Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  Terri added, frowning, “But why did he make a thing of your not taking the fixture away?”

  “Obvious.” Wolf grinned. “Little guy’s keeping his options open. So if he should get scared, it’s there to turn on. Good thinking. Also shows the colors don’t bother him. Why’d Loni think of blue and green as corpse colors, I wonder?”

  “You’ve seen a fresh drowned person, haven’t you?” Terri responded lightly. “But why don’t you ask Cassius that one? It’s the sort of question gets him talking.”

  “Right,” Wolf agreed without rancor. “Maybe I will.”

  And true enough, there’d been a couple of times during the visit (though not as many as Wolf had feared) when conversation had languished and they’d been grateful for any topic that would get it going again, such as oddities of psychology, Cassius’ academic field, or ghost stories, in which they all seemed to share an interest. Matter of fact, the visit was for Wolf one of ultimate reconciliation with his father after a near-separation from both parents for a period of twenty years or so, while Terri was meeting her father- in-law, and Tommy his grandfather, for the first time.

  The background for this was simply that the marriage of Wolf’s father and mother, Cassius Kruger and Helen Hostelford, had progressively become, after Wolf’s early childhood, a more and more unhappy, desperately quarrelsome, and alcoholic one, full of long, cold estrangements and fleeting reconciliations, yet neither partner had had the gumption to break it off and try something else. At the earliest teen age possible, Wolf (it was short for Wolfram, a fancy of his father) had wisely separated himself from them and largely gone it on his own, getting a degree in biology and working up a career in veterinary medicine and animal management, feeling his way through an unsuccessful early marriage and several living arrangements, until he’d met Terri. His mother’s death several years back from a mixture of alcohol and barbiturate sleeping pills hadn’t improved his relationship with his father—the opposite, rather, since he’d been somewhat closer to Helen and inclined to side with her in the unutterably wearisome marriage war—but then the old man, whom he’d expected to go downhill fast once he was alone, had surprised him by pulling out of his alcoholism (which had again and again threatened to end his academic career, another wearisomely repetitive series of crises) by the expedient of quitting drinking entirely and slowly rebuilding the wreckage of his body into at least a fairly good semblance of health.

  Wolf had been able to keep tabs on his father’s progress through letters he got from an old crony of his mother, a gossipy and humorous theatrical widow named Matilda “Tilly” Hoyt, who was also a Marin resident not far from Goodland Valley and kept in touch with the old man after Helen’s death; and from infrequent, cold-bloodedly short hello-good-bye solo visits he paid Cassius to check up on him that came from a dim unwilling feeling of responsibility and from an incredulous and almost equally unwilling feeling of hope.

  After several years, his father’s repeated good showings, his own reawakening good memories from early childhood before the marriage war had started, the old man’s seemingly sincere, even enthusiastic, interest in Wolf’s profession and all his son’s life, for that matter, plus some encouragement from Terri, worked a perhaps inevitable change in Wolf. He talked more with Cassius on his solo visits and found it good, and he began to think seriously of accepting the old man’s repeated invitation to bring the new family to visit.

  He talked it over first with Tilly Hoyt, though, calling on her at her sunny cottage nearer the beach and the thundering, chill, swift-currented Pacific than the treacherous brown hills which rains could rumble.

  “Oh, yes, he’s changed, all right,” she assured Wolf, “and as far as the liquor goes, I don’t think he’s had a drop since two or three months after Helen died. He’s got some guilt there, I think, which showed in odd ways after she died, like his bringing down from the attic that weird painting of her by that crazy French-Canadian—or was it Spanish-Mexican?—painter they used to have around.” She searched Wolf’s eyes unhappily, saying, “Cassius was pretty rough with Helen when he got very drunk, but I guess you know about that.”

  Wolf nodded darkly.

