The Mind Spider and Other Stories

by Fritz Leiber

  I certainly wasn’t expecting anything.

  Until, at the windy comer just before his place, Max suddenly stopped.

  Max’s junky front room-and-a-half was in a smoky brick building two flights up over some run-down stores. There is a rust-flaked fire escape on the front of it, running past the old-fashioned jutting bay windows, its lowest flight a counterbalanced one that only swings down when somebody walks out onto it—that is, if a person ever had occasion to.

  When Max stopped suddenly, I stopped too of course. He was looking up at his window. His window was dark and I couldn’t see anything in particular, except that he or somebody else had apparently left a big black bundle of something out on the fire-escape and—it wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen that space used for storage and drying wash and what not, against all fire regulations, I’m sure.

  But Max stayed stopped and kept on looking.

  “Say, Fred,” he said softly then, “how about going over to your place for a change? Is the standing invitation still out?”

  “Sure Max, why not,” I replied instantly, matching my voice to his. “I’ve been asking you all along.”

  My place was just two blocks away. We’d only have to turn the comer we were standing on and we’d be headed straight far it.

  “Okay then,” Max said. “Let’s get going.” There was a touch of sharp impatience in his voice that I’d never heard there before. He suddenly seemed very eager that we should get around that comer. He took hold of my arm.

  He was no longer looking up at the fire escape, but I was. The wind had abruptly died and it was very still. As we went around the comer—to be exact as Max pulled me around it—the big bundle of something lifted up and looked down at me with eyes like two red coals.

  I didn’t let out a gasp or say anything. I don’t think Max realized then that I’d seen anything, but I was shaken. This time I coudn’t lay it to cigarette butts or reflected tail lights, they were too difficult to place on a third-story fire escape. This time my mind would have to rationalize a lot more inventively to find an explanation, and until it did I would have to believe that something . , . well, alien . . . was at large in this part of Chicago.

  Big cities have their natural menaces—hold-up artists,, hopped-up kids, sick-headed sadists, that sort of thing—and you’re more or less prepared for them. You’re not prepared for something . . . alien. If you hear a scuttling in the basement you assume it’s rats and although you know rats can be dangerous you’re not particularly frightened and you may even go down to investigate. You don’t expect to find bird-catching Amazonian spiders.

  The wind hadn’t resumed yet. We’d gone about a third of the way down the first block when I heard behind us, faintly but distinctly, a rusty creaking ending in a metallic jar that didn’t fit anything but the first flight of the fire escape swinging down to the sidewalk.

  I just kept walking then, but my mind split in two—half of it listening and straining back over my shoulder, the other half darting off to investigate the weirdest notions, such as that Max was a refugee from some unimaginable concentration camp on the other side of the stars. If there were such concentration camps, I told myself in my cold hysteria, run by some sort of supernatural SS men, they’d have dogs just like the one I’d thought I’d seen . . . and, to be honest, thought I’d see padding along if I looked over my shoulder now.

  It was hard to hang on and just walk, not run, with this insanity or whatever it was hovering over my mind, and the fact that Max didn’t say a word didn’t help either.

  Finally, as we were starting the second block, I got hold of myself and I quietly reported to Max exactly what I thought I’d seen. His response surprised me.

  “What’s the layout of your apartment, Fred? Third floor, isn’t it?”

  "Yes. Well. ..”

  “Begin at the door we’ll be going in,” he directed me.

  "That’s the living room, then there’s a tiny short open hall, then the kitchen. It’s like an hour-glass, with the living room and kitchen the ends, and the hall the wasp waist. Two doors open from the hall: the one to your right (figuring from the living room) opens into the bathroom; the one to your left, into a small bedroom.”

  “Windows?’r

  "Two in the living room, side by side,” I told him. “None in the bathroom. One in the bedroom, onto an air shaft. Two in the kitchen, apart.”

  "Back door in the kitchen?” he asked.

  “Yes. To the back porch. Has glass in the top half of it. I hadn’t thought about that. That makes three windows in the kitchen.”

  “Are the shades in the windows pulled down now?”

  “No.”

  Questions and answers had been rapid-fire, without time for me to think, done while we walked a quarter of a block. Now after the briefest pause Max said, “Look, Fred, I’m not asking you or anyone to believe in all the things I’ve been telling as if for kicks at Sol’s—that’s too much for all of a sudden—but you do believe in that black dog, don’t you?” He touched jny arm wamingly. “No, don’t look behind you!”

  I swallowed. “I believe in him right now,” I said.

  “Okay. Keep on walking. I’m sorry I got you into this, Fred, but now I’ve got to try to get both of us out. Your best chance is to disregard the thing, pretend you’re not aware of anything strange happened—then the beast won’t know whether I’ve told you anything, it’ll be hesitant to disturb you, it’ll try to get at me without troubling you, and it’ll even hold off a while if it thinks it will get me that way. But it won’t hold off forever—it’s only imperfectly disciplined. My best chance is to get in touch with headquarters—something I’ve been putting off—and have them pull me out. I should be able to do it in an hour, maybe less. You can give me that time, Fred.”

