by Fritz Leiber
Sobbing with relief, yet dazed, we stare at one another across the blessedly commonplace laboratory. There is something strange in the look Ellis gives me; it is only later that I find out what it means.
It was night when we went through. Now day is breaking. All day we must wait; only at night can we steal the body. For it must be stolen; there is no other way. Why? All day long Ellis pleads and insists that we get, somehow, an order for exhumation. I dissuade him. I know what will happen. He is excited in no ordinary way. He will blab out his hopes. What will the common herd authorities make of those hopes? Insanity, at least. There will be delays; Ellis will grow more wildly insistent with them. They will call doctors; he will fight. Then the lock-up, the asylum. For me, too, if I insist on the exhumation with him, if I support his story.
No! We must wait. I have a pickax and spade. By night we may enter that graveyard, enter it even before the gates close, and steal the body. The place is then deserted; it is simple.
How I guessed that our fifth-dimensional activities had not canceled Mary’s death and funeral altogether? I looked at the back issues of the local papers; they still contained articles, announcements. Besides, I was intuitively sure.
With arguments and with force I restrain Ellis. At twilight, for the dark comes suddenly, we go by lonely ways, carrying spade and pickax muffled in cloth. The car we do not take; it is still too early for that. Remember, we are to become heinous criminals in the eyes of Smithville—if they see us. I would have waited longer, but that he will not do, so I must acquiesce or lose all chances.
We manage to be left in the graveyard when the sexton goes. I am almost seen but escape detection. Then our task; five feet of sandy dirt. Ellis works madly; it is soon completed. We jimmy the lead lid and then—Ellis greens. For it is death he sees. Death and decay. Damned are his hopes. But not mine. I had expected as much. Her new life is not yet caught up with the present.
So we get the body to his house. He has to fetch the car he left at my laboratory. While he is gone I replace coffin, earth, sod, and footstone. That last I must have put in backwards, as your sharp eyes discovered. Mistake. Then to his house we take the fearful body of the woman we both love. We place her in her bed. Shuddering, we descend the stair. We must wait. I do not know for how long. I am weak with reaction. The problems involved in the proper use of my great discovery come back upon me, a leaden burden.
I pour us whiskey. After Ellis gulps his glass he looks at me. For the first time the awful tension has left his face, the tension that had seemed almost to merge into the strain of madness, so he looks at me. Then there comes into his eyes a horror, a horror that I have seen trace of before.
“Kesserich,” he cries, “what has happened to you? Have you given me that drug again?”
I laugh. But he still stares. Then I look at myself, my hands and arms. They are no different. I regard Ellis suspiciously. He must be mad indeed, I think. Then there comes a doubt. Could he see something that I do not see?
I remember that when we were jerked back into the normal world, the world of the present, I felt a spasm that Td never noticed going through alone. I also remember that that time, the time the two of us came back, I gave him the more favorable position in the field of force. I may be… my head swims, the world trembles, ghostly and insubstantial, before my eyes; the stupidly staring Ellis is becoming a man of gas, whom the next breath may dissipate… Suddenly I cannot bear to be with him, to be in the house, to think, speculate, plot, or worry further.
Without giving him a word of explanation I go out the door, take his roadster, and drive off through the blackness following the false dawn.
He has another car, if he needs it. And as for Mary, I can do no further; he is the doctor.
I am miles away when I begin to think again. On the edge of the next town west. Thinking! I was doomed always to think again. Again I wonder… could it have been anything but the projection of his overwrought condition that Ellis saw? It may indeed be that I am subtly changed, that I have an improper time thickness, that I brought some of the clogging fifth dimension back with me, and that I cannot notice it because my sense organs have changed as I have changed. And that what I see shivers before my eyes, as if the world were thin, translucent. The few sounds of morning are weak and far away. Only lam real, corporeal…
The sun is almost up. I am in a residential section of the town. Along the sidewalk comes a man, one whose work makes him rise early. An idea comes to me, an idea for a test. I draw up the car. I wait ’til he gets alongside, then step out and make some polite and commonplace inquiry. He starts to answer, looks at me. Then his face pales and his eyes grow wide; with a low squeal of horror he turns and runs.
