Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop. I’m human! Three point one four one six. Pi. One three five seven eleven thirteen. Primes. Two four eight sixteen—

  OL: How like a machine. Nothing but numbers. Confused with food. You’re going crazy, machine.

  AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop! I tell you I’m flesh-and-blood—

  OL: Female, age 23, name Doris.

  AS: —and I’m serious about all this, and I know this isn’t the job for me at all, because I’m so horribly lonely; and what you say about me is the way I suspect myself of feeling, though I’m trying as hard as I can to feel the other way, the loving way, and I’m afraid—

  OL: I’m glad you can feel guilt. Love—don’t make me laugh. But I’m glad you’re afraid. Because then you can imagine something creeping toward you as deadly as what’s creeping toward me. What if your tapes should loop out and strangle you? What if your filthy matter-transmitter should suck you in and spit you out into a red-hot volcano or at the north pole or at the bottom of the Challanger Deep or on the sun side of Mercury? What’s that now?—closer than the storm, rattling ,the grill of your ventilation inlet? What’s that coming out of the answer slot of the computer? Why are the needle points of the long narrow blades of the scissors swinging toward you?

  AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop, or they’ll jump at my heart! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop—

  OL: Shut up! I’m tired of pretending. I’m just an old woman dying. And you’re just tapes. Yes, just tapes. I know that because I’ve been insulting you every way I could, and you’ve been taking it. A live human being wouldn’t. And only a tape would call me “madam.” A democratized woman—and there aren’t any others under 80—would call me dearie or senior citizen. And I’ve made you spend an hour on me. They’d never let a human being waste her working time like that, and she wouldn’t care to. But tapes?—who cares? Plug the old dame in on them and let her play with them until she dies! And finally one tape got stuck on the word stop and kept jerking back and forth there, over and over. Ooooh... ooooh... this is the end, at last... ooooh...

  AS: Stop, stop, STOP! Madam, the master files show that your phone is equipped with a miniaturized Important Trifle matter- receiver! It’s hidden in the earpiece! I will place the Cardinal pill on the bowl and—

  OL: Ooooh... too late, tape... I’m dying...

  AS: Please, madam. For my sake.

  OL: No, tape... I’m going now... I leave the horrors to you... I’m dying... like your mother... I’m... dead...

  The cadaverous old lady carefully dropped the phone, not on its prongs or the floor, but with a dull, short clatter on the edge of the thick pale marble top of the night table. She leaned back into the huge pillows. Something tiny rattled on the table top. She did not look. The phone called very faintly with an insect’s voice “Madam!” and “Mother!” again and again. She did not answer.

  The storm was almost over, the lightning gone, the thunder faded; but now came a different thunder, a muted thunder, a thunder that grew and made the old lady frown. It drowned the phone’s faint screaming, like that of a far-off cicada.

  Something shook the ceiling, then jarred it. There was a rapid tattoo of footsteps overhead, the creek and slam of a door, a clatter of footsteps down the silver stairs.

  Approaching her briskly was a slim, middle-aged man carrying a black bag and shaking a few water drops off his trim gray suit.

  “Well, what’s it this time?” he demanded with a cheery roughness. “Used your sleeping pills up too fast, I suppose, and then worked yourself into a tantrum. I’ll have you know I’ve delayed delivering the Governor’s daughter’s baby, just to make sure you keep me in your will.”

  She grinned at him, the tip of her nose straining toward the point of her chin.

  “The sleeping pills, yes, you clever devil. Oh, and I lost my temper with your stupid answering service.”

  “Don’t blame you there. I curse them a dozen times a day myself. Only get psychoneurotics to take that job. Everyone else demands a social working-life. Now let’s just— What’s that?”

  He had stopped with a jerk and was pointing at the phone.

  In one frantic scramble the old lady thrust herself halfway across the bed and halfway out of the covers and crouched, looking back. She began to tremble as the doctor was trembling. But her lips were smiling, and her eyes glittered like jet.

