Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  A pair of sleazy stretch pants and an old bra hanging on the back of a kitchen chair made Him remember Venus. There was a lot to be said for polytheism, He had to admit, especially when He woke lonely as this. The trouble was He couldn’t trust the pantheon, which He had fathered during his Zeus phase, to stick by Him. He had a vivid vision of Venus, last to leave Him, turning in the kitchen door, glorious in her sandals, denims, sweater, long golden hair, and inimitable vase-curves.

  “It’s been the most, Dad,” she’d said simply, “but now I gotta drift. The beach, Dad. I always had an affinity for surf.”

  Nor could he trust or find security in any of His mortal creatures. He’d guided them to atomic energy and spaceflight and computers, and then thought He could turn Himself off awhile, at least for this sector of the cosmos—and He’d come back to find them almost unrecognizable: talking a jumble of new scientific and artistic and social jargon (though many of them no longer thought, they dug), haring off after extrasensory perception, creating brief rainbow microcosms in the inner space of their brains with new alphabet drugs, peering up at quasars rather than stars, tweezering out the molecules of heredity, insanity, sanity—that list was almost endless—inventing languages for machines, reducing ultimate particles to flickering clouds of sub-particles—or wavicles!—devising new human relations by the hundred (they were fantastic social inventors) and new human arts by the thousand.

  Of course He could keep an eye on them all the time. He could watch each sparrow fall, each overworked ant collapse from heart failure, each microbe dissolve in the grip of a posse of leucocytes, each unstable atom give up its pale radioactive ghost, each restless particle put on its quick-change act, each idea flicker and die, not missing the one idea in a billion billion billion that lived. But would that grandiose busy-work bring Him any closer to His Creatures or really keep Him in touch with them? They’d still all go on changing and developing through the cycles of seemingly sterile repetition. And He’d be dead inside.

  A scrawny black kitten came, mewing at God’s shapeless, soft-soled slipper. Well, at least one of His creatures still depended on him. God levered open two triangular holes in a small can, poured the condensed milk into a dirty saucer, set it on the warped floor, and went off to inspect His four rooms.

  In the small studio where He roughed out creation, the paints were dry on canvas and palette, the watercolors cracked, the copper plates eaten through by acid.

  In the second room, where He recorded His directives—His Word—there was dust on the tapes and from the machine came a faint stale stench of burnt insulation.

  In the third room there were cobwebs on His typewriter.

  Clearly the Adversary hadn’t stopped at the back door. He had invaded and disordered the whole.

  He had even invaded His body, God belatedly realized. He was full of aches and pains, His tongue was thick, He had to lean down close to the typewriter to make out what He had been typing on the last sheet.

  There was a web just above the paper and a tiny black spider was walking across it. God jerked back. Why the Hell had He ever created spiders? What had got into Him then? For the moment He couldn’t recall. It seemed like the end of everything.

  But then He reminded Himself that this wasn’t the first time He’d been slammed back on His heels. This wasn’t the only occasion on which He’d been made to feel small. He became aware of a warm knot of identity deep in His gullet, under His breastbone. The Adversary hadn’t invaded that and right now that was all that mattered. He still had a mustard-seed of faith in Himself.

  His lifting gaze touched a tiny Buddha of once polished, now dust-coated, reddish wood. Maybe... no!—look at the trouble the contemplative mode had got Him into. The trouble about Nirvana was He always had to come back from it. No, another time, maybe, but not now.

  A chain of association flashed on in His mind, like a zigzag lightning flash. Buddha—those priests drenching themselves with gasoline and setting themselves afire—universal flames—atomic holocaust—the ultimate battle of Ragnarok—the Norse gods— Odin! Yes, that was it! It was time that He went out on another anonymous swing, to inspect His creatures and perhaps spot one of the lesser gods here and there. Somewhere along the line, He’d remember the beach.

  He returned to the kitchen and put on the eyepatch—His left eye felt as if it really needed the sleazy thing. He whipped on the slouch hat, pulling it low on his forehead, and swirled the old cloak around his shoulders.

