by Fritz Leiber
Viki said, “I can think of one possible reason, Mr. Kinzman. He isn’t going where we’re going.”
II
“Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by this appalling effigy.”
—M. R. James
Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook
Rim House was about two miles beyond Mr. Mortenson’s place and likewise on the downhill (down-cliff, rather!) side of the road. It was reached by a decidedly one-lane drive. On the outside of the drive, edged by white-painted stones, was a near-vertical drop of over one hundred feet. On the inside was a forty-five degree brush-dotted rocky slope between the drive and the road, which was climbing sharply along this stretch.
After about one hundred yards the drive widened to become the short, narrow, jutting plateau or terrace on which stood Rim House, occupying about half of the available space. Franz, who had taken the first part Of the drive with confident briskness, slowed the Volks to a crawl as soon as the house came in view so we could scan the outside layout while still somewhat above it.
The house was built to the very edge of the drop, which here plunged down further and even more sharply than it had along the drive. On the uphill side of the house, coming down to within two feet of it, was a dizzily expansive slope of raw earth with hardly a thing growing in it, smoothly geometrical as a little section of the side of a vast brown cone. Along the very top of it a row of short white posts, so distant I couldn’t see the cable joining them, marked the road we had left. The slope looked forty-five degrees to me—-these things always look impossibly steep—but Franz said it was only thirty—a completely stabilized landslide. It had been burned over a year ago in a brush fire that had almost got the house and still more recently there had been some minor slides started by repairs to the road above, accounting for the slope’s unvegetated appearance.
The house was long, one-storey, its walls finished in gray asbestos shingles. The nearly flat roof, also finished in gray asbestos, sloped gently from the cliff side in. Midway the length of the house was a bend, allowing the house to conform to the curving top of the cliff and dividing it into two equal sections or angles, to call them that. An unroofed porch, lightly railed (Franz called it “the deck”) ran along the nearer angle of the house fronting north and thrusting several feet out over the drop, which as this point was three hundred feet.
On the side of the house toward the drive was a flagstone yard big enough to turn a car in and with a lightly roofed carport up against the house on the side away from the drop. As we drove down onto the yard there was a slight clank as we crossed a heavy metal plate bridging a small neat ditch that ran along the foot of the raw earth slope, carrying off the water that would come down it—and also the water that would drain from the roof—during Southern California’s infrequent but sometimes severe winter rains.
Franz backed the car around before we got out. It required four movements—swing to the corner of the house where the deck started, back with a sharp turn until the rear wheels were almost in the ditch, forward with a reverse turn until the front wheels were at the cliff edge by the metal bridgelet, then back into the carport until the rear of the car was almost up against a door that Franz told us led to the kitchen.
The three of us got out and Franz led us to the center of the flagged yard for another look around before we went inside. I noticed that some of the gray flags were actually solid rock showing through the light soil cover, indicating that the plateau was not an earth terrace cut by men but a rocky flat-surfaced knob thrusting out of the hillside. It gave me a feeling of security which I especially welcomed because there were other impressions—sensations, rather that were distinctly disturbing to me.
They were minor sensations, all of them, barely on the threshold of awareness. Ordinarily I don’t think I’d have noticed them—I don’t consider myself a sensitive person—but undoubtedly the strange experience of the thing on the pinnacle had keyed me up. To begin with there was the hint of the nasty smell of burnt linen and with it an odd bitter brassy taste; I don’t think I imagined these things, because I noticed Franz wrinkling his nostrils and working his tongue against his teeth. Then there was the feeling of being faintly brushed by threads, cobwebs, or the finest vines, although we were right out in the open and the nearest thing overhead was a cloud a half mile up. And just as I felt that—the faintest feeling, mind you—I noticed Viki lightly and questing run her hand across the top of her hair and down the back of her neck in the common gesture of “feeling for a spider.”
All this time we were talking off and on—for one thing Franz was telling us about buying Rim House on quite inexpensive terms five years back from the heir of a wealthy surfing and sports-car enthusiast who had run himself off a turn in Decker Canyon.
Finally there were the sounds that were, I thought, breathing on the verge of audibility, in the remarkably complete silence that flowed around us when the Volks’ motor was cut off. I know that everyone who goes from the city to the country is troubled by sounds, but these were on the unusual side. There was an occasional whistling too high-pitched for the ear’s normal range and a soft rumbling too low for it. But along with these perhaps fancied vibrations, I three times thought I heard the hissing rattle of fine gravel spilling down. Each time I looked quickly toward the slope, but never could catch the faintest sign of earth on the move, although there was admittedly a lot of slope to be scanned.
The third time I looked up the slope, some clouds had moved aside enough so that the upper rim of the sun peered back down at me. “Like a golden rifleman drawing a bead” was the grotesque figure of speech that sprang to my mind. I looked hurriedly away. I wanted no more black spots before my eyes for the present. Just then Franz led us up on the deck and into Rim House by the front door.