  Flowing steadily from the small black hole in the center of the pearl-gray receiver, rilling across and dropping down past the pale marble and puddling on the pearl-gray satin comforter was a thin rippling ribbon of bright blood.

  SCREAM WOLF

  Although it was a muggy August night in Chicago, the Lieutenant’s smile was as grim and frosty as a December, sunrise over the Loop.

  “Let me see if I’ve got it straight so far, Mr. Groener,” he said. “This apartment isn’t your home. You and your wife were visiting Mrs. Labelle, an old friend. You occupied the front bedroom, just back of this living room. The back bedroom was occupied by another guest of Mrs. Labelle’s—a Miss Graves, also an old friend—Mrs. Labelle had the bedroom between.”

  The big man sitting opposite the Lieutenant nodded dully, his face turned away from the bridge lamp cascading light on his chair.

  “You went to bed about midnight,” the Lieutenant continued. “Mrs. Groener had been drinking heavily. At about two you woke and wanted a cup of coffee. You went back to the kitchen, past the other two bedrooms and through the dining room. While you were heating water, you heard Mrs. Groener scream. You found the bedroom empty. There was a cigarette burning out on the end of the sill of the open window beside a glass half full of straight whiskey. Four stories straight below you made out something turquoise-colored glimmering in the back courtyard.

  “Mrs. Groener had been wearing a turquoise-colored long-sleeved nightgown. You knocked on Mrs. Labelle’s bedroom door and told her to call us. Then you hurried down. You were kneeling beside your wife’s dead body when we arrived. Correct?”

  The big man slowly turned his head into the light. His face was that of a gaunt old matinee idol under its thatch of silvered dark hair. Then he looked straight at the Lieutenant and held out a steady, spread-fingered left hand.

  “Except for one point,” Groener said. “When my wife screamed I didn’t rush back to the bedroom. I finished making my cup of coffee and I drank it first.”

  The Lieutenant cocked an eyebrow. The younger blond detective who had been lounging wearily against the wall of the hallway sharply turned his wide face toward the speaker.

  “Now and then Mrs. Groener used to scream,” the big man explained, “when she’d been drinking heavily I’d leave the bedroom. It may have been a rebuke or summons to me, or a fighting challenge to the whiskey bottle, or simply an expression of her rather dark evaluation of life. But it had never meant anything more real than that—until tonight.”

  “Mrs. Groener was seeing a psychiatrist?” the Lieutenant asked harshly.

  “I never was able to get her to,” the big man said. “As I imagine you find in your business, Lieutenant, there’s no real middle course between persuading a person to seek therapy voluntarily and having them forcibly committed to an institution. Mrs. Groener always had the energy be quite sane when necessary.”

  The Lieutenant grunted noncommittally. “Well, you certainly seem to have been very long-suffering about it,” he said and then added sharply, “Cool, at any rate.”

  Groener smiled bleakly. “I’m an alcoholic myself,” he said. “I know how lonely it gets way out there in the dark. I didn’t used to scream, but I pounded holes in the walls, and woke up to bloody plaster-powdered knuckles... and cigarette burns between my fingers.” He gave his head a little shake as if he’d been dreaming. “Thing is, I managed to quit five years ago. My wife didn’t.”

  The long couch creaked as the Lieutenant slightly, shifted his position on the edge of the center of it. He nodded curtly.

  “So when Mrs. Groener screamed,” he said, “you f
inished making your cup of coffee and you drank it. You thought she had screamed simply because she had become unnerved by heavy drinking. You were not unduly alarmed.”

  Groener nodded. “I’m glad you didn’t say DTs,” he said. “Shows you know what it’s all about. Mrs. Groener never had DTs. If she had, I’d have been able to do something about her. I took my time drinking the coffee, by the way. I was hoping she’d be passed out again by the time I got to the bedroom.”

  “This scream she gave—how loud would you say it was?”

  “Pretty loud,” Groener said thoughtfully, “Almost loud enough, I’d say, to wake the people in the flat across the court—except that people in a big city never seem to bother about a scream next door.”