  She went on, “God knows I got my share of black eyes from Pat when he was still around, the bum.” She grimaced. “But I gave as good as I got, I sincerely hope, and somehow though we were fighting all the time, we were always making up a little more of the time. But with Helen and Cassius anything like that seemed to cut deeper, down to the bone, take longer to heal, they were both such nice, idealistic, goofy, perfectionist people in their ways, couldn’t accept the violence that was in them. And the fault wasn’t always on Cassius’ side. Your mother wasn’t the easiest person to get on with; she had a bitter streak, a cold-as-death witch thing, but I guess you know that too. Anyway, now Cassius is, well, what you might call... chastened.” She curled her lip in humorous distaste at the word and went on briskly, “I know he wants to meet your new family, Wolf. Whenever I see him he talks a lot about Tommy—he’s proud as anything to be a grandfather, and about Terri too, even Loni—he’s always showing me their pictures—and he positively makes a hero of you.”

  So Wolf had accepted his father’s invitation for himself and Terri and Tom and Loni, and everything had seemed to work out fine from the start. The days were spent in outings around the Bay, both north and south of the Golden Gate and east into the Napa wine country and Berkeley-Oakland, outings in which Cassius rarely joined and Wolf enjoyed playing tour guide, the evenings in talking about them and catching up on the lost years and comfortably growing a little closer. The old man had spread himself and not only had his cavernous place cleaned up but also had the Latino couple, the Martinezes, who looked after it part time, stay extra hours and cook dinners. In addition he had a couple of neighbors over from time to time, while Tilly was an almost constant dinner guest, and he insisted on serving liquor while not partaking of it himself, though he did nothing to call attention to the latter. This so touched Wolf that he hadn’t the heart to say anything about his father’s almost constant cigarette smoking, though the old man’s occasional emphysemic coughing fits worried him. But the other old people smoked too, Tilly especially, and on the whole everything went so well that neither Loni’s premature departure nor the occasional silences that fell on their host cast much of a damper.

  The talk about ghost stories had started just after dinner at the big table in the living room with the masklike painting of Wolf’s mother Helen with the little white light below it, looking down on them from the mantelpiece on which there also stood the half dozen bottles of sherry, Scotch, and other liquors Cassius kept for his guests. The conversation had begun with the mention of haunted paintings when Wolf brought up Montague Rhodes James’ story, “The Mezzotint.”

  “That’s the one, isn’t it,” Terri had said helpfully, “where an old engraving changes over a couple of days when several different people look at it at different times, and then they compare notes and realize they’ve been witnessing the re-enactment of some horror that happened long ago, just before or just after the print was engraved?”

  “You know, that’s so goddam complicated,” Tilly objected, but “Yes, indeed!” Cassius took up enthusiastically. “At first the ghost is seen from the rear and you don’t know it’s one; it’s just a figure in a black hood and robe crawling across the moonlit lawn toward a big house.”

  “And the next time someone sees the picture,” Wolf said, picking up the account, “the figure is gone, but one of the first-floor windows of the house is shown as being open, so that someone looking at the picture then observes, ‘He must have got in.’“

  “And then the next to last time they look at the picture and it’s changed,” Terri continued, “the figure’s back and striding away from the house, only you can’t see much of its face because of the hood, except that it’s fearfully thin, and cradled in its arms it’s got this baby it’s kidnapped...” She broke off abruptly and a little uncertai
nly, noticing that Tommy was listening intently.

  “And then what, Ma?” he asked.

  “The last time the picture changes,” his father answered for her, his voice tranquil, “the figure’s gone and whatever it might have been carrying. There’s just the house in the moonlight, and the moon.”

  Tommy nodded and said, “The ghost stayed inside the picture really, just like a movie. Suppose he could come out, sort of off the picture, I mean?”

  Cassius frowned, lighting a cigarette. “Ambrose Bierce got hold of that same idea, Tommy, and he wrote a story, a shorter one, about a picture that changed, only as in the James story no one ever saw it at the moment it changed. The picture was mostly calm ocean with the edge of a beach in the foreground. Out in the distance was a little boat with someone in it rowing toward shore. As it got closer you could see that the rower was a Chinaman with long snaky moustaches—”

  “Chinaperson,” Loni corrected and bit her lip.