  “How?” I asked him. I was mounting the steps to the vestibule. I thought I could hear, very faintly, a light pad-pad-ding behind us. I didn't look back.

  Max stepped through the door I held open and we started up the stairs.

  “As soon as we get in your apartment,” he said, “you turn on all the lights in the living room and kitchen. Leave the shades up. Then start doing whatever you might be doing if you were staying up at this time of night. Reading or typing, say. Or having a bite of food, if you can manage it. Play it as naturally as you can. If you hear things, if you feel things, try to take no notice. Above all, don’t open the windows or doors, or look out of them to see anything, or go to them if you can help it—you’ll probably feel drawn to do just that. Just play it naturally. If you can hold them . . . it . . . off that way for half an hour or so—until midnight, say—if you can give me that much time, I should be able to handle my end of it. And remember, it’s the best chance for you as well as for me. Once I’m out of here, you’re safe.”

  “But you—” I said, digging for my key, “—what will you do?"

  “As soon as we get inside,” Max said, “I’ll duck in your bedroom and shut the door. Pay no attention. Don’t come after me, whatever you hear. Is there a plug-in in your bedroom? I’ll need juice.”

  “Yes,” I told him, turning the key. “But the lights have been going off a lot lately. Someone has been blowing the fuses.” “That’s great,” he growled, following me inside.

  I turned on the lights and went in the kitchen, did the same there and came back. Max was still in the living room, bent over the table beside my typewriter. He had a sheet of light-green paper. He must have brought it with him. He was scrawling something at the top and bottom of it. He straightened up and gave it to me.

  “Fold it up and put it in your pocket and keep it on you the next few days,” he said.

  It was just a blank sheet of cracldingly thin light-green paper with “Dear Fred” scribbled at the top and “Your friend, Max Boumemann” at the bottom and nothing in between.

  “But what—?’’ I began, looking up at him.

  "Do as I sayl” He snapped at me. Then, as I almost flinched away from him,
he grinned—a great big comradely grin.

  "Okay, let’s get working,” he said, and he went into the bedroom and shut the door behind him.

  I folded the sheet of paper three times and unzipped my wind-breaker and tucked it inside the breast pocket. Then I went to the bookcase and pulled at random a volume out of the top shelf—my psychology shelf, I remembered the next moment—and sat down and opened the book and looked at a page without seeing the print.

  And now there was time for me to think. Since I’d spoken of the red eyes to Max there had been no time for anything but to listen and to remember and to act. Now there was time for me to think.

  My first thoughts were: This is ridiculous! I saw something strange and frightening, sure, but it was in the dark, I couldn’t see anything clearly, there must be some simple natural explanation for whatever it was on the fire escape. I saw something strange and Max sensed, I was frightened and when I told him about it he decided to play a practical joke on me in line with that eternal gag he lives by. I’ll bet right now he’s lying on my bed and chuckling, wondering how long it’ll be before I—

  The window beside me rattled as if the wind had suddenly risen again. The rattling grew more violent—and then it ab-ruptly stopped without dying away, stopped with a feeling of tension, as if the wind or something more material were still pressing against the pane.

  And I did not turn my head to look at it, although (or perhaps because) I knew there was no fire escape or other support outside. I simply endured that sense of a presence at my elbow and stared unseeingly at the book in my hands, while my heart pounded and my skin froze and flushed.

  I realized fully then that my first skeptical thoughts had been the sheerest automatic escapism and that, just as I’d told Max, I believed with my whole mind in the black dog. I believed in the whole business insofar as I could imagine it. I believed that there are undreamed of powers warring in this universe. I believed that Max was a stranded time-traveHer and that in my bedroom he was now frantically operating some unearthly device to signal for help from some unknown headquarters. I believed that the impossible and the deadly was loose in Chicago.

  But my thoughts couldn’t carry further than that. They kept repeating themselves, faster and faster. My mind felt like an engine that is shaking itself to pieces. And the impulse to turn my head and look out the window came to me and grew.

  I forced myself to focus on the middle of the page where I had the book open and start reading.

  Jungs archetype transgress the harriers of time and space. More than that: they are capable of breaking the shackles of the laws of causality. They are endowed with frankly mystical “prospective” faculties. The soul itself, according to Jung, is the reaction of the personality to the unconscious and includes in every person both male and female elements, the animus and anima, as well as the persona or the person’s reaction to the outside world....

  I think I read that last sentence a dozen times, swiftly at first, then word by word, until it was a meaningless jumble and I could no longer force my gaze across it.

  Then the glass in the window beside me creaked.

  I laid down the book and stood up, eyes front, and went into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of crackers and opened the refriegerator.

  The rattling that muted itself in hungry pressure followed. I heard it first in one kitchen window, then the other, then in the glass in the top of the door. I didn’t look.

  I went back in the liying room, hesitated a moment beside my typewriter, which had a blank sheet of yellow paper in it, then sat down again in the armchair beside the window, putting the crackers and the half carton of milk on the little table beside me. I picked up the book I’d tried to read and put it on my knees.

  The rattling returned with me—at once and peremptorily, as if something were growing impatient.

