AS CARR WAS about to kiss her, Marcia moved back from him smoothly, hands on his shoulders, inspecting his face.

  “You’re looking well,” she said. “Mix us some drinks while I slip into a dress.”

  She coolly departed and shut the bedroom door behind him.

  Carr located a bottle of rye in the kitchen. Before doing anything else he had a straight shot. The little experience had certainly shaken him up. It was like, but worse than, those moments in childhood when everything seems strangely vivid and at the same time unreal. Chalk on a blackboard. Being outside and throu
gh a window watching adults reading newspapers in a living room at night.

  He put a tray of ice in the sink to melt, hunted up ginger ale for himself. Marcia of course would take water, not too much.

  He’d mention his experience to her, jokingly. On second thought, he wouldn’t. At least not right off. Sometimes Marcia wasn’t interested in the subjective. More practical. People, money, the latest news—things like that. Jobs.

  He frowned unhappily, remembering her phone call.

  He took a long time making the drinks, but the bedroom door was still shut when he brought them out. He sat down, holding them, not touching his. It was a bit like waiting in an office.

  When Marcia came in he jumped up, smiling. “Say, are we going to the Pendletons’ party Friday? Should be interesting.”

  She nodded. “You’re meeting Keaton Fisher there.”

  He tried not to hear that.

  Marcia sampled her drink. She had put on a black slip, but no bra. She sat down on the couch.

  “Is it all right?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “Carr, this idea of Keaton’s—”

  “Say, Marcia,” he began moving over so that he stood in front of her, “the queerest thing happened to me this afternoon.”

  “—is a remarkable one,” she concluded.

  He gave up. “Well, what is it exactly?” he asked, starting to sit down close beside her. But she swung around toward him, so that he had to take the other end of the couch, leaving a business-like distance between them.

  “In the first place, this is confidential,” she began. “Keaton asked me not to tell anyone. You’ll have to pretend you’re getting it from him first hand, Friday night.” She paused. “It’s an editorial counseling service.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ll take ailing magazines of all sorts, newspapers, trade journals, etcetera, analyze them and their difficulties, conduct surveys of readers and advertisers, reshape their policies and modernize their methods, pump them full of new ideas—in short, sell them the advice that will put them on their feet.”