empyrean.
Mr. Stillman had placed his forearms on the railing round
the roof. Mavis had sunk her head between her knees. It was
only Mrs. Iblis who looked upwards, and what she saw nearly
finished her.
When Mrs. Iblis came round, the radiance in the air was
much diminished. Mavis and Mr. Stillman had lifted her into
Mavis’s deck chair. It was cold.
Mrs. Iblis peered through the railings.. There was no one
in sight. Only the light in Mrs. Coner’s bedroom burned reddish through the glimmer.
“ Where are they?”
“ They have merged,” said Mr. Stillman. “ They are at
one.” He was rubbing her left wrist. Mavis, now apparently
much recovered, was rubbing her right.
“ Where have they gone to?”
Mavis made a slight gesture away from the house. “ We
shan’t see them any more.”
Mrs. Iblis hardly dared to follow with her eyes. Then she
saw that the radiance had entirely faded. It was a starry,
moonless night without a cloud in the sky.
“ I no longer feel frightened.”
“ Nor I ,” said Mavis. “ Only cold. Why don’t we?”
“ Why should you?” said Mr. Stillman. “ They’ve got what
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they wanted. As everyone does.” He retied the cord of his
dressing gown. ‘‘Shall we go down?” He led the way.
“ I must look for Mr. Coner,” said Mavis as they descended. Mrs. Iblis realized that she had not noticed her host among the group in the garden.
They found him sitting in the empty hall. He was drunk
and still drinking. The key of his private spirit store was
gripped tightly in his hand. The hall looked as if recently
swept by a cyclone.
Mr. Stillman shut the open front door.
‘‘Please God,” said Coner in weak and sozzled accents,
‘‘please God give me something larger than myself.”
He dropped into stupor, knocking a full glass to the floor.
The disordered room began to reek of whiskey.
“ Let me give you a hand,” said Mr. Stillman to Mavis.
They began to ease Coner toward the lift. “ I think y o u ’d
better get some sleep,” said Mr. Stillman to Mrs. Iblis.
“ Good night. See you in the morning.” Mavis merely smiled
at her.
Just as the cortege had passed through the brown curtains,
the front door burst open once more. It was Sister Nuper and
her friends. Their clothes seemed much damaged and covered with mud. It was as if they had been riding to hounds.
But they all seemed as cheerful and gay as ever.
Mrs. Iblis had withdrawn into the shadows. She rather
gathered that the revelers were contemplating final drinks.
Sister Nuper, graceful even in fatigue, dropped into the
armchair just vacated by her employer. The bad light fell
upon her beautiful features. Her face was glistening in a way
Mrs. Iblis did not like. Her eyes were filled with such happiness that Mrs. Iblis was thoroughly scared all over again.
Unnoticed by the group of companions, Mrs. Iblis slipped
away. Rather than pass what was left of the night with such
a happy woman, she hastened to that room with the painted
Crucifixion in it, she stuffed her possessions into her suitcase,
and she left the house by a window at the back which had
been carelessly left open by the hired staff.
Fritz Leiber
Belsen Express
Fritz Leiber was a correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and
an admirer of Robert E. Howard, the great dark fantasist
of the pulps and inventor of the “ heroic fantasy” genre
(typified in his Conan the Barbarian stories). Leiber's first
stories appeared in Unknown magazine and Astounding— he was a Campbell writer who later became the standard bearer of 1950s SF with revolutionary stories
in Galaxy magazine. But his early triumphs were in the
horror mode: the classic novel Conjure Wife, and the
stories collected in his first book, Night's Black Agents
(Arkham House, 1949). His stories of urban horrors were
a key factor in establishing the new horror mode of Unknown magazine. Now an elder statesman of his field, he continues to produce a tale or two a year over the
past decade, including this World Fantasy A w ard -
winner, “ Belsen Express,” a classic examination of the
most egregious of horrors of the century, an understated
contrast to the city horrors of Ellison or Bradbury.
George Simister watched the blue flames writhe beautifully in the grate, like dancing girls drenched with alcohol and set afire, and congratulated himself on having survived well through the middle of the Twentieth Century
without getting involved in military service, world-saving, or
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any activities that interfered with the earning and enjoyment
o f money.
Outside rain dripped, a storm snarled at the city from the
outskirts, and sudden gusts of wind produced in the chimney
a sound like the mourning of doves. Simister shimmied himself a fraction of an inch deeper in his easy chair and took a slow sip of diluted scotch—he was sensitive to most cheaper
liquors. Simister’s physiology was on the delicate side; during his childhood certain tastes and odors, playing on an elusive heart weakness, had been known to make him faint.
