by Fritz Leiber
Carr said, “Well, since you won’t tell me about yourself yet…” He made it half a question; she shook her head, turning away, “…I have something to tell you.” And he told her how he had spied on Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson at General Employment and in the tobacco store.
That captured her attention, all right. She sat tensely.
“You’re sure they didn’t spot you?” she pressed when he was done. “You’re sure she meant it when she said she’d found nothing suspicious?”
“As sure as can be,” he told her, “knowing as little as I do. Anyway, I was bothered and I wanted to warn you. I went to the place where I’d left you the night before. Of course, it knocked me for a loop to see a ‘for sale’ sign, but then by the merest luck I found a paper you’d dropped, which happened to have your right address on it…”
“I know.”
“How?” He looked at her.
She hesitated. Then, “Because I was watching you,” she admitted, dropping her eyes. “I hadn’t intended to tell you that.”
“You were watching me?”
“Yes. I thought you might go back there, trying to find me again, and I was worried.”
“But where were you?” He still hardly believed her.
“Inside. Watching through a crack in one of those boarded-up windows. I found a way in.”
He stared at her. “But if you came back on my account, why didn’t you come out when you saw me?”
“Oh, I didn’t want you to find me,” she explained naively. “I’m doing my best to keep you out of this, though I know it doesn’t exactly look that way. I’m afraid there’s an unscrupulous part of my mind that’s working against me and keeps trying to draw you in.” Again she looked down. “I suppose it was that part of my mind that made me accidentally drop the envelope with the address where you’d remember it And before that, write that silly note about the lion’s tail and the five sisters.”
He looked at her a while longer. Then, with an uncomprehending sigh, he continued. “So I went over to your place.”
“I know,” she interrupted. “I followed you.”
He dropped his hands on his knees, leaned forward. “And still you didn’t—”
“Oh, no,” she assured him. “I didn’t want you to see me. I was just anxious.”
“But then you must know all the rest,” he expostulated. “How I finally went upstairs and how Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson came and…”
“Yes,” she said. “As soon as that happened I ran around and went up the back stairs. I found Fred and you…”
“Fred?”
“The small dark man with glasses. I found you in the bedroom. He’d just hit you. Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson were killing Gigolo in the front hall…”
“Your cat?”
She shut her eyes. “Yes.” She went on after a moment. “I told Fred who you were and we carried you down the back way to his car and…”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “How did your friend Fred happen to be there in the first place? I got the impression you hadn’t been in that room of yours for months.”
“Oh,” she said uncomfortably, “Fred has very queer habits, a sort of morbid sentimentality about me. He often goes to my room, though I’m not there. Don’t’ ask me any more about that now.”
“All right, so you carried me down to your car,” he said. “Then—?”
“We found your address in your pocketbook and drove you back to your room and carried you up, using your key and put you to bed. I was worried about you, I wanted to stay though I know I shouldn’t, but Fred said you’d be all right, so…”
“…you departed,” he finished for her, “after writing me this charming little note.” And he fished it out of his pocket.
“I asked you to burn that,” she said.
“How do you suppose I felt, waking up?” he asked her. “Happy about it all? Oh yes, and you left those powders too—no, I didn’t bring them with me—those powders I was supposed to swallow so trustfully…”
“You should have,” she cut in. “Really you should have. Don’t you see, Carr, I’m trying to keep you out of this? If you only knew what I’d give to be in a position where I could still keep out of it.” She broke off.
He refused to be moved by the intensity of feeling she had revealed. “You’ve talked a lot about ‘this,’ Jane,” he said deliberately, leaning back. She looked at him frightenedly. “Now it’s time you really told me something,” he continued. “Just what is ‘this’?”
A bell clanged. They both started.
She relaxed. “Closing time,” she explained.
Carr shrugged. The fact they were in the stacks of the Chicago Public Library had become inconsequential to him. “Just what is ‘this’?” he stared to repeat.
