Fritz Leiber: Horrible Imaginings

He’d come in from outside and found the empty cage ready and waiting, but he could hear another party just close enough behind him that he didn’t feel justified in taking off without them—though there’d been enough times, God knows, when he’d been left behind under the same circumstances. He dutifully waited, holding the door open. There had been times, too, when this politeness of his had been unavailing—when the people had been bound for a ground-floor apartment, or when it had been a lone woman and she’d found an excuse for not making her journey alone with him.

The party finally came into view—two middle-aged women and a man—and the latter insisted on holding the door himself. Ryker relinquished it without argument and went to the back of the cage, the two women following. But the man didn’t come inside; he held the door for yet a third party he’d evidently heard coming behind them.

The third party arrived, an elderly couple, but that man insisted on holding the door in his turn for the second man and his own ancient lady. They were six, a full load, Ryker counted. But then, just as the floor door was swinging shut, someone caught it from the outside, and the one who slipped in last was the Vanishing Lady.

Ramsey mightn’t have seen her if he hadn’t been tall, for the cage was now almost uncomfortably crowded, although none of them were conspicuous heavyweights. He glimpsed a triangle of pale face under dark gleaming eyes, which fixed for an instant on his, and he felt a jolt of excitement, or something. Then she had whipped around and was facing front, like the rest. His heart was thudding and his throat was choked up. He knew the sheen of her black hair and coat, the dull felt of her close-fitting hat, and watched them raptly. He decided from the flash of face that she was young or very smoothly powdered.

The cage stopped at the seventh floor. She darted out without a backward glance and the elderly couple followed her. He wanted to do something but he couldn’t think what, and someone pressed another button.

As soon as the cage had resumed its ascent, he realized that he too could have gotten out on Seven and at least seen where she went in, discovered her apartment number. But he hadn’t acted quickly enough and some of these people probably knew he lived on Fourteen and would have wondered.

The rest got out on Twelve and so he did the last floor alone—the floor that numerically was two floors, actually only one, yet always seemed to take a bit too long, the elevator growing tired, ha-ha-ha.

Next day he examined the names on the seventh-floor mailboxes, but that wasn’t much help. Last names only, with at most an initial or two, was the rule. No indication of sex or marital status. And, as always, fully a third were marked only as OCCUPIED. It was safer that way, he remembered being told (something about anonymous phone calls or confidence games), even if it somehow always looked suspicious, vaguely criminal.

Late the next afternoon, when he was coming in from the street, he saw a man holding the elevator door open for two elderly women to enter. He hurried his stride, but the man didn’t look his way before following them.

But just at that moment, the Vanishing Lady darted into view from the foyer, deftly caught the closing door, and with one pale glance over her shoulder at Ryker, let herself in on the heels of the man. Although he was too far away to see her eyes as more than twin gleams, he felt the same transfixing jolt as he had the previous day. His heart beat faster too.

And then as he hurried on, the light in the little window in the gray door winked out as the elevator rose up and away from him. A few seconds later he was standing in front of the electrically locked door with its dark little window and staring ruefully at the button and the tiny circular telltale just above it, which now glowed angry red to indicate the elevator was in use and unresponsive to any summons.

He reproached himself for not having thought to call out, “Please wait for me,” but there’d hardly been time to think, besides it would have been such a departure from his normal, habitually silent behavior. Still, another self-defeat, another self-frustration, in his pursuit of the Vanishing Lady! He wished this elevator had, like those in office buildings or hotels, a more extensive telltale beside or over its door that told which floor it was on or passing, so you could trace its course. It would be helpful to know whether it stopped at Seven again this time—it was hard to hear it stop when it got that far away. Of course you could run up the stairs, racing it, if you were young enough and in shape. He’d once observed two young men who were sixth-floor residents do just that, pitting the one’s strong legs and two-or-three-steps-at-a-time against the other’s slow elevator—and never learned who won. For that matter, the young tenants, who were mostly residents of the lower floors, where the turnover of apartments was brisker, quite often went charging blithely up the stairs even when the elevator was waiting and ready, as if to advertise (along with their youth) their contempt for its tedious elderly pace. If he were young again now, he asked himself, would he have raced up after a vanished girl?

The telltale went black. He jabbed the button, saw it turn red again as the cage obediently obeyed his summons.

Next afternoon found him staring rather impatiently at the red telltale on the fourteenth floor, this time while waiting to travel to the ground floor and so out. And this time it had been red for quite some while, something that happened not infrequently, since the cage’s slow speed and low capacity made it barely adequate to service a building of this size. And while it stayed red it was hard to tell how many trips it was making and how long people were holding the door at one floor. He’d listened to numerous speculative conversations about “what the elevator was doing,” as if it had mind and volition of its own, which one humorist had indeed suggested. And there were supposed to be certain people (sometimes named and sometimes not) who did outrageous and forbidden things, such as jamming the floor door open while they went back to get things they’d forgotten, or picked up friends on other floors as they went down (or up), organizing an outing or party or having secret discussions and arguments before reaching the less private street. There were even said to be cases of people “pulling the elevator away” from other people who were their enemies, just to spite them.

The most colorful theory, perhaps, was that held by two elderly ladies, both old buffs of elevator travel, whom Ramsey had happened to overhear on two or three occasions. The cornerstone of their theory was that all the building’s troubles were caused by its younger tenants and the teenage sons and daughters of tenants. “Mrs. Clancy told me,” one of them had whispered loudly once, “that they know a way of stopping the thing between floors so they can smooch together and shoot dope and do all sorts of other nasty things—even, if you can believe, go the whole way with each other.” Ryker had been amused; it gave the cage a certain erotic aura.

And every once in a while the elevator did get stuck between floors, sometimes with people in it and sometimes not, especially between the twelfth and fourteenth floors, Clancy had once told him, “like it was trying to stop at the thirteenth!”

But now the elevator’s vagaries weren’t all that amusing to Ramsey standing alone on the top floor, so after one more session of pettish button-pushing—the telltale had gone briefly black, but evidently someone else had beat him to the punch—he decided to “walk down for exercise,” something he’d actually done intentionally upon occasion.