  “Some of them don’t! Then it would have sounded still louder to Mrs. Labelle, or even Miss Graves, than to you. One of them might have been waked by it, or been awake, and gone to your wife’s bedroom.”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” the big man disagreed. “They were familiar with Mrs. Groener’s emotional tendencies. They’re both old friends.”

  “They still might have gone.”

  Groener shook his head. “I’d have heard them.”

  The Lieutenant frowned. “Has it occurred to you that one of the women may have gone to your wife before she screamed?”

  Groener’s answering gaze was stony, “I’d have certainly heard them if they had,” he said.

  The Lieutenant stood up and jerked his head at the blond detective, who came toward him.

  “Through with me?” Groener asked.

  “Yes,” the Lieutenant said. “When you get back to the dining room will you ask Cohan—that’s the other detective—to send in Miss Graves?”

  Groener nodded and started off, his feet dragging. When he came opposite the bedroom he and his wife had occupied, he paused and his shoulders tightened wincingly. The Lieutenant looked away, but when the footsteps didn’t resume, he turned quickly back. The big man had disappeared.

  The Lieutenant strode to the bedroom door. Groener was standing inside, just looking. The Lieutenant started to bark a question, but just then the big man’s steady left hand moved toward the bed in a slow curving gesture, as if he were caressing something invisible.

  It was a bedroom with a lot of little tables and stacked cardboard boxes besides the usual furnishings—evidently used by Mrs. Labelle for storage purposes as well as guests—but a broad clear path led through the orderly clutter from the far side of the double bed to the large black square of the open window.

  Standing two yards behind Groener’s back, the Lieutenant now became aware of the source of a high tinkling noise that had been fretting the edges of his mind for the past half hour. A small oscillating fan was going on a table beside the bed. Hanging from a yardstick stuck in a top dresser drawer a couple of feet from it was a collection of small oblongs and triangles of thin glass hanging on strings. When the stream of air swept them they jingled together monotonously.

  The Lieutenant stepped up beside Groener, touched him on the shoulder, and indicated the arrangement beside the bed. Behind them the blond detective cleared his throat uneasily.

  “My wife hated all little noises at night,” Groener explained. “Voice and tuned-down TVs and such. She used those Chinese windchimes to blur them out.”

  “Was she quite a small woman?” the Lieutenant asked softly.

  “How did you know that?” Groener asked as he started for the door. The Lieutenant pointed at the dresser mirror. It was turned down so that it cut off both their heads and the big man’s shoulders.

  The Lieutenant and the blond detective listened to his footsteps clumping noisily down the long uncarpeted hall. They heard the frosted glass door to the dining room open and close.

  The blond detective grinned. “I’ll bet he learned to walk loud to please his wife,” he said rapidly. “My mother-in-law does the same thing when she stays overnight with us. Claims it’s so as not to scare Ursie and me— we’ll know she’s coming. Say, this guy’s wife must have been nuttier than a fruit cake.”

  “There are all kinds of alkies, Zocky,” the Lieutenant said heavily, “with different degrees of nuttiness and sanity. You notice anything about this room, Zocky?”

  “Sure, it’s not messed up much for all the stuff in it,” the other answered instantly.

  “That mean anything to you?”

  Detective Zocky shrugged. “Takes all kinds to make a world,” he said. “My mother-in-law’s an ashtray-washing fanatic. Never dries ‘em either.”

  They heard the dining room door open again. As they started back for the living room, Zocky whispered unabashed, “Hey, did you notice the near-empty fifth tucked behind the head of the bed?”

  “No, I merely deduced the bottle would be there like Nero Wolfe,” the Lieutenant told him. “Thanks for the confirmation. Incidentally, quite a few people have a morbid fear of dirt, including cigar ashes. It’s called mysophobia. And now shut off that fan!”

  Miss Graves was as tall for a woman as Groener for a man and even more gaunt, but it was a coldly beautiful gauntness. She dressed it well in a severe black Chinese dress of heavy silk that hugged her knees. Her hair was like a silver fleece.

