Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  “I’ve got to get a grip on myself,” he found himself muttering tritely as the elevator lowered him noiselessly to the basement.

  He kept repeating it as he hurried to the locker room, left his coat and lunch, gave his hair a quick careful brushing, hurried again through the still-empty aisles, and slipped in behind the socks-and-handkerchiefs counter.

  “It’s just nerves. I’m not crazy. But I’ve got to get a grip on myself.”

  “Of course you’re crazy. Don’t you know that talking to yourself and not noticing anybody is the first symptom of insanity?”

  Gertrude Rees had stopped on her way over to neckties. Light brown hair, painstakingly waved and ordered, framed a serious not-too-pretty face.

  “Sorry,” he murmured. “I’m jittery.” What else could you say? Even to Gertrude.

  She grimaced sympathetically. Her hand slipped across the counter to squeeze his for a moment.

  But even as he watched her walk away, his hands automatically setting out the display boxes, the new question was furiously hammering in his brain. What else could you say? What words could you use to explain it? Above all, to whom could you tell it? A dozen names printed themselves in his mind and were as quickly discarded.

  One remained. Tom Goodsell. He would tell Tom. Tonight, after the first-aid class.

  Shoppers were already filtering into the basement. “He wears size eleven, Madam? Yes, we have some new patterns. These are silk and lisle.” But their ever-increasing numbers gave him no sense of security. Crowding the aisles, they became shapes behind which something might hide. He was continually peering past them. A little child who wandered behind the counter and pushed at his knee, gave him a sudden fright.

  Lunch came early for him. He arrived at the locker room in time to catch hold of Gertrude Rees as she retreated uncertainly from the dark doorway.

  “Dog,” she gasped. “Huge one. Gave me an awful start. Talk about jitters! Wonder where he could have come from? Watch out. He looked nasty.”

  But David, impelled by sudden recklessness born of fear and shock, was already inside and switching on the light.

  “No dog in sight,” he told her.

  “You’re crazy. It must be there.” Her face, gingerly poked through the doorway, lengthened in surprise. “But I tell you I—Oh, I guess it must have pushed out through the other door.”

  He did not tell her that the other door was bolted.

  “I suppose a customer brought it in,” she rattled on nervously. “Some of them can’t seem to shop unless they’ve got a pair of Russian wolfhounds. Though that kind usually keeps out of the bargain basement. I suppose we ought to find it before we eat lunch. It looked dangerous.”

  But he hardly heard her. He had just noticed that his locker was open and his overcoat dragged down on the floor. The brown paper bag containing his lunch had been torn open and the contents rummaged through, as if an animal had been nosing at it. As he stooped, he saw that there were greasy, black stains on the sandwiches, and a familiar stale stench rose to his nostrils. That night he found Tom Goodsell in a nervous, expansive mood. The latter had been called up and would start for camp in a week. As they sipped coffee in the empty little restaurant, Tom poured out a flood of talk about old times. David would have been able to listen better, had not the uncertain, shadowy shapes outside the window been continually distracting his attention. Eventually he found an opportunity to turn the conversation down the channels which absorbed his mind.

  “The supernatural beings of a modern city?” Tom answered, seeming to find nothing out of the way in the question. “Sure, they’d be different from the ghosts of yesterday. Each culture creates its own ghosts. Look, the Middle Ages built cathedrals, and pretty soon there were little gray shapes gliding around at night to talk with the gargoyles. Same thing ought to happen to us, with our skyscrapers and factories.” He spoke eagerly, with all his old poetic flare, as if he’d just been meaning to discuss this very matter. He would talk about anything tonight. “I’ll tell you how it works, Dave. We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn’t we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can’t take root in the new environment. Science goes materialistic, proving that there isn’t anything in the universe except tiny bundles of energy. As if, for that matter, a tiny bundle of energy mightn’t mean anything.

  “But wait, that’s just the beginning. We go on inventing and discovering and organizing. We cover the earth with huge structures. We pile them together in great heaps that make old Rome and Alexandria and Babylon seem almost toy-towns by comparison. The new environment, you see, is forming.”

