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

by Fritz Leiber

  “A little like that. Or a Byzantine mosaic. Glittering gold and glittering black.”

  Franz said, “Your picture, Viki, suggests that sense of breaking-up we feel in the modern world. Families, nations, classes, other loyalty groups falling apart. Things changing before you get to know them. Death on the installment plan—or decay by jumps. Instantaneous birth. Something out of nothing. Reality replacing science-fiction so fast that you can’t tell which is which. Constant sense of deja vu—‘I was here before—but when, how?’ Even the possibility that there’s no real continuity between events, just inexplicable gaps. And of course every gap—every crack—means a new perching place for horror.”

  “It also suggests the fragmentation of knowledge, as somebody called it,” I said. “A world too big and complex to grasp in more than patches. Too much for one man. Takes teams of experts—and teams of teams. Each expert has his field, his patch, his piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but between any two pieces is a no man’s land.”

  “Right, Glenn,” Franz said sharply, “and today I think the three of us have plunged into one of the biggest of those no man’s lands.” He hesitated then and said with an odd diffidence, almost embarrassment, “You know, we’re going to have to start talking sometime about what we saw—we can’t let ourselves be gagged by this fear that anything we say will alter the picture of what the others saw and warp their testimony. Well, about the blackness of this thing or figure or manifestation I saw (I called it ‘Black Empress,’ but Sphinx might have been a better word—there was the suggestion of a long tigerish or serpentine body in the midst of the black fringy sunburst)—but about its blackness, now, that blackness was more than anything else like the glimmering dark the eyes see in the absence of light.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Viki chimed.

  “There was a sense,” Franz went on, “that the thing was in my eyes, in my head, but also out there on the horizon, on the pinnacle I mean. That it was somehow both subjective—in my consciousness—and objective—in the material world—or... ” (He hesitated and lowered his voice) “... or existing in some sort of space more fundamental, more primal and less organized than either of those.

  “Why shouldn’t there be other kinds of space than those we know?” he went on a shade defensively. “Other chambers in the great universal cave? Men have tried to imagine four, five and more spatial dimensions. What’s the space inside the atom or the nucleus feel like, or the space between the galaxies or beyond any galaxy? Oh, I know the questions I’m asking would be nonsense to most scientists—they’re questions that don’t make sense operationally or referentially, they’d say—but those same men can’t give us the ghost of an answer to even the question of where and how the space of consciousness exists, how a jelly of nerve cells can support the huge flaming worlds of inner reality—they fob us off with the excuse (legitimate in its way) that science is about things that can be measured and pointed at, and who can measure or point at his thoughts? But consciousness is—it’s the basis we all exist in and start from, it’s the basis science starts from, whether or not science can get at it—so it’s allowable for me to wonder whether there may not be a primal space that’s a bridge between consciousness and matter... and whether the thing we saw may not exist in such a space.”

  “Maybe there are experts for this sort of thing and we’re missing them,” Viki said seriously. “Not scientists, but mystics and occultists, some of them at any rate—the genuine few among the crowd of fakers. You’ve got some of their books in your library. I recognized the titles.

  Franz shrugged. “I’ve never found anything in occult literature that seemed to have a bearing. You know, the occult—very much like stories of supernatural horror—is a sort of game. Most religion too. Believe in the game and accept its rules—or the premises of the story—and you can have the thrills or whatever it is you’re after. Accept the spirit world and you can see ghosts and talk to the dear departed. Accept Heaven and you can have the hope of eternal life and the reassurance of an all-powerful god working on your side. Accept Hell and you can have devils and demons, if that’s what you want. Accept—if only for story purposes—witchcraft, druidism, shamanism, magic or some modern variant and you can have werewolves, vampires, elementals. Or believe in the influence and power of a grave, an ancient house or monument, a dead religion, an old stone with an inscription on it—and you can have things of the same general sort. But I’m thinking of the kind of horror—and wonder too, perhaps—that lies beyond any game, that’s bigger than any game, that’s fettered by no rules, conforms to no manmade theology, bows to no charms or protective rituals, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will, much the same as (though it’s of a different order of existence than all of these) lightning or the plague or the enemy atom bomb. The sort of horror that the whole fabric of civilization was designed to protect us from and make us forget. The horror about which all man’s learning tells us nothing.”

  I stood up and moved close to the window. There seemed to be quite a few stars now. I tried to make out the big fold of rock in the hillside opposite, but the reflections on the glass got in the way.

  “Maybe so,” Viki said, “but there are a couple of those books I’d like to look at again. I think they’re back of your desk.”

  “What titles?” Franz asked. “I’ll help you find them.”

  “Meanwhile I’ll take a turn on the deck,” I said as casually as I could, moving toward the other end of the room. They didn’t call after me, but I had the feeling they watched me the whole way.

  As soon as I’d pushed through the door—which took a definite effort of will—and shoved it to without quite shutting it behind me—which took another—I became aware of two things: that it was much darker than I’d anticipated—the big view window angled away from the deck and there was no other obvious light source except the stars—; two, that I found the darkness reassuring.

