Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (9 page)

“An historic chair,” the Doctor observed, “designed and built for me by von Helmholtz of the Bauhaus. It has been occupied by all my best mediums during their so-called trance states. It was in that chair that I established to my entire satisfaction the real existence of ectoplasm—that elaboration of the mucous membrane and occasionally the entire epidermis that is distantly analogous to the birth envelope and is the fact behind the persistent legends of the snake-shedding of filmy live skins by human beings, and which the spiritualist quacks are forever trying to fake with their fluorescent cheesecloth and doctored negatives. Orgone, the primal sexual energy?—Reich makes a persuasive case, still… But ectoplasm?—yes! Angna went into trance sitting just where you are, her entire body dusted with a special powder, the tracks and distant smudges of which later revealed the ectoplasm’s movements and origin—chiefly in the genital area. The test was conclusive and led to further researches, very interesting and quite revolutionary, none of which I have published; my professional colleagues froth at the mouth, elaborating an opposite sort of foam, whenever I mix the psychic with psychoanalysis—they seem to forget that hypnotism gave Freud his start and that for a time the man was keen on cocaine. Yes indeed, an historic chair.”

I naturally looked down at it and for a moment I thought I had vanished, because I couldn’t see my legs. Then I realized that the upholstery had changed to a dark gray exactly matching my suit except for the ends of the arms, which merged by fine gradations into a sallow hue which blotted out my hands.

“I should have warned you that it’s now upholstered in chameleon plastic,” Slyker said with a grin. “It changes color to suit the sitter. The fabric was supplied me over a year ago by Henri Artois, the French dilettante chemist. So the chair has been many shades: dead black when Mrs. Fairlee—you recall the case?—came to tell me she had just put on mourning and then shot her bandleader husband, a charming Florida tan during the later experiments with Angna. It helps my patients forget themselves when they’re free-associating and it amuses some people.”

I wasn’t one of them, but I managed a smile I hoped wasn’t too sour. I told myself to stick to business—Evelyn Cordew’s and Jeff Crain’s business. I must forget the chair and other incidentals, and concentrate on Dr. Emil Slyker and what he was saying—for I have by no means given all of his remarks, only the more important asides. He had turned out to be the sort of conversationalist who will talk for two hours solid, then when you have barely started your reply, give you a hurt look and say, “Excuse me, but if I can get a word in edgewise—” and talk for two hours more. The liquor may have been helping, but I doubt it. When we had left the Countersign Club he had started to tell me the stories of three of his female clients—a surgeon’s wife, an aging star scared by a comeback opportunity, and a college girl in trouble—and the presence of the bodyguard hadn’t made him hold back on gory details.

Now, sitting at his desk and playing with the catch of a file drawer as if wondering whether to open it, he had got to the point where the surgeon’s wife had arrived at the operating theater early one morning to publish her infidelities, the star had stabbed her press agent with the wardrobe mistress’ scissors, and the college girl had fallen in love with her abortionist. He had the conversation-hogger’s trick of keeping a half-dozen topics in the air at once and weaving back and forth between them without finishing any. And of course he was a male tantalizer. Now he whipped open the file drawer and scooped out some folders and then held them against his belly and watched me as if to ask himself, “Should I?”

After a maximum pause to build suspense he decided he should, and so I began to hear the story of Dr. Emil Slyker’s girls, not the first three, of course—they had to stay frozen at their climaxes unless their folders turned up—but others.

I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I didn’t admit it was a let-down. Here I was expecting I don’t know what from his desk and all I got was the usual glimpses into childhood’s garden of father-fixation and sibling rivalry and the bed-changing
Sturm und Drang
of later adolescence. The folders seemed to hold nothing but conventional medico-psychiatric case histories, along with physical measurements and other details of appearance, unusually penetrating
precis
of each client’s financial resources, occasional notes on possible psychic gifts and other extrasensory talents, and maybe some candid snapshots, judging from the way he’d sometimes pause to study appreciatively and then raise his eyebrows at me with a smile.