  David stared at him with incredulous fascination, profoundly disturbed. This was not at all what he had expected or hoped for—this almost telepathic prying into his most hidden fears. He had wanted to talk about these things—yes—but in a skeptical reassuring way. Instead, Tom sounded almost serious. David started to speak, but Tom held up his finger for silence, aping the gesture of a schoolteacher.

  “Meanwhile, what’s happening inside each one of us? I’ll tell you. All sorts of inhibited emotions are accumulating. Fear is accumulating. Horror is accumulating. A new kind of awe of the mysteries of the universe is accumulating. A psychological environment is forming, along with the physical one. Wait, let me finish. Our culture becomes ripe for infection. From somewhere. It’s just like a bacteriologist’s culture—I didn’t intend the pun—when it gets to the right temperature and consistency for supporting a colony of germs. Similarly, our culture suddenly spawns a horde of demons. And, like germs, they have a peculiar affinity for our culture. They’re unique. They fit in. You wouldn’t find the same kind any other time or place.

  “How would you know when the infection had taken place? Say, you’re taking this pretty seriously, aren’t you? Well, so am I, maybe. Why, they’d haunt us, terrorize us, try to rule us. Our fears would be their fodder. A parasite-host relationship. Supernatural symbiosis. Some of us—the sensitive ones— would notice them sooner than others. Some of us might see them without knowing what they were. Others might know about them without seeing them. Like me, eh?

  “What was that? I didn’t catch your remark. Oh, about werewolves. Well, that’s a pretty special question, but tonight I’d take a crack at anything. Yes, I think there’d be werewolves among our demons, but they wouldn’t be much like the old ones. No nice clean fur, white teeth and shining eyes. Oh, no. Instead you’d get some nasty hound that wouldn’t surprise you if you saw it nosing at a garbage pail or crawling out from under a truck. Frighten and terrorize you, yes. But surprise, no. It would fit into the environment. Look as if it belonged in a city and smell the same. Because of the twisted emotions that would be its food, your emotions and mine. A matter of diet.”

  Tom Goodsell chuckled loudly and lit another cigarette. But David only stared at the scarred counter. He realized he couldn’t tell Tom what had happened this morning—or this noon. Of course, Tom would immediately scoff and be skeptical. But that wouldn’t get around the fact that Tom had already agreed—agreed in partial jest perhaps, but still agreed. And Tom himself confirmed this, when, in a more serious, friendlier voice, he said:

  “Oh, I know I’ve talked a lot of rot tonight, but still, you know, the way things are, there’s something to it. At least, I can’t express my feelings any other way.”

  They shook hands at the corner, and David rode the surging street car home through a city whose every bolt and stone seemed subtly infected, whose every noise carried shuddering overtones. His mother was waiting up for him, and after he had wearily argued with her about getting more rest and seen her off to bed, he lay sleepless himself, all through the night, like a child in a strange house, listening to each tiny noise and watching intently each changing shape taken by the shadows.

  That night nothing shouldered through the door or pressed its muzzle against the window pane.

  Yet he found that it cost him an effort to go down to the departme
nt store next morning, so conscious was he of the thing’s presence in the faces and forms, the structures and machines around him. It was as if he were forcing himself into the heart of a monster. Detestation of the city grew within him. As yesterday, the crowded aisles seemed only hiding places, and he avoided the locker room. Gertrude Rees remarked sympathetically on his fatigued look, and he took the opportunity to invite her out that evening. Of course, he told himself while they sat watching the movie, she wasn’t very close to him. None of the girls had been close to him—a not-very-competent young man tied down to the task of supporting parents whose little reserve of money had long ago dribbled away. He had dated them for a while, talked to them, told them his beliefs and ambitions, and then one by one they had drifted off to marry other men. But that did not change the fact that he needed the wholesomeness Gertrude could give him.

