The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  The studio was very quiet. The five other intellectuals looked at him. Norman rocked on his heels like any normal college professor, but his arms grew perceptibly more rigid as he clasped his hands even more tightly behind his back, fighting an exquisite compulsion.

  “As I say, my studies aren’t finished, but there’s clearly no time to carry them further—we must act on such conclusions as I have drawn from the evidence assembled to date. Here’s briefly how it shapes up: We must assume that mankind possesses an actual collective unconscious mind stretching thousands of years into the past and, for all I know, into the future. This collective unconscious mind may be pictured as a great dark space across which radio messages can sometimes pass with difficulty. We must also assume that the drummed phrase and with it the big splatter came to us by this inner radio from an individual living over a century in the past. We have good reason to believe that this individual is, or was, a direct male ancestor, in the seventh generation back, of Tally here. He was a witch doctor. He was acutely hungry for power. In fact, he spent his life seeking an incantation that would put a spell on the whole world. It appears that he found the incantation at the end, but died too soon to be able to use it—without ever being able to embody it in sound or sign. Think of his frustration!”

  “Norm’s right,” Tally said, nodding somberly. “He was a mighty mean man, I’m told, and mighty persistent.”

  Norman’s nod was quicker and also a plea for undivided attention. Beads of sweat were dripping down his forehead. “The thing came to us when it did—came to Tally specifically and through him to Simon —because our six minds, reinforcing each other powerfully, were momentarily open to receive transmissions through the collective unconscious, and because there is—was—this sender at the other end long desirous of getting his message through to one of his descendants. We cannot say precisely where this sender is—a scientifically oriented person might say that he is in a shadowed portion of the space-time continuum while a religiously oriented person might aver that he is in Heaven or Hell.”

  “I’d plump for the last-mentioned,” Tally volunteered. “He was that kind of man.”

  “Please, Tally,” Norman said. “Wherever he is, we must operate on the hope that there is a counter formula or negative symbol— yang to this yin—which he wants, or wanted, to transmit too—something that will stop this flood of madness we have loosed on the world.”

  “That’s where I must differ with you, Norm,” Tally broke in, shaking his head more somberly than he had nodded it, “if Old Five-Greats ever managed to start something bad, he’d never want to stop it, especially if he knew how. I tell you he was mighty mighty mean and-”

  “Please, Tally! Your ancestor’s character may have changed with his new environment, there may be greater forces at work on him—in any case, our only hope is that he possesses and will transmit to us the counter formula. To achieve that, we must try to recreate, by artificial means, the conditions that obtained in this studio at the time of the first transmission.”

  A look of acute pain crossed his face. He unclasped his hands and brought them in front of him. His pipe fell to the floor. He looked at the large blister the hot bowl had raised in one palm. Then clasping his hands together in front of him, palm to palm, with a twisting motion that made Lafcadio wince, he continued rapping out the words.

  “Men, we must act at once, using only such materials as can be rapidly assembled. Each of you must trust me implicitly. Tally, I know you don’t use it any more, but can you still get weed, the genuine crushed leaf? Good, we may need enough for two or three dozen sticks. Gory, I want you to fetch the self-hypnotism rigmarole that’s so effective—no, I don’t trust your memory and we may need copies. Lester, if you’re quite through satisfying yourself that Gory didn’t break your collarbone with his bottle, you go with Gory and see that he drinks lots of coffee. On your way back buy several bunches of garlic, a couple of rolls of dimes, and a dozen red railway flares. Oh yes, and call up your mediumistic lady and do your damnedest to get her to join us here—her talents may prove invaluable. Laf, tear off to your home loft and get the luminous paint and the black velvet hangings you and your red-bearded ex-friend used—yes, I know about that association!—when you and he were dabbling with black magic. Simon and I will hold down the studio. All right, then—” A spasm crossed his face and the veins in his forehead and cords in his neck bulged and his arms were jerking with the struggle he was waging against the compulsion that threatened to overpower him. “All right, then—Rump-titty-titty-tum-GET-MOVING!”

