Read Online The Mind Spider and Other Stories by Fritz Leiber - Free Book Online
Authors: Fritz Leiber
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MORNING
Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”
It was the sort of question would have suited a religious crackpot of the strong-arm, save-your-soul variety, but she didn’t look like one. And I might very well have answered it— in fact I almost did—with a hangover, one percent humorous, “Good God, no!” Or—a poor second—I could have studied the dark, dust-bumished arabesques of the faded blue carpet for a perversely long time and then countered with a grudging, “Oh, if you insist.”
But I didn’t, perhaps because there didn’t seem to be anything like one percent of humor in the situation. Point One: 1 have been blacked out the past half hour or so—this woman might just have opened the door or she might have been watching me for ten minutes. Point Two: I was in the fringes of DTs, trying to come off a big drunk. Point Three: I knew for certain that I had just killed someone or left him or her to die, though I hadn’t die faintest idea of whom or why.
Let me try to picture my state of mind a litde more vividly. My consciousness, the sentient self-aware part of me, was a single quivering point in the center of an endless plane vibrating harshly with misery and menace. I was like a man in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific—or better, I was like a man in a shellhole in the North African desert (I served under Montgomery and any region adjoining the DTs is certainly a No Man’s Land). Around me, in every direction—this is my consciousness I’m describing, remember—miles of flat burning sand, nothing more. Way beyond the horizon were two divorced wives, some estranged children, assorted jobs, and other unexceptional wreckage. Much closer, but still beyond the horizon, were State Hospital (twice) and Psycho (four times). Shallowly buried very near at hand, or perhaps blackening in the open just behind me in the shellhole, was the person I had killed.
But remember that I knew I had killed a real person. That wasn’t anything allegorical.
Now for a little more detail on this “Look, Buster,” woman. To begin with, she didn’t resemble any part of the DTs or its outlying kingdoms, though an amateur might have thought differently—especially if he had given too much weight to the sigil on her forehead. But I was no amateur.
She seemed about my age—forty-five—but I couldn’t be sure. Her body looked. younger than that, her face older; both were trim and had seen a lot of use, I got the impression. She was wearing black sandals and a black unbelted tunic with just a hint of the sack dress to it, yet she seemed dressed for the street. It occurred to me even then (off-track ideas can come to you very swiftly and sharply in the DT outskirts) that it was a costume that, except perhaps for the color, would have fitted into any number of historical eras: old Egypt, Greece, maybe the Directoire, World War I, Burma, Yucatan, to name some. (Should I ask her if she spoke Maya-than? I didn’t, but I don’t think the question would have fazed her; she seemed altogether sophisticated, a real cosmopolite—she pronounced “Buster” as if it were part of a curious, somewhat ridiculous jargon she was using for shock purposes.)
From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious.
Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked
Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”
It was the sort of question would have suited a religious crackpot of the strong-arm, save-your-soul variety, but she didn’t look like one. And I might very well have answered it— in fact I almost did—with a hangover, one percent humorous, “Good God, no!” Or—a poor second—I could have studied the dark, dust-bumished arabesques of the faded blue carpet for a perversely long time and then countered with a grudging, “Oh, if you insist.”
But I didn’t, perhaps because there didn’t seem to be anything like one percent of humor in the situation. Point One: 1 have been blacked out the past half hour or so—this woman might just have opened the door or she might have been watching me for ten minutes. Point Two: I was in the fringes of DTs, trying to come off a big drunk. Point Three: I knew for certain that I had just killed someone or left him or her to die, though I hadn’t die faintest idea of whom or why.
Let me try to picture my state of mind a litde more vividly. My consciousness, the sentient self-aware part of me, was a single quivering point in the center of an endless plane vibrating harshly with misery and menace. I was like a man in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific—or better, I was like a man in a shellhole in the North African desert (I served under Montgomery and any region adjoining the DTs is certainly a No Man’s Land). Around me, in every direction—this is my consciousness I’m describing, remember—miles of flat burning sand, nothing more. Way beyond the horizon were two divorced wives, some estranged children, assorted jobs, and other unexceptional wreckage. Much closer, but still beyond the horizon, were State Hospital (twice) and Psycho (four times). Shallowly buried very near at hand, or perhaps blackening in the open just behind me in the shellhole, was the person I had killed.
But remember that I knew I had killed a real person. That wasn’t anything allegorical.
Now for a little more detail on this “Look, Buster,” woman. To begin with, she didn’t resemble any part of the DTs or its outlying kingdoms, though an amateur might have thought differently—especially if he had given too much weight to the sigil on her forehead. But I was no amateur.
She seemed about my age—forty-five—but I couldn’t be sure. Her body looked. younger than that, her face older; both were trim and had seen a lot of use, I got the impression. She was wearing black sandals and a black unbelted tunic with just a hint of the sack dress to it, yet she seemed dressed for the street. It occurred to me even then (off-track ideas can come to you very swiftly and sharply in the DT outskirts) that it was a costume that, except perhaps for the color, would have fitted into any number of historical eras: old Egypt, Greece, maybe the Directoire, World War I, Burma, Yucatan, to name some. (Should I ask her if she spoke Maya-than? I didn’t, but I don’t think the question would have fazed her; she seemed altogether sophisticated, a real cosmopolite—she pronounced “Buster” as if it were part of a curious, somewhat ridiculous jargon she was using for shock purposes.)
From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious.
Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked
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