Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  Club dates can be anything from a company dinner for the whole family to an army of drunken apes at a so-called hunting lodge in the middle of an impenetrable forest. Business men, lodge brothers, politicos, actual fishermen, or just plain boobs, Usually the show would carry a pianist or even a band but once they had to fall back on a member of the audience who could only play the first six bars of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”... two hours of that, over, and over, while different girls stripped, can you imagine? Sometimes they’d have an auditorium; sometimes the stage would be the back end of a panel truck. Once the apes got the idea they’d grab Skinny off the back of the truck and throw her around among them... she’d been doing her half- and-half apache number and the year before there’d been a little stripper who’d let the apes give her the pass-around treatment. Skinny had to climb to escape. She was marooned on the roof of that truck for half and hour, but every ape that grabbed at her ankle got his fingers stamped on. So Skinny says. Oh, those club dates! All those effing club dates! as one of Skinny’s earthier associates refers to them.

  Sorry you have to go, friend. Gentlemen, may I buy us a beer around? I couldn’t help hearing the three of you discussing the perennial problem of how to make money. Now at a modest estimate my wife Skinny thinks up in a month more plans for making money than the four of us will in all our lives. That is, if you gentlemen are anything like me. Arabian restaurants where you sit on pillows, dog walking services that also change cat boxes and clean the birdcage, a chain of friendly American motels across Mexico that specialize in New England cooking, a shoppers’ escort and buying-guide service, a distressed party givers’ bureau that does everything from taking unruly drunks off your hands to emptying ashtrays the next morning... you name it, Skinny’s thought of it and threshed it all out... along with all the more conventional business enterprises. One new way a week of making a million dollars... that’s par for Skinny.

  But you can’t understand how intense Skinny is about her ideas for making money unless you’ve seen her make a pitch. She gets some of us together, me and two or three other lads, and she hands us a drink around and then she gives us a half-hour sales talk, all about initiative and push and golden opportunity. The NAM should hire Skinny, they really should... you never heard anybody build up industry, advertising, and the rewards of success the way she does. Her face just glows. She generally tops it off with something like, “Gentlemen, I have given you your choice: sit around on your fannies all your lives in Noplace Alley or put a down payment on a five-figure address on Easy Street!” Sometimes she says six-figure.

  Of course it turns out then that we all have to put up money or go out and start changing cat boxes, managing unruly drunks and transforming old grocery stores into Arabian restaurants. The other lads butter up Skinny and then back down, and I explain to her there isn’t much I can do all by myself, though she sometimes keeps after me for a while.

  Nothing discourages her. She needs that million-dollar plan a week just like she needs to nest-build every six months.

  The puzzling thing is that with all her brains and drive Skinny’s never been able to get a good job outside show business. I guess it’s the same way as with ballet... anybody who might hire Skinny is scared of her. Her drive shows through. They figure that if they gave her a toehold she’d own the business in a year. Just the same, She’s wonderful.

  Right now she’s got a job as a demonstrator at the big dime store. That’s right, that red-head who’s always chopping up vegetables with a patent gadget, or putting a rainbow oil-slick in china, or sample-enameling a teenager’s nails ten different shades, or managing a tableful of tiny clockwork men in striped pants... that’s Skinny. She gets a chance to sales talk and explain and do something all day long, but it never uses up all her energy. They say they never had anybody like her. The manager sometimes brings her home.

  You see, Skinny has the touch of imagination. Another demonstrator would never have thought of the ten-shades idea, which has become a high-school fad, she tells me. Or of having the little men march off a plank and drown in a sea of green cotton wool, She put live ants in a kaleidoscope, but they wouldn’t let her demonstrate that one at the store. She brought it home. It was quite weird to look into. Once she tried writing stories for Weird Tales but they all came back with the comment “Too horrible.” Or maybe it was “Needlessly horrible.” I never understood that. As that so-called screenwriter told Skinny, “Even Shakespeare got called too horrible.” By Lamb, I think. Something about putting someone’s eyes out on the stage. Which reminds me that one of the schemes Skinny keeps coming back to is starting an American Grand Guignol theater. She’s great at thinking up weird costumes... she still gets a club date once in a while, you know. She’s still got a terrific figure and she really takes care of it (it’s good for a woman to be proud of her figure, I think) though I guess even if she didn’t take care of it, all that energy of hers would keep her slimmed down anyway. And she’s great at thinking up weird costume accessories, like a gold wire handbag with white mice in it, or fireflies in cellophane pin-ons) that’s for garden parties, or having a real spider web between a tiara and a shoulder yoke, or using a live snake for a belt.

