Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

In the small studio where He roughed out creation, the paints were dry on canvas and palette, the watercolors cracked, the copper plates eaten through by acid.

In the second room, where He recorded His directives—His Word—there was dust on the tapes and from the machine came a faint stale stench of burnt insulation.

In the third room there were cobwebs on His typewriter.

Clearly the Adversary hadn’t stopped at the back door. He had invaded and disordered the whole.

He had even invaded His body, God belatedly realized. He was full of aches and pains, His tongue was thick, He had to lean down close to the typewriter to make out what He had been typing on the last sheet.

There was a web just above the paper and a tiny black spider was walking across it. God jerked back. Why the Hell had He ever created spiders? What had got into Him then? For the moment He couldn’t recall. It seemed like the end of everything.

But then He reminded Himself that this wasn’t the first time He’d been slammed back on His heels. This wasn’t the only occasion on which He’d been made to feel small. He became aware of a warm knot of identity deep in His gullet, under His breastbone. The Adversary hadn’t invaded that and right now that was all that mattered. He still had a mustard-seed of faith in Himself.

His lifting gaze touched a tiny Buddha of once polished, now dust-coated, reddish wood. Maybe… no!—look at the trouble the contemplative mode had got Him into. The trouble about Nirvana was He always had to come back from it. No, another time, maybe, but not now.

A chain of association flashed on in His mind, like a zigzag lightning flash. Buddha—those priests drenching themselves with gasoline and setting themselves afire—universal flames—atomic holocaust—the ultimate battle of Ragnarok—the Norse gods— Odin! Yes, that was it! It was time that He went out on another anonymous swing, to inspect His creatures and perhaps spot one of the lesser gods here and there. Somewhere along the line, He’d remember the beach.

He returned to the kitchen and put on the eyepatch—His left eye felt as if it really needed the sleazy thing. He whipped on the slouch hat, pulling it low on his forehead, and swirled the old cloak around his shoulders.

He looked up unhappily at the empty birdcage. He really ought to have His two ravens on His shoulders when He went on His Odin-tour of inspection, but they must have flown away long ago. Someone had probably released them out of mercy—maybe Venus, just before she left. Or maybe He had.

The kitten came purring to his slipper. On a sudden inspiration, God picked it up and gently stuffed it inside his vest. Then He hurried back to the typewriter, delicately caught up the cobweb with the spider on it and laid it on His shoulder. They would have to do for his Hugin and Munin. At least they were both black.

Then God squared His shoulders, tucked His chin against His chest, pushed the back door open wide, and stepped out. He was feeling remarkably cheerful. He’d really make His rounds this time. If he happened on a rocket bound for the Moon, or Mars, or even Midgard, He’d hop aboard.

The back gate was stuck like the back door and had to be forced open. That depressed Him again, but after He’d taken a few dozen steps down the dark alley, He began to feel better.

My most literally tangible brush with the supernatural (something I can get incredibly infatuated with yet forever distrust profoundly, like a very beautiful and adroit call girl) occurred in connection with the rape by a masked intruder of the woman who lived in the next apartment to mine during my San Francisco years. I knew Evelyn Mayne only as a neighbor and I slept through the whole incident, including the arrival and departure of the police, though there came a point in the case when the police doubted both these assertions of mine.

The phrase “victim of rape” calls up certain stereotyped images: an attractive young woman going home alone late at night, enters a dark street, is grabbed… or, a beautiful young suburban matron, mother of three, wakes after midnight, feels a nameless dread, is grabbed… The truth is apt to be less romantic. Evelyn Mayne was 65, long divorced, neglected and thoroughly detested by her two daughters-in-law and only to a lesser degree by their husbands, lived on various programs of old age, medical and psychiatric assistance, was scrawny, gloomy, alcoholic, waspish, believed life was futile, and either overdosed on sleeping pills or else lightly cut her wrists three or four times a year.

Her assailant at least was somewhat more glamorous, in a sick way. The rapist was dressed all in rather close-fitting gray, hands covered by gray gloves, face obscured by a long shock of straight silver hair falling over it. And in the left hand, at first, a long knife that gleamed silver in the dimness.

And she wasn’t grabbed either, at first, but only commanded in a harsh whisper coming through the hair to lie quietly or be cut up.

When she was alone again at last, she silently waited something like the ten minutes she’d been warned to, thinking that at least she hadn’t been cut up, or else (who knows?) wishing she had been. Then she went next door (in the opposite direction to mine) and roused Marcia Everly, who was a buyer for a department store and about half her age. After the victim had been given a drink, they called the police and Evelyn Mayne’s psychiatrist and also her social worker, who knew her current doctor’s number (which she didn’t), but they couldn’t get hold of either of the last two. Marcia suggested waking me and Evelyn Mayne countered by suggesting they wake Mr. Helpful, who has the next room beyond Marcia’s down the hall. Mr. Helpful (otherwise nicknamed Baldy, I never remembered his real name) was someone I loathed because he was always prissily dancing around being neighborly and asking if there was something he could do—and because he was six foot four tall, while I am rather under average height.

Marcia Everly is also very tall, at least for a woman, but as it happens I do not loathe her in the least. Quite the opposite in fact.

But Evelyn Mayne said I wasn’t sympathetic, while Marcia (thank goodness!) loathed Mr. Helpful as much as I do—she thought him a weirdo, along with half the other tenants in the building.

So they compromised by waking neither of us, and until the police came Evelyn Mayne simply kept telling the story of her rape over and over, rather mechanically, while Marcia listened dutifully and occupied her mind as to which of our crazy fellow-tenants was the best suspect—granting it hadn’t been done by an outsider, although that seemed likeliest. The three most colorful were the statuesque platinum-blonde drag queen on the third floor, the long-haired old weirdo on six who wore a cape and was supposed to be into witchcraft, and the tall, silver-haired, Nazi-looking lesbian on seven (assuming she wore a dildo for the occasion and was nuttier than a five-dollar fruit cake).

Ours really is a weird building, you see, and not just because of its occupants, who sometimes seem as if they were all referred here by mental hospitals. No, it’s eerie in its own right. You see, several decades ago it was a hotel with all the rich, warm inner life that once implied: bevies of maids, who actually used the linen closets (empty now) on each floor and the round snap-capped outlets in the baseboards for a vacuum system (that hadn’t been operated for a generation) and the two dumb-waiters (their doors forever shut and painted over). In the old days there had been bellboys and an elevator operator and two night porters who’d carry up drinks and midnight snacks from a restaurant that never closed.