Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (10 page)

My attitude still seemed to be fooling him, though he was studying me in a funny way, for he went on, “All right, Carr, I’ll show you the girls, or at least one, though we’ll have to put out all the lights after a bit—that’s why I keep the window shuttered so tightly—and wait for our eyes to accommodate. But which one should it be?—we have a large field of choice. I think since it’s your first and probably your last, it should be someone out of the ordinary, don’t you think, someone who’s just a little bit special? Wait a second—I know.” And his hand shot under the desk where it must have touched a hidden button, for a shallow drawer shot out from a place where there didn’t seem to be room for one. He took from it a single fat file folder that had been stored flat and laid it on his knees.

Then he began to talk again in his reminiscing voice and damn if it wasn’t so cool and knowing that it started to pull me back toward the river of girls and set me thinking that this man wasn’t really crazy, only extremely eccentric, maybe the eccentricity of genius, maybe he actually had hit on a hitherto unknown phenomenon depending on the more obscure properties of mind and matter, describing it to me in whimsically florid jargon, maybe he really had discovered something in one of the blind spots of modern science-and-psychology’s picture of the universe.

“Stars, Carr. Female stars. Movie queens. Royal princesses of the gray world, the ghostly chiaroscuro. Shadow empresses. They’re realer than people, Carr, realer than the great actresses or casting-couch champions they start as, for they’re symbols, Carr, symbols of our deepest longings and—yes—most hidden fears and secretest dreams. Each decade has several who achieve this more-than-life and less-than-life existence, but there’s generally one who’s the chief symbol, the top ghost, the dream who lures men along toward fulfillment and destruction. In the Twenties it was Garbo, Garbo the Free Soul—that’s my name for the symbol she became; her romantic mask heralded the Great Depression. In the late Thirties and early Forties it was Bergman the Brave Liberal; her dewiness and SwedishModern smile helped us accept World War Two. And now it’s”—he touched the bulky folder on his knees—“now it’s Evelyn Cordew the Good-Hearted Bait, the gal who accepts her troublesome sexiness with a resigned shrug and a foolish little laugh, and what general catastrophe she foreshadows we don’t know yet. But here she is, and in five ghost versions. Pleased, Carr?”

I was so completely taken by surprise that I couldn’t say anything for a moment. Either Slyker had guessed my real purpose in contacting him, or I was faced with a sizable coincidence. I wet my lips and then just nodded.

Slyker studied me and finally grinned. “Ah,” he said, “takes you aback a bit, doesn’t it? I perceive that in spite of your moderate sophistication you are one of the millions of males who have wistfully contemplated desertislanding with Delectable Evvie.A complex cultural phenomenon, Eva-Lynn Korduplewski. The child of a coal miner, educated solely in backstreet movie houses—shaped by dreams, you see, into a master dream, an empress dream-figure. A hysteric, Carr, in fact the most classic example I have ever encountered, with unequaled mediumistic capacities and also with a hypertrophied and utterly ruthless ambition. Riddled by hypochondrias, but with more real drive than a million other avid school-girls tangled and trapped in the labyrinth of film ambitions. Dumb as they come, no rational mind at all, but with ten times Einstein’s intuition—intuition enough, at least, to realize that the symbol our sex-exploiting culture craved was a girl who accepted like a happy martyr the incandescent sexuality men and Nature forced on her—and with the patience and malleability to let the feathersoft beating of the black-and-white light in a cheap cinema shape her into that symbol. I sometimes think of her as a girl in a cheap dress standing on the shoulder of a big throughway, her eyes almost blinded by the lights of an approaching bus. The bus stops and she climbs on, dragging a pet goat and breathlessly giggling explanations at the driver. The bus is Civilization.

“Everybody knows her life story, which has been put out in a surprisingly accurate form up to a point: her burlesque-line days, the embarrassingly faithful cartoon-series
Girl in a Fix
for which she posed, her bit parts, the amazingly timed success of the movies
Hydrogen Blonde
and
The Jean Harlow Saga
, her broken marriage to Jeff Crain—What was that, Carr? Oh, I thought you’d started to say something—and her hunger for the real stage and intellectual distinction and power. You can’t imagine how hungry for brains and power that girl became
after
she hit the top.