  I couldn’t focus on the print any more. I picked up a cracker and put it down. I touched the cold milk carton and my throat constricted and I drew my fingers away.

  I looked at my typewriter and then I thought of the blank sheet of green paper and the explanation for Max’s strange act suddenly seemed clear to me. Whatever happened to him tonight, he wanted me to be able to type a message over his signature that would exonerate me. A suicide note, say. Whatever happened to him . . .

  The window beside me shook violently, as if at a terific gust.

  It occurred to me that while I must not look out of the window as if expecting to see something (that would be the sort of give-away against which Max warned me) I could safely let my gaze slide across it—say, if I turned to look at the clock behind me. Only, I told myself, I musn’t pause or react if I saw anything.

  I nerved myself. After all, I told myself, there was the blessed possibility that I would see nothing outside the taut pane but darkness.

  I turned my head to look at the clock.

  I saw it twice, going and coming back, and although my gaze did not pause or falter, my blood and my thoughts started to pound as if my heart and mind would burst.

  It was about two feet outside the window—a face or mask or muzzle of a more gleaming black than the darkness around it. The face was at the same time the face of a hound, a panther, a giant bat, and a man—in between those four. A pitiless, hopeless man-animal face alive with knoweldge but dead with a monstrous melancholy and a monstrous malice. There was the sheen of needlelike white teeth against black lips or dewlaps. There was the dull pulsing glow of eyes like red coals.

  My gaze didn’t pause or falter or go back—yes—and my heart and mind didn’t burst, but I stood up then and stepped jerkily to the typewriter and sat down at it and started to pound the keys. After a while my gaze stopped blurring and I started to see what I was typing. The first thing I’d typed was:

  the quick red fox jumped over the crazy black dog . . .

  I kept on typing. It was better than reading. Typing I was doing something, I could discharge. I typed a flood of fragments: “Now is the time for all good men—”, the first words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Winston Commercial, six lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” without punctuation, Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “Mary had a big black—”

  In the middle of it all the face of the electric clock that I’d looked at sprang into my mind. My mental image of it had been blanked out until then. The hands were at quarter to twelve.

  Whipping in a fresh yellow sheet, I typed the first stanza of Poe’s “Raven,” the Oath of Allegiance to the American Flag, the lost-ghost lines from Thomas Wolfe, the Creed and the Lord’s prayer, “Beauty is truth; truth, blackness—”

  The rattling made a swift circuit of the windows—though I heard nothing from the bedroom, nothing at all—and finally the rattling settled on the kitchen door. There was a creaking of wood and metal under pressure.

  I thought: You are standing guard. You are standing guard for yourself and for Max. And then the second thought came: If you open the door, if you welcome it in, if you open the kitchen door and then the bedroom door, it will spare-you, it will not hurt you.

  Over and over again I fought down that second thought and the urge that went with it. It didn’t seem to be coming from my mind, but from the outside. I typed Ford, Buick, the names of all the automobiles I could remember, Overland Moon, I typed all the four-letter words, I typed the alphabet, lower case and capitals. I typed the numerals and punctuation marks, I typed the keys of the keyboard in order from left to right, top to bottom, then in from each side alternately. I filled the last yellow sheet I was on and it fell out and I kept pounding mechanically, making shiny black marks on the dull black platen.

  But then the urge became something I could not resist. I stood up and in the sudden silence I walked through the hall to the back door, looking down at the floor and resisting, dragging each step as much as I could.

  My hands touched the knob and the long-handled key in the lock. My body pressed the door, which seemed to surge against me
, so that I felt it was only my counter-pressure that kept it from bursting open in a shower of splintered glass and wood.

  Far off, as if it were something happening in another universe, I heard the University cloek tolling One . .. two . ..

  And then, because I could resist no longer, I turned the key and the knob.

  The lights all went out.

  In the darkness the door pushed open against me and something came in past me like a gust of cold black wind with streaks of heat in it.

  I heard the bedroom door swing open.

  The clock completed its strokes. Eleven ... twelve ...

  And then ...

  Nothing . . . nothing at all. All pressures lifted from me. I was aware only of being alone, utterly alone. I.knew it, deep down.

  After some . . . minutes, I think, I shut and locked the door and I went over and opened a drawer and rummaged out a candle, lit it, and went through the apartment and into the bedroom.

  Max wasn’t there. I’d known he wouldn’t be. I didn’t know how badly I’d failed him. I lay down on the bed and after a while I began to sob and, after another while, I slept.

  Next day I told the janitor about the lights. He gave me a funny look.

  “I know,” he said. “I just put in a new fuse this morning. I never saw one blown like that before. The window in the fuse was gone and there was a metal sprayed all over the inside of the box.”

  That afternoon I got Max’s message. I’d gone for a walk in the park and was sitting on a bench beside the lagoon, watching the water ripple in the breeze when I felt something burning against my chest. For a moment I thought I’d dropped my cigarette butt inside my windbreaker. I reached in and touched something hot in my pocket and jerked it out. It was the sheet of green paper Max had given me. Tiny threads of smoke were rising from it.

  I flipped it open and read, in a scrawl that smoked and grew blacker instant by instant: