by Fritz Leiber
Carr’s fear left him. There was no use to it.
The street narrowed, its sides grew dark. Behind them the fire engine braked, took a turn.
“You’re mixed up with Wilson and Hackman and Dris, aren’t you?” Carr asserted.
This time the roadster swerved to the left, and for a few moments roared along only inches from the curb, kicking up mud.
“Nor that brave,” the small dark man told him reprovingly as the roadster came back into the middle.
Carr caught a cold whiff of water and oil. Skyscrapers twinkled against the sky ahead, but just this side of them a gap in the buildings was widening „ and a black skeletal structure loomed.
A rapid clanging started. Towers flanking the black structure began to blink red. Carr grabbed for the wheel, stamped at the brake. “They’re opening the bridge!” he yelled.
The small man kicked him in the ankle, clubbed his hands aside, and accelerated. Ahead were stopped autos and a black and white barrier. Swinging far to the left, they struck its flexible end. It rasped along the roadster’s side, tore free with a great twang. They shot forward onto the dark span. To either side solidity dropped away. Far below, yellow windows of skyscrapers flowed in uneven patterns on the water.
THEY WERE three-quarters of the way across when, through their hurtling speed, Carr felt the feather touch of a titan. Under them the span had begun to rise. Ahead of them a thread of blackness appeared at the break in the jacknife of the span.
The small dark man clamped the throttle to the floor. There was a spine-compressing jar and jounce, the skyscrapers reeled, then another jar as the roadster came down—on its wheels. The tip of the second barrier broke off with a giant snap.
The open bridge had cleared the street ahead of traffic going their way. The small dark man breezed along it for four blocks like the winner of a race, then suddenly braked and skidded around the corner and across to the wrong side of the street. The two wheels on his side hit the curb and the roadster rocked to a stop.
Carr loosened his death-grip on dashboard and door handle, balled a fist and turned, this time without any compunction about glasses.
But the small dark man had vaulted out of the roadster and was lightly running up the steps of a building that Carr now realized was the public library. As he hit the sidewalk in pursuit, he saw the small dark man briefly silhouetted against the yellow rectangle of a swinging door. When Carr stiff-armed through it, the man was vanishing at the top of a flight of marble stairs.
Reaching the top, Carr felt a spurt of savage pleasure. He was gaining. Before him was a large, domed room, open shelves to one side, counters and booths to the other, unoccupied except for a couple of girls behind a window and a baldheaded man burdened with a stack of books and a briefcase.
The small dark man, with Carr almost at his heels, was racing toward a wall decorated with twinkling gold mosaic. He ducked down a narrow corridor and to his shock Carr realized they were both running on glass.
For a moment Carr thought that the small dark man had led him this long chase solely to get him to step through a skylight. Then he realized that he was on one of the many translucent cat-walks that served as aisles in the stacks of the library. He sprinted forward again, guided by the sonorous pit-pat of receding footsteps.
He found himself in a silent world within a world. A world several stories high and covering a good part of a block. An oddly insubstantial world of metal beams, narrow stairs, translucent runways, and innumerable books.
Like some animal that had reached its native element, the small dark man now held his lead, craftily doubling and redoubling on his course. Carr caught glimpses of a cream-colored raincoat, he shook his fist at teeth and a grin spied through gaps in successive tiers of books, he clutched futilely at a small, expensive-looking shoe disappearing up a metal-treaded stair in a tantalizingly leisurely way.
He was panting and his side had begun to hurt, something in his topcoat was growing heavier. It began to seem to him that the chase would never end, that the two of them would go skipping and staggering on indefinitely, always the same distance apart.
The whole experience had acquired nightmarish overtones. It pleased Carr to remember that the Dewey Decimal System of book classification has an end. “If I don’t catch him in the four hundreds, I’ll get him in the fives. If not in the useful arts, then in the fine. He shan’t double back to Mysticism and Witchcraft!”
