by Fritz Leiber
At one point she even said, “It all still could have been a series of chance little sounds and sights, you know, combined with suggestion working powerfully—like the night I saw a burglar standing against the wall beyond the foot of my bed, saw him so clearly in the dark that I could have described him down to the cut of his mustache and the droop of his left eyelid... until the dawn coming on turned him into my roommate’s black overcoat with a tan scarf thrown around the hanger and hook.”
While she’d been reading, she said, she’d become aware of the ghost-spills of gravel, some of them seeming to rattle faintly against the back wall of the house, and she’d gone out at once through the kitchen to investigate.
Groping her way, moving a few steps beyond the Volks toward the center of the yard, she had looked toward the slope and at once seen moving across it an incredibly tall wispy shape that she described as “a giant harvestman, tall as ten trees. You know harvestmen, some people call them daddy longlegs, those utterly harmless pitifully fragile spiders that are nothing but a tiny brown inanimate-looking ball with eight bendy legs that are like lengths of half-stiffened brown thread.”
She’d seen it quite clearly in spite of the darkness, because it was “black with a black shimmer.” Once it had vanished completely when a car had turned the bend in the road above and its headlights had feebly swept the air high above the slope (that would have been the faint brief overhead glow I’d sensed)—but when the headlights swung away the giant black glimmering harvestman had come back at once.
She hadn’t been frightened (wonderstruck and terribly curious, rather) until the thing had come treading rapidly toward her, its shimmering black legs drawing closer and closer together until before she realized it they were a tight cage around her.
Then, as she discovered they weren’t quite as thin and insubstantial as she’d imagined, and as she felt their feathery, almost bristly touch against her back and face and sides, she’d suddenly snapped and given that one terrific scream and started to struggle hysterically. “Spiders drive me wild,” she finished lightly, “and then there was the feeling I’d be sucked up the cage to the black brain in the stars—I thought of it as a black brain then, no reason why.”
Franz didn’t say anything for a bit. Then he began, in a rather heavy, halting way, “You know, I don’t think I showed much foresight or consideration when I invited you two up here. Quite the opposite, in fact, even if I didn’t then believe that... Anyway, I don’t feel right about it. Look here, you could take the Volks right now... or I could drive... and—”
“I think I know what you’re getting at, Mr. Kinzman, and why,” Viki said with a little laugh, standing up, “but I for one have had quite enough excitement for one night. I have no desire to top it off with watching for ghosts in the headlights for the next two hours.” She yawned. “I want to hit that luxurious hay you’ve provided for me, right this minute. Night-night, Franz, Glenn.” With no more word she walked down the hall and went in her bedroom, the far one, and closed the door.
Franz said, in a low voice, “I think you know I meant that very seriously, Glenn. It still might be the best thing.”
I said, “Viki’s got some kind of inner protection built up now. To get her to leave Rim House, we’d have to break it down. That would be rough.”
Franz said, “Better rough, maybe, than what else might happen here tonight.”
I said, “So far Rim House has been a protection for us. It’s shut things out.”
He said, “It didn’t shut out the footsteps Viki heard.”
I said, remembering my vision of the cosmos, “But Franz, if we’re up against the sort of influence we think we are, then it seems to me pretty ridiculous to imagine a few miles of distance or a few bright lights making any more difference to its power than the walls of a house.”
He shrugged. “We don’t know,” he said. “Did you see it, Glenn? Holding the light I didn’t see anything.”
“Just like Viki described it,” I assured him and went on to tell my own little tale. “If that was all suggestion,” I said, “it was a pretty fancy variety.” I squeezed my eyes and yawned; I was suddenly feeling very dull—reaction, I suppose. I finished, “While it was happening, and later while we were listening to Viki, there certainly were times when all I wanted was to be back in the old familiar world with the old familiar hydrogen bomb hanging over my head and all the rest of that stuff.”
“But at the same time weren’t you fascinated?” Franz demanded. ”Didn’t it make you crazy to know more?—the thought that you were seeing something utterly strange and that here was a chance really to understand the universe—at least to meet its unknown lords?”
“I don’t know,” I told him wearily. “I suppose so, in a way.”
“What did the thing really seem like, Glenn?” Franz asked. “What kind of being?—if that’s the right word.”
“I’m not sure it is,” I said. I found it difficult to summon the energy to answer his questions. “Not an animal. Not even an intelligence as we understand it. More like the things we saw on the pinnacle and the crag.” I tried to marshal my fatigue-drugged thoughts. “Halfway between reality and a symbol,” I said. “If that means anything.”
“But weren’t you fascinated?” Franz repeated.
“I don’t know,” I said, pushing to my feet with an effort. “Look, Franz, I’m too beat to be able to do any more thinking now. It’s just too hard to talk about these things. G’night.”
“Goodnight, Glenn,” he said as I walked to my bedroom. Nothing more.
Midway getting undressed, it f occurred to me that my dazed sleepiness might be my mind’s defense against having to cope with the unknown, but even that thought wasn’t enough to rouse me.
I pulled on my pajamas and put out the light. Just then the door to Viki’s bedroom opened and she stood there, wearing a light robe.
