Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  He broke off, eyeing Ryker just a little doubtfully.

  “But it stuck in your mind,” that one observed, “for all these years, so that when I told you about seeing a woman in black near the same door, you rushed off to check up on her, just on the chance? Though you’d never seen her yourself, even once?”

  Clancy’s expression became a shade unhappy. “Well, no,” he admitted, glancing up and down the hall, as though hoping someone would come along and save him from answering. “There was a little more than that,” he continued uneasily, “though I wouldn’t want anyone making too much of it, or telling the Mrs. I told them.

  “But then, Mr. Ryker, you’re not the one to be gossiping or getting the wind up, are you?” he continued more easily, giving his tenant a hopeful look.

  “No, of course I’m not,” Ryker responded, a little more casually than he felt. “What was it?”

  “Well, about four years ago we had another disappearance here, a single man living alone and getting on in years but still active. He didn’t own any of the furniture, his possessions were few, nothing at all fancy like Stensor’s, no friends or relations we knew of, and he came to us from a building that knew no more; in fact we didn’t realize he was gone until the time for paying the rent came round. And it wasn’t until then that I recalled that the last time or two I spoke to him he’d mentioned something about a woman in an upstairs hall, wondering if she’d found the people or the apartment number she seemed to be looking for. Not making a complaint, you see, just mentioning, just idly wondering, so that it wasn’t until he disappeared that I thought of connecting it up with Stensor’s girl at all.”

  “He say if she was young?” Ryker asked.

  “He wasn’t sure. She was wearing a black outside coat and hat or scarf of something that hid her face, and she made a point of not noticing him when he looked at her and thought of asking if she needed help. He did say she was thin, though, I remember.”

  Ryker nodded.

  Clancy continued,“And then a few years ago there was this couple on Nine that had a son living with them, a big fat lug who looked older than he was and was always being complained about whether he did anything or not. One of the old ladies in the apartment next to their bathroom used to kick to us about him running water for baths at two or three in the morning. And he had the nerve to complain to us about them, claiming they pulled the elevator away from him when he wanted to get it, or made it go in the opposite direction to what he wanted when he was in it. I laughed in his pimply face at that. Not that those two old biddies wouldn’t have done it to him if they’d figured a way and they’d got the chance.

  “His mother was a sad soul who used to fuss at him and worry about him a lot. She’d bring her troubles to the Mrs. and talk and talk—but I think really she’d have been relieved to have him off her mind.

  “His father was a prize crab, an ex-army officer forever registering complaints—he had a little notebook for them. But half the time he was feuding with me and the Mrs., wouldn’t give us the time of day—or of course ask it. I know he’d have been happy to see his loud-mouthed dumb son drop out of sight.

  “Well, one day the kid comes down to me here with a smart-ass grin and says, ‘Mr. Clancy, you’re the one who’s so great, aren’t you, on chasing winos and hookers out of here, not letting them freeload in the halls for a minute? Then how come you let—’

  “ ‘Go on,’ I tell him, ‘what do you know about hookers?’

  “But that doesn’t faze him, he just goes on (he was copying his father, I think, actually),‘Then how come you let this skinny little hooker in a black fur coat wander around the halls all the time, trying to pick guys up?’

  “ ‘You’re making this up,’ I tell him flat, ‘or you’re imagining things, or else one of our lady tenants is going to be awful sore at you if she ever hears you’ve been calling her a hooker.’

  “ ‘She’s nobody from this building,’ the kid insists, ‘she’s got more class. That fur coat cost money. It’s hard to check out her face, though, because she never looks at you straight on and she’s got this black hat she hides behind. I figure she’s an old bag—maybe thirty, even—and wears the hat so you can’t see her wrinkles, but that she’s got a young bod, young and wiry. I bet she takes karate lessons so she can bust the balls of any guy that gets out of line, or maybe if he just doesn’t satisfy her—’

  “ ‘You’re pipe-dreaming, kid,’ I tell him.

