Selected Stories

by Fritz Leiber

  "I know you will, Mr. Ryker," Clancy affirmed.

  Ryker himself wasn't nearly so sure of that. But he felt he had to get away to sort out his impressions. The dingy silvery walls were becoming oppressive.

  Ryker made his walk a long one, brisk and thoughtful to begin with, dawdling and mind-wandering to finish, so that it was almost sunset by the time he reentered the apartment tree (and our story), but he had his impressions sorted. Clancy had—possibly—given the Vanishing Lady a history, funny to start with (that "hookers' convention"!) but then by stages silly, sad, sinister. Melancholy, moody, and still mysterious.

  The chief retroactive effect of Clancy's story on his memories of his own encounters with the Vanishing Lady had been to intensify their sexual color, give them a sharper, coarser erotic note—an Ultrabooth note, you could say. In particular Ryker was troubled that ever since hearing Clancy narrate the loutish youth's steamy adolescent imagining that his "little hooker" had worn nothing but black stockings and a garter belt under her black fur coat, he was unable to be sure whether he himself had had similar simmering fantasy flashes during his encounters with her.

  Could he be guilty, at his age, he asked himself, of such callow and lurid fantasies? The answer to that was, of course, "Of course." And then wasn't the whole romantic business of the Vanishing Lady just a retailoring of Ultrabooth to his own taste, something that made an Ultrabooth girl his alone? Somehow, he hoped not. But had he any real plan for making contact with her if she ever did stop vanishing? His unenterprising behavior when he'd had the chance to get into the elevator with her alone, and later the chance to get off the elevator at the same floor as she, and today the opportunity to meet her face to face on the third floor, indicated clearly that the answer to that question was "No." Which depressed him.

  To what extent did Clancy believe in his story and in the reality of the girl who'd reportedly lingered on? He obviously had enjoyed telling it, and likely (from his glibness) had done so more than once, to suitable appreciative listeners. But did he believe she was one continuing real entity, or just a mixture of suggestion, chance, and mistaken resemblances, gossip, and outright lies? He'd never seen her himself—had this made Clancy doubt her reality, or contrariwise given him a stubborn hankering to catch sight of her himself for once at least? On the whole, Ryker thought Clancy was a believer—if only judging by his haste to search for her.

  And as for the ghost idea, which you couldn't get around because it fitted her appearing and disappearing behavior so well, no matter how silly and unfashionable such a suggestion might be—Clancy's reaction to that had seemed uneasy skepticism rather than outright "Nonsense!" rejection.

  Which was very much like Ryker's own reaction to it, he realized. He knew there'd been some feelings of fear mixed in with the excitement during all his later encounters with her, before he'd heard Clancy's story. How would he feel now, after hearing it, if he should see her again, he wondered uncomfortably. More fear? Or would he now spot clues to her unreality? Would she begin to melt into mist? Would she look different simply because of what he'd heard about her?

  Most likely, reality being the frustrating thing it was, he thought with an unamused inward guffaw, he'd simply never glimpse her again and never know. The stage having been set, all manifestations would cease.

  But then, as he let the front door slip from his hand and swing toward its click-solemnized self-locking, he saw the Vanishing Lady forty feet away exactly as he had the first two times, real, no ghostliness anywhere (the name for the material of her coat came to his mind—velour), her shadowed face swung his way, or almost so, and modestly reaverted itself, and she moved out of sight on her black oxfords.

  He reached the foyer fast as he could manage, its emptiness neither startling nor relieving him, nor the emptiness of the long back hall. He looked at the Clancys' door and the shuttered office window and shook his head and smiled. (Report this adventure? Whyever?) He started toward the stairs, but shook his head again and smiled more ruefully—he was already breathing very hard. He entered the elevator, and as he firmly pressed the 14 button with his thumb and heard the cage respond, he saw the dark gleaming eyes of the Vanishing Lady looking in at him anxiously, imploringly—they were open very wide—through the narrowing small window in the doors.

