Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  She was watching him intently, as was a moist and robed Tommy in the bathroom door.

  Grinning sympathetically, he shook his head. “Nope, got to go,” he said. “I’ll be cautious as hell, on the watch every second. Maybe just have to check the garage.”

  Outside, thunder rumbled. ‘That’s my cue,” he said and got out of the room as quickly as he could, and by the time he’d got the Volks on the bridge again, its gas tank once more topped off, he was feeling pretty good. Caffeine had done its work, thunderstorms always gave him a high, and now that he had only Cassius to worry about, everything was wonderfully simplified. It was great to be outdoors, alone, the city behind him, space around him, water under him, with lightning to reveal vividly every ten seconds or so the multiple mazy zigzag angles of the marvelous structure the Volks was traversing, and thunder to shake his bones. And himself free on a quixotic errand that had to be carried out but that really didn’t matter all that much when you got down to it, since worry about Cassius was hardly to be compared with worry about Tommy or Terri, say. Oh, this storm was good, though awfully big, much too big for any sentimentalities or worrisome petty human concerns. It washed those away, washed away his own concern about whether he was being, had been, a good son (or husband or father, for that matter) and whether he was being wise to make this trip or not, washed away Terri’s and Tilly’s concern as to what indignities, exactly, Cassius had visited on Loni, washed away Cassius’ own dreadful wondering as to whether or not he’d strangled his wife in a blackout, washed all those away and left only the naked phenomena, the stuff of which it, the storm itself, was composed, and all other storms, from those in teapots and cyclotrons to those out at the ends of the universe, that blustered through whole galaxies and blew out stars.

  This almost suspiciously exalted state of mind, this lightning high, stuck with Wolf after the Volks had got across the bridge and come to the first traffic hold-up, the one a little beyond the Waldo tunnel. It was worse this time, tour lanes were blocked, and took longer to get past; they were only letting cars through in one direction at a time. But now that his mind had time to move around, free for seconds and minutes from the task of driving, he found that it was drawn to phenomena and awarenesses rather than worries and concerns. For instance, those so-alike dreams Cassius and Tommy had had (they’d both used the same word “buzz” of the swooping green face), he now found himself simply lost in wonder at the coincidence. Could one person transmit his dreams to another? Could they travel through flesh and skin? And would they look like dreams if you saw them winging through darkness?

  And that black sonic generator, or whatever, Esteban was supposed to have invented, how shockingly it had come alive in his hands when Cassius had thrown the switch—that strong and deep vibration! Whatever had made it work after a quarter century of disuse? And why had the puzzle of that slipped completely from his mind? He knew one thing: if he got the chance tonight, he’d certainly glom onto the black cylinder and bring it away with him!

  And the color green, the witch green and death blue of Tommy’s ghost light, were colors more than the raiments of awareness, the arbitrary furniture of the mind? Were they outside the mind too: feelings, forces, the raw stuff of life? and could they kill? Wave motions, vibrations, buzzings—vibes, vibes, vibes, vibes.

  In such ways and a thousand others his thoughts veered and whirled throughout the trip, while thunder crackled and ripped, lightning made shiny sheets of streets awash, unceasing rain pattered and pelted.

  Then, not more than a mile from Goodland Valley, all streetlights, all store lights, all house lights were simultaneously extinguished. He told himself this was to be expected, that power failures were a part of storms. Moreover, the rain did at last seem to be lessening.

  Just the same he found it reassuring when the stationary headlights and red lanterns of the roadblock appeared through the rain mist.

  He’d been intending to explain about Cassius, but instead he found himself whipping out his veterinary identifications and launching into a story about this family in Goodland Valley that had a pet jaguar and wouldn’t vacate without it and so couldn’t move until he’d arrived and administered an anesthetic shot.

  Almost to his chagrin they passed him through with various warnings and well wishings before he’d said much more than the words “pet jaguar.” Evidently exotic pet carnivores were an old story in Marin County.

  He wondered fleetingly if he’d been inspired to compose the lie in honor of Esteban Bernadorre, who’d been a mine of equally unlikely anecdotes, some of them doubtless invented only to please an admiring and credulous boy.

  He followed his headlights up the slight grade leading into Goodland Valley, thankful the rain continued to slacken though lightning still flared faintly with diminished thunder from time to time, providing additional guidance. After what was beginning to seem too long a time, he caught sight of a few dim house lights in the steep hills close on each side (he’d got out of the area of the power failure, he told himself) and almost immediately afterwards his headlights picked up Cassius’ garage with one door lifted open as he’d left it. Vie nosed the Volks into it until he could see the dark shape of Cassius’ Buick.