  An hour later the studio smelt like a fire in a eucalyptus grove. Such light from outside as got past the cabalistically figured hangings covering windows and skylight revealed the shadowy forms of Simon, atop the scaffold, and the other five intellectuals, crouched against the wall, all puffing their reefers, sipping the sour smoke industriously. Their marijuana-blanked minds were still reverberating to the last compelling words of Gory’s rigmarole, read by Lester Phlegius in a sonorous bass.

  Phoebe Saltonstall, who had refused reefers with a simple, “No thank you, I always carry my own peyote,” had one wall all to herself. Eyes closed, she was lying along it on three small cushions, her pleated Grecian robe white as a winding sheet.

  Round all four walls waist-high went a dimly luminous line with six obtuse angles in it besides the four corners; Norman said that made it the topological equivalent of a magician’s pentalpha or pentagram. Barely visible were the bunches of garlic nailed to each door and the tiny silver discs scattered in front of them.

  Norman flicked his lighter and the little blue flame added itself to the six glowing red points of the reefers. In a cracked voice he cried, “The time approaches!” and he shambled about rapidly setting fire to the twelve railway flares spiked into the floor through the big canvas.

  In the hellish red glow they looked to each other like so many devils. Phoebe moaned and tossed. Simon coughed once as the dense clouds of smoke billowed up around the scaffold and filled the ceiling.

  Norman Saylor cried, “This is it!”

  Phoebe screamed thinly and arched her back as if in electroshock.

  A look of sudden agonized amazement came into the face of Taliaferro Booker Washington, as if he’d been jabbed from below with a pin or hot poker. He lifted his hands with great authority and beat out a short phrase on his gray African log.

  A hand holding a brightly-freighted eight-inch brush whipped out of the hellish smoke clouds above and sent down a great fissioning gout of paint that landed on the canvas with a sound that was an exact visual copy of Tally’s short drummed phrase.

  Immediately the studio became a hive of purposeful activity. Heavily-gloved hands jerked out the railway flares and plunged them into strategically located buckets of water. The hangings were ripped down and the windows thrown open. Two electric fans were turned on. Simon, half-fainting, slipped down the last feet of the ladder, was rushed to a window and lay across it gasping. Somewhat more carefully Phoebe Saltonstall was carried to a second window and laid in front of it. Gory checked her pulse and gave a reassuring nod.

  Then the five intellectuals gathered around the big canvas and stared. After a while Simon joined them.

  The new splatter, in Chinese red, was entirely different from the many ones under it and it was an identical twin of the new drummed phrase.

  After a while the six intellectuals went about the business of photographing it. They worked systematically but rather listlessly. When their eyes chanced to move to the canvas they didn’t even seem to see what was there. Nor did they bother to glance at the black-on-white prints (with the background of the last splatter touched out) as they shoved them under their coats.

  Just then there was a rustle of draperies by one of the open windows. Phoebe Saltonstall, long forgotten, was sitting up. She looked around her with some distaste.

  “Take me home, Lester,” she said faintly but precisely.

  Tally, half-way through th
e door, stopped. “You know,” he said puzzledly, “I still can’t believe that Old Five-Greats had the public spirit to do what he did. I wonder if she found out what it was that made him—”

  Norman put his hand on Tally’s arm and laid a ringer of the other on his own lips. They went out together, followed by Lafcadio, Gorius, Lester and Phoebe. Like Simon, all five men had the look of drunkards in a benign convalescent stupor, and probably dosed with paraldehyde, after a bout of DTs.

  The same effect was apparent as the new splatter and drummed phrase branched out across the world, chasing and eventually overtaking the first one. Any person who saw or heard it proceeded to repeat it once (make it, show it, wear it, if it were that sort of thing, in any case pass it on) and then forget it—and at the same time forget the first drummed phrase and splatter. All sense of compulsion or obsession vanished utterly.

