Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  In the dark hallway he twisted as if he had a stomachache.

  Next morning Karswell called on Dick as soon as class started. Perhaps he smelled rebellion and was smart enough to attack at the weakest point, Dick, his seat to the rear and well-shielded by the fat boy in front of him, was doodling abstractedly and very rapidly – a habit of his. I saw that this time it was words, not pictures, that his pencil was spawning, with apparent aimlessness, and I noted with approval "police," "jail," and "mother."

  Karswell creased his pulpy face and roughened his voice. Dick's pencil fluttered and stopped and like someone talking in his sleep he gave the correct answer.

  The revolt fizzled out. None of the other boys had nerve enough to stand up to Karswell alone, though they had been only too glad of an excuse to skip their homework. Naturally they called Dick a double-crosser and a couple of them picked fights with him which he lost because he knew he was in the wrong. He never did live the blow to his pride down.

  By the time we went to college I had my methods for tormenting Slade in smooth working order. I went first to his instructors. To each I said in effect, "Richard Slade is intensely interested in your subject. He will probably make it his life work. He is a very promising student, worthy of special attention."

  Naturally they were flattered and modified their behavior toward Slade accordingly. A few months later I paid each of them a second visit. I said, "I can see now that I was mistaken. Richard Slade is not really interested in your subject. He has confused transient mental excitement with enduring intellectual dedication. Just where his actual interests lie it's difficult to say. Perhaps he is incapable of any." Dick, poor fool, could not understand the reason for their sudden cooling, though to my delight he was considerably hurt by it.

  With an irony very amusing to me, he ended up by majoring in psychology, which netted him no real knowledge except such oddments of information as "automatic writing is on some respects the equivalent of word-doodling."

  His habit of doodling had grown with the years. His compulsion aroused brief interest in a class in experimental psychology and was superficially investigated. He learned nothing about it, but he acquired the practice of storing away all the automatic writing he did – generally without looking at it, for in later years he came to hate his "wild talent," which sometimes operated even when he was asleep.

  I wasn't being too rough on Slade at the time. It was a definite part of my plan to cushion him during those early years. Premature jolts must be avoided, I kept telling myself. He must be given the illusion of floating in a dreamy, easy current until I had my fish securely hooked crooked booked rooked cooked what a dish that poor fish ragged lipped belly ripped wet with blood and with mud in the boat and I gloat and I hate and I wait for my fate for it's late and I hate and I love hand in glove yes I love to make love and make hate with the girls with the girls with the girls With the girls.

  I pursued the policy that had succeeded so well with the instructors, playing "Slade loves you" against "Slade does not really love you, perhaps he is incapable of love" until I worked some of them into pitiably neurotic states where they were as ready to wound themselves as to wound Slade. That pleased me, since I knew he would suffer in either case – more in the first.

  During his last year at college Slade was deeply attracted to a girl somewhat more sophisticated than himself. She liked him and for a time I let matters develop unhindered.

  Then I went to a brilliant young instructor who was quite friendly with Slade because of kindred intellectual interests and who had a secret reputation for amusing himself with such girls as were adult enough to be safe.

  "Look, Satterlee," I said in effect, "why don't you sometimes go out with Slade and Beatrice? They both like you. They're your kind and I'm sure you would have some good times together. Besides, there's a special reason. Slade's often afraid he's boring Beatrice. A witty companion would take care of the dull moments and Slade would be flattered to have Beatrice know that you are his friend."

  Satterlee balked at this somewhat unrealistic suggestion. So, very guardedly, I introduced an argument that I knew would eventually get him; namely, that Beatrice was not much in love with Slade and that Slade, appearances to the contrary, was even less in love with her and might be glad of an opportunity to shake loose. Needless to say, the latter suggestion was a flat lie.

  After a few days, the three of them began to be seen together. There were wondering comments, also sardonic ones, quite baseless at the time. It was an interesting triangle. Beatrice was flattered, but a little uneasy. Satterlee, finding the situation somewhat different from the false one I had described to him, held his hand but did not withdraw. Slade kept me awake every night yapping about how happy he was.

