Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  Through this tumult Nicholas could still hear the voice of Miss Diable saying meaningfully, "Now you understand that Dr. Obermann was in somewhat the same position as you were down below. A considerably worse position, in fact. You are witnessing one of the 'worlds of mystic enjoyment in which he refreshed himself,' as Dr. Obermann somewhat falsely described it. Now, will you return and behave like a sensible executive, running your department under my guidance in such a way as to avoid such rebukes and admonitions as you are now witnessing? – and will you stop nattering about those six girls? – or would you rather I turned the hour-glass fully on its side for a period of, say–"

  The very long, very barbed black tongue was already lashing the man beside Nicholas – an executive giant with the build of a football guard, who cowered weeping and bleating.

  "I promise!" Nicholas called loudly. "I promise, dear Miss Diable! I'll never mention those six girls again. All my animosities have vanished, I assure you. It's quite impossible to maintain them in this atmosphere. Just be quick! I promise ... on my hour-glass!"

  The hateful bright room vanished. The black room returned. Nicholas collapsed into the black swivel chair. Miss Diable smiled at him in gentle triumph until his shaking had abated, then seated herself again upon his knee.

  Interweaving her fingers behind his neck, she said softly, "My dear Nick, I knew you'd be sensible when you understood the realities of the situation."

  Yielding gracefully to the inevitable, Nicholas embraced her in turn. "I am sure you are quite the loveliest fiend in all Hell," he murmured. "Quite the most charming she-devil in all Gehenna. I cannot imagine how I could ever, while looking at you, have had a single thought of any of those miserable little damned girls down there."

  "They are miserable, aren't they?" she agreed, yawning. "So miserable, in fact, that I feel no jealousy of them at all. In fact, if you're especially nice to me, over an extended period, I might let you look at one or two of their dossiers and even experiment with the buttons a bit, on long boresome afternoons."

  "Darling," he said, embracing her with renewed enthusiasm and adding with almost complete sincerity, "The only buttons I am remotely interested in are yours. If I should press the one on your belt again and at the same time the one I can feel through your skirt at the base of your spine–"

  Her lips burned, her tongue was a flame, her slim body through the unthreading seams of her black suit was like fire – almost.

  BLACK GLASS

  ON A CHILLY SATURDAY IN LATE AUTUMN last year I was walking slowly east on Forty-second Street in New York, threading my way through the somewhat raunchy throngs and noting with some wonder and more depression the changes a quarter-century had made in the super-metropolis (I'd visited the city several times recently, staying in Greenwich Village and Chelsea, but this was the first time in more than twenty years that I'd walked any distance across midtown Manhattan), when there was borne in on me the preponderance of black glass as a facing material in the newer skyscrapers, as though they were glisteningly robing themselves for an urban funeral -perhaps their own.

  Well, there was justification enough for that, I told myself with a bitter smile, what with the grime, the smog, the general filth and pollution, garbage strikes, teachers' strikes, the municipal universities retrenching desperately, municipal financing tottering near bankruptcy, crime in the growling, snarling streets where the taxi drivers, once famed for their wise-guy loquacity, were silent now, each in his front-seat fort, communicating with his passenger only by voice tube and payment slit. For two blocks now I'd been passing nothing but narrow houses showing X-rated films with an emphasis on torture, interspersed with pornographic bookstores, leather shops, hardware stores displaying racks of knives, a few seedy drug and cigar stores, and garish junk-food bars.

  Did my gloomy disapproval of all this reflect nothing but my piled-up years? I asked myself. (Those around me were mostly young, though with knowing eyes and used-looking flesh.) I'd reached the age where the rest of life is mostly downhill and more and more alone, when you know that what you haven't gotten already you most likely will never get – or be able to enjoy if you do, and when your greatest insights are apt to transform next moment into the most banal clichés, and then back again and forth still once more, bewildering. And just lately I'd tried and failed to write a book of memoirs and personal philosophy – I'd set out to make a net to capture the universe and ended by creating a cage for my solitary self. Had New York City really changed at all? For example, hadn't Times Square, across which I was now pressing, been for the last seventy-five years a mass of gigantic trick advertisements flaring aloft – monstrous ruby lips that puffed real smoke, brown bottles big as tank cars pouring unending streams of grainy electric whisky? Yes, but then they had evoked wonder and amusement; the illusions had been fun; now they got only a bored acceptance and a dark resentment at the establishment power they represented; the violence seething just below the surface in the city was as real as the filth upon that surface, and the skyscrapers had reason to foresee doom and robe themselves in black.

