by Fritz Leiber
“And it’s that thing, Glenn—that ghostly, utterly weird thing—that you believe can’t be written about effectively any more, or experienced?” Franz asked me with an odd note of suppressed eagerness, eyeing me keenly although the Volks was traveling a jouncy section. “Why?”
“You started to sketch the reasons yourself a moment ago,” I said. My newest black globe was slipping sideways now, pulsing, starting to fade. “We’ve become too smart and shrewd and sophisticated to be scared by fantasies. Most especially we’ve got an army of experts to explain away the supernatural sort of thing the instant it starts to happen. The physicist boys have put matter and energy through the finest sieves—there’s no room left in it for mysterious rays and influences, except for the ones they’ve described and catalogued. The astronomers are keeping tabs on the rim of the cosmos with their giant telescopes. The earth’s been pretty thoroughly explored, enough to show there aren’t any lost worlds in darkest Africa or Mountains of Madness near the South Pole.”
“What about religion?” Viki suggested.
“Most religions,” I replied, “steer away from the supernatural today—at least the religions that would attract an intellectual person. They concentrate on brotherhood, social service, moral leadership—or dictatorship!—and fine-drawn reconciliations of theology to the facts of science. They’re not really interested in miracles or devils.”
“Well, the occult then,” Viki persisted. “Psionics.”
“Nothing much there either,” I asserted. “If you do decide to go in for telepathy, ESP hauntings—the supernormal sort of thing—you find that territory has all been staked out by Doctor Rhine, riffling his eternal Zener cards, and a bunch of other parapsychologists who tell you they’ve got the whole benign spirit world firmly in hand and who are as busy classifying and file-carding as the physicists.
“But worst of all,” I went on as Mr. M. slowed the Volks for a potholed uphill stretch, “we’ve got seventy-seven breeds of certified psychiatrists and psychologists (excuse me, Franz!) all set to explain the least eerie feeling or sense of wonder we get in terms of the workings of our unconscious minds, our everyday human relationships, and our past emotional experiences.”
Vicki chuckled throatily and put in, “Supernatural dread almost always turns out to be nothing but childhood misconceptions and fears about sex. Mom’s the witch with her breasts of mystery and her underground baby-factory, while the dark hot bristly demon dissolves to Dear Old Dad.” At that moment the Volks, avoiding another dark spill of gravel, again aimed straight at the sun. I dodged it in part but Viki got it full in the eyes, as I could tell from the odd way she was blinking sideways at the turreted hills a moment later.
“Exactly,” I told her. “The point is, Franz, that these experts are experts, all joking aside, and they’ve divvied up the outer and inner world between them, and if we just start to notice something strange we turn to them at once (either actually or in our imaginations) and they have rational down-to-earth explanations all ready. And because each of the experts knows a lot more about his special field than we do, we have to accept their explanations—or else go off our own merry way, knowing in our heart of hearts that we’re behaving like stubborn romantic adolescents or out-and-out crackpots.”
“The result is,” I finished, as the Volks got past the potholes, “that there’s no room left in the world for the weird—though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it, as shown by the floods of corny monster films and the stacks of monster and madness magazines with their fractionally-educated hip cackling and beatnik jeers.”
“Laughing in the dark,” Franz said lightly, looking past us back the road, where the thin dust the Volks raised was falling over the cliff toward the thorny dark ravines far below.
“Meaning?” Viki asked.
“People still are afraid,” he stated simply, “and of the same things. They’ve just got more defenses against their fears. They’ve learned to talk louder and faster and smarter and funnier—and with more parroted expert-given authority—to shut them out. Why, I could tell you—” He checked himself. He really did seem intensely excited beneath the calm philosopher’s mask. “I can make it clear,” he said, “by an analogy.”
“Do,” Viki urged.
