Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

I got the light on and checked the door at once. It was securely shut. Then I looked at the table by the open window.

The heavy ashtray still sat in the center of it, rock firm.

But the rapist’s glove that had been under it was gone.

I must have stood there a couple of minutes, telling myself this could not be. Then I went over and lifted the ashtray and carefully inspected its underside, as if the glove had somehow managed to shrink and was clinging there.

And all the while I was having this vision of the glove painfully humping itself from under the ashtray and inching to the table’s edge and dropping to the floor and then crawling off… almost anywhere.

Believe me, I searched my place then, especially the floor. I even opened the doors to the closet and the clothes cabinet, though they had been tightly shut, and searched the floor there. And of course I searched under and behind the bed. And more than once while I searched, I’d suddenly jerk around thinking I’d seen something gray approaching my shoulder from behind.

There wasn’t a sign of the glove.

It was dawn by now—had been for some time. I made coffee and tried to think rationally about it.

It seemed to boil down to three explanations that weren’t wildly farfetched.

First, that I’d gone out of my mind. Could be, I suppose. But from what I’d read and seen, most people who go crazy know damn well ahead of time that something frightening is happening to their minds, except maybe paranoiacs. Still, it remained a possibility.

Second, that someone with a duplicate or master key had quietly taken the glove away while I was asleep. The apartment manager and janitor had such keys. I’d briefly given my duplicate to various people. Why, once before she got down on me, I’d given it to Evelyn Mayne—matter of letting someone in while I was at work. I thought I’d got it back from her, though I remember once having a second duplicate made—I’d forgotten why. The main difficulty about this explanation was motive. Who’d want to get the glove?—except the rapist, maybe.

Third, of course, there was the supernatural. Gloves are ghostly to start with, envelopes for hands—and if there isn’t a medieval superstition about wearing the flayed skin of another’s hand to work magic, there ought to be. (Of course, there was the Hand of Glory, its fingers flaming like candles, guaranteed to make people sleep while being burgled, but there the skin is still on the dried chopped-off hand.) And there are tales of spectral hands a-plenty—pointing out buried treasure or hidden graves, or at guilty murderers, or carrying candles or daggers—so why not gloves? And could there be a kind of telekinesis in which a hand controls at a distance the movements and actions of a glove it has worn? Of course that would be psionics or whatnot, but to me the parapsychological is supernatural. (And in that case what had the glove been trying to do probing at my neck?—strangle me, I’d think.) And somewhere I’d read of an aristocratic Brazilian murderess of the last century who wore gloves woven of spider silk, and of a knight blinded at a crucial moment in a tourney by a lady’s silken glove worn as a favor. Yes, they were eerie envelopes, I thought, gloves were, but I was just concerned with one of them, a vanishing glove.

I started with a jerk as there came a measured knock-knock. I opened the door and looked up at the poker faces of two young policemen. Over their shoulders Mr. Helpful was peering down eagerly at me, his lips rapidly quirking in little smiles with what I’d call questioning pouts in between. Back and a little to one side was Marcia, looking shocked and staring intently at me through the narrow space between the second policeman and the door jamb.

“Jeff Winters,” the first policeman said to me, as if it were a fact that he was putting into place. It occurred to me that young policemen look very blocky around their narrow hips with all that equipment they carry snugly nested and cased in black leather.

“Officer Hart—” Marcia began anxiously.

The second policeman’s eyes flickered towards her, but just then the first policeman continued, “Your neighbor Miss Everly says she handed you a glove earlier this morning,” and he stepped forward into the private space (I think it’s sometimes called) around my body, and I automatically stepped back.

“We want it,” he went on, continuing to step forward, and I back.

I hesitated. What was I to say? That the glove had started to spook me and then disappeared? Officer Hart followed the first policeman in. Mr. Helpful followed him in and stopped just inside my door, Marcia still beyond him and looking frantic. Officer Hart turned, as if about to tell Mr. Helpful to get out, but just then Officer Halstead (that was the other name Marcia had mentioned) said, “Well, you’ve still got it, haven’t you? She gave it to you, didn’t she?”

I shook and then nodded my head, which must have made me look rattled. He came closer still and said harshly and with a note of eagerness, “Well, where is it, then?”

I had to look up quite sharply at him to see his face. Beyond it, just to one side of it, diagonally upward across the room, was the top of the tall clothes cabinet, and on the edge of that there balanced that damned gray glove, flat fingers dripping over.

I froze. I could have sworn I’d glanced up there more than once when I was hunting the thing, and seen nothing. Yet there it was, as if it had flown up there or else been flicked there by me the second time I’d violently brushed something from my face.

Officer Halstead must have misread my look of terror, for he ducked his head toward mine and rasped, “Your neighbor Mr. Angus says that it’s your glove, that he saw you wearing gray gloves night before last! What do you say?”

But I didn’t say anything, for at that moment the glove slid off its precarious perch and dropped straight down and landed on Mr. Helpful’s (Angus’s) shoulder close to his neck, just like the hand of an arresting cop.

Now it may have been that in ducking his head to look at it, he trapped it between his chin and collarbone, or it may have been (as it looked to me) that the glove actively clung to his neck and shoulder, resisting all his frantic efforts to peel it off, while he reiterated, his voice mounting in screams, “It’s not my glove!”

He took his hands away for a moment and the glove dropped to the floor.

He looked back and forth and saw the dawning expressions on the faces of the two policemen, and then with a sort of despairing sob he whipped a long knife from under his coat.

Considerably to my surprise I started toward him, but just then Officer Hart endeared himself to us all forever by wrapping his arms around Mr. Angus like a bear, one hand closing on the wrist of the hand holding the knife.

I veered past him (I vividly recall changing the length of one of my strides so as not to step on the glove) and reached Marcia just in time to steady her as, turned quite white, she swayed, her eyelids fluttering.

I heard the knife clatter to the floor. I turned, my arms around Marcia, and we both saw Mr. Angus seem to shrink and collapse in Officer Hart’s ursine embrace, his face going gray as if he were an empty glove himself.

That was it. They found the other glove and the long silver wig in a locked suitcase in his room. Marcia stayed frightened long enough, off and on, for us to become better acquainted and cement our friendship.

Officer (now Detective) Hart tells us that Mr. Angus is a model prisoner at the hospital for the criminally insane and has gone very religious, but never smiles. And he—Hart—now has the glove in a sort of Black Museum down at the station, where it has never again been seen to move under its own power. If it ever did.