I know. What Ellis saw is indeed true. I am deformed; my face, my body, even my voice is blurred, is too thick. Even as the world now seems too thin to me, I seem too solid to the world. A man of stone in a world of men of air. Almost a ghost—not because I am insubstantial but because I am too substantial. No longer will the common herd recognize me. I bear upon my person the stigmata of my own discovery. Always will I be the inhuman one.
The man who ran from me is far away and has turned for a second look. Slowly I re-enter the car and drive off down a lonely desert road, one that I have traveled before when I wanted a new loneliness to stir my thoughts. Only this time it is for last thoughts, for retrospect.
Ellis I have forgotten, and Mary too. Why should I remember her, or go back to her, even if the improbable should happen and she should live? Her new life would be for him and not for me. What would it mean to me to learn that my discovery had worked another miracle? It would only be another. I am sated with miracles.
And what was Mary herself to me more than a dream? She were best remain a dream.
I drive aimlessly, stopping often, letting no one see me. At night I get gas, sleep for a while in the car. But the stars are no longer my comforters; they, too, are thin.
A day passes, maybe two. I do not return. Think. Think.
It is not my deformity, my stigmata, that weighs me down; that I can dispose of with another time-trip. Other things have a greater pressure, a pressure that has rolled up with the years.
I know, Kramer, know with the certainty of an army of hitherto half-hidden thoughts, that my discovery is too big a thing for me, too big a thing for all mankind, perhaps too big for God.
Am I the man to determine what in the past should be changed? Is any man wise enough to say, “This shall be resurrected; this shall be blotted out?” And more, when I do tamper with the past, I have no way of knowing what the results of that tampering will be. I may go back to blot out a tyrant, a dictator, and find that by so doing I only make room for a worse to step in his place. I may go back to resurrect a great man who died too young and only find that it was a blessing that his death came when it did. I have the power; yes, I have the power; it weighs upon me like the world on Atlas. But have I the wisdom to use that power? No! There Daniel Kesserich remains the member of the common herd into which an irrevocable fate bore him. Were I to try to improve the world with my discovery I know, know with only too dismal a clarity, that I will only wreck what I am trying to help. And if I give or lose the power to another? That will let hell loose. For even Kesserich, miserable malign fool that he is, is an angel in comparison with most of the brutes of his herd.
O, I am weary to death with the responsibility of it. I am too small, or too tired, to thrill with the grandeur of a new vision of power. Perhaps I have been recluse and introvert because I have been afraid of what the compulsive mischievous evils in myself would do to others. Fear of living, of reality. So the modern mind-doctors might say. No matter.
Along the desert road I drive Ellis’s car. Going nowhere; circling back.
Then, as it had to be, there began to throb through my brain words, implacable, unending, like a drum-beat, louder and louder:
“Destroy and escape; destroy and escape; destroy your discovery; destroy your machi
ne; before it is too late; while you still have the power; destroy; destroy; destroy…”
It is possible; I have provided for this contingency days before, when something hidden in me saw it coming; I have a chemical bomb…
“Destroy; destroy; destroy…”
Suddenly, I jerk the car around and tear off for Smithville. Driving wildly, thoughtlessly, that I may get to my laboratory while my resolution holds.
I have all planned. I will make one last trip through, to rid myself of my deformity. Then… destroy.
I arrive in the afternoon. I manage it. Plant the bomb. Must have been while you were following the new-appearing pebble trail to the orchard. I make a rough fuse…
And I succeeded. I blew up my discovery. But I did not make the last trip through; I did not rid myself of my deformity. I had lost nerve; perhaps I was afraid of what I might do to the world from the other side, afraid of what a madman might do from the other side. More, though, I could not bear, at the last moment, to do away with my last tangible tie to my greatness, the mark my discovery had put upon my very body. Saints hate to part with their stigmata; my time-thickness somehow seemed to set me, not only apart from, but also above my herd.
