You're All Alone (illustrated)

by Fritz Leiber

  If you want to meet me again in spite of dangers, I’ll be by the lion’s tail near the five sisters tonight at eight.

  HIS LIPS twisted in a wry smile.

  If that didn’t prove she’d been suckled on The Prisoner of Zenda and weaned on Graustark, he’d like to know! She probably carried the Rajah’s ruby in a bag around her neck and wrote love letters with a black swan’s quill—and she could stop haunting his imagination right now!

  No, there was no question but that Marcia was the woman for him—charming, successful, competent at both business and pleasure—even if she did like to be tormenting. What competition could be offered by a mere maladjusted girl?

  He hurried into the bathroom, rubbing his chin. Marcia liked him to be well-groomed, and his beard felt pretty conspicuous. He looked into the mirror to confirm his suspicions and once again he saw a different Carr Mackay.

  The one on the stairs had seemed lost. This one, framed in surgical white, looked trapped. A neat, wooden Mackay who went trudging through life without inquiring what any of the signposts meant. A stupid Mackay. A dummy.

  He really ought to shave, yes, but the way he was feeling, the sooner he and Marcia got started drinking, the better. He’d skip shaving this once.

  As he made this decision, he was conscious of a disproportionate feeling of guilt.

  He’d probably been reading too many “Five O’Clock Shadow” ads. Forget it.

  He hurried into the rest of his clothes, started toward the door, stopped by the bureau, pulled open the top drawer, looked longingly for a moment at the three flat pints of whisky nestling inside. Then he shut the drawer quickly and hurried down the stairs, averting his eyes from the mirror. It was a relief to know that he’d be with Marcia in a few minutes.

  But eight dark blocks are eight dark blocks, and they have to be walked, and to walk them takes time no matter how rapidly you stride. Time for your sense of purpose and security to dwindle to nothing. Time to get away from the ads and the pink lights and the radio voices and to think a little about the universe—to realize that it’s a place of mystification and death, with no more feeling than a sausage grinder for the life oozing through it.

  The buildings to either side became the walls of a black runway, and the occasional passers-by shadow-swathed automatons. He became conscious of the dark rhythm of existence as a nerve-twisting, insistent thing that tugged at him like a marionette’s strings, trying to drag him back to some pattern from which he had departed.

  Being with Marcia would fix him up, he told himself, as the dark facades crept slowly by. She at least couldn’t ever become a stranger.

  But he had forgotten her face.

  A trivial thing. A face is as easy to forget as the special place where you’ve put something for safe-keeping.

  Carr tried to remember it. A hundred faces blinked and faded in his mind, some of them so hauntingly suggestive of Marcia that for a moment he would think, “That’s her,” some of them grotesquely different.

  Light from a first story window spilled on the face of a girl in a blue slicker just as she passed him. His heart pounded. He had almost grabbed her and said, “Marcia!” And she hadn’t been Marcia’s type at all.

  He walked faster. The apartment tower where Marcia lived edged into sight, grew threateningly tall.

  HE HURRIED up the flagstone walk flanked by shrubbery. The lobby was a long low useless room with lots of carved wood and red leather. He stopped at the desk. The clerk was talking to someone over the phone. Carr waited, but the clerk seemed determined to prolong the conversation. Carr cleared his throat. The clerk yawned and languorously flexed the arm that held the receiver, as if to call attention to the gold seal ring and cuff-linked wrist.

  A few steps beyond, the elevator was waiting. Although he knew Marcia always liked him to call up first, Carr delayed no longer. He walked into the cage and said, “Seven, please.”

  But the tiny gray-haired woman did not move. She seemed to be asleep. She was perched on her stool in front of the panel of buttons like some weary old jungle bird. Carr started to touch her shoulder, but at the last moment reached impulsively beyond to press the seven button.

  The door closed with a soft crunch and the cage started upward. The ring of keys at the operator’s waist jingled faintly, but she did not wake. Her lips worked and she muttered faintly.

