Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  "And you just stood still and let it happen," Vi observed gently.

  "No, Vi, I didn't," Rose sobbed, tears spurting from her eyes. "I fought hysterically then but – just as with you and your foster father – she was stronger. She twisted my wrist behind my back and forced me over, making it weirdly sexy, and then she whipped me. It hurt like hell, God how it hurt, there was some blood, but the worst thing was that I knew he was getting a thrill out of it. His little princess, and he was getting a thrill!"

  "There, there, it's over," Vi said soothingly, drawing Rose's head towards her shoulder.

  "But it wasn't, Vi, that wasn't the worst," Rose said, dry-eyed now, pulling away. "After that happened I knew, like you, that I had to get out of there. And I guess my foster father knew that same thing, because two days later he ran away with a young hippy woman it turned out he'd been having an affair with, but oh God, Vi, he didn't take me with him.

  "I could have forgiven him being a coward and afraid to stop her – I was scared to death of her myself. I could even forgive him having sexual feelings seeing me whipped – I'd had sexual feelings myself, and not always at the nicest things, but oh God, Vi, he didn't take me with him! He ran away and didn't take me with him."

  Vi did not move to comfort her this time. Instead she studied her cooly and thoughtfully, missing nothing, not the track of one tear, as if Rose were an artist's model taking a pose and Vi the painter. Her pale blue eyes were at once sympathetic and merciless, and the distance within them was very great.

  She said at last, "Not to be loved, to find yourself betrayed ... it's a very dry pain, isn't it? As if you were being tortured on the rack for witchcraft and then they stop, the instruments relax their poignant grip, the blinding light recedes and the tormenting endless, nagging questions come to an end.

  "At first all that you feel is blessed numbness and a great enfolding silence. You think with quiet joy that perhaps you are dead at last.

  "And then every last injury they've done you comes to excruciating life. There's the refinement of the cruelty – they don't have to do anything to you at that point; your body does it all, remembering. Yes, each hurt they've ever inflicted on you begins to throb unceasingly, the pitch mounting and mounting, until you think the agony can't become greater, but it does.

  "And then you pray that they will start torturing you actively again – anything, anything, to disturb the embrace (as if it were a second skin) of that dry, fiery shroud."

  "You must have been there too," Rose said quite quietly. "Well, after my foster father ran away, my foster mother became quite insane in her hatred of all men ... and of all girls too. She acted as if all the males in the world and every woman younger than herself, but especially the teen and sub-teen girls, the nymphets, were in a vast conspiracy against her. She kept threatening me with reform school and the mental hospital and she whipped me again.

  "But then she overreached herself, thank God! – she really was crazy, Vi. She actually petitioned to have me sent to reform school as an uncontrollably wayward girl. I went to my high school English teacher, who'd encouraged me about my writing, and told her about it, and she brought in a social worker who was a friend. I still had the weals and cuts from the whipping and my foster mother went into a sort of fit in court. In the end I was put in a halfway house for girls with family problems like mine – or yours, Vi ... fathers and brothers with incestuous tendencies.

  "And for the next couple of years or so I lived a strange sort of half life there and in similar places (and really it's gone on – the limbo life – here in the Village too). They dunned my foster father and mother too for my support and got a little money from each of them from time to time, with difficulty, and they shifted me around between agencies.

  "When I say half life, I mean in several ways. I came close to the edge, mentally, more than once. I was still basically a very shy child and my experiences made me shrink away from friendship. And after those whippings my mother gave me I just didn't have any sexual feelings at all for a long while. A doctor once told me that if the mind doesn't trust a sensory message coming from some part of the body, it registers it as pain – the panic reaction. So for that time most sexual feelings were actually painful to me – and frightening. A finger touching me would seem to burn – it's mixed up with synesthesia, I'm sure.

  "And then I was very mixed up as to how I felt about girls and sex generally. A couple of young women at the institution where I lived openly boasted about being lesbian, as if it were something very special, which didn't turn me on at all. I also knew that the people on whose good will I depended, even my English teacher, didn't approve of and wouldn't sympathize with that sort of thing at all. So I knew I had to hide any feelings like that and my experiences with my little Watusi and Siobhan.