Now it is about all I have left. You see, I could not reduplicate my discovery. So much depended on chance, and my memory for the finer points is pretty well gone.
After seeing the explosion succeed I drove off again into the desert. I knew Ellis had another car and would not mind the loss of his roadster.
I did not want to know whether Mary had been reborn. It would be better for me to think I might have failed; that might help me to believe that my discovery had been a practical failure. I knew that if I saw her return to life I would be tempted into becoming once again a god-fool of fools.
I bought gas and supplies at night. Wore gloves; on my face bandages and glasses. Finally established myself in a lonely spot in the mountains. I managed.
Had to keep under cover. Should I be discovered, I might prove a nine-days’ horror; newspapers call me “the blurred terror.” Then capture. Imagine the outcry. False charges by frightened hysterics. Scientists coming from far and near to see the wonderful freak, to experiment upon him. Take samples of blood, skin, hair; they would try to put the fourth and fifth dimensions in a test tube or under a microscope. And some clever one would succeed; “Blood Test Yields Secret of the Blurred Man, Freak Proves Theory of Four-Dimensional Universe.”
And then the world would be through. Having such clues, men would find the way back to the past, and then wreck the world because of their clumsiness, because of their mental limitations.
Perhaps they will do it anyway. Perhaps it is futile that I hide myself. Any day I expect to see a headline (actually I seldom get a newspaper) saying: “Noted Scientist Goes Back in Time; The Resurrection Is at Hand, Says Prelate.” And then I will merely be the fool who found, and renounced, world power.
But my hope is that science will fail, that no one will ever again have my luck if I keep secret all the clues. In a few decades barbarism will be coming again and the search for the truth about matter will be waning.
Lately, though, I have become careless. Have come to New York. Live most of the time as a bandaged invalid. Draw money by mail. Take pleasure, now, in playing with the idea of having my deformity discovered. Self-doubt again, even of my deepest convictions. What matter? My way of committing suicide.
That, Kramer, is the story. Strange, I think I can see in your eyes that you believe it. Finishing touches? About Elstrom? Where he came in? Can’t you explain that? Why, the senile sadist poisoned Mary because he loved her even after she’d been married. And the idea grew upon him like a canker. Just like him to figure out a cunning way of making it all look like an accident and of shifting the blame for that accident onto a hired hand. Elstrom probably met her secretly in the orchard, gave her a specially poisoned fruit. No one to know.
What happened to the town to account for those wild, senseless actions on the part of almost everyone? That “mass-insanity,” as you called it? Why, they were affected by what we did in the past; just as Mary was. False memories began to creep into their minds, memories of Mary alive, yet in her coffin. Very like, as you and Ferguson noticed, the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion. A little more change and they’d have forgotten her death altogether. But they didn’t. That’s where the dimensional inertia I mentioned came in. It was only enough to produce false memories, fill them all with a wild guilt, a belief that they’d all had a hand in a plot to bury a woman alive. Nothing more.
The night of the riotous attack on Ellis? Elstrom was scared stiff. He, too, was beginning to feel that Mary wasn’t dead. But with him it took the form of a fear that she would rise from the grave and denounce him. So he tried to use the testimony of a graveyard-wandering boy to put the blame on Ellis and me.
His death? Kramer, you said yourself that you heard footsteps on the floor above, footsteps that couldn’t have been mine or Ellis’s. In that case, when Elstrom went upstairs he saw something that no one ever really saw before. He saw a ghost. The resurrected Mary. The terror he feared but knew could not come, came and killed him.
Yes, I must have succeeded in saving her, so that she might look at her murderer with justice in her grave-yellow face. But today Mary is far away from me and the dream of her from my soul.
