Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  The Governor was still on his knees with his sword held hilt up like a cross doing the long speech that begins, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” And of course the Ghost had his cloak drawn around him so you couldn’t see what was under it—and the little green light still wasn’t lit in his helmet. Tonight the absence of that theatric touch made him a more frightening figure—certainly to me, who wanted so much to see Guthrie’s ravaged old face and be reassured by it. Though there was still enough comedy left in the ragged edges of my thoughts that I could imagine Guthrie’s pugnacious son-in-law whispering angrily to those around him that Gilbert Usher was so jealous of his great father-in-law that he wouldn’t let him show his face on the stage.

  Then came the transition to the following scene where the Ghost has led Hamlet off alone with him—just a five-second complete darkening of the stage while a scrim is dropped—and at last the Ghost spoke those first lines of “Mark me” and “My hour is almost come, When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames Must render up myself.”

  If any of us had any worries about the Ghost blowing up on his lines or slurring them drunkenly, they were taken care of now. Those lines were delivered with the greatest authority and effect. And I was almost certain that it was Guthrie’s rightful voice—at least I was at first—but doing an even better job than the good one he had always done of getting the effect of distance and otherworldliness and hopeless alienation from all life on Earth. The theater became silent as death, yet at the same time I could imagine the soft pounding of a thousand hearts, thousands of shivers crawling—and I knew that Francis Farley Scott, whose shoulder was pressed against mine, was trembling.

  Each word the Ghost spoke was like a ghost itself, mounting the air and hanging poised for an impossible extra instant before it faded towards eternity.

  Those great lines came: “I am thy father’s spirit; Doomed for a certain term to walk the night…” and just at that moment the idea came to me that Guthrie Boyd might be dead, that he might have died and be lying unnoticed somewhere between his children’s home and the theater—no matter what Props had said or the rest of us had seen—and that his ghost might have come to give a last performance. And on the heels of that shivery impossibility came the thought that similar and perhaps even eerier ideas must be frightening Monica. I knew I had to go to her.

  So while the Ghost’s words swooped and soared in the dark—marvelous black-plumed birds—I again made that nervous cross behind the backdrop.

  Everyone stage right was standing as frozen and absorbed—motionless loomings—as I’d left John and F. F. I spotted Monica at once. She’d moved forward from the switchboard and was standing, crouched a little, by the big floodlight that throws some dimmed blue on the backdrop and across the back of the stage. I went to her just as the Ghost was beginning his exit stage left, moving backward along the edge of the light from the flood, but not quite in it, and reciting more lonely and eerily than I’d ever heard them before, those memorable last lines:

  “Fare thee well at once!

  “The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,

  “And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire;

  “Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.”

  One second passed, then another, and then there came two unexpected bursts of sound at the same identical instant: Monica screamed and a thunderous applause started out front, touched off by Guthrie’s people, of course, but this time swiftly spreading to all the rest of the audience.

  I imagine it was the biggest hand the Ghost ever got in the history of the theater. In fact, I never heard of him getting a hand before. It certainly was a most inappropriate place to clap, however much the performance deserved it. It broke the atmosphere and the thread of the scene.

  Also, it drowned out Monica’s scream, so that only I and a few of those behind me heard it.

  At first I thought I’d made her scream, by touching her as I had Guthrie, suddenly, like an idiot, from behind. But instead of shrinking or dodging away she turned and clung to me, and kept clinging too even after I’d drawn her back and Gertrude Grainger and Sybil Jameson had closed in to comfort her and hush her gasping sobs and try to draw her away from me.

  By this time the applause was through and Governor and Don and Joe were taking up the broken scene and knitting together its finish as best they could, while the floods came up little by little, changing to rosy, to indicate dawn breaking over Elsinore.

  Then Monica mastered herself and told us in quick whispers what had made her scream. The Ghost, she said, had moved for a moment into the edge of the blue floodlight, and she had seen for a moment through his veil, and what she had seen had been a face like Shakespeare’s. Just that and no more. Except that at the moment when she told us—later she became less certain—she was sure it was Shakespeare himself and no one else.