Yet after a while I couldn’t help starting to be impressed, if only by the sheer numbers. Here was this stream, this freshet, this flood of females, young and not-so-young all thinking of themselves as girls and wearing the girl’s suede mask even if they didn’t still have the girl’s natural face, all converging on Dr. Slyker’s office with money stolen from their parents or highjacked from their married lovers, or paid when they signed the six-year contract with semiannual options, or held out on their syndicate boyfriends, or received in a lump sum in lieu of alimony, or banked for dreary years every fortnight from paychecks and then withdrawn in one grand gesture, or thrown at them by their husbands that morning like so much confetti, or, so help me, advanced them on their half-written novels. Yes, there was something very impressive about this pink stream of womankind rippling with the silver and green of cash conveyed infallibly, as if all the corridors and streets outside were concrete-walled spillways, to Dr. Slyker’s office, but not to work any dynamos there except financial ones, instead to be worked over by a one-man dynamo and go foaming madly or trickling depletedly away or else stagnate excitingly for months, then: souls like black swamp water gleaming with mysterious lights.

Slyker stopped short with a harsh little laugh. “We ought to have music with this, don’t you think?” he said. “I believe I’ve got the
Nutcracker Suite
on the spindle,” and he touched one of an unobtrusive bank of buttons on his desk.

They came without the whisper of a turntable or the faintest preliminary susurrus of tape, those first evocative, rich, sensual, yet eerie chords, but they weren’t the opening of any section of the
Nutcracker
I knew—and yet, damn it, they sounded as if they should be. And then they were cut off as if the tape had been snipped and I looked at Slyker and he was white and one of his hands was just coming back from the bank of buttons and the other was clutching the file folders as if they might somehow get away from him and both hands were shaking and I felt a shiver crawling down my own neck.

“Excuse me, Carr,” he said slowly, breathing heavily,“but that’s high-voltage music, psychically very dangerous, that I use only for special purposes. It is part of the
Nutcracker
, incidentally—the ‘Ghostgirls Pavan’ which Tchaikovsky suppressed completely under orders from Madam Sesostris, the Saint Petersburg clairvoyant. It was tape-recorded for me by… no, I don’t know you quite well enough to tell you that. However, we will shift from tape to disk and listen to the known sections of the suite, played by the same artists.”

I don’t know how much this recording or the circumstances added to it, but I have never heard the “Danse Arabe” or the “Waltz of the Flowers” or the “Dance of the Flutes” so voluptuous and exquisitely menacing—those tinkling, superficially sugar-frosted bits of music that class after class of little-girl ballerinas have minced and teetered to ad nauseam, but underneath the glittering somber fancies of a thorough-going eroticist. As Slyker, guessing my thoughts, expressed it: “Tchaikovsky shows off each instrument—the flute, the throatier woodwinds, the silver chimes, the harp bubbling gold—as if he were dressing beautiful women in jewels and feathers and furs solely to arouse desire and envy in other men.”

For of course we only listened to the music as background for Dr. Slyker’s zigzagging, fragmentary, cream-skimming reminiscences. The stream of girls flowed on in their smart suits and flowered dresses and bouffant blouses and toreador pants, their improbable loves and unsuspected hates and incredible ambitions, the men who gave them money, the men who gave them love, the men who took both, the paralyzing trivial fears behind their wisely chic or corn-fed fresh facades, their ravishing and infuriating mannerisms, the trick of eye or lip or hair or wrist-curve or bosom-angle that was the focus of sex in each.

For Slyker could bring his girls to life very vividly, I had to grant that, as if he had more to jog his memory than case histories and notes and even photographs, as if he had the essence of each girl stoppered up in a little bottle, like perfume, and was opening them one by one to give me a whiff. Gradually I became certain that there
were
more than papers and pictures in the folders, though this revelation, like the earlier one about the desk, at first involved a let-down. Why should I get excited if Dr. Slyker filed away mementos of his clients?—even if they were keepsakes of love: lace handkerchiefs and filmy scarves, faded flowers, ribbons and bows, twenty-denier stockings, long locks of hair, gay little pins and combs, swatches of material that might have been torn from dresses, snippets of silk delicate as ghost dandelions—what difference did it make to me if he treasured this junk or it fed his sense of power or was part of his blackmail? Yet it did make a difference to me, for like the music, like the little fearful starts he’d kept giving ever since the business of the “Ghostgirls Pavan,” it helped to make everything very real, as if in some more-than-ordinary sense he did have a deskful of girls. For now as he opened or closed the folders there’d often be a puff of powder, a pale little cloud as from a jogged compact, and the pieces of silk gave the impression of being larger than they could be, like a magician’s colored handkerchiefs, only most of them were flesh-colored, and I began to get glimpses of what looked like X-ray photographs and artist’s transparencies, maybe life-size but cunningly folded, and other slack pale things that made me think of the ultra-fine rubber masks some aging actresses are rumored to wear, and all sorts of strange little flashes and glimmers of I don’t know what, except there was that aura of femininity and I found myself remembering what he’d said about fluorescent cheesecloth and I did seem to get whiffs of very individual perfume with each new folder.

He had two file drawers open now, and I could just make out the word burnt into their fronts. The word certainly looked like PRESENT, and there were two of the closed file drawers labeled what looked like PAST and FUTURE. I didn’t know what sort of hocus-pocus was supposed to be furthered by those words, but along with Slyker’s darting, lingering monologue they did give me the feeling that I was afloat in a river of girls from all times and places, and the illusion that there somehow was a girl in each folder became so strong that I almost wanted to say, “Come on, Emil, trot ’em out, let me look at ’em.”

He must have known exactly what feelings he was building up in me, for now he stopped in the middle of a saga of a starlet married to a Negro baseball player and looked at me with his eyes open a bit too wide and said, “All right, Carr, let’s quit fooling around. Down at the Countersign I told you I had a deskful of girls and I wasn’t kidding—although the truth behind that assertion would get me certified by all the little headshrinkers and Viennese windbags except it would scare the pants off them first. I mentioned ectoplasm earlier, and the proof of its reality. It’s exuded by most properly stimulated women in deep trance, but it’s not just some dimly fluorescent froth swirling around in a dark seance chamber. It takes the form of an envelope or limp balloon, closed toward the top but open toward the bottom, weighing less than a silk stocking but duplicating the person exactly down to features and hair, following the master-plan of the body’s surface buried in the genetic material of the cells. It is a real shed skin but also dimly alive, a gossamer mannequin. A breath can crumple it, a breeze can whisk it away, but under some circumstances it becomes startlingly stable and resilient, a real apparition. It’s invisible and almost impalpable by day, but by night, when your eyes are properly accommodated, you can just manage to see it. Despite its fragility it’s almost indestructible, except by fire, and potentially immortal. Whether generated in sleep or under hypnosis, in spontaneous or induced trance, it remains connected to the source by a thin strand I call the ‘umbilicus’ and it returns to the source and is absorbed back into the individual again as the trance fades. But sometimes it becomes detached and then it lingers around as a shell, still dimly alive and occasionally glimpsed, forming the very real basis for the stories of hauntings we have from all centuries and cultures— in fact, I call such shells‘ghosts.’A strong emotional shock generally accounts for a ghost becoming detached from its owner, but it can also be detached artificially. Such a ghost is remarkably docile to one who understands how to handle and cherish it—for instance, it can be folded into an incredibly small compass and tucked away in an envelope, though by daylight you wouldn’t notice anything in such an envelope if you looked inside. ‘Detached artificially’ I said, and that’s what I do here in this office, and you know what I use to do it with, Carr?” He snatched up something long and daggerlike and gleaming and held it tight in his plump hand so that it pointed at the ceiling. “Silver shears, Carr, silver for the same reason you use a silver bullet to kill a werewolf, though those words would set the little headshrinkers howling. But would they be howling from outraged scientific attitude, Carr, or from professional jealousy or simply from fear? Just the same as it’s unclear why they’d be howling, only certain they would be howling, if I told them that in every fourth or fifth folder in these files I have one or more ghostgirls.”

He didn’t need to mention fear—I was scared enough myself now, what with him spouting this ghost guff, this spiritualism blather put far more precisely than any spiritualist would dare, this obviously firmly held and elaborately rationalized delusion, this perfect symbolization of a truly insane desire for power over women—filing them away in envelopes!—and then when he got bug-eyed and brandished those foot-long stiletto-shears… Jeff Crain had warned me Slyker was “nuts—brilliant, but completely nuts and definitely dangerous,”and I hadn’t believed it, hadn’t really visualized myself frozen on the medium’s throne, locked in (“no one without explosives”) with the madman himself. It cost me a lot of effort to keep on the acolyte’s mask and simper adoringly at the Master.