Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  Joe tore himself away, plunged into the living room, clawed open the door to the car port, jumped in the Jag, punched the starter button, and took off down the hill, nursing the motor as it alternately choked and whined. The cold air whipped his green silk pajamas but he didn't feel it.

  He was rounding the third hairpin turn when he saw the big black funeral car moving up behind him, still without lights. He risked a look back and it came round the turn after him. The beam of his backing light struck its windshield and behind the steering wheel he saw Nore, slim and golden-haired as she'd been outside the window.

  On the fourth turn he skidded and scraped the fence. He knew he shouldn't be in the third gear. But the black car was coming up.

  Approaching the fifth turn he tried to double-clutch back to second. The back of the car seemed to lift sideways as he braked. His backing searchlight again struck just over the hood of the black car, spotlighting behind the wheel Nore as she'd been inside the door.

  The white-painted cable twanged as the Jag went over the fence. The car turned over in the air so that it was like a pale yellow canopy over Joe Grimaldi as he fell in his green pajamas. Then a pale gray rock came out of the dark below and smashed him.

  With a long squeal of brakes like a tuba's bray the black car came to a stop fifty yards ahead. The bloated thing in the filthy leather coat craned her neck out of the right-hand window and frowned. Little flames started fifty yards back and about the same distance below. They swiftly grew bright enough to show the red blood on the pale rock. The frown on the face of the bloated thing vanished.

  "You can sit up now, Nore," she said.

  The slim golden-haired girl in the spotless white leather coat unfolded herself from the left-hand corner of the front seat. "It's about time, Marge," she said. "I don't want to double up like that any more and I don't want you to drive doubled up and just peeking, even if it's part of the game. It's too scary."

  "The game's over, Nore," Marge Dovgard said, taking out a handkerchief and beginning to rub her fat cheeks. She sighed. "Now maybe I'll be able to take off some of this weight."

  "Aren't you going to play any more with Joe?" Eleanore Dovgard asked. "It's his turn to scare us now. Joe! Oh, Joe!"

  "Shut up, Nore! The game's over."

  "Well, if the game's over, I want my coat back," Eleanore complained. "They're going to be mad at you, Marge, stealing me out of the hospital and saying I was dead in the papers."

  Marge shrugged. "Come on, slip across me," she said. "We've got to change seats right now. You and me."

  The fire behind and below them flared. Marge looked straight ahead as she switched on the headlights.

  "Cheer up, kid," she said, as the car eased forward, "we're going home."

  DARK WINGS

  ROSE LOCKED the stout screen door of heavy mesh behind them, then closed and double locked the solid door, put on the chain, shot the three bolts (high, medium, and low) and squatting somewhat precariously on her high heels, tugged at the door's hinged buttress-bar to free it from its clamp.

  Vi said mischievously, "Now we're locked in for the night," but when Rose looked up startledly, explained , "just the tag line of one of the standard ghost stories," and remarked, "you really do things thoroughly."

  "A girl can't be too careful," Rose stated, tugging some more. "There have been three burglaries since I moved here a year ago, two muggings just outside the lobby, and one attempted rape. Oh blast! – this always sticks. I won't let a strange man inside my apartment unless the manager's with him – she's a woman. Ow! – now I've pinched my finger." She winced and sucked it.

  "Par for the Village," Vi said. "Here, let me."

  She knelt effortlessly, one leg stretched out behind, her back straight, freed the buttress-bar with a controlled jerk, and forced its end into the socket in the floor-plate. There was a harsh, grating, rather high-pitched scrape and click. Rose winced again.

  Vi said, "That sort of sound sets my teeth on edge too. But why do you shut your eyes?"

  Rose replied, "I've got synesthesia – I see sounds, hear colors, that sort of thing. My psychiatrist says I'm a classic case. She says most people only imagine the colors, but I actually see them. The bar was a lilac flash, my pinched finger a bright red one. It didn't break the skin, though," she announced after studying it closely. "Come on, Vi, let's compare some more. There really wasn't a proper mirror in Nathan's," and rather shyly taking the other young woman's hand, she led her to a large mirror that made up one third of the inner wall of the pleasantly furnished, medium-size one-room apartment.

  "It really is remarkable," she said softly after a bit.