  "And all the while I was still terrified of boys, of course – I mean young men – and still am, you can believe me. Knowing it was my foster mother's strange teachings and my foster father's betrayal didn't change that one bit and never has. And that basic fear of mine was reinforced when a male counselor tried to seduce me. He actually tried to use sleeping pills to help, Vi, can you imagine? And then a girlfriend here in NYC who'd said she was uncertain about which sex she was, fell for a man real hard and got the idea one night it would be real cute and a big favor to me if he introduced me to sex with men – whether under her active supervision or not I never learned. I almost panicked before I managed to get rid of them.

  "Well, anyway, my English teacher stuck with me through all this, the darling! And as soon as I was barely old enough, helped me to get the job that I hold now. She thought I needed a change of city and she was right. I even inherited this apartment from an old friend of hers.

  "So here I am, Vi, living my halfway life, making indexes, and trying to be a writer. I've just had a story rejected by Cosmopolitan, but they wrote a nice letter saying that it came close and asking me to keep submitting."

  "I've my ambitions too," Vi said.

  "Ballet?" Rose asked.

  "In part," Vi answered. "But ultimately solo pantomime – concise, dramatic acts, historical, contemporary, and fantasy. My own costumes, settings, music – everything. There was a dancer and mime named Angna Enters. Something like hers."

  "That's wonderful," Rose said. "Maybe I could write acts for you."

  "I'm sure you could and maybe I could give you ideas for stories. Will you write one about tonight?"

  "I don't know," Rose said thoughtfully. "Long lost twin sisters find each other -where's the conflict? It's all happy ending."

  "You'd have to work out a surprise premise for it," Vi said rapidly, sitting up straighter. "Suppose I were a young man who looked exactly like you – maybe identical twins of different sexes are possible this once. I have this overpowering lech for you, but I also know about your locks and bolts and fears. So I have my breasts injected. I even know about your mole and duplicate it–"

  "Oh, Vi!" Rose said reprovingly. "That's just too complicated."

  "Well if we were identical twins of different sex," Vi argued, "maybe I'd have female breasts too with the mirror-image mole, so I wouldn't need injections. Maybe only the primary sex organs would differ."

  "Stop it," Rose said. "I don't like that plot – it's too farfetched. Besides, you're thinking like your foster father." Her hands moved as if she were going to button the top of her dress.

  "I do believe I've frightened you again," Vi teased, grinning a little.

  "No, you haven't," Rose denied, her hands dropping away. "Remember, along with your breasts I've seen your nipples. It's just that I've gotten depressed. Reaction, I guess, or maybe the brandy. And then you start–" She broke off and impulsively moving closer, her arms hanging limp, her hands with palms upturned, said in a quavering, oddly tragic voice, "Vi, comfort me."

  Vi did not move, except that her gaze wandered about Rose's face and shoulders, dropped to the supine hands, then traveled up to the woeful eyes again. She was smiling t
enderly, but her own eyes had the distance in them.

  There came that skirling cry, muffled this time, and (muffled too) a high, twanging sound, as of something sharp scraped across metal mesh. Rose started violently, wincing, then twisted around abruptly to look at the door. Vi got up then and moved towards it.

  Rose followed her closely, hands trembling, but poised as if about to grab the other's shoulders, crying, "Don't open it!"

  Standing on tiptoes, Vi put her right eye to the fish-eye lens set just above the little door-in-a-door masking the grille.

  "I can't see anything," she said cooly. "The hall light must be out," and unlatched the little door.

  "Don't!" Rose said, clutching her shoulders now, but Vi opened it.

  Another skirling cry, unmuffled, came knifing in and with it the brushing and beating of wings and the unnerving scrape of claws (or was it that?) on heavy wire.

  "Still can't see anything," Vi reported tersely. "A black flashing–"

  The sounds broke off except that of something like a huge but unsubstantial bird blindly brushing and buffeting about in the black hall.

