by Fritz Leiber
I stood up and moved close to the window. There seemed to be quite a few stars now. I tried to make out the big fold of rock in the hillside opposite, but the reflections on the glass got in the way.
“Maybe so,” Viki said, “but there are a couple of those books I’d like to look at again. I think they’re back of your desk.”
“What titles?” Franz asked. “I’ll help you find them.”
“Meanwhile I’ll take a turn on the deck,” I said as casually as I could, moving toward the other end of the room. They didn’t call after me, but I had the feeling they watched me the whole way.
As soon as I’d pushed through the door—which took a definite effort of will—and shoved it to without quite shutting it behind me—which took another—I became aware of two things: that it was much darker than I’d anticipated—the big view window angled away from the deck and there was no other obvious light source except the stars—; two, that I found the darkness reassuring.
The reason for the latter seemed clear enough: the horror I’d glimpsed was associated with the sun, with blinding sunlight. Now I was safe from that—though if someone unseen should have struck a match in front of my face just then, the effect on me would have been extreme.
I moved forward by short steps, feeling in front of me with my hands at the level of the rail.
I knew why I’d come out here I thought. I wanted to test my courage against the thing, whatever it was, illusory or real or something else, inside or outside our minds, or somehow as Franz had suggested, able to move in both regions. But beyond that, I realized now, there was the beginning of a fascination.
My hands touched the rail. I studied the black wall opposite, deliberately looking a little away and then back, as one does to make a faint star or a dim object come clear in the dark. After a bit I could make out the big pale fold and some of the rocks above it, but a couple of minutes’ watching convinced me that it was possible endlessly to see dark shapes crossing it.
I looked up at the heavens. There was no Milky Way yet, but there would be soon, the stars were flashing on so brightly and thickly at this smog-free distance, from LA. I saw the Pole Star straight above the dark star-silhouetted summit-crag of the hillside across from me. and the Great Bear and Cassiopeia swinging from it. I felt the bigness of the atmosphere, I got a hint of the stupendous distance between me and the stars, and then—as if my vision could go out in all directions at will, piercing solidity as readily as the dark—I got a lasting, growing, wholly absorbing sense of the universe around me.
Lying behind me, a gently swelling, perfectly rounded section of the earth about a hundred miles high masked off the sun. Africa lay under my right foot through the earth’s core, India under my left, and it was strange to think of the compressed incandescent stuff that lay between us under earth’s cool mantle—blindingly glowing plastic metal or ore in a space where there were no eyes to see and no millionth of a free inch in which all that dazzling locked-up light could travel. I sensed the tortured ice of the frigid poles, the squeezed water in the deep seas, the fingers of mounting lava, the raw earth crawling and quivering with an infinitude of questing rootlets and burrowing worms.
Then for moments I felt I looked out glimmeringly through two billion pairs of human eyes, my consciousness running like fuse-fire from mind to mind. For moments more I dimly shared the feelings, the blind pressures and pulls, of a billion trillion motes of microscopic life in the air, in the earth, in the bloodstream of man.
Then my consciousness seemed to move swiftly outward from earth in all directions, like an expanding globe of sentient gas. I passed the dusty dry mote that was Mars. I glimpsed milkily-banded Saturn with its great thin wheels of jumbled jagged rock. I passed frigid Pluto with its bitter nitrogen snows. I thought of how people are like planets—lonely little forts of mind with immense black distances barring them off from each other.
Then the speed of expansion of my consciousness became infinite and my mind was spread thin in the stars of the Milky Way and in the other gauzy star islands beyond it—above, below, to all sides, among the nadir stars as well as those of the zenith—and on the trillion trillion planets of those stars I sensed the infinite variety of self-conscious life—naked, clothed, furred, armor-shelled, and with cells floating free—clawed, handed, tentacled, pinchered, ciliated, fingered by winds or magnetism—loving, hating, striving, despairing, imagining.
For a while it seemed to me that all these beings were joined in a dance that was fiercely joyous, poignantly sensuous, tenderly responsive.
Then the mood darkened and the beings fell apart into a trillion trillion trillion lonely motes locked off forever from each other, sensing only bleak meaninglessness in the cosmos around them, their eyes fixed forward only on universal death.
Simultaneously each dimensionless star seemed to become for me the vast sun it was, beating incandescently on the platform where my body stood and on the house behind it and the beings in it and on my body too, aging them with the glare of a billion desert noons, crumbling them all to dust in one corruscatingly blinding instant.
Hands gently grasped my shoulders and at the same time Franz’s voice said, “Steady, Glenn.” I held still, though for a moment every nerve cell in me seemed on the verge of triggering, then I let out an uneven breath edged with laughter and turned and said in a voice that sounded to me quite dull, almost drugged, “I got lost in my imagination. For a minute there I seemed to be seeing everything. Where’s Viki?”