I had thought of looking in on her, but had decided that if she were sleeping it was the best thing for her and any attempt to check on her might break her inner protection.
But now I could tell from her expression, by the bit of light from her room, that they were shattered.
At the same moment my own inner protection—the false sleepiness—was gone.
Viki closed the door behind her and we moved together and put our arms around each other and stood there. After a while we lay down side by side on the bed under the view window that showed the stars.
Viki and I are lovers, but there wasn’t an atom of passion in our embraces now. We were simply two, not so much frightened as completely overawed people, seeking comfort and reassurance in each other’s presence.
Not that we could hope to get any security, any protection, from each other—the thing looming above us was too powerful for that—but only a sense of not being alone, of sharing whatever might happen.
There wasn’t the faintest impulse to seek temporary escape in love-making, as we might have done to shut out a more physical threat, the thing was to weird for that. For once Viki’s body was beautiful to me in a completely cold abstract way that had no more to do with desire than the colors in an insect’s wing-case or the curve of a tree or the glitter of a snowfield. Yet within this strange form, I knew, was a friend.
We didn’t speak a word to each other. There were no easy words for most of our thoughts, sometimes no words at all. Besides, we shrank from making the slightest sound, as two mice would while a cat sniffs past the clump of grass in which they are hiding. For the sense of a presence looming around and over Rim House was overpoweringly strong. Dipping into Rim House now too, for all the minor sensations came drifting down on us like near-impalpable black snowflakes—the dark burnt taste and smell, the fluttering cobwebs, the bat-sounds and the wave-sounds and once again the feathery spills of gravel.
And above and behind them the sense of
a black uprearing presence linked to the whole cosmos by the finest black filaments that in no way impeded it...
I didn’t think of Franz, I hardly thought of the things that had happened today, though now and then I would worry at the edge of a memory...
We simply lay there and held still and looked at the stars. Minute after minute. Hour after hour.
At times we must have slept, I know I did, though blacked-out would be a better expression for it, for there was no rest and waking was a nightmarish business of slowly becoming aware and dark aches and chills.
After a long while I noticed that I could see the clock in the far corner of the room—because its dial was luminescent, I thought. The hands pointed to three o’clock. I gently turned Viki’s face toward it and she nodded that she could see it too.
The stars were what was keeping us sane, I told myself, in a world that might dissolve to dust at the faintest breath from the nearer presence.
It was just after I noticed the clock that the stars began to change color, all of them. First they had a violet tinge, which shifted to blue, then green.
In an unimportant corner of my mind I wondered what fine mist or dust drifting through the air could work that change.
The stars turned to dim yellow, to orange, to dark furnace-red, and then—like the last sparks crawling on a sooty chimney wall above a dead fire—winked out.
I thought crazily of the stars all springing away from earth, moving with such impossible swiftness that their light had shifted beneath the red into invisible ranges.
We should have been in utter darkness then, but instead we began to see each other and the things around us outlined by the faintest white glimmer. I thought it was the first hint of morning and I suppose Viki did too. We looked together at the clock. It was barely four-thirty. We watched the minute hand edge. Then we looked back at the window. It wasn’t ghostly pale, as it would have been with dawn, but—and I could tell that Viki saw this too by the way she gripped my hand—it was a pitch-black square, framed by the white glimmer.
I could think of no natural explanation for the glimmer. It was a little like a whiter paler version of the luminescence of the clock dial. But even more it was like the pictures one imagines in ones eyes in absolute darkness, when one wills the churning white sparks of the retinal field to coalesce into recognizable ghostly forms—it was as if that retinal dark had spilled out of our eyes into the room around us and we were seeing each other and our surroundings not by light but by the power of imagination—which each second increased the sense of miracle that the shimmering scene did not dissolve to churning chaos.
We watched the hand of the clock edge toward five. The thought that it must be getting light outside and that something barred us from seeing that light, finally stirred me to move and speak, though the sense of an inhuman inanimate presence was as strong as ever.
“We’ve got to try and get out of here,” I whispered.
Moving across the bedroom pike a shimmering ghost, Viki opened the connecting door. The light had been on in her room, I remembered.
There wasn’t the faintest glimmer visible through the door. Her bedroom was dead black.
I’d fix that, I thought. I switched on the lamp by the bed. My room became solid black. I couldn’t see even the face of the clock. Light is darkness now, I thought. White is black.
I switched off the light and the glimmer came back. I went to Viki where she was standing by the door and whispered to her to switch off the light in her room. Then I got dressed, mostly feeling around for my clothes, not trusting the ghostly light that was so much like a scene inside my head trembling on the verge of dissolution.
Viki came back. She was even carrying her little overnight bag. I inwardly approved the poise that action indicated, but I made no effort to take any of my own things. “My room was very cold,” Viki said.
We stepped into the hall. I heard a familiar sound: the whir of a telephone dial. I saw a tall silver figure standing in the living room. It was a moment before I realized it was Franz, seen by the glimmer. I heard him say, “Hello, operator. Operator!” We walked to him.