  "Please close it," Rose implored. Vi did so.

  Unmindful of Rose dragging her back, Vi said, "I really should go out there–"

  Rose said, "No, No!" –

  "though how that bird managed to get inside–" She looked at Rose and said reasonably, "Well, should we call the apartment manager (there is one?) or the police?"

  "The phone's disconnected," Rose said miserably. "I let the bill get too big."

  "So–?" Vi said quizzically (they could hear nothing now outside the door) "–well, we could scream."

  Rose answered. "The room was soundproofed by an earlier tenant – my English teacher's friend."

  Vi smiled. "Well, I suppose we could always open the windows wide and scream together–"

  "Don't make fun," Rose protested. "Oh, Vi, I'm so scared and miserable. You've just got to stay with me tonight. Oh, Vi, comfort me. Take off your clothes and come to bed and comfort me," she pleaded, clutching the other again and pressing her head between the other's neck and shoulder.

  After a bit she heard Vi say tenderly but very deliberately, "Very well, I will." Then she felt her hands being gently but firmly disengaged and put to her sides and then she felt the pressure of Vi's palm in the small of her back, guiding her back to the low day bed.

  "Sit down," she heard and did so on the edge, looking at her stockinged knees. She heard Vi moving around. The lights went out. There were soft sounds. Then Vi returned and sat down close to her. The soft glow from the bathroom showed her Vi's dimly gleaming knees beside her own and she saw how alike they were. Then with a little sob that surprised her (she thought she'd quieted down) she turned to Vi, who'd left her singlet on, and clutched her, saying, "Oh, Vi."

  "Be still," she heard Vi calmly order her. "How can I comfort you properly if you're crawling all over me?"

  Again she felt her hands being gently but firmly disengaged, only this time Vi put them behind Rose's back and pinioned the wrists in her left hand.

  Rose looked up shyly into Vi's ghostly face, the eyes dark smudges below the close-cropped head, neat as a bird's, and said, "We've both got very long-fingered hands, only yours are stronger."

  "Is that bad?" Vi teased and then, nodding towards the books, "You've read about it all in The Joys of Sex, I'm sure – bondage and discipline. Do you like it?"

  "Unless it gets too scary," Rose confessed, lifting her fact to kiss Vi's chin lightly.

  "Well, as to that, one cannot tell ahead of time. We play by ear," Vi said, giving her a soft peck between the eyes. Then her right hand went to Rose's brassiere. Pinching one cup between thumb and forefinger and the other between little finger and palm, she drew them together and used her middle finger to nudge loose the hook. She touched Rose's breasts in turn and leaned her cheek against them. Vi's eyelashes felt to Rose like a tiny bird fluttering. She felt Vi's hand trail down between her breasts and then finish unbuttoning her dress.

  Vi lifted her face, smiling, and drawing Rose's arms a little farther down behind her back to expose her neck, gave her a gentle nip between the hinge of her jaw and her collarbone, and then again on the lobe of her ear, breathing humorously, "Don't struggle – it won't help you. I'm the third vampire, remember?"

  Rose felt quite frightened and yet not afraid, as if there were flashes of light on the verge of vision or at its edges, too faint to hurt or even to be seen. She felt adventurous.

  Still holding her wrists tight, that arm against Rose's hip and garter belt, Vi slipped around and knelt on the carpet in front of her, very close to Rose (still on the edge of the low day bed) but with back so straight that her face was on a level with Rose's, even a little higher, her eyes flashing in the gloom.

  Rose thought, "I'm like Andromeda chained to the rock. Only the monster's friendly."

  As if Vi were reading her mind, she heard her say, "It's fun to play with fears, now isn't it? You could safely imagine now that your twin's also a bird-woman, one of the archetypes, even. The animus."

  Rose felt the spread fingers of Vi's right hand push into her hair and through it around the sides of her head to the nape of her neck and grip a large lock there (it pulled her scalp) and lift her face, bending it back a little, and then Vi kissed her mouth, her eyes, her cheek, her neck, her breasts. It took her breath away, she gasped, "Oh God, oh Vi," and seemed to hear, but only in her imagination, only playfully, the rush and beat of wings, the skirling cries, Vi's fingers velvet talons and her soft lips a beak.