  Skinny loves animals. Birds, mice, lizards and turtles, pythons (small ones), baby alligators. Right now it’s golden hamsters. Of course her father running a pet shop is a big help. Sometimes it builds way up and gets to be a sort of balanced economy... the mice ate the birdseed and the blacksnake ate the mice. Once Skinny had twenty-three birds. They were kind of enjoyable flying around, except when they buzzed you, but they started pulling off the wallpaper in little ribbons and they made everybody sort of uneasy about the smorgasbord. Eventually she cut down to seven parakeets.

  Some animals she has no luck with. Twice she has cats but they got out fast. The spaniel slipped its leash and we never saw him again... that was my fault. Once she had two Samoyeds. They were just her style... big and white and woolly and fierce looking. She liked to walk them. But one got run over and the other bit some people. Skinny right away had me drive the dog into the next county and sell it. The people never found out who it belonged to.

  We had the same trouble with the baby alligator. Skinny left it outside one night in a puddle under a washtub to give it a little nature and it worked its way out. It bit two neighbors who were weeding their gardens before we stopped hearing about it. It had bitten me too, before I found out how fast it could move. A baby alligator’s bite is the funniest thing when it’s fresh... a little crescent of red drops on your hand with two bigger drops for the eyeteeth.

  The boa constrictor... it was only five feet long... just lost its appetite and sort of faded. Skinny thought a vacation in Mother’s garden would refresh it, but Mother refused.

  Of course the animals are a lot of work, sometimes more than the plants. But Skinny gets a big kick out of them. Skinny’s wonderful. Why, she...

  All right, gentlemen, I’ll subside. I can see that Skinny is too much for you. Especially Skinny and animals. That’s all right; She’s sometimes too much for me. I understand. I’ll just have one more beer at the end of the bar and quietly talk to myself.

  Skinny loves me too. She really does. She tries to make something out of me and that’s the test. She’s done everything she could to give me ambition and sober me up. She’s had me take antabuse and join AA and her father gives me dianstic therapy. She’s really worked on me. She loves me, all right. Of course there was that screenwriter... he said... and the time she started to Constantinople with the Turkish medical student and those three months she just disappeared, but those were exceptions. And of course she gets mad at me sometimes and talks about murdering me, but I know it’s just a gag when she asks people at parties about undetectable poisons and how do you induce a heart attack in someone who refuses to exert himself.

  Yes, that’s for me. I’ll take it. Hello, Skinny. Yes, I’m here. Well, I don’t know how long. All right, right away. I s
aid right away. Yes, I’ll keep an eye out for golden hamsters the last couple of blocks. What? Look, Skinny, I can’t handle that slab all by myself... George and Fred were going to help, they said they would, remember? Well, that’s too bad. Yes, I suppose a taxi would help, but not enough and the driver probably wouldn’t allow it. You can still use the old coffee table top for the party tonight. I know the new one’s going to look nicer but you’ll have all the rest of your life to enjoy it. Well, it may be only three inches thick but that’s still damn heavy. I don’t care if the cutter has to get rid of all his samples. He can hold onto it a day longer... it isn’t the sort of thing a person can toss in the trashcan. I absolutely refuse... Oh I can, Can I? Well, you know where you can shove it!

  Draw me one more beer, will you, one for the road? Yes, that was Skinny. Better give me a shot too, this time. I’m going to need it. On the way home I got to pick up a gravestone.