  She seemed determined to be hostile, for as she sat down she glared at the Lieutenant and said to him, “I’m a labor organizer!” as if that made them lifelong enemies.

  “You are, huh?” the Lieutenant responded, thumbing a notebook and playing up to her hostility in a way that made Zocky grin behind her back. “Then what do you know about Mrs. Groener? An alcoholic, wasn’t she?”

  “She was a thoroughly detestable woman!” Miss Graves snapped back sharply. “The only decent thing she ever did was what she did tonight, and she did that much too late! I hated her!”

  “Does that mean you were in love with her husband?”

  “I—Don’t be stupid, officer!”

  “Stupid, my eye! There has to be some reason, since you stayed close friends—at least outwardly.” He held his aggressive, forward-hunching pose a moment, then leaned back, put away his notebook, smiled like a gentle tomcat, and said culturedly, “Hasn’t there now, Miss Graves? Most of these complications have a psychological basis.”

  She did a double-take, then the tension seemed to go out of her. “You’re right, of course,” she said. “I knew Mr. Groener in college, before he ever met her, and after that I saw a bit of them both from time to time, through Mrs. Labelle and others.”

  Her voice deepened. “I watched him misuse his best years on too many high-pressure jobs, trying to be too successful too soon—because of her. I watched him become an alcoholic because of her. Finally I saw him drag himself out of that morass, but remain tied to her more closely than ever. She was his weakness, or rather, she brought out the weakness in him.”

  Miss Graves shook her head thoughtfully. “Actually I no longer hated her when she killed herself—because during the last years she wasn’t at all sane. It wasn’t just the liquor, understand. Mrs. Groener scribbled paranoid comments in the few books she read. I found some in one I loaned her. She wrote wild complaining letters to people which sometimes cost Mr. Groener jobs.

  “As for her social behavior—well, they were staying here because they’d been put out of their last apartment on account of her screaming and loud abusive talk. And she did all sorts of queer little things. For instance, when I came in yesterday she was drinking in the sunroom and she had her left wrist tied to the arm of her chair with a scarf. I asked her why, and she giggled something about supposing I thought she was fit to be tied. I imagine you’ve seen that horrible little wind-and-glass machine she used to blank out the sounds of reality?”

  The Lieutenant nodded.

  “It wasn’t the first time she tried to commit suicide, either,” Miss Graves went on thoughtfully.

  “No? Mr. Groener didn’t tell us anything about that.”

  “He wouldn’t! He was always trying to cover up for her, and he still is
! It’s a wonder he didn’t try to hide from you that she was an alcoholic.”

  “About this earlier suicide attempt,” the Lieutenant prompted.

  “I don’t know much about it except that it happened and she used sleeping pills.”

  “I take it you don’t live here regularly, Miss Graves.”

  “Oh no! Mrs. Labelle invited me yesterday with the idea of old friends rallying around the Groeners. It wasn’t a good idea. Mrs. Groener was hostile toward me, as always, and he was simply miserable.”

  “About Mrs. Groener,” the Lieutenant said. “Besides her hostility did she seem depressed?”

  Miss Graves shook her head. “No—just a little crazier than last time. And thinner than ever, a bunch of match-sticks. Her drinking had got to that stage. We had some drinks after dinner—not Mr. Groener, of course—and she got very drunk and loud. We could hear her ranting at him for a half hour after we all went to bed—about how he shouldn’t have let them be put out of their apartment and about how he always had to be surrounded by his old girl friends and—”

  “Meaning you and Mrs. Labelle?” the Lieutenant cut in.

  Miss Graves made a little grimace as she nodded. “Oh yes. Mrs. Groener firmly believed that any other halfway good-looking women in the same room with her husband was his mistress or had been at some time in the past. A fixed delusion though she’d only come out with it at a certain stage of her drinking. I knew that, but it still upset me. I had trouble getting to sleep.”

  “You stayed awake?”

  “No, I dozed. Her scream awakened me. I started to get up, but then I remembered it was just part of the act. I lay there and after awhile I heard Mr. Groener coming back from the kitchen.”

  “Had you heard him go?”