The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Smoke Ghost

Fritz Leiber

Location: Chicago, USA.

Time: October, 1941.

Eyewitness Description: “I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings.”

Author: Fritz Reuter Leiber (1910–92) deserves the accolade as the writer who introduced the ghost of the tough city centre. His stories postulated a modern post-industrial aesthetic of horror, emerging spontaneously from the urban landscape. In a 1940 essay he argued: “The supernatural beings of a modern city would be different from the ghosts of yesterday, because each culture creates its own ghosts.” The son of a noted Shakespearean actor, Fritz toured with his father’s road company for several years and secured parts in a few films before turning to authorship in the Forties. He hit a rich vein of form with tales about the supernatural in contemporary America, notably Conjure Wife (1943), about witchcraft in a modern university, and a series of short stories, “The Automatic Pistol” (1940), “The Girl With Hungry Eyes” (1949) and “Smoke Ghost” (1941) with its grimy phantom. He later reworked this concept into a novel, Our Lady of Darkness (1977), set in San Francisco and proffering reasons why so many of the city’s coterie of writers, including Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, had met such tragic deaths. Several critics regard this work as Leiber’s homage to the horror of Edgar Allan Poe and the supernaturalism of M. R. James. Here, though, is the original short story that created a new niche for the ghost story.

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, “Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?” And she had tittered nervously and replied, “When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when I slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things.” And he had said, “I don’t mean that kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books.” And she hadn’t known what to say.

He’d never been like this before. Of course he might be joking, but it didn’t sound that way. Vaguely Miss Millick wondered whether he mightn’t be seeking some sort of sympathy from her. Of course, Mr Wran was married and had a little child, but that didn’t prevent her from having daydreams. The daydreams were not very exciting, still they helped fill up her mind. But now he was asking her another of those unprecedented questions.

“Have you ever thought what a ghost of our times would look like, Miss Millick? Just picture it. A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns. Each one overlying and yet blending with the other, like a pile of semitransparent masks?”

Miss Millick gave a little self-conscious shiver and said, “That would be terrible. What an awful thing to think of.”

She peered furtively across the desk. She remembered having heard that there had been something impressively abnormal about Mr Wran’s childhood, but she couldn’t recall what it was. If only she could do something – laugh at his mood or ask him what was really wrong. She shifted the extra pencils in her left hand and mechanically traced over some of the shorthand curlicues in her notebook.

“Yet, that’s just what such a ghost or vitalized projection would look like, Miss Millick,” he continued, smiling in a tight way. “It would grow out of the real world. It would reflect the tangled, sordid, vicious things. All the loose ends. And it would be very grimy. I don’t think it would seem white or wispy, or favor graveyards. It wouldn’t moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleeve. Like a sick, surly ape. What would such a thing want from a person, Miss Millick? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?”

Miss Millick giggled nervously. There was an expression beyond her powers of definition in Mr Wran’s ordinary, flat-cheeked, thirtyish face, silhouetted against the dusty window. He turned away and stared out into the gray down-town atmosphere that rolled in from the railroad yards and the mills. When he spoke again his voice sounded far away.

“Of course, being immaterial, it couldn’t hurt you physically – at first. You’d have to be peculiarly sensitive to see it, or be aware of it at all. But it would begin to influence your actions. Make you do this. Stop you from doing that. Although only a projection, it would gradually get its hooks into the world of things as they are. Might even get control of suitably vacuous minds. Then it could hurt whomever it wanted.”

Miss Millick squirmed and read back her shorthand, like the books said you should do when there was a pause. She became aware of the failing light and wished Mr Wran would ask her to turn on the overhead. She felt scratchy, as if soot were sifting down on to her skin.

“It’s a rotten world, Miss Millick,” said Mr Wran, talking at the window. “Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It’s time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear. They’d be no worse than men.”

“But” – Miss Millick’s diaphragm jerked, making her titter inanely – “of course, there aren’t any such things as ghosts.”

Mr Wran turned around.

“Of course there aren’t, Miss Millick,” he said in a loud, patronizing voice, as if she had been doing the talking rather than he. “Science and common sense and psychiatry all go to prove it.”

