Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

Otherwise she behaved as she always had, changing costume seven times a day, paying great attention to her coiffure and to her cosmetic and juvenation treatments, being idly charming to the officers and stewards.

But she spent hours in her husband’s office, studying his business and working to the edge of exhaustion his three secretaries. And she always took her small meals in the Master Stateroom.

On Menkar V they told her, after weeks of test and study, that her husband was beyond reawakening, at least at the present state of medical skill, and to come back in ten years. More would be known then.

At that, Annaoj nodded frigidly and took up the reins of her husband’s business, conducting them entirely from the Eros as it skipped about through space and hyperspace. Under her guidance the Foelitsack economic empire prospered still more than it had under its founder. She successfully fought or bought off the claims of Piliph’s eleven surviving divorced wives, a hundred of his relatives and a score of his prime managers.

She regularly returned to Menkar V and frequently visited other clinics and sought out famous healers. She became expert at distinguishing the charlatans from the dedicated, the conceited from the profound. Yet at times she also consulted sorcerers and wizards and witchdoctors. Incantations in exotic tongues and lights were spoken and glowed over Philiph’s frigid form, extraterrestrial stenches filled the surgery of the Eros, and there were focused there the meditations of holy creatures which resembled man less than a spider does—while three or four fuming yet dutiful doctors of the Eros’ dozen waited for the crucial moment in the ceremony when they would obediently work a five-second reversal of the neutrino field to bring the body briefly to normal temperature to determine whether the magic had worked.

But neither science nor sorcery could revive him.

She bullied many a police force and paid many a detective agency to hunt down the gypsy with the black cat, but the old crone and her runic spaceship had vanished as utterly as the vital spark in Piliph Foelitsack. No one could tell whether Annaoj really believed that the gypsy had had something to do with the striking down of her husband and might be able to bring him alive, or whether the witch had merely become another counter in the sorcery game of which Annaoj had suddenly grown so fond.

In the course of time Annaoj took many lovers. When she tired of one, she would lead him for the first time into the Master Stateroom of the Eros and show him the filmed and frosty body of her husband and send him away without as much as a parting touch of her fingertips and then lie down beside the cold, cold form under the cold, cold stars of the skylight.

And she never once let another woman set foot in that room.

Not the humblest, nor ugliest maid. Not the greatest sculptress of Pleiades. Not the most feared and revered sorceress in the Hyades.

She became known as Crazy Annaoj, though no one thought it to her face or whispered it within a parsec of her.

When she still looked 17, though her age was 70 times that—for sciences of geriatrics and juvenation had progressed greatly since her husband’s collapse—she felt an unfamiliar weariness creeping on her and she ordered the Eros to make once more for Menkar V at force speed.

The Eros never emerged from hyperspace. Most say she was lost scuttled by Annaoj as she felt death coming on her. A few maintain she exited into altogether another universe, where Crazy Annaoj is still keeping up her search for the healer who can revive Piliph, or playing her game with the doctors and witchdoctors and with her lovers.

But in any case the gypsy’s prediction was fulfilled, for in the course of Annaoj’s voyages, the body of Piliph Foelitsack had been carried twice to Andromeda and also to two galaxies in Virgo, three in Leo and one in Coma Berenices.

David Lashley huddled the skimpy blankets around him and dully watched the cold light of morning seep through the window and stiffen in his room. He could not recall the exact nature of the terror against which he had fought his way to wakefulness, except that it had been in some way gigantic and had brought back to him the fear-ridden helplessness of childhood. It had lurked near him all night and finally it had crouched over him and thrust down toward his face.

The radiator whined dismally with the first push of steam from the basement, and he shivered in response. He thought that his shivering was an ironically humorous recognition of the fact that his room was never warm except when he was out of it. But there was more to it than that. The penetrating whine had touched something in his mind without being quite able to dislodge it into consciousness. The mounting rumble of city traffic, together with the hoarse panting of a locomotive in the railroad yards, mingled themselves with the nearer sound, intensifying its disturbing tug at hidden fears. For a few moments he lay inert, listening. There was an unpleasant stench too in the room, he noticed, but that was nothing to be surprised at. He had experienced more than once the strange olfactory illusions that are part of the aftermath of flu. Then he heard his mother moving about laboriously in the kitchen, and that stung him into action.

“Have you another cold?” she asked, watching him anxiously as he hurriedly spooned in a boiled egg before its heat should be entirely lost in the chilly plate. “Are you sure?” she persisted. “I heard someone sniffling all night.”

“Perhaps Father—” he began. She shook her head. “No, he’s all right. His side was giving him a lot of pain yesterday evening, but he slept quietly enough. That’s why I thought it must be you, David. I got up twice to see, but”—her voice became a little doleful—”I know you don’t like me to come poking into your room at all hours.”

“That’s not true!” he contradicted. She looked so frail and little and worn, standing there in front of the stove with one of Father’s shapeless bathrobes hugged around her, so like a sick sparrow trying to appear chipper, that a futile irritation, an indignation that he couldn’t help her more, welled up within him, choking his voice a little. “It’s that I don’t want you getting up all the time and missing your sleep. You have enough to do taking care of Father all day long. And I’ve told you a dozen times that you mustn’t make breakfast for me. You know the doctor says you need all the rest you can get.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” she answered quickly, “but I was sure you’d caught another cold. All night long I kept hearing it—a sniffling and a snuffling—”

Coffee spilled over into the saucer as David set down the half-raised cup. His mother’s words had reawakened the elusive memory, and now that it had come back he did not want to look it in the face.

“It’s late, I’ll have to rush,” he said.

She accompanied him to the door, so accustomed to his hastiness that she saw in it nothing unusual. Her wan voice followed him down the dark apartment stair: “I hope a rat hasn’t died in the walls. Did you notice the nasty smell?”

And then he was out of the door and had lost himself and his memories in the early morning rush of the city. Tires singing on asphalt. Cold engines coughing, then starting with a roar. Heels clicking on the sidewalk, hurrying, trotting, converging on street car intersections and elevated stations. Low heels, high heels, heels of stenographers bound downtown, and of war workers headed for the outlying factories. Shouts of newsboys and glimpses of headlines: “AIR BLITZ ON… BATTLESHIP SUNK… BLACKOUT EXPECTED HERE… DRIVEN BACK.”