  ANSWERING SERVICE

  The oval bedroom and boudoir rocked with the wind and shook with the thunder. The curving, tempered glass of the continuous-view windows strained, relaxed, strained again. The lightning flashes showed outside only the lashing tops of the big pines against inky night. Inside they regularly drowned the clusters of rosy lights and blanched to bone the quilted, pearl-gray satin upholstery. At one end of the oval, the silvery, spiral stairway leading up to the flat roof and down to the elevator floor cast momentarily flaring, fantastic shadows across the tufted floor and the great central bed with its huge silk pillows and pearl-gray comforter.

  The old lady occupying an edge of the bed looked like the bent-waist mummy of a girl freshly wrapped and hurriedly fitted with a shaggy blonde wig and blonde silk nightgown. But the brown human claw did not tremble, holding the antique-inspired, pearl- gray phone greedily close to ear and lips, while the wrinkle-webbed eye gleamed with the lightning and without it, like jewels of obsidian or black onyx.

  OLD LADY: Haven’t you got the doctor yet, you bitch?

  ANSWERING SERVICE: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm is interfering with short-wave telephony.

  OL: I know all about the storm. Haven’t you arranged yet for my medicine to be delivered, you incompetent slut?

  AS: No, madam. The copters of all regional taxi and delivery services have been grounded by the storm. There have been two deaths by frightening—excuse me, lightning. I have your Cardinal pills here now. If the madam’s phone were equipped with a matter-receiver—

  OL: It isn’t. Stop tormenting me by holding those pills just out of reach. Haven’t you got the doctor yet?

  AS: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm—

  OL: That tape is beginning to bore me. You are just a bunch of tapes, aren’t you? All very cleverly keyed to whatever I say, but still just a bunch of tapes.

  AS: No, madam. I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age 23, name Doris. It’s true, I sometimes think I’m just a tape. I’m surrounded by miles of them, which do answer routine inquiries. Alongside my matter-transmitter and keyboard I have a tape-writer for punching out more tapes. I have a long scissors and a pot of cement for editing them. But I am truly not a tape myself, though once I took a small bottle of sleeping pills because I thought—No, no, I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age 23...

  OL:... name Doris. Yes, I got that on the first spin past the transmitting head. So now we have tapes with biographies, tapes that attempt suicide and ask for sympathy, tapes that play on the customer’s feelings. How charming. Here I am, an old woman, all alone in a storm, and without a single servant, ever since the government with its red tape and its oversell of democracy made it possible to hire them, or even private nurses. An old—

  AS: You haven’t a robot nurse, madam?

  OL: Shining horrors! No! I’m just an old, old woman, all alone, dying for lack of a doctor and medicine, but privileged to listen to tapes making excuses.

  AS: Please, madam, I am not—

  OL: Ooooh... my heart... please, nurse, my Cardinal pills... please, tape...

  AS: Madam! Madam?

  OL:... my heart... I’m going... ooooh...

  AS: Madam, I’m breaking the rules to say this, but if you’re having a heart attack, it’s essential that you relax, make no effort or outcry, waste no strength on—

  OL: Oooh... yes, and tapes to help you die quietly, to leave your tortured body without making a fuss that might embarrass the powers that be. Oh, don’t worry, dear tape,—and let’s not have any sympathetic-anxiety spools. I’m over that spasm now and merely waiting for the next. Just an old woman alone in the midst of a dreadful storm—hear that crash?—listening to tapes and waiting to die for lack of one Cardinal pill.

  AS: Madam, a phone of your rating should have a matter-receiver. Are you quite certain you have not? I will inquire of our master files—

  OL: And tapes to make a sales pitch while you die. Next you’ll be trying to sell me a casket and a burial plot, or even urn space in a tomb satellite. I already have the first two of those, thank you. I do not have a matter-receiver.

  AS: Madam, I am not trying to sell you anything, I am trying to save your life. I have your Cardinal pills here—

  OL: Stop tantalizing me.