Half turned in his seat, Franz looked straight back at the two of us. A quarter of a mile ahead or so the road, climbing a little again, plunged into a stretch of heavy cloud-shadow. I noted this fact with relief—as I now had no less than three dark fuzzy globes crawling along the horizon and I yearned to be out of the sun. From the way Viki was squinting I could tell she was in the same fix. Mr. M. with his pulled-down hat and Franz, faced around, seemed less affected.
Franz said, “Imagine that mankind is just one man—and his family—living in a house in a clearing in the midst of a dark dangerous forest, largely unknown, largely unexplored. While he works and while he rests, while he makes love to his wife or plays with his children, he’s always keeping an eye on that forest.
“After a while he becomes prosperous enough to hire guards to watch the forest for him, men trained in scouting and woodcraft—your experts, Glenn. The man comes to depend on them for his safety, he defers to their judgment, he is perfectly willing to admit that each of them knows a little more about one small nearby sector of the forest than he does.
“But what if those guards should all come to him one day and say, ‘Look, Master, there really is no forest out there at all, only some farmlands we’re cultivating that stretch to the ends of the universe. In fact, there never was a forest out there at all, Master—you imagined all those black trees and choked aisles because you were scared of the witch doctor!
“Would the man believe them? Would he have the faintest justification for believing them? Or would he simply decide that his hired guards, vain of their little skills and scouting’s, had developed delusions of omniscience?”
The cloud-shadow was very close now, just at the top of the slight climb we’d almost finished. Franz Kinzman leaned closer to us against the back of the front seat and there was a hush in his voice as he said, “The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research man, far far beyond the mad beat half-hysterical laughter…the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.”
With an exhilarating chilling and glooming, the Volks rolled into the sharply-edged cloud-shadow. Switching around in his seat Franz began eagerly, intently, rapidly to search the landscape ahead, which seemed suddenly to expand, gain depth, and spring into sharper existence with the screening off of the blinding sun.
Almost at once his gaze fixed on a smoothly ridged gray stone pinnacle that had just come into view on the opposite rim of the canyon valley beside us. He slapped Mr. M. on the shoulder and pointed with his other hand at a small parking area, surfaced like the road, on the hillside bulge we were crossing.
Then, as Mr. M. swung the car to a grating stop in the indicated area just on the brink of the drop, Franz raised in his seat and, looking over the windshield, pointed commandingly at the gray pinnacle while lifting his other hand a little, fingers tautly spread, in a gesture enjoining silence.
I looked at the pinnacle. At first I saw nothing but the half dozen rounded merging turrets of gray rock springing out of the brush-covered hilltop. Then it seemed to me that the last of my annoying after-images of the sun—dark, pulsing, fringe-edged—had found lodgment there.
I blinked and swung my eyes a little to make it go away or at least move off—for after all it was nothing but a fading disturbance in my retinas that, purely by chance, momentarily coincided with the pinnacle.
It would not move away. It clung to the pinnacle, a dark translucent pulsing shape, as if held ther
e by some incredible magnetic attraction.
I shivered, I felt all my muscles faintly chill and tighten at this unnatural linkage between the space inside my head and the space outside it, at this weird tie between the sort of figures that one sees in the real world and the kind that swim before the eyes when one closes them in the dark.
I blinked my eyes harder, swung my head from side to side.
It was no use. The shaggy dark shape with the strange lines going out from it clung to the pinnacle like some giant clawed and crouching beast.
And instead of fading it now began to darken further, even to blacken, the faint lines got a black glitter, the whole thing began horridly to take on a definite appearance and expression, much as the figures we see swimming in the dark become faces or masks or muzzles or forms in response to our veering imagination—though now I felt no ability whatever to change the trend of the shaping of the thing on the pinnacle.
Viki’s fingers dug into my arm with painful force. Without realizing it, we’d both stood up in the back of the car and were leaning forward, close to Franz. My own hands gripped the back of the front seat. Only Mr. M. hadn’t raised up, though he was staring at the pinnacle too.
Viki began, in a slow rasping strained voice, “Why, it looks like—”
With a sharp jerk of his spread-fingered hand Franz commanded her to be silent. Then without taking his eyes away from the crag he dipped in the side pocket of his coat and was next reaching some things back toward us.