  And as they walked home through the chilly night, he found himself talking inconsequentially and laughing at his own jokes. Then, as they turned to one another in the shadowy vestibule and she lifted her lips, he sensed her features altering queerly, lengthening. “A funny sort of light here,” he thought as he took her in his arms. But the thin strip of fur on her collar grew matted and oily under his touch, her fingers grew hard and sharp against his back, he felt her teeth pushing out against her lips, and then a sharp, prickling sensation as of icy needles.

  Blindly he pushed away from her, then saw—and the sight stopped him dead—that she had not changed at all or that whatever change had been was now gone.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” he heard her ask startledly. “What’s happened? What’s that you’re mumbling? Changed, you say? What’s changed? Infected with it? What do you mean? For heaven’s sake, don’t talk that way. You’ve done it to me, you say? Done what?” He felt her hand on his arm, a soft hand now. “No, you’re not crazy. Don’t think of such things. But you’re neurotic and maybe a little batty. For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together.”

  “I don’t know what happened to me,” he managed to say, in his right voice again. Then, because he had to say something more: “My nerves all jumped, like someone had snapped them.”

  He expected her to be angry, but she seemed only puzzledly sympathetic, as if she liked him but had become afraid of him, as if she sensed something wrong in him beyond her powers of understanding or repair.

  “Do take care of yourself,” she said doubtfully. “We’re all a little crazy now and then, I guess. My nerves get like wires too. Goodnight.”

  He watched her disappear up the stair. Then he turned and ran.

  At home his mother was waiting up again, close to the hall radiator to catch its dying warmth, the inevitable shapeless bathrobe wrapped about her. Because of a new thought that had come to the forefront of his brain, he avoided her embrace and, after a few brief words, hurried off toward his room. But she followed him down the hall.

  “You’re not looking at all well, David,” she told him anxiously, whispering because Father might be asleep. “Are you sure you’re not getting flu again? Don’t you think you should see the doctor tomorrow?” Then she went on quickly to another subject, using that nervously apologetic tone with which he was so familiar. “I shouldn’t bother you with it, David, but you really must be more careful of the bedclothes. You’d laid something greasy on the coverlet and there were big, black stains.”

  He was pushing open the bedroom door. Her words halted his hand only for an instant. How could you avoid the thing by going one place rather than another?

  “And one thing more,” she added, as he switched on the lights. “Will you try to get some cardboard tomorrow to black out the windows? They’re out of it at the stores around here and the radio says we should be ready.”

  “Yes, I will. Goodnight, mother.”

  “Oh, and something else,” she persisted, lingering uneasily just beyond the door. “That really must be a dead rat in the walls. The smell keeps coming in waves. I spoke to the real-estate agent, but he hasn’t done anything about it. I wish you’d speak to him.”

  “Yes. Goodnight, Mother.”

  He waited until he heard her door softly close. He lit a cigarette and slumped down on the bed to try and think as clearly as he could about something to which everyday ideas could not be applied.

  Question One (and he realized with an ironic twinge that it sounded melodramatic enough for a dime-novel): Was Gertrude Rees what might be called, for want of a better term, a werewolf? Answer: Almost certainly not, in any ordinary sense of the word. What had momentarily come to her had been something he had communicated to her. It had happened because of his presence. And either his own shock had interrupted the transformation or else Gertrude Rees had not proved a suitable vehicle of incarnation for the thing.

  Question Two: Might he not communicate the thing to some other person? Answer: Yes. For a moment his thinking paused, as there swept before his mind’s eye kaleidoscopic visions of the faces which might, without warning, begin to change in his presence: His mother, his father, Tom Goodsell, the prim-mouthed real estate agent, a customer at the store, a panhandler who would approach him on a rainy night.