  “Chinaperson,” Cassius repeated with a nod and a lingering smile at her. “Anyhow as he beached the boat and came toward the front of the picture you could see he had a long knife. Next time someone looked at it, the picture was empty except for the boat in the edge of the wavelets. But the time after that the Chinaperson was back in the boat and rowing away. Only now lying in the stern of the boat was the corpse of the... person he’d killed. Now I suppose you could say he got out of the picture for a while.”

  Shaking his head a little, Tommy said, ‘That’s good, but I don’t mean that way ‘zactly, Grandpa. I mean if you saw him step or float out of the picture, come off the picture like, same size and everything as in the picture.”

  “That would be something,” Wolf said, catching his son’s idea. “Mickey Mouse, say, mouse life-size—no, comic book size—waltzing around on the coffee table. That tiny, his squeak might be too high to hear.”

  “But Mickey Mouse isn’t a ghost, Pa,” Tommy objected.

  “No,” his grandfather agreed, “though I remember an early animation where he challenged a castle run by ghosts and fought a duel with a six-legged spider. But that surely is an interesting idea of yours, Tommy,” he went on, his gaze roving around the room and coming to rest on the large reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica” that dominated one wall, “except that for some pictures,” he said, “it wouldn’t be so good if their figures came out of the frames and walked, or floated.”

  “I guess so,” Tommy agreed, wrinkling his nose at the looming bull man and the other mad faces and somber patterns in Picasso’s masterpiece.

  Terri started to say something to him; then her eyes shifted to Cassius. Wolf was watching her.

  Loni yielded to the natural impulse to look around at the other pictures, gauging their suitability for animation. She hesitated at the dark backgrounded one which showed the head only, all by itself like a Benda mask, of a rather young Helen Kruger with strange though striking flesh tones. She started to make a remark, but caught herself.

  But Tommy had been watching her and, remembering something he’d overheard before dinner, guessed what she might have been going to say and popped out with, “I bet Grandma Helen would make a pretty green ghost if she came out of her frame.”

  ‘Tommy...” Terry began, while, “I didn’t—” Loni started involuntarily to protest, when Cassius, whose eyes had flashed rekindling interest rather than hurt at Tommy’s observation, cut in lightly and rapidly, yet with a strange joking or mocking intensity (hard to tell which) that soon had them all staring at him, “Yes, she would, wouldn’t she? Tiny flakes of pink and green paint come crackling off the canvas without losing their configuration as a face…. Esteban always put a lot of, some said too much, green in his flesh—he said it gave it life…. Yes, a whole flight, or flock, or fester, or flutter, or flurry, yes flurry of greenish flakes floating off and round about in formation, swooping this way and that through the air, as though affixed to an invisible balloon responding to faintest air currents, a witches-sabbath swirling and swarming…. And then, who knows? Perhaps, their ghost venture done, settling rustlingly back onto the canvas so perfectly into their original position that not the slightest crack or faintest irregularity would be evidence of—”

  He broke off suddenly as an inhalation changed into a coughing fit that bent him over, but before anyone had time to voice a remark or move to assist him, he had mastered it, and his strangely intent eyes searched them and he began to speak again, but in an altogether different voice and much more slowly.

  “Excuse me, my dears. I let my imagination run away with me. You might call it the intoxication of the grotesque? I encouraged Tommy to indulge in it too, and I ask your pardons.” He lit another cigarette as he went on speaking measuredly. “But let me say in extenuation of our behavior that Esteban Bernadorre was a very strange man and had some very strange ideas about color and light and pigments, strange even for a painter. Surely you must remember him, Wolf, though you weren’t much older than Tommy here when that painting of Helen was executed.”

  “I remember Esteban,” Wolf said, still studying his father uneasily and revolving in his mind the words the old man had poured out with such compulsive rapidity and then so calculatedly, as if reciting a speech, “though not so much about his being a painter as that he was able to fix a toy robot I’d broke, and that he rode a motorcycle, oh yes, and that I thought he must be terribly old because he had a few grey hairs.”