  Of course the glass wasn't really black – an opaque black – although it looked like that from the outside. But when you went inside (as I now did, through revolving doors, into the spacious lobby of the Telephone Building at Forty-second and Sixth Avenue), you saw at once it was only somewhat dusky, as if a swift-traveling storm cloud had blotted out the sun while you were going in. Or as if (it occurred to me with a twinge of fear) the small gray churning edged shadow in my left eye were expanding out to cover the whole visual field – and invading my right eye also. (I'd discovered that evidence of retinal degeneration a year ago, and the optical surgeon had treated it with skillfully aimed bursts of laser light, whose pinpoint cautery had scarred the diseased tissue, arresting the shadow's spread – but for dreary weeks I'd anticipated going blind and practiced for that by feeling my way around my room for an hour each day with my eyes shut tight.)

  Now through the dusky glass I saw a young woman in a dark green cloak and gloves and jaunty visored cap pulled down – it was a chilly day, foreshadowing winter -striding along purposefully in the direction I'd been going, and her example inspired me to shake off my dismal thoughts, push out through the dizzying doors, and follow after. I enjoyed passing iron-fenced Bryant Park with its winter-dark bushes and grass, although the wind bit keenly – at least there were no neon promises of sick thrills, no violet-glowing mercury-vapor commands to buy. And then I came to the great Public Library at Fifth Avenue, which always gives me a lift with its semblance of being an island of disinterested intelligence in a dingy, commercial sea – although today, in tune with the times, a small scattered crowd encircled a swarthy man juggling flaming torches on the library's broad steps (encourage local street artists! – it promotes integration) while the two proud stone lions flanking the wide entry seemed to look away disdainfully. Some skinny children ran around the northern one, two rangy blacks conversing earnestly rested themselves against its side, and then my striding young woman in green, coming suddenly out of a crowd, passed in front of the lion, but as she did so, she briefly paused with face averted and laid her hand upon its mane in a gesture that was at once compassionate and commanding and even had an odd and faintly sinister note of ritual. I knew I was being imaginative to read so much into a stranger's gesture seen at a distance, but it nevertheless struck me as being somehow important.

  She had reversed directions on me, going back toward Sixth, and once more I took my cue from her for my own strolling. I wasn't following her with any real intentness, or at least that's what I told myself then – why, I hadn't even glimpsed her face either time – but I did want to see more of those black glass buildings, and they had seemed to cluster most thickly north on Sixth. At any rate, by the time I'd reached Sixth again, I'd lost sight of her, though I somehow had the impression she'd turned north there.

  I reminded myself it isn't called Sixth any more, but been rather grandiosely renamed the Ave
nue of the Americas. Though really it's the same old knock-about Sixth that once had an elevated and then was forever being dug up. And it's still Sixth underground – the Sixth Avenue IND subway.

  I found enough black glass as I wended north, peering upward like a hick, to delight my sense of the grotesque. After New York Telephone there was RCA Corporation and Bankers Trust and West Side Federal Savings and W.R. Grace and Company, where the dark glass sloped, and the Stevens Tower, where the black facings were separated by gravestone pale verticals. And at 1166 they had black glass with stars, by God (but why were green faceless people painted on the wooden facing masking the lobby they were rebuilding there? Here be mysteries, I thought.)