He looked at us, holding the receiver to his ear. Then he put it down again and said, “Glenn. Viki. I’ve been trying to phone Ed Mortenson, see if the stars changed there, or anything else. But it doesn’t work for me. You try your luck at getting the operator, Glenn.”
He dialed once, then handed me the receiver. I heard no ringing, no buzz, but a sound like wind wailing softly. “Hello, operator,” I said. There was no response or change, just that wind sound. “Wait,” Franz said softly.
It must have been at least five seconds when my own voice came back to me out of the phone, very faintly, half drowned in the lonely wind, like an echo from the end of the universe. “Hello, operator.”
My hand shook as I put down the phone. “The radio?” I asked. “The wind sound,” he told me, “all over the dial.”
“Just the same we’ve got to try to get out,” I said.
“I suppose we should,” he said with a faint ambiguous sigh. “I’m ready. Come on.”
As I stepped onto the deck after Franz and Viki, I felt the intensified sense of a presence. The minor sensations were with us again, but far stronger now: the burnt taste made me gag almost, I wanted to claw at the cobwebs, the impalpable wind moaned and whistled loudly, the ghost-gravel hissed and splashed like the rapids of a river. All in near absolute darkness.
I wanted to run but Franz stepped forward to the barely glimmering rail. I held on to myself.
The faintest glimmer showed a few lines of the rock wall opposite. But from the sky above it was beating a dead inkier blackness—blacker than black, I thought—that was eating up the glimmer everywhere, dimming it moment by moment. And with the inkier blackness came a chill that struck into me like ice needles.
“Look,” Franz said. “It’s the sunrise.”
“Franz, we’ve got to get moving,” I said.
“In a moment,” he answered softly, reaching back his hand. “You go ahead. Start the car. Pull out to the center of the yard. I’ll join you there.”
Viki took the keys from him. She’s driven a Volks. There was still enough glimmer to see by, though I trusted it less than ever. Viki started the car, then forgot and switched on the headlights. They obscured yard and drive with a fan of blackness. She switched them off and pulled to the center of the yard.
I looked back. Although the air was black with the icy sunlight I could still see Franz clearly by the ghost light. He was standing where we’d left him. only leaning forward now, as though eagerly peering.
“Franz!” I called loudly against the weirdly wailing wind and the mounting gravel-roar. “Franz!”
There reared out of the canyon, facing Franz, towering above him, bending toward him a little, a filament-trailing form of shimmering velvet black—not the ghost light, but shimmering darkness itselfؙ—that looked like a gigantic hooded cobra, or a hooded madonna, or a vast centipede, or a giant cloaked figure of the cat-headed goddess Bast, or all or none of these.
I saw the silver of Franz’s body begin to crumble and churn. In the same moment the dark form dipped down and enfolded him like the silk-gloved fingers of a colossal black hand or the petals of a vast black flower closing.
Feeling like someone who throws the first shovel of earth on coffin of a friend, I croaked to Viki to get going.
There was hardly any glimmer left—not enough to see the drive, I thought, as the Volks started up it.
Viki drove fast.
* * * *
The sound of the spilling gravel grew louder and louder, drowning out the intangible wind, drowning out our motor. It rose to a thunder. Under the moving wheels, transmitting up through them, I could feel the solid earth shaking.
A bright pit opened a
head of us on the canyon side. For a moment it was as if we were driving through veils of thick smoke, then suddenly Viki was braking, we were turning into the road, and early daylight was almost blinding us.
But Viki didn’t stop. We headed up the Little Sycamore Canyon road.
Around us were the turreted hills. The sun hadn’t yet climbed above them but the sky was bright.
We looked down the road. No dust clouds obscured it anywhere, though there was dust rising now from the bottom of the canyon-valley.
The slope swept down straight from us to the cliff edge, without a break, without a hummock, without one object thrusting up through. Everything had been carried away by the slide.
That was the end of Rim House and Franz Kinsman.
THURNLEY ABBEY, by Perceval Landon
Originally published in McClure’s Magazine, 1907.
Three years ago I was on my way out to the East, and as an extra day in London was of some importance, I took the Friday evening mail-train to Brindisi instead of the usual Thursday morning Marseilles express. Many people shrink from the long forty-eight-hour train journey through Europe, and the subsequent rush across the Mediterranean on the nineteen-knot Isis or Osiris; but there is really very little discomfort on either the train or the mail-boat, and unless there is actually nothing for me to do, I always like to save the extra day and a half in London before I say goodbye to her for one of my longer tramps. This time—it was early, I remember, in the shipping season, probably about the beginning of September—there were few passengers, and I had a compartment in the P. & O. Indian express to myself all the way from Calais. All Sunday I watched the blue waves dimpling the Adriatic, and the pale rosemary along the cuttings; the plain white towns, with their flat roofs and their bold “duomos,” and the grey-green gnarled olive orchards of Apulia. The journey was just like any other. We ate in the dining-car as often and as long as we decently could. We slept after luncheon; we dawdled the afternoon away with yellow-backed novels; sometimes we exchanged platitudes in the smoking-room, and it was there that I met Alastair Colvin.