“How did you get down here tonight?” she interrupted quickly, looking away.
“All right,” he said, meaning that he was patient and his own question could wait. He refilled both their cups. Then, without hurrying, he told her about going back to the apartment on Mayberry and meeting Fred. Revisualizing the ride shook him, though its details were beginning to seem incredible.
And it seemed to shake Jane too. Though when he finished he realized it was anger which was making her tremble.
“Oh, the coward,” she breathed. “The awful coward. Pretending to be gallant, pretending to sacrifice his own feelings ,even to the point of bringing you to me—but really just doing it to hurt me, because he knew I had done my best to keep you out of this. And then on top of it all, taking chances with your life, hoping that you would both die while he was being noble!” Her lips curled. “No, he doesn’t love me any more, unless morbidness and self-torment count for love. I don’t think he ever did.”
“But why do you go with him then?”
“I don’t,” she replied unhappily. “Except that he’s the only person in the whole world to whom I can go and…” Again she broke off.
“Are you sure of that, Jane?” His voice was low. His hand touched her sleeve.
She pulled her arm away. “Why don’t you go away, Carr?” she pleaded, eyeing him with a kind of wild fright. “Why don’t you drink the powders and forget? I don’t want to drag you down. You’ve got a job and a woman and a life, a path through the world laid out for you. You don’t have to walk into the darkness, the meaninglessness, the chaos, the black machine.”
The lights in the stacks began to wink off, all but the one above their heads.
“Another drink?” she asked in a small voice.
There wasn’t much left in the bottle when he’d filled the cups. She accepted hers absently, looking beyond him. Her face seemed incredibly tiny now, as she sat hunched on her stool, her brown suit shading into the background. The stacks were silent; the mutter of the city was inaudible. In all directions the aisles stretched off into darkness, from their single light. All around them was the pressure of the hundred of thousands of books. But always the gaps between the books, the tunneling slits, the peepholes.
“Look at it from my point of view, Jane,” Carr said. “Just how maddening it seems. I know you’re running away from something horrible. Fred is, too. I know there’s some kind of organization I never dreamed of loose in the world, and that it’s threatening you. I know there’s something terribly wrong with your parents. But what? I can’t even make a guess. I’ve tried to make things fit together, but they won’t. Just think, Jane—you coming to me in terror…that slap right out in the open…your warning…Miss Hackman searching my desk…the words I overheard about ‘checking on you’ and ‘having fun’…” Jane shuddered. He went on, “Those crazy notes you’d made on the envelope…the queer piano in your folks’ place…your mother crazily pretending you were there or whatever it was…your father humoring her, or crazily pretending to…Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson busting in, ignoring them, acting as if they weren’t alive…more talk about ‘checking’ and ‘fun’ and a ‘beast’ and some sort of threatening ‘other groups’—all th
e while acting as if the rest of humanity were beneath contempt…and then the cat…and Fred almost killing me…and his wild, fatuous talk tonight about ‘deadly peril’ and so on…and that insane ride…and now you hiding here in the stacks of the Chicago Public Library…”
He shook his head hopelessly.
“They just won’t fit into any pattern, no matter how crazy.” He hesitated. “And then two or three times,” he went on, frowning, “I’ve had the feeling that the explanation was something utterly inconceivable, something far bigger, more dreadful—”
“Don’t,” she interrupted. “Don’t ever let yourself start thinking about it that way.”
“At any rate, don’t you see why you’ve got to tell me about it, Jane?” he finished.
For a moment there was silence. Then she said, “If I tell you about it, that is, if I tell you partly about it, will you promise to go and do what I asked you in the note? So you can escape?”
“No. I won’t promise anything until after you’ve told me.”