  Then in the late afternoon of a Saturday when the three of them had a date for dinner and a concert, I lured Slade into a game of chess with an opponent of just the right caliber to test his powers fully. I had selected him for precisely that reason.

  It was an intensely exciting struggle, but prolonged. The dusty windows of the café annex grew dark. Lights were turned on. The small hand of the ugly wall-clock began its upward climb. Slade, I noted with approval, was nervously doodling in a notebook where he had started to keep the score of the game, filling page after page with words his eyes would never see.

  He was tempted to break off the game by offering a draw, although he was in a winning position. But I pointed out he could forego the dinner and still be in time for the concert. (He held the three tickets.) Twice he tried to call Beatrice or Satterlee, but the lines were busy and he had to hurry back to the board.

  Finally he rushed off with barely time to make the concert, having lost the game by an oversight. He was very nervous now and stood on the front platform of the rocking street car, although there were plenty of seats inside. Making good connections, he arrived at the auditorium with ten minutes to spare. But no Beatrice, and no Satterlee.

  He paced the lobby until the concert had begun, then risked a dash to the restaurant on the off-chance that they might have waited for him there. Of course they hadn't. He hurried back. Still no Beatrice and Satterlee, although the man in the box office thought a couple answering to Slade's description of them had looked around the lobby and walked out.

  Slade tried again to call them. The girl who answered the dormitory phone told him Beatrice had gone out before supper, while the phone in Satterlee's apartment rang unanswered. Eventually he went into the auditorium, leaving the other two tickets at the box office. He spent most of the evening darting back and forth between the lobby and the three empty seats.

  Next day Beatrice and Satterlee had their excuses. Indeed at first Slade thought of himself as the guilty party. But I saw to it that he was informed that Beatrice had been seen leaving Satterlee's apartment early Sunday morning lorning warning horning suborning adorning scorning warning stop look listen listen look stop stop stop red red bed bed bred wed dead slain pain pain pain pain pain The pain this discovery caused Slade provided me with rare pleasure for the whole two months before his graduation.

  I next turned my attention to the matter of Slade's marriage. From his girl friends I selected one who was rather idealistic, timid, and sympathetic, though by no means lacking in narrow-mindedness. I went straight to her and said, "Slade needs you. Potentially he's a man of creative genius but he's like a child. Will you devote your life to cherishing his dreams, soothing his hurts, shielding him so far as you are able from the harsher aspects of reality?"

  The moment sticks in my mind. It was winter and the girl was alone with me. (Slade's best friend, up to a best friend's usual tricks). We were sitting in front of a log fire. Its flames struck mysterious gleams from her dark eyes and lent a false flush to her cheeks as she answered in a whisper, almost reverently, "Yes."

  Once outside, I grinned with satisfaction. This was the final triumph. I had procured for Slade a lifelong companion who would reflect all his moods, bringing them to an almos
t unendurable focus. Little remained for me to do except await the inevitable developments.

  The worst frustrations are yet to come. I, who have laid and lit the fuses, know.

  At present Slade is working in an insurance office. Outwardly he hasn't done too badly for the past ten years, but two drawers of his desk and a large cardboard box are filled with his hated word-doodlings. He keeps the stuff at his office ever since his wife found out about his accumulated automatic writing, worshipfully decided there might be creative material – "even stories, Dick!" – buried in it, and insisted on reading it.

  Slade is very confused. His futile idealisms ache like hard sores, and his wife cherishes him very, very much. I am toying with the idea of infatuating him with the pleasures of the senses. Slade with a mistress – it would be a wonderful comedy. And I may sting him – via the mistress? – into a desperate attempt to make big money. He couldn't succeed in that either, but he could spend several very painful years trying. Oh, the possibilities are endless.

