Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  The roof world can be quite treacherous at night, you see. Our roofs especially are apt to be cluttered with little low standpipes and kitchen chimneys and ventilators, things very easy to miss and trip over. It's the worst on clear moonless nights, for then there are no clouds to reflect the city's lights back down, and as a result it's dark as pitch around your feet. (Paradoxically, it's better when it's raining or just been raining for then there's streetlight reflected by the rainclouds and the roof has a wet glisten so that obstructions stand out.) Of course, I generally carry a small flashlight and use it from time to time but, more important, I memorize down to the last detail the layout of any roof visit by night. Only this time that latter precaution had failed me.

  It brought me up short to think of how my encounter with the TV cable could have had fatal consequences. It made me see just how very upset I was getting from my writer's block and wonder about unconscious suicidal impulses and accidentally-on-purpose things. Certainly my stalled project was getting to the point where I'd have to do something drastic about it, like seeing a psychiatrist or getting drunk ... or something.

  But the physical fear I felt didn't last long, and soon I was prowling about again, though a little less carelessly. I didn't feel comfortable except when I was moving. When I held still, I felt choked with failure (my writing project). And yet at the same time I felt I was on the verge of an important insight, one that would solve all my problems if I could get it to come clear. It seemed to begin with, "If you could sum up all you felt about life and crystallize it in one master insight...", but where it went from there I didn't know. But I knew I wasn't going to get an answer sitting still.

  Perhaps, I thought, this whole roof-thing with me expresses an unconscious atavistic faith in astrology, that I will somehow find the answer to any problem in the stars. How quaint of skeptical me!

  On the roof at my old place, one of my favorite sights had been the Sutro TV Tower with its score or so of winking red lights. Standing almost a thousand feet high on a hill that is a thousand already, that colorful tripod tower dominates San Francisco from its geographical center and is a measuring rod for the altitude of fogs and cloudbanks, their ceilings and floors. One of my small regrets about moving had been that it couldn't be seen from this new roof. But then only a couple of weeks ago I'd discovered that if you climb the short stairway to the locked door of the boxlike structure hiding the elevator's motor, you see the tops of the Tower's three radio masts poking up over and two miles beyond the top of the glassy Federal Building. Binoculars show the myriad feathery white wires guying them that look like sails – they're nylon so as not to interfere with the TV signals.

  This night when I got around to checking the three masts out by their red flashes, I lingered a bit at the top of the skeleton stairs watching them, and as I lingered I saw in the black sky near them a tremorous violet star wink on and then after a long second wink off. I wouldn't have thought of it twice except for the color. Violet is an uncommon color for a light on a building or plane, and it's certainly an uncommon color for a star. All star colors are very faint tinges, for that matter. I've looked at stars there that were supposed to be green and never been able to see it.

  But down near the horizon where the air is thicker, anything can happen, I reminded myself. Stars that are white near the zenith begin to flash red and blue, almost any color at all, when they're setting. And suddenly grow dim, even wink out unexpectedly. Still, violet, that was a new one.

  And then as I was walking away from the stairs and away from Sutro Tower too, diagonally across the roof toward the other end of it, I looked toward the narrow, window-spangled slim triangle of the Trans-American Pyramid Building, a half mile or so away and I saw for a moment, just grazing its pinnacle, what looked like the same mysterious pulsing violet star. Then it went off or vanished – or went behind the pinnacle, but I couldn't walk it into view again, either way.

  What got me the most, perhaps, about that violet dot was the way the light had seemed to graze the Pyramid, coming (it was my impression) from a great distance. It reminded me of the last time I'd looked at the planet Mercury through my telescope. I'd followed it for quite a while as it moved down the paling dawn sky, flaring and pulsing (it was getting near the horizon), and then it had reached the top of the Hilton Tower where they have a room whose walls are almost all window, and for almost half a minute I'd continued my observation of it through the glassy corner of the Hilton Hotel. Really, it had seemed most strange to me, that rare planetary light linking me to another building that way, and being tainted by that building's glass, and in a way confounding all my ideas as to what is close and what is far, what clean and what unclean ...

