Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  The oldest and wealthiest man in the Milky Way and its loveliest girl laughed as they left the gypsy’s tent pitched just outside the jewel-pillared space-field of the most exclusive pleasure planet between the galaxy’s two dizzily-whirling, starry arms. The gypsy’s black cat, gliding past them back into the tent, only smiled cryptically.

  A private, eiderdown-surfaced slidewalk, rolled out like the red carpet of ancient cliche, received the begemmed slippers of the honeymooning couple and carried them toward the most diamond-glittering pillar of them all, the private hyperspace yacht Eros of the galactic shipping magnate Piliph Foelitsack and his dazzling young bride Annaoj.

  He looked 21 and was 20 times that old. Cosmetic surgery and organ replacements and implanted featherweight power-prosthetics and pacemakers had worked their minor miracles. At any one time there were three physicians in the Eros listening in on the functionings of his body.

  She looked and was 17, but the wisdom in her eyes was that of Eve, of Helen of Troy, of Cleopatra, of Forzane. It was also the wisdom of Juliet, of Iseult, of Francesca da Rimini. It was a radiant but not a rational wisdom, and it had a frightening ingredient that had been known to make nurses and lady’s maids and the wives of planetary presidents and systemic emperors shiver alike.

  Together now on the whispering white slidewalk, planning their next pleasures, they looked the pinnacle of cosmic romance fulfilled—he dashing and handsome and young, except that there was something just a shade careful about the way he carried himself; she giddy and slim with a mind that was all sentimental or amorous whim, except for that diamond touch of terrifying fixed white light in her most melting or mischievous glance. Despite or perhaps because of those two exceptions, they seemed more akin to the sparkling stars above them than even to the gorgeous pleasure planet around them.

  He had been born in a ghetto on Andvari III and had fought his way up the razor-runged ladder of economic power until he owned fleets of hyperspace freighters, a dozen planets, and the governments of ten times that many.

  She had been born in a slum on Aphrodite IV, owning only herself. It had taken her six Terran months to bring herself to the attention of Piliph Foelitsack by way of three beauty contests and one bit part in a stereographic all-senses sex-film, and six more months to become his seventeenth wife instead of one more of his countless casual mistresses.

  The beepers of social gossip everywhere had hinted discreetly about the infatuation-potential of fringe senile megabillionaires and the coldly murderous greed of teenage starlets. And Annaoj and Piliph Foelitsack had smiled at this gossip, since they knew they loved each other and why: for their matching merciless determination to get what they wanted and keep it, and for the distance that had been between them and was no longer. Of the two, Annaoj’s love was perhaps the greater, accounting for the icy, fanatic glint in her otherwise nymphet’s eyes.

  They had laughed on leaving the drab tent of the gypsy fortuneteller, who herself owned a small, beat-up spaceship covered with cabalistic signs, because the last thing she had said to the shipping king, fixing his bright youthful eyes with her bleared ones, had been, “Piliph Foelitsack, you have journeyed far, very far, for such a young man, yet you shall make even longer journeys hereafter. Your past travels will be trifles compared to your travels to come.”

  Both Piliph and Annaoj knew that he had been once to the Andromeda Galaxy and twice to both Magellanic Clouds, though they had not told the silly old gypsy so, being despite their iron wills kindly lovers, still enamored of everything in the cosmos by virtue of their mutual love. They also knew that Piliph had determined to restrict his jauntings henceforth to the Milky Way, to keep reasonably close to the greatest geriatric scientists, and they were both reconciled, at least by day, to the fact that despite all his defenses, death would come for him in ten or twenty years.

  Yet, although they did not now tell each other so, the gypsy’s words had given a spark of real hope to their silly night-promises under the stars like gems and the galaxies like puffs of powder that: “We will live and love forever.” Their loveliest night had been spent a hundred light-years outside the Milky Way—it was to be Piliph’s last extragalactic venture—where the Eros had emerged briefly from hyperspace and they had lolled and luxuriated for hours under the magnifying crystal skylight of the Master Stateroom, watching only the far-off galaxies, with all of their moiling, toiling home-galaxy out of sight beneath the ship.