  Some day those possibilities, fruitful as they seem now, may be exhausted. In that case I shall kill Slade. But probably that will not be for years. My capacity for devising new and ever more grotesque torments for Slade seems infinite.

  I wonder why that is. Why of all the people in the world, I should hate and abominate Richard Slade.

  Did Slade originally harm me in some secret, despicable way my memory cannot retain? Or am I simply suffering from a monomania? Is the world my hell and Slade my punishment?

  Or ... yes, that might be it ... I may have missed it all these years because of its very obviousness – Perhaps I hate Slade simply because he hates me, because he has sought to trick and persecute me for as long as I can remember, because he has done his best to wreck my life ... and because he placed a dead branch so it would trip me in the dark and make me break my telescope.

  For of course I am also Richard Slade slayed made laid grayed grave slave but I'm brave like a slave in the grave and I write in the night without light without sight and I write write right wrong ...

  Although Miss Barnes made a careful search, no other connected narratives whatever were discovered in the two boxes, nor any light thrown on their origin. They have since become the property of the Krothering-Kingsley Art Conference.

  THE WINTER FLIES

  AFTER THE supper dishes were done there was a general movement from the Adler kitchen to the Adler living room.

  It was led by Gottfried Helmuth Adler, commonly known as Gott. He was thinking how they should be coming from a dining room, yes, with coloured maids, not from a kitchen. In a large brandy snifter he was carrying what had been left in the shaker from the martinis, a colourless elixir weakened by melted ice yet somewhat stronger than his wife was supposed to know. This monster drink was a regular part of Gott's carefully-thought-out programmer for getting safely through the end of the day.

  "After the seventeenth hour of creation God got sneaky," Gott once put it to himself.

  He sat down in his leather-upholstered easy chair, flipped open Plutarch's Lives left-handed, glanced down through the lower halves of his executive bifocals at the paragraph in the biography of Caesar he'd been reading before dinner, then without moving his head looked through the upper halves back toward the kitchen.

  After Gott came Jane Adler, his wife. She sat down at her drawing table, where pad, pencils, knife, art gum, distemper paints, water, brushes, and rags were laid out neatly.

  Then came little Heinie Adler, wearing a spaceman's transparent helmet with a large hole in the top for ventilation. He went and stood beside this arrangement of objects: first a long wooden box about knee-length with a smaller box on top and propped against the latter a toy control panel of blue and silver plastic, on which only one lever moved at all; next, facing the panel, a child's wooden chair; then back of the chair another long wooden box lined up with the first.

  "Good-bye Mama, good-bye Papa," Heinie called. "I'm going to take a trip in my spaceship."

  "Be back in time for bed," his mother said.

  "Hot jets!" murmured his father.

  Heinie got in, touched the control panel twice, and then sat motionless in the little wooden chair, looking straight ahead.

  A fourth person came into the living-room from the kitchen – the Man in the Black Flannel Suit. He moved with the sick jerkiness and he had the slack putty-grey features of a figure of the imagination that hasn't been fully developed. (There was a fifth person in the house, but even Gott didn't know about him yet.)

  The Man in the Black Flannel Suit made a stiff gesture at Gott and gaped his mouth to talk to him, but the latter silently writhed his lips in a 'Not yet, you fool!' and nodded curtly towards the sofa opposite his easy chair.

  "Gott," Jane said, hovering a pencil over the pad, "you've lately taken to acting as if you were talking to someone who isn't there."

  "I have, my dear?" her husband replied with a smile as he turned a page, but not lifting his face from his book. "Well, talking to oneself is the sovereign guard against madness."

  "I thought it worked the other way," Jane said.

  "No," Gott informed her.

  Jane wondered what she should draw and saw she had very faintly sketched on a small scale the outlines of a child, done in sticks-and-blobs like Paul Klee or kindergarten art. She could do another 'Children's Clubhouse,' she supposed, but where should she put it this time?

  The old electric clock with brass fittings that stood on the mantel began to wheeze shrilly. 'Mystery, mystery, mystery, mystery.' It struck Jane as a good omen for her picture. She smiled.

