Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

“It’s that damned automatic of Inky’s,” I whispered shakily. “It’s trying to shoot itself.”

When a person wakes up sudden and before he should, he’s apt to feel just like I did and say crazy things without thinking. Glasses looked at me for a moment, then he rubbed his eyes and smiled. I could hardly see the smile in the dim light, but I could feel it in his voice when he said, “No Nose, you are getting positively psychic.”

“I tell you I’d swear to it,” I insisted. “It was the click of the hammer of a gun.”

Glasses yawned. “Next you will be telling me that the gun was Inky’s familiar.”

“Familiar what?” I asked him, scratching my head and beginning to get mad. There are times when Glasses’ college professor stuff gets me down.

“No Nose,” he continued, “have you ever heard of witches?”

I was walking around to the windows and glancing out from behind the blinds to make sure there was no one around. I didn’t see anyone. For that matter, I didn’t really expect to.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Sure I have. Why, I knew a guy, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and he told me about witches putting what he called hexes on people. He said his uncle had a hex put on him and he died afterward. He was a traveling salesman—the Dutchman that told me, I mean.”

Glasses nodded his head, and then went on, sleepy-like, from the floor, “Well, No Nose, the Devil used to give each witch a pet black cat or dog or maybe a toad to follow it around and protect it and revenge injuries. Those little creatures were called familiars—stooges sent out by the Big Boy to watch over his chosen, you might say. The witches used to talk to them in a language no one else could understand. Now this is what I’m getting at. Times change and styles change—and the style in familiars along with them. Inky’s gun is black, isn’t it? And he used to mutter at it in a language we couldn’t understand, didn’t he? And—”

“You’re crazy,” I told him, not wanting to be kidded.

“Why, No Nose,” he said, “you were telling me yourself just now that you thought the gun had a life of its own, that it could cock itself and shoot itself without any human assistance. Weren’t you?”

“You’re crazy,” I repeated, feeling like an awful fool and wishing I hadn’t waked Glasses up. “See, the gun’s here where I left it on the table, and the bullets are still in my pocket.”

“Luckily,” he said in a stagy voice he tried to make sound like an undertaker’s. “Well, now that you’ve called me early, I shall wander off and avail us of our neighbor’s newspaper. Meanwhile you may run my bath.”

I waited until I was sure he was gone, because I didn’t want him to make a fool of me again. Then I went over and examined the gun. First I looked for the trade mark or the name of the maker. I found a place which had been filed down, where it might have been once, but that was all. Before this I would have sworn I could have told the make, but now I couldn’t. Not that in general it didn’t look like an ordinary automatic; it was the details—the grip, the trigger guard, the safety catch—that were unfamiliar. I figured it was some foreign make I’d never happened to see before.

After I’d been handling it for about two minutes I began to notice something queer about the feel of the metal. As far as I could see it was just ordinary blued steel, but somehow it was too smooth and slick and made me want to keep stroking the barrel back and forth. I can’t explain it any better; the metal just didn’t seem right to me. Finally I realized the gun was getting on my nerves and making me imagine things; so I put it down on the mantel.

When Glasses got back, the sun was up and he wasn’t smiling any more. He shoved a newspaper on my lap and pointed. It was open to page five. I read:

I looked up to see Larsen standing in the bedroom door. He was in his pajama trousers and looked yellow and seedy, his eyelids puffed and his pig eyes staring at us.

“Good morning, boss,” said Glasses slowly. “We just noticed in the paper that they are trying to do you a dirty trick. They’re claiming you, not Dugan, had Inky shot.”

Larsen grunted, came over and took the paper, looked at it quickly, grunted again, and went to the sink to splash some cold water on his face.

“So,” he said, turning to us. “All the better we are here at the hideout.”

That day was the longest and most nervous I’ve ever gone through. Somehow Larsen didn’t seem to be completely waked up. If he’d been a stranger I’d have diagnosed it as a laudanum jag. He sat around in his pajama trousers, so that by noon he still looked as if he’d only that minute rolled out of bed. The worst thing was that he wouldn’t talk or tell us anything about his plans. Of course he never did much talking, but this time there was a difference. His funny pig eyes began to give me the jim-jams; no matter how still he sat they were always moving—like a guy having a laudanum nightmare and about to run amuck.

Finally it started to get on Glasses’ nerves, which surprised me, for Glasses usually knows how to take things quietly. He began by making little suggestions—that we should get a later paper, that we should call up a certain lawyer in New York, that I should get my cousin Jake to mosey around the police station at Bayport and see if anything was up, and so on. Each time Larsen shut him up quick.

Once I thought he was going to take a crack at Glasses. And Glasses, like a fool, kept on pestering. I could see a blow-up coming, plain as the absence of my nose. I couldn’t figure what was making Glasses do it. I guess when the college professor type gets the jim-jams they get them worse than a dummy like me. They’ve got trained brains which they can’t stop from pecking away at ideas, and that’s a disadvantage.

As for me, I tried to keep hold of my nerves. I kept saying to myself, “Larsen is O.K. He’s just a little on edge. We all are. Why, I’ve known him ten years. He’s O.K.” I only half realized I was saying those things because I was beginning to believe that Larsen wasn’t O.K.

The blow-up came at about two o’clock. Larsen’s eyes opened wide, as if he’d just remembered something, and he jumped up so quick that I started to look around for Luke Dugan’s firing-squad—or the police. But it wasn’t either of those. Larsen had spotted the automatic on the mantel. Right away as he began fingering it, he noticed it was unloaded.

“Who monkeyed with this?” he asked in a very nasty, thick voice. “And why?”

Glasses couldn’t keep quiet.

“I thought you might hurt yourself with it,” he said.

Larsen walked over to him and slapped him on the side of the face, knocking him down. I took firm hold of the chair I had been sitting on, ready to use it like a club. Glasses twisted on the floor for a moment, until he got control of the pain. Then he looked up, tears beginning to drip out of his left eye where he had been hit. He had sense enough not to say anything, or to smile. Some fools would have smiled in such a situation, thinking it showed courage. It would have showed courage, I admit, but not good sense.

After about twenty seconds Larsen decided not to kick him in the face.

“Well, are you going to keep your mouth shut?” he asked.

Glasses nodded. I let go my grip on the chair.

“Where’s the load?” asked Larsen.

I took the bullets out of my pocket and put them on the table, moving deliberately.

Larsen reloaded the gun. It made me sick to see his big hands sliding along the blue-black metal, because I remembered the feel of it.