Horrible Imaginings Read online

  Horrible Imaginings

  Fritz Leiber

  Copyright © 2004 the Estate of Fritz Leiber

  Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

  www.ereads.com

  Introduction © 2004 John Pelan

  “Horrible Imaginings” originally appeared in Death, 1982 Playboy Publishing

  “The Automatic Pistol” originally appeared in Weird Tales, May 1940

  “Crazy Annaoj” originally appeared in Galaxy, February 1968

  “The Hound” originally appeared in Weird Tales, November 1942

  “Alice and the Allergy” originally appeared in Weird Tales, September 1946

  “Skinny’s Wonderful” original to this collection

  “Answering Service” originally appeared in Worlds of If, December 1967

  “Scream Wolf” originally appeared in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, February 1961

  “Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum” originally appeared in Universe 5, 1974 Random House

  “When Brahma Wakes” originally appeared in Fantastic, January 1968

  “The Glove” originally appeared in Whispers, June 1975

  “The Girl With Hungry Eyes” originally appeared in The Girl With Hungry Eyes 1949 Avon Books

  “While Set Fled” originally appeared in Amra #15, 1961

  “Diary in the Snow” originally appeared in Night’s Black Agents 1947 Arkham House

  “The Ghost Light” originally appeared in The Ghost Light 1984 Berkley Books

  Acknowledgements

  The editor would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Catherine Brown, Richard Curtis, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Allen Koszowski, Brian Metz of Green Rhino Graphics, Kathy Pelan, & David Read in the preparation of this volume.

  Imagine, if you will...

  Obviously, the author of these tales needs little introduction. Fritz Leiber was a master of imaginative fiction and a profound influence on the genres of horror, science fiction, and heroic fantasy. As comfortable putting his own unique spin on H.P. Lovecraft’s as he was creating his own worlds, Leiber’s stories display a rare mastery in all the fields he touched.

  This collection is another volume of his darker tales, selected from different points in a forty-year career. From his 1940 tale “The Automatic Pistol” to “The Ghost Light” from 1984, this collection presents a retrospective sampling of Leiber’s horror fiction. No doubt there are some familiar pieces here; certainly several of these stories have been frequently anthologized and will be familiar to Leiber fans. However, we are pleased to offer up a selection of stories that had vanished into relative obscurity. His short fantasies “When Brahma Wakes” and “When Set Fled” are minor masterpieces of the short-short form. One tale was discovered among the Leiber papers and to my knowledge has never seen prior publication. “Skinny’s Wonderful” was found with a note from Leiber’s agent implying that he expected a sale to Esquire to be forthcoming… To the best of my knowledge, this sale never took place and the story languished in an envelope, unsubmitted elsewhere.

  Esquire’s loss is our gain; “Skinny’s Wonderful” is an excellent Hitchcockian piece that shows Leiber’s excellence at the straight psychological suspense tale to great effect. Another rare inclusion is the short and poignant sword and sorcery tale “When Set Fled” from a 1961 issue of the Robert E. Howard journal Amra. “Scream Wolf” is another suspense tale, this time from the often-excel- lent Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine. MSMM has undeservedly fallen into obscurity under the larger shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’ Mystery Magazine, but a perusal of 1960s and 1970s issues yields some nice surprises. In any given issue you may find stories by Weird Tales alumni such as Robert Bloch, Carl Jacobi, Theodore Sturgeon, and even Robert Barbour Johnson; to say nothing of early appearances by modern masters like Richard Laymon and Gary Brandner.

  These are essentially the oddball items in this collection; assuming that you bought the first two Midnight House volumes of Leiber, you’re here for the horror… I must apologize and explain the somewhat eclectic nature of this series. When we began, we foolishly assumed that one or two volumes collecting rarer pieces would be adequate and that two volumes each of SF and horror would pretty well cover things. Such has been the popularity of the series that we’ve decided to forge ahead and collect all of Leiber’s non-Gray Mouser tales. There will be one such story published, but it’s the early, never-before- published version of “Adept’s Gambit”, written as a Cthulhu Mythos tale! Sadly, I did not discover until well into the third book that Fritz had assembled a horror collection entitled Thirteen Dark Dreads. We will offer this title in 2005, but due to several of the stories appearing elsewhere, the contents will be radically different from what Fritz had envisioned. To that I can only offer up an apology for my eagerness to get The Black Gondolier and Smoke Ghost into print, and hope that you, the reader find that the dark dreads I’ve selected meet with your approval.