  She felt Vi press her body more closely against her own, front to front. She tried to push away, but Vi's strong left hand pinioning her wrists pressed them into the small of her back, against her coccyx, so that she couldn't move in that direction and the stockinged soles of her feet kept slipping on the carpet as they pushed frantically and finally kicked.

  And then she felt (she experienced it as a point of intensely bright white light, shockingly painful) the unknown forcibly and irresistibly entering her between her legs.

  She gasped, "Oh no, oh no," Vi whispered fiercely, "There, there," the point of light grew to an almost blinding white-hot moon that suddenly began to flash with scarlet. She squeezed her eyelids but it didn't stop. Vi's shrewd right hand closed alternately on her breasts, now left, now right, lightly pinching her nipples, her wrists and Vi's left hand pinioning them were like an iron knot at the base of her spine against which her body was jolting violently, there was a bitter taste at the base of her tongue and a brimstone stench high inside her nostrils, she heard Vi whisper, "The ego is not inaccessible, you see," and then she was seeing Vi through flashes of black light that made it seem as if her twin's slim dancer's body was covered with bright black feathers and the night itself was like great dark wings beating rhythmically, there was a skirling and deep booming in her ears, and Vi was saying through her devouring kisses in tones that kept gathering force, "There, there; there, there; there there!"

  Some Notes on the Texts

  John Pelan & Steve Savile

  (With thanks to David Read)

  Since we failed to provide comprehensive data on the stories included in The Black Gondolier, our inaugural volume of Fritz Leiber's stories (an oversight that many readers saw fit to call to our attention); and it's somewhat safe to assume that readers of this volume have also purchased the aforementioned, we'll include information on the stories from the first book as well. We have several other Leiber collections in the works due to a discovery of a considerable amount of previously unpublished material. At least two collections will be predominantly SFnal in content and will be published under the Darkside Press imprint. These books will be identical in format to The Black Gondolier and Smoke Ghost, with the only substantial difference in presentation being the imprint.

  There are several reasons for doing this, not the least of which is to avoid an identity crisis here at Midnight House. We are a publisher of weird and horror ficti
on and realize that many of our readers may not care to include Science Fiction in their collections, conversely, those that do want the entire Leiber set will be able to have a nicely matched set of volumes. I fully realize that Leiber (and several of our other authors, most notably Bob Leman) often blur the boundaries between genres. In the case of these books there may well be some SF in the Midnight House books and some weird or horrific elements in the stories in the SF collections, but by and large we'll attempt to split the tales up in a manner that will seem at least somewhat logical.

  The Black Gondolier

  "The Black Gondolier" 1964, Over the Edge (Arkham House)

  "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" 1945, The Acolyte (Spring)

  "Game for Motel Room" 1963, The Magazine of F & SF (March)

  "The Phantom Slayer" 1942, Weird Tales (January)

  "Lie Still, Snow White" 1964, Taboo (New Classics House)

  "Mr. Bauer and the Atoms" 1946, Weird Tales (January)

  "In the X-Ray" 1949, Weird Tales (July)

  "Spider Mansion" 1942, Weird Tales (September)

  "The Secret Songs" 1962, The Magazine of F & SF (August)

  "The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity" 1962, The Magazine of F & SF (March)

  "The Dead Man" 1950, Weird Tales (November)

  "The Thirteenth Step" 1962, The Fiend in You (Ballantine Books)

  "The Repair People" 1980, Transmission

  "Black Has Its Charms" 1984, Whispers 21-22

  "Schizo Jimmie" 1960, The Saint Mystery Magazine

  "The Creature from Cleveland Depths" 1962, Galaxy (December)

  "The Casket-Demon" 1963, Fantastic (April)

  "Dr. Adams' Garden of Evil" 1963, Fantastic (February)

  Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

  "Smoke Ghost" 1941, Unknown (October)