Fritz Leiber: The Sinful Ones

If you want to meet me again in spite of dangers, I’ll be by the lion’s tail near the five sisters tonight at eight.

His lips twisted in a wry, incredulous smile. Then he spat out a laugh. That tore it! If that didn’t prove that she’d been suckled on The Prisoner of Zenda and weaned on Graustark, he’d like to know. Lion’s tail and five sisters! She probably carried the Rajah’s ruby in a bag around her neck and wrote love letters with a black swan’s quill. In short, she went in for a brand of melodrama and high mystification that had gone out with the bustle. Here was the key to her antics, and she could stop haunting his imagination right now.

Why, there was no question but that Marcia was the right woman for him, even I at times she was a little too eager to change his life. Capable, charming, successful, mature. An executive with an important publishing firm. Competent at both business and pleasure. His kind. Sailed and golfed with him and the crowd, playing a shrewd game of poker, went to theaters and interesting parties, knew important people. He and Marcia would reach some satisfying understanding soon, maybe even get married. What competition could be offered by a mere maladjusted girl?

“But,” something reminded him quickly, “didn’t you decided at the office that it wasn’t anything like love that was the bond between you and the frightened girl? Aren’t you trying to dodge the problem by shifting it to an entirely different emotional level?”

He hurried into the bathroom, rubbing his chin. Marcia liked him to be well-groomed and his beard felt pretty conspicuous. He looked into the mirror to confirm his suspicious and once again he saw a different Carr Mackay.

The one down there on the stairs had seemed lost. This one, framed in surgical white, looked trapped. A neat, wooden little Mackay who went trudging through life without inquiring what any of the signposts meant, who always grabbed at pleasures he didn’t want, who kept selling himself this, that, and the other thing—customer Jekyll and salesman Hyde. A stupid Mackay, who always stuck to the ordained routine. A dummy.

He really ought to shave, yes, but the way he was feeling, the sooner he and Marcia got started drinking, the better. He’d skip shaving this once.

As he made this decision, he was conscious of a disproportionate feeling of guilt.

But everyone, at some time or another, finds himself attaching grotesque importance to some trivial action. Like stepping on, or not stepping on, a crack in the sidewalk.

He’d probably been reading too many “Five O’Clock Shadow” ads.

Forget it.

He hurried into the rest of his clothes, started toward the door, stopped by the bureau, pulled open the top drawer, looked for a moment at the three flat pints of whiskey nestling inside it. Then he shut the drawer quickly and hurried into the hall, down the stairs, averting his eyes from the mirror, passed quickly through the still shadowy hall, and out into the street.

It was a relief to know he’d be with Marcia in a few minutes. But eight dark blocks are eight dark blocks, and they have to be walked, and to walk them takes time no matter how rapidly you stride. Time for your sense of purpose and security to dwindle to nothing. Time for the familiar to become the chillingly unfamiliar. Time for the patterns you live by to lose their neat outlines. Time to get away from the ads and the pink lights and the television voices and to think a little bit about the universe—to realize that it’s a place of mystification and death, with no more feeling than a sausage grinder for the life oozing through it.

The buildings to either side became the walls of a black runway, and the occasional passers-by, shadow-swathed automatons.

He became conscious of the dark rhythm of existence as a nerve-twisting, insistent thing that tugged at him like a marionette’s string, trying to drag him back to some pattern from which he had departed. A compound of hurrying footsteps, roaring engines, screeching streetcars, drumming propellers, surging oceans, spinning planets, plunging stars, and still something more.

Just a mood, he told himself, a very intense mood. But wasn’t that saying enough? Wasn’t the essence of a mood one’s inability to combat it? And the more intelligent you were, the more readily you could see through all dodges and rationalizations back to the cold, harsh, unfathomable reality of the mood itself.

Being with Marcia could fix him up, he told himself, as the dark facades crept slowly by. She at least couldn’t ever become a stranger. There was too much between them. Once with her, he would snap back to normal.

But he had forgotten her face.

A trivial thing. It is always easy momentarily to forget a face, no matter how familiar. Like a name, or the place where you’ve put something for safe-keeping. And the more you try to remember it, the more the precise details elude you.

Carr tried. A hundred faces blinked and faded in his mind, some hauntingly suggestive of Marcia, some grotesquely dissimilar. Girls he had know in college, job applicants of months ago whom he had never thought of since, pictures in magazines, faces glimpsed for a moment in a crowded street, others with no source-tag at all.

Light from a first-story window spilled on the face of a girl in a blue slicker just as she passed him. His heart pounded as he walked on. He had almost grabbed her and said, “Marcia!” And she hadn’t been Marcia’s type at all.

He walked faster. The apartment tower where Marcia lived edged into view, grew threateningly tall.

He hurried up the flagstone walk flanked by shrubbery. The lobby was a long useless room furnished in some supposedly Spanish style, with lots of carved wood and red leather. He stopped at the desk. The clerk was at the back of the cubicle, talking to someone over the phone. Carr waited, but the clerk seemed determined to prolong the conversation. Carr cleared his throat. The clerk yawned and languorously flexed the arm that held the receiver, as if to call attention to the gold seal-ring and cuff-linked wrist.

The automatic elevator was waiting, the door open, the cage dark. Carr delayed no longer. He stepped in and pushed the seven button.

Nothing happened.

After jabbing the button a couple of more times, he decided he’d better tell the clerk it was out of order.

But just then the door closed, the light blinked on, and the cage started upward.

It was a small cage. Vermillion panels, brass fittings, a carpet of darkest red. A small placard said that it could safely carry 1,500 pounds. The vermillion was darkened where people had learned, and worn spots showed where packages had been rested on the brass rail and things stuck behind it.

The cage stopped at seven. The door opened. A fat man in a thick overcoat took his finger off the outside button and stepped inside without waiting. Carr squeezed past his paunch, turned around as soon as he was through the door and snapped, “I beg your pardon!” But the door was already closing and the boorish fat man made no rejoinder.

Carr walked down the red-carpeted hall. In front of Marcia’s door he hesitated. She mightn’t like him barging in this way. But who could be expected always to wait the pleasure of that prissy clerk?

Behind him he heard the cage stop at the ground floor.

He noticed that the door he faced was ajar.

He pushed it open a few inches.

“Marcia,” he called. “Marcia?” His voice came out huskily.

He stepped inside, into the living room. The reading lamp with its white, tufted shade showed dull pearl walls, white bookcase, blue over-stuffed sofa with a coat and yellow silk scarf tossed across it, and a faint curl of cigarette smoke from somewhere.