There was another silence. Then she sighed, “All right, I’ll tell you partly. But always remember that you made me do it!” She paused, then began, “About a year-and-a-half ago I met Fred. There was nothing serious between us. We just used to meet in the park and go for walks. My father and mother didn’t know about him. I used to spend most of the time working at the piano, and I was going to music school. I didn’t know then that those three—Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson and Dris—were after Fred. He hadn’t told me anything. But then one day they saw us together. And because of that, because those three had linked me with Fred, my life was no longer safe. I had to run away from home. Since then I’ve lived as I could, here, there, I’ve tried to be inconspicuous, I’ve made notes to remind me what I must and mustn’t do, I’ve stayed in places like this, talked to no one, slept in parks, empty apartments…”
“But that’s impossible.”
“It’s true. For a time I managed to escape them. Then a week ago they stared to close in on me. When I went to your office I was desperate. I went there because someone I knew long ago worked there…”
“Tom Elvested?”
“Don’t interrupt. But then I saw you, I saw you weren’t busy and I went to you. I knew it was my last chance. And you helped me, you pretended…” She hesitated. “That’s all,” she finished.
“Oh, Jane,” Carr said, after a moment, as one might say to a schoolchild who hasn’t prepared her lesson, “you haven’t told me anything. What—” But his voice lacked its former insistence. He was getting tired now, tired of pushing things, of straining after facts. He wanted…He hardly knew what he wanted. He divided the rest of the liquor between them, but it was hardly more than a sip. “Look, Jane,” he said, making a last weary effort, “won’t you trust me? Won’t you stop being so frightened? I do want to help you.”
She looked at him, not quite smiling. “You’ve been awfully nice to me, Carr,” she said. “You’ve give me courage and a little forgetfulness—the Custer’s Last Stand bar, the music store, the movie, the chess, the touching by the gate. I’ve been pretty rotten to you. I’ve made use of you, exposed you to dangers, left you hurt, dragged you back by unconscious tricks into my private underworld. If you knew the real situation, I think you’d understand. But that’s something I’ll have to battle out myself. It’s honestly true what I wrote you in that note, Carr. You can’t help me, you can only spoil my chance of escape.” She looked down. “It isn’t because I think you can help me that I keep drawing you back,” she added, and paused.
“There are two kinds of people in the world, Carr. The steadies and the waifs. The steady knows where he and his world are going. The waif sees only darkness. She knows a secret about life that locks her away forever from happiness and rest. You’re really a steady, Carr. That woman you told me about who wants you to succeed, she’s a steady too. It’s no use helping a waif, Carr. No matter how tender-hearted she may be, how filled with good intentions, there’s something destructive about her, something akin to the darkness, something that makes her want to destroy other people’s certainties and faiths, lead them to the precipice and then point down and say, ‘See? Nothing!’ And there’s nothing you can do for me, nothing at all.”
Carr shook his head. “I can help,” he persisted.
“No.”
“Oh, but Jane, don’t you understand? I really want to help you.” He started to put his arm around her, but she quickly got up.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, following her.
She turned, putting her hand between them. She had trouble speaking. “Go away, Carr. Go away right now. Go back to that wonderful new business you told me about and that woman who wants you to have it. Forget everything else. I thought it would be fun to be with you for an evening, to pretend that things were different—I was insane! Every minute you stay with me, I’m doing you a wrong. Please go, Carr.”
“No.”
“Then stay with me for a little while. Stay with me tonight, but go away tomorrow.”
“No.”
They stood facing each other tautly for a moment. Then the tension suddenly sagged. Carr rubbed his eyes and exclaimed, “Dammit, I wish I had a drink.”
Jane’s eye suddenly twinkled. Carr sensed an abrupt change in her. She seemed to have dropped her cloak of fear and thrown around her shoulders another garment, which he couldn’t identify, except that it shimmered. Even before she spoke, he felt his spirits rising in answer to hers.
“Since you won’t recognize danger and go, let’s forget it for tonight,” was what she told him. “Only, you must promise me one thing.” Her eyes gleamed strangely. “You must believe that I am…magic, that I have magical powers, that while you are with me, you can do anything you want to in the world and it can’t do anything to you, that you’re free as an invisible spirit. You promise? Good. And now I believe you said you wanted a drink.”
He followed her as if she were some fairy-tale princess as she went three aisles over, pulled on a light, took down from an upper shelf three copies of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, stuck her hand into the gap, and brought out a fifth of scotch.
“I put it here two months ago,” she said. “That was when I realized that solitary drinking was a bad thing.” Suddenly she set the bottle down, shook him, cried, “You’re risking your life by your stubbornness, do you understand that? What we’re doing is horribly dangerous. I don’t care, I want to, but still it’s horribly dangerous. Do you understand?”
But his eyes were on the bottle of scotch. “Do you live down here?” he demanded.
She laughed helplessly and let go of him. “In a way. Would you like to see?” And recklessly pulling out handfuls of other books so that they thudded on the floor, she showed him a pack-rat accumulation of cosmetics, showy jewelry, bags of peanuts and candy, cans of gourmet food and an opener, boxes of crackers, loose handkerchiefs, gloves, scarves, all sorts of little boxes and bottles, cups, plates, and glasses.
Taking two of the latter, crystal, long-stemmed, she said, “And now will you have a drink with me, in my house?”
Chapter Eight
The Strip Tease
LIKE TWO DRUNKEN stowaways in the hold of a ship, tipsily swaying and constantly shushing each other. Carr and Jane ascended a narrow stair. They groped through the foreign language section, and surveyed library’s lightless rotunda. Carr’s heart immediately went out to the shadows festooning it. They looked as warm and friendly as the scotch had tasted. He felt he could fly up to them if he willed, wrap them around him fold on fold, luxuriate in their smoky softness. Light from outside, slanting upward through the windows, evoked golden and greenish gleams from the mosaic. Lower down, shelves and counters made blurry-edged rectangles. The longer Carr looked, the more he rejoiced at the cosmetic magic of darkness.
They were halfway across the rotunda when a beam of light began to bob through the archway ahead. Carr pulled Jane toward the information booth.
&nbs
p; “What’s the matter?” she mumbled, resisting. “What are you doing?”
“The watchman!” he whispered urgently, dragging her along.
She said foolishly, “Who cares?”
“Shh!” He pulled her into the both and down into a crouch beside him.
The light swam closer. The tread of rubber-shod feet became audible. The light swung around slowly, poking into shadows. Once it swept across their hiding place, like an enemy searchlight over a foxhole, showing the grain in the oak counter just above Carr’s head. And once it leaped to the ceiling and mystically spotlighted the golden name of Corneille.
A cracked voice began to hum softly, “I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Dad.”
Jane started to peek over the counter. Carr managed to pull her down noiselessly. In doing it, he glimpsed an old man half turned away from them, with a clock strapped to his belt.
Once again the light brushed across their retreat. Then it and the footsteps started away.
“He wants a girl,” Jane whispered and giggled.
“Shh!”
“I won’t unless you stop hurting my wrist.”
“Shh!” Nevertheless he let go of her. A few seconds later he raised his head until his eyes were above the level of the counter, but just at the moment he heard Jane scramble over it at the other end of the booth. Forsaking caution, he gave a push at what he thought was the swinging door, smacked solid wood instead, and without bothering to hunt any further, vaulted after Jane.
Weaving behind her down the broad white stair, he felt the contagion of her recklessness. They might be prince and princess stealing from a marble castle, bound on some dangerous escapade.
Then Carr realized that Jane had got through the door to the street. He followed her and halted, entranced. For there, beyond the white sidewalk, was a most fitting, even through anachronistic, continuation of his fantasy—a long low limousine with silvery fittings and softly glowing interior.
Then he saw that approaching it at a stately waddle came two well-fed couples in top hats and bright feathery capes. Under the street light, the features of all four were screwed up into that expression of germicidal abstraction which is the customary mark of the Four Hundred. While they were still some yards away, a chauffeur opened the door and touched his visored cap.