  Gott took a slow pull from his goblet and felt the scentless vodka bite just enough and his skin shiver and the room waver pleasantly for a moment with shadows chasing across it. Then he swung the pupils of his eyes upward and looked across at the Man in the Black Flannel Suit, noting with approval that he was sitting rigidly on the sofa. Gott conducted his side of the following conversation without making a sound or parting his lips more than a quarter of an inch, just flaring his nostrils from time to time.

  BLACK FLANNEL: Now if I may have your attention for a space, Mr. Adler –

  GOTT: Speak when you're spoken to! Remember, I created you.

  BLACK FLANNEL: I respect your belief. Have you been getting any messages?

  GOTT: The number 6669 turned up three times today in orders and estimates. I received an airmail advertisement beginning 'Are you ready for big success?' though the rest of the ad didn't signify. As I opened the envelope the minute hand of my desk clock was pointing at the faceless statue of Mercury on the Commerce Building. When I was leaving the office my secretary droned at me, 'A representative of the Inner Circle will call on you tonight,' though when I questioned her she claimed that she'd said, 'Was the letter to Innes-Burkle and Company all right?' Because she is aware of my deafness I could hardly challenge her. In any case she sounded sincere. If those were messages from the Inner Circle, I received them. But seriously I doubt the existence of that clandestine organization. Other explanations seem to me more likely – for instance, that I am developing a psychosis. I do not believe in the Inner Circle.

  BLACK FLANNEL (smiling shrewdly – his features have grown tightly handsome though his complexion is still putty grey): Psychosis is for weak minds. Look, Mr. Adler, you believe in the Mafia, the FBI, and the Communist Underground. You believe in upper-echelon control groups in unions and business and fraternal organizations. You know the workings of big companies. You are familiar with industrial and political espionage. You are not wholly unacquainted with the secret fellowships of munitions manufacturers, financiers, dope addicts and procurers and pornography connoisseurs and the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of sexual deviates and enthusiasts. Why do you boggle at the Inner Circle?

  GOTT (cooly): I do not wholly believe in all of those other organizations. And the Inner Circle still seems to me more of a wish-dream than the rest. Besides, you may want me to believe in the Inner Circle in order a
t a later date to convict me of insanity.

  BLACK FLANNEL (drawing a black brief-case from behind his legs and unzipping it on his knees): Then you do not wish to hear about the Inner Circle?

  GOTT (inscrutably): I will listen for the present. Hush!

  Heinie was calling out excitedly, "I'm in the stars, Papa! They're so close they burn!" He said nothing more and continued to stare straight ahead, his eyes diamond bright.

  "Don't touch them," Jane warned without looking around. Her pencil made a few faint five-pointed stars. The Children's Clubhouse would be on a boundary of space, she decided – put it in a tree on the edge of the Old Ravine. She said, "Gott, what do you suppose Heinie sees out there besides stars?"

  "Bug-eyed angels, probably," her husband answered, smiling again but still not taking his head out of his book.

  BLACK FLANNEL (consulting a sheet of crackling black paper he has slipped from his brief-case, though as far as Gott can see there is no printing, typing, writing, or symbols of any sort in any colour ink on the black bond): The Inner Circle is the world's secret élite, operating behind and above all figureheads, workhorses, wealthy dolts, and those talented exhibitionists we name genius. The Inner Circle has existed sub rosa niger for thousands of years. It controls human life. It is the repository of all great abilities and the key to all ultimate delights.

  GOTT (tolerantly): You make it sound plausible enough. Everyone half believes in such a cryptic power gang, going back to Sumeria.

  BLACK FLANNEL: The membership is small and very select. As you are aware, I am a kind of talent scout for the group. Qualifications for admission (he slips a second sheet of black bond from his briefcase) include a proven great skill in achieving and wielding power over men and women, and amoral zest for all of life, a seasoned blend of ruthlessness and reliability, plus wide knowledge and lightning wit.