Fritz Leiber: Horrible Imaginings

The figure 12 appeared and disappeared in the window. He kept his eyes on the empty rectangle and gave an accustomed chuckle when the next figure was 14, with none intervening. Superstition, how mighty, how undying! (Though somehow the travel between the last two floors, Twelve and Fourteen, always seemed to take longest, by a fraction. There was food for thought there. Did elevators get tired?—perhaps because the air grew more rarified with increased altitude?)

The window above the 14 steadied. There was a clicking; the gray door slid open sideways, he pushed through the outer door, and as he did so, he uttered another chuckle that was both cheerful and sardonic. He’d just realized that after all his journeying in the apartment tree, he’d at last become interested in one of his nameless traveling companions. The elevator-tree world also held the Vanishing Lady.

It was surprising how lighthearted he felt.

As if in rebuke for this and for his springing hopes not clearly defined, he didn’t see the Vanishing Lady for the next three days, although he devised one or two errands for himself that would bring him back to the apartment tree at dusk, and when he did spot her again on the fourth day, the circumstances were altered from those of their first two encounters.

Returning from another of his little twilight outings and unlocking the heavy street door, he noted that the hall and distant foyer were a little bit dimmer than usual, as if some small, normal light source were gone, with the effect of a black hole appearing suddenly in the fabric of reality.

As he started forward warily, he discerned the explanation. The doors to the elevator were wide open, but the ceiling light in the cage had been switched (or gone) off, so that where a gray door gleaming by reflection should have been, there was an ominous dark upright rectangle.

And then, as he continued to advance, he saw that the cage wasn’t empty. Light angling down into it from the foyer’s ceiling fixture revealed the slender figure of the Vanishing Lady leaning with her back against the cage’s wall just behind the column of buttons. The light missed her head, but showed the rest of her figure well enough, her dejected posture, her motionless passivity.

As he imperceptibly quickened his stride straight toward her, the slanting light went on, picking up bits of detail here and there in the gloom, almost as if summoning them: the glossy gleam of black oxfords, the muted one of black stockings, and the in-between sheen of her sleek coat. The nearest black-gloved hand appeared to be clutching that together snugly, and from the closure there seemed to come faint diamond glimmers like the faintest ghost of a sparkler shower, so faint he couldn’t be sure whether it was really there, or just his own eyes making the churning points of light there are in darkness. The farthest jetty hand held forward a small brass object which he first took for an apartment door key got out well in advance (as some nervous people will) but then saw to be a little too narrow and too long for that.

He was aware of a mounting tension and breathlessness—and sense of strangeness too. And then without warning, just as he was about to enter the cage and simultaneously switch its light on, he heard himself mutter apologetically, “Sorry, I’ve got to check my mailbox first,” and his footsteps veered sharply but smoothly to the right with never a hesitation.

For the next few seconds his mind was so occupied with shock at this sudden rush of timidity, this flinching away from what he’d thought he wanted to do, that he actually had his keys out, was advancing the tiny flat one toward the brass-fronted narrow box he’d checked this noon as always, before he reversed his steps with a small growl of impatience and self-rebuke and hurried back past the manager’s shuttered window and around the stairs.

The elevator doors were closed and the small window glowed bright. But just as he snatched at the door to open it, the bright rectangle narrowed from the bottom and winked out, the elevator growled softly as the cage ascended, and the door resisted his yank. Damn! He pressed himself against it, listening intently. Soon—after no more than five or six seconds, he thought—he heard the cage stop and its door clump open. Instantly he was thumbing the button. After a bit he heard the door clump shut and the growling recommence. Was it growing louder or softer—coming down or going away? Louder! Soon it had arrived, and he was opening the door—rather to the surprise of its emerging occupant, a plump lady in a green coat.

Her eyebrows rose at his questions, rather as had happened on the previous such occasion. She’d been on Three when she’d buzzed for the elevator, she said. No, there’d been no one in it when it arrived, no one had got off, it had been empty. Yes, the light had been off in the elevator when it had come up, but she hadn’t missed anyone on account of that—and she’d turned it on again. And then she’d just gotten in and come down. Had he been buzzing for it? Well, she’d been pushing the button for One, too. What did it matter?

She made for the street door, glancing back at Ryker dubiously, as if she were thinking that, whatever he was up to, she didn’t ever want that excited old man tracking her down.

Then for a while Ryker was so busy trying to explain that to himself (Had there been time for her to emerge and shut the doors silently and hurry down the long hall or tiptoe up the stairs before the cage went up to Three? Well, just possibly, but it would have had to be done with almost incredible rapidity. Could he have imagined her—projected her onto the gloom inside the cage, so to speak? Or had the lady in green been lying? Were she and the Vanishing Lady confederates? And so on…) that it was some time before he began to try to analyze the reasons for his self-betrayal.

Well, for one thing, he told himself, he’d been so gripped by his desire to see her close up that he’d neglected to ask himself what he’d do once he’d achieved that, how he’d make conversation if they were alone together in the cage—and that these questions popping up in his mind all at once had made him falter. And then there was his lifelong habit, he had to admit, of automatically shrinking from all close contact with women save his mother and wife, especially if the occasion for it came upon him suddenly. Or had he without knowing it become just a little frightened of this mysterious person who had stirred him erotically—the apartment tree was always dimly lit, there’d never been anyone else around when she’d appeared, there’d been something so woeful-melancholy about her attitude (though that was probably part of her attraction), and finally she had vanished three times unaccountably—so that it was no wonder he had veered aside from entering the elevator, its very lightlessness suggesting a trap. (And that made him recall another odd point. Not only had the light inside the elevator been switched off but the door, which always automatically swung shut unless someone held it open or set a fairly heavy object, such as a packed suitcase or a laden-large shopping bag, against it, had been standing open. And he couldn’t recall having seen any such object or other evidence of propping or wedging. Mysterious. In fact, as mysterious as his suffocation dreams, which at least had lessened in number and intensity since the Vanishing Lady had turned up.)

Well, he told himself with another effort at being philosophical, now that he’d thought all these things through, at least he’d behave more courageously if a similar situation arose another time.

But when the Vanishing Lady next appeared to Ramsey, it was under conditions that did not call for that sort of courage. There were others present.