Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  This one wasn't empty. Halfway along it a dozen black-clad figures, black-hooded and black-trousered, were at work where two of the observation windows had been jaggedly smashed open to the dark, reddening sky. Through that large gap came the dry wind that now blew against me more strongly. About half the black figures were busy manhandling a gun (from the first I knew it was a gun) so that it pointed north out the gap. The weapon, formed of a grayish metal, resembled a field piece of the world wars, but there were perplexing differences. The barrel was pointed sharply upward like a mortar's but was longer, more like that of a recoilless rifle. The breech bulged unnaturally – too big. It was mounted on a carriage with small wheels that seemed to turn with difficulty, judging from the way the black figures strained at it, while beside it on a squat tripod was a steaming cauldron heated by a small fire built on the floor.

  The other six or seven figures were closely grouped around the edges of the gap and peering out of it intently and restlessly, as though on watch and guard for something in the sky. Each held ready, close against him, a small missile weapon of some sort.

  All the figures were silent, appearing to communicate by some sort of sign language that involved twitchings of the head and grippings of one another's upper arms and legs – perhaps a language more of touch than visual signs.

  Despite their silence, there was such a venom and hatred, such a killer's eagerness, about the way the gunhandlers heaved at their cranky weapons, strained and touch-talked, and in the window guards the same, though in them mixed more with dread, that my genitals contracted and my stomach fluttered and I wanted to retch.

  Inch by inch I withdrew, thankful for their single-minded intentness on the gap and for the crepe soles of my shoes. I retraced my path past the elevator, its blotched doors still shut at the back of the shadowy recess, and peered with circumspection into the southern corridor. It seemed as empty as the one I was in. The windows at its far end glowed red with sunset light. A short distance along it, the escalator to the open observation deck on the roof three stories above began its straight-line ascent. Its treads weren't moving (I hardly needed visual confirmation of that), but up through it the dry wind, now on my neck, seemed to be blowing out, escaping from this floor.

  I had no desire to explore the red-lit west corridor, the only one I hadn't peered along, or to wait by the stained doors of the elevator. The oily, coaly stench was sickening me. I began the long ascent of the stalled escalator.

  At first I went slowly, to avoid noise, then I speeded up nervously from the dry wind's pressure on my back and its faint whistlings, and in my feelings a queer mixture of claustrophobia and fear of exposure – the feeling of being in a long, narrow opening. Then I slowed down to avoid getting winded. And the last few steps I took very slowly, for fear of running into a guard (or whatever) at the top – that and a certain hesitation to see what I would see.

  Spying from the entry, I first closely surveyed the open observation deck – really just a wide, railed, rectangular catwalk, supported by a minimum of metal framework, about fifteen feet above and twenty feet back from the edges of the flat roof of the building proper, those edges having a stout high mesh fence, the top wires of which were electrified to further discourage would-be suicide jumpers and such. (I knew these details from my earlier visit.)

  I didn't spot anyone or anything in the twilight (anyone standing or crouching, at least), though there was the opposite exit structure matching mine, around which it would be possible to hide, and at one point the railing was gone and a slanting ladder led down to the roof – a crude stairs. Also a good deal of the outer fence appeared to have been torn away, though I didn't try to check that very closely.

  Thus reassured (if you can call it that), I straightened up, walked out, and looked around. First to the west where a flattened sun, deep red and muted enough to look at without hurt, was about to go beneath the Jersey horizon. Its horizontal rays gave the low heavens a furnace glow that made "the roof of Hell" a cliché no longer, though lower down the sky was dark.

  The horizon all around looked higher than it ought to be. From it in toward me stretched an absolutely flat black plain, unbroken save for several towers, mostly toward the north, their western walls uniformly red-lit by the sunset, their long shadows stretching endlessly to the east, a few of the towers rather tall but some quite squat.

  I looked in vain for the streets of New York, for the lights that should be coming on (and becoming more apparent) by now, for the Hudson and East rivers, for the bay with its islands and for the Narrows.

