The Second Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  “What did the thing really seem like, Glenn?” Franz asked. “What kind of being?—if that’s the right word.”

  “I’m not sure it is,” I said. I found it difficult to summon the energy to answer his questions. “Not an animal. Not even an intelligence as we understand it. More like the things we saw on the pinnacle and the crag.” I tried to marshal my fatigue-drugged thoughts. “Halfway between reality and a symbol,” I said. “If that means anything.”

  “But weren’t you fascinated?” Franz repeated.

  “I don’t know,” I said, pushing to my feet with an effort. “Look, Franz, I’m too beat to be able to do any more thinking now. It’s just too hard to talk about these things. G’night.”

  “Goodnight, Glenn,” he said as I walked to my bedroom. Nothing more.

  Midway getting undressed, it f occurred to me that my dazed sleepiness might be my mind’s defense against having to cope with the unknown, but even that thought wasn’t enough to rouse me.

  I pulled on my pajamas and put out the light. Just then the door to Viki’s bedroom opened and she stood there, wearing a light robe.

  I had thought of looking in on her, but had decided that if she were sleeping it was the best thing for her and any attempt to check on her might break her inner protection.

  But now I could tell from her expression, by the bit of light from her room, that they were shattered.

  At the same moment my own inner protection—the false sleepiness—was gone.

  Viki closed the door behind her and we moved together and put our arms around each other and stood there. After a while we lay down side by side on the bed under the view window that showed the stars.

  Viki and I are lovers, but there wasn’t an atom of passion in our embraces now. We were simply two, not so much frightened as completely overawed people, seeking comfort and reassurance in each other’s presence.

  Not that we could hope to get any security, any protection, from each other—the thing looming above us was too powerful for that—but only a sense of not being alone, of sharing whatever might happen.

  There wasn’t the faintest impulse to seek temporary escape in love-making, as we might have done to shut out a more physical threat, the thing was to weird for that. For once Viki’s body was beautiful to me in a completely cold abstract way that had no more to do with desire than the colors in an insect’s wing-case or the curve of a tree or the glitter of a snowfield. Yet within this strange form, I knew, was a friend.

  We didn’t speak a word to each other. There were no easy words for most of our thoughts, sometimes no words at all. Besides, we shrank from making the slightest sound, as two mice would while a cat sniffs past the clump of grass in which they are hiding. For the sense of a presence looming around and over Rim House was overpoweringly strong. Dipping into Rim House now too, for all the minor sensations came drifting down on us like near-impalpable black snowflakes—the dark burnt taste and smell, the fluttering cobwebs, the bat-sounds and the wave-sounds and once again the feathery spills of gravel.

  And above and behind them the sense of a black uprearing presence linked to the whole cosmos by the finest black filaments that in no way impeded it…

  I didn’t think of Franz, I hardly thought of the things that had happened today, though now and then I would worry at the edge of a memory…

  We simply lay there and held still and looked at the stars. Minute after minute. Hour after hour.

  At times we must have slept, I know I did, though blacked-out would be a better expression for it, for there was no rest and waking was a nightmarish business of slowly becoming aware and dark aches and chills.

  After a long while I noticed that I could see the clock in the far corner of the room—because its dial was luminescent, I thought. The hands pointed to three o’clock. I gently turned Viki’s face toward it and she nodded that she could see it too.

  The stars were what was keeping us sane, I told myself, in a world that might dissolve to dust at the faintest breath from the nearer presence.

  It was just after I noticed the clock that the stars began to change color, all of them. First they had a violet tinge, which shifted to blue, then green.

  In an unimportant corner of my mind I wondered what fine mist or dust drifting through the air could work that change.

  The stars turned to dim yellow, to orange, to dark furnace-red, and then—like the last sparks crawling on a sooty chimney wall above a dead fire—winked out.

  I thought crazily of the stars all springing away from earth, moving with such impossible swiftness that their light had shifted beneath the red into invisible ranges.