She hung her head and might even have blushed if she hadn’t felt so all at sea. Her leg muscles twitched, making her stand up, although she hadn’t intended to. She aimlessly rubbed her hand along the edge of the desk.

“Why, Mr Wran, look what I got off your desk,” she said, showing him a heavy smudge. There was a note of clumsily playful reproof in her voice. “No wonder the copy I bring you always gets so black. Somebody ought to talk to those scrubwomen. They’re skimping on your room.”

She wished he would make some normal joking reply. But instead he drew back and his face hardened.

“Well, to get back,” he rapped out harshly, and began to dictate.

When she was gone, he jumped up, dabbed his finger experimentally at the smudged part of the desk, frowned worriedly at the almost inky smears. He jerked open a drawer, snatched out a rag, hastily swabbed off the desk, crumpled the rag into a ball and tossed it back. There were three or four other rags in the drawer, each impregnated with soot.

Then he went over to the window and peered out anxiously through the dusk, his eyes searching the panorama of roofs, fixing on each chimney and water tank.

“It’s a neurosis. Must be. Compulsions. Hallucinations,” he muttered to himself in a tired, distraught voice that would have made Miss Millick gasp. “It’s that damned mental abnormality cropping up in a new form. Can’t be any other explanation. But it’s so damned real. Even the soot. Good thing I’m seeing the psychiatrist. I don’t think I could force myself to get on the elevated railway tonight.” His voice trailed off, he rubbed his eyes, and his memory automatically started to grind.

It had all begun on the elevated. There was a particular little sea of roofs he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar-paper, tarred gravel and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by ghostly windblown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow; and it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive; almost beautifully ugly though in no sense picturesque; dreary, but meaningful. Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and total wars. The quick daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life. Oddly, he never saw it in the morning, for it was then his habit to sit on the other side of the car, his head buried in the paper.

One evening toward winter he noticed what seemed to be a shapeless black sack lying on the third roof from the tracks. He did not think about it. It merely registered as an addition to the well-known scene and his memory stored away the impression for further reference. Next evening, however, he decided he had been mistaken in one detail. The object was a roof nearer than he had thought. Its color and texture, and the grimy stains around it, suggested that it was filled with coal dust, which was hardly reasonable. Then, too, the following evening it seemed to have been blown against a rusty ventilator by the wind – which could hardly have happened if it were at all heavy. Perhaps it was filled with leaves. Catesby was surprised to find himself anticipating his next daily glance with a minor note of apprehension. There was something unwholesome in the posture of the thing that stuck in his mind – a bulge in the sacking that suggested a misshaped head peering around the ventilator. And his apprehension was justified, for that evening the thing was on the nearest roof, though on the farther side, looking as if it had just flopped down over the low brick parapet.

Next evening the sack was gone. Catesby was annoyed at the momentary feeling of relief that went through him, because the whole matter seemed too unimportant to warrant feelings of any sort. What difference did it make if his imagination had played tricks on him, and he’d fancied that the object was slowly crawling and hitching itself closer across the roofs? That was the way any normal imagination worked. He deliberately chose to disregard the fact that there were reasons for thinking his imagination was by no means a normal one. As he walked home from the elevated, however, he found himself wondering whether the sack was really gone. He seemed to recall a vague, smudgy trail leading across the gravel to the nearer side of the roof, which was masked by a parapet. For an instant an unpleasant picture formed in his mind – that of an inky, humped creature crouched behind the parapet, waiting.

The next time he felt the familiar grating lurch of the car, he caught himself trying not to look out. That angered him. He turned his head quickly. When he turned it back, his compact face was definitely pale. There had been only time for a fleeting rearward glance at the escaping roof. Had he actually seen in silhouette the upper part of a head of some sort peering over the parapet? Nonsense, he told himself. And even if he had seen something, there were a thousand explanations which did not involve the supernatural or even true hallucination. Tomorrow he would take a good look and clear up the whole matter. If necessary, he would visit the roof personally, though he hardly knew where to find it and disliked in any case the idea of pampering a silly fear.