  The reason for the latter seemed clear enough: the horror I’d glimpsed was associated with the sun, with blinding sunlight. Now I was safe from that—though if someone unseen should have struck a match in front of my face just then, the effect on me would have been extreme.

  I moved forward by short steps, feeling in front of me with my hands at the level of the rail.

  I knew why I’d come out here I thought. I wanted to test my courage against the thing, whatever it was, illusory or real or something else, inside or outside our minds, or somehow as Franz had suggested, able to move in both regions. But beyond that, I realized now, there was the beginning of a fascination.

  My hands touched the rail. I studied the black wall opposite, deliberately looking a little away and then back, as one does to make a faint star or a dim object come clear in the dark. After a bit I could make out the big pale fold and some of the rocks above it, but a couple of minutes’ watching convinced me that it was possible endlessly to see dark shapes crossing it..

  I looked up at the heavens. There was no Milky Way yet, but there would be soon, the stars were flashing on so brightly and thickly at this smog-free distance, from LA. I saw the Pole Star straight above the dark star-silhouetted summit-crag of the hillside across from me. and the Great Bear and Cassiopeia swinging from it. I felt the bigness of the atmosphere, I got a hint of the stupendous distance between me and the stars, and then—as if my vision could go out in all directions at will, piercing solidity as readily as the dark—I got a lasting, growing, wholly absorbing sense of the universe around me.

  Lying behind me, a gently swelling, perfectly rounded section of the earth about a hundred miles high masked off the sun. Africa lay under my right foot through the earth’s core, India under my left, and it was strange to think of the compressed incandescent stuff that lay between us under earth’s cool mantle—blindingly glowing plastic metal or ore in a space where there were no eyes to see
and no millionth of a free inch in which all that dazzling locked-up light could travel. I sensed the tortured ice of the frigid poles, the squeezed water in the deep seas, the fingers of mounting lava, the raw earth crawling and quivering with an infinitude of questing rootlets and burrowing worms.

  Then for moments I felt I looked out glimmeringly through two billion pairs of human eyes, my consciousness running like fuse-fire from mind to mind. For moments more I dimly shared the feelings, the blind pressures and pulls, of a billion trillion motes of microscopic life in the air, in the earth, in the bloodstream of man.

  Then my consciousness seemed to move swiftly outward from earth in all directions, like an expanding globe of sentient gas. I passed the dusty dry mote that was Mars. I glimpsed milkily-banded Saturn with its great thin wheels of jumbled jagged rock. I passed frigid Pluto with its bitter nitrogen snows. I thought of how people are like planets—lonely little forts of mind with immense black distances barring them off from each other.

  Then the speed of expansion of my consciousness became infinite and my mind was spread thin in the stars of the Milky Way and in the other gauzy star islands beyond it—above, below, to all sides, among the nadir stars as well as those of the zenith—and on the trillion trillion planets of those stars I sensed the infinite variety of self-conscious life—naked, clothed, furred, armor-shelled, and with cells floating free—clawed, handed, tentacled, pinchered, ciliated, fingered by winds or magnetism—loving, hating, striving, despairing, imagining.

  For a while it seemed to me that all these beings were joined in a dance that was fiercely joyous, poignantly sensuous, tenderly responsive.

  Then the mood darkened and the beings fell apart into a trillion trillion trillion lonely motes locked off forever from each other, sensing only bleak meaninglessness in the cosmos around them, their eyes fixed forward only on universal death.

  Simultaneously each dimensionless star seemed to become for me the vast sun it was, beating incandescently on the platform where my body stood and on the house behind it and the beings in it and on my body too, aging them with the glare of a billion desert noons, crumbling them all to dust in one corruscatingly blinding instant.

  Hands gently grasped my shoulders and at the same time Franz’s voice said, “Steady, Glenn.” I held still, though for a moment every nerve cell in me seemed on the verge of triggering, then I let out an uneven breath edged with laughter and turned and said in a voice that sounded to me quite dull, almost drugged, “I got lost in my imagination. For a minute there I seemed to be seeing everything. Where’s Viki?”

  “Inside leafing through The Symbolism of the Tarot and a couple of other books on the arcana of the fortune-telling cards, and grumbling that they don’t have indexes. But what’s this ‘seeing everything,’ Glenn?”

  Haltingly I tried to tell him about my “vision,” not conveying a hundredth of it, I felt. By the time I finished I could see the blur of his face against the black wall of the house barely well enough to tell that he nodded.

  “The universe fondling and devouring her children,” his brooding comment came out of the dark. “I imagine you’ve run across in your reading, Glenn, the superficially sterile theory that the whole universe is in some sense alive or at least aware. There are a lot of terms for it in the jargon of metaphysics: cosmotheism, theopantism, panpsychism, panpneumatism—but simply pantheism is the commonest. The idea that the universe is God, though for me God isn’t the right term, it’s been used to mean too many things. If you insist on a religious approach, perhaps what comes closest is the Greek idea of the Great God Pan, the mysterious nature deity, half animal, that frightened man and woman to panic in lonely places. Incidentally, panpneumatism is the most interesting to me of the obscurer concepts: old Karl von Hartmann’s notion that unconscious mind is the basic reality—it comes close to what we were saying inside about the possibility of a more fundamental space linking the inner and outer world and perhaps providing a bridge from anywhere to anywhere.”

  As he paused I heard a faint spill of gravel, then a second, though I got none of the other minor sensations.

  “But whatever we call it,” Franz went on, “there’s something there, I feel—something less than God but more than the collective mind of man—a force, a power, an influence, a mood of things, a something more than subatomic particles, that is aware and that has grown with the universe and that helps to shape it.” He had moved forward now so that I saw his head silhouetted against the thick stars and for a moment there was the grotesque illusion that it was the stars rather than his mouth that was speaking. “I think there are such influences, Glenn. Atomic particles alone can’t sustain the flaming inner worlds of consciousness, there must be a pull from the future as well as a push from the past to keep us moving through time, there must be a ceiling of mind over life as well as a floor of matter beneath it.”

  Again, as his voice faded out, I heard the feathery hisses of gravel running—two close together, then two more. I thought uneasily of the slope behind the house.

  “And if there are those influences,” Franz continued, “I believe that man has grown enough in awareness today to be able to contact them without ritual or formula of belief, if they should chance to move or look this way. I think of them as sleepy tigers, Glenn, that mostly purr and dream and look at us through slitted eyes, but occasionally—perhaps when a man gets a hint of them—open their eyes to the full and stalk in his direction. When a man becomes ripe for them, when he’s pondered the possibility of them, and then When he’s closed his ears to the protective, mechanically-augmented chatter of humanity, they make themselves known to him.”

  The spills of gravel, still faint as illusions, were coming now in a rapid rhythm like—it occurred to me at that instant—padding footsteps, each footstep dislodging a little earth. I sensed a faint brief glow overhead.

  “For they’re the same thing, Glenn, as the horror and wonder I talked about inside, the horror and wonder that lies beyond any game, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will.”

  At that instant the silence was ripped by a shrill scream of terror from the flagged yard between the house and the drive. For an instant my muscles were chilled and constricted and there was a gagging pressure in my chest. Then I lunged toward that end of the deck.

  Franz darted into the house.

  * * * *

  I plunged off the end of the deck, almost fell, twisted to my feet—and stopped, suddenly at a loss for my next move.

  Here I couldn’t see a thing in the blackness. In stumbling I’d lost my sense of direction—for the moment I didn’t know which ways were the slope, the house, and the cliff edge.

  I heard Viki—I thought it had to be Viki—gasping and sobbing strainingly, but the direction of that wouldn’t come clear, except it seemed more ahead of me than behind me.

  Then I saw, stretching up before me, a half dozen or so thin close-placed stalks of what I can only describe as a more gleaming blackness—it differed from the background as dead black velvet does from dead black felt. They were barely distinguishable yet very real. I followed them up with my eyes as they mounted against the starfields, almost invisible, like black wires, to where they ended—high up—in a bulb of darkness, defined only by the patch of stars it obscured, as tiny as the moon.

  The black bulb swayed and there was a corresponding rapid jogging in the crowded black stalks—though if they were free to move at the base I ought to call them legs.

  A door opened twenty feet from me and a beam of white light struck across the yard, showing a streak of flagstones and the beginning of the drive.

  Franz had come out the kitchen door with a powerful flashlight. My surroundings jumped sideways into place.

  The beam swept back along the slope, showing nothing, then forward toward the cliff edge. When it got to the spot where I’d s
een the ribbony black legs, it stopped.

  There were no stalks, legs or bands of any sort to be seen, but Viki was swaying and struggling there, her dark hair streaming across her face and half obscuring her agonized expression, her elbows tight to her sides, her hands near her shoulders and clawed outward—exactly as though she were gripping and struggling against the vertical bars of a tight cage.

  The next instant the tension went out of her, as though whatever she’d been struggling against had vanished. She swayed and began to move in blind tottering steps toward the cliff edge.

  That snapped my freeze and I ran toward her, grabbed her wrist as she stepped on the verge, and half-dragged, half-whirled her away from it. She didn’t resist. Her movement toward the cliff had been accidental, not suicidal. Franz kept the flashlight on us.

  She looked at me, one side of her blanched face twitching, and said, “Glenn.”

  Franz yelled at us from the kitchen door, “Come on in!”

  IV

  “But the third Sister, who is also the youngest—Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot he hidden... This youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding with tigers leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.”

  —Thomas de Ouincy

  Suspira de Profundis

  As soon as we got Viki inside she recovered very rapidly from her shock and at once insisted on telling us her story. Her manner was startlingly assured, interested, almost gay, as if some protective door in her mind were already closed against the absolute reality of what had happened.