He lurched around a corner and there, not ten feet away, back turned, standing beside an old brass-fitted drinking fountain that gurgled merrily, was his quarry.
CARR HICCUPED a laugh between his gasps for air. This was no sinister metaphysical pursuit after all. It was just a chase in a Chaplin film. They would both refresh themselves at the fountain, commenting on the excellence of the water. Then the small dark man would nod politely and walk off. Carr would realize with whom he’d been drinking, and the whole chase would start over again.
But first, Carr decided, he’d slug the guy.
As he moved forward, however, it was inevitable that he should look at the thing at which the small dark man was looking.
Or rather, at the person.
For just inside the next aisle, gilt-buttoned brown suit almost exactly the same shade as the buckram bindings that made a background, lips formed in an ellipse of dismay that couldn’t quite avoid being a smile, was Jane.
Carr drifted past the small dark man as if the latter were part of a dissolving dream. With every step forward the floor seemed to get solider under his feet.
Jane’s lips held the same shape, she just tilted her head, as he put his arms around her and kissed her. He felt as if he had grasped the one real figure out of thousands in a room of mirrors.
She pushed away, looking up at him incredulously. His nerves reawoke with a jerk. “Where’s he gone?” he asked, looking around him.
“Who?”
“The small dark madman with glasses.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He has a way of fading.”
“I’ll say he has!” He turned on her. “Though generally he tries to murder you first.” His hands were beginning to tremble from delayed reaction to his ride.
“What?”
“Yes. I thought you said he was timid.”
“He is. Terribly.”
“Then you should have seen him tonight.” And he told her about the ride. “I guess he got his courage out of a bottle,” he finished, really shaking now.
“Oh, the coward,” she breathed. “Pretending to sacrifice his own feelings, even to the point of bringing you to me—but really just doing it to hurt me, because he knew I wanted to keep you out of this. And then on top of it all, taking chances with your life, hoping that you both would die while he was being noble.” Her lips curled.
“All right, all right!” Carr said, “But what’s it all about?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Your friend and Hackman and Wilson and Dris and the four men with black hats and you being Tom Elvested’s Jane Gregg, who wasn’t there, and Jane Gregg of Mayberry Street.”
She backed away from him, shaking her head.
He followed her. His voice was harsh. “Look, Jane,” he said, “day before yesterday your friend ran away from me. Last night he knocked me out. Tonight he took crazy chances with my life. Why?”
The fear in her eyes brought his exasperation to the boil. “What have you and he done? Why are the others after you? What’s wrong with your father and mother? What are you doing here? You’ve got to tell me!”
He had her backed against the shelves and was shouting in her face. But she would only goggle up at him and shake her head. His control snapped. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard.
BUT NO MATTER how violently her head snapped back and forth, her lips stayed pressed tightly together. He suddenly loosed her and turned away, burying his head in his hands, breathing heavily.
When he looked up she was
smoothing her suit. She bit her lip when her hand touched her shoulder. “Do I shake well?” she asked.
He winced. “Sorry,” he said dully. “But I’ve just got to know.”
“It would be the worst thing that could happen to you,” she told him simply.
“I don’t care.”
“It would be like signing your death warrant.”
“I tell you I don’t care.” He looked at her in a misery of exasperation. “Jane!”
“All right,” she said quietly, “I’ll tell you everything.”
He looked at her incredulously. Then his eyes widened. For the first time he actually realized where he was.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” he said, jumping away from the shelves against which he’d been leaning. “Why?” She was as cool as ever.
“We’re in the stacks.” His voice automatically hushed itself. “No one can come here without a pass. We made enough racket to wake the dead. They’re bound to come looking for us.”
“Are they?” She smiled. “They haven’t yet.”
“And then—oh Good Lord—the traffic cops and who knows who else . . . they’re bound to!” He looked down the long aisles apprehensively.
She smiled again. “But they haven’t.”
Carr turned wondering eyes on her. Something of the charming willfulness of the night before last seemed to have returned to her. He felt an answering spirit rising in himself.
