Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  He straightened himself, drew a canvas on which he’d been keeping his hand out of the stack with a flourish, wiped it off on his sleeve, and faced it to Wolf.

  It was a medium-size oil painting, wider than high, of a golden leopard with black spots like tiny footprints, stretched out on a branch in a sea, a flood, of green leaves. You knew it was high in the tree because the branch was thin and the green sunlight the leaves transmitted was bright, so all-suffusingly bright that it gave a greenish cast to the leopard’s sleek fur, Cassius had been right about that. And also about the bad anatomy too, for Wolf at once noted errors of muscle placement and underlying bony structure.

  But the face! Or muzzle or mask, rather, that was as magnificent as memory had kept it for him, a wonderfully savage sensitive visage, watchful and wild, the quintessence of the feline….

  Cassius was saying, “You can see he’s even got the eyes wrong, giving them circular pupils instead of slits.”

  “In that one point he happens to be right,” Wolf said, happy to get in a word for the man who, he was beginning to remember, had been something of a childhood hero to him. “The leopard does not have slit eyes like a house cat, but pupils exactly like ours. It’s that detail which gives him a human look.”

  “Ah so,” Cassius conceded. “I didn’t know that. Live and learn. He should have painted just that, used the mask trick he did with his pictures of people.”

  Wolf’s gaze and mind returned to the black object. He looked it over more closely without handling it, except to brush off dust here and there. “How the devil was it supposed to be powered? I can’t see any place for plugging in wires, just the one switch on top, which indicates it was run by electricity.”

  “Batteries, I think he told me,” the old man said, and, bolder or less cautious than his son, reached over and pushed the switch.

  It was, at first, to Wolf holding it, as if a very distant unsuspected ponderous beast had roused and begun to tramp toward them across unimagined miles or light years. Under his hands the black cylinder shook a little, then began to vibrate faster and faster, while in his ears a faint buzzing became a humming and then a higher and higher pitched whine.

  The unexpectedness of it paralyzed Wolf for a moment, yet it was he rather than his father who thrust back the switch and turned off the thing.

  Cassius was looking at it in mild surprise and with what seemed to be a shade of reproach. “Well, fancy that!” he said lightly. “Esteban returning to us through his works. I never dreamed—This seems to be my morning for misjudging things.”

  “Batteries that last twenty or more years—?” Wolf uttered incredulously and then didn’t know how to go on.

  His father shrugged, which was not the answer Wolf was looking for, and said, “Look, I’m going to take this picture downstairs. I agree it has possibilities. Could you carry that... er... thing? I know it’s too heavy for me, but perhaps we should have a look at it later. Or something...” he trailed off vaguely.

  Wolf nodded curtly, thinking, Yes, and shut it away safely where neither Tommy nor anyone else can get their eager little unthinking hands on it. He found himself strangely annoyed by his father’s irresponsibility, or over-casualness, or whatever it was. Up to now the old man had seemed to him such a normal sort of reformed or arrested alcoholic. But now—? He hefted the black cylinder. It was heavy.

  He found himself wondering, as he followed the slow-moving Cassius to the front of the attic, what other time bombs there might be, in the old man’s mind as well as the house, waiting to be detonated.

  But his thoughts were somewhat diverted when he glanced out the front attic window. A short way down the hillside and to the side of the house amongst the nearest trees and further fenced by tall shrubs was a grassy bower that was bathed in sunlight and into which he could look down from his vantage point. Sprawled supine at its center on a long black beach towel was Loni clad in black wraparound sunglasses, a quite splendid sight which somehow reminded Wolf of a certain wariness Terri had had of her then thirteen-year-old sister during their courtship and also reminded him perhaps to tell the girl a cautionary tale or two about the Trailside Murderer who had terrified Marin County some years back.

  When he got the black cylinder downstairs he set it, at Cassius’ direction, on the high mantelpiece, which would at least put it out of Tommy’s reach, and as an extra precaution taped the switch in the off position with two short lengths of friction adhesive. The old man had propped the painting on a straight-backed chair standing against the wall nearby.