  He looked up unhappily at the empty birdcage. He really ought to have His two ravens on His shoulders when He went on His Odin-tour of inspection, but they must have flown away long ago. Someone had probably released them out of mercy—maybe Venus, just before she left. Or maybe He had.

  The kitten came purring to his slipper. On a sudden inspiration, God picked it up and gently stuffed it inside his vest. Then He hurried back to the typewriter, delicately caught up the cobweb with the spider on it and laid it on His shoulder. They would have to do for his Hugin and Munin. At least they were both black.

  Then God squared His shoulders, tucked His chin against His chest, pushed the back door open wide, and stepped out. He was feeling remarkably cheerful. He’d really make His rounds this time. If he happened on a rocket bound for the Moon, or Mars, or even Midgard, He’d hop aboard.

  The back gate was stuck like the back door and had to be forced open. That depressed Him again, but after He’d taken a few dozen steps down the dark alley, He began to feel better.

  THE GLOVE

  My most literally tangible brush with the supernatural (something I can get incredibly infatuated with yet forever distrust profoundly, like a very beautiful and adroit call girl) occurred in connection with the rape by a masked intruder of the woman who lived in the next apartment to mine during my San Francisco years. I knew Evelyn Mayne only as a neighbor and I slept through the whole incident, including the arrival and departure of the police, though there came a point in the case when the police doubted both these assertions of mine.

  The phrase “victim of rape” calls up certain stereotyped images: an attractive young woman going home alone late at night, enters a dark street, is grabbed... or, a beautiful young suburban matron, mother of three, wakes after midnight, feels a nameless dread, is grabbed... The truth is apt to be less romantic. Evelyn Mayne was 65, long divorced, neglected and thoroughly detested by her two daughters-in-law and only to a lesser degree by their husbands, lived on various programs of old age, medical and psychiatric assistance, was scrawny, gloomy, alcoholic, waspish, believed life was futile, and either overdosed on sleeping pills or else lightly cut her wrists three or four times a year.

  Her assailant at least was somewhat more glamorous, in a sick way. The rapist was dressed all in rather close-fitting gray, hands covered by gray gloves, face obscured by a long shock of straight silver hair falling over it. And in the left hand, at first, a long knife that gleamed silver in the dimness.

  And she wasn’t grabbed either, at first, but only commanded in a harsh whisper coming through the hair to lie quietly or be cut up.

  When she was alone again at last, she silently waited something like the ten minutes she’d been warned to, thinking that at least she hadn’t been cut up, or else (who knows?) wishing she had been. Then she went next door (in the opposite direction to mine) and roused Marcia Everly, who was a buyer for a department store and about half her age. After the victim had been given a drink, they called the police and Evelyn Mayne’s psychiatrist and also her social worker, who knew her current doctor’s number (which she didn’t), but they couldn’t get hold of either of the last two. Marcia suggested waking me and Evelyn Mayne countered by suggesting they wake Mr. Helpful, who has the next room beyond Marcia’s down the hall. Mr. Helpful (otherwise nicknamed Baldy, I never remembered his real name) was someone I loathed because he was always prissily dancing around being neighborly and asking if there was something he could do—and because he was six foot four tall, while I am rat
her under average height.

  Marcia Everly is also very tall, at least for a woman, but as it happens I do not loathe her in the least. Quite the opposite in fact.

  But Evelyn Mayne said I wasn’t sympathetic, while Marcia (thank goodness!) loathed Mr. Helpful as much as I do—she thought him a weirdo, along with half the other tenants in the building.

  So they compromised by waking neither of us, and until the police came Evelyn Mayne simply kept telling the story of her rape over and over, rather mechanically, while Marcia listened dutifully and occupied her mind as to which of our crazy fellow-tenants was the best suspect—granting it hadn’t been done by an outsider, although that seemed likeliest. The three most colorful were the statuesque platinum-blonde drag queen on the third floor, the long-haired old weirdo on six who wore a cape and was supposed to be into witchcraft, and the tall, silver-haired, Nazi-looking lesbian on seven (assuming she wore a dildo for the occasion and was nuttier than a five-dollar fruit cake).