  But all the time that I was playing my game with the buildings, I was aware of a not altogether pleasant change that had begun to take place in the scene around me after I'd looked out of the lobby of the Telephone Building and seen the day suddenly darken. That darkening effect had kept up after I'd got outside, as if the afternoon were drawing to an end sooner than it should, or as if – melodramatic fantasy! – an inky infection were spreading from the pernicious black glass to the air and space around it. The farther north I pressed, block by block, the more I noticed it, as though I were penetrating deeper and deeper into some realm of not altogether unfrightening mystery.

  As for the girl in green, although I once or twice thought I'd caught sight of her a block or so ahead, I made no effort to catch up with her and verify my guess (or see her face.) So she could hardly be responsible for the darkly romantic element (the feeling of playing with mysterious dangers) that had entered my fantasies. Or so I believed at the time.

  And then I found I'd arrived at Rockefeller Plaza, where the black tried to disguise itself with dim silvery verticals, and the game became by degrees a little more somber and frightening. I think the transition occurred at the Pool of the Planets. I noted that oddly but not unpleasantly jarring feature (in the midst of the metropolitan commercial, the cosmic) down in a sunken court. I was instantly attracted and descended by means of broad gray granite steps. Nearby were chaste advertisements for a municipal theater offering something called "The New York Experience," which somehow struck me a bit comically, as though London should announce it was going to impersonate London. And there were other features which I have forgotten.

  The pool itself was dark and very shallow, perfectly circular and quite wide, and from it rose on slender metal stems, all at their proper distances from the center and in their proper sizes, amazingly, as far as I could determine, the spheres of the planets done in some darkened silver metal and blackish brass. Simple inset plates of the same metals gave the names, symbols, dimensions, and distances. Truly, a charming conceit, but with sinister touches (the theme of darkening, the idea of the planets emerging from, or menaced by, a great unknown sea in space), so that when I finally turned away from it and especially when I'd mounted the stairs again to the sidewalk, I was not altogether surprised to find the scene around me altered still further. The people seemed to have grown fewer and I was unaccountably hesitant to look at their faces, and it had grown much, much darker – a sort of grainy blackness sprinkled everywhere – so that for the first time in months I felt for a moment in sharpest intensity the fear I'd had a year ago of going blind, while in my mind, succeeding each other rapidly, there unrolled a series of very brief darting visions: of New York and its high-rises drowned in a black sea, of the girl in green whirling on me and showing under her cap's visor no face at all, of the northern library lion coming suddenly awake at memory of the girl's touch (post-hypnotic command?) and shaking his pale mane and suppling his stony flanks and setting out after us, the pads of his paws grating on the steps and sidewalk, like giant's chalk – those fugitive visions and a dozen like them, such as the mind only gets when it's absorbing presentations from inner space at top speed, too many to remember.

  At the first break in those visions, I wrenched my attention away from inner space to the sidewalk just ahead of me and I moved away from the sunken court. It worked. My surroundings didn't darken any further (that change was arrested) and the people grew no fewer, though I didn't yet risk looking at their faces. After a space I found myself grasping a thick brass railing and gazing down into a larger and – thank God! -more familiar sunken area. It was the skating rink, and there, one more figure among the graceful circlers in the white-floored gloom (a couple of them in rather flamboyant costumes, a couple of them suggesting animals), was my girl in green with cap pulled down and cloak swinging behind her, taking the long strokes you'd have expected from her striding.

  I was entranced. I remember telling myself that she'd had just enough time, while I'd paused at the Pool of the Planets, to put on her skates and join the others. It was a delight to watch her moving swiftly without having to chase after her. I kept wishing she'd look up and I'd see her face and she'd wave. I concentrated so on her that I hardly noticed the gloom once more on the increase, and the other skaters growing fewer as they broke away to glide from the rink, and the low murmur of comment growing around me. It was as if there were an invisible spotlight on her.

  And then there entered the rink with a rush, skidding to a near stop at its center, an amazing figure of clownish comedy, so that the murmur around me changed to laughter. It was that of a man in a wonderfully authentic tawny-pale lion's costume with more of a real lion's mask than a man's face, as with the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, so that for a moment (but a moment only) I recalled my fantasy of the library lion coming to life. The girl in green came smoothly gliding toward him, as if they were supposed to waltz together, and he moved to meet her but then skidded off at an unlikely angle, fighting to keep his balance, and the laughter rose obediently.

