Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  When he finally fought his way awake it was day, but his long sleep had in no way rested him. He felt tired still and good for nothing. Yesterday’s story and walk had been too long, he told himself, yesterday’s elevator encounter too emotionally exhausting. “Prisoners of the apartment tree,” he murmured.

  The Vanishing Lady was in very truth an eternal prisoner of the apartment tree, knowing no other life than there and no sleep anywhere except for lapsings that were as sudden as a drunkard’s blackouts into an unconsciousness as black as Ryker’s nightmares, but of which she retained no memory whatever save for a general horror and repulsion which colored all her waking thoughts.

  She’d come awake walking down a hall, or on the stairs or in the moving elevator, or merely waiting somewhere in the tall and extensive apartment tree, but mostly near its roots and generally alone. Then she’d simply continue whatever she was doing for a while, sensing around her (if the episode lasted long enough, she might begin to wander independently), thinking and feeling and imagining and wondering as she moved or stood, always feeling a horror, until something would happen to swoop her back into black unconsciousness again. The something might be a sudden sound or thought, a fire siren, say, sight of a mirror or another person, encounter with a doorknob, or with the impulse to take off her gloves, the chilling sense that someone had noticed her or was about to notice her, the fear that she might inadvertently walk through a silver-gray, faintly grimy wall, or slowly be absorbed into the carpet, sink through the floor. She couldn’t recall those last things ever happening, and yet she dreaded them. Surely she went somewhere, she told herself, when she blacked out. She couldn’t just collapse down on the floor, else there’d be some clue to that next time she came awake—and she was always on her feet when that happened. Besides, not often, but from time to time, she noticed she was wearing different clothes—similar clothes, in fact always black or some very dark shade close to it, but of a definitely different cut or material (leather, for instance, instead of cloth). And she couldn’t possibly change her clothes or, worse, have them changed for her, in a semi-public place like the apartment tree—it would be unthinkable, too horribly embarrassing. Or rather—since we all know that the unthinkable and the horribly embarrassing (and the plain horrible too, for that matter) can happen—it would be too grotesque.

  That was her chief trouble about everything, of course, she knew so little about her situation—in fact, knew so little about herself and the general scheme of things that held sway in this area, period. That she suffered from almost total amnesia, that much was clear to her. Usually she assumed that she lived (alone?) in one of the apartments hanging on the tree, or else was forever visiting someone who did, but then why couldn’t she remember the number or somehow get inside that apartment, or come awake inside, or else get out the door into the street if she were headed that way? Why, oh why, couldn’t she once ever wake in a hospital bed?—that would be pure heaven! except for the thought of what kind of a hospital and what things they had passing as doctors and nurses.

  But just as she realized her amnesia, she knew she must have some way of taking care of herself during her unconscious times, or be the beneficiary of another’s or others’ system of taking care of her, for she somehow got her rest and other necessary physical reliefs, she must somehow get enough food and drink to keep her functioning, for she never felt terribly tired or seriously sick or weak and dizzy—except just before her topplings into unconsciousness, though sometimes those came without any warning at all, as sudden as the strike of pentothal.

  She remembered knowing drunks (but not their names—her memory was utterly worthless on names) who lived hours and days of their lives in states of total blackout, safely crossing busy streets, eating meals, even driving cars, without a single blink of remembered awareness, as if they had a guardian angel guiding them, to the point of coming awake in distant cities, not having the ghost of an idea as to how they’d got there. (Well, she could hardly be a drunk; she didn’t stagger and there was never a bottle in her purse, the times she came awake clutching a purse.)

  But those were all deductions and surmises, unanchored and unlabeled memories that bobbed up in her mind and floated there awhile. What did she really know about herself?