  Ours really is a weird building, you see, and not just because of its occupants, who sometimes seem as if they were all referred here by mental hospitals. No, it’s eerie in its own right. You see, several decades ago it was a hotel with all the rich, warm inner life that once implied: bevies of maids, who actually used the linen closets (empty now) on each floor and the round snap-capped outlets in the baseboards for a vacuum system (that hadn’t been operated for a generation) and the two dumb-waiters (their doors forever shut and painted over). In the old days there had been bellboys and an elevator operator and two night porters who’d carry up drinks and midnight snacks from a restaurant that never closed.

  But they’re gone now, every last one of them, leaving the halls empty-feeling and very gloomy, and the stairwell an echoing void, and the lobby funereal, so that the mostly solitary tenants of today are apt to seem like ghosts, especially when you meet one coming silently around a turn in the corridor where the ceiling light’s burnt out.

  Sometimes I think that, what with the smaller and smaller families and more and more people living alone, our whole modern world is getting like that.

  The police finally arrived, two grave and solicitous young men making a good impression—especially a tall and stalwart (Marcia told me) Officer Hart. But when they first heard Evelyn Mayne’s story, they were quite skeptical (Marcia could tell, or thought she could, she told me). But they searched Evelyn’s room and poked around the fire escapes and listened to her story again, and then they radioed for a medical policewoman, who arrived with admirable speed and who decided after an examination that in all probability there’d been recent sex, which would be confirmed by analysis of some smears she’d taken from the victim and the sheets.

  Officer Hart did two great things, Marcia said. He got hold of Evelyn Mayne’s social worker and told him he’d better get on over quick. And he got from him the phone number of her son who lived in the city and called him up and threw a scare into his wife and him about how they were the nearest of kin, God damn it, and had better start taking care of the abused and neglected lady.

  Meanwhile the other cop had been listening to Evelyn Mayne, who was still telling it, and he asked her innocent questions, and had got her to admit that earlier that night she’d gone alone to a bar down the street (a rather rough place) and had one drink, or maybe three. Which made him wonder (Marcia said she could tell) whether Evelyn hadn’t brought the whole thing on herself, maybe by inviting some man home with her, and then inventing the rape, at least in part, when things went wrong. (Though I couldn’t see her inventing the silver hair.)

  Anyhow the police got her statement and got it signed and then took off, even more solemnly sympathetic than when they’d arrived, Officer Hart in particular.

  Of course, I didn’t know anything about all this when I knocked on Marcia’s door before going to work that morning, to confirm a tentative movie date we’d made for that evening. Though I was surprised when the door opened and Mr. Helpful came out looking down at me very thoughtfully, his bald head gleaming, and saying to Marcia in the voice adults use when children are listening, “I’ll keep in touch with you about the matter. If there is anything I can do, don’t hesitate...”

  Marcia, looking at him very solemnly, nodded.

  And then my feeling of discomfiture was completed when Evelyn Mayne, empty glass in hand and bathrobe clutched around her, edged past me as if I were contagious, giving me a peculiarly hostile look and calling back to Marcia over my head, “I’ll come back, my dear, when I’ve repaired my appearance, so that people can’t say you’re entertaining bedraggled old hags.”

  I was relieved when Marcia gave me a grin as soon as the door was closed and said, “Actually she’s gone to get herself another drink, after finishing off my supply. But really, Jeff, she has a reason to this morning—and for hating any man she runs into.” And her face grew grave and troubled (and a little frightened too) as she quickly clued me in on the night’s nasty events. Mr. Helpful, she explained, had dropped by to remind them about a tenants’ meeting that evening and, when he got the grisly news, to go into a song and dance about how shocked he was and how guilty at having slept through it all, and what could he do?

  Once she broke off to ask, almost worriedly, “What I can’t understand, Jeff, is why any man would want to rape someone like Evelyn.”

  I shrugged. “Kinky some way, I suppose. It does happen, you know. To old women, I mean. Maybe a mother thing.”