  But now, as if the cryptic universe had determined to give an instant sardonic rejoinder to the gypsy’s prediction, the eiderdown slidewalk had not murmured them halfway to the Eros when a look of odd surprise came into Piliph’s bright youthful eyes and he clutched at his heart and swayed and would have toppled except that Annaoj caught him in her strong slender arms and held him to her tightly.

  Something had happened in the body of Piliph Foelitsack that could not be dealt with by all its pacemakers and its implanted and remotely controlled hormone dispensers, nor by any of the coded orders frantically tapped out by the three physicians monitoring its organs and systems.

  It took thirty seconds for the ambulance of the Eros to hurtle out from the yacht on a track paralleling the slidewalk and brake to a bone-jolting silent halt.

  During that half minute Annaoj watched the wrinkles come out on her husband’s smooth face, like stars at nightfall in the sky of a planet in a star cluster. She wasted one second on the white-hot impulse to have the gypsy immediately strangled, but she knew that the great aristocrats of the cosmos do not take vengeance on its vermin and that in any event she had far more pressing business with which to occupy herself fully tonight. She clasped the pulseless body a trifle more tightly, feeling the bones and prosthetics through the layer of slack flesh.

  In two minutes more, in the surgery of the Eros, Piliph’s body was in a dissipatory neutrino field, which instantly sent all its heat packing off at the speed of light, but in particles billions of times slimmer than the photons of heat, so that the body was supercooled to the temperature of frozen helium without opportunity for a single disruptive crystal to form.

  Then without consulting the spacefield dispatching station or any other authority of the pleasure planet, Annaoj ordered the Eros blasted into hyperspace and driven at force speed to the galaxy’s foremost geriatrics clinic on Menkar V, though it lay halfway across the vast Milky Way.

  During the anxious, grueling trip, she did only one thing quite out of the ordinary. She had her husband’s supercooled body sprayed with a transparent insulatory film, which would adequately hold its coolth for a matter of days, and placed in the Master Stateroom. Once a week the body was briefly returned to the dissipatory neutrino field, to bring its temperature down again to within a degree of zero Kelvin.

  Otherwise she behaved as she always had, changing costume seven times a day, paying great attention to her coiffure and to her cosmetic and juvenation treatments, being idly charming to the officers and stewards.

  But she spent hours in her husband’s office, studying his business and working to the edge of exhaustion his three secretaries. And she always took her small meals in the Master Stateroom.

  On Menkar V they told her, after weeks of test and study, that her husband was beyond reawakening, at least at the present state of medical skill, and to come back in ten years. More would be known then.

  At that, Annaoj nodded frigidly and took up the reins of her husband’s business, conducting them entirely from the Eros as it skipped about through space and hyperspace. Under her guidance the Foelitsack economic empire prospered still more than it had under its founder. She successfully fought or bought off the claims of Piliph’s eleven surviving divorced wives, a hundred of his relatives and a score of his prime managers.

  She regularly returned to Menkar V and frequently visited other clinics and sought out famous healers. She became expert at distinguishing the charlatans from the dedicated, the conceited from the profound. Yet at times she also consulted sorcerers and wizards and
witchdoctors. Incantations in exotic tongues and lights were spoken and glowed over Philiph’s frigid form, extraterrestrial stenches filled the surgery of the Eros, and there were focused there the meditations of holy creatures which resembled man less than a spider does—while three or four fuming yet dutiful doctors of the Eros’ dozen waited for the crucial moment in the ceremony when they would obediently work a five-second reversal of the neutrino field to bring the body briefly to normal temperature to determine whether the magic had worked.

  But neither science nor sorcery could revive him.

  She bullied many a police force and paid many a detective agency to hunt down the gypsy with the black cat, but the old crone and her runic spaceship had vanished as utterly as the vital spark in Piliph Foelitsack. No one could tell whether Annaoj really believed that the gypsy had had something to do with the striking down of her husband and might be able to bring him alive, or whether the witch had merely become another counter in the sorcery game of which Annaoj had suddenly grown so fond.

