Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  I looked again at her “spooky” in its fold of tissue (so that she wouldn’t have to touch it, what other reason?) and, you know, it began to give me the shivers. Just an old glove, but now it had an invisible gray aura radiating from it.

  “Okay,” I said, closing my hand on it with an effort, and went on ungraciously, really without thinking, “Though I wonder you didn’t ask Mr. Helpful first, what with all his offers and seeing him at the meeting.”

  “Well, I asked you,” she said a little angrily. Then her features relaxed into a warm smile, “Thanks, Jeff.”

  Only then did it occur to me that here I was passing up in my sleep-soddenness what might be a priceless opportunity. Well, that could be corrected. But before I could invite her in, there came this sharp little cough, or clearing of the throat. We both turned and there was Mr. Helpful in front of his open door, dressed in pajamas and a belted maroon dressing gown. He came smiling and dancing toward us (he didn’t really dance, but he gave that impression in spite of being six foot four) and saying, “Could I be of any assistance, Miss Everly? Did something alarm you? Is there... er?...” He hesitated, as if there might be something he should be embarrassed at.

  Marcia shook her head curtly and said to me quite coolly, “No thank you, I needn’t come in, Mr. Winter. That will be fine. Good night.”

  I realized Baldy had managed to embarrass her and that she was making it clear that we weren’t parting after a rendezvous, or about to have one. (But to use my last name!)

  As she passed him, she gave him a formal nod. He hurried back to his own door, a highlight dancing on the back of his head. (Marcia says he shaves it; I, that he doesn’t have to.)

  I waited until I heard her double-lock her door and slide the bolt across. Then I looked grimly at Baldy until he’d gone inside and closed his—I had that pleasure. Then I retired myself, tossed the glove down on some sheets of paper on the table in front of the open window, threw myself into bed and switched out the light.

  I fully expected to spend considerable time being furious at my hulking, mincing, officious neighbor, and maybe at Marcia too, before I could get to sleep, but somehow my mind took off on a fantasy about the building around me as it might have been a half century ago. Ghostly bellboys sped silently with little notes inviting or accepting rendezvous. Ghostly waiters wheeled noiseless carts of silver-covered suppers for two. Pert, ghostly maids whirled ghostly sheets through the dark air as they made the bed, their smiles suggesting they might substitute for non-arriving sweethearts. The soft darkness whirlpooled. Somewhere was wind.

  I woke with a start as if someone or something had touched me, and I sat up in bed. And then I realized that something was touching me high on my neck, just below my ear. Something long, like a finger laid flat or—oh God!—a centipede. I remembered how centipedes were supposed to cling with their scores of tiny feet—and this was clinging. As a child I’d been terrified by a tropical centipede that had come weaving out of a stalk of new-bought bananas in the kitchen, and the memory still returned full force once in a great while. Now it galvanized me into whirling my hand behind my head and striking my neck a great brushing swipe, making my jaw and ear sting. I instantly turned on the light and rapidly looked all around me without seeing anything close to me that might have brushed off my neck. I thought I’d felt something with my hand when I’d done that, but I couldn’t be sure.

  And then I looked at the table by the window and saw that the glove was gone.

  Almost at once I got the vision of it lifting up and floating through the air at me, fingers first, or else dropping off the table and inching across the floor and up the bed. I don’t know which was worse. The thing on my neck had felt leathery.

  My immediate impulse was to check if my door was still shut. I couldn’t tell from where I sat. A very tall clothes cabinet abuts the door, shutting the view of it off from the head of the bed. So I pushed my way down the bed, putting my feet on the floor after looking down to make sure there was nothing in the immediate vicinity.

  And then a sharp gust of wind came in the window and blew the last sheet of paper off the table and deposited it on the floor near the other sheets of paper and the glove and the tissue now disentangled from it.