  The cage stopped at seven. Again the keys jingled faintly. The door opened. With one last glance at the sleeping woman, Carr stepped softly out. Just before he reached Marcia’s door, he heard the operator make a funny little sound between a yawn and a sigh and a laugh, and he heard the door close and the cage start down.

  In front of Marcia’s door Carr hesitated, She mightn’t like him barging in this way. But who could be expected always to await the pleasure of that prissy clerk?

  Behind him he heard the cage stop at the ground floor.

  He noticed that the door he faced was ajar.

  He pushed it open a few inches.

  “Marcia,” he called. “Marcia?” His voice came out huskily.

  He stepped inside. The white-shaded lamp showed dull pearl walls, white bookcase, blue overstuffed sofa with a coat and yellow silk scarf tossed across it, and a faint curl of cigarette smoke.

  The bedroom door was open. He crossed to it, his footsteps soundless on the thick carpet. He stopped.

  Marcia was sitting at the dressing table. She was wearing a light gray negligee with a silvery sheen. It touched and fell away from her figure in graceful folds, half revealing her breasts. A squashed cigarette smoldered in a tiny silver ash tray. She was lacquering her nails.

  That was all. But to Carr it seemed that he had blundered into one of those elaborately realistic department store window displays. He almost expected to see faces peering in the dark window, seven stories up.

  Modern bedroom in rose and smoke. Seated mannequin at vanity table. Perhaps a placard in script: “Point up your Pinks with Gray.”

  He stood stupidly a step short of the doorway, saying nothing.

  In the mirror her eyes seemed to meet his. She went on lacquering her nails.

  She might be angry with him for not phoning from downstairs. But it wasn’t like Marcia to choose this queer way of showing her displeasure.

  Or was it?

  He watched her face in the mirror. It was the one he had forgotten, all right. There were the firm lips, the cool forehead framed by reddish hair, the fleeting quirks of expression—definitely hers.

  Yet recognition did not bring the sense of absolute certainty it should. Something was lacking—the feeling of a reality behind the face, animating it.

  SHE FINISHED her nails and held them out to dry. The negligee fell open a bit further.

  Could this be another of her tricks for tormenting him? Marcia, he knew, thoroughly enjoyed his helpless desire and especially those fits of shyness for which he berated himself afterwards.

  But she wouldn’t draw it out so long.

  A sharp surge of uneasiness went through Carr. This was nonsensical, he told himself. In another moment she must move or speak—or he must. But his throat was constricted and his legs felt numb.

  And then it came back: the big fear.

  What if Marcia weren’t really alive at all, not consciously alive, but just a part of a dance of mindless atoms, a clockworks show that included the whole world, except himself? Merely by coming a few minutes ahead of time, merely by omitting to shave, he had broken the clockworks rhythm. That was why the clerk hadn’t spoken to him, why the operator had been asleep, why Marcia didn’t greet him. It wasn’t time yet for those little acts in the clockworks show.

  The creamy telephone tinkled. Lifting it gingerly, fingers stiffly spread, the figure at the vanity held it to her ear a moment and said, “Thank you. Tell him to come up.”

  She inspected her nails, waved them, looked at her reflection in the glass, belted her negligee.

  Through the open door Carr could hear the drone of the
rising cage.

  Marcia started to get up, hesitated, sat down again, smiled.

  The cage stopped. There was the soft jolt of its door opening. He heard the operator’s voice, but no one else’s. He waited for footsteps. They didn’t come.

  That was his elevator, he thought with a shudder, the one he was supposed to come up in. The woman had brought it to seven without him, for that was part of the clockworks show.

  Suddenly Marcia turned. “Darling,” she called, rising quickly, “the door’s open.” She came toward him.

  The hairs on the back of his neck lifted. She wasn’t looking straight at him, he felt, but at something behind him. She was watching him come through the living room.