  The other tales from this volume may be familiar to a large extent; “The Automatic Pistol” was so overshadowed by “Smoke Ghost” that many have forgotten what an excellent early story this was. Other inclusions from the Weird Tales years are “The Hound” and “Alice and the Allergy”. I’ve tended to leave aside the entire decade of the 1950s in favor of presenting early and still vital work which may be contrasted with three of Leiber’s latter-day masterpieces. In the 1970s and 1980s Stuart Schiff’s phenomenal little magazine Whispers was an infrequently published delight, everything that Weird Tales should have been. Artists included the great Lee Brown Coye and Frank Utpatel and authors read like a who’s who of the time period. Leiber, King, Campbell, Strieber, Wellman, Aickman, and newer authors like Karl Edward Wagner. David Campton, David Drake, and many others. Leiber’s story “The Glove” remains one of the most fondly remembered tales from that great magazine.

  Editor Schiff was able to parlay his success from Whispers into a series of anthologies, while the Whispers series drew mainly from the magazine, his anthology Death was a non-themed horror anthology, he rounded up some top-flight authors that he knew could deliver the goods and left them to write whatever pleased them at whatever length. Fritz Leiber responded with the remarkable titular novella of this collection. A story which was also selected as best of the year for 1982 in The Century’s Best Horror.

  There’s little I can say about “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”, that hasn’t already been remarked on by scores of critics. The quintessential 1950s horror story, it’s been reprinted a number of times and is readily available in many anthologies, but I thought it would be a shame to leave it out here.

  “Mysterious Doings at the Metropolitan Museum” is more likely to raise a smile than a shiver (at least on initial reading), it’s only after the book has been set aside and we start to wonder about the secret nature of things that the chill starts to set in and the horripilations begin.

  We end the book with a bit of a contrast, a story from early in Leiber’s career that I feel transcends its pulp tropes very effectively and we conclude with his last real masterpiece, “The Ghost Light”. “The Ghost Light” is an ambitious work that examines themes and motifs that have been present in Leiber’s work for years the dark magic of cities, alcoholism, loss, alienation, and of course our ability (or is it a need?) to create new ghosts for a modern era.

  For over forty years no one did a more effective job of showing us our new ghosts than did Fritz Leiber, here are few of them for your enjoyment... Do leave the light on and consider that the gray shape slowly detaching itself from the alley is probably just a shadow. Probably...

  John Pelan

  Midnight House

  Summer Solstice 2004

  HORRIBLE IMAGININGS

  “
Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.”

  —Macbeth

  Old Ramsey Ryker only commenced thinking about going to see (through one-way glass) the young women fingering their genitals after he started having the low-ceilinged dreams without light—the muttering dull black nightmares—but before he began catching glimpses of the vanishing young-old mystery girl, who wore black that twinkled, lurking in the first-floor ground-level corridors, or disappearing into the elevator, and once or twice slipping along the upstairs halls of the apartment tree (or skeleton) that is, with one exception, the sole scene of the action in this story, which does not venture farther, disturb the privacy of the apartments themselves, or take one step out into the noisy metropolitan street. Here all is hushed.