  On another sudden inspiration he reversed the direction of the Volks as he backed it out, so that it faced downgrade, the way he’d come. He parked it, setting the hand-brake, nearer the narrow road’s center than its side. He took the flashlight from the glove compartment and got out on the side facing the house, leaving the headlights on, the motor idling, and the door open.

  A fingering tendril of wind, startlingly chill, made him shiver.

  But was the shiver from the wind alone? Staring uphill, straining his eyes at the dim bulk of the house, he saw a small greenish glow moving behind the windows of the second floor, while halfway between him and the house there stood a dark pale-headed figure. White-haired Cassius? Or a white crash helmet?

  A flare of lightning brighter than those preceding it showed the swollen hillside empty and the windows blank.

  Imagination! he told himself.

  Thunder crashed loudly. The storm was getting nearer again, coming back.

  He switched on the flashlight and by its reassuringly bright beam rapidly mounted the hill, stamping each step firmly into the soggy ground.

  The front door was ajar. He thrust it open and was in the short hall that held the stairs to the second floor and led back to the living room.

  As he moved forward between stairs and wall, he became aware of a deep and profound vibration that gave the whole house a heavy tremor; it was in the floor under his feet, the wall his hand groped, even in the thick air he breathed. While his ears were assaulted by a faint thin screaming, as of a sound too shrill to be quite heard, a sound to drive dogs mad and murder bats.

  Midway in his short journey the house lurched sharply once, so he was staggered, then held steady. The deep vibration and the shrill whatever-it-was continued unchanging.

  He paused in the doorway to the living room. From where he stood he had a clear view of the fireplace midway in the far wall, the mantelpiece above it, the two windows to either side of it that opened on the hill behind the house, a small coffee table in front of the fireplace, and in front of that an easy chair facing away from him. Barely showing above the back of the last was the crown of a white-haired head.

  The bottles on the mantelpiece had been transferred to the coffee table, where one of them lay on its side, so that the mantelpiece itself was occupied only by the stubby black cylinder of Esteban’s sonic generator and by his painting of Helen, which seemed strangely to have a pale grey rag plastered closely across it.

  Wolf at first saw all these things not so much by the beam of his flashlight, which was directed at the floor from where his hand hung at his side, as by the green and blue glow of the ghost light beneath the oddly obscured painting.

  Then the white glare of a lightning flash flooded in briefly from behind him through the open door and
a window above the stairs, though strangely no ray of it showed through the windows to either side of the fireplace, followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder.

  As though that great sound had been a word of command, Wolf strode rapidly toward the fireplace, directing the flashlight ahead of him. With every step forward the deep vibration and the super-shrill whine increased in intensity, almost unbearably.

  He stopped by the coffee table and shone his flashlight at Esteban’s invention. Torn-away friction tape dangled from the switch, which had been thrown on.

  He shifted the beam to the painting and saw that what he had thought grey rag was the central area of bare canvas from which every last flake of paint had vanished, or rather been shaken by the vibrations from the cylinder beside it. For he could see now that the stripped canvas was quivering rapidly and incessantly like an invisibly beaten drumhead.

  But the mantelpiece beneath the painting was bare. It showed no trace of fallen flakes.

  As he swung the bright beam around to the easy chair, flashing in his mind on how the slim pinkish-green witch mask had swooped and buzzed through Cassius’ and Tommy’s dreams, it passed slowly across the nearest window, revealing why the lightning flash hadn’t shone through it. Beyond the glass, close against it from top to bottom, was wet dirt packed solid.

  The beam moved on to the easy chair. Cassius’ hands gripping its arms and his head, pressed in frozen terror into the angle between back and side, were all purplish, while the whites of his bulging eyes were shot with a lacework of purple.

  The reason for his suffocation was not far to seek. Stuffing his nostrils and plastered intrusively across his grimacing lips were tight-packed dry flakes of greenish-pink oil paint.

  With a muted high-pitched crackle the two windows gave way to huge dark-faced thrusts of mud.

  Wolf took off at speed, his flashlight held before him, raced down the lurching hall, out the open front door, down the splashing hill toward the lights of the Volks, and through its door into the driver’s seat.

  Simultaneously releasing the hand-brake, shifting the gear lever, and giving her throttle, he got away in a growling first that soon changed to a roaring second. A last sideways glimpse showed the house rushing down toward him in the grip of a great moving earth-wall in which uprooted trees rode like logs in a breaking-up river jam.

  For critical seconds the end of the earth-wave seemed to Wolf’s eye on a collision course with the hurtling Volks, but then rapidly fell behind the escaping car. He’d actually begun to slow down when he started to hear the profound, long-drawn rumbling roar of the hill burying forever Goodland Valley and all its secrets.