  She moistened her lips. Her arms went out to him. Just before they touched him, Carr jerked back.

  The arms closed on air. Marcia lifted her face. Her back arched as if there were a strong arm around it. There was the sloppy sound of a kiss.

  Carr shook as he backed across the living room. “That’s enough for you, darling,” he heard Marcia murmur sharply to the air. He spun around and darted into the hall—not to the elevator, but to the stairs beyond.

  As he plunged down them in strides that were nightmarishly long and slow, a thought popped to the surface of his whirling mind.

  The meaning of a phrase he had read uncomprehendingly an hour before: “. . . the lion’s tail near the five sisters . . .”

  CHAPTER V

  If you catch on to the secret, you’d better keep your mouth shut. It never brought anybody anything but grief. If you’ve got friends, the kindest thing you can do for them is not to let them find out . . .

  FEW PEOPLE walk on the east side of Michigan Boulevard after dark. At such times the Art Institute looks very dead. Headlights coming down Adams play on its dark stone like archeologists’ flashlights. The two majestic bronze lions might be guarding the portals of some monument of Roman antiquity. The tail of one of the lions, conveniently horizontal and kept polished by the casual elbows of art students and idlers, now served as a backrest for the frightened girl.

  She silently watched Carr mount the steps. He might be part of some dream she was having. A forbiddingly cold wind was whipping in from the lake and she had buttoned up her cardigan. Carr stopped a half dozen paces away.

  After a moment she smiled and said, “Hello.”

  Carr smiled jerkily in reply and moved toward her. His first words surprised him.

  “I met your small dark man with glasses. He ran away.”

  “Oh? I’m sorry. He really might be your friend. But he’s . . . timid,” she added, her lips setting in bitter lines.

  “He can’t always be depended on. He was supposed to meet me here, but . . .” She glanced, shrugging her shoulders, toward the electric numerals glowing high above the north end of Grant Park. “I had some vague idea of introducing the two of you, but now I’m not so sure.” The wind blew strands of her shoulder-length hair against her cheek. “I never really thought you’d come, you know. Leaving notes like that is just a way I have of tempting fate. You weren’t supposed to guess. How did you know it was one of these lions?”

  Carr laughed. “Taft’s Great Lakes fountain is a minor obsession of mine. I always try to figure out which of the five sisters is which lake. And of course that’s just around the corner.” He instantly grew serious again and moved closer to her. “I want to ask you a question,” he said.

  “Yes?” she asked guardedly.

  “Do you think I’m insane?”

  Headlights from Adams swept across her gray eyes, enigmatic as those of a sphinx. “That’s hardly a question for a stranger to answer.” She looked at him a while longer and shook her head. “No, I don’t,” she said softly.

  “All right,” he said, “grant I’m sane. Then answer this: Do you think it’s reasonably possible for a sane person to meet eight or ten insane ones, some of them people he knows, all in one day? And I don’t mean in an asylum.”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. Then, unwillingly, “I suppose not.”

  “All right,” he said. “Then comes the big question: Do you think . . . (He had trouble getting the words out) “. . . that most people are really alive?”

  She seemed to shrink in size. Her face was all in shadow. “I don’t understand,” she faltered.

  “I mean,” he said, “do you really believe there’s anything behind most people’s foreheads but blackness? Do they really think and act, or are they just mindless parts of a mindless pattern?” His voice grew stronger. “Do you think that all that—” (He swept his hand along the boulevard and the towering buildings and the darkness) “—is really alive, or contains life? Or is all Chicago just a big machine, with people for parts?”

  SHE FAIRLY sprang at him from the shadows. The next instant her hands were gripping his together and her strained and apprehensive face was inches from his own.

  “Never think that!” she told him rapidly. “Don’t even toy with such crazy ideas!”

  “Why not?” he demanded, his prisoned hands throbbing as if from an electric shock. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen today—”

  Without warning she laughed gayly, loosed his tingling hands, and spun away from him. “Idiot!” she said in a voice that rippled with laughter, “I know what’s happened to you. You’ve been scared by life. You’ve magnified a few funny things into a morbid idea.”