  The next thing he was aware of, the cage was passing Three and he had just croaked out a harsh "Good evening"—the chalky aftertaste of these words was in his throat. The rest of the trip seemed interminable.

  When the cage reached Fourteen, his thumb was already pressing the One button—and that trip seemed interminable too.

  No sign of anyone anywhere, on One. He looked up the stairs, but he was breathing harder than even before. Finally he got back into the elevator and hovered his thumb over the 14 button. He could touch but not press it down. He brought his face close to the empty little window and waited and waited—and waited.

  His thumb did not press down then, but the cage responded. The little window slipped shut. "It's out of my hands," he told himself fatalistically; "I'm being pulled somewhere." And from somewhere the thought came to him: What if a person were confined to this apartment tree forever, never leaving it, just going up and down and back and forth, and down and up and forth and back?

  The cage didn't stop until Twelve, where the door was opened by a white-haired couple. Responding to their apologies with a reassuring head-shake and a signed "It's all right," Ryker pressed past them and, gasping gently and rapidly, mounted the last flight of stairs very slowly, very slowly. The two extra steps brought on a fit of swirling dizziness, but it passed and he slowly continued on toward his room. He felt frustrated, confused and very tired. He clung to the thoughts that he had reversed the elevator's course as soon as he could, despite his fright, and returned downstairs to hunt for her, and that in his last glimpse of them, her eyes had looked frightened too.

  That night he had the muttering black nightmare again, all of it for the first time in weeks, and stronger, he judged afterward, than he'd ever before experienced it. The darkness seemed more impenetrable, solid, an ocean of black concrete congealing about him. The paralysis more complete, black canvas mummy wrappings drawn with numbing tightness, a spiral black cocoon tourniquet-tight. The dry and smoky odors more intense, as though he were baking and strangling in volcanic ash, while the sewer-stenches vied in disgustingness with fruity-flowery reeks meant to hide them. The sullen ghost-light of his imagination showed the micro-males grosser and more cockroachlike in their hordes. And when finally under the goad of intensest horror he managed to stir himself and strain upward, feeling his heart and veins tearing with the effort, he encountered within a fraction of an inch his tomb's coarsely lined ceiling, which showered gritty ash into his gasping mouth and sightless eyes.

  When he finally fought his way awake it was day, but his long sleep had in no way rested him. He felt tired still and good for nothing. Yesterday's story and walk had been too long, he told himself, yesterday's elevator encounter too emotionally exhausting. "Prisoners of the apartment tree," he murmured.

  The Vanishing Lady was in very truth an eternal prisoner of the apartment tree, knowing no other life than there and no sleep anywhere except for lapsings that were as sudden as a drunkard's blackouts into an unconsciousness as black as Ryker's nightmares, but of which she retained no memory whatever save for a general horror and repulsion which colored all her waking thoughts.

  She'd come awake walking down a hall, or on the stairs or in the moving elevator, or merely waiting somewhere in the tall and extensive apartment tree, but mostly near its roots and generally alone. Then she'd simply continue whatever she was doing for a while, sensing around her (if the episode lasted long enough, she might begin to wander independently), thinking and feeling and imagining and wondering as she moved or stood, always feeling a horror, until something would happen to swoop her back into black unconsciousness again. The something might be a sudden sound or thought, a fire siren, say, sig
ht of a mirror or another person, encounter with a doorknob, or with the impulse to take off her gloves, the chilling sense that someone had noticed her or was about to notice her, the fear that she might inadvertently walk through a silver-gray, faintly grimy wall, or slowly be absorbed into the carpet, sink through the floor. She couldn't recall those last things ever happening, and yet she dreaded them. Surely she went somewhere, she told herself, when she blacked out. She couldn't just collapse down on the floor, else there'd be some clue to that next time she came awake—and she was always on her feet when that happened. Besides, not often, but from time to time, she noticed she was wearing different clothes—similar clothes, in fact always black or some very dark shade close to it, but of a definitely different cut or material (leather, for instance, instead of cloth). And she couldn't possibly change her clothes or, worse, have them changed for her, in a semi-public place like the apartment tree—it would be unthinkable, too horribly embarrassing. Or rather—since we all know that the unthinkable and the horribly embarrassing (and the plain horrible too, for that matter) can happen—it would be too grotesque.