“Inside leafing through The Symbolism of the Tarot and a couple of other books on the arcana of the fortune-telling cards, and grumbling that they don’t have indexes. But what’s this ‘seeing everything,’ Glenn?”
Haltingly I tried to tell him about my “vision,” not conveying a hundredth of it, I felt. By the time I finished I could see the blur of his face against the black wall of the house barely well enough to tell that he nodded.
“The universe fondling and devouring her children,” his brooding comment came out of the dark. “I imagine you’ve run across in your reading, Glenn, the superficially sterile theory that the whole universe is in some sense alive or at least aware. There are a lot of terms for it in the jargon of metaphysics: cosmotheism, theopantism, panpsychism, panpneumatism—but simply pantheism is the commonest. The idea that the universe is God, though for me God isn’t the right term, it’s been used to mean too many things. If you insist on a religious approach, perhaps what comes closest is the Greek idea of the Great God Pan, the mysterious nature deity, half animal, that frightened man and woman to panic in lonely places. Incidentally, panpneumatism is the most interesting to me of the obscurer concepts: old Karl von Hartmann’s notion that unconscious mind is the basic reality—it comes close to what we were saying inside about the possibility of a more fundamental space linking the inner and outer world and perhaps providing a bridge from anywhere to anywhere.”
As he paused I heard a faint spill of gravel, then a second, though I got none of the other minor sensations.
“But whatever we call it,” Franz went on, “there’s something there, I feel—something less than God but more than the collective mind of man—a force, a power, an influence, a mood of things, a something more than subatomic particles, that is aware and that has grown with the universe and that helps to shape it.” He had moved forward now so that I saw his head silhouetted against the thick stars and for a moment there was the grotesque illusion that it was the stars rather than his mouth that was speaking. “I think there are such influences, Glenn. Atomic particles alone can’t sustain the flaming inner worlds of consciousness, there must be a pull from the future as well as a push from the past to keep us moving through time, there must be a ceiling of mind over life as well as a floor of matter beneath it.”
Again, as his voice faded out, I heard the feathery hisses of gravel running—two close together, then two more. I thought uneasily of the slope behind the house.
“And if there are those influe
nces,” Franz continued, “I believe that man has grown enough in awareness today to be able to contact them without ritual or formula of belief, if they should chance to move or look this way. I think of them as sleepy tigers, Glenn, that mostly purr and dream and look at us through slitted eyes, but occasionally—perhaps when a man gets a hint of them—open their eyes to the full and stalk in his direction. When a man becomes ripe for them, when he’s pondered the possibility of them, and then When he’s closed his ears to the protective, mechanically-augmented chatter of humanity, they make themselves known to him.”
The spills of gravel, still faint as illusions, were coming now in a rapid rhythm like—it occurred to me at that instant—padding footsteps, each footstep dislodging a little earth. I sensed a faint brief glow overhead.
“For they’re the same thing, Glenn, as the horror and wonder I talked about inside, the horror and wonder that lies beyond any game, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will.”
At that instant the silence was ripped by a shrill scream of terror from the flagged yard between the house and the drive. For an instant my muscles were chilled and constricted and there was a gagging pressure in my chest. Then I lunged toward that end of the deck.
Franz darted into the house.
* * * *
I plunged off the end of the deck, almost fell, twisted to my feet—and stopped, suddenly at a loss for my next move.
Here I couldn’t see a thing in the blackness. In stumbling I’d lost my sense of direction—for the moment I didn’t know which ways were the slope, the house, and the cliff edge.
I heard Viki—I thought it had to be Viki—gasping and sobbing strainingly, but the direction of that wouldn’t come clear, except it seemed more ahead of me than behind me.
Then I saw, stretching up before me, a half dozen or so thin close-placed stalks of what I can only describe as a more gleaming blackness—it differed from the background as dead black velvet does from dead black felt. They were barely distinguishable yet very real. I followed them up with my eyes as they mounted against the starfields, almost invisible, like black wires, to where they ended—high up—in a bulb of darkness, defined only by the patch of stars it obscured, as tiny as the moon.
The black bulb swayed and there was a corresponding rapid jogging in the crowded black stalks—though if they were free to move at the base I ought to call them legs.
A door opened twenty feet from me and a beam of white light struck across the yard, showing a streak of flagstones and the beginning of the drive.
Franz had come out the kitchen door with a powerful flashlight. My surroundings jumped sideways into place.
The beam swept back along the slope, showing nothing, then forward toward the cliff edge. When it got to the spot where I’d seen the ribbony black legs, it stopped.
There were no stalks, legs or bands of any sort to be seen, but Viki was swaying and struggling there, her dark hair streaming across her face and half obscuring her agonized expression, her elbows tight to her sides, her hands near her shoulders and clawed outward—exactly as though she were gripping and struggling against the vertical bars of a tight cage.
The next instant the tension went out of her, as though whatever she’d been struggling against had vanished. She swayed and began to move in blind tottering steps toward the cliff edge.
