The Second Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®: 20 Tales by Modern and Classic Authors

by Fritz Leiber

  We had just passed that point of the Little Sycamore Canyon road where all the Santa Barbara Islands are visible like an argosy of blue-gray faintly granular clouds floating on the surface of the pale blue Pacific, when I suddenly remarked, for no profound major reason that I was aware of at the time, “I don’t suppose it’s any longer possible today to write a truly gripping story of supernatural horror—or for that matter to undergo a deeply disturbing experience of supernatural terror.”

  Oh, there were enough minor reasons for the topic of my remark. Viki and I had worked in a couple of cheap monster movies, Franz Kinzman was a distinguished science-fantasy writer as well as a research psychologist, and the three of us had often gabbed about the weird in life and art. Also, there had been the faintest hint of mystery in Franz’s invitation to Viki and myself to spend with him the weekend of his return to Rim House after a month in LA. Finally, the abrupt transition from a teeming city to a forbidding expanse of nature always has an eerie sting—as Franz immediately brought up without turning his head.

  “I’ll tell you the first condition for such an experience or artistic inspiration,” he said as the Volks entered a cool band of ‘shadow. “You’ve got to get away from the Hive.”

  “The Hive?” Viki questioned, understanding very well what he meant, I was sure, but wanting to hear him talk and have him turn his head.

  Franz obliged. He has a singularly handsome, thoughtful, noble face, hardly of our times, though looking all of his fifty years and with eyes dark-circled ever since the death of his wife and two sons in a jet crash a year ago.

  “I mean the City,” he said as we buzzed into the sun again. “The human stamping ground, where we’ve policemen to guard us and psychiatrists to monitor our minds and neighbors to jabber at us and where our ears are so full of the clack of the mass media that it’s practically impossible to think or sense or feel deeply anything that’s beyond humanity. Today the City, in its figurative sense, covers the whole world and the seas and the airways too and by anticipation the spaceways. I think what you mean, Glenn, is that it’s hard to get out of the City even in the wilderness.”

  Mr. M. honked twice at a blind hairpin turn and put in the next remark. “I don’t know about that,” he said, hunching determinedly over the wheel, “but I should think you could find all the horror and terror you wanted, Mr. Seabury, without going away from home, though it’d make pretty grim films. I mean the Nazi death camps, brainwashing, sex murders, race riots, stuff like that, not to mention the atom bomb.”

  “Right,” I countered, “but I’m talking about supernatural horror, which is almost the antithesis of even the worst human violence and cruelty. Hauntings, the suspension of scientific law, the intrusion of the unutterly alien, the sense of something listening at the rim of the cosmos or scratching faintly at the other side of the sky.”

  As I said that, Franz looked around at me sharply with what seemed an expression of sudden excitement and apprehension, but at that moment the sun blinded me again and Viki said, “Doesn’t science fiction give you that, Glenn? I mean, horrors from other planets, the extraterrestrial monster?”

  “No,” I told her, blinking at a fuzzy black globe that crawled across the mountains, “because the monster from Mars or wherever has (at least as visualized by the author) so many extra feet, so many tentacles, so many purple eyes—as real as the cop on the beat. Or if he’s a gas, he’s a describable gas. The exact sort of goon men will be meeting when the spaceships start traveling the starways. I’m thinking of something... well ghostly utterly weird.”

  “And it’s that thing, Glenn—that ghostly, utterly weird thing—that you believe can’t be written about effectively any more, or experienced?” Franz asked me with an odd note of suppressed eagerness, eyeing me keenly although the Volks was traveling a jouncy section. “Why?”

  “You started to sketch the reasons yourself a moment ago,” I said. My newest black globe was slipping sideways now, pulsing, starting to fade. “We’ve become too smart and shrewd and sophisticated to be scared by fantasies. Most especially we’ve got an army of experts to explain away the supernatural sort of thing the instant it starts to happen. The physicist boys have put matter and energy through the finest sieves—there’s no room left in it for mysterious rays and influences, except for the ones they’ve described and catalogued. The astronomers are keeping tabs on the rim of the cosmos with their giant telescopes. The earth’s been pretty thoroughly explored, enough to show there aren’t any lost worlds in darkest Africa or Mountains of Madness near the South Pole.”

  “What about religion?” Viki suggested.

  “Most religions,” I replied, “steer away from the supernatural today—at least the religions that would attract an intellectual person. They concentrate on brotherhood, social service, moral leadership—or dictatorship!—and fine-drawn reconciliations of theology to the facts of science. They’re not really interested in miracles or devils.”

  “Well, the occult then,” Viki persisted. “Psionics.”

  “Nothing much there either,” I asserted. “If you do decide to go in for telepathy, ESP hauntings—the supernormal sort of thing—you find that territory has all been staked out by Doctor Rhine, riffling his eternal Zener cards, and a bunch of other parapsychologists who tell you they’ve got the whole benign spirit world firmly in hand and who are as busy classifying and file-carding as the physicists.

