by Fritz Leiber
All this time we were talking off and on—for one thing Franz was telling us about buying Rim House on quite inexpensive terms five years back from the heir of a wealthy surfing and sports-car enthusiast who had run himself off a turn in Decker Canyon.
Finally there were the sounds that were, I thought, breathing on the verge of audibility, in the remarkably complete silence that flowed around us when the Volks’ motor was cut off. I know that everyone who goes from the city to the country is troubled by sounds, but these were on the unusual side. There was an occasional whistling too high-pitched for the ear’s normal range and a soft rumbling too low for it. But along with these perhaps fancied vibrations, I three times thought I heard the hissing rattle of fine gravel spilling down. Each time I looked quickly toward the slope, but never could catch the faintest sign of earth on the move, although there was admittedly a lot of slope to be scanned.
The third time I looked up the slope, some clouds had moved aside enough so that the upper rim of the sun peered back down at me. “Like a golden rifleman drawing a bead” was the grotesque figure of speech that sprang to my mind. I looked hurriedly away. I wanted no more black spots before my eyes for the present. Just then Franz led us up on the deck and into Rim House by the front door.
I was afraid that all the unpleasant sensations would intensify as we got inside—especially somehow the burnt-linen smell and the invisible cobwebs—so I was greatly cheered when instead they all vanished instantly, as though faced-down by the strong sense of Franz’s genial, sympathetic, wide-ranging, highly civilized personality that the living room exuded.
It was a long room, narrow at first where it had to give space to the kitchen and utility room and a small bathroom at this end of the house, then broadening out to the full width of the building. There was no empty wall-space, it was completely lined with shelves—half of books, half of statuary, archeological oddments, scientific instruments, tape recorder, high-fi set and the like. Near the inner wall, beyond the narrow section, were a big desk, some filing cabinets, and a stand with the phone.
There were no windows looking out on the deck. But just beyond the deck, where the bend in the house came, was a big view window looking out across the canyon at the craggy hills that completely cut off any sight of the Pacific. Facing the view window and close to it was a long couch backed by a long table.
At the end of the living room a narrow hall led down the middle of the second angle of the house to a door that in turn let out into a most private grassy space that could be used for sunbathing and was just big enough, for a badminton court—if anyone felt nervy enough to leap about swatting at the bird on the edge of that great drop.
On the side of the hall toward the slope was a big bedroom—Franz’s—and a large bathroom opening into the hall at the end of the house. On the other side were two only slightly smaller bedrooms, each with a view window that could be completely masked by heavy dark drapes. These rooms had been his boys’, he remarked casually, but I noted with relief that there were no mementoes or signs whatever left of youthful occupancy: my closet, in fact, had some women’s clothes hanging in the back of it. These two bedrooms, which he assigned to Viki and myself, had a connecting door which could be bolted from both sides, but now stood unbolted but shut—a typical indication, albeit a minor one, of Franz’s civilized tactfulness: he did not know, or at least did not presume to guess, the exact relationship between Viki and myself, and so left us to make our own arrangements as we saw fit—without any spoken suggestion that we should do so, of course.
Also, each door to the hall had a serviceable bolt—Franz clearly believed in privacy for guests—and in each room was a little bowl of silver coins, no collector’s items, just current American coinage. Viki asked about that and Franz explained deprecatingly, smiling at his own romanticism, that he’d copied the old Spanish California custom of the host providing guests with convenience money in that fashion.
Having been introduced to the house, we unloaded the Volks of our trifling luggage and the provisions Franz had picked up in LA. He sighed faintly at the light film of dust that had accumulated everywhere during his month’s absence and Viki insisted that we pitch in with him and do a bit of house-cleaning. Franz agreed without too much demurring. I think all of us were eager to work off the edge of this afternoon’s experience and get feeling back in the real world again before we talked about it—I know I was.
Franz proved an easy man to help houseclean—thoughtful for his home but not at all fussy or finicky about it. And while wielding broom or mop Viki looked good in her sweater, toreador pants, and highbound sandals—she wears the modern young-female’s uniform with style rather than the customary effect of dreary intellectuality mated to a solemnly biologic femaleness.
When we’d done, we sat down in the kitchen with mugs of black coffee—somehow none of us wanted a drink—and listened to Franz’s stew simmer.
“You’ll want to know,” he said without preface, “if I’ve had any previous eerie experiences up here, if I knew something was apt to happen when I invited you up for the weekend, whether the phenomena—pretentious term, isn’t it?—seem to be connected with anything in the past of the region or the house or my own past—or with current activities here, including the scientific-military installations of the missile people—and finally whether I have any overall theory to account for them—such as Ed’s suggestion about hypnotism.”
Viki nodded. He’d adequately stated what was in our minds.
“About that last, Franz,” I said abruptly. “When Mr. Mortenson first made that suggestion, I thought it was completely impossible, but now I’m not quite so sure. I don’t mean you’d deliberately hypnotize us, but aren’t there kinds of self-hypnosis that can be communicated to others? At any rate, the conditions were favorable for suggestion operating—we’d just been talking about the supernatural, there was the sun and its afterimages acting as an attention-capturer, then the sudden transition to shadow, and finally you pointing decisively at that pinnacle as if we all had to see something there.”