  We should have been in utter darkness then, but instead we began to see each other and the things around us outlined by the faintest white glimmer. I thought it was the first hint of morning and I suppose Viki did too. We looked together at the clock. It was barely four-thirty. We watched the minute hand edge. Then we looked back at the window. It wasn’t ghostly pale, as it would have been with dawn, but—and I could tell that Viki saw this too by the way she gripped my hand—it was a pitch-black square, framed by the white glimmer.

  I could think of no natural explanation for the glimmer. It was a little like a whiter paler version of the luminescence of the clock dial. But even more it was like the pictures one imagines in ones eyes in absolute darkness, when one wills the churning white sparks of the retinal field to coalesce into recognizable ghostly forms—it was as if that retinal dark had spilled out of our eyes into the room around us and we were seeing each other and our surroundings not by light but by the power of imagination—which each second increased the sense of miracle that the shimmering scene did not dissolve to churning chaos.

  We watched the hand of the clock edge toward five. The thought that it must be getting light outside and that something barred us from seeing that light, finally stirred me to move and speak, though the sense of an inhuman inanimate presence was as strong as ever.

  “We’ve got to try and get out of here,” I whispered.

  Moving across the bedroom pike a shimmering ghost, Viki opened the connecting door. The light had been on in her room, I remembered.

  There wasn’t the faintest glimmer visible through the door. Her bedroom was dead black.

  I’d fix that, I thought. I switched on the lamp by the bed. My room became solid black. I couldn’t see even the face of the clock. Light is darkness now, I thought. White is black.

  I switched off the light and the glimmer came back. I went to Viki where she was standing by the door and whispered to her to switch off the light in her room. Then I got dressed, mostly feeling around for my clothes, not trusting the ghostly light that was so much like a scene inside my head trembling on the verge of dissolution.

  Viki came back. She was even carrying her little overnight bag. I inwardly approved the poise that action indicated, but I made no effort to take any of my own things. “My room was very cold,” Viki said.

  We stepped into the hall. I heard a familiar sound: the whir of a telephone dial. I saw a tall silver figure standing in the living room. It was a moment before I realized it was Franz, seen by the glimmer. I heard him say, “Hello, operator. Operator!” We walked to him.

  He looked at us, holding the receiver to his ear. Then he put it down again and said, “Glenn. Viki. I’ve been trying to phone Ed Mortenson, see if the stars changed there, or anything else. But it doesn’t work for me. You try your luck at getting the operator, Glenn.”

  He dialed once, then handed me the receiver. I heard no ringing, no buzz, but a sound like wind wailing softly. “Hello, operator,” I said. There was no response or change, just that wind sound. “Wait,” Franz said softly.

  It must have been at least five seconds when my own voice came back to me out of the phone, very faintly, half drowned in the lonely wind, like an echo from the end of the universe. “Hello, operator.”

  My hand shook as I put down the phone. “The radio?” I asked. “The wind sound
,” he told me, “all over the dial.”

  “Just the same we’ve got to try to get out,” I said.

  “I suppose we should,” he said with a faint ambiguous sigh. “I’m ready. Come on.”

  As I stepped onto the deck after Franz and Viki, I felt the intensified sense of a presence. The minor sensations were with us again, but far stronger now: the burnt taste made me gag almost, I wanted to claw at the cobwebs, the impalpable wind moaned and whistled loudly, the ghost-gravel hissed and splashed like the rapids of a river. All in near absolute darkness.

  I wanted to run but Franz stepped forward to the barely glimmering rail. I held on to myself.

  The faintest glimmer showed a few lines of the rock wall opposite. But from the sky above it was beating a dead inkier blackness—blacker than black, I thought—that was eating up the glimmer everywhere, dimming it moment by moment. And with the inkier blackness came a chill that struck into me like ice needles.

  “Look,” Franz said. “It’s the sunrise.”

  “Franz, we’ve got to get moving,” I said.