“I’ve been part of the story of that hunger, Carr, and I pride myself that I’ve done more to satisfy it than all the culture-johnnies she’s had on her payroll. Evelyn Cordew has learned a lot about herself right where you’re sitting, and also threaded her way past two psychotic crack-ups. The trouble is that when her third loomed up she didn’t come to me, she decided to put her trust in wheat germ and yogurt instead, so now she hates my guts—and perhaps her own, on that diet. She’s made two attempts on my life, Carr, and had me trailed by gangsters… and by other individuals. She’s talked about me to Jeff Crain, whom she still sees from time to time, and Jerry Smyslov and Nick De Grazia, telling them I’ve got a file of information on her burlesque days and a few of her later escapades, including some interesting photostats and the real dope on her income and her tax returns, and that I’m using it to blackmail her white. What she actually wants is her five ghosts back, and I can’t give them to her because they might kill her. Yes, kill her, Carr.” He flourished the shears for emphasis. “She claims that the ghosts I’ve taken from her have made her lose weight permanently—‘look like a skeleton’ are her words—and given her fits of mental blackout, a sort of psychic fading—whereas actually the ghosts have bled off from her a lot of malignant thoughts and destructive emotions, which could literally kill her (or someone!) if reabsorbed—they’re drenched with death-wish. Still, I hear she actually does look a little haggard, a trifle faded, in her last film, in spite of all Hollywood’s medico-cosmetic lore, so maybe she has a sort of case against me. I haven’t seen the film, I suppose you have. What do you think, Carr?”

I knew I’d been overworking the hesitation and the silent flattery, so I whipped out quickly, “I’d say it was due to her anemia. It seems to me that the anemia is quite enough to account for her loss of weight and her tired look.”

“Ah! You’ve slipped, Carr,” he lashed back, pointing at me triumphantly, except that instead of the outstretched finger there were those ridiculous, horrible shears.“Her anemia is one of the things that’s been kept top-secret, known only to a very few of her intimates. Even in all the half-humorous releases about her hypochondrias that’s one disease that has never been mentioned. I suspected you were from her when I got your note at the Countersign Club—the handwriting squirmed with tension and secrecy—but the
Justine
amused me—that was a fairly smart dodge—and your sorcerer’s apprentice act amused me too, and I happened to feel like talking. But I’ve been studying you all along, especially your reactions to certain test-remarks I dropped in from time to time, and now you’ve really slipped.” His voice was loud and clear, but he was shaking and giggling at the same time and his eyes showed white all the way around the irises. He drew back the shears a little, but clenched his fingers more tightly around them in a dagger grip, as he said with a chuckle, “Our dear little Evvie has sent all types up against me, to bargain for her ghosts or try to scare or assassinate me, but this is the first time she’s sent an idealistic fool. Carr, why didn’t you have the sense not to meddle?”

“Look here, Dr. Slyker,” I countered before he started answering for me, “it’s true I have a special purpose in contacting you. I never denied it. But I don’t know anything about ghosts or gangsters. I’m here on a simple, businesslike assignment from the same guy who lent me the
Justine
and who has no purpose whatever beyond protecting Evelyn Cordew. I’m representing Jeff Crain.”

That was supposed to calm him. Well, he did stop shaking and his eyes stopped wandering, but only because they were going over me like twin searchlights, and the giggle went out of his voice.

“Jeff Crain! Evvie just wants to murder me, but that cinematic Hemingway, that hulking guardian of hers, that human Saint Bernard tonguing the dry crumbs of their marriage—he wants to set the T-men on me, and the boys in blue and the boys in white too. Evvie’s agents I mostly kid along, even the gangsters, but for Jeff ’s agents I have only one answer.”

The silver shears pointed straight at my chest and I could see his muscles tighten like a fat tiger’s. I got ready for a spring of my own at the first movement this madman made toward me.

But the move he made was back across the desk with his free hand. I decided it was a good time to be on my feet in any case, but just as I sent my own muscles their orders I was hugged around the waist and clutched by the throat and grabbed by the wrists and ankles. By something soft but firm.

I looked down. Padded, broad, crescent-shaped clamps had sprung out of hidden traps in my chair and now held me as comfortably but firmly as a gang of competent orderlies. Even my hands were held by wide, velvet-soft cuffs that had snapped out of the bulbous arms. They were all a nondescript gray but even as I looked they began to change color to match my suit or skin, whichever they happened to border.