  "As we already decided at Nathan's," Vi reminded her, but her voice was a shade awe-struck too.

  Anyone studying the two faces side by side, as they were now, would have concluded that beyond the shadow of a doubt these two were identical twins. Their figures were alike – slender, petite. Vi was two inches shorter – her flats – but Rose toed off her shoes and that difference vanished. Rose wore a knee-length blue dress that buttoned down the front and her blonde hair in a page-boy bob that brushed her shoulders. Vi, a trim blue slack suit, a shirt of paler blue, and her blonde hair cut short, almost en brosse. They looked like one of those delightful, genetically impossible sets of boy-girl identical twins from Shakespeare, only in this case Violet was Sebastian and Rose, Viola.

  Rose said, "Blue is my favorite color."

  Vi said, "So is mine."

  Rose said, "I had my appendix out a year ago."

  Vi responded, "They took mine too – year and a half."

  Rose said, "My first pet was a kitten named Blackie."

  Vi echoed, "And so was mine, believe it or not, Little Black."

  Their eyes were getting wider all the time.

  Rose continued, almost chanting, "I have a mole on my left breast."

  Vi grinned, held up a palm, and swiftly unbuttoned her shirt. Rose gave a start, drew off a little, and watched uneasily in the mirror. Vi, studying her sidewise, pulled down her paler blue singlet of ribbed lightweight cotton, exposing her small, attractive breasts, a dark brown mole on the inner curve of her right one.

  She said insistently with an odd undercurrent of amusement, "For a moment you were scared I was a man after all, got in past your locks. Well, weren't you?"

  "Well, yes," Rose admitted uncomfortably, blushing, then said eagerly, "but you do have a mole, and on your left breast too."

  "Wrong, right," Vi corrected. "You're looking in the mirror which reverses. We're mirror-image twins, like all identicals. Now, how about you?" She smiled.

  "Oh, yes," Rose said apologetically, quickly beginning to fumble at the neck of her dress. "There's a tiny hook and eye here. I can never–"

  "Let me," Vi said cooly, still smiling, and undid it, then went on efficiently to unbutton the top of the blue dress. Rose was wearing a dark blue brassiere. Vi's eyebrows lifted.

  Rose explained hurriedly, "Mother – I mean my foster mother got me to always wearing one. I still don't ever wear pantyhose," as she took over, saying, "this hooks in front. With my all-thumbs fingers I never can work the ones that hook behind. There. See the mole?"

  The touch of awe briefly returned to Vi's voice as she said, "And to think that two hours ago neither of us knew we had a sister, let alone an identical twin."

  Rose said, "Vi, why do you suppose our foster mothers never told us about each other?"

  Vi chuckled harshly. "Mine would never have told me anything nice. She hated me, because foster papa liked me – and more and more the more I grew. Dig?"

  "Oh," Rose said feebly, hooking her brassiere again. "My foster father was sort of weak and timid. Mother – my foster mother, I mean, ran everything, especially me. She smothered me with love, very possessive and jealous, and wanted me to be like her exactly. I guess that's why she never told me about you. You'd have been a rival. You might have taken me away from her."

  Vi's chuckle was bitter, though
the undercurrent of distant amusement was still there. "The wonder is they told us our right birthdays."

  "So we could find out tonight they were the same," Rose took up. "Just think, Vi, in three weeks we can have a birthday party together – two Children of the Moon."

  "That's right, dear sister, two Cancers, the dark sign," Vi agreed, giving Rose's waist a brief squeeze with one arm as she moved away from the mirror towards the day bed with its light paisley spread and scatter of gay pillows.

  "Gee, it's so strange to have someone calling me sister," Rose said, smiling in wonder.

  "Not just someone," Vi reminded her, grinning mischievously back over her shoulder.

  "That's what I mean," Rose protested, "a sister calling me sister ... sister darling," she added, getting a lump in her throat as she said the two words.

  Vi nodded as she looked the bookcase over and then studied more closely the dozen volumes between collie-dog book ends on the low table in front of the day bed, as she sat down on it.

  "You have a lot of books," she observed.