  None of those things were there, only the dull ebon plain, across which the dry north wind blew ceaselessly. Oh, the utter flatness of that plain! It was like the waters of an absolutely still great lake, not a quiver in it, thickly filmed with coal dust and across which spiders might run.

  And then I began to recognized the towers by their tops. That one to the north, the tallest in that direction except for one at almost twice the distance, its somewhat rounded stepbacks were unmistakable – Kong-unmistakable. It was the Empire State shrunken to less than half its height without a corresponding diminishment in breadth. And that still slender spire was the top quarter of the graceful Chrysler Building, its bottom three quarters chopped off by (were they beneath?) the plain. And there was the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center where I'd just been – the top hundred feet of it.

  But what were those two structures rather taller (allowing for differences in distance) than the Empire State? One mostly truncated pyramid, the most distant northern one; the other to the northeast, about where the United Nations enclave would be. Were they buildings built after my ... well, I had to face up to the possibility of time travel, didn't I?

  And there were lights, I began to see now, as the red western walls started to darken – a very few windows scattered here and there among the towers. One of them was in a most modest structure nearby – hardly four stories with a pyramidal roof. I knew it from boyhood, the Woolworth Building, New York's tallest in 1920 and for some years after, which the black plain had almost inundated.

  Yes, the black plain, which lay only some five or six hundred feet beneath me, not the thirteen hundred and fifty it ought to be.

  And then I knew with an intuitive, insane certainty the black plain's nature. It was the final development of the Guck, the Dreck, the sinister, static, ineradicable foam, the coming of which the old Jew had described to me.

  But how in hell could there be this much accumulation of waste of whatever sort, seven or eight hundred feet of it? Unless one imagined the whole process as being catalytic in some way and reaching and overpassing some critical value (analogous to fission and fusion temperatures in atomics), after which the process became self-perpetuating and self-devouring – "Death taking over," as he'd said.

  And how far, in God's name, did the black plain extend? To the ends of the Earth? It would take more than the melting of a couple of black icecaps to do that to the planet. Oh, I was beginning to think in a crazy way, I told myself...

  At the same time a line from the cauldron scene in Macbeth joggled its way to the surface of my mind: "Make the gruel thick and slab..."

  But the gruel wouldn't have to be thick, I reminded myself with insane cunning, because it was composed of microscopic bubbles. That would stretch the Guck, make it seem that there was much more Dreck than there really was. And it wouldn't be solid and massy like liquids are, but feathery and soft as finest soot or new-fallen snow, hundreds of feet of it...

  New-fallen black snow...

  But if the stuff were foam, why didn't it mound up in hillocks and humps, like the life-choking detergent foams the old Jew had talked about? What force, what unnatural surface tension, constrained it to lie flat as a stagnant pond?

  And why did I keep coming back to his ideas, monotonously? My intuition was insane, all right, as insane as what was happening to me, or as his own paranoid ideas – or mine. I shook my head to clear it of them all and to stir mysel
f to action, and I began to move around the catwalk, studying my closer surroundings. The first thing to catch my eye and almost stop me was the wire-hung narrow suspension bridge connecting the northwest corner of this roof with the nearest corner of the roof of Tower One. It was a primitive affair, the junkyard equivalent of a jungle structure of bamboo and braided vines. The two main wires or thin cables, guyed through holes driven in the roof edges, also served as its rails, from which was flimsily suspended the narrow footway made of sections of thin aluminum sheeting of varying lengths. It swayed a little and creaked and sang in the dry wind from the north.

  I could see no figures or movement on the roof of Tower One, though another of its corners was simply gone for twenty feet or so, as if gigantically chopped or bitten off.

  I came to the first right-angle turn (to the east) in the catwalk and (just beyond it) the gap in the rail where the ladder went down.