I was afraid that all the unpleasant sensations would intensify as we got inside—especially somehow the burnt-linen smell and the invisible cobwebs—so I was greatly cheered when instead they all vanished instantly, as though faced-down by the strong sense of Franz’s genial, sympathetic, wide-ranging, highly civilized personality that the living room exuded.
It was a long room, narrow at first where it had to give space to the kitchen and utility room and a small bathroom at this end of the house, then broadening out to the full width of the building. There was no empty wall-space, it was completely lined with shelves—half of books, half of statuary, archeological oddments, scientific instruments, tape recorder, high-fi set and the like. Near the inner wall, beyond the narrow section, were a big desk, some filing cabinets, and a stand with the phone.
There were no windows looking out on the deck. But just beyond the deck, where the bend in the house came, was a big view window looking out across the canyon at the craggy hills that completely cut off any sight of the Pacific. Facing the view window and close to it was a long couch backed by a long table.
At the end of the living room a narrow hall led down the middle of the second angle of the house to a door that in turn let out into a most private grassy space that could be used for sunbathing and was just big enough, for a badminton court—if anyone felt nervy enough to leap about swatting at the bird on the edge of that great drop.
On the side of the hall toward the slope was a big bedroom—Franz’s—and a large bathroom opening into the hall at the end of the house. On the other side were two only slightly smaller bedrooms, each with a view window that could be completely masked by heavy dark drapes. These rooms had been his boys’, he remarked casually, but I noted with relief that there were no mementoes or signs whatever left of youthful occupancy: my closet, in fact, had some women’s clothes hanging in the back of it. These two bedrooms, which he assigned to Viki and myself, had a connecting door which could be bolted from both sides, b
ut now stood unbolted but shut—a typical indication, albeit a minor one, of Franz’s civilized tactfulness: he did not know, or at least did not presume to guess, the exact relationship between Viki and myself, and so left us to make our own arrangements as we saw fit—without any spoken suggestion that we should do so, of course.
Also, each door to the hall had a serviceable bolt—Franz clearly believed in privacy for guests—and in each room was a little bowl of silver coins, no collector’s items, just current American coinage. Viki asked about that and Franz explained deprecatingly, smiling at his own romanticism, that he’d copied the old Spanish California custom of the host providing guests with convenience money in that fashion.
Having been introduced to the house, we unloaded the Volks of our trifling luggage and the provisions Franz had picked up in LA. He sighed faintly at the light film of dust that had accumulated everywhere during his month’s absence and Viki insisted that we pitch in with him and do a bit of house-cleaning. Franz agreed without too much demurring. I think all of us were eager to work off the edge of this afternoon’s experience and get feeling back in the real world again before we talked about it—I know I was.
Franz proved an easy man to help houseclean—thoughtful for his home but not at all fussy or finicky about it. And while wielding broom or mop Viki looked good in her sweater, toreador pants, and highbound sandals—she wears the modern young-female’s uniform with style rather than the customary effect of dreary intellectuality mated to a solemnly biologic femaleness.
When we’d done, we sat down in the kitchen with mugs of black coffee—somehow none of us wanted a drink—and listened to Franz’s stew simmer.
“You’ll want to know,” he said without preface, “if I’ve had any previous eerie experiences up here, if I knew something was apt to happen when I invited you up for the weekend, whether the phenomena—pretentious term, isn’t it?—seem to be connected with anything in the past of the region or the house or my own past—or with current activities here, including the scientific-military installations of the missile people—and finally whether I have any overall theory to account for them—such as Ed’s suggestion about hypnotism.”
Viki nodded. He’d adequately stated what was in our minds.
“About that last, Franz,” I said abruptly. “When Mr. Mortenson first made that suggestion, I thought it was completely impossible, but now I’m not quite so sure. I don’t mean you’d deliberately hypnotize us, but aren’t there kinds of self-hypnosis that can be communicated to others? At any rate, the conditions were favorable for suggestion operating—we’d just been talking about the supernatural, there was the sun and its afterimages acting as an attention-capturer, then the sudden transition to shadow, and finally you pointing decisively at that pinnacle as if we all had to see something there.”
“I don’t believe that for one minute, Glenn,” Viki said with conviction.
“Neither do I really,” I told her. “After all, the cards indicate we had remarkably similar visions—our descriptions were just different enough to make them fearfully convincing—and I don’t see where that material could have been suggested to us during the trip out or at any earlier time when we were together. Still, the idea of some obscure sort of suggestion has crossed my mind. A blend of highway hypnosis and sun-hypnosis, maybe? Franz, what were your earlier experiences? I take it there were some.”
He nodded but then looked at us both thoughtfully and said, “I don’t think I should tell you about them in any detail, though. Not because I’m afraid of you being skeptical or anything like that, but simply because if I do, and then similar things happen to you, you’ll be more likely to feel—and rightly—that the power of suggestion may have been at work.