  That was her chief trouble about everything, of course, she knew so little about her situation—in fact, knew so little about herself and the general scheme of things that held sway in this area, period. That she suffered from almost total amnesia, that much was clear to her. Usually she assumed that she lived (alone?) in one of the apartments hanging on the tree, or else was forever visiting someone who did, but then why couldn't she remember the number or somehow get inside that apartment, or come awake inside, or else get out the door into the street if she were headed that way? Why, oh why, couldn't she once ever wake in a hospital bed?—that would be pure heaven! except for the thought of what kind of a hospital and what things they had passing as doctors and nurses.

  But just as she realized her amnesia, she knew she must have some way of taking care of herself during her unconscious times, or be the beneficiary of another's or others' system of taking care of her, for she somehow got her rest and other necessary physical reliefs, she must somehow get enough food and drink to keep her functioning, for she never felt terribly tired or seriously sick or weak and dizzy—except just before her topplings into unconsciousness, though sometimes those came without any warning at all, as sudden as the strike of pentothal.

  She remembered knowing drunks (but not their names—her memory was utterly worthless on names) who lived hours and days of their lives in states of total blackout, safely crossing busy streets, eating meals, even driving cars, without a single blink of remembered awareness, as if they had a guardian angel guiding them, to the point of coming awake in distant cities, not having the ghost of an idea as to how they'd got there. (Well, she could hardly be a drunk; she didn't stagger and there was never a bottle in her purse, the times she came awake clutching a purse.)

  But those were all deductions and surmises, unanchored and unlabeled memories that bobbed up in her mind and floated there awhile. What did she really know about herself?

  Pitifully little. She didn't know her name or that of any friend or relative. Address and occupation, too, were blanks. Ditto education, race, religion, and marital status. Oh Christ! she didn't even know what city she was in or how old she was! and whether she was good-looking, ugly, or merely nondescript. Sometimes one of those last questions would hit her so hard that she would forget and start to look into one of the many mirrors in the apartment tree, or else begin to take off her gloves, so she could check it that way—hey! maybe find a tag with her name on it sewed inside her coat! But any of these actions would, of course, plunge her back into the black unconsciousness from which this time there might be no awakening.

  And what about the general scheme of things that held sway in this area? What did she know about that? Precious little, too. There was this world of the apartment tree which she knew very well although she didn't permit herself to look at every part of it equally. Mirrors were taboo, unless you were so placed you couldn't see your own reflection in them; so mostly were people's faces. People meant danger. Don't look at them, they might look at you.

  Then there was the outside world, a mysterious and wonderful place, a heaven of delights where there was everything desirable you could think or imagine, where there was freedom and repose. She took this on faith and on the evidence of most of her memories. (Though, sad to say, those memories' bright colors seemed to fade with time. Having lost names, they tended to lose other details, she suspected. Besides, it was hard to keep them vivid and bright when your only conscious life was a series of same-seeming, frantic, frightened little rushes and hidings and waits in the apartment tree, glued together at the ends like stretches of film—and the glue was black.)

  But between those two worlds, the outside and the inside, separating them, there was a black layer (who knows how thick?) of unspeakable horrors and infinite terrors. What its outer surface was, facing the outside world, she could only guess, but its inside surface was clearly the walls, ceilings, and floors of the apartment tree. That was why she worried so much that she might become forgetful and step through them without intending to—she didn't know if she were insubstantial enough to do that (though she sometimes felt so), but she might be, or become so, and in any case she didn't intend to try! And why she had a dread of cracks and crevices and small holes anywhere and things which could go through such cracks and holes, leading logically enough to a fear of rats and mice and cockroaches and water bugs and similar vermin.