And it did seem the height of silliness to worry about breaking library regulations just after you’d escaped a messy death a dozen times—and were about to hear the most important story in the world.
“All right,” he said, “in that case let’s have a drink.” And he fished out of his pocket the unopened pint of whisky.
“Swell,” she said, her eyes brightening. “The fountain’s right there. I’ll get paper cups.”
CHAPTER XII
Of course if there’s someone you really love, you’ve got to tell them the secret. For love means sharing everything, even the horrors . . .
CARR LOWERED his cup, half emptied.
“Listen,” he said, “there’s someone coming.”
Jane seemed unconcerned. “Just a page.”
“How do you know? Besides, he’s coming this way.”
He hustled Jane to the next aisle.
They where there was less light. The footsteps grew louder, ringing on the glass.
“Let’s go farther back,” Carr whispered. “He might see us here.”
But Jane refused to budge. He peered over her shoulder. “Damn!” he breathed, “I forgot the bottle. He’s bound to spot it.”
Jane’s shoulders twitched.
The he turned out to be a she, Carr saw by patches through the gaps between the shelves. A she with sleek black hair cut in bangs across the forehead, and a tight, dark red dress. She walked past their aisle, stopped at the second one beyond. She looked up.
“Here we are, boys and girls,” they heard her say to herself in a loud bitter voice. “Oh, in six volumes, is it? Is that all he expects at closing time?” She scribbled briefly on a slip of paper she was carrying. “Sorry, Baldy, but—out! You’ll have to learn about the secrets of sex some other day.” And she returned the way she had come, humming “St. Louis Woman.” Carr recovered the bottle. “Quite a character,” he said with a smile. “I’m not sure but what she didn’t see us.” Jane gave him a look. Then she went to the next aisle and returned with a couple of stools. Carr pushed his topcoat back over some books. His face grew serious. For a moment they were silent. Then he said, “Well, I’m waiting.”
Jane moved nervously. “Let’s have another drink.”
Carr refilled their cups. Jane just held hers. It was shadowy where they were. She reached up and tugged a cord. Extra light spilled around them. There was another pause. Jane looked at him.
“You must think of my childhood,” she began, “as an empty, middle-class upbringing in a city apartment. You must think o» me as miserable and lonely, with a few girl-friends whom I thought silly and at the same time more knowing than I. And then my parents—familiar creatures I was terribly tied to, but with whom I had no real contact. They seemed to go unhappily through a daily routine as sterile as death.
“The whole world was an ugly mystery to me. I didn’t know what people were after, why they did the things they did, what secret rules they were obeying. I used to take long walks alone in the park, trying to figure it out.” She paused. “It was in the park that I first met the small dark man with glasses.
“No,” she corrected herself, frowning, “I didn’t exactly meet him. I just noticed him watching me. Usually from a distance—from another path, or across the lagoon, or through a crowd of people. He’d watch me and follow me for a way and then drift out of sight and maybe turn up again farther on.
“I pretended not to notice him. I knew that strange men who followed girls were not to be trusted. Though I don’t think I was ever frightened of him that way. He looked so small and respectful. Actually I suppose I was beginning to feel romantic about him.” She took a swallow of her drink.
Carr had finished his. “Well?”
“OH, HE KEPT coming closer and then one day he spoke to me. ‘Would you mind if I walked with you for a while?’ he asked. I gulped and managed to say, ‘No.’ That’s all. He just walked beside me. It was days before he even touched my arm. But that didn’t matter. It was what he said that was important. He talked hesitatingly, but he knew the thoughts inside me I’d never told anyone—how puzzling life was, how alone you felt, how other people sometimes seemed just like animals, how they could hurt you with their eyes. And he knew the little pictures in my mind too—how the piano keys looked like champing teeth, how written words were just meaningless twists of ribbon, how snores sounded like faraway railway trains and railway trains like snores.