  Scanning north again, I saw the last red highlights on the scanty cluster of towers fade as the crouched-down scarlet sun flattened itself completely behind the western horizon, but the hell glow lingered on the low, cramping sky, under which that dry wind from the pole blew on and blew. Squinting my eyes against it, I thought I saw shapes in movement, soaring and flapping, around the most distant northern tower, the tall, unfamiliar, mysterious one. If they were fliers and were really there, they were gigantic, I told myself uneasily.

  My gaze dropped down to the lowly pale Woolworth tower with its single dim light and I noticed that its roof edge was damaged somewhat like that of Tower One, and I had a vision (the soaring shaped had paved the way for it) of a vast dragon's head with jaws agape (and mounted on a long neck like that of a plesiosaur) emerging from the black plain and menacing the structure, while great dull black ripples spread out from it in ever-widening circles. Another scrap of poetry came to my mind, Lanier's "But who will reveal to our waking ken/The forms that swim and the shapes that creep/Under the waters of sleep?"

  As I mused on that, I heard a not very loud but nevertheless arresting sound, a gasp of indrawn breath. Glancing sharply ahead along the catwalk, I saw, near the exit structure, something that may or may not have been there before (I could have missed it in my survey): a body sprawled flat with that attitude of finality about it which indicates utter exhaustion, unconsciousness, or death. It was clad in what looked in the dusk dark green – cloak, cap, gloves ... and trousers.

  Before I could begin to sort out my reactions to that sight (although I instantly moved softfootedly toward it), another dark-green-clad figure emerged swiftly from the exit-structure and swiftly knelt to the sprawled form in a way that was complete identification for me. I had seen that identical movement earlier today, though then it had been on skates.

  When I was less than a dozen feet away, I said, clearing my throat, "Excuse me, but can I be of any help to you?"

  She writhed to her feet with the sinuous swiftness of a cobra rearing and faced me tensely across the dead or insensate form, her eyes blazing with danger and menace in the last light from the west. I almost cringed from her. Then there was added a look of tentative recognition, of counting up.

  "You're the man in the subway," she said rapidly. "Neutral, possibly favorable, at least not actively hostile – I took a chance on you and that's how I still read you. The man from Elsewhen."

  "The subway, yes," I said. "I don't know about the Elsewhen part. I presume from what I see I've time-traveled, but I've always thought that time travel, if such a thing could possibly be, would be instantaneous, not by a weird, crooked series of transformations and transitions."

  "Then you were wrong," she said, rather impatiently. "You don't do anything all at once in the universe. To get from here to there you traverse a space-time between. Even light moves a step at a time. There are no instantaneous transitions, though there are short cuts, no actions at a distance. There are no miracles."

  "And as for being possibly favorable," I went on, "I've already asked if I could help you."

  "You say that as lightly as if it meant tipping your hat or holding a door open. You don't know what you're getting into," she assured me. "You saw the men on the lower deck?"

  "The men in black with the gun, yes."

  "You mention the gun. That's good," she commented quickly, and for the first time there was a hint in her voice and look that I might be accepted. She went on, "That's the gun my brother and I were going to knock out, when ... when..." Her gaze flickered down toward the flattened form, dark green, death pale, between us, and her voice stumbled.

  "I'm terribly sorry–" I began.

  "Please! – no sympathy," she interrupted. "We haven't time and I haven't the strength. Now listen to me. In this age the blackness has almost buried New York. We are the sole survivors, we in these two towers and like lonely groups on those out there, a desolate few." She indicated the scattered tops to the north and around. "We should be brothers in adversity. Yet all that those men on the lower deck can feel is hate, hate for all men in other towers than their own, hate and the fears from which their hatred grew -dread of the blackness and of other things. They dress in black because they fear it so and hope so to gain for themselves all the cruel power and exulting evil they read in it, while their avoidance of spoken language is another tribute to their fear – in point, the Guck's their god, their devil-god."

  She paused, then commented, "Man lacks imagination, doesn't he? Or even a mere talent for variety in his reactions. Sometimes it seems appropriate he should drown squealing in the dark."