He did not relish the walk home from the elevated that evening, and visions of the thing disturbed his dreams, and were in and out of his mind all next day at the office. It was then that he first began to relieve his nerves by making jokingly serious remarks about the supernatural to Miss Millick, who seemed properly mystified. It was on the same day, too, that he became aware of a growing antipathy to grime and soot. Everything he touched seemed gritty, and he found himself mopping and wiping at his desk like an old lady with a morbid fear of germs. He reasoned that there was no real change in his office, and that he’d just now become sensitive to the dirt that had always been there, but there was no denying an increasing nervousness. Long before the car reached the curve, he was straining his eyes through the murky twilight, determined to take in every detail.

Afterward he realized he must have given a muffled cry of some sort, for the man beside him looked at him curiously, and the woman ahead gave him an unfavourable stare. Conscious of his own pallor and uncontrollable trembling, he stared back at them hungrily, trying to regain the feeling of security he had completely lost. They were the usual reassuringly wooden-faced people everyone rides home with on the elevated. But suppose he had pointed out to one of them what he had seen – that sodden, distorted face of sacking and coal dust, that boneless paw which waved back and forth, unmistakably in his direction, as if reminding him of a future appointment – he involuntarily shut his eyes tight. His thoughts were racing ahead to tomorrow evening. He pictured this same windowed oblong of light and packed humanity surging around the curve – then an opaque monstrous form leaping out from the roof in a parabolic swoop – an unmentionable face pressed close against the window, smearing it with wet coal dust – huge paws fumbling sloppily at the glass—

Somehow he managed to turn off his wife’s anxious inquiries. Next morning he reached a decision and made an appointment for that evening with a psychiatrist a friend had told him about. It cost him a considerable effort, for Catesby had a well-grounded distaste for anything dealing with psychological abnormality. Visiting a psychiatrist meant raking up an episode in his past which he had never fully described even to his wife. Once he had made the decision, however, he felt considerably relieved. The psychiatrist, he told himself, would clear everything up. He could almost fancy him saying, “Merely a bad case of nerves. However, you must consult the oculist whose name I’m writing down for you, and you must take two of these pills in water every four hours,” and so on. It was almost comforting, and made the coming revelation he would have to make seem less painful.

But as the smoky dusk rolled in, his nervousness had returned and he had let his joking mystification of Miss Millick run away with him until he had realized he wasn’t frightening anyone but himself.

He would have to keep his imagination under better control, he told himself, as he continued to peer out restlessly at the massive, murky shapes of the downtown office buildings. Why, he had spent the whole afternoon building up a kind of neo-medieval cosmology of superstition. It wouldn’t do. He realized then that he had been standing at the window much longer than he’d thought, for the glass panel in the door was dark and there was no noise coming from the outer office. Miss Millick and the rest must have gone home.

It was then he made the discovery that there would have been no special reason for dreading the swing around the curve that night. It was, as it happened, a horrible discovery. For, on the shadowed roof across the street and four stories below, he saw the thing huddle and roll across the gravel and, after one upward look of recognition, merge into the blackness beneath the water tank.

As he hurriedly collected his things and made for the elevator, fighting the panicky impulse to run, he began to think of hallucination and mild psychosis as very desirable conditions. For better or for worse, he pinned all his hopes on the psychiatrist.

“So you find yourself growing nervous and . . . er . . . jumpy, as you put it,” said Dr Trevethick, smiling with dignified geniality. “Do you notice any more definite physical symptoms? Pain? Headache? Indigestion?”

Catesby shook his head and wet his lips. “I’m especially nervous while riding in the elevated,” he murmured swiftly.

“I see. We’ll discuss that more fully. But I’d like you first to tell me about something you mentioned earlier. You said there was something about your childhood that might predispose you to nervous ailments. As you know, the early years are critical ones in the development of an individual’s behavior pattern.”

Catesby studied the yellow reflections of frosted globes in the dark surface of the desk. The palm of his left hand aimlessly rubbed the thick nap of the armchair. After a while he raised his head and looked straight into the doctor’s small brown eyes.

