Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

“She said to me, gesturing impatiently with her empty glass, ‘Oh, we’re quite familiar with Esteban’s boundless self-pity and self-dramatizing tricks. You should know him by now. He’s forever parading his little wounds and making a big production of them.’

“At that moment I remembered that Helen was really dead, and that woke me up, as it generally does.”

And with that Cassius blew out his breath in a humorously intended sigh of achievement and looked around for applause. Instead he encountered something close to stony gazes from Terri and Tilly too, Wolf looked both doubtful and slightly embarrassed, while Tommy’s face had lost the excited smile it had had during the cherub-spider part of the dream, and the child avoided his grandfather’s gaze. The four faces, for that matter, were a study in varieties of avoidance.

“Well,” the old man grumbled apologetically after a moment, “I guess I should have realized beforehand that that was an X-rated dream. Not on account of sex or violence, but the horrifies, you might say. I’m sorry, ladies, I got carried away. Tommy, Gramps is not only a liar, he never knows when to stop. I thought my dream was a pretty good show, but I guess it overdid on the unexplained horrifies. They can be tricky, not to everyone’s taste.”

“That’s true enough,” Wolf said with a placating little laugh as Cassius went off into the kitchen to raise mild hell with the Martinezes about something. Wolf was glad to turn his attention to getting the day’s drive to Golden Gate Park under way. That boiled down to plans for Tom and himself, since Terri decided she was tired from yesterday and wanted to gossip with Tilly, maybe drive over to the older woman’s place. This didn’t exactly displease Wolf, as the thought had struck him that Terri might be as tired as his father of their visit, maybe more so, and a day with Tilly Hoyt might set that right, and in any case give him time to rethink his own thoughts.

Tommy was uncommonly silent during the drive down, but a rowboat ride on Stow Lake and a visit to the buffaloes got him cheerful and moderately talkative again. Wolf couldn’t produce any live wolves but at least found the kid a group of stuffed ones at the Academy of Sciences, while both of them enjoyed the speeding, circling dolphins at the Steinhart Aquarium, the only seemingly simplistic Bufano animal sculptures in the court outside, and the even more simplified, positively sketchy food in the cafeteria below.

Emerging in the court again, their attention was captured by the hurrying hungry clouds, which devoured the red skeletal Sutro TV tower as they watched.

“Pa, are clouds alive?” Tommy asked.

“They act that way, don’t they?” Wolf agreed. “But, no, they’re no more alive than, say, the ocean is, or mountains.”

“They’re made of snowflakes, aren’t they?”

“Some of them are, Tom. Mostly high, feathery ones called cirrus. Those’re made of ice flakes, you could say, tiny needles of ice. But these we’re looking at are just water, billions of billions of tiny drops of water that sail through the air together.”

“But drops of water aren’t white, Pa. Milk clouds would be white.”

“That’s true, Tom, but the drops of water are tremendously tiny, droplets you call them, and at a distance they do look white when sunlight or just a lot of sky light hits them.”

“What about small clouds, Pa, are they alive? I mean clouds small enough to be indoors, like smoke clouds or paint clouds, clouds of flakes or paint flakes. Grandpa can blow smoke clouds like He showed me.”

“No, those clouds aren’t alive either, Tom. And you don’t say smoke flakes or paint flakes, though there might be flakes of soot in heavy smoke and you could blow a sort of cloud of droplets—droplets, not flakes—from a spraypaint can, but I wouldn’t advise it.”

“But Grandpa told about a little cloud of paint flakes flying off a picture.”

“That was just in a story, Tom, and an imaginary story at that. Pretend stuff. Come on, Tom, we’ve looked at the sky enough for now.”

But the day, which had started in sunlight, continued to grow more and more lowering until, after their visit to the Japanese Tea Garden, whose miniaturized world appealed to Tom and where he found a little bridge almost steep enough to be a ha-ha, Wolf decided they’d best head for home.

The rain held off until they were halfway across the Golden Gate If Bridge, where it struck in a great squally flurry that drenched and I locked the car, as if it were a wet black beast pouncing. And although they were happily ahead of thick traffic, the rain kept up all the way to Goodland Valley, so that Wolf was relieved to get his Volks into the sturdy garage next to Cassius’ old Buick, and hurry up the pelting slippery hill with Tommy in his arms. During their absence, things had smoothed out at the old man’s place, at least superficially; and mostly by simplification—the Martinezes had both departed early to their home in the Mission after getting dinner into the oven, while Tilly, who’d been going to stay for it, had decided she had to get to her place to see to its storm defenses so there were only the four of them that ate it.

By this time the rain had settled down to a steady beat considerably less violent than its first onset. Wolf could tell from Terri’s manner that she had a lot she wanted to talk to him about, but only when they were alone, so he was glad the Golden Gate Park talk both lasted out the meal and trailed off quickly afterwards (while the black cylinder on the mantelpiece and the green leopard painting under it stood as mute signs of all the things they weren’t talking about), so they could hurry Tommy, who was showing signs of great tiredness, off to bed, still without night light, say good-night to Cassius, who professed himself equally weary, and shut their bedroom door behind them.

Terri whipped off her dress and shoes and paced up and down in her slip.

“Boy, have I got a lot to tell you!” she said, eyeing Wolf excitedly, almost exultantly, somewhat frightenedly, and overall a bit dubiously.

“I take it this is mostly going to be stuff got from Tilly today?” he asked from where he sat half-reclining on the bed. ‘That’s not to put it down. I’ve always trusted what she says, though she sure loves scandal.”

Terri nodded. “Mostly,” she said, “along with an important bit from Loni I’ve been keeping back from you, and some things I just worked out in my head.”

“So tell,” he said with more tranquility than he felt.

“I’ll start with the least important thing,” she said, approaching him and lowering her voice, “because in a way it’s the most pressing, especially now that it’s raining. Wolf, the hill under and back of this house—and all of Goodland Valley for that matter (they really should call it Goodland Canyon, it’s so constricted and overhung!)—isn’t anywhere near as stable as your father thinks it is, or keeps telling us it is. Why, every time a heavy rain keeps on, the residents are phoned warnings to get ready to evacuate, and sometimes the highway police come and make them, or try to. Wolf, there have been mudslides around the Bay that smashed through and buried whole houses, and people caught in them and their bodies never recovered. Right in places like this. There was a slide in Love Canyon, and in other places.”

Wolf nodded earnestly, lips pressed together, eyeing his aroused wife. “That doesn’t altogether surprise me. I’ve known about some of that and I certainly haven’t believed everything Cassius has to say about the stability of this hillside, but there seemed no point in talking about it earlier.”

She went on, “And Tilly says the last times there’ve been warnings, Cassius has gone down and stayed at her place. We’ve never heard a word about that. She says it looks like it might happen again, and we’ll have to be ready to get out too.”