  Wolf’s speculations about Cassius and the house were further driven from his mind, or to its shadowy outer reaches at any rate, by the day’s activities when he drove Terri and Tommy up into Sonoma County through the Valley of the Moon to the Jack London Museum and led them through the big trees to the fire-darkened gaunt stone ruins of London’s Wolf House. (Tommy made a solemn joke of calling it “Pa House,” while Wolf promised to show him some real wolves at Golden Gate Park tomorrow.)

  That must have been the day, Wolf figured out later, of Loni’s impulsive departure for her Oregon college, for she wasn’t there the next morning to hear Cassius’ dream of the giant spider and Esteban (though Tilly was, who’d come over early to share their late breakfast). It was also the day when Weather confirmed that the big storm front building up in the North Pacific had veered south and was headed for San Francisco.

  Cassius prefaced his account of the night’s somnial pageantry with some nervous and veering verbal flamboyancies. He seemed a bit hollow-eyed and overwrought, as if sleep hadn’t rested him and he were clowning around and gallumphing to hide the fact, and for the first time Wolf found himself wondering whether their visit hadn’t begun to tire the old man.

  “Never dream these days,” Cassius grumbled, “just feelings and flashes, as I think I’ve told you, Terri, but last night I sure had a doozie. You brought it on me, Wolf, by making me go up to the attic and look at that old stuff of Esteban’s I’d forgotten was there.” He nodded toward the black cylinder and green-flooded leopard painting. “Yes, sir, Tommy, your Pa gave me one doozie of a dream.” He paused, wrinkled his nose, and looked comically sideways at Wolf. “No, that isn’t true at all, is it? I was the one who told you about it and led you up there. I brought it all on myself! See, Tommy, never trust what your Grandpa says, his mind’s slipping.

  “Anyhow,” he launched out, “I was standing in the front attic window, which had become French windows nine feet tall with yellow silk drapes, and I was working away on a big kirschwasser highball. I sometimes drink in my dreams,” he explained to Terri. “It’s one of my few surviving pleasures. Sometimes wake up dream-drunk for a blessed moment or two.

  “Around me in my dream the whole house was jumping, first floor, second floor, attic turned ballroom. People, lights, music, the tintinnabulation of alcoholic crystal. Benighted Goodland Valley resounded with the racket from stem to stern. Even the darkness jumped. I realized that your Grandma, Tommy, was giving one of her huge parties, to which she invited everyone and which generally bored me stiff.” He looked surprised and tapped himself on his mouth. “That’s another lie,” he said. “I enjoyed those parties more than she did. She gave them just to please me. Keep remembering what I told you about trusting your Grandpa, Tommy.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “there I was carousing on the edge of nothing, leaning against the friendly dark outside, for the French windows were pure ha-ha.” He explained to Tommy, “That’s a place in a British fancy garden where there should be a flight of steps, but isn’t. You start down it and—boomp. Hence ha-ha. Very funny. The British have a wonderfully subtle sense of humor.

  “But in my dream I was gifted with an exquisite sense of balance. I could easily have walked a tightwire from where I was to the opposite crest of the valley, balancing myself with sips of kirsch and soda, if my dream had only provided one. But just then I felt something tug at my trousers, trying to topple me forward.

  “I lo
oked down at my leg, and there was a naked baby no higher than my knee, a beautiful cherub straight out of Tiepolo or Titian, but with a nasty look on her cute little face, yanking ineffectually at my pant leg with both hands. I looked straight down the outside of the house and saw, just below me way down there, a new cellar door of the slanting flat kind thrown wide open, revealing a short flight of steps leading down into the basement, from which light was pouring, as if the party were going on there too.

  “But a green tinge in that light telegraphed ‘Danger!’ to my brain, and that was no lie for suddenly there was rearing out of the cellar up toward me a huge green and yellow spider with eight glaring jet black eyes and terribly long legs, the first pair so super long, like the two tentacular arms of a squid, that they could reach the attic.

  “At that moment I felt something that made me look back at my leg, and I saw that the cherub had let go of my pants and was starting to overbalance and fall (she had no wings as a proper cherub should).