I saw, without looking at them directly, that they were blank white cards and stub pencils. Viki and I took them—so did Mr. M.
“Franz whispered hoarsely, “Don’t say what you see. Write it down. Just your impressions. Now. Quickly. The thing won’t last long—I think.”
For the next few seconds the four of us looked and scribbled and shivered—at least I know I was shuddering at one point, though not for an instant taking my eyes away.
Then, for me, the pinnacle was suddenly bare. I knew that it must have become so for the others too at almost the same instant, from the way their shoulders slumped and the strained sigh Viki gave.
We didn’t say a word, just breathed hard for a moment or so, then passed the cards around and read them. Most of the writing or printing had the big sloppiness of something scribbled without looking at the paper, but beyond that there was a visible tremor or shakiness, especially in Viki’s notes and my own.
Viki Quinn’s: Black tiger, burning bright. Blinding fur—or vines. Stickiness.
Franz Kinzman’s: Black Empress. Glittering cloak of threads. Visual glue.
Mine (Glenn Seabury’s): Giant Spider. Black lighthouse. The web. The pull on the eyes.
Mr. M, whose writing was firmest: I don’t see anything. Except three people looking at a big bare gray rock as if it were the door to Hell.
And it was Mr. M. who first looked up. We met his gaze. His lips sketched a tentative grin that seemed both sour and uneasy.
He said after a bit, “Well, you certainly had your young friends pretty well hypnotized, Mr. Kinzman.”
Franz asked calmly, “Is that your explanation, Ed—hypnotic suggestion—for what happened, for what we thought happened?”
The other shrugged. “What else?” he asked more cheerfully. “Do you have another explanation, Franz?—something that would account for it not working on me?”
Franz hesitated. I hung on his answer, wild to know if he’d known it was coming, as he’d seemed to, and how he’d known, and whether he’d had any comparable previous experiences, The hypnotism notion, though clever, was pure nonsense.
Finally Franz shook his head and said firmly, “No.”
Mr. M. shrugged and started the Volks.
None of us wanted to talk. The experience was still with us, pinning us down inside, and then the testimony of the cards was so complete in its way, the parallelisms so exact, the conviction of a shared experience so sure, that there was no great immediate urge to compare notes.
Viki did say to me, in the offhand way of a person checking a point of which he’s almost certain, “‘Black lighthouse’—that means the light was black? Rays of darkness?”
“Of course,” I told her and then asked in the same way, “Your ‘vines,’ Viki, your ‘threads,’ Franz—did they suggest those fine wire figures of curved planes and space you see in mathematical museums? Something linking a center to infinity?”
They both nodded. I said, “Like my web,” and that was all the talk for a bit.
I took out a cigarette, remembered, and shoved it back in my top pocket.
Viki said, “Our descriptions…vaguely like descriptions of tarot cards…none of the actual tarots, though…” Her remarks trailed off unanswered.
Mr. M. stopped at the top of a narrow drive that led down sharply to a house of which the only visible part was the flat roof, topped with pale jagged gravel. He jumped out.
“Thanks for the lift, Franz,” he said. “Remember to call on me—the phone’s working again—if you people should need a lift…or anything.” He looked quickly toward the two of us in the back seat and grinned nervously. “Good-by, Miss Quinn, Mr. Seabury. Don’t—” he broke off, said simply, “So long,” and walked rapidly down the drive.
Of course we guessed he’d been going to say, “Don’t see any more black tigers with eight legs and lady’s faces,” or something like that.
Franz slid across into the driver’s seat. As soon as the Volks got moving I knew one reason the steady competent Mr. M. might have wanted to drive the mountainous stretch. Franz didn’t exactly try to make the old Volks behave like a sports car, but his handling of it was in that direction—skittish, a bit dashing.
He mused loudly, “One thing keeps nagging me: why didn’t Ed Mortenson see it?—if ‘see’ is the right word.”