“From perhaps my third to my ninth year,” he began, choosing the words with care, “I was what you might call a sensory prodigy.”

The doctor’s expression did not change. “Yes?” he inquired politely.

“What I mean is that I was supposed to be able to see through walls, read letters through envelopes and books through their covers, fence and play ping-pong blindfolded, find things that were buried, read thoughts.” The words tumbled out.

“And could you?” The doctor’s voice was toneless.

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose so,” answered Catesby, long-lost emotions flooding back into his voice. “It’s all confused now. I thought I could, but then they were always encouraging me. My mother . . . was . . . well . . . interested in psychic phenomena. I was . . . exhibited. I seem to remember seeing things other people couldn’t. As if most opaque objects were transparent. But I was very young. I didn’t have any scientific criteria for judgment.”

He was reliving it now. The darkened rooms. The earnest assemblages of gawking, prying adults. Himself alone on a little platform, lost in a straight-backed wooden chair. The black silk handkerchief over his eyes. His mother’s coaxing, insistent questions. The whispers. The gasps. His own hate of the whole business, mixed with hunger for the adulation of adults. Then the scientists from the university, the experiments, the big test. The reality of those memories engulfed him and momentarily made him forget the reason why he was disclosing them to a stranger.

“Do I understand that your mother tried to make use of you as a medium for communicating with the . . . er . . . other world?”

Catesby nodded eagerly.

“She tried to, but she couldn’t. When it came to getting in touch with the dead, I was a complete failure. All I could do – or thought I could do – was see real, existing, three-dimensional objects beyond the vision of normal people. Objects anyone could have seen except for distance, obstruction, or darkness. It was always a disappointment to mother.”

He could hear her sweetish, patient voice saying, “Try again, dear, just this once. Katie was your aunt. She loved you. Try to hear what she’s saying.” And he had answered, “I can see a woman in a blue dress standing on the other side of Dick’s house.” And she had replied, “Yes, I know, dear. But that’s not Katie. Katie’s a spirit. Try again. Just this once, dear.” The doctor’s voice gently jarred him back into the softly gleaming office.

“You mentioned scientific criteria for judgment, Mr Wran. As far as you know, did anyone ever try to apply them to you?”

Catesby’s nod was emphatic.

“They did. When I was eight, two young psychologists from the university got interested in me. I guess they did it for a joke at first, and I remember being very determined to show them I amounted to something. Even now I seem to recall how the note of polite superiority and amused sarcasm drained out of their voices. I suppose they decided at first that it was very clever trickery, but somehow they persuaded mother to let them try me out under controlled conditions. There were lots of tests that seemed very businesslike after mother’s slipshod little exhibitions. They found I was clairvoyant – or so they thought. I got worked up and on edge. They were going to demonstrate my supernormal sensory powers to the university psychology faculty. For the first time I began to worry about whether I’d come through. Perhaps they kept me going at too hard a pace, I don’t know. At any rate, when the test came, I couldn’t do a thing. Everything became opaque. I got desperate and made things up out of my imagination. I lied. In the end I failed utterly, and I believe the two young psychologists got into a lot of hot water as a result.”

He could hear the brusque, bearded man saying, “You’ve been taken in by a child, Flaxman, a mere child. I’m greatly disturbed. You’ve put yourself on the same plane as common charlatans. Gentlemen, I ask you to banish from your minds this whole sorry episode. It must never be referred to.” He winced at the recollection of his feeling of guilt. But at the same time he was beginning to feel exhilarated and almost light-hearted. Unburdening his long-re-spressed memories had altered his whole viewpoint. The episodes on the elevated began to take on what seemed their proper proportions as merely the bizarre workings of overwrought nerves and an overly suggestible mind. The doctor, he anticipated confidently, would disentangle the obscure subconscious causes, whatever they might be. And the whole business would be finished off quickly, just as his childhood experience – which was beginning to seem a little ridiculous now – had been finished off.