  "I'm in the publishing business," Rose explained. "That is, I make indexes for a man who is. Say, would you like some more coffee? I'm going to make some," she continued, opening some light folding shutters in the nook that also held the bathroom door and revealing a small refrigerator top, electric stove, and sink all in line with cupboards above and below.

  "That would be fine," Vi said. "I dance for a man who does TV toothpaste commercials. I'm the third vampire. We dance slow motion in filmy negligees that float out very artistically all over a huge bathroom, baring our teeth. Then Dracula comes in, flashing his teeth, in a black dressing gown, a head taller than any of us and very thin, and we make love to him with our large dark liquid eyes, flashing our teeth some more, and he holds up the toothpaste we all four use as (in the newest version) we come together for a group tooth-baring, facing camera. Actually he's gay. And then four evenings a week I have my ballet classes."

  "Why, I've seen that commercial," Rose said, filling and putting on the stove the silvery hemisphere of the teakettle. "But you don't look like you. Your hair–"

  "–is a long black wig," Vi interrupted. "And then those three-quarter-inch eyelashes do something to my face. Not to mention all that blood-red lipstick, which they varnish on so it won't smudge our teeth. It takes us fifteen minutes to get it all off afterwards. But not Dracula – the make-up boy is his very special friend. Say, these books are interesting – more twin identicalities." And she read off, "The Plays of Shakespeare, Newman on Twins, Fear of Flying, Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler, The Wind in the Willows, Jung's The Archetypes, Animus and Anima, by Joan S. Rosenbloom, M.D. – that's one I don't have–"

  "She's my psychiatrist. My firm published it. I did the index," Rose said proudly, sitting down on the day bed two feet from Vi, between her and the casement windows, which were open a third of the way and locked in that position. Traffic sounds floated in irregularly and the faint steady thud of a hi-fi's woofer. "You know the animus, of course, if you've read Jung – the male self that haunts and inspires and sometimes terrifies each of us women, overshadowing the shadow. The equivalent of the anima in a man." An intense look came into Rose's face, contracting her soft brow. She looked a little like a blonde Barbie doll being very fierce. "I'd like to be some man's anima, some young stud's," she said with surprising venom. "I'd terrorize him. I'd make him suffer."

  "Think you'd be up to it?" Vi asked her playfully, but with the distance again, her chuckle throaty. "Like your foster mother terrorized her husband, eh? But worse than that, of course."

  "I'm not sure," Rose confessed flusteredly, her face relaxing. "All the archetypes can be pretty frightening sometimes, just to think about. But to actually be one..." She hesitated, then blurted out, "You know, Vi, I've sometimes imagined they really existed. The archetypes, I mean. Not just in my mind, but somehow outside where I might see and touch them."

  "Why not?" Vi asked lazily yet soothingly, apparently still playful. "That's how everything exists – outside. Nothing's just in the mind and nowhere else. Witches are real people, aren't they? Then why not demons and other so-called spirits? Jesus was a real person, wasn't he? – but also God. Then why not a real Jungian shadow moving around, a real anima? And a real animus."

  There was a sudden rushing, whirring sound and something struck one of the black casement windows with a jar and rattled the pane sharply. Rose started to clutch at Vi, then checked herself, her face twisted towards the night.

  "Relax," Vi said with a gentle chuckle. "That was just a bird. A lost and mixed-up pigeon, probably."

  "If it had been a pigeon, we'd have seen a flash of white. Did you?" Rose said rapidly, breathily. "Or a dove. They're white too. Some of them nest here, under the eaves."

  "There are black pigeons – and black doves too, I suppose," Vi said. "Relax."

  "Yes, and black hawks and eagles ... and other things. Besides, that was too heavy for a dove or pigeon."

  Vi sat up a little, smiling with a mixture of amusement and tenderness, and slowly reached out a hand, saying, "A black eagle in Manhattan! What would it do, Rose? Fly in ominous circles over Wall Street?" but before her fingers quite touched Rose there came a sudden fluttering whistle which swiftly grew louder and shriller. Rose got up hurriedly and crossed to the kitchenette, her hands ahead of her and her eyes closed or rather almost closed, like a person walking into a dusty wind.

  "What's the matter, Sis? Are you getting more lilac flashes?" Vi asked solicitously, watching her.

  Rose lifted the steam-jetting kettle off the heating element. The whistling quickly died.