  While I was musing, my feet had carried me to another observation place, where in a narrow slot between two close-by buildings I can see the gray open belfry towers of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill five blocks off. And there, through or in one of the belfry's arched openings, I saw the violet star again resting or floating.

  A star leaping about the sky that way? – absurd! No, this was something in my eye or eyes. But even as I squeezed my eyes shut and fluttered the lids and shook my head in short tight arcs, my neck muscles taut, to drive the illusion away, that throbbing violet star peered hungrily at me from the embrasure wherein it rested in the gray church's tower.

  I've stared at many a star, but never before with the feeling that it was glaring back at me.

  But then (something told me) you've never seen a star that came to earth, sliding down that unimaginable distance in a trice and finding itself a niche or hiding hole in the dark world of roofs. The star went out, drew back, was doused.

  Do you know that right after that I was afraid to lift my head? or look up at anything? for fear of seeing that flashing violet diamond somewhere it shouldn't be? And that as I turned to move toward the door at the head of the stairs that led down from the roof, my gaze inadvertently encountered the Hilton Tower and I ducked my head so fast that I can't tell you now whether or not I saw a violet gleam in one of that building's windows?

  In many ways the world of roofs is like a vast, not too irregular games board, each roof a square, and I thought of the violet light as a sort of super-chess piece making great leaps like a queen (after an initial vast one) and crookedly sidewise moves like a knight, advancing by rushings and edgings to checkmate me.

  And I knew that I wanted to get off this roof before I saw a violet glow coming from behind the parapet of one of the airshafts or through the cracks around the locked door to the elevator's motor.

  Yet as I moved toward the doorway of escape, the door down, I felt my face irresistibly lifted from between my hunched shoulders and against my neck's flinching opposition until I was peering through painfully winced eye-slits at the cornice of the next building east, the one that overlooked the windows of my apartment.

  At first it seemed all dark, but then I caught the faintest violet glint or glimmer, as of something spying down most warily.

  From that point until the moment I found myself facing the door to my apartment, I don't remember much at all except the tightness with which my hands gripped the stair-rails going down ... and continued to grip railings tightly as I went along the sixth-story hall, although of course there are no railings there.

  I got the door unlocked, then hesitated.

  But then my gaze wavered back the way I'd come, toward the stair from the roof, and something in my head began to recite in a little shrill voice, I met a star upon the stair, A violet star that wasn't there...

  I'd pressed on inside and had the door shut and double-locked and was in the bedroom and reaching for the bedside light before I realized that this time it hadn't happened, that at least I'd been spared the half sound and the fugitive dark ghost on this last disastrous night.

  But then as I pressed the switch and the light came on with a tiny fizzing crackle and a momentary greenish glint and then shone more brightly and whitely than it should (as old bulbs will
when they're about to go – they arc) something else in my head said in a lower voice, But of course when the right night came it wouldn't make its move until you were safely locked inside and unable to retreat ...

  And then as I stared at the bright doorway and the double-locked door beyond, there came from the direction of the dinette-kitchen a great creaking sound like a giant footstep, no halfsound but something finished off completely, very controlled, very deliberate, neither a stamp nor a tramp, and then another and a third, coming at intervals of just about a second, each one a little closer and a little louder, inexorably advancing very much like the footsteps of time in the "Saturn" section of The Planets, with more instruments coming in – horns, drums, cymbals, huge gongs and bells – at each mounting repetition of the beat.

  I went rigid. In fact, I'm sure my first thought was, I must hold absolutely still and watch the doorway, with perhaps the ghost comment riding on it, Of course! the panic reaction of any animal trapped in its hole.

