Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

They should succeed, however. The interfering biped had been eliminated, and the other biped was responding beautifully.

How long this moment had been anticipated! How many eons had been spent waiting for the emergence of sufficiently intelligent animals on that faraway planet and their development of adequate radiation exciters—maddeningly slow processes even with telepathic urging! How long, too, at the end, it had taken to select and mold one of the bipeds into a suitably sensitive subject! For a while it had seemed that he was going to escape them by hiding among the crude thought-storms of his duller fellows, but at last he had been tempted into the open. Conditions were right for the establishment of that delicate admixture of physical and mental radiations which opened the door between the stars and built the web across the cosmic chasms.

And now the spider-creature was halfway across that web. Five times already he had crossed it, only to be repulsed at the very end. He must not fail this time. The fate of the world hung on it.

The tractable biped’s mind was becoming restive, though not as yet to an alarming degree. Because his conscious mind could not bear the reality of what he was doing, the biped was inscribing it as a fictional account—his customary rationalization.

And now the spider-creature was across the bridge. His transmuted flesh tingled as it began to reassemble, shuddered at the first radiation blasts of this raw, hot planet. It was like being reborn.

The biped’s mind was in turmoil. Obviously the crasser, planet-tethered portion of it was straining to gain control and would soon over-power the more sensitive segment—but not soon enough. Dispassionately the spider-creature scanned it and noted: an almost unendurable horror, the intent to set fire to its habitation with an inflammable oil in an effort to injure the invader (that was good—it would destroy evidence), and the further intent to flee as soon as it regained control of its body (that must be prevented—the biped must be overtaken and eliminated; its story would not be believed, but alive it constituted a danger, nevertheless).

The spider-creature broke free, its crossing accomplished. As the mental portion of it underwent the final transformation, it felt its control of the biped’s mind snap and it prepared for pursuit.

At that first moment of exultation, however, it felt a twinge of pity for the small, frantic, doomed animal that had helped alter so signally the destiny of its planet.

It could so easily have saved itself. It had only to have resisted one of the telepathic promptings. It had only to have maintained its previous detestation of the voice of the herd. It had only not to have undone the work of defensive sabotage its comrade, in dying, had achieved. It had only not to have repaired the radio.

Final Comment by Willard P. Cronin, M.D., Terrestrial, Montana: The fire at John Wendle’s residence was noted at 3:00 A.M. on the morning of January 17th, shortly after the blizzard ended. I was a member of the party that immediately set out to render aid, and was among the first to sight the gutted cabin. In its ruin was discovered a single, badly-charred body, later identified as that of Wendle. There were indications that the fire had been started by the deliberate smashing of a kerosene lamp.

It should be obvious to any rational person that Thomas Alderman’s “diary” is the work of an insane mind, and almost certainly fabricated in an effort to shift to other and fabulous shoulders the guilt for a murderous crime, which he also sought to conceal entirely—by arson.

Interrogation of Alderman’s former city associates confirms the picture of a weak-minded and antisocial dreamer, a miserable failure in his vocation. Very possibly the motive for his crime was jealousy of a fellow hackwriter who, although his stories were largely a puerile bilge of pseudoscience designed for immature minds, had at least some small financial success. As for the similarly childish “story” that Alderman claimed to be writing, there is no evidence that it even existed, though it is impossible, of course, to disprove that it did indeed exist and was destroyed in the fire.

Most unfortunately, some of the more lurid details of the “diary” have been noised around in Terrestrial, giving rise to scare stories among the more ignorant and credulous inhabitants.

It is equally unfortunate that an uneducated and superstitious miner named Evans, a member of the rescue party and of the group that followed Alderman’s footprints away from the charred cabin, should have strayed from that group and shortly returned in panic with a wild account of having found a set of “big, sprawly, ropey tracks” paralleling Alderman’s trail. Doubly unfortunate that a sudden resumption of the snowfall prevented his yarn from being disproved by such visual evidence as even the most brutish minds must accept.

It is no use pointing out to such low-grade mentalities that no reputable citizen of Terrestrial has seen anything in the least out of the ordinary in the snowfields, that no unusual auroras whatever have been reported by meteorologists, and that there were no radio broadcasts which could possibly have agreed, either in hour or content, with those “scientific programs” of which Alderman made so much.

With the exasperating and ludicrous consistency characteristic of epidemics of mass hallucination, stories of “strange tracks” in the snow and distant fleeting glimpses of “a big black spidery thing” continue to trickle in.

One wishes, with an understandably angry fervor, that the whole episode could have had the satisfying and all-decisive conclusion that the public trial of Thomas Alderman would have provided.

That, however, was not to be. About two miles from the cabin, the group following Alderman’s footprints came upon his body in the snow. The expression on his frozen face was sufficient in itself to prove his insanity. One stiff hand, half buried in the snow, clutched the notebook containing the “diary.” On the back of the other, which was clapped to his frosted eyes, was something that, although furnishing more fuel for the delusions of morons like Evans, provides the educated and scientific intellect with a clue as to the source of one of the more bizarre details in Alderman’s fabrication.

This thing on the back of his hand obviously must have been a crude bit of tattooing, though so old and inexpertly done that the characteristic punctures and discrete dye granules were not apparent

A few wavy violet lines .

Afterwards Wolf and Terri couldn’t decide whether little Tommy’s slightly off-beat request about the green and blue night light (that later came to be called the ghost light) had come before or after the first dinner table talk about ghosts with the white-haired old man (Wolf’s widowed professor emeritus father, Cassius Kruger, a four-years reformed alcoholic) in the living room of the latter’s dark, too big, rather spooky house on the steep wooded hillside of canyon-narrow Goodland Valley up in Marin County just north of San Francisco that was subject to mud slides during seasons of heavy rain.

For one thing, there’d been more than one such conversation, scattered over several evenings. And they’d been quite low key and unscary, at least at first, more about memorable literary ghost stories than real or purported ghosts, so that neither Terri nor Wolf had been particularly worried about Tommy being disturbed by them.

Little Tommy Kruger was a solemn, precocious four-year-old whose rather adult speech patterns hadn’t yet been corrupted by school and the chatter of other kids. Although not particularly subject to night terrors, he’d always slept with a tiny light of some sort in the room, more his mother’s idea than his. In his bedroom at his grandfather’s this was a small, weak bulb plugged in at floor level and cased in tiny panes of dark green and deep blue glass set in tin edges crafted in Mexico.