  I discovered then that when you hear something like that you don’t exclaim or get outwardly excited. Or even inwardly, exactly. It rather shuts you up. I know I felt at the same time extreme awe and a renewed irritation at the Ouija board. I was deeply moved, yet at the same time pettishly irked, as if some vast adult creature had disordered the toy world of my universe.

  It seemed to hit Sybil and even Gertrude the same way. For the moment we were shy about the whole thing, and so, in her way, was Monica, and so were the few others who had overheard in part or all what Monica had said.

  I knew we were going to cross the stage in a few more seconds when the curtain came down on that scene, ending the first act, and stage lights came up. At least I knew that I was going across. Yet I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  When the curtain did come down—with another round of applause from out front—and we started across, Monica beside me with my arm still tight around her, there came a choked-off male cry of horror from ahead to shock and hurry us. I think about a dozen of us got stage left about the same time, including of course the Governor and the others who had been on stage.

  F. F. and Props were standing inside the doorway to the empty prop room and looking down into the hidden part of the L. Even from the side, they both looked pretty sick. Then F. F. knelt down and almost went out of view, while Props hunched over him with his natural stoop.

  As we craned around Props for a look—myself among the first, just beside the Governor, we saw something that told us right away that this Ghost wasn’t ever going to be able to answer that curtain call they were still fitfully clapping for out front, although the house lights must be up by now for the first intermission.

  Guthrie Boyd was lying on his back in his street clothes. His face looked gray, the eyes staring straight up. While swirled beside him lay the Ghost’s cloak and veil and the helmet and an empty fifth of whiskey.

  Between the two conflicting shocks of Monica’s revelation and the body in the prop room, my mind was in a useless state. And from her helpless incredulous expression I knew Monica felt the same. I tried to put things together and they wouldn’t fit anywhere.

  F. F. looked up at us over his shoulder. “He’s not breathing,” he said. “I think he’s gone.” Just the same he started loosing Boyd’s tie and shirt and pillowing his head on the cloak. He handed the whisky bottle back to us through several hands and Joe Rubens got rid of it.

  The Governor sent out front for a doctor and within two minutes Harry Grossman was bringing us one from the audience who’d left his seat number and bag at the box office. He was a small man—Guthrie would have made two of him—and a bit awestruck, I could see, though holding himself with greater professional dignity because of that, as we made way for him and then crowded in behind.

  He confirmed F. F.’s diagnosis by standing up quickly after kneeling only for a few seconds where F. F. had. Then he said hurriedly to the Governor, as if the words were being surprised out of him against his professional caution, “Mr. Usher, if I hadn’t heard this man giving that great performance just now, I’d think he’d been dead for an hour or more.”

  He sp
oke low and not all of us heard him, but I did and so did Monica, and there was Shock Three to go along with the other two, raising in my mind for an instant the grisly picture of Guthrie Boyd’s spirit, or some other entity, willing his dead body to go through with that last performance. Once again I unsuccessfully tried to fumble together the parts of this night’s mystery.

  The little doctor looked around at us slowly and puzzledly. He said, “I take it he just wore the cloak over his street clothes?” He paused. Then,“He did play the Ghost?” he asked us.

  The Governor and several others nodded, but some of us didn’t at once and I think F. F. gave him a rather peculiar look, for the doctor cleared his throat and said, “I’ll have to examine this man as quickly as possible in a better place and light. Is there—?” The Governor suggested the couch in his dressing room and the doctor designated Joe Rubens and John McCarthy and Francis Farley Scott to carry the body. He passed over the Governor, perhaps out of awe, but Hamlet helped just the same, his black garb most fitting.

  It was odd the doctor picked the older men—I think he did it for dignity. And it was odder still that he should have picked two ghosts to help carry a third, though he couldn’t have known that.

  As the designated ones moved forward, the doctor said, “Please stand back, the rest of you.”