  “ ‘And you know what?’ he goes on. ‘I bet you she’s got nothing on but black stockings and a garter belt under that black fur coat she keeps wrapped so tight around her, so when she’s facing a guy she can give him a quick flash of her bod, to lead him on—’

  “ ‘And you got a dirty mind,’ I say. ‘You’re making this up.’

  “ ‘I am not,’ he says.‘She was just now up on Ten before I came down and leering at me sideways, giving me the come on.’

  “ ‘What were you doing up on Ten?’ I ask him loud.

  “ ‘I always go up a floor before I buzz the elevator,’ he answers me quick, ‘so’s those old dames won’t know it’s me and buzz it away from me.’

  “ ‘All right, quiet down, kid,’ I tell him. ‘I’m going up to Ten right now, to check this out, and you’re coming with me.’

  “So we go on up to Ten and there’s nobody there and right away the kid starts yammering,‘I bet you she picked up a trick in this building and they’re behind one of these doors screwing, right now. Old Mr. Lucas—’

  “I was really going to give him a piece of my mind then, tell him off, but on the way up I’d been remembering that girl of Stensor’s who lingered behind, maybe for a long time, if there was anything to what the other guy told me. And somehow it gave me a sort of funny feeling, so all I said was something like‘Look here, kid, maybe you’re making this up and maybe not. Either way, I still think you got a dirty mind. But if you did see this hooker and you ever see her again, don’t you have anything to do with her—and don’t go off with her if she should ask you. You just come straight to me and tell me, and if I’m not here, you find a cop and tell him. Hear me?’

  “You know, that sort of shut him up.‘All right, all right!’ he said and went off, taking the stairs going down.”

  “And did he disappear?” Ryker asked after a bit. He seemed vaguely to remember the youth in question, a pallid and lumbering lout who tended to brush against people and bump into doorways when he passed them.

  “Well, you know, in a way that’s a matter for argument,” Clancy answered slowly. “It was the last time I saw him—that’s a fact. And the Mrs. never saw him again either. But when she asked his mother about him, she just said he was off visiting friends for a while, but then a month or so later she admitted to the Mrs. that he had gone off without telling them a word—to join a commune, she thought, from some of the things he’d been saying, and that was all right with her, because his father just couldn’t get along with him, they had such fights, only she wished he’d have the consideration to send her a card or something.”

  “And that was the last of it?” Ryker asked.

  Clancy nodded slowly, almost absently.“That was damn all of it,” he said softly. “About ten months later the parents moved. The kid hadn’t turned up. There was nothing more.”

  “Until now,” Ryker said, “when I came to you with my questions about a woman in black—and on Three at that, where this Stensor had lived. It wasn’t a fur coat, of course, and I didn’t think of her being a hooker—” (Was that true? he wondered) “—and it brought it all back to you, which now included what the young man had told you, and so you checked out the floors and then very kindly told me the whole story so as to give me the same warning you gave him?”

  “But you’re an altogether different sort of person, Mr. Ryker,” Clancy protested.“I’d never think— But yes, allowing for that, that about describes it. You can’t be too careful.”

  “No, you can’t. It’s a strange business,”
Ryker commented, shaking his head, and then added, making it sound much more casual, even comical, than he felt it, “You know, if this had happened fifty years ago, we’d be thinking maybe we had a ghost.”

  Clancy chuckled uneasily and said, “Yeah, I guess that’s so.”

  Ryker said, “But the trouble with that idea would have been that there’s nothing in the story about a woman disappearing, but three men—Stensor, and the man who lived alone, and the young man who lived with his parents.”

  “That’s so,” Mr. Clancy said.

  Ryker stirred himself. “Well, thanks for telling me all about it,” he said as they shook hands. “And if I should run into the lady again, I won’t take any chances. I’ll report it to you, Clancy. But not to the Mrs.”

  “I know you will, Mr. Ryker,” Clancy affirmed.

  Ryker himself wasn’t nearly so sure of that. But he felt he had to get away to sort out his impressions. The dingy silvery walls were becoming oppressive.

