Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  Fafhrd heaved out his trapped leg, not even noting the splinter-scratches it got and as unmindful as the Mouser of the continuing creakings. The rats were gone. He lunged after his comrade, who had thrust a bunch of kindlers into the stove, to make more light.

  The horror was that, although the rats were all gone, the two longish heaps remained, although considerably diminished and, as now shown clearly by the yellow flames leaping from the tilted black door, changed in hue—no longer were the heaps red-beaded black, but a mixture of gleaming black and dark brown, a sickening purple-blue, violet and velvet black and snow-serpent white, and the reds of stockings and blood and bloody flesh and bone.

  Although hands and feet had been gnawed bone-naked, and bodies tunneled heart-deep, the two faces had been spared. But that was not good, for they were the parts purple-blue from death by strangulation, lips drawn back, eyes bulging, all features contorted in agony. Only the black and very dark brown hair gleamed unchanged—that and the white, white teeth. As each man stared down at his love, unable to look away despite the waves of horror and grief and rage washing higher and higher in him, each saw a tiny black strand uncurl from the black depression ringing each throat and drift off, dissipating, toward the open door behind them—two strands of night-smog.

  With a crescendo of crackings the floor sagged three spans more in the center before arriving at a new temporary stability.

  Edges of centrally tortured minds noted details: That Vlana’s silver-hilted dagger skewered to the floor a rat, which, likely enough, overeager had approached too closely before the night-smog had done its magic work.

  That her belt and pouch were gone. That the blue-enameled box inlaid with silver, in which Ivrian had put the Mouser’s share of the highjacked jewels, was gone too.

  The Mouser and Fafhrd lifted to each other white, drawn faces which were quite mad, yet completely joined in understanding and purpose. No need for Fafhrd to explain why he stripped off his robe and hood, or why he jerked up Vlana’s dagger, snapped the rat off it with a wrist-flick, and thrust it in his belt. No need for the Mouser to tell why he searched out a half-dozen jars of oil and after smashing three of them in front of the flaming stove, paused, thought, and stuck the other three in the sack at his waist, adding to them the remaining kindlers and the fire-pot, brimmed

  with red coals, its top lashed down tight.

  Then, still without word exchanged, the Mouser reached into the fireplace and without a wince at the burning metal’s touch, deliberately tipped the flaming stove forward, so that it fell door-down on oil-soaked rugs. Yellow flames sprang up around him.

  They turned and raced for the door. With louder crackings than any before, the floor collapsed. They desperately scrambled their way up a steep hill of sliding carpets and reached door and porch just before all behind them gave way and the flaming rugs and stove and all the firewood and candles and the golden couch and all the little tables and boxes and jars—and the unthinkably mutilated bodies of their first loves—cascaded into the dry, dusty, cobweb-choked room below, and the great flames of a cleansing or at least obliterating cremation began to flare upward.

  They plunged down the stairs, which tore away from the wall and collapsed in the dark as they reached the ground. They had to fight their way over the wreckage to get to Bones Alley.

  By then flames were darting their bright lizard-tongues out of the shuttered attic windows and the boarded-up ones in the story just below. By the time they reached Plague Court, running side by side at top speed, the Silver Eel’s fire alarm was clanging cacophonously behind them. They were still sprinting when they took the Death Alley fork. Then the Mouser grappled Fafhrd and forced him to a halt. The big man struck out, cursing insanely, and only desisted—his white face still a lunatic’s—when the Mouser cried panting, “Only ten heartbeats to arm us!”

  He pulled the sack from his belt and keeping tight hold of its neck, crashed it on the cobbles—hard enough to smash not only the bottles of oil, but also the fire-pot, for the sack was soon flaming at its base.

  Then he drew gleaming Scalpel and Fafhrd Graywand, and they raced on, the Mouser swinging his sack in a great circle beside him to fan its flames.

  It was a veritable ball of fire burning his left hand as they dashed across Cheap Street and into Thieves’ House, and the Mouser, leaping high, swung it up into the great niche above the doorway and let go of it. The niche-guards screeched in surprise and pain at the fiery invader of their hidey-hole.

  Student thieves poured out of the doors ahead at the screeching and footpounding, and then poured back as they saw the fierce point of flames and the two demon-faced on-comers brandishing their long, shining swords. One skinny little apprentice—he could hardly have been ten years old—lingered too long. Graywand thrust him pitilessly through, as his big eyes bulged and his small mouth gaped in horror and plea to Fafhrd for mercy.

  Now from ahead of them there came a weird, wailing call, hollow and hair-raising, and doors began to thud shut instead of spewing forth the armed guards Fafhrd and the Mouser prayed would appear to be skewered by their swords. Also, despite the long, bracketed torches looking newly renewed, the corridor was darkening.

  The reason for this last became clear as they plunged up the stairs. Strands of night-smog appeared in the stairwell, materializing from nothing, or the air.

  The strands grew longer and more tangible. They touched and clung nastily. In the corridor above they were forming from wall to wall and from ceiling to floor, like a gigantic cobweb, and were becoming so substantial that the Mouser and Fafhrd had to slash them to get through, or so their two maniac minds believed. The black web muffled a little a repetition of the eerie, wailing call, which came from the seventh door ahead and this time ended in a gleeful chittering and cackling as insane as the emotions of the two attackers.

  Here, too, doors were thudding shut. In an ephemeral flash of rationality, it occurred to the Mouser that it was not he and Fafhrd the thieves feared, for they had not been seen yet, but rather Hristomilo and his magic, even though working in defense of Thieves’ House.

  Even the map room, whence counterattack would most likely erupt, was closed off by a huge oaken, iron-studded door.

  They were now twice slashing the black, clinging, rope-thick spiderweb for every single step they drove themselves forward. While midway between the map and magic rooms, there was forming on the inky web, ghostly at first but swiftly growing more substantial, a black spider as big as a wolf. The Mouser slashed heavy cobweb before it, dropped back two steps, then hurled himself at it in a high leap. Scalpel thrust through it, striking amidst its eight new-formed jet eyes, and it collapsed like a daggered bladder, loosing a vile stink.

  Then he and Fafhrd were looking into the magic room, the alchemist’s chamber. It was much as they had seen it before, except some things were doubled, or multiplied even further.

  On the long table two blue-boiled cucurbits bubbled and roiled, their heads shooting out a solid, writhing rope more swiftly than moves the black swamp-cobra, which can run down a man—and not into twin receivers, but into the open air of the room (if any of the air in Thieves’ House could have been called open then) to weave a barrier between their swords and Hristomilo, who once more stood tall though hunchbacked over his sorcerous, brown parchment, though this time his exultant gaze was chiefly fixed on Fafhrd and the Mouser, with only an occasional downward glance

  at the text of the spell he drummingly intoned.

  While at the other end of the table, in web-free space, there bounced not only Slivikin, but also a huge rat matching him in size in all members except the head.

  From the ratholes at the foot of the walls, red eyes glittered and gleamed in pairs.

  With a bellow of rage Fafhrd began slashing at the black barrier, but the ropes were replaced from the cucurbit heads as swiftly as he sliced them, while the cut ends, instead of drooping slackly, now began to strain hungrily toward him like constrictive snakes or strang
le-vines.

  He suddenly shifted Graywand to his left hand, drew his long knife and hurled it at the sorcerer. Flashing toward its mark, it cut through three strands, was deflected and slowed by a fourth and fifth, almost halted by a sixth, and ended hanging futilely in the curled grip of a seventh. Hristomilo laughed cacklingly and grinned, showing his huge upper

  incisors, while Slivikin chittered in ecstasy and bounded the higher. The Mouser hurled Cat’s Claw with no better result—worse, indeed, since his action gave two darting smog-strands time to curl hamperingly around his sword-hand and stranglingly around his neck. Black rats came racing out of the big holes at the cluttered base of the walls.

  Meanwhile other strands snaked around Fafhrd’s ankles, knees and left arm, almost toppling him. But even as he fought for balance, he jerked Vlana’s dagger from his belt and raised it over his shoulder, its silver hilt glowing, its blade brown with dried rat’s-blood.

  The grin left Hristomilo’s face as he saw it. The sorcerer screamed strangely and importuningly then, and drew back from his parchment and the table, and raised clawed clubhands to ward off doom.

  Vlana’s dagger sped unimpeded through the black web—its strands even seemed to part for it—and betwixt the sorcerer’s warding hands, to bury itself to the hilt in his right eye.

  He screamed thinly in dire agony and clawed at his face.

  The black web writhed as if in death spasm.

  The cucurbits shattered as one, spilling their lava on the scarred table, putting out the blue flames even as the thick wood of the table began to smoke a little at the lava’s edge. Lava dropped with plops on the dark marble floor.

  With a faint, final scream Hristomilo pitched forward, hands clutched to his eyes above his jutting nose, silver dagger-hilt protruding between his fingers.

  The web grew faint, like wet ink washed with a gush of clear water. The Mouser raced forward and transfixed Slivikin and the huge rat with one thrust of Scalpel before the beasts knew what was happening. They too died swiftly with thin screams, while all the other rats turned tail and fled back down their holes swift almost as black lightning.

  Then the last trace of night-smog or sorcery-smoke vanished, and Fafhrd and the Mouser found themselves standing alone with three dead bodies amidst a profound silence that seemed to fill not only this room but all Thieves’ House. Even the cucurbit-lava had ceased to move, was hardening, and the wood of the table no longer smoked.

  Their madness was gone and all their rage, too—vented to the last red atomy and glutted to more than satiety. They had no more urge to kill Krovas or any other thieves than to swat flies. With horrified inner-eye Fafhrd saw the pitiful face of the child-thief he’d skewered in his lunatic anger. Only their grief remained with them, diminished not one whit, but rather growing greater—that and an ever more swiftly growing revulsion from all that was around them: the dead, the disordered magic room, all Thieves’ House, all of the city of Lankhmar to its last stinking alleyway. With a hiss of disgust the Mouser jerked Scalpel from the rodent cadavers, wiped it on the nearest cloth, and returned it to its scabbard. Fafhrd likewise sketchily cleansed and sheathed Graywand. Then the two men picked up their knife and dirk from where they’d dropped to the floor when the web had dematerialized, though neither glanced at Vlana’s dagger where it was buried. But on the sorcerer’s table they did notice Vlana’s black velvet, silver-worked pouch and belt, and Ivrian’s blue-enameled box inlaid with silver. These they took. With no more word than they had exchanged back at the Mouser’s burnt nest behind the Eel, but with a continuing sense of their unity of purpose, their identity of intent, and of their comradeship, they made their way with shoulders bowed and with slow, weary steps which only very gradually quickened out of the magic room and down the thick-carpeted corridor, past the map room’s wide door now barred with oak and iron, and past all the other shut, silent doors, down the echoing stairs, their footsteps speeding a little; down the bare-floored lower corridor past its closed, quiet doors, their footsteps resounding loudly no matter how softly they sought to tread; under the deserted, black-scorched guard-niche, and so out into Cheap Street, turning left and north because that was the nearest way to the Street of the Gods, and there turning right and east—not a waking soul in the wide street except for one skinny, bent-backed apprentice lad unhappily swabbing the flagstones in front of a wine shop in the dim pink light beginning to seep from the east, although there were many forms asleep, a-snore and a-dream in the gutters and under the dark porticoes—yes, turning right and east down the Street of the Gods, for that way was the Marsh Gate, leading to Causey Road across the Great Salt Marsh; and the Marsh Gate was the nearest way out of the great and glamorous city that was now loathsome to them, a city of beloved, unfaceable ghosts—indeed, not to be endured for one more stabbing, leaden heartbeat than was necessary.

  Four Ghosts in Hamlet

  ACTORS ARE A SUPERSTITIOUS LOT, probably because chance plays a big part in the success of a production of a company or merely an actor—and because we’re still a little closer than other people to the gypsies in the way we live and think. For instance, it’s bad luck to have peacock feathers on stage or say the last line of a play at rehearsals or whistle in the dressing room (the one nearest the door gets fired) or sing God Save the Sovereign on a railway train. (A Canadian company got wrecked that way.)

  Shakespearean actors are no exceptions. They simply travel a few extra superstitions, such as the one which forbids reciting the lines of the Three Witches, or anything from Macbeth, for that matter, except at performances, rehearsals, and on other legitimate occasions. This might be a good rule for outsiders too—then there wouldn’t be the endless flood of books with titles taken from the text of Macbeth—you know, Brief Candle, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, The Sound and the Fury, A Poor Player, All Our Yesterdays, and those are all just from one brief soliloquy.

  And our company, the Governor’s company, has a rule against the Ghost in Hamlet dropping his greenish cheesecloth veil over his helmet-framed face until the very moment he makes each of his entrances. Hamlet’s dead father mustn’t stand veiled in the darkness of the wings.

  This last superstition commemorates something which happened not too long ago, an actual ghost story. Sometimes I think it’s the greatest ghost story in the world—though certainly not from my way of telling it, which is gossipy and poor, but from the wonder blazing at its core.

  It’s not only a true tale of the supernatural, but also very much a story about people, for after all—and before everything else—ghosts are people.

  The ghostly part of the story first showed itself in the tritest way imaginable: three of our actresses (meaning practically all the ladies in a Shakespearean company) took to having sessions with a Ouija board in the hour before curtain time and sometimes even during a performance when they had long offstage waits, and they became so wrapped up in it and conceited about it and they squeaked so excitedly at the revelations which the planchette spelled out—and three or four times almost missed entrances because of it—that if the Governor weren’t such a tolerant commander-in-chief, he would have forbidden them to bring the board to the theater. I’m sure he was tempted to and might have, except that Props pointed out to him that our three ladies probably wouldn’t enjoy Ouija sessions one bit in the privacy of a hotel room, that much of the fun in operating a Ouija board is in having a half-exasperated, half-intrigued floating audience, and that when all’s done the basic business of all ladies is glamour, whether of personal charm or of actual witchcraft, since the word means both.

  Props—that is, our property man, Billy Simpson—was fascinated by their obsession, as he is by any new thing that comes along, and might very well have broken our Shakespearean taboo by quoting the Three Witches about them, except that Props has no flair for Shakespearean speech at all, no dramatic ability whatsoever, in fact he’s the one person in our company who never acts even a bit part or carries a mute spear on stage, though he has other talent
s which make up for this deficiency—he can throw together a papier-mâché bust of Pompey in two hours, or turn out a wooden prop dagger all silvery-bladed and hilt-gilded, or fix a zipper, and that’s not all.

  As for myself, I was very irked at the ridiculous alphabet board, since it seemed to occupy most of Monica Singleton’s spare time and satisfy all her hunger for thrills.

  I’d been trying to promote a romance with her—a long touring season becomes deadly and cold without some sort of heart-tickle—and for a while I’d made progress. But after Ouija came along, I became a ridiculous Guildenstern mooning after an unattainable unseeing Ophelia—which were the parts I and she actually played in Hamlet.

  I cursed the idiot board with its childish corner-pictures of grinning suns and smirking moons and windblown spirits, and I further alienated Monica by asking her why wasn’t it called a Nenein or No-No board (Ninny board!) instead of a Yes-Yes board? Was that, I inquired, because all spiritualists are forever accentuating the positive and behaving like a pack of fawning yes-men?—yes, we’re here; yes, we’re your uncle Harry; yes, we’re happy on this plane; yes, we have a doctor among us who’ll diagnose that pain in your chest; and so on.

  Monica wouldn’t speak to me for a week after that.

  I would have been even more depressed except that Props pointed out to me that no flesh-and-blood man can compete with ghosts in a girl’s affections, since ghosts being imaginary have all the charms and perfections a girl can dream of, but that all girls eventually tire of ghosts, or if their minds don’t, their bodies do. This eventually did happen, thank goodness, in the case of myself and Monica, though not until we’d had a grisly, mindwrenching experience—a night of terrors before the nights of love.

  So Ouija flourished and the Governor and the rest of us put up with it one way or another, until there came that three-night-stand in Wolverton, when its dismal uncanny old theater tempted our three Ouija-women to ask the board who was the ghost haunting the spooky place and the swooping planchette spelled out the name S-H-A-K-E-S-P-E-A-R-E…