  Deep down inside herself she felt quite sure, most of the time, that she spent all her unconscious life in the black layer, and that it was her experiences there, or her dreams there, that infected all her times awake with fear. But it didn't do to think of that, it was too terrible, and so she tried to occupy her mind fully with her normal worries and dreads, and with observing permitted things in the apartment tree, and with all sorts of little notions and fantasies.

  One of her favorite fantasies, conceived and enjoyed in patches of clear thinking and feeling in the mostly on-guard, frantic stretches of her ragtag waking life, was that she really lived in a lovely modern hospital, occupied a whole wing of it, in fact, the favorite daughter of a billionaire no doubt, where she was cared for by stunningly handsome, sympathetic doctors and bevies of warm-hearted merry nurses who simply cosseted her to swooning with tender loving care, fed her the most delicious foods and drinks, massaged her endlessly, stole kisses sometimes (it was a rather naughty place), and the only drawback was that she was asleep throughout all these delightful operations.

  Ah, but (she fantasized) you could tell just by looking at the girl—her eyes closed, to be sure, but her lips smiling—that somewhere deep within she knew all that was happening, somewhere she enjoyed. She was a sly one!

  And then, when all the hospital was asleep, she would rise silently from her bed, put on her clothes, and still in a profound sleep sneak out of the hospital without waking a soul, hurry to this place, dive in an instant through the horror layer, and come awake!

  But then, unfortunately, because of her amnesia, she would forget the snow-white hospital and all her specific night-to-night memories of its delights and her wonderfully clever escapes from it.

  But she could daydream of the hospital to her heart's content, almost! That alone was a matchless reward, worth everything, if only you looked at it the right way.

  And then after a while, of course, she'd realize it was time to hurry back to the hospital before anyone there woke up and discovered she was gone. So she would, generally without letting on to herself what she was doing, seek or provoke an incident which would hurtle her back into unconsciousness again, transform her into her incredibly clever blacked-out other self who could travel anywhere in the universe unerringly, do almost anything—and with her eyes closed! (It wouldn't do to let the doctors and nurses ever suspect she'd been out of bed. Despite their inexhaustible loving-kindness they'd be sure to do something about it, maybe even come here and get her, and
bar her from the apartment tree forever.)

  So even the nicest daydreams had their dark sides.

  As for the worst of her daydreams, the nastiest of her imaginings, it didn't do to think of them at all—they were pure black-layer, through and through. There was the fantasy of the eraser-worms for instance—squirmy, crawling, sleek, horny-armored things about an inch long and of the thickness and semi-rigidity of a pencil eraser or a black telephone cord; once they were loose they could go anywhere, and there were hordes of them.

  She would imagine them . . . Well, wasn't it better to imagine them outright than to pretend she'd had a dream about them? for that would be admitting that she might have dreamed about them in the black layer, which would mean she might actually have experienced them in the black layer, wasn't that so? Well, anyway, she would start by imagining herself in utter darkness. It was strange, wasn't it, how, not often, but sometimes, you couldn't keep yourself from imagining the worst things? For a moment they became irresistible, a sort of nasty reverse delight.

  Anyhow, she would imagine she was lying in utter darkness—sometimes she'd close her eyes and cup her hands over them to increase the illusion, and once, alone in the elevator, greatly daring, she had switched off the light—and then she'd feel the first worm touch her toe, then crawl inquisitively, peremptorily between her big toe and the next, as if it owned her. Soon they'd be swarming all over her, investigating every crevice and orifice they reached, finally assaulting her head and face. She'd press her lips tightly together, but then they'd block her nostrils (it took about two of them, thrusting together, to do each of those) and she'd be forced to part her lips to gasp and then they'd writhe inside. She'd squeeze her eyes tight shut, but nevertheless . . . and she had no way to guard her ears and other entries.

  It was only bearable because you knew you were doing it to yourself and could stop any time you wanted. And maybe it was a sort of test to prove that, in a pinch, you could stand it—she wasn't sure. And although you told yourself it was nothing but imagination, it did give you ideas about the black layer.