  “But worst of all,” I went on as Mr. M. slowed the Volks for a potholed uphill stretch, “we’ve got seventy-seven breeds of certified psychiatrists and psychologists (excuse me, Franz!) all set to explain the least eerie feeling or sense of wonder we get in terms of the workings of our unconscious minds, our everyday human relationships, and our past emotional experiences.”

  Vicki chuckled throatily and put in, “Supernatural dread almost always turns out to be nothing but childhood misconceptions and fears about sex. Mom’s the witch with her breasts of mystery and her underground baby-factory, while the dark hot bristly demon dissolves to Dear Old Dad.” At that moment the Volks, avoiding another dark spill of gravel, again aimed straight at the sun. I dodged it in part but Viki got it full in the eyes, as I could tell from the odd way she was blinking sideways at the turreted hills a moment later.

  “Exactly,” I told her. “The point is, Franz, that these experts are experts, all joking aside, and they’ve divvied up the outer and inner world between them, and if we just start to notice something strange we turn to them at once (either actually or in our imaginations) and they have rational down-to-earth explanations all ready. And because each of the experts knows a lot more about his special field than we do, we have to accept their explanations—or else go off our own merry way, knowing in our heart of hearts that we’re behaving like stubborn romantic adolescents or out-and-out crackpots.”

  “The result is,” I finished, as the Volks got past the potholes, “that there’s no room left in the world for the weird—though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it, as shown by the floods of corny monster films and the stacks of monster and madness magazines with their fractionally-educated hip cackling and beatnik jeers.”

  “Laughing in the dark,” Franz said lightly, looking past us back the road, where the thin dust the Volks raised was falling over the cliff toward the thorny dark ravines far below.

  “Meaning?” Viki asked.

  “People still are afraid,” he stated simply, “and of the same things. They’ve just got more defenses against their fears. They’ve learned to talk louder and faster and smarter and funnier—and with more parroted expert-given authority—to shut them out. Why, I could tell you—” He checked himself. He really did seem intensely excited beneath the calm philosopher’s mask. “I can make it clear,” he said, “by an analogy.”

  “Do,” Viki urged.

  Half turned in his s
eat, Franz looked straight back at the two of us. A quarter of a mile ahead or so the road, climbing a little again, plunged into a stretch of heavy cloud-shadow. I noted this fact with relief—as I now had no less than three dark fuzzy globes crawling along the horizon and I yearned to be out of the sun. From the way Viki was squinting I could tell she was in the same fix. Mr. M. with his pulled-down hat and Franz, faced around, seemed less affected.

  Franz said, “Imagine that mankind is just one man—and his family—living in a house in a clearing in the midst of a dark dangerous forest, largely unknown, largely unexplored. While he works and while he rests, while he makes love to his wife or plays with his children, he’s always keeping an eye on that forest,

  “After a while he becomes prosperous enough to hire guards to watch the forest for him, men trained in scouting and woodcraft—your experts, Glenn. The man comes to depend on them for his safety, he defers to their judgment, he is perfectly willing to admit that each of them knows a little more about one small nearby sector of the forest than he does.

  “But what if those guards should all come to him one day and say, ‘Look, Master, there really is no forest out there at all, only some farmlands we’re cultivating that stretch to the ends of the universe. In fact, there never was a forest out there at all, Master—you imagined all those black trees and choked aisles because you were scared of the witch doctor!

  “Would the man believe them? Would he have the faintest justification for believing them? Or would he simply decide that his hired guards, vain of their little skills and scouting’s, had developed delusions of omniscience?”

  The cloud-shadow was very close now, just at the top of the slight climb we’d almost finished. Franz Kinzman leaned closer to us against the back of the front seat and there was a hush in his voice as he said, “The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research man, far far beyond the mad beat half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.”

  With an exhilarating chilling and glooming, the Volks rolled into the sharply-edged cloud-shadow. Switching around in his seat Franz began eagerly, intently, rapidly to search the landscape ahead, which seemed suddenly to expand, gain depth, and spring into sharper existence with the screening off of the blinding sun.

  Almost at once his gaze fixed on a smoothly ridged gray stone pinnacle that had just come into view on the opposite rim of the canyon valley beside us. He slapped Mr. M. on the shoulder and pointed with his other hand at a small parking area, surfaced like the road, on the hillside bulge we were crossing.

  Then, as Mr. M. swung the car to a grating stop in the indicated area just on the brink of the drop, Franz raised in his seat and, looking over the windshield, pointed commandingly at the gray pinnacle while lifting his other hand a little, fingers tautly spread, in a gesture enjoining silence.

  I looked at the pinnacle. At first I saw nothing but the half dozen rounded merging turrets of gray rock springing out of the brush-covered hilltop. Then it seemed to me that the last of my annoying after-images of the sun—dark, pulsing, fringe-edged—had found lodgment there.

  I blinked and swung my eyes a little to make it go away or at least move off—for after all it was nothing but a fading disturbance in my retinas that, purely by chance, momentarily coincided with the pinnacle.

  It would not move away. It clung to the pinnacle, a dark translucent pulsing shape, as if held there by some incredible magnetic attraction.

  I shivered, I felt all my muscles faintly chill and tighten at this unnatural linkage between the space inside my head and the space outside it, at this weird tie between the sort of figures that one sees in the real world and the kind that swim before the eyes when one closes them in the dark.