  It was then that the very little thing happened which made all the pieces of this night’s mystery fall into place—for me, that is, and for Monica too, judging from the way her hand trembled in and then tightened around mine. We’d been given the key to what had happened. I won’t tell you what it was until I’ve knit together the ends of this story.

  The second act was delayed perhaps a minute, but after that we kept to schedule, giving a better performance than usual—I never knew the Graveyard Scene to carry so much feeling, or the bit with Yorick’s skull to be so poignant.

  Just before I made my own first entrance, Joe Rubens snatched off my street hat—I’d had it on all this while—and I played all of Guildenstern wearing a wristwatch, though I don’t imagine anyone noticed.

  F. F. played the Ghost as an offstage voice when he makes his final brief appearance in the Closet Scene. He used Guthrie’s voice to do it, imitating him very well. It struck me afterwards as ghoulish—but right.

  Well before the play ended, the doctor had decided he could say that Guthrie had died of a heart seizure, not mentioning the alcoholism. The minute the curtain came down on the last act, Harry Grossman informed Guthrie’s son and daughter and brought them backstage. They were much moved, though hardly deeply smitten, seeing they’d been out of touch with the old boy for a decade. However, they quickly saw it was a Grand and Solemn Occasion and behaved accordingly, especially Guthrie’s pugnacious son-in-law.

  Next morning the two Wolverton papers had headlines about it and Guthrie got his biggest notices ever in the Ghost. The strangeness of the event carried the item around the world—a six-line filler, capturing the mind for a second or two, about how a once-famous actor had died immediately after giving a performance as the Ghost in Hamlet, though in some versions, of course, it became Hamlet’s Ghost.

  The funeral came on the afternoon of the third day, just before our last performance in Wolverton, and the whole company attended along with Guthrie’s children’s crowd and many other Wolvertonians. Old Sybil broke down and sobbed.

  Yet to be a bit callous, it was a neat thing that Guthrie died where he did, for it saved us the trouble of having to send for relatives and probably take care of the funeral ourselves. And it did give old Guthrie a grand finish, with everyone outside the company thinking him a hero-martyr to the motto The Show Must Go On. And of course we knew too that in a deeper sense he’d really been that.

  We shifted around in our parts and doubled some to fill the little gaps Guthrie had left in the plays, so that the Governor didn’t have to hire another actor at once. For me, and I think for Monica, the rest of the season was very sweet. Gertrude and Sybil carried on with the Ouija sessions alone.

  And now I must tell you about the very little thing which gave myself and Monica a satisfying solution to the mystery of what had happened that night.

  You’ll have realized that it involved Props. Afterwards I asked him straight out about it and he shyly told me that he really couldn’t help me there. He’d had this unaccountable devilish compulsion to get drunk and his mind had blanked out entirely from well before the performance until he found himself standing with F. F. over Guthrie’s body at the end of the first act. He didn’t remember the Ouija-scare or a word of what he’d said to me about theaters and time machines—or so he always insisted.

  F. F. told us that after the Ghost’s last exit he’d seen him—very vaguely in the dimness—lurch across backstage into the empty prop room and that he and Props had found Guthrie lying there at the end of the scene. I think the queer look F. F.—the old reality-fuddling rogue!—gave the doctor was to hint to him that he had played the Ghost, though that wasn’t something I could ask him about.

  But the very little thing—When they were picking up Guthrie’s body and the doctor told the rest of us to stand back, Props turned as he obeyed and straightened his shoulders and looked directly at Monica and myself, or rather a little over our heads. He appeared compassionate yet smilingly serene as always and for a moment transfigured, as if he were the eternal observer of the stage of life and this little tragedy were only part of an infinitely vaster, endlessly interesting pattern.

  I realized at that instant that Props could have done it, that he’d very effectively guarded the doorway to the empty prop room during our searches, that the Ghost’s costume could be put on or off in seconds (though Props’s shoulders wouldn’t fill the cloak like Guthrie’s), and that I’d never once before or during the play seen him and the Ghost at the same time. Yes, Guthrie had arrived a few minutes before me… and died… and Props, nerved to it by drink, had covered for him.

