Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

Murmuring reassurances, Wolf disengaged himself, got up, and shouldered hurriedly into his robe. Terri had the same thought: Tommy.

The door opened and Tommy hurtled in, to stop and look back and forth between them desperately. His facewas white, his eyes were huge.

He cried out, losing three years of vocabulary from whatever shock, “Ma take me! No, Pa take me! ‘Fraid Flakesma!’

Wolf scooped him up, submitted to being grappled around the neck, speaking and cuddle-patting reassurances about as he would have to a frightened monkey. Terri started to take him from Wolf or at least add her embraces to his, but restrained herself, uneasily watching the open door.

White lightning washed the room again, followed after a second by another loud but lesser ripping crack!

As if the thunder had asked a question, Tommy drew his head back from Wolfs cheek a little and pronounced rapidly but coherently, regaining some vocabulary but continuing to coin new expressions under the pressure of fear: “I woke up. The ghost light was on! It made Grandma Flakesma come in after me, ceiling to floor! Pa, it brings her! Her green balloon face buzzed, Pa!”

Gathering her courage, which a new-sprouted anger reinforced, Terri moved toward the door. By the time she reached Tommy’s room she was almost running.

The green and blue night light was on, just as Tommy’d said. Its deathly glow revealed a scattered trail of pillows, sheet, and blanket from the abandoned bed to her feet.

Behind her, footsteps competed with the pounding rain.

As she heard Cassius ask, “Where’s Tommy? In Wolf’s bedroom, Terri? Did the thunder scare him?” she stooped and switched off the offending globe with a vicious jab.

Then, as she hurried past the whitely tousle-headed old man mummy-wrapped in a faded long brown bathrobe, she snarled at him, “Your poisonous night light gave Tommy a terrible nightmare!” and rushed downstairs without listening to his stumbling responses.

In the dark living room the portrait of Helen Hostelford Kruger by Esteban Bernadorre was softly spotlighted by the pearly bulb just below its frame. As Terri advanced toward it, moving more slowly and deliberately now, breathing her full-blown anger, its witch face seemed to mock her. She noticed a subtlety that she’d previously missed: the narrowed eyes were very darkly limned, so that they sometimes seemed to be there but sometimes not, as though the portrait itself might be that of a taper-chinned witch mask greenish flesh-pink and waiting for eyes to fill it—and maybe teeth.

After glaring at it for a half dozen pounding heartbeats while thunder crackled in the middle distance, her fists clenching and unclenching, she contented herself with switching off its milky light—poison milk!—with a just audible “Flakesma!” like a curse and hurrying back upstairs.

In the hall there she passed Cassius coming out of “Wolfs bedroom,” as he’d called it. She spared him a glare, but he, agitated looking and seemingly intent on wherever he was heading, hardly appeared to notice.

Wolf had Tommy tucked into the middle of their bed and was sitting close beside him. ‘Tom’s going to spend the rest of the night with us,” he told her. “Big family reunion and all.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said, forcing a smile and bidding anger depart, at least from her features and tumultuous bosom.

“I’ve already invited him and he’s accepted,” Wolf went on, “so I guess you haven’t any say in the matter.”

“But we really want you, Ma,” Tommy assured her anxiously, sitting up a little.

She plopped down on the other side, saying, “And I’m delighted to accept,” as she hugged and kissed him.

Straightening up, she informed Wolf, “I turned that light off,” and Tommy’s face changed a little, and Wolf said lightly, “You mean that ghost light in Tom’s room? A good idea. He and I have been talking about that a bit, and about ghosts and visions of all sorts, and thunderstorms, and flying cabbages and specter kings, and why if the sea were boiling hot we’d have fish stew.”

“And wings for pigs,” Tommy added with a pallid flicker of enthusiasm. “Space Pigs.”

“Incidentally,” Wolf remarked, “we discovered how the ghost light came to be on. No witchcraft at all. Cassius told us. It seems he was passing Tom’s room on his way to bed and saw it was out, and not knowing that Tom had given up sleeping with a night light—”

“I might have known your father’d be the one!” Terri interjected venomously, yet midway through that statement recalled the command she’d given her anger, and managed to mute it somewhat.

“—and thinking to do a good turn he quietly stole in, so as not to wake Tom, and switched it on,” Wolf finished, widening his eyes a little at Terri, warningly. “See? No mystery at all.”

Then Wolf got up, saying, “Look, you guys, I want to check on what that storm’s up to. I’ve been telling Tom how rare such storms are out here, and usually feeble when they do come. While I’m gone, Terri, why don’t you tell Tom about the real humdingers they have in the Midwest that make even this one seem pretty tame? I’ll be back soon.”

Passing Tom’s room he smelled fresh cigarette smoke.

Cassius was kneeling by the night light with his back to the door. He shoved something into his pocket and stood up. He looked haggard and distraught. He started to make an explanation to Wolf, but the latter with a warning nod toward the room where Terri and Tommy were, and not trusting himself to talk, motioned his father in the opposite direction downstairs, and followed him.

The interval gave the old man time to compose his thoughts as well as his features. When they faced each other in the living room, Cassius began, “I was replacing the night light that frightened Tommy with the white one from under Helen’s picture.” He gestured toward where the mask painting hung, now without its own special illumination. “Didn’t want to leave the slightest opportunity for that nightmare, or whatever, to recur.

“But, Wolf,” he immediately went on, his voice deepening, “what I really want to tell you is that I’ve been lying to you in more than one way while you’ve been here, at least lying in the sense of withholding information, though it didn’t seem important to start with and was done, at least in part, with good intentions. Or at least I could make myself believe that, until now.”

Wolf nodded without comment, dark-and suspicious-visaged.

“The littlest lie was that I haven’t been dreaming much lately except for that bitch of a one about Esteban. The truth is that for the past six months or so I’ve been having horrible dreams in which Helen comes back from the dead and hounds and torments me, and especially dreams—green dreams, I call ‘em—in which her face tonics off that picture and buzzes around me whispering and wailing like green-eyed skulls used to when I had nightmares as a boy, and threatening to strangle me—remember that!…

“… for the most obvious reason for these dreams leads us straight hack to my larger lie—again, a lie by withholding information: that ever since Helen’s death I’ve had this half-memory, half-dread, that back in the horrible grey world of alcohol and blackout I contributed more actively to her death than just by not waking and getting her to the hospital in time to be pumped out.

“Sometimes the memory-dread has almost faded away (almost, sometimes, as if it could vanish forever), sometimes it’s been real as a death-sentence—and especially since I’ve started this green-dreaming.” Underlying all that has been the unnerving suspicion or conviction that somewhere in my mind is the memory of what really happened if only I could find a way to get back to it, through past alcoholic mists and blackout, maybe by fasting and exhaustion and sheer deprivation, maybe by drinking my way to it again or taking some stronger drug, maybe by mind-regression or psychoanalysis or some other awareness-broadening pushed to an extreme, maybe even by giving my dreams and dreads to another, to see what he’d find in them— Wolf, it’s the sudden realization that I may have been trying (unknowingly!) to do that to Tommy—and to all of you, for that matter, but especially to Tommy—to use him as a sort of experimental subject, that shattered me tonight.”