“I don’t believe that for one minute, Glenn,” Viki said with conviction.
“Neither do I really,” I told her. “After all, the cards indicate we had remarkably similar visions—our descriptions were just different enough to make them fearfully convincing—and I don’t see where that material could have been suggested to us during the trip out or at any earlier time when we were together. Still, the idea of some obscure sort of suggestion has crossed my mind. A blend of highway hypnosis and sun-hypnosis, maybe? Franz, what were your earlier experiences? I take it there were some.”
He nodded but then looked at us both thoughtfully and said, “I don’t think I should tell you about them in any detail, though. Not because I’m afraid of you being skeptical or anything like that, but simply because if I do, and then similar things happen to you, you’ll be more likely to feel—and rightly—that the power of suggestion may have been at work.
“Still, I ought to answer your questions,” he continued. “So here goes, briefly and in a general way. Yes, I had experiences while I was up here alone month before last—some of them like this afternoon’s, some of them quite different. They didn’t seem to link up with any particular folklore or occult theory or anything else, yet they frightened me so that I went down to LA and had my eyes checked by a very good oculist and had a psychiatrist and a couple of psychologists I trust give me a thorough check-up. They pronounced me fit and unwarped—likewise my eyes. After a month I had myself convinced that everything I’d seen or sensed had been hallucinatory, that I’d simply had a case of nerves, a fit of the horrors, from too much loneliness. I invited you two along partly to avoid restarting the cycle.”
“You couldn’t have been completely convinced, though,” Viki pointed out. “You had those cards and pencils all ready in your pocket.”
Franz grinned at the neatly-scored point. “Right,” he said, “I was still keeping in mind the offtrail chan
ce and preparing for it. And then when I got in the hills the set of my ideas changed. What had seemed completely inconceivable in LA became once more a borderline possibility. Queer. Come on, let’s take a turn on the deck—it’ll be cool by now.”
We took our mugs along. It was moderately cool, all right, most of the canyon-valley had been in the shadow for at least two hours and a faint breeze flowed upward around our ankles. Once I’d got used to being on the edge of the terrific drop I found it exhilarating. Viki must have too, for she leaned over with deliberately showy daring to peer.
The floor of the canyon was choked with dark trees and undergrowth. This thinned out going up the opposite face until just across from us there was a magnificent upthrusted and folded stratum of pale tan rock that the canyon wall cut in cross-section and showed us like a geology book. Above this fold was more undergrowth, then a series of tan and gray rocks with dark gullies and caves between them, leading by steps to a high gray summit-crag.
The slope behind the house completely cut off the sun from us, of course, but its yellow rays were still striking the tops of the wall across from us, traveling up them as the sun sank. The clouds had all blown away east, where a couple were still visible, and none had replaced them.
In spite of being in a much cheerier “normal” mood, I’d braced myself just a bit for the eerie little sensations as we’d come out onto the deck, but they weren’t there. Which somehow wasn’t quite as reassuring as it ought to have been. I made myself study and admire the variegated rocky wall opposite.
“God, what a view to wake up to every morning!” Viki said enthusiastically. “You can feel the shape of the air and the height of the sky.”
“Yes, it’s quite a prospect,” Franz agreed.
* * * *
Then they came, the little ones, faint-footed as before, feather-treading the sensory thresholds—the burnt-linen odor, the bitter brassy tang, the brushing of skyey cobwebs, the vibrations not quite sound, the hissing rattling spill of ghost gravel…the minor sensations, as I’d named them to myself…
I knew Viki and Franz were getting them too, simply because they said no more and I could sense them both holding very still.
…and then one of the last rays of the sun must have struck a mirror-surface in the summit-crag, perhaps an outcropping of quartz, for it struck back at me like a golden rapier, making me blink, and then for an instant the beam was glitteringly black and I thought I saw (though nothing as clearly as I’d seen the black all-knowing spider-centipede on the pinnacle) a black shape—black with the queer churning blackness you see only at night with your eyes dosed. The shape coiled rapidly down the crag, into the cavern gullies and around the rocks and finally and utterly into the undergrowth above the fold and disappeared.
Along the way Viki had grabbed my arm at the elbow and Franz had whipped round to look at us and then looked back.
It was strange. I felt frightened and at the same time eager, on the edge of marvels and mysteries about to be laid bare. And there had been something quite controlled about the behavior of all of us through it. One fantastically trivial point—none of us had spilled any coffee.
We studied the canyon wall above the fold for about two minutes.
Then Franz said, almost gaily, “Time for dinner. Talk afterwards.”
I felt deeply grateful for the instant steadying, shielding, anti-hysterical and, yes, comforting effect of the house as we went back in. I knew it was an ally.
III
“When the hard-boiled rationalist came to consult me for the first time, he was in such a state of panic that not only he himself but I also felt the wind coming over from the side of the lunatic asylum!”
—Carl Gustav Jung
Psyche and Symbol
We accompanied Franz’s stew with chunks of dark pumpernickel and pale brick cheese and followed it with fruit and coffee, then took more coffee to the long couch facing the big view window in the living room. There was a spectral yellow glow in the sky but it faded while we were settling ourselves. Soon the first star to the north glittered faintly—Dubhe perhaps.