  I was so relieved I almost laughed. I went over and picked up the glove, feeling a certain revulsion, but only at the thought of who had worn it and what it had been involved in. I examined it closely, which I hadn’t done earlier. It was rather thin gray kid, a fairly big glove and stretched still further as if a pretty big hand had worn it, but quite light enough to have blown off the table with the papers.

  There were grimy streaks on it and a slightly stiff part where some fluid had dried and a faintly reddish streak that might have been lipstick. And it looked old—decades old.

  I put it back on the table and set a heavy ashtray on top of it and got back in bed, feeling suddenly secure again.

  It occurred to me how the empty finger of a gray leather glove is really very much like a centipede, some of the larger of which are the same size, flat and yellowish gray (though the one that had come out of the banana stalk had been bright red), but these thoughts were no longer frightening.

  I looked a last time across the room at the glove, pinioned under the heavy ashtray, and I confidently turned off the light.

  Sleep was longer in coming this time, however. I got my fantasy of hotel ghosts going again, but gloves kept coming into it. The lissom maids wore work ones as they rhythmically polished piles of ghostly silver. The bellboys’ hands holding the ghostly notes were gloved in pale gray cotton. And there were opera gloves, almost armpit length, that looked like spectral white cobras, especially when they were drawn inside-out off the sinuous, snake-slender arms of wealthy guesting ladies. And other ghostly gloves, not all hotel ones, came floating and weaving into my fantasy: the black gloves of morticians, the white gloves of policemen, the bulky fur-lined ones of polar explorers, the trim dark gauntlets of chauffeurs, the gloves of hunters with separate stalls only for thumb and trigger finger, the mittens of ice-skaters and sleigh riders, old ladies’ mitts without any fingers at all, the thin, translucent elastic gloves of surgeons, wielding flashing scalpels of silver-bright steel—a veritable whirlpool of gloves that finally led me down, down, down to darkness.

  Once again I woke with a start, as if I’d been touched, and shot up. Once again I felt something about four inches long clinging high on my neck, only this time under the other ear. Once again I frantically slashed at my neck and jaw, stinging them painfully, only this time I struck upward and away. I thought I felt something go.

  I got the light on and checked the door at once. It was securely shut. Then I looked at the table by the open window.

  The heavy ashtray still sat in the center of it, rock firm.

  But the rapist’s glove that had been under it was gone.

  I must have stood there a couple of minutes, telling myself this could not be. Then I went over and lifted the ashtray and carefully inspected its underside, as if the glove had somehow managed to shrink and was clinging there.

  And all the while I was having this vision of the glove painfully humping itself from under the ashtray and inching to the table’s edge and dropping to the floor and then crawling off... almost anywhere.

  Believe me, I searched my place then, especially the floor. I even opened the doors to the closet and the clothes cabinet, though they had been tightly shut, and searched the floor there. And of course I searched under and behind the bed. And more than once while I searched, I’d suddenly jerk around thinking I’d seen something gray approaching my shoulder from behind.

  There wasn’t a sign of the glove.

  It was dawn by now—had been for some time. I made coffee and tried to think rationally about it.

  It seemed to boil down to three explanations that weren’t wildly farfetched.

  First, that I’d gone out of my mind. Could be, I suppose. But from what I’d read and seen, most people wh
o go crazy know damn well ahead of time that something frightening is happening to their minds, except maybe paranoiacs. Still, it remained a possibility.

  Second, that someone with a duplicate or master key had quietly taken the glove away while I was asleep. The apartment manager and janitor had such keys. I’d briefly given my duplicate to various people. Why, once before she got down on me, I’d given it to Evelyn Mayne—matter of letting someone in while I was at work. I thought I’d got it back from her, though I remember once having a second duplicate made—I’d forgotten why. The main difficulty about this explanation was motive. Who’d want to get the glove?—except the rapist, maybe.