  Pitifully little. She didn’t know her name or that of any friend or relative. Address and occupation, too, were blanks. Ditto education, race, religion, and marital status. Oh Christ! she didn’t even know what city she was in or how old she was! and whether she was good-looking, ugly, or merely nondescript. Sometimes one of those last questions would hit her so hard that she would forget and start to look into one of the many mirrors in the apartment tree, or else begin to take off her gloves, so she could check it that way—hey! maybe find a tag with her name on it sewed inside her coat! But any of these actions would, of course, plunge her back into the black unconsciousness from which this time there might be no awakening.

  And what about the general scheme of things that held sway in this area? What did she know about that? Precious little, too. There was this world of the apartment tree which she knew very well although she didn’t permit herself to look at every part of it equally. Mirrors were taboo, unless you were so placed you couldn’t see your own reflection in them; so mostly were people’s faces. People meant danger. Don’t look at them, they might look at you.

  Then there was the outside world, a mysterious and wonderful place, a heaven of delights where there was everything desirable you could think or imagine, where there was freedom and repose. She took this on faith and on the evidence of most of her memories. (Though, sad to say, those memories’ bright colors seemed to fade with time. Having lost names, they tended to lose other details, she suspected. Besides, it was hard to keep them vivid and bright when your only conscious life was a series of same- seeming, frantic, frightened little rushes and hidings and waits in the apartment tree, glued together at the ends like stretches of film—and the glue was black.)

  But between those two worlds, the outside and the inside, separating them, there was a black layer (who knows how thick?) of unspeakable horrors and infinite terrors. What its outer surface was, facing the outside world, she could only guess, but its inside surface was clearly the walls, ceilings, and floors of the apartment tree. That was why she worried so much that she might become forgetful and step through them without intending to—she didn’t know if she were insubstantial enough to do that (though she sometimes felt so), but she might be, or become so, and in any case she didn’t intend to try! And why she had a dread of cracks and crevices and small holes anywhere and things which could go through such cracks and holes, leading logically enough to a fear of rats and mice and cockroaches and water bugs and similar vermin.

  Deep down inside herself she felt quite sure, most of the time, that she spent all her unconscious life in the black layer, and that it was her experiences there, or her dreams there, that infected all her times awake with fear. But it didn’t do to think of that, it was too terrible, and so she tried to occupy her mind fully with her normal worries and dreads, and with observing permitted things in the apartment tree, and with all sorts of little notions and fantasies.

  One of her favorite fantasies, conceived and enjoyed in patches of clear thinking and feeling in the mostly on-guard, frantic stretches of her ragtag waking life, was that she really lived in a lovely modern hospital, occupied a whole wing of it, in fact, the favorite daughter of a billionaire no doubt, where she was cared for by stunningly handsome, sympathetic doctors and bevies of warm-hearted merry nurses who simply cosseted her to swooning with tender loving care, fed her the most delicious foods and drinks, massaged her endlessly, stole kisses sometimes (it was a rather naughty place), and the only drawback was that she was asleep throughout all these delightful operations.

  Ah, but (she fantasized) you could tell just by looking at the girl—her eyes closed, to be sure, but her lips smiling—that somewhere deep within she knew all that was happening, somew
here she enjoyed. She was a sly one!

  And then, when all the hospital was asleep, she would rise silently from her bed, put on her clothes, and still in a profound sleep sneak out of the hospital without waking a soul, hurry to this place, dive in an instant through the horror layer, and come awake!

  But then, unfortunately, because of her amnesia, she would forget the snow white hospital and all her specific night-to-night memories of its delights and her wonderfully clever escapes from it.

  But she could daydream of the hospital to her heart’s content, almost! That alone was a matchless reward, worth everything, if only you looked at it the right way.

  And then after a while, of course, she’d realize it was time to hurry back to the hospital before anyone there woke up and discovered she was gone. So she would, generally without letting on to herself what she was doing, seek or provoke an incident which would hurtle her back into unconsciousness again, transform her into her incredibly clever blacked-out other self who could travel anywhere in the universe unerringly, do almost anything—and with her eyes closed! (It wouldn’t’ do to let the doctors and nurses ever suspect she’d been out of bed. Despite their inexhaustible loving-kindness they’d be sure to do something about it, maybe even come here and get her, and bar her from the apartment tree forever.)