I wasn’t scared. I was merely frightened half to death.
“Surprised, Carr? You shouldn’t be.”Slyker was sitting back like an amiable schoolteacher and gently wagging the shears as if they were a ruler.“Streamlined unobtrusiveness and remote control are the essence of our times, especially in medical furniture. The buttons on my desk can do more than that. Hypos might slip out—hardly hygienic, but then germs are overrated. Or electrodes for shock. You see, restraints are necessary in my business. Deep mediumistic trance can occasionally produce convulsions as violent as those of electroshock, especially when a ghost is cut. And I sometimes administer electroshock too, like any garden-variety headshrinker. Also, to be suddenly and firmly grabbed is a profound stimulus to the unconscious and often elicits closely guarded facts from difficult patients. So a means of making my patients hold still is absolutely necessary—something swift, sure, tasteful and preferably without warning. You’d be surprised, Carr, at the situations in which I’ve been forced to activate those restraints. This time I prodded you to see just how dangerous you were. Rather to my surprise you showed yourself ready to take physical action against me. So I pushed the button. Now we’ll be able to deal comfortably with Jeff Crain’s problem… and yours. But first I’ve a promise to keep to you. I said I would show you one of Evelyn Cordew’s ghosts. It will take a little time and after a bit it will be necessary to turn out the lights.”
“Dr. Slyker,” I said as evenly as I could, “I—”
“Quiet! Activating a ghost for viewing involves certain risks. Silence is essential, though it will be necessary to use—very briefly— the suppressed Tchaikovsky music which I turned off so quickly earlier this evening.” He busied himself with the hi-fi for a few moments.“But partly because of that it will be necessary to put away all the other folders and the four ghosts of Evvie we aren’t using, and lock the file drawers. Otherwise there might be complications.”
I decided to try once more. “Before you go any further, Dr. Slyker,” I began, “I would really like to explain—”
He didn’t say another word, merely reached back across the desk again. My eyes caught something coming over my shoulder fast and the next instant it clapped down over my mouth and nose, not quite covering my eyes, but lapping up to them—something soft and dry and clinging and faintly crinkled-feeling. I gasped and I could feel the gag sucking in, but not a bit of air came through it. That scared me seven-eighths of the rest of the way to oblivion, of course, and I froze. Then I tried a very cautious inhalation and a little air did seep through. It was wonderfully cool coming into the furnace of my lungs, that little suck of air—I felt I hadn’t breathed for a week.
Slyker looked at me with a little smile.“I never say ‘Quiet’ twice, Carr. The foam plastic of that gag is another of Henri Artois’ inventions. It consists of millions of tiny valves. As long as you breathe softly—very, very softly, Carr—they permit ample air to pass, but if you gasp or try to shout through it, they’ll close up tight. A wonderfully soothing device. Compose yourself, Carr; your life depends on it.”
I have never experienced such utter helplessness. I found that the slightest muscular tension, even crooking a finger, made my breathing irregular enough so that the valves started to close and I was in the fringes of suffocation. I could see and hear what was going on, but I dared not react, I hardly dared think. I had to pretend that most of my body wasn’t there (the chameleon plastic helped!), only a pair of lungs working constantly but with infinite caution.
Slyker had just set the Cordew folder back in its drawer, without closing it, and started to gather up the other scattered folders, when he touched the desk again and the lights went out. I have mentioned that the place was completely sealed against light. The darkness was complete.
“Don’t be alarmed, Carr,” Slyker’s voice came chuckling through it. “In fact, as I am sure you realize, you had better not be. I can tidy up just as handily—working by touch is one of my major skills, my sight and hearing being rather worse than appears—and even your eyes must be fully accommodated if you’re to see anything at all. I repeat, don’t be alarmed, Carr, least of all by ghosts.”
I would never have expected it, but in spite of the spot I was in (which actually did seem to have its soothing effects), I still got a little kick—a very little one—out of thinking I was going to see some sort of secret vision of Evelyn Cordew, real in some sense or faked by a master faker. Yet at the same time, and I think beyond all my fear for myself, I felt a dispassionate disgust at the way Slyker reduced all human drives and desires to a lust for power, of which the chair imprisoning me, the “Siegfried Line” door, and the files of ghosts, real or imagined, were perfect symbols.
