Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

When he got the black cylinder downstairs he set it, at Cassius’ direction, on the high mantelpiece, which would at least put it out of Tommy’s reach, and as an extra precaution taped the switch in the off position with two short lengths of friction adhesive. The old man had propped the painting on a straight-backed chair standing against the wall nearby.

Wolf’s speculations about Cassius and the house were further driven from his mind, or to its shadowy outer reaches at any rate, by the day’s activities when he drove Terri and Tommy up into Sonoma County through the Valley of the Moon to the Jack London Museum and led them through the big trees to the fire-darkened gaunt stone ruins of London’s Wolf House. (Tommy made a solemn joke of calling it “Pa House,” while Wolf promised to show him some real wolves at Golden Gate Park tomorrow.)

That must have been the day, Wolf figured out later, of Loni’s impulsive departure for her Oregon college, for she wasn’t there the next morning to hear Cassius’ dream of the giant spider and Esteban (though Tilly was, who’d come over early to share their late breakfast). It was also the day when Weather confirmed that the big storm front building up in the North Pacific had veered south and was headed for San Francisco.

Cassius prefaced his account of the night’s somnial pageantry with some nervous and veering verbal flamboyancies. He seemed a bit hollow-eyed and overwrought, as if sleep hadn’t rested him and he were clowning around and gallumphing to hide the fact, and for the first time Wolf found himself wondering whether their visit hadn’t begun to tire the old man.

“Never dream these days,” Cassius grumbled, “just feelings and flashes, as I think I’ve told you, Terri, but last night I sure had a doozie. You brought it on me, Wolf, by making me go up to the attic and look at that old stuff of Esteban’s I’d forgotten was there.” He nodded toward the black cylinder and green-flooded leopard painting. “Yes, sir, Tommy, your Pa gave me one doozie of a dream.” He paused, wrinkled his nose, and looked comically sideways at Wolf. “No, that isn’t true at all, is it? I was the one who told you about it and led you up there. I brought it all on myself! See, Tommy, never trust what your Grandpa says, his mind’s slipping.

“Anyhow,” he launched out, “I was standing in the front attic window, which had become French windows nine feet tall with yellow silk drapes, and I was working away on a big kirschwasser highball. I sometimes drink in my dreams,” he explained to Terri. “It’s one of my few surviving pleasures. Sometimes wake up dream-drunk for a blessed moment or two.

“Around me in my dream the whole house was jumping, first floor, second floor, attic turned ballroom. People, lights, music, the tintinnabulation of alcoholic crystal. Benighted Goodland Valley resounded with the racket from stem to stern. Even the darkness jumped. I realized that your Grandma, Tommy, was giving one of her huge parties, to which she invited everyone and which generally bored me stiff.” He looked surprised and tapped himself on his mouth. “That’s another lie,” he said. “I enjoyed those parties more than she did. She gave them just to please me. Keep remembering what I told you about trusting your Grandpa, Tommy.

“Anyway,” he went on, “there I was carousing on the edge of nothing, leaning against the friendly dark outside, for the French windows were pure ha-ha.” He explained to Tommy, “That’s a place in a British fancy garden where there should be a flight of steps, but isn’t. You start down it and—boomp. Hence ha-ha. Very funny. The British have a wonderfully subtle sense of humor.

“But in my dream I was gifted with an exquisite sense of balance. I could easily have walked a tightwire from where I was to the opposite crest of the valley, balancing myself with sips of kirsch and soda, if my dream had only provided one. But just then I felt something tug at my trousers, trying to topple me forward.

“I looked down at my leg, and there was a naked baby no higher than my knee, a beautiful cherub straight out of Tiepolo or Titian, but with a nasty look on her cute little face, yanking ineffectually at my pant leg with both hands. I looked straight down the outside of the house and saw, just below me way down there, a new cellar door of the slanting flat kind thrown wide open, revealing a short flight of steps leading down into the basement, from which light was pouring, as if the party were going on there too.

“But a green tinge in that light telegraphed ‘Danger!’ to my brain, and that was no lie for suddenly there was rearing out of the cellar up toward me a huge green and yellow spider with eight glaring jet black eyes and terribly long legs, the first pair so super long, like the two tentacular arms of a squid, that they could reach the attic.

“At that moment I felt something that made me look back at my leg, and I saw that the cherub had let go of my pants and was starting to overbalance and fall (she had no wings as a proper cherub should).

“With one hand I steadied the baby-skinned creature and with the back of the other (oh, my balance was positively miraculous) I knocked aside the spider leg that was about to touch the cherub.

“At the same instant I saw that the monster was only a large pillow toy made of lustrous stuffed velvet, the eyes circles of black sequins, and that the whole business was a put-on, a party joke on me.”

Cassius took a swallow of cold coffee and lit another cigarette. “Well, that ended that part of the dream,” he said, “and the next I knew I was standing on the dark hillside beside the house, the party still going on, and calculating how many inches the hill had shifted down and forward during the last rain (it never has, you know, not an iota) and wondering what the next rain was going to do to it—guess I was anticipating today’s weather forecast—when I heard someone call my name softly.

“I looked down the hillside to the road and saw a small closed car, one of those early Austins or maybe a Hillman Minx, drawing up to park there. And, this is a funny part, although it was black night, I could see the driver silhouetted inside, as if by an impossibly belated sunset afterglow, and although he was wearing a big white motorcycle crash helmet I identified him at once—something about his posture, the way he held himself—as Esteban Bernadorre, whom I haven’t seen for almost a quarter of a century.

“‘Esteban?’ I called hoarsely, and from the tiny car came the quiet, clipped, clearly enunciated response, ‘Certainly, I will be happy to coffee with you, Cassius.’

“Next thing I knew I was walking uphill toward the house with Esteban close beside me. As we approached the open door, which was filled with a knot of animatedly conversing drinkers—a sort of overflow from the hubbub inside—I realized Esteban was still wearing his crash helmet, oversize gauntlets too, and that I still hadn’t greeted him properly.

“Preparatory to introducing him to the others, I swung in front of him, offering my hand and trying to discern his face in the cavernous seeming helmet’s depths. He drew off his gauntlet and shook hands. His hand was oversize, as its glove had been, and wet, gritty, and soft all at once. After shaking mine, he lifted his hand and made the motion of wiping the back of it across his eyes, and I saw it was composed of wet grey ashes except where the wiping motion had bared a narrow edge of pink flayed flesh. And at the same time I saw that his eyes were nothing but charred black holes, infinitely deep, and his whole face granular black char wet as the ashes.

“I swiftly turned to check how much, if anything, those in the door had seen, for we were now quite close to them. I saw that the centralmost carouser was Helen, my dear wife, looking very dashing in a silver lame evening dress.