  It went on like that for a while, the lion proceeding around the rink in a series of staggering rushes and skids, flailing his front paws (his arms) in every direction, the girl circling him solicitously and invitingly, dipping in toward him and out, to the accompaniment of the laughter.

  But then the scene grew darker still, as if the invisible spotlights were failing, and the grating of the lion's skates against the ice louder as he skidded (so that my library-lion fantasy came uneasily back to my mind), and he moved more slowly and drooped his great maned mask as if he were sick, so that his efforts to keep balance became more pathetic than comical, and the laughter, and then all the other sounds too, died away as though someone had turned on a tap marked "Silence."

  And then he collapsed in a sprawling heap on the ice and the girl reached him in one long glide and knelt low over him, and the darkness became so great that I could no longer see the green in her visored cap or in her cloak trailed on the ice behind her, or in the gloves on her hands cupping his huge jowls, and the gloom closed in completely.

  It was then that my trick of concentrating on the pavement just ahead of me (there was light enough for that, it was lighter up here) and not looking at faces (there were people crowding around me now, though they made no noise) stood me in good stead, so that I was able to get away, step by step, from the sunken court of the skating rink drowned in inky darkness.

  I don't know with certainty what my intentions were then. I think they were to get down to her somehow and help her with her unfortunate partner. At any rate, one way or another, letting myself move with the crowd here, clutching along a stair rail there, I did manage to descend several levels, one of them by escalator, until I finally emerged into that brightly lit, somewhat low-ceilinged world of dingy white tile which underlies so much of New York.

  There was one difference, however. Although the place was lined with colorful busy storefronts, and marked with arrow-trails leading to various street exits and subways, and although there were throngs and scatters of people following along them, everything went silently, or at most with a seashell-roaring suggestion of muted noise, as if I had actually gone temporarily deaf from a great but unremembered sound, or else descended rapidly from a very great height and my ears
not yet adjusted to it.

  Just then I was caught up in a hurrying crowd of people coming from one of the subway entrances, so thick a crowd that I was forced to move with it for a ways while I edged sideways to get free. And then this crowd was in turn further constrained by another crowd pushing in the opposite direction – into the subway – so that my efforts to extricate myself were further hampered. And then, while I was in that situation, just being hemmed in and carried along, I saw my young woman in green in the same predicament as myself, apparently, but in the other crowd, so that she was being carried toward and then past me. I saw her face at last: It was rather narrow and somehow knifelike with glowing hazel eyes, and I got the instant impression of invincible youth strangely matured before its time. She looked angry and somewhat disheveled, her green cap pushed back with visor askew and brown hair foaming out from under it. She didn't have her lion man being crowded along with her (that would have been a sight, I told myself – and might have gained her some space, too) but she was carrying, clutched to her chest, a pale-tan long-haired cat. And then, just when she'd been carried opposite me and I unable for the moment to move a step closer to her – there must have been a dozen people between us; we could only see each other clearly because we were both quite tall -why, just then she looked straight at me and her hazel eyes widened and her brown eyebrows went up, and lifting one cupped hand alongside her lips while she clutched her cat more closely with the other, she twice called something to me, working her lips and face as though she were trying to enunciate very clearly, before she was rapidly carried out of my sight – and all the lights around me dimmed a little. I made a real effort to get free and follow her then, but it only resulted in a minor altercation that further delayed me – a woman I was squeezing past snarled at me, and as I begged her pardon while still trying to get past, a man beside her grabbed me and told me to quit shoving and I grabbed his elbows and shook him a bit in turn, while still apologizing. By that time the crowd had started to melt away, but it seemed too late now to go tearing after the girl into the subway. Besides, I was still trying to make sure of and puzzle out the cryptic message I thought she'd called to me – actually I was pretty sure of it, what with my hearing having gotten somewhat better and a bit of reading her lips as they carefully shaped the few words. Twice.