  Third, of course, there was the supernatural. Gloves are ghostly to start with, envelopes for hands—and if there isn’t a medieval superstition about wearing the flayed skin of another’s hand to work magic, there ought to be. (Of course, there was the Hand of Glory, its fingers flaming like candles, guaranteed to make people sleep while being burgled, but there the skin is still on the dried chopped- off hand.) And there are tales of spectral hands a-plenty—pointing out buried treasure or hidden graves, or at guilty murderers, or carrying candles or daggers—so why not gloves? And could there be a kind of telekinesis in which a hand controls at a distance the movements and actions of a glove it has worn? Of course that would be psionics or whatnot, but to me the parapsychological is supernatural. (And in that case what had the glove been trying to do probing at my neck?—strangle me, I’d think.) And somewhere I’d read of an aristocratic Brazilian murderess of the last century who wore gloves woven of spider silk, and of a knight blinded at a crucial moment in a tourney by a lady’s silken glove worn as a favor. Yes, they were eerie envelopes, I thought, gloves were, but I was just concerned with one of them, a vanishing glove.

  I started with a jerk as there came a measured knock-knock. I opened the door and looked up at the poker faces of two young policemen. Over their shoulders Mr. Helpful was peering down eagerly at me, his lips rapidly quirking in little smiles with what I’d call questioning pouts in between. Back and a little to one side was Marcia, looking shocked and staring intently at me through the narrow space between the second policeman and the door jamb.

  “Jeff Winters,” the first policeman said to me, as if it were a fact that he was putting into place. It occurred to me that young policemen look very blocky around their narrow hips with all that equipment they carry snugly nested and cased in black leather.

  “Officer Hart—” Marcia began anxiously.

  The second policeman’s eyes flickered towards her, but just then the first policeman continued, “Your neighbor Miss Everly says she handed you a glove earlier this morning,” and he stepped forward into the private space (I think it’s sometimes called) around my body, and I automatically stepped back.

  “We want it,” he went on, continuing to step forward, and I back.

  I hesitated. What was I to say? That the glove had started to spook me and then disappeared? Officer Hart followed the first policeman in. Mr. Helpful followed him in and stopped just inside my door, Marcia still beyond him and looking frantic. Officer Hart turned, as if about to tell Mr. Helpful to get out, but just then Officer Halstead (that was the other name Marcia had mentioned) said, “Well, you’ve still got it, haven’t you? She gave it to you, didn’t she?”

  I shook and then nodded my head, which must have made me look rattled. He came closer still and said harshly and with a note of eagerness, “Well, where is it, then?”

  I had to look up quite sharply at him to see his face. Beyond it, just to one side of it, diagonally upward across the room, was the top of the tall clothes cabinet, and on the edge of that there balanced that damned gray glove, flat fingers dripping over.

  I froze. I could have sworn I’d glanced up there more than once when I was hunting the thing, and seen nothing. Yet there it was, as if it had flown up there or else been flicked there by me the second time I’d violently brushed something from my face.

  Officer Halstead must have misread my look of terror, for he ducked his head toward mine and rasped, “Your neighbor Mr. Angus says that it’s your glove, that he saw you wearing gray gloves night before last! What do you say?”

  But I didn’t say anything, for at that moment the glove slid off its precarious perch and dropped straight down and landed on Mr. Helpful’s (Angus’s) shoulder close to his neck, just like the hand of an arresting cop.

  Now it may have been that in ducking his head to look at it, he trapped it between his chin and collarbone, or it may have been (as it looked to me) that the glove actively clung to his neck and shoulder, resisting all his frantic efforts to peel it off, while he reiterated, his voice mounting in screams, “It’s not my glove!”

  He took his hands away for a moment and the glove dropped to the floor.

  He looked back and forth and saw the dawning expressions on the faces of the two policemen, and then with a sort of despairing sob he whipped a long knife from under his coat.

  Considerably to my surprise I started toward him, but just then Officer Hart endeared himself to us all forever by wrapping his arms around Mr. Angus like a bear, one hand closing on the wrist of the hand holding the knife.