She and Ellis. I suppose they went to China, as you think. Perhaps she with still a taint of corruption. At least they came off with unwrecked lives. Human or vampire, alive or living dead, to them a miracle rightly happened. But me, Kesserich? What is a miracle to me? And what are the doings of the other living dead?
Shall I take off for you, Kramer, the bandages about my face, the gloves from my hands, the thick glasses from over my eyes? Shall the tragedian come before the audience without his mask? And prove… no, for you there shall be left the loophole for doubt…
Good-bye, Kramer.
POSTSCRIPT
How long it was that I sat in the booth in the grip of a trembling reaction after the man with the bandages had gone I do not know. Only I too finally departed without a sight of the proprietor.
For three days I mulled my doubts and fears. What I had seen and heard must have been delirium, drunken delirium, nothing else and yet it fitted. Fitted all the facts. Impossible, but consistent.
The third day I went back to The Black Cat to settle for the drinks. As soon as the old Hungarian saw me his jaw sagged a little, his face seemed to turn pale. Yet I did not sense that it was I whom he feared, but rather something my presence suggested. He spoke no word as I paid him, only clucked his tongue, as though he wanted to mention something but was uncertain how to begin. I remembered the shuffling, fleeing footsteps I had heard on that night…
“I know,” I said, turning in the door, “three nights ago you saw something more than a man called Kesserich.”
FIN
Fritz Leiber, Jr.
Fritz Leiber, Jr. Born Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. in Chicago, Illinois, on December 24, 1910, to Fritz Leiber, Sr. and Virginia Bronson Leiber, both Shakespearean actors. Toured with father’s repertory company in 1928 before entering the University of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1932; went on to study at General Theological Seminary in New York, and was briefly a candidate for ordination in the Episcopal Church. Toured intermittently with father’s company and appeared with him in films Camille (1936) and The Great Garrick (1937). Married Jonquil Stephens in 1936 and moved to Hollywood; they soon had a son. Corresponded with horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, who encouraged and influenced his literary development; wrote a supernatural novella, The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (1936; published posthumously in 1997), and showed Lovecraft early stories. Returning to Chicago, took job as staff writer for Consolidated Book Publishing (1937–41), contributing to the Standard American Encyclopedia. His first publication as a professional writer, “Two Sought Adventure” (in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Unknown in 1939), introduced popular charac
ters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, developed with his friend Harry Fischer and modeled on their relationship; the story inaugurated a series he would continue for more than fifty years, helping to define the subgenre he labeled “Sword and Sorcery.” (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories were later collected in Two Sought Adventure, 1957; Swords in the Mist, 1968; Swords Against Wizardry, 1968; The Swords of Lankhmar, 1968; Swords and Deviltry, 1970; Swords and Ice Magic, 1977; The Knight and Knave of Swords, 1988; and other volumes.) Worked as a drama and speech instructor at Occidental College in 1941, and during the war as an inspector at Douglas Aircraft. His first novel, Conjure Wife—about secret witchcraft on a college campus—appeared in Unknown in 1943 (but not as a book until 1952; it was filmed three times). His first science fiction novel, Gather, Darkness!, was also serialized in 1943 (book version, 1950). From 1945 to 1956, he worked as an editor at Science Digest in Chicago. Published science fiction novels Destiny Times Three (in Astounding, 1945; as book, 1957); The Green Millennium (1953); and The Big Time (in Galaxy, 1958; as book, 1961), the last winning a Hugo Award and inaugurating his popular “Change War” series. Moved back to Los Angeles in 1958, and turned to writing full-time; published science fiction novels The Silver Eggheads (1961), The Wanderer (1964), and A Specter Is Haunting Texas (1969). Lived in San Francisco after the death of his wife in 1969; the city forms the setting of his fantasy novel Our Lady of Darkness (1977). In 1976, he received a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and in 1981 a Grand Master Award from Science Fiction Writers of America. Married Margo Skinner in May 1992; died on September 5, 1992, in San Francisco, of an apparent stroke. In 2001 he was inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.