“Still, I ought to answer your questions,” he continued. “So here goes, briefly and in a general way. Yes, I had experiences while I was up here alone month before last—some of them like this afternoon’s, some of them quite different. They didn’t seem to link up with any particular folklore or occult theory or anything else, yet they frightened me so that I went down to LA and had my eyes checked by a very good oculist and had a psychiatrist and a couple of psychologists I trust give me a thorough check-up. They pronounced me fit and unwarped—likewise my eyes. After a month I had myself convinced that everything I’d seen or sensed had been hallucinatory, that I’d simply had a case of nerves, a fit of the horrors, from too much loneliness. I invited you two along partly to avoid restarting the cycle.”
“You couldn’t have been completely convinced, though,” Viki pointed out. “You had those cards and pencils all ready in your pocket.”
Franz grinned at the neatly-scored point. “Right,” he said, “I was still keeping in mind the offtrail chance and preparing for it. And then when I got in the hills the set of my ideas changed. What had seemed completely inconceivable in LA became once more a borderline possibility. Queer. Come on, let’s take a turn on the deck—it’ll be cool by now.”
We took our mugs along. It was moderately cool, all right, most of the canyon-valley had been in the shadow for at least two hours and a faint breeze flowed upward around our ankles. Once I’d got used to being on the edge of the terrific drop I found it exhilarating. Viki must have too, for she leaned over with deliberately showy daring to peer.
The floor of the canyon was choked with dark trees and undergrowth. This thinned out going up the opposite face until just across from us there was a magnificent upthrusted and folded stratum of pale tan rock that the canyon wall cut in cross-section and showed us like a geology book. Above this fold was more undergrowth, then a series of tan and gray rocks with dark gullies and caves between them, leading by steps to a high gray summit-crag.
The slope behind the house completely cut off the sun from us, of course, but its yellow rays were still striking the tops of the wall across from us, traveling up them as the sun sank. The clouds had all blown away east, where a couple were still visible, and none had replaced them.
In spite of being in a much cheerier “normal” mood, I’d braced myself just a bit for the eerie little sensations as we’d come out onto the deck, but they weren’t there. Which somehow wasn’t quite as reassuring as it ought to have been. I made myself study and admire the variegated rocky wall opposite.
“God, what a view to wake up to every morning!” Viki said enthusiastically. “You can feel the shape of the air and the height of the sky.”
“Yes, it’s quite a prospect,” Franz agreed.
* * * *
Then they came, the little ones, faint-footed as before, feather-treading the sensory thresholds—the burnt-linen odor, the bitter brassy tang, the brushing of skyey cobwebs, the vibrations not quite sound, the hissing rattling spill of ghost gravel... the minor sensations, as I’d named them to myself...
I knew Viki and Franz were getting them too, simply because they said no more and I could sense them both holding very still.
... and then one of the last rays of the sun must have struck a mirror-surface in the summit-crag, perhaps an outcropping of quartz, for it struck back at me like a golden rapier, making me blink, and then for an instant the beam was glitteringly black and I thought I saw (though nothing as clearly as I’d seen the black all-knowing spider-centipede on the pinnacle) a black shape—black with the queer churning blackness you see only at night with your eyes dosed. The shape coiled rapidly down the crag, into the cavern gullies and around the rocks and finally and utterly into the undergrowth above the fold and disappeared.
Along the way Viki had grabbed my arm at the elbow and Franz had whipped round to look at us and then looked back.
It was strange. I felt frightened and at the same time eager, on the edge of marvels and mysteries about to be laid bare. And there had been something quite controlled about the behavior of all of us through it. One fantastically trivial point—none of us had spilled any c
offee.
We studied the canyon wall above the fold for about two minutes.
Then Franz said, almost gaily, “Time for dinner. Talk afterwards.”
I felt deeply grateful for the instant steadying, shielding, anti-hysterical and, yes, comforting effect of the house as we went back in. I knew it was an ally.
III
“When the hard-boiled rationalist came to consult me for the first time, he was in such a state of panic that not only he himself but I also felt the wind coming over from the side of the lunatic asylum!”
—Carl Gustav Jung
Psyche and Symbol
We accompanied Franz’s stew with chunks of dark pumpernickel and pale brick cheese and followed it with fruit and coffee, then took more coffee to the long couch facing the big view window in the living room. There was a spectral yellow glow in the sky but it faded while we were settling ourselves. Soon the first star to the north glittered faintly—Dubhe perhaps.
“Why is black a frightening color ?” Viki put before us.
“Night,” Franz said. “Though you’ll get an argument as to whether it’s a color or absence of color or simply basic sensory field. But is it intrinsically frightening?”
Viki nodded with pursed lips.
I said, “Somehow the phrase ‘the black spaces between the stars’ has always been an ultimate to me in terror. I can look at the stars without thinking of it, but the phrase gets me.”
Viki said, “My ultimate horror is the idea of inky black cracks appearing in things, first in the sidewalk and the sides of houses, then in the furniture and floors and cars and things, finally in the pages of books and people’s faces and the blue sky. The cracks are inky black—nothing ever shows.”
“As if the universe were a gigantic jigsaw puzzle,” I suggested.