“Why is black a frightening color?” Viki put before us.
“Night,” Franz said. “Though you’ll get an argument as to whether it’s a color or absence of color or simply basic sensory field. But is it intrinsically frightening?”
Viki nodded with pursed lips.
I said, “Somehow the phrase ‘the black spaces between the stars’ has always been an ultimate to me in terror. I can look at the stars without thinking of it, but the phrase gets me.”
Viki said, “My ultimate horror is the idea of inky black cracks appearing in things, first in the sidewalk and the sides of houses, then in the furniture and floors and cars and things, finally in the pages of books and people’s faces and the blue sky. The cracks are inky black—nothing ever shows.”
“As if the universe were a gigantic jigsaw puzzle,” I suggested.
“A little like that. Or a Byzantine mosaic. Glittering gold and glittering black.”
Franz said, “Your picture, Viki, suggests that sense of breaking-up we feel in the modern world. Families, nations, classes, other loyalty groups falling apart. Things changing before you get to know them. Death on the installment plan—or decay by jumps. Instantaneous birth. Something out of nothing. Reality replacing science-fiction so fast that you can’t tell which is which. Constant sense of deja vu—‘I was here before—but when, how?’ Even the possibility that there’s no real continuity between events, just inexplicable gaps. And of course every gap—every crack—means a new perching place for horror.”
“It also suggests the fragmentation of knowledge, as somebody called it,” I said. “A world too big and complex to grasp in more than patches. Too much for one man. Takes teams of experts—and teams of teams. Each expert has his field, his patch, his piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but between any two pieces is a no man’s land.”
“Right, Glenn,” Franz said sharply, “and today I think the three of us have plunged into one of the biggest of those no man’s lands.” He hesitated then and said with an odd diffidence, almost embarrassment, “You know, we’re going to have to start talking sometime about what we saw—we can’t let ourselves be gagged by this fear that anything we say will alter the picture of what the others saw and warp their testimony. Well, about the blackness of this thing or figure or manifestation I saw (I called it ‘Black Empress,’ but Sphinx might have been a better word—there was the suggestion of a long tigerish or serpentine body in the midst of the black fringy sunburst)—but about its blackness, now, that blackness was more than anything else like the glimmering dark the eyes see in the absence of light.”
“Right,” I said.
“Oh yes,” Viki chimed.
“There was a sense,” Franz went on, “that the thing was in my eyes, in my head, but also out there on the horizon, on the pinnacle I mean. That it was somehow both subjective—in my consciousness—and objective—in the material world—or…” (He hesitated and lowered his voice) “…or existing in some sort of space more fundamental, more primal and less organized than either of those.
“Why shouldn’t there be other kinds of space than those we know?” he went on a shade defensively. “Other chambers in the great universal cave? Men have tried to imagine four, five and more spatial dimensions. What’s the space inside the atom or the nucleus feel like, or the space between the galaxies or beyond any galaxy? Oh, I know the questions I’m asking would be nonsense to most scientists—they’re questions that don’t make sense operationally or referentially, they’d say—but those same men can’t give us the ghost of an answer to even the question of where and how the space of consciousness exists, how a jelly of nerve cells can support the huge flaming worlds of inner reality—they fob us off with the excuse (legitimate in its way) that science is about things that can be measured and pointed at, and who can measure or point at his thoughts? But consciousness is—it’s the basis we all exist in
and start from, it’s the basis science starts from, whether or not science can get at it—so it’s allowable for me to wonder whether there may not be a primal space that’s a bridge between consciousness and matter…and whether the thing we saw may not exist in such a space.”
“Maybe there are experts for this sort of thing and we’re missing them,” Viki said seriously. “Not scientists, but mystics and occultists, some of them at any rate—the genuine few among the crowd of fakers. You’ve got some of their books in your library. I recognized the titles.
Franz shrugged. “I’ve never found anything in occult literature that seemed to have a bearing. You know, the occult—very much like stories of supernatural horror—is a sort of game. Most religion too. Believe in the game and accept its rules—or the premises of the story—and you can have the thrills or whatever it is you’re after. Accept the spirit world and you can see ghosts and talk to the dear departed. Accept Heaven and you can have the hope of eternal life and the reassurance of an all-powerful god working on your side. Accept Hell and you can have devils and demons, if that’s what you want. Accept—if only for story purposes—witchcraft, druidism, shamanism, magic or some modern variant and you can have werewolves, vampires, elementals. Or believe in the influence and power of a grave, an ancient house or monument, a dead religion, an old stone with an inscription on it—and you can have things of the same general sort. But I’m thinking of the kind of horror—and wonder too, perhaps—that lies beyond any game, that’s bigger than any game, that’s fettered by no rules, conforms to no manmade theology, bows to no charms or protective rituals, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will, much the same as (though it’s of a different order of existence than all of these) lightning or the plague or the enemy atom bomb. The sort of horror that the whole fabric of civilization was designed to protect us from and make us forget. The horror about which all man’s learning tells us nothing.”