  I blinked my eyes harder, swung my head from side to side.

  It was no use. The shaggy dark shape with the strange lines going out from it clung to the pinnacle like some giant clawed and crouching beast.

  And instead of fading it now began to darken further, even to blacken, the faint lines got a black glitter, the whole thing began horridly to take on a definite appearance and expression, much as the figures we see swimming in the dark become faces or masks or muzzles or forms in response to our veering imagination—though now I felt no ability whatever to change the trend of the shaping of the thing on the pinnacle.

  Viki’s fingers dug into my arm with painful force. Without realizing it, we’d both stood up in the back of the car and were leaning forward, close to Franz. My own hands gripped the back of the front seat. Only Mr. M. hadn’t raised up, though he was staring at the pinnacle too.

  Viki began, in a slow rasping strained voice, “Why, it looks like—”

  With a sharp jerk of his spread-fingered hand Franz commanded her to be silent. Then without taking his eyes away from the crag he dipped in the side pocket of his coat and was next reaching some things back toward us.

  I saw, without looking at them directly, that they were blank white cards and stub pencils. Viki and I took them—so did Mr. M.

  “Franz whispered hoarsely, “Don’t say what you see. Write it down. Just your impressions. Now. Quickly. The thing won’t last long—I think.”

  For the next few seconds the four of us looked and scribbled and shivered—at least I know I was shuddering at one point, though not for an instant taking my eyes away.

  Then, for me, the pinnacle was suddenly bare. I knew that it must have become so for the others too at almost the same instant, from the way their shoulders .slumped and the strained sigh Viki gave.

  We didn’t say a word, just breathed hard for a moment or so, then passed the cards around and read them. Most of the writing or printing had the big sloppiness of something scribbled without looking at the paper, but beyond that there was a visible tremor or shakiness, especially in Viki’s notes and my own.

  Viki Quinn’s: Black tiger, burning bright. Blinding fur—or vines. Stickiness.

  Franz Kinzman’s: Black Empress. Glittering cloak of threads. Visual glue.

  Mine (Glenn Seabury’s): Giant Spider. Black lighthouse. The web. The pull on the eyes.

  Mr. M, whose writing was firmest: I don’t see anything. Except three people looking at a big bare gray rock as if it were the door to Hell.

  And it was Mr. M. who first looked up. We met his gaze. His lips sketched a tentative grin that seemed both sour and uneasy.

  He said after a bit, “Well, you certainly had your young friends pretty well hypnotized, Mr. Kinzman.”

  Franz asked calmly, “Is that your explanation, Ed—hypnotic suggestion—for what happened, for what we thought happened?”

  The other shrugged. “What else?” he asked more cheerfully. “Do you have another explanation, Franz?—something that would account for it not working on me?”

  Franz hesitated. I hung on his answer, wild to know if he’d known it was coming, as he’d seemed to, and how he’d known, and whether he’d had any comparable previous experiences, The hypnotism notion, though clever, was pure nonsense.

  Finally Franz shook his head and said firmly, “No.”

  Mr. M. shrugged and started the Volks.

  None of us wanted to talk. The experience was still with us, pinning us down inside, and then the testimony of the cards was so complete in its way, the parallelisms so exact, the conviction of a shared experience so sure, that there was no great immediate urge to compare notes.

  Viki did say to me, in the offhand way of a person checking a point of which he’s almost certain, “ ‘Black lighthouse’—that means the light was black? Rays of darkness?”

>   “Of course,” I told her and then asked in the same way, “Your ‘vines,’ Viki, your ‘threads,’ Franz—did they suggest those fine wire figures of curved planes and space you see in mathematical museums? Something linking a center to infinity?”

  They both nodded. I said, “Like my web,” and that was all the talk for a bit.

  I took out a cigarette, remembered, and shoved it back in my top pocket.

  Viki said, “Our descriptions... vaguely like descriptions of tarot cards... none of the actual tarots, though... ” Her remarks trailed off unanswered.

  Mr. M. stopped at the top of a narrow drive that led down sharply to a house of which the only visible part was the flat roof, topped with pale jagged gravel. He jumped out.

  “Thanks for the lift, Franz,” he said. “Remember to call on me—the phone’s working again—if you people should need a lift... or anything.” He looked quickly toward the two of us in the back seat and grinned nervously. “Good-by, Miss Quinn, Mr. Seabury. Don’t—” he broke off, said simply, “So long,” and walked rapidly down the drive.

  Of course we guessed he’d been going to say, “Don’t see any more black tigers with eight legs and lady’s faces,” or something like that.

  Franz slid across into the driver’s seat. As soon as the Volks got moving I knew one reason the steady competent Mr. M. might have wanted to drive the mountainous stretch. Franz didn’t exactly try to make the old Volks behave like a sports car, but his handling of it was in that direction—skittish, a bit dashing.

  He mused loudly, “One thing keeps nagging me: why didn’t Ed Mortenson see it?—if ‘see’ is the right word.”

  So at last I was sure of Mr. M.’s name. Mortenson. It seemed a triumph.