  Ryker made his walk a long one, brisk and thoughtful to begin with, dawdling and mind-wandering to finish, so that it was almost sunset by the time he reentered the apartment tree (and our story), but he had his impressions sorted. Clancy had—possibly—given the Vanishing Lady a history, funny to start with (that “hookers’ convention”!) but then by stages silly, sad, sinister. Melancholy, moody, and still mysterious.

  The chief retroactive effect of Clancy’s story on his memories of his own encounters with the Vanishing Lady had been to intensify their sexual color, give them a sharper, coarser erotic note—an Ultrabooth note, you could say. In particular Ryker was troubled that ever since hearing Clancy narrate the loutish youth’s steamy adolescent imagining that his “little hooker” had worn nothing but black stockings and a garter belt under her black fur coat, he was unable to be sure whether he himself had had similar simmering fantasy flashes during his encounters with her.

  Could he be guilty, at his age, he asked himself, of such callow and lurid fantasies? The answer to that was, of course, “Of course.” And then wasn’t the whole romantic business of the Vanishing Lady just a retailoring of Ultrabooth to his own taste, something that made an Ultrabooth girl his alone? Somehow, he hoped not. But had he any real plan for making contact with her if she ever did stop vanishing? His unenterprising behavior when he’d had the chance to get into the elevator with her alone, and later the chance to get off the elevator at the same floor as she, and today the opportunity to meet her face to face on the third floor, indicated clearly that the answer to that question was “No.” Which depressed him.

  To what extent did Clancy believe in his story and in the reality of the girl who’d reportedly lingered on? He obviously had enjoyed telling it, and likely (from his glibness) had done so more than once, to suitable appreciative listeners. But did he believe she was one continuing real entity, or just a mixture of suggestion, chance, and mistaken resemblances, gossip, and outright lies? He’d never seen her himself—had this made Clancy doubt her reality, or contrariwise given him a stubborn hankering to catch sight of her himself for once at least? On the whole, Ryker thought Clancy was a believer—if only judging by his haste to search for her.

  And as for the ghost idea, which you couldn’t get around because it fitted her appearing and disappearing behavior so well, no matter how silly and unfashionable such a suggestion might be—Clancy’s reaction to that had seemed uneasy skepticism rather than outright “Nonsense!” rejection.

  Which was very much like Ryker’s own reaction to it, he realized. He knew there’d been some feelings of fear mixed in with the excitement during all his later encounters with her, before he’d heard Clancy’s story. How would he feel now, after hearing it, if he should see her again, he wondered uncomfortably. More fear? Or would he now spot clues to her unreality? Would she begin to melt into mist? Would she look different simply because of what he’d heard about her?

  Most likely, reality being the frustrating thing it was, he thought with an unamused inward guffaw, he’d simply never glimpse her again and never know. The stage having been set, all manifestations would cease.

  But then, as he let the front door slip from his hand and swing toward its click-solemnized self-locking, he saw the Vanishing Lady forty feet away exactly as he had the first two times, real, no ghostliness anywhere (the name for the material of her coat came to his mind—velour), her shadowed face swung his way, or almost so, and modestly reaverted itself, and she moved out of sight on her black oxfords.

  He reached the foyer fast as he could manage, its emptiness neither startling nor relieving him, nor the emptiness of the long back hall. He looked at the Clancys’ door and the shuttered office window and shook his head and smiled. (Report this adventure? Whyever?) He started toward the stairs, but shook his head again and smiled more ruefully—he was already breathing very hard. He entered the elevator, and as he firmly pressed the 14 button with his thumb and heard the cage respond, he saw the dark gleaming eyes of the Vanishing Lady looking in at him anxiously, imploringly—they were open very wide—through the narrowing small window in the doors.

  The next thing he was aware of, the cage was passing Three and he had just croaked out a harsh “Good evening”—the chalky aftertaste of these words was in his throat. The rest of the trip seemed interminable.

  When the cage reached Fourteen, his thumb was already pressing the One button—and that trip seemed interminable too.

  No sign of anyone anywhere, on One. He looked up the stairs, but he was breathing harder than even before. Finally he got back into the elevator and hovered his thumb over the 14 button. He could touch but not press it down. He brought his face close to the empty little window and waited and waited—and waited.

  His thumb did not press down then, but the cage responded. The little window slipped shut. “It’s out of my hands,” he told himself fatalistically; “I’m being pulled somewhere.” And from somewhere the thought came to him: What if a person were confined to this apartment tree forever, never leaving it, just going up and down and back and forth, and down and up and forth and back?

  The cage didn’t stop until Twelve, where the door was opened by a whitehaired couple. Responding to their apologies with a reassuring head-shake and a signed “It’s all right,” Ryker pressed past them and, gasping gently and rapidly, mounted the last flight of stairs very slowly, very slowly. The two extra steps brought on a fit of swirling dizziness, but it passed and he slowly continued on toward his room. He felt frustrated, confused and very tired. He clung to the thoughts that he had reversed the elevator’s course as soon as he could, despite his fright, and returned downstairs to hunt for her, and that in his last glimpse of them, her eyes had looked frightened too.

  That night he had the muttering black nightmare again, all of it for the first time in weeks, and stronger, he judged afterward, than he’d ever before experienced it. The darkness seemed more impenetrable, solid, an ocean of black concrete congealing about him. The paralysis more complete, black canvas mummy wrappings drawn with numbing tightness, a spiral black cocoon tourniquet-tight. The dry and smoky odors more intense, as though he were baking and strangling in volcanic ash, while the sewer-stenches vied in disgustingness with fruity-flowery reeks meant to hide them. The sullen ghost-light of his imagination showed the micro-males grosser and more cockroachlike in their hordes. And when finally under the goad of intensest horror he managed to stir himself and strain upward, feeling his heart and veins tearing with the effort, he encountered within a fraction of an inch his tomb’s coarsely lined ceiling, which showered gritty ash into his gasping mouth and sightless eyes.

  When he finally fought his way awake it was day, but his long sleep had in no way rested him. He felt tired still and good for nothing. Yesterday’s story and walk had been too long, he told himself, yesterday’s elevator encounter too emotionally exhausting. “Prisoners of the apartment tree,” he murmured.

  The Vanishing Lady was in very truth an eternal prisoner of the ap
artment tree, knowing no other life than there and no sleep anywhere except for lapsings that were as sudden as a drunkard’s blackouts into an unconsciousness as black as Ryker’s nightmares, but of which she retained no memory whatever save for a general horror and repulsion which colored all her waking thoughts.

  She’d come awake walking down a hall, or on the stairs or in the moving elevator, or merely waiting somewhere in the tall and extensive apartment tree, but mostly near its roots and generally alone. Then she’d simply continue whatever she was doing for a while, sensing around her (if the episode lasted long enough, she might begin to wander independently), thinking and feeling and imagining and wondering as she moved or stood, always feeling a horror, until something would happen to swoop her back into black unconsciousness again. The something might be a sudden sound or thought, a fire siren, say, sight of a mirror or another person, encounter with a doorknob, or with the impulse to take off her gloves, the chilling sense that someone had noticed her or was about to notice her, the fear that she might inadvertently walk through a silver-gray, faintly grimy wall, or slowly be absorbed into the carpet, sink through the floor. She couldn’t recall those last things ever happening, and yet she dreaded them. Surely she went somewhere, she told herself, when she blacked out. She couldn’t just collapse down on the floor, else there’d be some clue to that next time she came awake—and she was always on her feet when that happened. Besides, not often, but from time to time, she noticed she was wearing different clothes—similar clothes, in fact always black or some very dark shade close to it, but of a definitely different cut or material (leather, for instance, instead of cloth). And she couldn’t possibly change her clothes or, worse, have them changed for her, in a semi-public place like the apartment tree—it would be unthinkable, too horribly embarrassing. Or rather—since we all know that the unthinkable and the horribly embarrassing (and the plain horrible too, for that matter) can happen—it would be too grotesque.