Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

But don’t try to use that advice to win me back, for it can’t be done. Save it for some other girl. Keaton Fisher isn’t handsome, but he knows how to use what he has and he isn’t afraid of taking risks.

And now, dear, the best of luck

Marcia

When supernatural terror prefaces an emotional wound, the latter is deadened. Still, as the letter dropped from Carr’s hand and he heard Marcia coming from the bedroom, he felt a stab of mingled jealousy and self-pity hard to endure.

Her hand brushed the table beside him, she hesitated a moment, then stood at the center of the room.

Now that she knew he knew, he told himself, she must be waiting for him to go, perhaps preparing herself to reject some final appeal, setting her expression in obdurate lines.

But instead she was smiling. Smiling in a particularly unpleasant, animal-like way.

And gesturing in a peculiar fashion with her right hand.

And still not looking at him.

Carr felt a mounting horror as he watched her.

He tried to tell himself that he didn’t understand what her gestures meant.

Tried to tell himself that they weren’t the movements of someone sipping from a highball glass that wasn’t there.

Tried to tell himself that when her hand had brushed the table, it hadn’t been to take up the drink she had left there.

Because that would mean she hadn’t made the drink for him, but for herself; that she hadn’t recognized his presence; that the terrible delusion that had tortured him back at his room was true.

And that mustn’t be.

“Marcia!” he called sharply.

She licked her lips.

Mustn’t, he repeated to himself. Nothing could write you a letter to hurt you so and yet be a mindless machine.

He moved toward her. “Marcia!” he cried desperately and took her by the shoulders.

Then, under his hands, the moment he touched her, he could feel her muscles go rigid. She began to shake, to vibrate like a piece of machinery that’s about to tear itself apart. He jerked away from her.

Her face was flustered, her features screwed up like a baby’s.

From her lips came a mumbling that grew louder. It was, Carr realized with a gust of horror, exactly like the chattering of the dumpy man.

Or rather, the image sprang into Carr’s mind as he broke away toward the door, like the meaningless noise of a phonograph record running backwards.

Carr gazed up at huge, grainy photogenic enlargements of women in brassieres and pants painted bright orange. A sign screamed, “Girls and More Girls!”

Around him, lone dreary figures of men slouched purposely.

He realized that he was on South State Street, and that he had been searching for Jane Gregg through the nightmares of Chicago and his own mind ever since he had fled stealthily from Marcia’s apartment some hours ago.

Jane was the only person in the world for him now. The only person who would answer when he spoke. The only person behind whose forehead there was an inner light.

Except for a few others best not thought of.

He had gone to every place he and Jane had been, fruitlessly. Now he had come to one place he remembered her speaking of.

Around him the signs glared, the dance music groaned, the automatons slouched through the dirty shadows. Chicago, city of death, mindless metropolis, peopled by millions of machines of flesh and bone that walked and worked and uttered phonograph words and rusted and went to the scrap heap.

Dead city in a dead universe. Dead city through which he was doomed to search forever, futilely.

He was glad that the nightmares inside his mind had helped to shut it out.

For a fleeting moment he had a vision of Marcia’s face as he had last seen it. He expected the stuff behind the forehead of the vision to ooze from the eyes in black tears.

He passed a slot-like store that said TATTOOING, then a jumbled window with three dingy gilt balls over head. In front of it lounged two figures of men in dark slickers. They somehow stood out from the other dreary automatons.

As he crossed the street, a taxicab drew up ahead of him at a dull-windowed drugstore. The fat figure of the driver squeezed out and hurried inside. As Carr passed the drugstore, he noticed him dialing at an open phone. A line of dirty collar was creased between greasy-coated bulky shoulders and thick red neck. He heard the motor softly chugging.

Ahead lights thinned, sidewalks became emptier, as South State approached the black veil of the railway yards. He passed the figure of a woman. The face was shadowed by an awning, but he could see the shoulder-length hair, the glossy black dress tight over the hips and thighs, and the long bare legs.

He passed a sign that read: IDENTIFICATION PHOTOS AT ALL HOURS. He passed a black-windowed bar that said: CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT.

He thought: I will search for Jane forever and never find her. I will search for Jane…

Carr stopped.

…I will search for Jane…

Carr turned around.

No, it couldn’t be, he thought. This one’s hair is blonde, and the hips wing commonly in the tight black dress.

But if he disregarded those two things…

The hair had been unevenly blonde. It could be, undoubtedly was, bleached.

The walk could be assumed.

He was beginning to think it was Jane.

Just then his glance flickered beyond the shoulder-brushing blonde hair.

A long black convertible drew up to the curb just this side of the taxi, parking the wrong way. Out of it stepped the handless man.

On the other side of the street, just opposite the girl in black, stood Miss Hackman. She was wearing a green sports suit and hat. She glanced quickly both ways, then started across.

Halfway between Carr and the girl in black, Mr. Wilson stepped out of a dark doorway.

Carr felt as if his heart were being squeezed. This was the finish, he thought. The end of Jane’s long, terrified flight. The kill.

Unless…

The three pursuers closed in slowly, confidently The girl in black didn’t turn or stop, but she seemed to slow down just a trifle.

Unless something happened to convince them that he and Jane were automatons like the rest. Unless he and Jane could put on an act that would deceive them.

It could be done. They’d always been doubtful about Jane.

But she couldn’t do it alone. She couldn’t put on an act by herself. But with him…

The three figures continued to close in. Miss Hackman was smiling.

Carr wet his lips and whistled twice, with an appreciative chromatic descent at the end of each blast.

The girl in black stopped.

Carr slouched toward her swiftly.

The girl in black turned around. He saw Jane’s white face, framed by that ridiculous blonde hair.

“Hello, kid,” he called saluting her with a wave of his fingers.

“Hello,” she replied. Her heavily lipsticked mouth smiled. She still swayed a little as she waited for him.

Passing Mr. Wilson, Carr reached her a moment before the others did. He did not look at them, but he could sense them closing in behind him and Jane, forming a dark semicircle.

“Doing anything tonight?” he asked Jane.

Her chin described a little movement, not quite a nod. She studied him up and down. “Maybe.”

“They’re faking!” Miss Hackman’s whisper was very faint. It seemed to detach itself from her lips and glide toward his ear like an insect.

“I don’t think so,” he heard Mr. Wilson whisper in reply. “Looks like an ordinary pickup to me.”

Cold prickles rose on Carr’s scalp.

“How about us doing it together?” he asked Jane, pretending there was no whispers, no people behind them, forcing himself to go on playing the part he had chosen.