by Fritz Leiber
And they lured. They carried a promise of mystery.
He concentrated with the fixity of a mystic, clearing his mind of all random thoughts and letting his sensation float free, trying to feel and respond to the pulls.
He yielded to them.
The streets were deserted and there was no wind. He passed a bare newsstand. His foot rustled a torn sheet of newspaper.
The pulls continued, though without strengthening. As if a magnet drawing him on were receding as he walked, keeping always the same distance.
Halfway down this block the pull abruptly changed direction, drawing him into a narrow alley, a mere slit between giant walls.
It was too dark to see. He held his hands outstretched and felt ahead with each foot before trusting his weight to the large cobblestones. He could guide himself in a general way by the vertical streak of smoky light shot with strange blue glows at the far end.
After perhaps twenty steps he haled uncertainly. He began to hear muffled laughter and talk, strains of raucous music.
As he edged along the dark alley, he wondered what it could be that he was following. Some actual trail in the pavement or air—chemical or electrical traces that impinged on the senses too subtly for conscious recognition? Or was it submerged memories of something that had happened to him before—perhaps during one of the amnesia attacks? Or even some kind of posthypnotic suggestion?
But thinking interfered with his ability to sense the trail. He must make his mind like that of an amoeba that automatically drifts towards the shadows.
He emerged at the other end of the alley.
He found himself looking into the window of a music store, scanning by streetlight the sheet music and record albums and toy instruments. For a while he stood with his face pressed to the glass door, trying to make out what was inside.
From nowhere, a title dropped into his mind. The Moonlight Sonata. His thoughts bent and shuddered as if from a gust of wind. For a moment he was about to remember everything…
He came to a movie theater. Green-eyed three-sheets leered at him from the lobby and clutched with white claws at shadowy female forms whose terror-stricken faces implored rescue. A sign in front said: “You’ll Stare! You’ll Scream! You’ll shiver with Delicious Panic, as the Mad Monster Roams the Darkened Streets, Seeking His Prey!”
In front of the box office, the oddest thing happened. The trail abruptly veered toward the curb and changed completely in quality. Up to this point it had been quiet, almost sedate, if you could use such words. Now it suddenly became wild, ecstatic, “hot”—the spoor of something crazy and joyful. Carr had come to a place where, if he’d been a dog, he’d have given an excited yelp and bounded off into the brush.
He became suspicious. It wasn’t only that the change in the trail frightened him with its suggestion of the abandonment of sanity.
Dogs usually bounded off at an angle because they’d struck a different scent.
There must be two trails.
He spent almost a quarter-hour beating back and forth. What made it so difficult was that every time he struck the “hot” trail, it ruined his ability to sense the other for several seconds. Eventually he managed to plot them out to his satisfaction.
The hot trail came from around the next corner, circled deliriously in front of the theater, then shot off across the street. The quite trail made one of its side-tracks into the theater and then came out again.
He shook his head. It was all so utterly strange. As if the tails were two of his moods. One melancholy, almost soothing. The other mad, daredevil, crazily impudent.
After a couple of false starts he followed the quite trail across the next street and down another block where it turned a corner. It seemed to grow stronger, or perhaps that was because there was no longer a distinction.
He came into the business district. Here the feeling of hostile desolation, that had accompanied him for some time, increased markedly. It wasn’t only that the liquor was dying in him. Back by the stores and theaters there had been at least the ghost of some sort of human excitement, however cheap and stale, the glamour of tawdry lures hung to enmesh human appetites. But these great looming office buildings, with their trappings of iron-work and facings of granite, actually wanted to be ugly. They gloried in their stony efficiency, their indifference to human desires, their gray ability to crush out happiness.
Carr’s eyes went uneasily from side to side. Did that narrow black façade, shooting up dizzily, jerk forward a little, as if giving an inscrutable nod? There was something exceedingly horrible in the thought of miles of darkened offices, empty but for the endless desks, typewriters, filing cabinets, water coolers. What would a stranger from Mars deduce from them? Surely not human beings. Here reigned grinding death, by day as well as night, only now it put off its disguises.
With a great roar a cavalcade of newspaper trucks careened across the next corner, plunging as frantically as if the face of nations were at stake.
The feeling of active dread, that had first hit him on entering the business district, had increased. There was something that must not hear him, something that must not see him, something that under no circumstances must be allowed to know that it was heard or seen.
Easy enough to understand why a bunch of deserted skyscrapers should give a person a momentary shiver. But why should it give you that certainty of a gang bent on tracking you down? And why, in the name of sanity, should that feeling be tied up with such incongruous items as an advertisement for Wilson’s Hams, a glass panel, a black dog on a leash?
And somehow the number three. Three things? Three persons? Three what?
His feeling of near-memory was mounting toward a climax. He was certain that each hollow in the stone treads had received his foot before; that each naked vista of steel-ribbed and sinewed shafts had trapped his wandering gaze.
It had grown quite light while he’d been thinking. The stars had all gone. He could even make out, some blocks distant, the giant statue of Ceres atop the Board of Trade building. He recalled that she had no face. Being too high for features to be discerned except from an airplane or by telescope, a blank curved surface of stone did just as well.