“From that day on,” he continued, “I never exhibited a trace of my supposed powers. My mother was frantic and tried to sue the university. I had something like a nervous breakdown. Then the divorce was granted, and my father got custody of me. He did his best to make me forget it. We went on long outdoor vacations and did a lot of athletics, associated with normal matter-of-fact people. I went to business college eventually. I’m in advertising now. But,” Catesby paused, “now that I’m having nervous symptoms, I’ve wondered if there mightn’t be a connection. It’s not a question of whether I was really clairvoyant or not. Very likely my mother taught me a lot of unconscious deceptions, good enough to fool even young psychology instructors. But don’t you think it may have some important bearing on my present condition?”

For several moments the doctor regarded him with a professional frown. Then he said quietly, “And is there some . . . er . . . more specific connection between your experiences then and now? Do you by any chance find that you are once again beginning to . . . er . . . see things?”

Catesby swallowed. He had felt an increasing eagerness to unburden himself of his fears, but it was not easy to make a beginning, and the doctor’s shrewd question rattled him. He forced himself to concentrate. The thing he thought he had seen on the roof loomed up before his inner eye with unexpected vividness. Yet it did not frighten him. He groped for words.

Then he saw that the doctor was not looking at him but over his shoulder. Color was draining out of the doctor’s face and his eyes did not seem so small. Then the doctor sprang to his feet, walked past Catesby, threw up the window and peered into the darkness.

As Catesby rose, the doctor slammed down the window and said in a voice whose smoothness was marred by a slight, persistent gasping, “I hope I haven’t alarmed you. I saw the face of . . . er . . . a Negro prowler on the fire escape. I must have frightened him, for he seems to have gotten out of sight in a hurry. Don’t give it another thought. Doctors are frequently bothered by voyeurs . . . er . . . Peeping Toms.”

“A Negro?” asked Catesby, moistening his lips.

The doctor laughed nervously. “I imagine so, though my first odd impression was that it was a white man in blackface. You see, the color didn’t seem to have any brown in it. It was dead-black.”

Catesby moved toward the window. There were smudges on the glass. “It’s quite all right, Mr Wran.” The doctor’s voice had acquired a sharp note of impatience, as if he were trying hard to reassume his professional authority. “Let’s continue our conversation. I was asking you if you were” – he made a face – “seeing things.”

Catesby’s whirling thoughts slowed down and locked into place. “No, I’m not seeing anything that other people don’t see, too. And I think I’d better go now. I’ve been keeping you too long.” He disregarded the doctor’s half-hearted gesture of denial. “I’ll phone you about the physical examination. In a way you’ve already taken a big load off my mind.” He smiled woodenly. “Goodnight, Dr Trevethick.”

Catesby Wran’s mental state was a peculiar one. His eyes searched every angular shadow, he glanced sideways down each chasm-like alley and barren basement passage-way, and kept stealing looks at the irregular line of the roofs, yet he was hardly conscious of where he was going. He pushed away the thoughts that came into his mind, and kept moving. He became aware of a slight sense of security as he turned into a lighted street where there were people and high buildings and blinking signs. After a while he found himself in the dim lobby of the structure that housed his office. Then he realized why he couldn’t go home, why he daren’t go home – after what had happened at the office of Dr Trevethick.

“Hello, Mr Wran,” said the night elevator man, a burly figure in overalls, sliding open the grille-work door to the old-fashioned cage. “I didn’t know you were working nights now, too.”

Catesby stepped in automatically. “Sudden rush of orders,” he murmured inanely. “Some stuff that has to be gotten out.”

The cage creaked to a stop at the top floor. “Be working very late, Mr Wran?”

He nodded vaguely, watched the car slide out of sight, found his keys, swiftly crossed the outer office, and entered his own. His hand went out to the light switch, but then the thought occurred to him that the two lighted windows, standing out against the dark bulk of the building, would indicate his whereabouts and serve as a goal toward which something could crawl and climb. He moved his chair so that the back was against the wall and sat down in the semidarkness. He did not remove his overcoat.