The outspread newspaper started to slip from his knee. He
detained it, let his glance rove across the next page, noted a
headline about an uprising in Prague like that in Hungary in
1956 and murmured, “ Damn Slavs,” noted another about
border fighting around Israel and muttered, “ Damn Jews,”
and let the paper go. He took another sip of his drink,
yawned, and watched a virginal blue flame flutter fright-
enedly the length of the log before it turned to a white smoke
ghost. There was a sharp knock-knock.
Simister jumped and then got up and hurried tight-lipped
to the front door. Lately some of the neighborhood children
had been trying to annoy him probably because his was the
most respectable and best-kept house on the block. Doorbell
ringing, obscene sprayed scrawls, that sort of thing. And
hardly children—young rowdies rather, who needed rough
handling and a trip to the police station. He was really angry
by the time he reached the door and swung it wide. There
was nothing but a big wet empty darkness. A chilly draft
spattered a couple of cold drops on him. Maybe the noise
had come from the fire. He shut the door and started back to
the living room, but a small pile of books untidily nested in
wrapping paper on the hall table caught his eye and he grimaced.
They constituted a blotchily addressed parcel which the
postman had delivered by mistake a few mornings ago. Simister could probably have deciphered the address, for it was clearly on this street, and rectified the postman’s error, but
Belsen Express
375
he did not choose to abet the activities of illiterates with leaky
pens. And the delivery must have been a mistake for the top
book was titled The Scourge o f the Swastika and the other
two had similar titles, and Simister ha
d an acute distaste for
books that insisted on digging up that satisfactorily buried
historical incident known as Nazi Germany.
The reason for this distaste was a deeply hidden fear that
George Simister shared with millions, but that he had never
revealed even to his wife. It was a quite unrealistic and now
completely anachronistic fear of the Gestapo.
It had begun years before the Second World War, with the
first small reports from Germany of minority persecutions
and organized hoodlumism—the sense of something reaching
out across the dark Atlantic to threaten his life, his security,
and his confidence that he would never have to suffer pain
except in a hospital.
Of course it had never got at all close to Simister, but it
had exercised an evil tyranny over his imagination. There was
one nightmarish series of scenes that had slowly grown in his
mind and then had kept bothering him for a long time. It
began with a thunderous knocking, of boots and rifle butts
rather than fists, and a shouted demand: “ Open up! It’s the
Gestapo.” Next he would find himself in a stream of frantic
people being driven toward a portal where a division was
made between those reprieved and those slated for immediate
extinction. Last he would be inside a closed motor van
jammed so tightly with people that it was impossible to move.
After a long time the van would stop, but the motor would
keep running, and from the floor, leisurely seeking the crevices between the packed bodies, the entrapped exhaust fumes would begin to mount.
Now in the shadowy hall the same horrid movie had a
belated showing. Simister shook his head sharply, as if he
could shake the scenes out, reminding himself that the Gestapo was dead and done with for more than ten years. He felt the angry impulse to throw in the fire the books responsible for the return of his waking nightmare. But he remem-
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Fritz Leiber
bered that books are hard to bum. He stared at them uneasily,
excited by thoughts of torture and confinement, concentration
and death camps, but knowing the nasty aftermath they left
in his mind. Again he felt a sudden impulse, this time to
bundle the books together and throw them in the trash can.
But that would mean getting wet, it could wait until tomorrow. He put the screen in front of the fire, which had died and was smoking like a crematory, and went up to bed.
Some hours later he waked with the memory of a thunderous knocking.
He started up, exclaiming, “ Those damned kids!” The
drawn shades seemed abnormally dark—probably they’d
thrown a stone through the street lamp.
He put one foot on the chilly floor. It was now profoundly
still. The storm had gone off like a roving cat. Simister
strained his ears. Beside him his wife breathed with irritating
evenness. He wanted to wake her and explain about the young
delinquents. It was criminal that they were permitted to roam
the streets at this hour. Girls with them too, likely as not.
The knocking was not repeated. Simister listened for footsteps going away, or for the creaking of boards that would betray a lurking presence on the porch.
After awhile he began to wonder if the knocking might not
have been part of a dream, or perhaps a final rumble of actual
thunder. He lay down and pulled the blankets up to his neck.
Eventually his muscles relaxed and he got to sleep.
At breakfast he told his wife about it.
“ George, it may have been burglars,” she said.
“ Don’t be stupid, Joan. Burglars don’t knock. If it was
anything it was those damned kids.”
“ Whatever it was, I wish you’d put a bigger bolt on the
front door.”