Then, close, in fact across the street, he noticed three figures. He leaned forward sharply, watching.
For moment he though they might be statues.
There were really four figures, but the fourth was that of a large black animal—doglike yet somehow feline.
The three taller figures seemed to be surveying the sleeping city, somberly, speculatively.
The first was standing beside the dog with one arm extended straight forward towards its neck, as if holding it was the sheen of light, glistening hair, the flare of a wide-shouldered coat.
The second was a portly man.
The third was slenderer, taller, seemingly younger. His head looked small and neat, though not bald. And as he extended his arm to point at something far off, his cuff seemed empty.
Flashes of memory flickered wildly in Carr’s brain. He leaned forward a bit more and craned his neck, as if getting even an inch closer to the group might let him identify him.
It was still too dark for faces. Yet through he knew those three had faces and what the faces looked like, he found himself wondering if they, any more than the statue of Ceres, needed to wear faces now.
He leaned farther and farther forward.
He remembered everything.
Chapter Eleven
The Visible Woman
THE KNOB OF Carr’s bedroom door kept turning around and back. First a slow, creaking rotation, until the latch bolt was disengaged. Then a push, so that the door strained against the inside bolt. Then the knob, suddenly released, would spin back with a rattle. Then it would start all over again.
From where he lay, fully clothed except for shoes and coat, Carr watched the knob, peering along his leg and through the intricate brass bars that rose at the foot of the bed. He breathed as shallowly as he could. Although h
is neck and shoulders ached, he kept his head in the same awkward jerked-up position it had assumed when he first heard someone at the door. All his faculties were concentrated on avoiding any betraying sounds.
An infinitesimal breeze stirred the drawn shade. A big fly buzzed lazily in the muted sunlight, hovered along the ceiling, dipped to the mantle, floated noisily across the room, hit the shade with a loud plop, fell to the sill, crawled along it for a while, buzzed, and then started hovering along the ceiling again.
Carr could hear the throaty breathing of whoever was outside the door. Besides that sound there was a faint shuffling or scrabbling, as if a dog were trying to get in.
The doorknob kept on turning like a broken-down bit of machinery that refuses to gasp its last.
For a moment Carr thought the fly had lit on his forehead. It was just a trickle of sweat, but it was enough to make him jerk a little. The bedsprings creaked. His muscles tightened. His stiffened his aching, nearly trembling arms. The whole room seemed to become a wall-papered funnel narrowing down to the doorknob, which kept on turning and springing back just as before.
He could hear more than the breathing now. A querulous muttering as if whoever were outside was getting impatient.
The fly plopped against the shade, fell, and buzzed along the sill. A bit of laughter floated up from the street.
All the will power in the world could no longer have subdued the shaking in Carr’s arms. Again the bedsprings creaked, so loudly that whoever was outside must surely hear.
Yet the rhythm of the knob did not change, though the mutterings grew a trifle louder. Carr strained his ears, but could not make out the words.
The shade swayed. The fly started on its trip across the ceiling. He shifted his weight from arms to buttocks, slid one foot to the floor. The springs creaked, but no worse than before. In a moment he was crouching beside the bed. The mutterings were still unintelligible. He took a cautious step toward the door.
The knob stopped moving. There was a scrape of metal on wood and the swish of water. Then footsteps plodding away from the door.
Carr hesitated. Then he quickly tiptoed to the door, eased open the bolt, paused again, opened the door a slit and peered out.
The cleaning woman was walking away, pail in one hand; mop, broom, duster, and dustpan in the other. Straggly plumes of hair stuck up from the rag wound around her hair. A damp, dirty blue apron was tied in a hard knot behind her waist. The heels of her shoes ran off at the sides.
Carr opened the door farther. He wet his lips. “Hello,” he said huskily.
The cleaning woman kept walking away.
He stepped into the hall. “Hello,” he called, getting control of his voice. Then, louder, “Hello!”
Not by a moment’s hesitation, not by the slightest alteration in her trudging gait, did the cleaning woman indicate that she heard.
“Hello!” Carr shouted.
The cleaning woman disappeared at an even pace down the stairs. Carr gazed after her. But his mind was listening to the drone of lone-forgotten phrases from a college psychology class:
To explain human behavior, it need not be assumed that consciousness exists. After all, we can never penetrate to the inner life of other individuals. We can never prove that such an inner life exists. But we need not. All the actions of human beings can be adequately accounted for on the assumption that human beings are unconscious mechanisms.
He edged blinding back into his rooms, bolted the door behind him, slumped against it.
At least, he told himself, the things at his door had not been what he had most feared.
But it had been almost worse.
Why, he asked himself, had he bothered to shout? Why had he sought last, unnecessary confirmation?
He already knew, had known ever since he had recovered his memory and fled from the streets.
Knew what he had known, known and rejected, at least four times before: when he had been ignored by the dumpy man and the doctor at General Employment, when he had watched Marcia in her bedroom, when he had spied on Jane’s parents in their apartment, when he had run away from the Pendleton party.