That snapped my freeze and I ran toward her, grabbed her wrist as she stepped on the verge, and half-dragged, half-whirled her away from it. She didn’t resist. Her movement toward the cliff had been accidental, not suicidal. Franz kept the flashlight on us.
She looked at me, one side of her blanched face twitching, and said, “Glenn.”
Franz yelled at us from the kitchen door, “Come on in!”
IV
“But the third Sister, who is also the youngest—Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot he hidden… This youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding with tigers leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.”
—Thomas de Ouincy
Suspira de Profundis
As soon as we got Viki inside she recovered very rapidly from her shock and at once insisted on telling us her story. Her manner was startlingly assured, interested, almost gay, as if some protective door in her mind were already closed against the absolute reality of what had happened.
At one point she even said, “It all still could have been a series of chance little sounds and sights, you know, combined with suggestion working powerfully—like the night I saw a burglar standing against the wall beyond the foot of my bed, saw him so clearly in the dark that I could have described him down to the cut of his mustache and the droop of his left eyelid…until the dawn coming on turned him into my roommate’s black overcoat with a tan scarf thrown around the hanger and hook.”
While she’d been reading, she said, she’d become aware of the ghost-spills of gravel, some of them seeming to rattle faintly against the back wall of the house, and she’d gone out at once through the kitchen to investigate.
Groping her way, moving a few steps beyond the Volks toward the center of the yard, she had looked toward the slope and at once seen moving across it an incredibly tall wispy shape that she described as “a giant harvestman, tall as ten trees. You know harvestmen, some people call them daddy longlegs, those utterly harmless pitifully fragile spiders that are nothing but a tiny brown inanimate-looking ball with eight bendy legs that are like lengths of half-stiffened brown thread.”
She’d seen it quite clearly in spite of the darkness, because it was “black with a black shimmer.” Once it had vanished completely when a car had turned the bend in the road above and its headlights had feebly swept the air high above the slope (that would have been the faint brief overhead glow I’d sensed)—but when the headlights swung away the giant black glimmering harvestman had come back at once.
She hadn’t been frightened (wonderstruck and terribly curious, rather) until the thing had come treading rapidly toward her, its shimmering black legs drawing closer and closer together until before she realized it they were a tight cage around her.
Then, as she discovered they weren’t quite as thin and insubstantial as she’d imagined, and as she felt their feathery, almost bristly touch against her back and face and sides, she’d suddenly snapped and given that one terrific scream and started to struggle hysterically. “Spiders drive me wild,” she finished lightly, “and then there was the feeling I’d be sucked up the cage to the black brain in the stars—I thought of it as a black brain then, no reason why.”
Franz didn’t say anything for a bit. Then he began, in a rather heavy, halting way, “You know, I don’t think I showed much foresight or consideration when I invited you two up here. Quite the opposite, in fact, even if I didn’t then believe that… Anyway, I don’t feel right about it. Look here, you could take the Volks right now…or I could drive…and—”
“I think I know what you’re getting at, Mr. Kinzman, and why,” Viki said with a little laugh, standing up, “but I for one have had quite enough excitement for one night. I have no desire to top it off with watching for ghosts in the headlights for the next two hours.” She yawned. “I want to hit that luxurious hay you’ve provided for me, right this minute. Night-night, Franz, Glenn.” With no more word she walked down the hall and went in her bedroom, the far one, and closed the door.
Franz said, in a low voice, “I think you know I meant that very seriously, Glenn. It still might be the best thing.”
I said, “Viki’s got some kind of inner protection built up now. To get her to leave Rim House, we’d have to b
reak it down. That would be rough.”
Franz said, “Better rough, maybe, than what else might happen here tonight.”
I said, “So far Rim House has been a protection for us. It’s shut things out.”
He said, “It didn’t shut out the footsteps Viki heard.”
I said, remembering my vision of the cosmos, “But Franz, if we’re up against the sort of influence we think we are, then it seems to me pretty ridiculous to imagine a few miles of distance or a few bright lights making any more difference to its power than the walls of a house.”
He shrugged. “We don’t know,” he said. “Did you see it, Glenn? Holding the light I didn’t see anything.”
“Just like Viki described it,” I assured him and went on to tell my own little tale. “If that was all suggestion,” I said, “it was a pretty fancy variety.” I squeezed my eyes and yawned; I was suddenly feeling very dull—reaction, I suppose. I finished, “While it was happening, and later while we were listening to Viki, there certainly were times when all I wanted was to be back in the old familiar world with the old familiar hydrogen bomb hanging over my head and all the rest of that stuff.”
“But at the same time weren’t you fascinated?” Franz demanded. “Didn’t it make you crazy to know more?—the thought that you were seeing something utterly strange and that here was a chance really to understand the universe—at least to meet its unknown lords?”
“I don’t know,” I told him wearily. “I suppose so, in a way.”