  Cassius chuckled. “That’s right, Esteban had that mechanical knack so strange in an artist and always had some invention or other he was working on. In his spare time he panned for gold—oh, he was up to every sort of thing that might make him money—the gold-panning was partly what the motorcycle was for, to take him up into the little canyons where the little goldiferous streams are. I remember he talked about vibrations—vibes—before anyone else did. He used to say that all vibrations were one and that all colors were alive, only that red and yellow were the full life colors—blood and sunlight—while blue was the death, no, life-in-death color, the blue of empty sky, the indigo of outer space....” He chuckled again, reflectively. “You know,” he said, “Esteban wasn’t really much of a draftsman; he couldn’t draw hardly anything worth a damn except faces; that’s why he worked out that portrait technique of making faces like hanging Benda masks; that way he never got involved in hands or ears or other body parts he was apt to botch.”

  “That’s strange,” said Wolf, “because the only other one of his pictures I seem to remember now from those days—I think now that it had some influence on my life, my choice of profession—was one of a leopard.”

  Cassius’ sudden laugh was excited. “You know, Wolf,” he said, “I believe I’ve got that very picture up in the attic! Along with some other stuff Esteban asked me if he could store there. He was going to send for them or come back for them but he never did. In fact it was the last time I ever saw him, or heard from him for that matter. It’s not a good picture, he never could sell it, the anatomy’s all wrong and somehow a lot of green got into it that shouldn’t have. I’ll take you up and show it to you, Wolf, if you’d like. But tomorrow. It’s too late tonight.”

  ‘That’s right,” Terri echoed somewhat eagerly. “Time for bed, Tommy. Time for bed long ago.”

  And later, when she and Wolf were alone in their bedroom, she confided in him, “You know, your father gave me a turn tonight. It was when he was talking about those dry flakes of green paint vibrating in the air in the shape of a face. He dwelt on them so! I think imagining them brought on his coughing fit.”

  “It could have,” Wolf agreed thoughtfully.

  The third-floor attic was as long as the house. Its front window seemed too high above the descending hillside, its rear one too close to it, shutting off the morning sunlight. Cassius piloted Wolf through the debris of an academic lifetime to where a half dozen canvases, some of them wrapped in brown paper, were stacked against the wall behind a kitchen chair on which rested a dust-filmed chunky blac
k cylindrical object about the size and shape of a sealed-in electric generator.

  “What’s that?” Wolf asked.

  “One of Esteban’s crazy inventions,” his father answered offhandedly, as he tipped the canvases forward one by one and peered down between them, hunting for the leopard painting, “some sort of ultrasonic generator that was supposed to pulverize crushed ore or, no, maybe agitate it when it was suspended in water and get the heavier gold flakes out that way, a mechanical catalyst for panning or placering, yes, that was it!” He paused in his peering search to look up at Wolf. “Esteban was much impressed by a wild claim of the aged Tesla (you know, Edison’s rival, the inventor of alternating current) that he could build a small, portable device that could shake buildings to pieces, maybe set off local earthquakes, by sympathetic vibrations. That ultrasonic generator there, or whatever he called it, was Esteban’s attempt in the same general direction, though with more modest aims—which is a sort of wonder in itself considering Esteban’s temperament. Of course it never worked; none of Esteban’s great inventions did.” He shrugged.

  “He fixed my robot,” Wolf mused. Then, somewhat incredulously, his voice rising, “You mean he left it here with you, and the other stuff, and actually never came back for it, even wrote? And you didn’t do anything about it either, write him at least?”

  Cassius shrugged more broadly. “He was that sort of person. As for me, I think I tried to write him once or twice, but the letters came back. Or weren’t answered.” He smiled unhappily and said softly, “Alcohol’s a great forgettery, you know, a great eraser, or at least blurrer, softener….” With a small gesture he indicated the shelves of books, the piled boxes of old files and papers between them and the ladder to the second floor. “Alcohol’s washed through everything up here—the university, Helen, Esteban, all my past—and greyed it all. That’s alcohol dust on the books.” He chuckled and his voice briskened. “And now to things of today. Here’s the picture I promised you.”