But then he had known it only for fleeting moments.
This time it had gripped his mind for hours.
It was insane, incredible.
But it was true.
Nothing else could explain his experiences.
Jane knew, the small dark man knew, these other three knew.
And now he knew.
The universe was a machine. The people in it, save for a very few, were mindless mechanisms, clockwork things of flesh and bone. So long as you made the proper clockwork motions, they seemed to react intelligently. But when you stopped, they went on just the same. When you quite being part of the clockworks, they ignored you.
How else explain the times when he had been ignored? By the dumpy man, Tom and the doctor. By the desk clerk at Marcia’s and by Marcia herself, when he had come minutes ahead of the clockwork rhythm. By Jane’s parents. By Marcia at the Pendleton party—she hadn’t been pretending to dance with someone as she twirled by herself; she had been mindlessly dancing with another clockworks figure (himself) that had moved from its proper place in the clockworks.
How else explain the times when he and Jane had been ignored? In the tavern, in the music shop, at the movie house, at the chess club. In the stacks of the library, in the streets of the Loop, at Goldie’s Casablanca. Or when Fred and he had been ignored—that crazy ride that should have set people staring and a dozen police cars and motor-cycles on their trail; and that crazy, unnoticed pursuit through the library.
How else explain the times when those other three had been ignored? The slap. Miss Hackman going through his desk. Mr. Wilson helping himself to the cigarettes. Their open talk in the tobacco shop and in front of Jane’s parents.
How else the things that hadn’t fitted? The dumpy man talking to the air. Pianos that played themselves and elevators that rose without occupants. Marcia calling him about the “wonderful evening” they’d spent together, when actually he’d run away. (For a moment he had a ghostly glimpse of her talking to an invisible companion at the Kungsholm, the waiter setting loaded plates before an empty chair. Jane’s mother stroking non-existent hair, whimpering to an absent girl. And now the cleaning woman mindlessly trying a door that, in the vast operation plan of a clockworks universe, was not supposed to be bolted; repeated the action, like a toy obstructed in mid-performance, until the appointed time came for her to finish cleaning his room and go away.
There were no other explanations. The universe was a machine. Teeming Chicago was a city of the dead, the mindless, the inanimate, in which you were more alone than in the most desolate wilderness. The face you looked at, the faces that looked at you, that smiled and frowned and spoke, had behind them only black emptiness.
Except for a few, a mostly horrible few.
What might some people do if they awakened to the knowledge that they alone had minds and consciousness, that they could do what they wanted and the machine could not stop them, that all authority was truly blind?
They would run amuck like soldiers in a conquered city, like drunken thieves in a department store at night. Treating all the people around them like the lay-figures they were. Exulting in their power. (He saw in his mind those three looking down at a sleeping Chicago.) Obeying all their hidden impulses. Satisfying all their secretest, darkest desires.
A few of them might band together, perhaps because they had awakened together. Say a wall-eyed blonde and an affable-seeming older man and a young man without a hand…
And a beast.
Jane had written, “Some animals are alive.” And he, Carr, had once been noticed when he shouldn’t have been, by a cat.
Yes, a few might band together. But except for that, they would be intensely suspicious. Afraid that some greedy, merciless group like themselves might become aware of them and destroy them, because absolute tyrants always fear and hate each othe
r. Afraid, above all, that other people might come alive, more and more people, and punish them for their crimes.
As they satisfied their desires, as they had their “fun,” they would guiltily watch for the slightest signs of true life around them, in order to crush it out.
That was why those three had trailed Jane, why they had wanted to “check” on her.
The slap had been a test. If Jane had reacted to it, she would have been lost.
That was why Miss Hackman had searched his desk—for sights that he was something more than a mindless automaton.
That was why the small dark man with glasses was afraid. That was the great danger against which Jane had warned him, the “private underworld” she didn’t want to drag him into.
Three people preying on the dead city of Chicago, watching for the faintest hints of consciousness in the lay-figures around them.
Carr realized that he was shaking. Mustn’t they have seen him staring out the window at them this morning, conspicuous against the otherwise drearily unbroken façade? Mightn’t they even now be coming up the stairs, or standing noiselessly outside the door at which he was staring so fearfully?
He clenched his hands. All this was insanity, he told himself, a paranoid’s nightmare.
But…
His throat ached. He went to the bathroom, drank a large glass of water, set it down on the stained bowl. Then he lay down again on the rumpled bed. Fatigue smarted behind his eyelids, was like a fever in his flesh.
Presently he fell asleep.
When he awoke it was dusk. The room was all soft shadows. The window shade seemed faintly phosphorescent. His face felt fresh, as if it had just been sponged.
Instantly his thoughts began to race again, but the cooling refreshment of sleep had given them an entirely new perspective.
He had teetered on the edge of insanity, he told himself.
He had fallen victim to a terrible delusion.
He must root it out of his mind as quickly as possible.
He must talk to someone, someone who was close to him and sensible, and convince himself that it was a delusion.