  “In a moment,” he answered softly, reaching back his hand. “You go ahead. Start the car. Pull out to the center of the yard. I’ll join you there.”

  Viki took the keys from him. She’s driven a Volks. There was still enough glimmer to see by, though I trusted it less than ever. Viki started the car, then forgot and switched on the headlights. They obscured yard and drive with a fan of blackness. She switched them off and pulled to the center of the yard.

  I looked back. Although the air was black with the icy sunlight I could still see Franz clearly by the ghost light. He was standing where we’d left him. only leaning forward now, as though eagerly peering.

  “Franz!” I called loudly against the weirdly wailing wind and the mounting gravel-roar. “Franz!”

  There reared out of the canyon, facing Franz, towering above him, bending toward him a little, a filament-trailing form of shimmering velvet black—not the ghost light, but shimmering darkness itselfؙ—that looked like a gigantic hooded cobra, or a hooded madonna, or a vast centipede, or a giant cloaked figure of the cat-headed goddess Bast, or all or none of these.

  I saw the silver of Franz’s body begin to crumble and churn. In the same moment the dark form dipped down and enfolded him like the silk-gloved fingers of a colossal black hand or the petals of a vast black flower closing.

  Feeling like someone who throws the first shovel of earth on coffin of a friend, I croaked to Viki to get going.

  There was hardly any glimmer left—not enough to see the drive, I thought, as the Volks started up it.

  Viki drove fast.

  * * * *

  The sound of the spilling gravel grew louder and louder, drowning out the intangible wind, drowning out our motor. It rose to a thunder. Under the moving wheels, transmitting up through them, I could feel the solid earth shaking.

  A bright pit opened ahead of us on the canyon side. For a moment it was as if we were driving through veils of thick smoke, then suddenly Viki was braking, we were turning into the road, and early daylight was almost blinding us.

  But Viki didn’t stop. We headed up the Little Sycamore Canyon road.

  Around us were the turreted hills. The sun hadn’t yet climbed above them but the sky was bright.

  We looked down the road. No dust clouds obscured it anywhere, though there was dust rising now from the bottom of the canyon-valley.

  The slope swept down straight from us to the cliff edge, without a break, without a hummock, without one object thrusting up through. Everything had been carried away by the slide.

  That was the end of Rim House and Franz Kinsman.

  THE DREAMS OF ALBERT MORELAND

  Originally published in The Acolyte #10 (Spring, 1945)

  I think of the autumn of 1939, not as the beginning of the Second World War, but as the period in which Albert Moreland dreamed the dream. The two events—the war and the dream—are not, however, divorced in my mind. Indeed, I sometimes fear that there is a definite connection between them, but it is not a connection which any sane person ought to consider seriously, and in any case it is not a clear one.

  Albert Moreland was, and perhaps still is, a professional chessplayer. That fact has an important bearing on the dream, or dreams. He made most of his scant income at a games arcade in lower Manhattan, taking on all comers—the enthusiast who got a kick out of trying to beat an expert, the lonely man who turned to chess as to a drug, or the down-and-outer tempted into purchasing a half hour of intellectual dignity for a quarter. After I got to know him, I often wandered into the arcade and watched him playing as many as three or four games simultaneously, oblivious to the clicking and mechanical whirring of the pinball games and the intermittent whip-cracks from the shooting gallery. He got fifteen cents for every win; the house took the extra dime. When he lost, neither got anything.

  Eventually I found out that he was a much better player than he needed to be to whitewash arcade competition. He had won casual games from internationally famous masters. A couple of Manhattan clubs had wanted to groom him for the big tournaments, but lack of ambition kept him drifting along in obscurity. I go the impression that he actually thought chess too trivial a business to warrant serious consideration, although he was perfectly willing to dribble his life away at the arcade, waiting for something really important to come along, if it ever did. Once in a while, he eked out his income by playing on a club team, getting as much as five dollars.