“After we’d walked for a while that first day, I saw two of my girl-friends ahead. He said, “I’ll leave you now,’ and went off. I was glad, for I wouldn’t have known how to introduce him.
“That first walk set a pattern, almost as if we’d learned a list of magic rules. We must always meet as if by accident and part without warning. We must never go any special place. We must never tell our names. We must never talk of tomorrow or plan anything, just yield to a fatalistic enchantment. Of course I never mentioned my friend to a soul. Away from the park I’d say, ‘You dreamed him, Jane,’ almost believing it. But the next afternoon I’d go back and he’d appear and I’d walk with him and have the feeling of a friend seeing into my mind. It went on that way for quite a while.” She emptied her cup.
“And then things changed?” Carr asked as he poured her more.
“In a way.”
“Did he start to make love to you?”
“No. Perhaps that was what was wrong. Perhaps if he’d made love to me, everything would have been all right. But he never did any more than take my arm. He was like a man who walks with a gun at his back. I sensed a terrible, mute tension inside him, born of timidity or twisted pride, a seething flood of frustrated energy. Eventually it began to seep over into me. For no good reason my heart would start to pound, I could hardly breathe, and little spasms would race up and down me. And all the while he’d be talking calmly. It was awful. I think I would have done something to break that tension between us, except for the magic rules and the feeling that everything would be spoiled if we once disobeyed them. So I did nothing. And then things began to get much worse.”
“How do you mean?” Carr asked.
Jane looked up at him. Now that she was lost in her story, she looked younger than ever.
“We were stuck, that’s what it amounted to, and we began to rot. All that knowledge he had of my queer thoughts began to terrify me. Because, you see, I’d always believed that they were just quirks of my mind, and that by sharing them I’d get rid of them. I kept waiting for him to tell me how silly they were. But he never did. Instead, I began to see from the way he ta
lked that my queer thoughts weren’t illusions at all, but the truth. Nothing did mean anything. Snores actually were a kind of engine-puffing, and printed words had no more real meaning than wind-tracings in sand. Other people weren’t alive, really alive, like you were. You were all alone.”
A bell clanged. They both started.
Jane relaxed. “Closing time,” she explained.
Carr shrugged. That they were in the stacks of the library had become inconsequential to him. “Go on,” he said.
“Now the walks did begin to effect the rest of my life. All day long I’d be plunged in gloom. My father and mother seemed a million miles away, my classes at the music academy the stupidest things in the world. And yet I didn’t show anything outwardly. No one noticed any change, except Gigolo my cat, who sometime acted afraid and spat at me, yet sometimes came purring to me in a most affectionate way—and sometimes watched at the windows and doors for hours, as if he were on guard. I was lost and not one soul tried to save me, not even my man in the park.”
SHE TOOK a drink and leaned back. “And then one autumn day when the clouds were low and the fallen leaves crackled under our feet, and we’d walked farther together than ever before, in fact a little way out of the park, I happened to look across the street and I noticed a spruce young man looking at us. I called my friend’s attention to him. He peered around through his thick glasses.
“The next instant he had grabbed me tight above the elbow and was marching me ahead. He didn’t speak until we got around the corner. Then he said, in a voice I’d never heard him use before, ‘They have seen us. Get home.’
“I started to ask questions, but he only said, ‘Don’t talk. Don’t look back.’ I was frightened and obeyed him.
“In the hours afterwards my fear grew. I pictured ‘them’ in a hundred horrible ways. I went to sleep praying never to see the small dark man again and just be allowed to live my old stupid life.
“Some time after midnight I awoke with my heart jumping, and there was Gigolo standing on the bedclothes spitting at the window. I made myself get up and tiptoe to it. Two dark things rose above the outside sill. They were the top of a ladder resting against it. I looked down. Light from the alley showed me the smiling face of the young man I’d seen across the street that afternoon. You know him, Carr. The one they call Dris—Driscoll Ames. He had two hands then. He reached them up to open the window.