“ Nonsense. If I ’d known you were going to act this way I
wouldn’t have said anything. I told you it was probably just
the thunder.”
But next night at about the same hour it happened again.
This time there could be little question of dreaming. The
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377
knocking still reverberated in his ears. And there had been
words mixed with it, some sort of yapping in a foreign language. Probably the children of some of those European refugees who had settled in the neighborhood.
Last night they’d fooled him by keeping perfectly still after
banging on the door, but tonight he knew what to do. He
tiptoed across the bedroom and went down the stairs rapidly,
but quietly because of his bare feet. In the hall he snatched
up something to hit them with, then in one motion unlocked
and jerked open the door.
There was no one.
He stood looking at the darkness. He was puzzled as to
how they could have got away so quickly and silently. He
shut the door and switched on die light. Then he felt the thing
in his hand. It was one of the books. With a feeling of disgust
he dropped it on the others. He must remember to throw
them out first thing tomorrow.
But he overslept and had to rush. The feeling of disgust or
annoyance, or something akin, must have lingered, however,
for he found himself sensitive to things he wouldn’t ordinarily
have noticed. People especially. The swollen-handed man
seemed deliberately surly as he counted Simister’s pennies
and handed him the paper. The tight-lipped woman at the
gate hesitated suspiciously, as if he were trying to pass off a
last month’s ticket.
And when he was hurrying up the stairs in response to an
approaching rumble, he brushed against a little man in an
oversize coat and received in return a glance that gave him a
positive shock.
Simister vaguely remembered having seen the little man
several times before. He had the thin nose, narrow-set eyes
and receding chin that is by a stretch of the imagination described as “ rat-faced.” In the movies he’d have played a stool pigeon. The flapping overcoat was rather comic.
But there seemed to be something at once so venomous
and sly, so time-bidingly vindictive, in the glance he gave
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Fritz Leiber
Simister that the latter was taken aback and almost missed
the train.
He just managed to squeeze through the automatically
closing door of the smoker after the barest squint at the sign
to assure himself that the train was an express. His heart was
pounding in a way that another time would have worried him,
but now he was immersed in a savage pleasure at having
thwarted the man in the oversize coat. The latter hadn’t hurried fast enough and Simister had made no effort to hold open the door for him.
As a smooth surge of electric power sent them sliding away
from the station Simister pushed his way from the vestibule
into the car and snagged a strap. From the next one already
swayed his chief commuting acquaintance, a beefy, suspiciously red-nosed, irritating man named Holstrom, now reading a folded newspaper one-handed. He shoved a headline in Simister’s face. The latter knew what to expect.
“ Atomic Weapons for West Germany,’’ he read tonelessly.
Holstrom was always trying to get him into outworn argumen
ts about totalitarianism, Nazi Germany, racial prejudice and the like. “ Well, what about it?”
Holstrom shrugged. “ It’s a natural enough step, I suppose,
but it started me thinking about the top Nazis and whether
we really got all of them.”
“ Of course,” Simister snapped.
“ I ’m not so sure,” Holstrom said. “ I imagine quite a few
of them got away and are still hiding out somewhere.”
But Simister refused die bait. The question bored him. Who
talked about the Nazis any more? For that matter, the whole
trip this morning was boring; the smoker was overcrowded;
and when they finally piled out at the downtown terminus,
the rude jostling increased his irritation.
The crowd was approaching an iron fence that arbitrarily
split the stream of hurrying people into two sections which
reunited a few steps farther on. Beside the fence a new guard
was standing, or perhaps Simister hadn’t noticed him before.
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379
A cocky-looking young fellow with close-cropped blond hair
and cold blue eyes.
Suddenly it occurred to Simister that he habitually passed
to the right of the fence, but that this morning he was being
edged over toward the left. This trifling circumstance, coming on top of everything else, made him boil. He deliberately pushed across the stream, despite angry murmurs and the
hard stare of the guard.
He had intended to walk the rest of the way, but his anger
made him forgetful and before he realized it he had climbed
aboard a bus. He soon regretted it. The bus was even more
crowded than the smoker and the standees were morose and
lumpy in their heavy overcoats. He was tempted to get off
and waste his fare, but he was trapped in the extreme rear
and moreover shrank from giving the impression of a man
who didn’t know his own mind.
Soon another annoyance was added to the ones already
plaguing him—a trace of exhaust fumes was seeping up from
the motor at the rear. He immediately began to feel ill. He
looked around indignantly, but the others did not seem to
notice the odor, or else accepted it fatalistically.
In a couple of blocks the fumes had become so bad that
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 46