  “A few funny things?” he demanded, confused by her startling change of behavior. “Why, if you’d seen—”

  “I don’t care!” she interrupted with triumphant gayety. “Whatever it is, it’s foolishness.” Her eyes, dancing with an infectious excitement, fixed on his. “Come with me,” she said, “and I’ll show you that all that—” (She swept her hand, as he had, at the boulevard) “—is safe and warm and friendly.”

  “But—” he began.

  She danced toward him. “Is it a date?” she asked.

  “Well—”

  “Is it, Mr. Serious?”

  He couldn’t stop a big grin. “Yes,” he told her.

  She held up a finger. “You’ve got to remember that this is my date, that I pick the places we go and that whatever I do, you fall in with it.”

  “Like follow-the-leader?”

  “Exactly like follow-the-leader. Tonight I’m showing you Chicago. That’s the agreement.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Then come on.”

  “What’s your name?” he said, catching her elbow.

  “Jane,” she told him.

  “Jane what?”

  “You don’t need to know,” she replied impishly.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, pulling them to a stop. “Is it Jane Gregg?” He couldn’t tell from her face whether that question meant anything to her. “I won’t tell you,” she said, pulling at him.

  “Do you know Tom Elvested?” he continued.

  “I won’t answer foolish questions like that,” she assured him. “Oh come on, you’ve got to get in the spirit of the thing, what’s-your-name.”

  “Carr. Two R’s,” he told her. “Then we turn north here, Carr,” she told him.

  . “Where to?” he asked.

  She looked at him severely. “Follow the leader,” she reminded him and laughed and raced ahead. He had to run to keep up with her, and by that time he was laughing too.

  They were a block from the Institute when Carr asked, “What about your friend, though—the small dark man with glasses?”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “If he comes now, he can have a date with the five sisters.”

  “Incidently,” Carr asked, “‘what’s his real name?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Are they after him too?” Carr persisted, his voice growing somber. “Who?”

  “Those three people you warned me against.”

  “I don’t want to talk about them.” Her voice was suddenly flat. “They’re obscene and horrible and I don’t want to think a
bout them at all.”

  “But look, Jane, what sort of hold do they have on you? Why did you let that big blonde slap you without doing anything?”

  “I tell you I won’t talk about them! If you go on like this, there won’t be any date.” She turned on him, gripping hi§ arm. “Oh Carr, you’re spoiling everything,” she told him, close to tears. “Do get in the spirit, like you promised.”

  “All right,” he said gently, “I will, really.” He linked his arm through hers and for a while they walked in silence. The wind and the gloom and the wide empty sidewalk seemed strange and lonely so close to the boulevard with its humming cars and its fringe of people and lights on the other side.

  Her arm tightened a little on his. “This is fun,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Having a date.”

  “I shouldn’t think you’d have any trouble,” he told her.

  “Oh? You don’t know anything about my troubles—and we’re not going to talk about them tonight! Here we turn again.”

  THEY WERE opposite the public library. She led him across the boulevard. It seemed to Carr the loneliness followed them, for they passed only two people as they went by the library.

  They squinted against blown grit. A sheet of newspaper flapped against their faces. Carr ripped it away and it swooped up into the air.

  Jane led him down a cobbled alley choked with fire escapes, down some steps and into a little tavern.

  The place was dimly lit. None of the booths were occupied. At the bar two men contemplated half empty glasses of beer.

  “What’ll you have?” Carr asked Jane.

  “Let’s wait a bit,” she said, steering him instead to the last booth. Neither the two drinkers nor the fat and solemn bartender looked up as they went past.

  They looked at each other across the splotched table. Color had come into Jane’s cheeks. Carr found himself thinking of college days, when there had been hip flasks and roadsters and checks from home and classes to cut.