  I said, uneasy at this chilly philosophizing, "I'd think you'd be afraid they'd come up here and find us. I wonder that they haven't posted guards."

  She shook her head. "They never come out under the sky unless they have to. They fear the birds – the birds and other things."

  Before I could ask her another question she resumed the main thread of her talk. "And so all that those men on the lower deck can think to do is to destroy all other towers save their own. That is the business they're about just now (the business of the gun) and one on which they concentrate ferociously – another reason we needn't fear them surprising us here.

  "Someday," she said, and for a moment her voice grew wistful, "someday we may be able to change their hearts and minds. But now all we can do is take away their tools, remove their weapon, the gun that's capable of killing buildings.

  "And so now, sir," she said briskly, looking toward me, "will you aid me in this venture, knowing the risks? Will you play the part my brother would have played -receive my fire? For I must tell you that my weapon requires both a firer and a receiver. One soul can't work it. Also it works only against their weapon, not against them (I would not wish it otherwise), and so it cannot save us from their aftermath. Escaping will be your own business, with my help. How say you, sir?"

  It sounded crazy, but I was in a crazy situation and my feelings fitted themselves to it – and I remembered the sickening venomousness I had sensed in the black-clad men below.

  "I'll help you," I told her in a low, choked voice, swallowing hard and nodding sharply.

  She laughed, and with a curtsy to her brother's corpse, knelt by it again and from a pouch at the belt removed something which she held out to me.

  "Your receiver, sir," she said gaily, smiling over it. "Your far-focus, yin to the yang of mine. I believe you have seen something like it earlier today. Here, take it, sir."

  It was a pale brown cube with rounded corners, about as big as a golf ball and surprisingly heavy. When I looked at it close up I saw that it was the figure of a lioness crouching, quite stylized, the body all drawn together to fit the cubic form – one face of the cube, for instance, was all proud, glaring head and forepaws. It was a remarkable piece, so far as I could make out in the dusk. The eyes appeared to flash, though it seemed all of one material.

  "Here is its mate," she said, "my near-focus, my firer," and she held close to my eyes for a long moment a like figure of a maned lion. "And now the pla
n. It is only necessary that we be on opposite sides of our target, in this case the gun, so that I may weave the web and you anchor it. When we get to the foot of the long stair, you go to the left, I'll go to the right. Walk rapidly but quietly as you can to the end corridor they're in. Stand in the middle of it facing them and holding the receiver in front of you. It doesn't matter if it's hidden in your fist, only don't stir then and whatever happens, don't drop it." She chuckled. "You won't have to wait long for me once you get there. Oh, and one other thing. Although your receiver is no weapon against them afterwards, except to weight your fist – no weapon at all without the aid of mine – it has one virtue: If you lack for air (as, viz., they use the Guck on you) hold it close to your nostrils or your lips. That, I believe, is all." She gently clapped her left arm around the back of my waist from where she was standing close beside me and looked up a bit at me and said, "So, sir, let's go.

  "But first," she added somewhat comically, "my thanks for your companioning in this venture. Ill met and worse to follow!" And she leaned around laughingly and rather quickly kissed me.

  As our lips were pressed together there came a jarringly loud sound from close below. It sounded like a giant cough from very deep in a dark throat. As we pulled apart, turning each toward the north, we saw an incandescent scarlet line rapidly mounting out from the tower beneath, belched from the midst of a spreading smoke puff. It soared across the last darkening carmine streaks of sunset in the top of the sky, seemed to hang there, then fell more and more rapidly through the last of its parabolic course and was extinguished (it seemed) in the black plain short of the Empire State. But then began a churning and a mounding and a glowing in the Guck, ending in a tumultuous eruption of blackness and flame. I was vividly reminded of depth-charging at night, only this glare was redder. And the flash seemed to last longer too, for by its darkening red glow I saw the facade of the Empire State hugely splotched and pied with inky black – napalm that didn't burn.