  Question Three: Was there any escape from the thing? Answer: No. And yet—There was one bare possibility. Escape from the city. The city had bred the thing; might it not be chained to the city? It hardly seemed to be a reasonable possibility; how could a supernatural entity be tied down to one locality? And yet—he stepped quickly to the window and, after a moment’s hesitation, jerked it up. Sounds which had been temporarily blotted out by his thinking now poured past him in quadrupled volume, mixing together discordantly like instruments tuning up for some titanic symphony—the racking surge of street car and elevated, the coughing of a locomotive in the yards, the hum of tires on asphalt and the growl of engines, the mumbling of radio voices, the faint mournful note of distant horns. But now they were no longer separate sounds. They all issued from one cavernous throat—a single moan, infinitely penetrating, infinitely menacing. He slammed down the window and put his hands to his ears. He switched out the lights and threw himself on the bed, burying his head in the pillows. Still the sound came through. And it was then he realized that ultimately, whether he wanted to or not, the thing would drive him from the city. The moment would come when the sound would begin to penetrate too deeply, to reverberate too unendurably in his ears.

  The sight of so many faces, trembling on the brink of an almost unimaginable change, would become too much for him. And he would leave whatever he was doing and go away.

  The moment came a little after four o’clock next afternoon. He could not say what sensation it was that, adding its straw-weight to the rest, drove him to take the step. Perhaps it was a heaving movement in the rack of dresses two counters away; perhaps it was the snoutlike appearance momentarily taken by a crumpled piece of cloth. Whatever it was, he slipped from behind the counter without a word, leaving a customer to mutter indignantly, and walked up the stair and out into the street, moving almost like a sleep-walker yet constantly edging from side to side to avoid any direct contact with the crowd engulfing him. Once in the street, he took the first car that came by, never noting its number, and found himself an empty place in the corner of the front platform.

  With ominous slowness at first, then with increasing rapidity the heart of the city was left behind. A great gloomy bridge spanning an oily river was passed over, and the frowning cliffs of the buildings grew lower. Warehouses gave way to factories, factories to apartment buildings, apartment buildings to dwellings which were at first small and dirty white, then large and mansion-like but very much decayed, then new and monotonous in their uniformity. Peoples of different economic status and racial affiliation filed in and emptied out as the different strata of the city were passed through. Finally the vacant lots began to come, at first one by one, then in increasing numbers, until the houses were spaced out two or three to a block.

  “End of the line,” sang out the conductor, and withou
t hesitation David swung down from the platform and walked on in the same direction that the street car had been going. He did not hurry. He did not lag. He moved as an automaton that had been wound up and set going, and will not stop until it runs down.

  The sun was setting smokingly red in the west. He could not see it because of a tree-fringed rise ahead, but its last rays winked at him from the window panes of little houses blocks off to the right and left, as if flaming lights had been lit inside. As he moved they flashed on and off like signals. Two blocks further on the sidewalk ended, and he walked down the center of a muddy lane. After passing a final house, the lane also came to an end, giving way to a narrow dirt path between high weeds. The path led up the rise and through the fringe of trees. Emerging on the other side, he slowed his pace and finally stopped, so bewilderingly fantastic was the scene spread out before him. The sun had set, but high cloud-banks reflected its light, giving a spectral glow to the landscape.

  Immediately before him stretched the equivalent of two or three empty blocks, but beyond that began a strange realm that seemed to have been plucked from another climate and another geological system and set down here outside the city. There were strange trees and shrubs, but, most striking of all, great uneven blocks of reddish stone which rose from the earth at unequal intervals and culminated in a massive central eminence fifty or sixty feet high.

  As he gazed, the light drained from the landscape, as if a cloak had been flipped over the earth, and in the sudden twilight there rose from somewhere in the region ahead a faint howling, mournful and sinister, but in no way allied to the other howling that had haunted him day and night. Once again he moved forward, but now impulsively toward the source of the new sound.

  A small gate in a high wire fence pushed open, giving him access to the realm of rocks. He found himself following a gravel path between thick shrubs and trees. At first it seemed quite dark, in contrast to the open land behind him. And with every step he took, the hollow howling grew closer. Finally the path turned abruptly around a shoulder of rock, and he found himself at the sound’s source.