  “With one hand I steadied the baby-skinned creature and with the back of the other (oh, my balance was positively miraculous) I knocked aside the spider leg that was about to touch the cherub.

  “At the same instant I saw that the monster was only a large pillow toy made of lustrous stuffed velvet, the eyes circles of black sequins, and that the whole business was a put-on, a party joke on me.”

  Cassius took a swallow of cold coffee and lit another cigarette. “Well, that ended that part of the dream,” he said, “and the next I knew I was standing on the dark hillside beside the house, the party still going on, and calculating how many inches the hill had shifted down and forward during the last rain (it never has, you know, not an iota) and wondering what the next rain was going to do to it—guess I was anticipating today’s weather forecast—when I heard someone call my name softly.

  “I looked down the hillside to the road and saw a small closed car, one of those early Austins or maybe a Hillman Minx, drawing up to park there. And, this is a funny part, although it was black night, I could see the driver silhouetted inside, as if by an impossibly belated sunset afterglow, and although he was wearing a big white motorcycle crash helmet I identified him at once—something about his posture, the way he held himself—as Esteban Bernadorre, whom I haven’t seen for almost a quarter of a century.

  “‘Esteban?’ I called hoarsely, and from the tiny car came the quiet, clipped, clearly enunciated response, ‘Certainly, I will be happy to coffee with you, Cassius.’

  “Next thing I knew I was walking uphill toward the house with Esteban close beside me. As we approached the open door, which was filled with a knot of animatedly conversing drinkers—a sort of overflow from the hubbub inside—I realized Esteban was still wearing his crash helmet, oversize gauntlets too, and that I still hadn’t greeted him properly.

  “Preparatory to introducing him to the others, I swung in front of him, offering my hand and trying to discern his face in the cavernous seeming helmet’s depths. He drew off his gauntlet and shook hands. His hand was oversize, as its glove had been, and wet, gritty, and soft all at once. After shaking mine, he lifted his hand and made the motion of wiping the back of it across his eyes, and I saw it was composed of wet grey ashes except where the wiping motion had bared a narrow edge of pink flayed flesh. And at the same time I saw that his eyes were nothing but charred black holes, infinitely deep, and his whole face granular black char wet as the ashes.

  “I swiftly turned to check how much, if anything, those in the door had seen, for we were now quite close to them. I saw that the centralmost carouser was Helen, my dear wife, looking very dashing in a silver lame evening dress.

  “She said to me, gesturing impatiently with her empty glass, ‘Oh, we’re quite familiar with Esteban’s boundless self-pity and self-dramatizing tricks. You should know him by now. He’s forever parading his little wounds and making a big production of them.’

  “At that moment I remembered that Helen was really dead, and that woke me up, as it generally does.”

  And with that Cassius blew out his breath in a humorously intended sigh of achievement and looked around for applause. Instead he encountered something close to stony gazes from Terri and Tilly too, Wolf looked both doubtful and slightly embarrassed, while Tommy’s face had lost the excited smile it had had during the cherub-spider part of the dream, and the child avoided his grandfather’s gaze. The four faces, for that matter, were a study in varieties of avoidance.

  “Well,” the old man grumbled apologetically after a moment, “I guess I should have realized beforehand that that was an X-rated dream. Not on account of sex or violence, but the horrifies, you might say. I’m sorry, ladies, I got carried away. Tommy, Gramps is not only a liar, he never knows when to stop. I thought my dream was a pretty good show, but I guess it overdid on the unexplained horrifies. They can be tricky, not to everyone’s taste.”

  “That’s true enough,” Wolf said with a placating little laugh as Cassius went off into the kitchen to raise mild hell with the Martinezes about something. Wolf was glad to turn his attention to getting the day’s drive to Golden Gate Park under way. That boiled down to plans for Tom and himself, since Terri decided she was tired from yesterday and wanted to gossip with Tilly, maybe drive over to the older woman’s place. This didn’t exactly displease Wolf, as the thought had struck him that Terri might be as tired as his father of their visit, maybe more so, and a day with Tilly Hoyt might set that right, and in any case give him time to rethink his own thoughts.

