Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

He shook his head hopelessly.

“They just won’t fit into any pattern, no matter how crazy.” He hesitated. “And then two or three times,” he went on, frowning, “I’ve had the feeling that the explanation was something utterly inconceivable, something far bigger, more dreadful—”

“Don’t,” she interrupted. “Don’t ever let yourself start thinking about it that way.”

“At any rate, don’t you see why you’ve got to tell me about it, Jane?” he finished.

For a moment there was silence. Then she said, “If I tell you about it, that is, if I tell you partly about it, will you promise to go and do what I asked you in the note? So you can escape?”

“No. I won’t promise anything until after you’ve told me.”

There was another silence. Then she sighed, “All right, I’ll tell you partly. But always remember that you made me do it!” She paused, then began, “About a year-and-a-half ago I met Fred. There was nothing serious between us. We just used to meet in the park and go for walks. My father and mother didn’t know about him. I used to spend most of the time working at the piano, and I was going to music school. I didn’t know then that those three—Miss Hackman and Mr. Wilson and Dris—were after Fred. He hadn’t told me anything. But then one day they saw us together. And because of that, because those three had linked me with Fred, my life was no longer safe. I had to run away from home. Since then I’ve lived as I could, here, there, I’ve tried to be inconspicuous, I’ve made notes to remind me what I must and mustn’t do, I’ve stayed in places like this, talked to no one, slept in parks, empty apartments…”

“But that’s impossible.”

“It’s true. For a time I managed to escape them. Then a week ago they stared to close in on me. When I went to your office I was desperate. I went there because someone I knew long ago worked there…”

“Tom Elvested?”

“Don’t interrupt. But then I saw you, I saw you weren’t busy and I went to you. I knew it was my last chance. And you helped me, you pretended…” She hesitated. “That’s all,” she finished.

“Oh, Jane,” Carr said, after a moment, as one might say to a schoolchild who hasn’t prepared her lesson, “you haven’t told me anything. What—” But his voice lacked its former insistence. He was getting tired now, tired of pushing things, of straining after facts. He wanted…He hardly knew what he wanted. He divided the rest of the liquor between them, but it was hardly more than a sip. “Look, Jane,” he said, making a last weary effort, “won’t you trust me? Won’t you stop being so frightened? I do want to help you.”

She looked at him, not quite smiling. “You’ve been awfully nice to me, Carr,” she said. “You’ve give me courage and a little forgetfulness—the Custer’s Last Stand bar, the music store, the movie, the chess, the touching by the gate. I’ve been pretty rotten to you. I’ve made use of you, exposed you to dangers, left you hurt, dragged you back by unconscious tricks into my private underworld. If you knew the real situation, I think you’d understand. But that’s something I’ll have to battle out myself. It’s honestly true what I wrote you in that note, Carr. You can’t help me, you can only spoil my chance of escape.” She looked down. “It isn’t because I think you can help me that I keep drawing you back,” she added, and paused.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, Carr. The steadies and the waifs. The steady knows where he and his world are going. The waif sees only darkness. She knows a secret about life that locks her away forever from happiness and rest. You’re really a steady, Carr. That woman you told me about who wants you to succeed, she’s a steady too. It’s no use helping a waif, Carr. No matter how tender-hearted she may be, how filled with good intentions, there’s something destructive about her, something akin to the darkness, something that makes her want to destroy other people’s certainties and faiths, lead them to the precipice and then point down and say, ‘See? Nothing!’ And there’s nothing you can do for me, nothing at all.”

Carr shook his head. “I can help,” he persisted.

“No.”

“Oh, but Jane, don’t you understand? I really want to help you.” He started to put his arm around her, but she quickly got up.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, following her.

She turned, putting her hand between them. She had trouble speaking. “Go away, Carr. Go away right now. Go back to that wonderful new business you told me about and that woman who wants you to have it. Forget everything else. I thought it would be fun to be with you for an evening, to pretend that things were different—I was insane! Every minute you stay with me, I’m doing you a wrong. Please go, Carr.”

“No.”

“Then stay with me for a little while. Stay with me tonight, but go away tomorrow.”

“No.”

They stood facing each other tautly for a moment. Then the tension suddenly sagged. Carr rubbed his eyes and exclaimed, “Dammit, I wish I had a drink.”

Jane’s eye suddenly twinkled. Carr sensed an abrupt change in her. She seemed to have dropped her cloak of fear and thrown around her shoulders another garment, which he couldn’t identify, except that it shimmered. Even before she spoke, he felt his spirits rising in answer to hers.

“Since you won’t recognize danger and go, let’s forget it for tonight,” was what she told him. “Only, you must promise me one thing.” Her eyes gleamed strangely. “You must believe that I am…magic, that I have magical powers, that while you are with me, you can do anything you want to in the world and it can’t do anything to you, that you’re free as an invisible spirit. You promise? Good. And now I believe you said you wanted a drink.”

He followed her as if she were some fairy-tale princess as she went three aisles over, pulled on a light, took down from an upper shelf three copies of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, stuck her hand into the gap, and brought out a fifth of scotch.

“I put it here two months ago,” she said. “That was when I realized that solitary drinking was a bad thing.” Suddenly she set the bottle down, shook him, cried, “You’re risking your life by your stubbornness, do you understand that? What we’re doing is horribly dangerous. I don’t care, I want to, but still it’s horribly dangerous. Do you understand?”

But his eyes were on the bottle of scotch. “Do you live down here?” he demanded.

She laughed helplessly and let go of him. “In a way. Would you like to see?” And recklessly pulling out handfuls of other books so that they thudded on the floor, she showed him a pack-rat accumulation of cosmetics, showy jewelry, bags of peanuts and candy, cans of gourmet food and an opener, boxes of crackers, loose handkerchiefs, gloves, scarves, all sorts of little boxes and bottles, cups, plates, and glasses.

Taking two of the latter, crystal, long-stemmed, she said, “And now will you have a drink with me, in my house?”

Like two drunken stowaways in the hold of a ship, tipsily swaying and constantly shushing each other. Carr and Jane ascended a narrow stair. They groped through the foreign language section, and surveyed library’s lightless rotunda. Carr’s heart immediately went out to the shadows festooning it. They looked as warm and friendly as the scotch had tasted. He felt he could fly up to them if he willed, wrap them around him fold on fold, luxuriate in their smoky softness. Light from outside, slanting upward through the windows, evoked golden and greenish gleams from the mosaic. Lower down, shelves and counters made blurry-edged rectangles. The longer Carr looked, the more he rejoiced at the cosmetic magic of darkness.