  AS: —and I am doing everything I can to get them to you. If you had a matter-receiver, I would only have to drop one of the pills in the transmitter bowl in front of me or punch out its codes, and you would have it the next microsecond. Well over 99 percent of all phones of your rating have both a matter-receiver and telekinesis glove. I will inquire—

  OL: Oh yes, a telekinesis glove—so I’d be able to sign checks long-distance for silver caskets cool with pearls and orchid plots and pills and masses to be said for my soul in Chartres, no doubt. But I don’t have one, ha-ha, or a matter-receiver either. Who’d swallow a pill that came over a wire, all dirty with oil and electricity? Oooh...

  AS: I have programmed an inquiry, madam. It is possible that you have a matter-receiver and aren’t aware of it. Please don’t distress or in any way exert yourself, madam; but I must point out to you that actual matter is never transmitted over the waves or wires and that, in any case, no oil is involved. The chemical and mass-shape codes for the object are punched into the transmitter or analyzed from a sample. Only those codes travel over the wires or waves. When they reach the receiver, they instantly synthesize an exact duplicate from standard raw materials there. I am oversimplifying somewhat, but—

  OL: Even tapes to give lectures, to contradict and argue with a dying customer. Very clever indeed, especially when one knows that a computer, working a billion times as fast as a mere brain, can always out-think a human being, even one who isn’t dying.

  AS: Madam, I am not a tape! I am a flesh-and-blood.... Oh, what’s the use?

  OL: That would have been the third running for that one. Is it possible that even a computer, even a tape has a little shame? Very well, my dear, we will pretend you are not a tape, but a woman: age 23, name Doris. A young woman—it’s only bitchy little sexpots that get to record those tapes, isn’t it? Or do they concoct them entirely nowadays from the squeal of metal and the hum of power? Anyhow, we’ll pretend you’re a beautiful young woman who is tormenting me with pills I can’t have and with grounded delivery-copters and with doctors who have skipped off on emergency visits to their mistresses and can’t be reached. Yes, a beautiful vicious young woman, dear tape. At least that will give me something definite to hate while I die here all alone, someone who could conceivably suffer as I suffer. Ooooh...

  AS: Madam, I am not beautiful and I’m trying hard not to be vicious. And I’m quite as alone as you are. All alone in a tiny cubical, surrounded by yards and yards of electric circuits, until my relief turns up. Yet I can faintly hear through the air-conditioning system the same storm you’re having. It’s moving my way.

  OL: I’m glad you’re all alone. I’m glad you can hear the storm. I’m glad you
’re in a tiny cubical and can’t get away. Then you can imagine something horrible creeping silently toward you, as death is creeping toward me, while you puff your cigarettes into the air-conditioning outlet and drink your cocktails from a flask disguised as a walkie-talkie, I imagine, and preen yourself in front of a mirror and call one of your boy friends and amuse yourself by cat-and-mousing an old woman dying—

  AS: Stop, mother, please!

  OL: So now I’ve become the mother of a tape. How interesting. Oh, excuse me, dear, I forgot we’re pretending you’re a beautiful young woman; but my memory’s not so good these last hours, or minutes. And besides, it startled me so to discover that now tapes—excuse me again— even have mother fixations and have been psychoanalyzed, no doubt, and—

  AS: Please, madam, I’m being serious. I may not be dying, but I wish I were—

  OL: You’re making me feel better, dear. Thank you.

  AS: —so I’m every bit as miserable as you are. I took this job because of something that happened to me when I was a very little girl. My mother had a sudden heart attack and couldn’t move, and she asked me to get her medicine. But I wouldn’t do it because I’d asked her for candy a half hour before and she’d refused to give me any, and so I refused to move. She always called my medicine “candy,” and I didn’t understand what was happening at all. I thought I was just getting even. I didn’t realize she was dying. And so long afterwards I took this job so I could help other people who were in her situation and make up for my crime and so I could—

  OL: Oh no, my dear, you took this job so you could repeat over and over with gloating satisfaction the hot excitement you got when you watched your mother die and knew it was you who were killing her, so you could go on and on and on refusing to give old women their medicine or get them doctors, meanwhile showering them with sticky sweet sympathy, like poison for ants, and, not content with that torture, slipping in dirty little pleas for sympathy for your own vicious, murderous self—