  So even the nicest daydreams had their dark sides.

  As for the worst of her daydreams, the nastiest of imaginings, it didn’t do to think of them at all—they were pure black-layer, through and through. There was the fantasy of the eraser-worms for instance—squirmy, crawling, sleek, horny-armored things about an inch long and of the thickness and semi-rigidity of a pencil eraser or a black telephone cord; once they were loose they could go anywhere, and there were hordes of them.

  She would imagine them... Well, wasn’t it better to imagine them outright than to pretend she’d had a dream about them? for that would be admitting that she might have dreamed about them in the black layer, which would mean she might actually have experienced them in the black layer, wasn’t that so? Well, anyway, she would start by imagining herself in utter darkness. It was strange, wasn’t it, how, not often, but sometimes, you couldn’t keep yourself from imagining the worst things? For a moment they became irresistible, a sort of nasty reverse delight.

  Anyhow, she would imagine she was lying in utter darkness— sometimes she’d close her eyes and cup her hands over them to increase the illusion, and once, alone in the elevator, greatly daring, she had switched off the light—and then she’d feel the first worm touch her toe, then crawl inquisitively, peremptorily between her big toe and the next, as if it owned her. Soon they’d be swarming all over her, investigating every crevice and orifice they reached, finally assaulting her head and face. She’d press her lips tightly together, but then they’d block her nostrils (it took about two of them, thrusting together, to do each of those) and she’d be forced to part her lips to gasp and then they’d writhe inside. She’d squeeze her eyes tight shut, but nevertheless... and she had no way to guard her ears and other entries.

  It was only bearable because you knew you were doing it to yourself and could stop any time you wanted. And maybe it was a sort of test to prove that, in a pinch, you could stand it—she wasn’t sure. And although you told yourself it was nothing but imagination, it did give you ideas about the black layer.

  She’d rouse from such a session shaking her head and with a little indrawn shudder, as if to say, “Who would believe the things she’s capable of?” and “You’re brooding, you’re getting into yourself too much, child. Talk to others. Get out yourself!” (And perhaps it was just as well there was seldom opportunity—long enough lulls—to indulge in such experimenting in the nervous, unpredictable, and sometimes breathless-paced existence of the apartment tree.)

  There were any number of reasons why she couldn’t follow her own advice and speak to others in the apartment tree, strike up conversations, even look at them much, do more than steal infrequent glances at their faces, but the overriding one was the deep conviction that she had no right to be in the apartment tree and that she’d get into serious trouble if she drew attention to herself. She might even be barred from the tree forever, sentenced to the black layer. (And if that last were the ridiculous nonsense idea it sounded like—where was the court and who would pronounce sentence?—why did it give her the cold shivers and a sick depression just to mention it to herself?)

  No, she didn’t have an apartment here, she’d tell herself, or any friend in the building. That was why she never had any keys—or any money either, or any little notebooks in which she could find out things about herself, or letters from others or even bills! No, she was a homeless waif and she had nothing. (The only thing she always or almost always carried was a complete riddle to her: a brass tube slim as a soda straw about four inches long which at one end went through a-smooth cork not much bigger around than an eraser-worm—don’t think of those!)

  At other times she’d tell herself she needn’t have any fear of being spotted, caught, unmasked, shown to be an illegal intruder by the other passers-through of the apartment tree, because she was invisible to them, or almost all of them. The proof of this (which was so obvious, right before your eyes, that you missed it) was simply that none of them noticed her, or spoke to her, or did her the little courtesies which they did each other, such as holding the elevator door for her. She had to move aside for them, not they for her!