  In the course of time Annaoj took many lovers. When she tired of one, she would lead him for the first time into the Master Stateroom of the Eros and show him the filmed and frosty body of her husband and send him away without as much as a parting touch of her fingertips and then lie down beside the cold, cold form under the cold, cold stars of the skylight.

  And she never once let another woman set foot in that room.

  Not the humblest, nor ugliest maid. Not the greatest sculptress of Pleiades. Not the most feared and revered sorceress in the Hyades.

  She became known as Crazy Annaoj, though no one thought it to her face or whispered it within a parsec of her.

  When she still looked 17, though her age was 70 times that—for sciences of geriatrics and juvenation had progressed greatly since her husband’s collapse—she felt an unfamiliar weariness creeping on her and she ordered the Eros to make once more for Menkar V at force speed.

  The Eros never emerged from hyperspace. Most say she was lost scuttled by Annaoj as she felt death coming on her. A few maintain she exited into altogether another universe, where Crazy Annaoj is still keeping up her search for the healer who can revive Piliph, or playing her game with the doctors and witchdoctors and with her lovers.

  But in any case the gypsy’s prediction was fulfilled, for in the course of Annaoj’s voyages, the body of Piliph Foelitsack had been carried twice to Andromeda and also to two galaxies in Virgo, three in Leo and one in Coma Berenices.

  THE HOUND

  David Lashley huddled the skimpy blankets around him and dully watched the cold light of morning seep through the window and stiffen in his room. He could not recall the exact nature of the terror against which he had fought his way to wakefulness, except that it had been in some way gigantic and had brought back to him the fear-ridden helplessness of childhood. It had lurked near him all night and finally it had crouched over him and thrust down toward his face.

  The radiator whined dismally with the first push of steam from the basement, and he shivered in response. He thought that his shivering was an ironically humorous recognition of the fact that his room was never warm except when he was out of it. But there was more to it than that. The penetrating whine had touched something in his mind without being quite able to dislodge it into consciousness. The mounting rumble of city traffic, together with the hoarse panting of a locomotive in the railroad yards, mingled themselves with the nearer sound, intensifying its disturbing tug at hidden fears. For a few moments he lay inert, listening. There was an unpleasant stench too in the room, he noticed, but that was nothing to be surprised at. He had experienced more than once the strange olfactory illusions that are part of the aftermath of flu. Then he heard his mother moving about laboriously in the kitchen, and that stung him into action.

  “Have you another cold?” she asked, watching him anxiously as he hurriedly spooned in a boiled egg before its heat should be entirely lost in the chilly plate. “Are you sure?” she persisted. “I heard someone sniffling all night.”

  “Perhaps Father—” he began. She shook her head. “No, he’s all right. His side was giving him a lot of pain yesterday evening, but he slept quietly enough. That’s why I thought it must be you, David. I got up twice to see, but”—her voice became a little doleful—”I know you don’t like me to come poking into your room at all hours.”

  “That’s not true!” he contradicted. She looked so frail and little and worn, standing there in front of the stove with one of Father’s shapeless bathrobes hugged around her, so like a sick sparrow trying to appear chipper, that a futile irritation, an indignation that he couldn’t help her more, welled up within him, choking his voice a little. “It’s that I don’t want you getting up all the time and missing your sleep. You have enough to do taking care of Father all day long. And I’ve told you a dozen times that you mustn’t make breakfast for me. You know the doctor says you need all the rest you can get.”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” she answered quickly, “but I was sure you’d caught another cold. All night long I kept hearing it—a sniffling and a snuffling—”

  Coffee spilled over into the saucer as David set down the half-raised cup. His mother’s words had reawakened the elusive memory, and now that it had come back he did not want to look it in the face.

  “It’s late, I’ll have to rush,” he said.

  She accompanied him to the door, so accustomed to his hastiness that she saw in it nothing unusual. Her wan voice followed him down the dark apartment stair: “I hope a rat hasn’t died in the walls. Did you notice the nasty smell?”