Among immediate worries, although I did a pretty good job of suppressing all of them, the one that nagged at me the most was that Slyker had admitted to me the inadequacy of his two major senses. I didn’t think he would make that admission to someone who was going to live very long.
The black minutes dragged on. I heard from time to time the rustle of folders, but only one soft thud of a file drawer closing, so I knew he wasn’t finished yet with the putting-away and locking-up job.
I concentrated the free corner of my mind—the tiny part I dared spare from breathing—on trying to hear something else, but I couldn’t even catch the background noise of the city. I decided the office must be soundproofed as well as light-sealed. Not that it mattered, since I couldn’t get a signal out anyway.
Then a noise did come—a solid snap that I’d heard just once before, but knew instantly. It was the sound of the bolts in the office door retracting. There was something funny about it that took me a moment to figure out: there had been no preliminary grating of the key.
For a moment too I thought Slyker had crept noiselessly to the door, but then I realized that the rustling of folders at the desk had kept up all the time.
And the rustling of folders continued. I guessed Slyker had not noticed the door. He hadn’t been exaggerating about his bad hearing.
There was the faint creaking of the hinges, once, twice—as if the door were being opened and closed—then again the solid snap of the bolts. That puzzled me, for there should have been a big flash of light from the corridor—unless the lights were all out.
I couldn’t hear any sound after that, except the continued rustling of the file folders, though I listened as hard as the job of breathing let me—and in a crazy kind of way the job of cautious breathing helped my hearing, because it made me hold absolutely still yet without daring to tense up. I knew that someone was in the office with us and that Slyker didn’t know it. The black moments seemed to stretch out forever, as if an edge of eternity had got hooked into our time-stream.
All of a sudden there was a
swish
, like that of a sheet being whipped through the air very fast, and a grunt of surprise from Slyker that started toward a screech and then was cut off as sharp as if he’d been gagged noseand-mouth like me. Then there came the scuff of feet and the squeal of the castors of a chair, the sound of a struggle, not of two people struggling, but of a man struggling against restraints of some sort, a frantic confined heaving and panting. I wondered if Slyker’s little lump of chair had sprouted restraints like mine, but that hardly made sense.
Then abruptly there was the whistle of breath, as if his nostrils had been uncovered, but not his mouth. He was panting through his nose. I got a mental picture of Slyker tied to his chair some way and eyeing the darkness just as I was doing.
Finally out of the darkness came a voice I knew very well because I’d heard it often enough in movie houses and from Jeff Crain’s tape-recorder. It had the old familiar caress mixed with the old familiar giggle, the naiveté and the knowingness, the warm sympathy and cool-headedness, the high-school charmer and the sybil. It was Evelyn Cordew’s voice, all right.
“Oh for goodness sake stop threshing around, Emmy. It won’t help you shake off that sheet and it makes you look so funny. Yes, I said ‘look,’ Emmy—you’d be surprised at how losing five ghosts improves your eyesight, like having veils taken away from in front of them; you get more sensitive all over.
“And don’t try to appeal to me by pretending to suffocate. I tucked the sheet under your nose even if I did keep your mouth covered. Couldn’t bear you talking now. The sheet’s called wraparound plastic—I’ve got my chemical friend too, though he’s not Parisian. It’ll be next year’s numberone packaging material, he tells me. Filmy, harder to see than cellophane, but very tough. An electronic plastic, no less, positive one side, negative the other. Just touch it to something and it wraps around, touches itself, and clings like anything. Like I just had to touch it to you. To make it unwrap fast you can just shoot some electrons into it from a handy static battery—my friend’s advertising copy, Emmy—and it flattens out
whang
. Give it enough electrons and it’s stronger than steel.
“We used another bit of it that last way, Emmy, to get through your door. Fitted it outside, so it’d wrap itself against the bolts when your door opened. Then just now, after blacking out the corridor, we pumped electrons into it and it flattened out, pushing back all the bolts. Excuse me, dear, but you know how you love to lecture about your valved plastics and all your other little restraints, so you mustn’t mind me giving a little talk about mine. And boasting about my friends too. I’ve got some you don’t know about, Emmy. Ever heard the name Smyslov, or the Arain? Some of them cut ghosts themselves and weren’t pleased to hear about you, especially the past-future angle.”
There was a protesting little squeal of castors, as if Slyker were trying to move his chair.
