Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

“The whole world was a mystery to me, and a rather ugly one. I didn’t know what people were after, why they did the things they did, what secret rules they were obeying. I didn’t know that there were neither rules nor purposes, only mechanical motions. I used to take long walks alone, trying to figure it out, down by the river, or in the park.” She paused. “It was in the park that I met the man with glasses.”

Carr looked up. “What’s happened to him now?” he asked nervously.

She shrugged. “I haven’t any idea. The last time I saw him was when you came to the library.”

“You say you first met him in the park?”

“I didn’t exactly meet him,” she replied. “I just noticed him watching me. Usually from a distance—from another path in the park, or across the lagoon, or through a crowd of people. He’d watch me and follow me for a way and then drift out of sight and maybe turn up farther on.” She hesitated. “I had no idea, of course, that he was already outside the machine—I mean Life—and attracted to me because I could sometimes ee him and so must be half awakened to consciousness. But suspicious and afraid of me too and wating to make sure of me first.

“I sometimes thought he was something I’d made up in my mind. He had the oddest way of fading into the shrubbery, of slipping behind people, of disappearing when there seemed to be no place to disappear to. He reminded me of my cat Gigolo in one of his prowling moods, when one moment he’d be lying on the cushion looking at me, and the next peeking in from the hall—and no memory at all in my mind of his moving from one place to the other. Yes, it was like that. I had the feeling that I could blink the small dark man on and off, if you can understand that. I know now that was because I was sometimes almost fully awake to consciousness—when I’d see him—and then almost asleep again. I wouldn’t think of him again until he popped up the next day.

“That was the inertia of the machine asserting itself. Because the machine—the big machine called Life—always wants you to live according to the preordained pattern, even if you do grow a mind; in a sort of trance, as it were. That’s why it’s so easy to forget what you experience outside the pattern, why a simply drug like the chloral hydrate I gave you in the powders made you forget. The machine wanted me to forget the small dark man.”

“Did you ever try to speak to him?” Carr asked. He felt calmer now. Jane’s young voice soothed.

“Didn’t I tell you how timid I was? I pretended not to notice him. Besides, I knew that strange men who followed girls must never be given a chance of getting them alone. Though I don’t think I was ever frightened of him that way. He looked so small and respectful. Actually I suppose I began to feel romantic about him.” She took a swallow of her drink.

Carr had finished his. “Well?”

“Oh, he kept coming closer and then one day he walked up and spoke to me. ‘Would you mind if I walked with you for a while?’ he asked. I gulped and managed to say, ‘No.’ That’s all. He just walked along beside me. It was a long while before he even touched my arm. But that didn’t matter. It was what he said that was important. You’ll never believe the thrill it gave me. He talked very quietly, rather hesitatingly, but everything he said went straight to my heart. He knew the thoughts inside me I’d never told anyone—how mysterious and puzzling life was, how alone you felt, how other people sometimes seemed just like animals or machines, how dead and menacing their eyes were. And he knew the little things in my mind too—how the piano keys looked like champing teeth, how common words came to be just queer artistic designs, how snores at night sounded like far-away railroad trains and railroad trains like snores. Of course now I know that it was rather easy for him to guess those things, partly because he knew we were both outside the life-machine, even though I didn’t.

“After we had walked for a while the first day I saw two of my girl friends ahead. He said, ‘I’ll leave you now.’ and I got that queer blinking feeling and he went off. I was glad, because I wouldn’t have know how to introduce him.

“That first walk set a pattern. We’d always meet and part in the same way. And I still had the oddest trouble remembering him and of course I never mentioned him to a soul. Away from the park I’d say, ‘You dreamed him, Jane,’ almost meaning it. But the next afternoon Id’ go to the park and he’d appear and I’d walk with him and have the feeling of a friend seeing into my mind. It went on that way for quite a while.”

Carr got up and took he glass. He noticed that one of the window shades had about an inch of blackness under it and he went over and pulled it down to the sill.

“And then things changed?” he asked as he made more drinks.

“In a way.”

“Did he start to make love to you?”

“No. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps thing would have been better if he had. But he couldn’t. Because, you see, he was trying to do a very difficult and delicate thing. He wanted me to exist both inside the life-machine and out of it at the same time, without my knowing it. Away from the park I’d just be part of the machine, going through the required motions in a sort of trance. Then at the park with him, I’d break the pattern, but without spoiling the pattern of the rest of my life. Because at that park I’d have just been wandering by myself most of the time, and if he saw I was about to meet someone else, bringing me back into the pattern, he could always drift off.

“He wanted me for a friend, because he was all alone, but he didn’t want me alone with him in his dangerous existence, where he’d have to be responsible for me.

“All this meant that he had to be very careful about our meetings and I’d have to be careful about them too. He made me understand, though he didn’t exactly say so, that our walks together were governed by magic rules and everything would be spoiled if they were once broken. For instance, I must never hurry to meet him. It must always happen as if by accident. We must never try to go any special place together. We must talk as familiarly as the closest friends and yet never ask each other our names, and he must always leave me without warning and without arranging when or where we were to meet again. As if everything happened by a quiet, fatalistic enchantment.

“Actually he was trying to drive along beside a part of my life’s pattern, an unknown intruder, while I was to be his dream-child, or dream-love, you might say, whom he had awakened, but left entranced in the pattern of her old life, not really changed.

“But he couldn’t do it. Not for long. As it turned out, things had to change. No matter how had he tried, he couldn’t conceal from me that there was something horribly important behind what was happening so idly. I sensed a terrible, mute tension inside him. Even when his voice was gentlest and most impersonal I could feel that seething flood of energy, locked up, frustrated, useless. Eventually it began to seep over into me. We’d be walking along slowly and for no good reason my heart would begin to pound, I could hardly breathe, there’d be a ringing in my ears, and little spasms of tension would race up and down me. And all the while he’d be talking ever so calmly. It was awful.

“Perhaps if he ha made love to me…though of course that would have spoiled his whole plan, and, from his point of view, exposed me to dangers that he didn’t feel he had the right to make me share. Still, perhaps if he’d have spoken to me frankly, told me exactly how things were, asked me to share his miserable, hunted life with him, it would have been better.

“But he didn’t. And then things began to get much worse.”