  I veered past him (I vividly recall changing the length of one of my strides so as not to step on the glove) and reached Marcia just in time to steady her as, turned quite white, she swayed, her eyelids fluttering.

  I heard the knife clatter to the floor. I turned, my arms around Marcia, and we both saw Mr. Angus seem to shrink and collapse in Officer Hart’s ursine embrace, his face going gray as if he were an empty glove himself.

  That was it. They found the other glove and the long silver wig in a locked suitcase in his room. Marcia stayed frightened long enough, off and on, for us to become better acquainted and cement our friendship.

  Officer (now Detective) Hart tells us that Mr. Angus is a model prisoner at the hospital for the criminally insane and has gone very religious, but never smiles. And he—Hart—now has the glove in a sort of Black Museum down at the station, where it has never again been seen to move under its own power. If it ever did.

  One interesting thing. The gloves had belonged to Mr. Angus’s father, now deceased, who had been a judge.

  THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES

  All right, I’ll tell you why the Girl gives me the creeps. Why I can’t stand to go downtown and see the mob slavering up at her on the tower, with that pop bottle or pack of cigarettes or whatever it is beside her. Why I hate to look at magazines any more because I know she’ll turn up somewhere in a brassiere or a bubble bath. Why I don’t like to think of millions of Americans drinking in that poisonous half smile. It’s quite a story—more story than you’re expecting.

  No, I haven’t suddenly developed any long-haired indignation at the evils of advertising and the national glamour-girl complex. That’d be a laugh for a man in my racket, wouldn’t it?

  Though I think you’ll agree there’s something a little perverted about trying to capitalize on sex that way. But it’s okay with me. And I know we’ve had the Face and the Body and the Look and what not else, so why shouldn’t someone come along who sums it all up so completely, that we have to call her the Girl and blazon her on all the billboards from Times Square to Telegraph Hill?

  But the Girl isn’t like any of the others. She’s unnatural. She’s morbid. She’s unholy.

  Oh it’s 1948, is it, and the sort of thing I’m hinting at went out with witchcraft? But you see I’m not altogether sure myself what I’m hinting at, beyond a certain point. There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.

  And there were the murders, if they were murders.

  Besides, let me ask you this. Why, when America is obsessed with the Girl, don’t we find out more about her? Why doesn’t she rate a Time cover with a droll biography inside? Why hasn’t there been a feature in Life or the Post? A Profile in the New Yorker? Why hasn’t Charm or Mademoiselle done her career saga? Not rea
dy for it? Nuts!

  Why haven’t the movies snapped her up? Why hasn’t she been on Information, Please? Why don’t we see her kissing candidates at political rallies? Why isn’t she chosen queen of some sort of junk or other at a convention?

  Why don’t we read about her tastes and hobbies, her views of the Russian situation? Why haven’t the columnists interviewed her in a kimono on the top floor of the tallest hotel in Manhattan and told us who her boy-friends are?

  Finally—and this is the real killer—why hasn’t she ever been drawn or painted?

  Oh, no she hasn’t. If you knew anything about commercial art you’d know that. Every blessed one of those pictures was worked up from a photograph. Expertly? Of course. They’ve got the top artists on it. But that’s how it’s done.

  And now I’ll tell you the why of all that. It’s because from the top to the bottom of the whole world of advertising, news, and business, there isn’t a solitary soul who knows where the Girl came from, where she lives, what she does, who she is, even what her name is.

  You heard me. What’s more, not a single solitary soul ever sees her—except one poor damned photographer, who’s making more money off her than he ever hoped to in his life and who’s scared and miserable as hell every minute of the day.

  No, I haven’t the faintest idea who he is or where he has his studio. But I know there has to be such a man and I’m morally certain he feels just like I said.

  Yes, I might be able to find her, if I tried. I’m not sure though—by now she probably has other safeguards. Besides, I don’t want to.

  Oh, I’m off my rocker, am I? That sort of thing can’t happen in this Year of our Atom 1948? People can’t keep out of sight that way, not even Garbo?