  "Yes, I was – bright ones that hurt," she answered sharply and a shade defiantly, reaching down a brown jar of coffee crystals out of the cupboard. "They started green, then went through blue to violet as the pitch rose. With streaks of red – the pain."

  "I'm truly sorry," Vi said. "That must be very strange and frightening, what you have – and also very painful, your?..."

  "Synesthesia," Rose supplied. "How big a teaspoon do you take? Level, mounded, or heaping?"

  "It doesn't matter–" Vi began. Then, "No – heaping."

  Rose brought the two steaming mugs over and set them on the table. "Watch out," she said rather huffily, "they're hot." Suddenly her eyes flashed and she grinned like a naughty girl. "Suppose I put a little brandy in them," she whispered loudly to Vi. "There's some left from a bottle I bought for Christmas."

  "I think that would be fun," Vi told her.

  Rose's eyes got bigger still with the mischief of it as she fetched and added the brandy, a pony apiece and then a little more at Vi's suggestion. They took a burning, aromatic, eye-moistening swallow together, looking at each other, and Rose confessed, "I got a little mad when I got scared and you just told me to relax. But now I'm feeling wonderful."

  "And so am I," Vi assured her. "What is that mournful night sound?" she asked, eyeing the windows.

  "Oh, that's the doves," Rose said. "Whatever it was must have waked them up. They nest under the eaves, as I told you, and this apartment is right under them."

  "I'd think you'd be afraid of someone getting in that way," Vi suggested, serious eyed. "You know, down off the road, around the eaves, and in through the windows. Though he'd have to have a good head for climbing."

  "Don't think I'm not," Rose assured her aggressively. "But they've each got a hook and also a bolt bar which can't either be unfastened from the outside when I leave them partly open in warm weather like this."

  "That sounds completely safe," Vi said neutrally, drinking her coffee royale.

  Rose took a big swallow of hers and said, "I know you think I'm silly, Vi, for being so scared and fussing so about my locks and bolts. But really, Vi, if anyone ever got in and raped me, I know I'd die, or else go crazy."

  "You think so now," Vi said softly and bitterly, eyeing the floor. "Your locks and bolts – I think they're sensible."

  "What do you me
an?" Rose demanded. Then her eyebrows went up. "You mean that you?..."

  Vi nodded.

  "Oh, you poor thing," Rose gasped. "Oh my God, how horrible, how terribly horrible. How did it happen, Vi? Did someone con his way into your place, get you to take off the chain? Or were you out alone late at night on some dark street? Or–"

  Vi shook her head. "I was home in my own bed, being a good girl," she said with a sour smile and wrinkled nostrils. "I told you that my foster father had a lech for me–"

  "Oh, my God," Rose breathed.

  "Well, one night when he was drunk – and after getting my foster mother dead drunk, of course – he just came into my bedroom and satisfied it. Afterwards–"

  "Didn't you try to fight him off, Vi? Were you so terrified that–?"

  "Of course I did and in every dirty way I knew," Vi said harshly, "but they weren't dirty enough and he was stronger."

  "Oh my God, Vi, did it hurt?"

  "It hurt like hell," Vi said savagely. "But even that wasn't as bad as the way he slobbered over me afterwards, telling me how sorry he was. There wasn't even much blood. No, the worst thing was being touched – and not only touched, but invaded – where only you have ever touched yourself before, and then only very gently, very tentatively, almost reverently, a special thing, just like (I suppose) a man touches his–"

  "I know, I know," Rose groaned, rocking back and forth. "I've dreamed of it."

  "Anywhere else, almost, they have to cut you with a knife to get inside you," Vi said viciously. "But there–"

  "I know, I know," Rose echoed herself agonizedly. "I hate to be touched there, even by cloth."

  Vi caught her breath, drank the last of her brandy and coffee, and said in another voice, a more open and even roughly humorous one, "I'll give the gays this. At least they know what it's like to be raped."

  "How do you mean?" Rose asked, gulping the last of hers.

  "Oh, come on, Rose," Vi said impatiently, but with a little grin, "you've got the books right out there, dear identical: the Masters and Johnson, The Joys of Sex, even Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine – you know, that's the only other copy I've ever seen of that oldy besides my own."