  And then a fourth footstep and a fifth and sixth, each one closer and louder, so that I'm sure my second real thought was, The noise I'm hearing must be more than sound, else it would wake the city. Could it be a physical vibration? Something was resounding deeply through my flesh, but the doorway wasn't shaking visibly and I watched it. Was it the reverberation of something mounting upward from the depths of the earth or my subconscious mind, taking giant strides, smashing upward through the multiple thick floors that protect surface life and daytime consciousness? Or could it be the crashing around me in ruins of my world of certainties, in particular the ideas of that miserable haunting project that had been tormenting me, all of them overset and trodden down together?

  And then a seventh, eighth, ninth footstep, almost unbearably intense and daunting, followed by a great grinding pause, a monstrous hesitation. Surely something must appear now, I told myself. My every muscle was tight as terror could make it, especially those of my face and, torus-like, about my eyes (I was especially and rather fearfully conscious of their involuntary blinking). I must have been grimacing fearfully. I remember a fleeting fear of heart attack, every part of me was straining so, putting on effort.

  And then there thrust silently, rather rapidly, yet gracefully into the doorway a slender, blunt-ended, sinuous leaden-gray, silver-glistening arm (or other member, I wondered briefly), followed immediately and similarly by the remainder of the figure.

  I held still and observed, somehow overcoming the instant urge to flinch, to not-see. More than ever now, I told myself, my survival depended on that, my very life.

  How describe the figure? If I say it looked like (and so perhaps was) the manikin in the fabrics shop, you will get completely the wrong impression; you will think of that stuffed and stitched form moving out of its window through the dark and empty store, climbing upstairs, etc., and I knew from the start that that was certainly not the case. In fact, my first thought was, It is not the manikin, although it has its general form.

  Why? How did I know that? Because I was certain from the first glimpse that it was alive, though not in quite the way I was alive, or any other living creatures with which I am familiar. But just the same, that leaden-gray, silver-misted integument was skin, not sewn fabric – there were no sewn seams, and I knew where the seams were on the manikin.

  How different its kind of life from mine? I can only say that heretofore such expressions as "dead-alive," "living dead," and "life in death," were horror-story clichés to me; but now no longer so. (Did the leaden hue of its skin suggest to me a drowned person? I don't think so – there was no suggestion of bloat and all its movements were very graceful.)

  Or take its face. The manikin's face had been a blank, a single oval piece of cloth sewn to the sides and top of the head and to the neck. Here there was no edge-stitching and the face was not altogether blank but was crossed by two very faint, fine furrows, one vertical, the other horizontal, dividing the face into four approximately equal quarters, rather like a mandala or the symbol of planet Earth. And now, as I forced myself to scan the horizontal furrow, I saw that it in turn was not altogether featureless. There were two points of violet light three inches apart, very faint but growing brighter the longer I watched them and that moved from side to side a little without alteration in the distance between them, as though scanning me. That discovery cost me a pang not to flinch away from, let me tell you!

  The vertical furrow in the face seemed otherwise featureless, as did the similar one between the legs with its mute suggestion of femininity. (I had to keep scanning the entire figure over and over, you see, because I felt that if I looked at the violet eye-points too long at any one time they would grow bright enough to blind me, as surely as if I were looking at the midday sun; and yet to look away entirely would be equally, though not necessarily similarly disastrous.)

  Or take the matter of height. The window manikin was slenderly short. Yet I was never conscious of looking down at this figure which I faced, but rather a little up.

  What else did I glean as this long nightmarish moment prolonged itself almost unendurably, going on and on and on, as though I were trapped in eternity?

  Any other distinguishing and different feature? Yes. The sides and the top of the head sprouted thick and glistening black "hair" that went down her back in one straight fall.

  (There, I have used the feminine pronoun on the figure, and I will stick with that from now on, although it is a judgment entirely from remembered feeling, or instinct, or whatever, and I can no more point to objective evidence for it than I can in the case of the manikin's imagined gender. And it is a further point of similarity between the two figures although I've said I knew they were different.)