For a long time he sat there motionless, listening to his own breathing and the faraway sounds from the streets below: the thin metallic surge of the crosstown streetcar, the farther one of the elevated, faint lonely cries and honkings, indistinct rumblings. Words he had spoken to Miss Millick in nervous jest came back to him with the bitter taste of truth. He found himself unable to reason critically or connectedly, but by their own volition thoughts rose up into his mind and gyrated slowly and rearranged themselves with the inevitable movement of planets.

Gradually his mental picture of the world was transformed. No longer a world of material atoms and empty space, but a world in which the bodiless existed and moved according to its own obscure laws or unpredictable impulses. The new picture illuminated with dreadful clarity certain general facts which had always bewildered and troubled him and from which he had tried to hide: the inevitability of hate and war, the diabolically timed mischances which wreck the best of human intentions, the walls of willful misunderstanding that divide one man from another, the eternal vitality of cruelty and ignorance and greed. They seemed appropriate now, necessary parts of the picture. And superstition only a kind of wisdom.

Then his thoughts returned to himself and the question he had asked Miss Millick, “What would such a thing want from a person? Sacrifices? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?” It had become a practical question.

With an explosive jangle, the phone began to ring. “Cate, I’ve been trying everywhere to get you,” said his wife. “I never thought you’d be at the office. What are you doing? I’ve been worried.”

He said something about work.

“You’ll be home right away?” came the faint anxious question. “I’m a little frightened. Ronny just had a scare. It woke him up. He kept pointing to the window saying, ‘Black man, black man.’ Of course it’s something he dreamed. But I’m frightened. You will be home? What’s that, dear? Can’t you hear me?”

“I will. Right away,” he said. Then he was out of the office, buzzing the night bell and peering down the shaft.

He saw it peering up the shaft at him from the deep shadows three floors below, the sacking face pressed against the iron grille-work. It started up the stair at a shockingly swift, shambling gait, vanishing temporarily from sight as it swung into the second corridor below.

Catesby clawed at the door to the office, realized he had not locked it, pushed it in, slammed and locked it behind him, retreated to the other side of the room, cowered between the filing cases and the wall. His teeth were clicking. He heard the groan of the rising cage. A silhouette darkened the frosted glass of the door, blotting out part of the grotesque reverse of the company name. After a little the door opened.

The big-globed overhead light flared on and, standing inside the door, her hand on the switch, was Miss Millick.

“Why, Mr Wran,” she stammered vacuously, “I didn’t know you were here. I’d just come in to do some extra typing after the movie. I didn’t . . . but the lights weren’t on. What were you—”

He stared at her. He wanted to shout in relief, grab hold of her, talk rapidly. He realized he was grinning hysterically.

“Why, Mr Wran, what’s happened to you?” she asked embarrassedly, ending with a stupid titter. “Are you feeling sick? Isn’t there something I can do for you?”

He shook his head jerkily and managed to say, “No, I’m just leaving. I was doing some extra work myself.”

“But you look sick,” she insisted, and walked over toward him. He inconsequentially realized she must have stepped in mud, for her high-heeled shoes left neat black prints.

“Yes, I’m sure you must be sick. You’re so terribly pale.” She sounded like an enthusiastic, incompetent nurse. Her face brightened with a sudden inspiration. “I’ve got something in my bag, that’ll fix you up right away,” she said. “It’s for indigestion.”

She fumbled at her stuffed oblong purse. He noticed that she was absent-mindedly holding it shut with one hand while she tried to open it with the other. Then, under his very eyes, he saw her bend back the thick prongs of metal locking the purse as if they were tinfoil, or as if her fingers had become a pair of steel pliers.

Instantly his memory recited the words he had spoken to Miss Millick that afternoon. “It couldn’t hurt you physically – at first. . . gradually get its hooks into the world . . . might even get control of suitably vacuous minds. Then it could hurt whomever it wanted.” A sickish, cold feeling grew inside him. He began to edge toward the door.

But Miss Millick hurried ahead of him.

“You don’t have to wait, Fred,” she called. “Mr Wran’s decided to stay a while longer.”

The door to the cage shut with a mechanical rattle. The cage creaked. Then she turned around in the door.