  I mean by the apartment tree all the public or at least tenant-shared space within the thirteen-floor building where Ryker lived alone. With a small effort you can visualize that volume of connected space as a rather repetitious tree (color it red or green if it helps, as they do in “You are here” diagrammatic maps; I see it as pale gray myself, for that is the color of the wallpaper in the outer halls, pale gray faintly patterned with dingy silver): its roots the basement garage where some tenants with cars rented space along with a few neighborhood shopkeepers and businessmen; its trunk the central elevator shaft with open stairway beside it (the owner of the building had periodic difficulties with the fire inspectors about the latter—they wanted it walled off with heavy self-closing doors at each floor; certainly a building permit would never have been granted today—or in the last three decades, for that matter—for such a lofty structure with an open stairwell); its branches the three halls, two long, one short, radiating out from the shaft-stairwell trunk and identical at each level except for minor features; from the top floor a sort of slanted, final thick branch of stairs led, through a stout door (locked on the outside but open on the inside—another fire regulation), to the roof and the strong, floored weatherproof shed holding the elevator’s motor and old-fashioned mechanical relays. But we won’t stir through that door either to survey the besmogged but nonetheless impressive cityscape and hunt for the odd star or (rarer still) an interesting window.

  At ground level one of the long corridors led to the street door; on the floors above, to the front fire escape. The other long ones led to the alley fire escape. The short hall was blind (the fire inspector would shake his head at that feature too, and frown).

  And then of course we should mention, if only for the sake of completists, the apartment tree’s micro-world, its tiniest twigs and leaflets, in a sense: all the cracks and crevices (and mouse-and rat-holes, if any) going off into the walls, ceilings, and floors, with perhaps some leading to more spacious though still cramped volumes of space.

  But it would be discourteous of us to wander—and so frivolously—through the strange labyrinthine apartment tree with its angular one- and two-bedroom forbidden fruit, when all the time Ramsey Ryker, a lofty, gaunt old man somewhat resembling a neatly dressed scarecrow, is waiting impatiently for us with his equally strange and tortuous problems and concerns. Of these, the black nightmares were the worst by far and also in a way the cause of, or at least the prelude to, all the others.

  Actually they were the worst nightmares in a restrained sort of way that Ramsey ever remembered having in the seven decades of his life and the only ones, the only dreams of any sort for that matter, without any visual element at all (hence the “black”), but only sound, touch, intramuscular feelings, and smell. And the black was really inky, midnight, moonless and starless, sooty, utter—all those words. It didn’t even have any of those faint churning points of light we see, some of them tinted, when we shut our eyes in absolute darkness and when supposedly we’re seeing rods and cones of our retina fire off without any photons of outside light hitting them. No, the only light in his nightmares, if any, was of the phantom sort in which memories are painted—a swift, sometimes extensive-seeming flash which starts to fade the instant it appears and never seems to be in the retina at all, something far more ghostly even than the nebular churnings that occur under the eyelids in the inkiest dark.

  He’d been having these nightmares every two or three nights, regular almost as clockwork, for at least a month now, so that they were beginning to seriously worry and oppress him. I’ve said “nightmares” up to now, but really there was only one, repeated with just enough changes in its details to convince him that he was experiencing new nightmares rather than just remembering the first. This made them more ominously terrifying; he’d know what was coming—up to a point—and suffer the more because of that.

  Each “performance” of his frightening lightless dream, on those nights when his unconscious decided to put on a show, would begin the same way. He would gradually become aware, as though his mind were rising with difficulty from unimaginable depths of sleep, that he was lying stretched out naked on his back with his arms extended neatly down his sides, but that he was not in his bed—the surface beneath him was too ridged and hard for that. He was breathing shallowly and with difficulty—or rather he discovered that if he tried to investigate his breathing, speed or slow it, expand his chest more fully, he ran the danger of bringing on a strangling spasm or coughing fit. This prospect frightened him; he tried never to let it happen.

  To check on this, explore the space around him, he would next in his dream try to lift up a hand and arm, stretch a leg sideways—and find out that he could not, that so far as any gross movement of limbs went he was paralyzed. This naturally would terrify him and push him toward panic. It was all he could do not to strain, thrash (that is, try to), gasp, or cry out.

  Then as his panic slowly subsided, as he schooled himself to quietly endure this limitation on his actions, he would discover that his paralysis was not complete, that if he went about it slowly he could move a bit, wag his head about an inch from side to side, writhe a little the superficial muscles and skin under his shoulders and down his back and buttocks and legs, stir his heels and fingertips slightly. It was in this way that he discovered that the hard surface under him consisted of rough laths set close together, which were very dusty—no, gritty.