  I met him at the old brownstone house, where we happened to have rooms on the same floor. And it was there that he first tole me about the dream.

  We had just finished a game of chess, and I was idly watching the battle-scarred pieces slide off the board and pile up in a fold of the blanket on his cot. Outside, a fretful wind eddied the dry grit; coming home earlier in the evening I had had to keep my eyes three-quarters closed. There was the surge of traffic noises, and from somewhere the buzz of a defective neon sign. I had just lost, but I was glad that Moreland never let me win, as he occasionally did to encourage the players at the arcade. Indeed, I thought myself fortunate in being able to play with Moreland at all, not knowing then that I was probably the best friend he had.

  I was saying something obvious about the game.

  “You think it a complicated game?” he inquired, peering at me with quizzical intentness, his brown eyes dark like round windows pushed up under heavy eaves. “Well, perhaps it is. But I play a game a thousand times more complex every night in my dreams. And the queer thing is that the game goes on night after night. The same game. I never really sleep. only dream, about the game.”

  Then he told me, speaking with the mixture of facetious jest and uncomfortable seriousness that was to characterise many of our subsequent conversations.

  The images of his dream, as he described them, were impressively simple, without any of the usual merging and incongruity. A board so vase he sometimes had to walk out onto it to move his pieces. A great many more squares than in chess and arranged in patches of different colors, the power of the pieces varying according to the color of the square on which they stood. Above and to each side of the board only blackness, but a blackness that suggested starless infinity, as if, as he put it, the scene were laid on the very top of the universe.

  When he was awake, he couldn’t quite remember all the rules of the game, although he recalled a great many isolate points, such as the appearance and powers of certain pieces, the situation in which two or more might be moved at the same time, and the interesting fact that—quite unlike chess—his pieces and those of his adversary did not duplicate each other. Yet he was convinced that he not only understood the game perfectly while dreaming, but also was able to play it in the highly strategic manner that characterized the master chess player. It was, he said, as thought his dreaming mind had many more dimensions of thought than his waking mind, and were able to grasp intuitively complex series of moves that would ordinarily have to be
reasoned out painfully, step by step.

  “A feeling of increased mental power is a very ordinary dream-delusion, isn’t it?” he added, peering at me sharply. “And so I suppose you might say it’s a very ordinary dream.”

  I didn’t know quite how to take that last remark, with its trade of sarcasm and ambiguity, so I prodded him with a question, for I wanted him to go on.

  “What do the pieces look like?” I asked.

  It turned out that they were similar to those of chess in that they were considerably stylized and yet suggested the original forms—architectural, animal, ornamental—which has served as their inspiration. but there the similarity ended. The inspiring forms, so far as he could guess at them, were grotesque in the extreme. There were terraced towers subtly distorted out of the perpendicular, strangely asymmetric polygons that nevertheless made him think of temples and tombs, vegetable-animal shapes which defied classification and whose formalized limbs and external organs suggested a variety of unknown functions. The more powerful pieces seemed to be modelled after life forms, for the carried stylized weapons and other implements, and wore things similar to crowns and tiaras—a little like the king, queen, and bishop in chess—which the carving indicated voluminous robes and hoods. but they were in no other sense anthropomorphic. Moreland sought in vain for earthly analogies, mentioning Hindu idols, prehistoric reptiles, futurist sculpture, squids bearing daggers in their tentacles, and huge and and mantices and other insects with fantastically adapted end organs.

  “I think you would have to search the whole universe—every planet and every dead sun—before you could find the original models,” he said, frowning. “Remember, there is nothing cloudy or vague about the pieces themselves in my dream. They are as tangible as this rook.” He picked up the piece, clenched his fist around it for a moment, and then held it out toward me on his open palm. “It is only in what they suggest that the vagueness lies.”

  It was strange, but his words seemed to open some dream-eye in my own mind, so that I could almost see the things he described. I asked him if he experienced fear during his dream.