  What else, then, did I feel about her? That she had come to destroy me in some way, to wipe me out, erase me – I felt a calmer and a colder thing than "kill," there was almost no heat to it at all. That she was weighing me in a very cool fashion, like that Egyptian god which weighs the soul, that she was, yes (And had her leaden-hued skin given me a clue here?), the Button Molder, come to reduce my individuality to its possibly useful raw materials, extinguish my personality and melt me down, recycle me cosmically, one might express it.

  And with that thought there came (most incidentally, you might say – a trifling detail) the answer I'd been straining for all evening. It went this way: If you could sum up all you felt about life and crystallize it in one master insight, you would have said it all and you'd be dead.

  As that truism (?) recited itself in my mind, she seemed to come to a decision and she lithely advanced toward me two silent steps so she was barely a foot away in the arcing light's unnatural white glare, and her slender mitten-hands reached wide to embrace me, while her long black "hair" rose rustlingly and arched forward over her head, in the manner of a scorpion's sting, as though to enshroud us both, and I remember thinking, However fell or fatal, she has style. (I also recall wondering why, if she were able to move silently, the nine footsteps had been so loud? Had those great crashes been entirely of mind-stuff, a subjective earthquake? Mind's walls and constructs falling?) In any case her figure had a look of finality about it, as though she were the final form, the ultimate model.

  That was the time, if ever (when she came close, I mean), for me to have flinched away or to have shut tight my eyes, but I did not, although my eyes were blurred – they had spurted hot tears at her advance. I felt that if I touched her, or she me, it would be death, the extinguishment of memory and myself (if they be different), but I still clung to the faith (it had worked thus far) that if I didn't move away from and continued to observe her, I might survive. I tried, in fact, to tighten myself still further, to make myself into a man of brass with brazen head and eyes (the latter had cleared now) like Roger Bacon's robot. I was becoming, I thought, a frenzy of immobility and observation.

  But even as I thought "immobility" and "touching is death," I found myself leaning a little closer to her (although it made her violet eye-points stingi
ngly bright) the better to observe her lead-colored skin. I saw that it was poreless but also that it was covered by a network of very fine pale lines, like crazed or crackled pottery, as they call it, and that it was this network that gave her skin its silvery gloss ...

  As I leaned toward her, she moved back as much, her blunt arms paused in their encirclement, and her arching "hair" spread up and back from us.

  At that moment the filament of the arcing bulb fizzled again and the light went out.

  Now more than ever I must hold still, I told myself.

  For a while I seemed to see her form outlined in faintest ghostly yellow (violet's complement) on the dark and hear the faint rustle of "hair," possibly falling into its original position down her back. There was a still fainter sound like teeth grating. Two ghost-yellow points twinkled a while at eye-height and then faded back through the doorway.

  After a long while (the time it took my eyes to accommodate, I suppose) I realized that white fluorescent streetlight was flooding the ceiling through the upward-tilted slats of the blind and filling the whole room with a soft glow. And by that glow I saw I was alone. Slender evidence, perhaps, considering how treacherous my new apartment had proved itself. But during that time of waiting in the dark my feelings had worn out.

  Well, I said I was going to tell you about those ten endless seconds and now I have. The whole experience had fewer consequences and less aftermath than you might expect. Most important for me, of course, my whole great nonfiction writing project was dead and buried, I had no inclination whatever to dig it up and inspect it (all my feelings about it were worn out too), and within a few days I was writing stories as if there were no such thing as writer's block. (But if, in future, I show little inclination to philosophize dogmatically, and if I busy myself with trivial and rather childish activities such as haunting games stores and amusement parks and other seedy and picturesque localities, if I write exceedingly fanciful, even frivolous fiction, if I pursue all sorts of quaint and curious people restlessly, if there is at times something frantic in my desire for human closeness, and if I seem occasionally to head out toward the universe, anywhere at all in it, and dive in – well, I imagine you'll understand.)