  “Maybe he hates women,” she speculated. “Wants to punish them.”

  I nodded.

  She had finished by the time Evelyn Mayne came back, very listless now, looking like a woebegone ghost, and dropped into a chair. She hadn’t got dressed or even combed her hair. In one hand she had her glass, full and dark, and in the other a large, pale gray leather glove, which she carried oddly, dangling it by one finger.

  Marcia started to ask her about it, but she just began to recite once more all that had happened to her that night, in an unemotional, mechanical voice that sounded as if it would go on forever.

  Look, I didn’t like the woman—she was a particularly useless, venomous sort of nuisance (those wearisome suicide attempts!)—but that recital got to me. I found myself hating the person who would deliberately put someone into the state she was in. I realized, perhaps for the first time, just what a vicious and sick crime rape is and how cheap are all the easy jokes about it.

  Eventually the glove came into the narrative naturally: “… and in order to do that he had to take off his glove. He was particularly excited just then, and it must have got shoved behind the couch and forgotten, where I found it just now.”

  Marcia pounced on the glove at once then, saying it was important evidence they must tell the police about. So she called them and after a bit she managed to get Officer Hart himself, and he told her to tell Evelyn Mayne to hold onto the glove and he’d send someone over for it eventually.

  It was more than time for me to get on to work, but I stayed until she finished her call, because I wanted to remind her about our date that evening.

  She begged off, saying she’d be too tired from the sleep she’d lost and anyway she’d decided to go to the tenants’ meeting tonight. She told me, “This has made me realize that I’ve got to begin to take some responsibility for what happens around me. We may make fun of such people—the good neighbors—but they’ve got something solid about them.”

  I was pretty miffed at that, though I don’t think I let it show. Oh, I didn’t so much mind her turning me down—there were reasons enough for it that she didn’t have to make such a production of it and drag in “good neighbors.” (Mr. Helpful, who else?) Besides, Evelyn Mayne came out of her sad apathy long enough to give me a big smile when Marcia said “No.”

  So I didn’t go to the tenants’ meeting that night, as I might otherwise have done. Instead I had dinner out and went to the movie—it was lousy—and then had a few drinks, so that it was late when I got back (no signs of life in the
lobby or lift or corridor) and gratefully piled into bed.

  I was dragged out of the depths of sleep—that first blissful plunge—by a persistent knocking. I shouted something angry but unintelligible and when there was no reply made myself get up, feeling furious.

  It was Marcia. With a really remarkable effort I kept my mouth shut and even smoothed out whatever expression was contorting my face. The words one utters on being suddenly awakened, especially from that matchless first sleep that is never recaptured, can be as disastrous as speaking in drink. Our relationship had progressed to the critical stage and I sure didn’t want to blow it, especially when treasures I’d hoped to win were spread out in front of my face, as it were, under a semi-transparent nightgown and hastily-thrown-on negligee.

  I looked up, a little, at her face. Her eyes were wide.

  She said in a sort of frightened little-girl voice that didn’t seem at all put on, “I’m awfully sorry to wake you up at three o’clock in the morning, Jeff, but would you keep this ‘spooky’ for me? I can’t get to sleep with it in my room,”

  It is a testimony to the very high quality of Marcia’s treasures that I didn’t until then notice what she was carrying in front of her—in a fold of toilet paper—the pale gray leather glove Evelyn Mayne had found behind her couch.

  “Huh?” I said, not at all brilliantly. “Didn’t Officer Hart come back, or send someone over to pick it up?”

  She shook her head. “Evelyn had it, of course, while I was at my job—her social worker did come over right after you left. But then at supper time her son and daughter-in-law came (Officer Hart did scare them!) and bundled her off to the hospital, and she left the glove with me. I called the police, but Officer Hart was off duty and Officer Halstead, whom I talked to, told me they’d be over to pick it up early in the morning. Please take it, Jeff. Whenever I look at it, I think of that crazy sneaking around with the silver hair down his face and waving the knife. It keeps giving me the shivers.”