  Next in his dream came an awareness of sound. At first it would seem the normal muttering hum of any big city, but then he’d begin to distinguish in it a faint rustling and an infinitesimal rapid clicking that was very much closer and seemed to get nearer each moment and he’d think of insects and spiders and he’d feel new terror gusting through him and there’d be another struggle to stave off hysteria. At this point in his dream he’d usually think of cockroaches, armies of them, as normal to big cities as the latter’s muttering sounds, and his terror would fade though his revulsion would mount. Filthy creatures! but who could be frightened of them? True, his dear wife, now dead five years, had had a dread of stepping on one in the dark and hearing it crunch. (That reaction he found rather hard to understand. He was, well, if not exactly pleasured, then well satisfied to step on cockroaches, or mash them in the sink.)

  His attention would then likely return to the muttering, growling, faintly buzzing, somehow nasal component of the general sound, and he’d begin to hear voices in it, though he could seldom identify the words or phrases—it was like the voices of a crowd coming out of a theater or baseball park or meeting hall and commenting and arguing droningly and wearily about what they’d just seen or heard. Male voices chiefly, cynical, sarcastic, deprecating, mean, sleepily savage, and ignorant, very ignorant, he’d feel sure. And never as loud or big as they ought to be; there was always a littleness about them. (Was his hearing impaired in his nightmares? Was he dreaming of growing deaf?) Were they the voices of depraved children? No, they were much too low—deep throat tones. Once he’d asked himself, “Midgets?” and had thought, rich in dream wisdom, “A man lying down is not even as tall as a midget.”

  After sound, odor would follow, as his senses were assaulted cumulatively. First dry, stale, long-confined—somehow so natural seemin
g he would be unaware of the scents. But then he would smell smoke and know a special pang of fright—was he to be burned alive, unable to move? And the fire sirens when the engines came, tinied by distance and by muffling walls, no larger than those of toys?

  But then he would identify it more precisely as tobacco smoke, the reeking smoke of cigars chiefly. He remembered how his dead wife had hated that, though smoking cigarettes herself.

  After that, a whole host of supporting odors: toilet smells and the cheap sharp perfumes used to balance those out, stinking old flesh, the fishy reek of unwashed sex, locker rooms, beer, disinfectants, wine-laden vomit—all fitting very nicely, too, with the ignorant low growling.

  After sound and odor, touch, living touch. Behind the lobe of his right ear, in his jaw’s recessed angle, where a branch of the carotid pulses close to the surface, there’d come an exploring prod from the tip of something about as big as a baby’s thumb, a pencil’s eraserhead, snout of a mouse or of a garter snake, an embryo’s fist, an unlit cigarette, a suppository, the phallus of a virile mannequin—a probing and a thrusting that did not stop and did not go away.

  At that point his dream, if it hadn’t already, would turn into full nightmare. He’d try to jerk his head sideways, throw himself over away from it, thrash his arms and legs, yell out unmindful of what it did to his breathing—and find that the paralysis still gripped him, its bonds growing tighter the more he struggled, his vocal cords as numb as if these were his life’s last gaspings.

  And then—more touches of the same puppet sort: his side, his thigh, between two fingers, up and down his body. The sounds and odors would get darker still as a general suffocating oppression closed in. He’d visualize grotesquely in imagination’s light- less lightning flashes, which like those of memory are so utterly different from sight, a crowd of squatty, groping male Lilliputians, a press of dark-jowled, thickset, lowbrowed, unlovely living dolls standing or leaning in locker-room attitudes, each one nursing with one hand beneath his paunch a half-erect prick with a casual lasciviousness and with the other gripping a beer can or cigar or both, while all the while they gargled out unceasingly a thick oozy stream of shitty talk about crime and sports and sex, about power and profit. He envisioned their tiny prick nubs pressing in on him everywhere, as if he were being wrapped tighter and tighter in a rubber blanket that was all miniscule elastic knobs.