“Don’t go away, Emmy. I’m sure you know why I’m here. Yes, dear, I’m taking them all back as of now. All five. And I don’t care how much deathwish they got, because I’ve got some ideas for that. So now ’scuse me, Emmy, while I get ready to slip into my ghosts.”
There wasn’t any noise then except Emil Slyker’s wheezy breathing and the occasional rustle of silk and the whir of a zipper, followed by soft feathery falls.
“There we are, Emmy, all clear. Next step, my five lost sisters. Why, your little old secret drawer is open—you didn’t think I knew about that, Emmy, did you? Let’s see now, I don’t think we’ll need music for this—they know my touch; it should make them stand up and shine.”
She stopped talking. After a bit I got the barest hint of light over by the desk, very uncertain at first, like a star at the limit of vision, where it keeps winking back and forth from utter absence to the barest dim existence, or like a lonely lake lit only by starlight and glimpsed through a thick forest, or as if those dancing points of light that persist even in absolute darkness and indicate only a restless retina and optic nerve had fooled me for a moment into thinking they represented something real.
But then the hint of light took definite form, though staying at the dim limit of vision and crawling back and forth as I focused on it because my eyes had no other point of reference to steady it by.
It was a dim angular band making up three edges of a rectangle, the top edge longer than the two vertical edges, while the bottom edge wasn’t there. As I watched it and it became a little clearer, I saw that the bands of light were brightest toward the inside—that is, toward the rectangle they partly enclosed, where they were bordered by stark blackness—while toward the outside they faded gradually away. Then as I continued to watch I saw that the two corners were rounded while up from the top edge there projected a narrow, lesser rectangle—a small tab.
The tab made me realize that I was looking at a file folder silhouetted by something dimly glowing inside it
Then the top band darkened toward the center, as would happen if a hand were dipping into the folder, and then lightened again as if the hand were being withdrawn. Then up out of the folder, as if the invisible hand were guiding or coaxing it, swam something no brighter than the bands of light.
It was the shape of a woman, but distorted and constantly flowing, the head and arms and upper torso maintaining more of an approximation to human proportions than the lower torso and legs, which were like churning, trailing draperies or a long gauzy skirt. It was extremely dim, so I had to keep blinking my eyes, and it didn’t get brighter.
It was like the figure of a woman phosphorescently painted on a longskirted slip of the filmiest silk that had silk-stocking-like sheaths for arms and head attached—yes, and topped by some illusion of dim silver hair. And yet it was more than that. Although it looped up gracefully through the air as such a slip might when shaken out by a woman preparing to put it on, it also had a writhing life of its own.
But in spite of all the distortions, as it flowed in an arc toward the ceiling and dove downward, it was seductively beautiful and the face was recognizably that of Evvie Cordew.
It checked its dive and reversed the direction of its flow, so that for a moment it floated upright high in the air, like a filmy nightgown a woman swishes above her head before she slips into it. Then it began to settle toward the floor and I saw that there really was a woman standing under it and pulling it down over her head, though I could see her body only very dimly by the reflected glow of the ghost she was drawing down around her.
The woman on the floor shot up her hands close to her body and gave a quick wriggle and twist and ducked her head and then threw it back, as a woman does when she’s getting into a tight dress, and the flowing glowing thing lost its distortions as it fitted itself around her.
Then for a moment the glow brightened a trifle as the woman and her ghost merged and I saw Evvie Cordew with her flesh gleaming by its own light—the long slim ankles, the vase-curve of hips and waist, the impudent breasts almost as you’d guess them from the bikini shots, but with larger aureoles—saw it for an instant before the ghost-light winked out like white sparks dying, and there was utter darkness again.
Utter darkness and a voice that crooned, “Oh that was like silk, Emmy, pure silk stocking all over. Do you remember when you cut it, Emmy? I’d just got my first screen credit and I’d signed the seven-year contract and I knew I was going to have the world by the tail and I felt wonderful and I suddenly got terribly dizzy for no reason and I came to you. And you straightened me out then by coaxing out and cutting away my happiness. You told me it would be a little like giving blood, and it was. That was my first ghost, Emmy, but only the first.”