  Tommy was uncommonly silent during the drive down, but a rowboat ride on Stow Lake and a visit to the buffaloes got him cheerful and moderately talkative again. Wolf couldn’t produce any live wolves but at least found the kid a group of stuffed ones at the Academy of Sciences, while both of them enjoyed the speeding, circling dolphins at the Steinhart Aquarium, the only seemingly simplistic Bufano animal sculptures in the court outside, and the even more simplified, positively sketchy food in the cafeteria below.

  Emerging in the court again, their attention was captured by the hurrying hungry clouds, which devoured the red skeletal Sutro TV tower as they watched.

  “Pa, are clouds alive?” Tommy asked.

  “They act that way, don’t they?” Wolf agreed. “But, no, they’re no more alive than, say, the ocean is, or mountains.”

  “They’re made of snowflakes, aren’t they?”

  “Some of them are, Tom. Mostly high, feathery ones called cirrus. Those’re made of ice flakes, you could say, tiny needles of ice. But these we’re looking at are just water, billions of billions of tiny drops of water that sail through the air together.”

  “But drops of water aren’t white, Pa. Milk clouds would be white.”

  “That’s true, Tom, but the drops of water are tremendously tiny, droplets you call them, and at a distance they do look white when sunlight or just a lot of sky light hits them.”

  “What about small clouds, Pa, are they alive? I mean clouds small enough to be indoors, like smoke clouds or paint clouds, clouds of flakes or paint flakes. Grandpa can blow smoke clouds like He showed me.”

  “No, those clouds aren’t alive either, Tom. And you don’t say smoke flakes or paint flakes, though there might be flakes of soot in heavy smoke and you could blow a sort of cloud of droplets— droplets, not flakes—from a spraypaint can, but I wouldn’t advise it.”

  “But Grandpa told about a little cloud of paint flakes flying off a picture.”

  “That was just in a story, Tom, and an imaginary story at that. Pretend stuff. Come on, Tom, we’ve looked at the sky enough for now.”

  But the day, which had started in sunlight, continued to grow more and more lowering until, after their visit to the Japanese Tea Garden, whose miniaturized world appealed to Tom and where he found a little bridge almost steep enough to be a ha-ha, Wolf decided they’d best head for home.

  The rain held off until they were halfway across the Golden Gate If Bridge, where it struck in a great squally f
lurry that drenched and I locked the car, as if it were a wet black beast pouncing. And although they were happily ahead of thick traffic, the rain kept up all the way to Goodland Valley, so that Wolf was relieved to get his Volks into the sturdy garage next to Cassius’ old Buick, and hurry up the pelting slippery hill with Tommy in his arms. During their absence, things had smoothed out at the old man’s place, at least superficially; and mostly by simplification—the Martinezes had both departed early to their home in the Mission after getting dinner into the oven, while Tilly, who’d been going to stay for it, had decided she had to get to her place to see to its storm defenses so there were only the four of them that ate it.

  By this time the rain had settled down to a steady beat considerably less violent than its first onset. Wolf could tell from Terri’s manner that she had a lot she wanted to talk to him about, but only when they were alone, so he was glad the Golden Gate Park talk both lasted out the meal and trailed off quickly afterwards (while the black cylinder on the mantelpiece and the green leopard painting under it stood as mute signs of all the things they weren’t talking about), so they could hurry Tommy, who was showing signs of great tiredness, off to bed, still without night light, say good-night to Cassius, who professed himself equally weary, and shut their bedroom door behind them.

  Terri whipped off her dress and shoes and paced up and down in her slip.

  “Boy, have I got a lot to tell you!” she said, eyeing Wolf excitedly, almost exultantly, somewhat frightenedly, and overall a bit dubiously.

  “I take it this is mostly going to be stuff got from Tilly today?” he asked from where he sat half-reclining on the bed. ‘That’s not to put it down. I’ve always trusted what she says, though she sure loves scandal.”

  Terri nodded. “Mostly,” she said, “along with an important bit from Loni I’ve been keeping back from you, and some things I just worked out in my head.”