“Why, Mr Wran,” she gurgled reproachfully, “I just couldn’t think of letting you go home now. I’m sure you’re terribly unwell. Why, you might collapse in the street. You’ve just got to stay here until you feel different.”

The creaking died away. He stood in the center of the office, motionless. His eyes traced the coal-black course of Miss Millick’s footprints to where she stood blocking the door. Then a sound that was almost a scream was wrenched out of him, for it seemed to him that the blackness was creeping up her legs under the thin stockings.

“Why, Mr Wran,” she said, “You’re acting as if you were crazy. You must lie down for a while. Here, I’ll help you off with your coat.”

The nauseously idiotic and rasping note was the same; only it had been intensified. As she came toward him he turned and ran through the storeroom, clattered a key desperately at the lock of the second door to the corridor.

“Why, Mr Wran,” he heard her call, “are you having some kind of a fit? You must let me help you.”

The door came open and he plunged out into the corridor and up the stairs immediately ahead. It was only when he reached the top that he realized the heavy steel door in front of him led to the roof. He jerked up the catch.

“Why, Mr Wran, you mustn’t run away. I’m coming after you.”

Then he was out on the gritty gravel of the roof. The night sky was clouded and murky, with a faint pinkish glow from the neon signs. From the distant mills rose a ghostly spurt of flame. He ran to the edge. The street lights glared dizzily upward. Two men were tiny round blobs of hat and shoulders. He swung around.

The thing was in the doorway. The voice was no longer solicitous but moronically playful, each sentence ending in a titter.

“Why, Mr Wran, why have you come up here? We’re all alone. Just think, I might push you off.”

The thing came slowly toward him. He moved backward until his heels touched the low parapet. Without knowing why, or what he was going to do, he dropped to his knees. He dared not look at the face as it came nearer, a focus for the worst in the world, a gathering point for poisons from everywhere. Then the lucidity of terror took possession of his mind, and words formed on his lips.

“I will obey you. You are my god,” he said. “You have supreme power over man and his animals and his machines. You rule this city and all others. I recognize that.”

Again the titter, closer. “Why, Mr Wran, you never talked like this before. Do you mean it?”

“The world is yours to do with as you will, save or tear to pieces,” he answered fawningly, the words automatically fitting themselves together in vaguely liturgical patterns. “I recognize that. I will praise, I will sacrifice. In smoke and soot I will worship you for ever.”

The voice did not answer. He looked up. There was only Miss Millick, deathly pale and swaying drunkenly. Her eyes were closed. He caught her as she wobbled toward him. His knees gave way under the added weight and they sank down together on the edge of the roof.

After a while she began to twitch. Small noises came from her throat and her eyelids edged open.

“Come on, we’ll go downstairs,” he murmured jerkily, trying to draw her up. “You’re feeling bad.”

“I’m terribly dizzy,” she whispered. “I must have fainted, I didn’t eat enough. And then I’m so nervous lately, about the war and everything, I guess. Why, we’re on the roof! Did you bring me up here to get some air? Or did I come up without knowing it? I’m awfully foolish. I used to walk in my sleep, my mother said.”

As he helped her down the stairs, she turned and looked at him. “Why, Mr Wran,” she said, faintly, “you’ve got a big black smudge on your forehead. Here, let me get it off for you.” Weakly she rubbed at it with her handkerchief. She started to away again and he steadied her.

“No, I’ll be all right,” she said. “Only I feel cold. What happened, Mr Wran? Did I have some sort of fainting spell?”

He told her it was something like that.

Later, riding home in the empty elevated railway car, he wondered how long he would be safe from the thing. It was a purely practical problem. He had no way of knowing, but instinct told him he had satisfied the brute for some time. Would it want more when it came again? Time enough to answer that question when it arose. It might be hard, he realized, to keep out of an insane asylum. With Helen and Ronny to protect, as well as himself, he would have to be careful and tightlipped. He began to speculate as to how many other men and women had seen the thing or things like it.

The elevated slowed and lurched in a familiar fashion. He looked at the roofs near the curve. They seemed very ordinary, as if what made them impressive had gone away for a while.