So at last I was sure of Mr. M.’s name. Mortenson. It seemed a triumph.
Viki said, “I can think of one possible reason, Mr. Kinzman. He isn’t going where we’re going.”
II
“Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by this appalling effigy.”
—M. R. James
Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook
Rim House was about two miles beyond Mr. Mortenson’s place and likewise on the downhill (down-cliff, rather!) side of the road. It was reached by a decidedly one-lane drive. On the outside of the drive, edged by white-painted stones, was a near-vertical drop of over one hundred feet. On the inside was a forty-five degree brush-dotted rocky slope between the drive and the road, which was climbing sharply along this stretch.
After about one hundred yards the drive widened to become the short, narrow, jutting plateau or terrace on which stood Rim House, occupying about half of the available space. Franz, who had taken the first part Of the drive with confident briskness, slowed the Volks to a crawl as soon as the house came in view so we could scan the outside layout while still somewhat above it.
The house was built to the very edge of the drop, which here plunged down further and even more sharply than it had along the drive. On the uphill side of the house, coming down to within two feet of it, was a dizzily expansive slope of raw earth with hardly a thing growing in it, smoothly geometrical as a little section of the side of a vast brown cone. Along the very top of it a row of short white posts, so distant I couldn’t see the cable joining them, marked the road we had left. The slope looked forty-five degrees to me—these things always look impossibly steep—but Franz said it was only thirty—a completely stabilized landslide. It had been burned over a year ago in a brush fire that had almost got the house and still more recently there had been some minor slides started by repairs to the road above, accounting for the slope’s unvegetated appearance.
The house was long, one-storey, its walls finished in gray asbestos shingles. The nearly flat roof, also finishe
d in gray asbestos, sloped gently from the cliff side in. Midway the length of the house was a bend, allowing the house to conform to the curving top of the cliff and dividing it into two equal sections or angles, to call them that. An unroofed porch, lightly railed (Franz called it “the deck”) ran along the nearer angle of the house fronting north and thrusting several feet out over the drop, which as this point was three hundred feet.
On the side of the house toward the drive was a flagstone yard big enough to turn a car in and with a lightly roofed carport up against the house on the side away from the drop. As we drove down onto the yard there was a slight clank as we crossed a heavy metal plate bridging a small neat ditch that ran along the foot of the raw earth slope, carrying off the water that would come down it—and also the water that would drain from the roof—during Southern California’s infrequent but sometimes severe winter rains.
Franz backed the car around before we got out. It required four movements—swing to the corner of the house where the deck started, back with a sharp turn until the rear wheels were almost in the ditch, forward with a reverse turn until the front wheels were at the cliff edge by the metal bridgelet, then back into the carport until the rear of the car was almost up against a door that Franz told us led to the kitchen.
The three of us got out and Franz led us to the center of the flagged yard for another look around before we went inside. I noticed that some of the gray flags were actually solid rock showing through the light soil cover, indicating that the plateau was not an earth terrace cut by men but a rocky flat-surfaced knob thrusting out of the hillside. It gave me a feeling of security which I especially welcomed because there were other impressions—sensations, rather that were distinctly disturbing to me.
They were minor sensations, all of them, barely on the threshold of awareness. Ordinarily I don’t think I’d have noticed them—I don’t consider myself a sensitive person—but undoubtedly the strange experience of the thing on the pinnacle had keyed me up. To begin with there was the hint of the nasty smell of burnt linen and with it an odd bitter brassy taste; I don’t think I imagined these things, because I noticed Franz wrinkling his nostrils and working his tongue against his teeth. Then there was the feeling of being faintly brushed by threads, cobwebs, or the finest vines, although we were right out in the open and the nearest thing overhead was a cloud a half mile up. And just as I felt that—the faintest feeling, mind you—I noticed Viki lightly and questing run her hand across the top of her hair and down the back of her neck in the common gesture of “feeling for a spider.”