  This speculation about being invisible led to another special horror for her. Suppose, in her efforts to discover how old she was, she ever did manage to take off her gloves and found, not the moist hands of a young woman, nor yet the dry vein-crawling ones of a skinny old hag, but simply emptiness? What if she managed to open her coat and found herself, chin tucked in, staring down at lining? What if she looked into a mirror and saw nothing, except the wall behind her, or else only another mirror with reflections of reflections going back to infinity?

  What if she were a ghost? Although it was long ago, or seemed long ago, she could recall, she thought, the dizzying chill that thought had given her the first time she’d had it. It fitted. Ghosts were supposed to haunt one place and to appear and disappear by fits and starts, and even then to be visible only to the sensitive few. None of the ghost stories she knew told it from the ghosts’ side—what they thought and felt, how much they understood, and whether they ever knew what they were (ghosts) and what they were doing (haunting).

  (And there even had been the “sensitive few” who had seemed to see her—and she looked back at them flirtatiously—though she didn’t like to remember those episodes because they frightened her and made her feel foolish—whyever had she flirted? taken that risk?—and in the end made her mind go blurry. There’d been that big fat boy—whatever had she seen in him?—and before him a gentle old man, and before him— no, she certainly didn’t have to push her memory back that far, no one could make her!)

  But now that thought—that she might be a ghost—had become only one more of her familiar fancies, coming back into her mind every once in a while as regular as clockwork and with a little but not much of the original shock the idea had once given her. “Part of my repertoire,” she told herself drolly. (God knows how she’d manage to stand her existence if things didn’t seem funny to her once in a while.)

  But most times weren’t so funny. She kept coming back and coming back to what seemed after all the chief question: How long had her conscious life, this conscious life, lasted? And the only final answer she could get to this, in moments of unpanic, was that she couldn’t tell.

  It might be months or years. Long enough so that although not looking at their faces, she’d gotten to know the tenants of the apartment tree by their clothes and movements, the little things they said to each other, their gaits and favorite expressions. Gotten to know them well enough so that she could recognize them when they’d changed their clothes, put on new shoes, slowed down their gait, begun to use a cane. Sometimes comple
tely new ones would appear and then slowly become old familiars—new tenants moving in. And then these old familiars might in their turn disappear—moved away, or died. My God, had she been here for decades? She remembered a horror story in which a beautiful young woman woke from a coma to find herself dying of old age. Would it be like that for her when she at last faced the mirror?

  And if she were a ghost, would not the greatest horror for such a being be to die as a ghost?—to feel you had one tiny corner of existence securely yours, from which you could from time to time glimpse the passing show, and then be mercilessly swept out of that?

  Or it might, on the other hand, be only minutes, hours, days at most—of strangely clear-headed fever dreaming, or of eternity- seeming withdrawal from a drug. Memory’s fallible. Mind’s capable of endless tricks. How could you be sure?

  Well, whatever the truth was about the “How long?” business, she needn’t worry about it for a while. The last few days (and weeks, or hours and minutes, who cared?) she’d been having a brand-new adventure. Yes, you could call it a flirtation if you wanted, but whatever you called it and in spite of the fact that it had its bad and scary parts, it had made her feel happier, gayer, braver, even more devil-may-care than she had in ages. Why, already it had revealed to her, what she’d seen in the big fat boy and in the old man before him. My goodness, she’d simply seen them, felt interest in, them, felt concern for them, yes, loved them. For that was the way it was now.

  But that was then and this was now.

  From the first time she’d happened to see Ryker (she didn’t; know his name then, of course) gazing so admiringly and wonderstruck at her from the front door, she’d known he couldn’t possibly mean her harm, be one of the dangerous ones who’d send her back to the hospital or the black layer, or whatever. What had surprised her was the extent of her own inward reaction. She had a friend!— someone who thought she amounted to something, who cared. It made her dizzy, delirious. She managed to walk only a few steps, breasting the emotional tide, before she collapsed happily into the arms of darkness.