  While Monica, as she told me later, knew at once that here was the greatbrowed face she’d glimpsed for a moment through the greenish gauze.

  Clearly there had been four ghosts in Hamlet that night—John McCarthy, Francis Farley Scott, Guthrie Boyd, and the fourth who had really played the role. Mentally blacked out or not, knowing the lines from the many times he’d listened to Hamlet performed in this life, or from buried memories of times he’d taken the role in the days of Queen Elizabeth the First, Billy (or Willy) Simpson, or simply Willy S., had played the Ghost, a good trouper responding automatically to an emergency.

  Gonna roll the Bones

  SUDDENLY JOE SLATTERMILL KNEW FOR SURE he’d have to get out quick or else blow his top and knock out with the shrapnel of his skull the props and patches holding up his decaying home, that was like a house of big wooden and plaster and wallpaper cards except for the huge fireplace and ovens and chimney across the kitchen from him. Those were stone-solid enough, though. The fireplace was chin-high, at least twice that long, and filled from end to end with roaring flames. Above were the square doors of the ovens in a row—his Wife baked for part of their living. Above the ovens was the wall-long mantelpiece, too high for his Mother to reach or Mr. Guts to jump any more, set with all sorts of ancestral curios, but any of them that weren’t stone or glass or china had been so dried and darkened by decades of heat that they looked like nothing but shrunken human heads and black golf balls. At one end were clustered his Wife’s square gin bottles. Above the mantelpiece hung one old chromo, so high and so darkened by soot and grease that you couldn’t tell whether the swirls and fat cigar shape were a whaleback steamer plowing through a hurricane or a spaceship plunging through a storm of light-driven dust motes.

  As soon as Joe curled his toes inside his boots, his Mother knew what he was up to.“Going bumming,” she mumbled with conviction.“Pants pockets full of cartwheels of house money, too, to spend on sin.”And she went back to munching the long shreds she stripped fumblingly with her right hand off the turkey carcass set close
to the terrible heat, her left hand ready to fend off Mr. Guts, who stared at her yellow-eyed, gaunt-flanked, with long mangy tail a-twitch. In her dirty dress, streaky as the turkey’s sides, Joe’s Mother looked like a bent brown bag and her fingers were lumpy twigs.

  Joe’s Wife knew as soon or sooner, for she smiled thin-eyed at him over her shoulder from where she towered at the centermost oven. Before she

  closed its door, Joe glimpsed that she was baking two long, flat, narrow, fluted loaves and one high, round-domed one. She was thin as death and disease in her violet wrapper. Without looking, she reached out a yard-long, skinny arm for the nearest gin bottle and downed a warm slug and smiled again. And without a word spoken, Joe knew she’d said, “You’re going out and gamble and get drunk and lay a floozy and come home and beat me and go to jail for it,” and he had a flash of the last time he’d been in the dark gritty cell and she’d come by moonlight, which showed the green and yellow lumps on her narrow skull where he’d hit her, to whisper to him through the tiny window in back and slip him a half pint through the bars.

  And Joe knew for certain that this time it would be that bad and worse, but just the same he heaved up himself and his heavy, muffledly clanking pockets and shuffled straight to the door, muttering, “Guess I’ll roll the bones, up the pike a stretch and back,” swinging his bent, knobby-elbowed arms like paddlewheels to make a little joke about his words.

  When he’d stepped outside, he held the door open a hand’s breadth behind him for several seconds. When he finally closed it, a feeling of deep misery struck him. Earlier years, Mr. Guts would have come streaking along to seek fights and females on the roofs and fences, but now the big tom was content to stay home and hiss by the fire and snatch for turkey and dodge a broom, quarreling and comforting with two housebound women. Nothing had followed Joe to the door but his Mother’s chomping and her gasping breaths and the clink of the gin bottle going back on the mantel and the creaking of the floor boards under his feet.