  And then he was out of the door and had lost himself and his memories in the early morning rush of the city. Tires singing on asphalt. Cold engines coughing, then starting with a roar. Heels clicking on the sidewalk, hurrying, trotting, converging on street car intersections and elevated stations. Low heels, high heels, heels of stenographers bound downtown, and of war workers headed for the outlying factories. Shouts of newsboys and glimpses of headlines: “AIR BLITZ ON... BATTLESHIP SUNK... BLACKOUT EXPECTED HERE... DRIVEN BACK.”

  But sitting in the stuffy solemnity of the street car, it was impossible to keep from thinking of it any longer. Besides, the stale medicinal smell of the yellow woodwork immediately brought back the memory of that other smell. David Lashley clenched his hands in his overcoat pockets and asked himself how it was possible for a grown man to be so suddenly overwhelmed by a fear from childhood. Yet in the same instant he knew with acute certainty that this was no childhood fear, this thing that had pursued him up the years, growing ever more vast and menacing, until, like the demon wolf Fenris at Ragnorak, its gaping jaws scraped heaven and earth, seeking to open wider. This thing that had dogged his footsteps, sometimes so far behind that he forget its existence, but now so close that he could feel its cold sick breath on his neck. Werewolves? He had read up on such things at the library, fingering dusty books in uneasy fascination, but what he had read made them seem innocuous and without significance—dead superstitions—in comparison with this thing that was part and parcel of the great sprawling cities and chaotic peoples of the Twentieth Century, so much a part that he, David Lashley, winced at the endlessly varying howls and growls of traffic and industry—sounds at once animal and mechanical; shrank back with a start from the sight of headlights at night—those dazzling unwinking eyes; trembled uncontrollably if he heard the scuffling of rats in an alley or caught sight in the evenings of the shadowy forms of lean mongrel dogs looking for food in vacant lots. “Sniffling and snuffling.” his mother had said. What better words could you want to describe the inquisitive, persistent pryings of the beast that had crouched outside the bedroom door all night in his dreams and then finally pushed through to plant its dirty paws on his chest. For a moment he saw, superimposed on the yellow ceiling and garish advertising placards of the streetcar, its malformed muzzle... the red eyes like thickly scummed molten metal... the jaws slavered with thick black oil….

  Wild
ly he looked around at his fellow passengers, seeking to blot out that vision, but it seemed to have slipped down into all of them, infecting them, giving their features an ugly canine cast—the slack, receding jaw of an otherwise pretty blond, the narrow head and wide-set eyes of an unshaven mechanic returning from the night shift. He sought refuge in the open newspaper of the man sitting beside him, studying it intently without regard for the impression of rudeness he was creating. But there was a wolf in the cartoon and he quickly turned away to stare through the dusty pane at the stores sliding by. Gradually the sense of oppressive menace lifted a little. But the cartoon had established another contact in his brain—the memory of a cartoon from the First World War. What the wolf or hound in that earlier cartoon had represented—war, famine, or the ruthlessness of the enemy—he could not say, but it had haunted his dreams for weeks, crouched in corners, and waited for him at the head of the stairs. Later he had tried to explain to friends the horrors that may lie in the concrete symbolisms and personifications of a cartoon if interpreted naively by a child, but had been unable to get his idea across.

  The conductor growled out the name of a downtown street, and once again he lost himself in the crowd, finding relief in the never- ceasing movement, the brushing of shoulders against his own. But as the time-clock emitted its delayed musical bong! and he turned to stick his card in the rack, the girl at the desk looked up and remarked, “Aren’t you going to punch in for your dog, too?”

  “My dog?”

  “Well, it was there just a second ago. Came in right behind you, looking as if it owned you—I mean you owned it.” She giggled briefly through her nose. “One of Mrs. Montmorency’s mastiffs come to inspect conditions among the working class, I presume.”

  He continued to stare at her blankly. “A joke,” she explained patiently, and returned to her work.