  Drum ‘n’ Drag died a-borning. Blotto Cards vanished from handbags and pockets, the McSPATS I and II from doctor’s offices and psychiatric clinics. Bump Parties no longer plagued and enlivened mental hospitals. Catatonics froze again. The Young Turks went back to denouncing tranquilizing drugs. A fad of green-and-purple barber-pole stripes covered up splattermarks on raincoats. Satanists and drug syndicates presumably continued their activities unhampered except by God and the Treasury Department. Capetown had such peace as it deserved. Spotted shirts, neckties, dresses, lampshades, wallpaper, and linen wall hangings all became intensely passé. Drum Saturday was never heard of again. Lester Phlegius’ second attention-getter got none.

  Simon’s big painting was eventually hung at one exhibition, but it got little attention even from critics, except for a few heavy sentences along the lines of “Simon Grue’s latest elephantine effort fell with a thud as dull as those of the gobs of paint that in falling composed it.” Visitors to the gallery seemed able only to give it one dazed look and then pass it by, as is not infrequently the case with modern paintings.

  The reason for this was clear. On top of all the other identical splatters it carried one in Chinese red that was a negation of all symbols, a symbol that had nothing in it—the new splatter that was the identical twin of the new drummed phrase that was the negation and completion of the first, the phrase that had vibrated out from

  Tally’s log through the red glare and come slapping down out of Simon’s smoke cloud, the phrase that stilled and ended everything (and which obviously can only be stated here once): “Tah-titty-titty-tee-toe’t”

  The six intellectual people continued their weekly meetings almost as if nothing had happened, except that Simon substituted for splatter-work a method of applying the paint by handfuls with the eyes closed, later treading it in by foot. He sometimes asked his friends to join him in these impromptu marches, providing wooden shoes imported from Holland for the purpose.

  One afternoon, several months later, Lester Phlegius brought a guest with him—Phoebe Saltonstall.

  “Miss Saltonstall has been on a round-the-world cruise,” he explained. “Her psyche was dangerously depleted by her experience in this apartment, she tells me, and a complete change was indicated. Happily now she’s entirely recovered.”

  “Indeed I am,” she said, answering their solicitous inquiries with a bright smile.

  “By the way,” Norman said, “at the time your psyche was depleted here, did you receive any message from Tally’s ancestor?”

  “Indeed I did,” she said.

  “Well, what did Old Five-Greats have to say?” Tally asked eagerly. “Whatever it was, I bet he was pretty crude about it!”

  “Indeed he was,” she said, blushing prettily. “So crude, in fact, that I wouldn’t dare attempt to convey that aspect of his message. For that matter, I am sure that it was the utter fiendishness of his anger and the unspeakable visions in which his anger was clothed that so reduced my psyche.” She paused.

  “I don’t know where he was sending from,” she said thoughtfully. “I had the impression of a warm place, an intensely warm place, though of course I may have been reacting to the railway flares.” Her frown cleared. “The actual message was short and simple enough:

  “ ‘Dear Descendant, They mode me stop it It was beginning to catch on down here.’”

  Little Old Miss Macbeth

  THE SPHERE of dim light from the electric candle on the orange crate was enough to show the cot, a little bare wall behind it and concrete floor beneath it, a shrouded birdcage on the other side of the cot, and nothing more. Spent batteries and their empty boxes overflowed the top of the orange crate and made a little mound. Three fresh batteries remained in a box by the candle.

  The little old woman turned and tossed in her sleep under the blankets. Her face was troubled and her mouth pursed in a thin line that turned downward at the corners—a tragic mask scaled down for a little old lady. At times, without waking, she’d creep her hands up from under the blanket and touch her ears, as though they were assaulted by noise—though the silence was profound.

  At last, as if she could bear it no longer, she slowly sat up. Her eyes opened, though she did not wake, staring out with the fixity of unconscious seeing. She put her feet into snug felt slippers with a hole in the left toe. She took a woolly bathrobe from the foot of the cot and pulled it around her. Without looking, still sitting on the edge of the cot, she reached for the electric candle. Then she got up and crossed the floor to a door, carrying the candle, which made on the ceiling a circle of light that followed her. At no time was the full size of the room revealed. Her face was still a prim little tragic mask, eyes open, fast asleep.

