Fritz Leiber: The Sinful Ones

The blonde was still watching from the doorway, her manner implying that she owned the place, or any other she might stalk into. Her eyes looked whiter than they should be and they didn’t seem quite to focus, although that didn’t diminish, but rather intensified, the impression of hungry, hostile peering.

He looked back at the frightened girl. Her hands still gripped her elbows, but she was leaning forward now and studying his face, as if everything in the world depended on what she saw there.

“You’re not one of them?”

He frowned puzzledly. “Them? Who?”

“You’re not?” she repeated, still watching his face.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t you know what you are?” she asked with a sudden fierceness. “Don’t you know whether you’re one of them or not?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he assured her, “and I haven’t the faintest idea of whom you mean by ‘them.’”

Slowly her hands loosened their hold on her elbows and trailed into her lap. “No,” she said, “I guess you’re not. You haven’t their filthy look. But then…” her lips twitched, “…I must have been fated to come here at this exact moment. And say just these words. Oh, what a crazy, crazy joke.” She was trembling again. “Or else you really are…?” and there came into her eyes an important, but quite incomprehensible question.

“Look,” Carr said gently, “you’d better explain things from the beginning. Just what…”

“Please, not now,” she said evenly.

Carr realized suddenly that her shaking was that of repressed hysteria and that she was asking for time to get herself under control.

He looked away, trying to fathom his reactions. By all rights he should type this girl as belonging to the lunatic fringe of the unemployables that clutter up every employment office. Probably her application blank, if she’d filled one out, was being held up because Miss Zabel or one of the other girls had noticed some weird discrepancies in it. He should be thinking of a smooth way to terminate the interview and ease her out.

But instead his mind was searching for a more logical pattern than psychosis underlying her actions, as if convinced that such a pattern existed and he must discover it.

All at once the smudge on her left hand, the intellectual pursing of her features, the uneasy hunch of her shoulders, and the long, irregular curves in which her brown hair fell to them, seemed to suggest a thousand things.

Somehow he had become involved.

Love? That might do in a romantic novel. Here some vastly more plausible explanation was required.

A sense of lifelessness in his surroundings continued to oppress him, had even deepened. Somewhere in the past few minutes he had crossed the boundary that separated the ordinary from the extraordinary. But how could he know, when there was not one iota of concrete evidence and he had only intuition to back him up?

“Who’s that woman following you?” he asked her quietly. “Is she one of ‘them?’”

The terror returned to her face. “I can’t tell you that. Please don’t ask me. And please don’t look at her. It’s terribly important that she doesn’t think I’ve seen her.”

“But how could she possibly think otherwise after the way she planked herself down beside you?”

“Please, oh please!” She was almost whimpering. “I can’t tell you why. It’s just terribly important that we act naturally, that we seem to be doing whatever it is that we’re supposed to be doing. Can we?”

Carr studied her. She was obviously close to actual hysteria. “Sure,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, smiled at her, and raised his voice a trifle. “Just what sort of job do you feel would make the best use of your abilities, Miss…?”

“Job? Oh yes, that’s why I’d have come here, isn’t it?” For a moment she stared at him helplessly. Then, hurriedly, the words tumbling over each other, she began to talk. “Let’s see, I can play the piano. Not very well. Mostly classical. I’ve studied it a lot, though. I once wanted to become a concert pianist. And I’ve done some amateur acting. And I can read books very fast. Fiction, that is. I know my way around libraries pretty well. And I used to play a mediocre game of tennis—” Her grotesquely animated expression froze. “But that isn’t at all the sort of thing you want to know, is it?”

Carr shrugged. “Helps give me a picture. Did some amateur acting once, in college.” He kept his voice casual. “Have you had any regular jobs?”

“I once read books for a publisher. Just fiction, though. And for a little while I worked in an architect’s office.”

“Did you learn to read blueprints?” he asked.

“Blueprints?” The girl shivered. “Not much, I’m afraid. I hate patterns of all sorts, unless they’re so mixed up that no one but myself knows they’re patterns. Patterns are traps. Once you start living according to a pattern, other people know how to get control of you.” She leaned forward confidently, her fingers hooking onto the edge of the desk. “Oh, and I’m a good judge of people. I have to be. I suppose you have to be too.” The incomprehensible question came back into her eyes. “Don’t you know what you are?” she asked softly. “Haven’t you found out yet? Why, you must be almost forty. Surely in that time…Oh, you must know.”

“I still haven’t the ghost of an idea what you’re talking about,” said Carr. “What am I?”

The girl hesitated.

“Tell me,” he said.

She shook her head. “If you honestly don’t know, I’m not sure I should tell you. As long as you don’t know, you’re safe. Relatively safe, that is. If I had had the opportunity of not knowing, I know how I would have chosen. At least I know how I’d choose now. Oh God, yes.”

Carr began to feel like the anecdotal man to whom a beautiful woman hands a note written in French which no one will translate for him. “Please stop being mysterious,” he said. “Just what is it about me that’s so important? Something I don’t know about my background? Or about my race? My political leanings? My psychological type? My love life?”

“But if you don’t know,” she went on, disregarding his questions, “and if I don’t tell you, then I’m letting you run a blind risk. Not a big one, but very terrible. And with them so close and perhaps suspecting…Oh, it’s so hard to decide.”

“They’re killing me!”

Carr jerked around. Miss Zabel squinted at him in agony, dropped an application folder in the wire basket, and hobbled off. Carr looked at the folder. It wasn’t for a girl at all. It started, “Jimmie Kozacs, Male. Age 43.”

He became aware that the frightened girl was studying his face again, as if she saw something there that she had missed the first time. It seemed to cause her dismay.

“Maybe you never were, until today,” she said, more to herself than him. “That would explain your not knowing. Maybe my bursting in here was what did it. Maybe I was the one who awakened you.”

She clenched her hands, torturing the palms with the long, untapered fingers, and Carr’s sardonic remark about having been awakened quite early in life died before it was born. “To think that I would ever do that to anyone!” she continued. “To think that I would ever cause anyone the agony that /he/ caused me! Oh, if only there were someone I could talk to, someone who could tell me what to do.’

The black misery in her voice caught at Car. “What is the matter?” he pleaded. “Please tell me.”

The girl looked shocked. “Now?” Her glance half-circled the room, strayed toward the glass wall. “No, not here. I can’t.” The fingers of her right hand rippled as if they were playing a frantic arpeggio. Suddenly they dived into the pocket of her cardigan and came out with a stubby, chewed pencil. She ripped a sheet from Carr’s scratch pad and began to scribble hurriedly.