Fritz Leiber: The Sinful Ones

He looked down the next cross-street. The small dark man was nowhere in sight. He might very well be three blocks away by now, the way he’d been going.

Carr smiled. It occurred to him that he really had no good reason to believe that this was the frightened girl’s small dark man. After all—arresting thought!—there must be thousands, tens of thousands of small dark men with glasses in the world.

But he found he couldn’t laugh off the incident quite that easily. It had reawakened that same mood that the frightened girl had evoked in him this afternoon—a mood of uneasiness and frustrated excitement. Carr’s memory kept picturing the face of the frightened girl.

He pictured her as a college girl, the sort who would cut classes in order to sit on the brink of a fountain and argue very seriously with some young man about the meaning of art. With pencil smudges on her cheeks. The picture fitted, all right. Only consider the howling naïveté of her wondering whether she had “awakened” him.

And yet even that question might cut a lot deeper than you’d think. Wasn’t there a sense in which he actually was “unawakened?”—a person who’d dodged life, who’d never been truly comfortable with any job or any woman—except Marcia, he reminded himself hurriedly. He’d always had that sense of a vastly richer and more vivid existence just out of reach.

For that matter, didn’t most people live their lives without every really “awakening”—as dull as worms, as mechanical as insects, their thoughts spoon-fed to them by newspaper and radio? Couldn’t robots perform the much over-rated “business of living” just as well?

Certainly this afternoon’s events had been of a sort to disturb the imagination most peculiarly. He couldn’t off-hand think of a single satisfactory explanation for the frightened girl’s actions: insanity, neurosis, or some actual danger. Or perhaps a joke?

No, there’d been something undeniably sinister about the wall-eyed blonde, and something in her attitude toward the frightened girl suggestive of a morbid spiritual tyranny. Carr flushed, remembering the slap.

And then those encounters with the dumpy man and the small dark man coming so pat, the latter just as predicted. Carr had the uneasy conviction that he had blundered somehow into a vast shadowy web.

He had reached the Michigan Avenue bridge. In the dusk the Chicago River was a dark, matte floor. He could sense the fine sprinkling of soot that filmed the ripples.

He noticed an odd black motor-barge approaching the bridge. A small, clumsy looking vessel with a long low cabin and a squat stack.

But it was the bargeman who was the most impressive. He was a man of gigantic stature, big-framed. His face was big-jawed, deep-eyed, a fighter’s, but above it rose a great white forehead. His clothes were rough and black, yet Carr fancied that there was about him an air of intellectual power. In his right hand, like a pike, he carried a wicked-looking boathook with a thick shaft almost twice as long as himself.

As the barge neared the bridge he slowly lifted his head and fixed on Carr a gaze so intense, so speculative, so meaningful, that Carr almost jerked back from the rail.

He was still looking at Car, his face a half-squared white oval against the black of his garments and the deck, as the barge floated on under the bridge.

All the way home, over the big windy bridge, between the gleaming white and yellow-gray pylons of the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower, through the dark, gay streets of the near North Side and up to the very steps of the old brownstone house in which he rented a room, Carr tried to discern the outlines of the web in which he seemed to have become entangled. He was quite unsuccessful, and as for a spider, there was not even the shadow of one. What possible linkage could there be between a frightened girl, an unbalanced magnetic inspector, a strange who fled at the sight of you, and perhaps a gargantuan bargeman?

The hallway was musty and dim. He felt in his pigeon-hole, but there was no mail. He hurried up the ornately balustraded stairs, relic of the opulent days of the 1890’s. On the stairs it was darker. A small stained-glass window, mostly patches of dark red and purple, gave the only light.

Just as he reached the turn, he thought he saw himself coming toward himself in the gloom.

The illusion lasted only a moment. Then he recognized the figure for his reflection in the huge mirror, misty, time-streaked and speckled, that occupied most of the wall space of the landing. It had happened to him before.

But still he stood there, staring at the dark-engulfed image of a tall, rather slightly-built man with light hair and small, regular features. A trivial experience had taken on a new meaning, had caused a crystallization of emotion and thought.

There he was—Carr Mackay. And all around him was an unknown universe. And just want, in the universe, did Carr Mackay mean or matter? What was the real significance of the routine, the dark rhythm, that was rushing him through life at an ever-hastening pace toward a grave somewhere? Did it have any significance—that is, any significance a man could accept or endure—especially when any break in the rhythm, like this afternoon’s events, could make it seem so dead and purposeless, an endless marching and counter-marching of marionettes?

He ran blindly past the reflection up the stairs.

In the hall above it was darker still. A bulb had burned out and not been replaced. He felt his way down the corridor and opened the door of his own room.

It was high-ceilinged and comfortable, with rich old woodwork that countless layers of cheap paint couldn’t quite obliterate, and there was an old brass bed with rods and knobs like a fancy birdcage. Starting in at once to change his clothes, Carr tried to let the place take him and cradle him in its suggestion of the familiar and of his life with Marcia and her crowd, make him forget that lost Carr Mackay down there in the mirror. There were his golf clubs in the corner, the books on sailing, the case of poker chips on the mantelpiece, the box for shirt studs with the theater program beside it, and the sleek military hairbrushes Marcia had given him. But tonight they seemed as arbitrary and poignantly useless an assortment of objects as those placed in an old Egyptian grave, to accompany their owner on his long trek through the underworld.

They were not as alive, even, as the two dusty books on metaphysics he had bought in college and never waded more than a quarter through, or the little plaster plaque of the masks of comedy and tragedy presented fifteen years ago to the members of the college dramatic association, or the long-unopened box of chessmen, or the tarnished silver half-pint flask.

He slung his brown suit on a hanger, took it in the closet, and reached down his blue suit, still in its wrapper from the cleaner’s.

There in the gloom he seemed again to see the face of the frightened girl. His hand holding the weighted hanger stopped halfway down from the rack. He could make out the serious, hunted eyes, the thin features, the nervous lips.

She had the key, the password to the hidden world. She knew the answer to the question that dark-engulfed Mackay had been asking.

The imagined lips parted nervously, as if she were about to speak.

With an angry exhalation of held breath, Carr jerked back into the room. What could he be thinking? It was only in wistful, half-baked books that men of thirty-nine fell in love with moody, mysterious, coltish college girls. Or were caught up in glamorously sinister intrigues that existed solely in such girls’ hot-house brains.

He put on his blue suit, then started to transfer to it the stuff in the pockets of the brown one. He came upon the note the frightened girl had scribbled. He must have shoved it into his pocket when the dumpy man had started misbehaving. He turned it over and saw that he hadn’t read all of it.