  Outside the door she went down one flight of an iron stairway, which sounded from its faint deep ringing under her light tread as if there were many more flights above. She went through another door, a heavy, softly moaning one like the stage door of a theater, and closed it behind her and stood still.

  If you’d been there outside, you’d have seen her holding the electric candle, and a small semicircle of brick wall and iron door behind her and another semicircle of sidewalk under her feet, and nothing more, no other side to the street, no nothing—the feeble light went no further. Then after a while you’d have noticed a ribbon of faint stars overhead—a narrow ribbon, too narrow to show constellations, as if the unseen buildings here were very high. And if you’d have looked up a second time, you’d have wondered if a few of the stars hadn’t moved or changed color, or if there weren’t extra stars now or missing ones, and it would have worried you.

  The little old lady didn’t wait long. She started down the street in the dun globe of light from her electric candle, keeping close to the curb, so that even the wall on her side of the street was almost lost in darkness. Her felt slippers scuffed softly. Otherwise the city, for that was what it seemed to be, was absolutely quiet. Except that after a couple of blocks a very faint angry buzzing became audible. And the corner at the next cross street was outlined now by an extremely fault red glow, the exact color of neon signs.

  The old lady turned the corner into a block that was crawling with luminous worms, about forty or fifty of them, as thick as your thumb and long as your arm, though some were shorter. They weren’t bright enough to show anything but themselves. They were all colors, but neon red was commonest. They moved like caterpillars but a little faster. They looked like old neon tubes come alive and crawled down out of signs, but blackened and dimmed by ages of ions. They crawled in sine curves on the sidewalks and street, a few of them on ledges a little way up the walls, and one or two along what must have been wires hanging overhead. As they moved they buzzed and the wires sang.

  They seemed to be aware of the little old lady, for two or three came and circled her, keeping outside her dim globe of light. When she turned at the next corner a mercury-violet one followed her a little way, lifting its head to buzz and crackle angrily, exactly like a defective neon sign.

  This block was black again with just the ribbon of elusive stars. But although the little old lady still kept close to the cur
b, the sidewalk was narrower and the electric candle showed wrecked display windows with jagged edges and occasional stretches of almost unbroken, thick glass. The old lady’s eyes, seeing in her sleep, didn’t waver to either side, but if you’d have been there you’d have dimly seen dummies behind the broken windows, the men in zoot suits and wide-brimmed hats, the women in tight skirts and glimmering blouses, and although they stood very stiff you’d have wondered if their eyes didn’t follow the little old lady as she passed, and there’d have been no way for you to know, as soon as her globe of light was gone, that they didn’t step out carefully between the glass razors and follow.

  In the next block a ghost light swirled across a flatness that began about a story up in the dark. It seemed to be something moving through the ten thousand bulbs of an old theater marquee, barely quickening for an instant their brittle old filaments—a patchy, restless shimmer. Across the street, but rather higher, there appeared, on the very threshold of vision, a number of large rectangular signs, their murky colors irregularly revealed and concealed—giant bats crawling across almost completely faded luminescent billboards would have given the effect. While at least twenty stories up, at the edge of the dubious starlight, one small window spilled yellow light.

  Halfway down the next block the little old lady turned in from the curb to a fence of iron pickets. She leaned against a gate, giving a querulous little moan, the only sound she’d uttered, and it swung in, crunching against the gravel.

  She pressed it shut behind her and walked ahead, her slippers crushing dead leaves, her thin nostrils wrinkling mindlessly at the smell of weeds and dust. Directly overhead a small square of stars projected from the ribbon. She went up wooden steps and across a porch and through a six-paneled door that creaked as she opened and shut it.

  The halls of the house were bare and its stairs uncarpeted and its woodwork tritely ornate. When she reached the third floor with her dim globe of light there was the faintest crunch from below and a little later a creaking. She took hold of a rope that hung from above and added some of her weight to it, swaying a little, and a ladder swung out of the ceiling and bumped against the floor.