Fritz Leiber - The Hound

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2024-11-19 3 0 43.54KB 22 页 5.9玖币

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The Hound

Fritz Leiber

David Lashley huddled the skimpy blankets around him and dully

watched the cold light of an early spring morning seep through the

window and stiffen in his room. He could not recall the exact nature

of the terror against which he had fought his way into wakefulness,

except that it had been in some way gigantic and had brought back

to him the fear-ridden helplessness of childhood. It had lurked near

him all night, and finally it had crouched over him and thrust down

toward his face. The radiator whined dismally with the first push of

steam from the basement, and he shivered in response. He thought

that his shivering was an ironically humorous recognition of the fact

that his room was never warm except when he was out of it. But

there was more to it than that. The penetrating whine had touched

something in his mind without being quite able to dislodge it and

bring it into consciousness. The mounting rumble of city traffic,

together with the hoarse panting of a locomotive in the railroad

yards, mingled themselves with the nearer sound, intensifying its

disturbing tug at hidden fears. For a few moments he lay inert,

listening. There was an unpleasant stench, too, in the room, he

noticed, but that was nothing to be surprised at. He had experienced

before the strange olfactory illusions that are part of the aftermath of

sinus trouble and flu. Then he heard his mother moving around

laboriously in the kitchen, and that stung him into action.

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The Hound

"Have you caught another cold?" she asked, watching him

anxiously as he hurriedly spooned in a boiled egg before its heat

should be entirely lost in the chilly plate. "Are you sure?" she

persisted. "I heard someone sniffling all night."

"Perhaps father—" he began. She shook her head. "No, he's all

right. His side was giving him a lot of pain yesterday evening, but

he slept quietly enough. That's why I thought it must be you, David.

I got up twice to see, but"—her voice became a little doleful—"I

know you don't like me to come poking into your room at all hours."

"That's not true!" he contradicted. She looked so frail and little and

worn, standing there in front of the stove with one of father's

shapeless bathrobes hugged around her, so like a sick sparrow

trying to appear chipper, that a futile irritation, and an indignation

that he couldn't help her more, welled up within him, choking his

voice a little. "It's that I don't want you getting up all the time, and

missing your sleep. You have enough to do taking care of father all

day long. And I've told you a dozen times that you mustn't make

breakfast for me. You know the doctor says you need all the rest

you can get."

"Oh, I'm all right," she answered quickly, "but I was sure you'd

caught another cold. All night long I kept hearing it—a sniffling and

a snuffling—"

Coffee spilled over into the saucer, as David set down the half-

raised cup. His mother's words had reawakened the elusive memory,

and now that it had come back he did not want to look it in the face.

His hand was shaking.

"It's late, I'll have to rush," he said.

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The Hound

She accompanied him to the door, so accustomed to his hastiness

that she saw in it nothing unusual. Her wan voice followed him

down the dark apartment stair: "I hope a rat hasn't died in the walls.

Did you notice the nasty smell?"

And then he was out of the door and had lost himself and his

memories in the early morning rush of the city. Tires singing on

asphalt. Cold engines coughing, then starting with a roar. Heels

clicking on the sidewalk, hurrying, trotting, converging on street car

intersections and elevated stations. Low heels, high heels. Heels of

stenographers bound downtown and of housewives hastening to

their stints of war work. Shouts of newsboys and glimpses of

headlines: "AIR BLITZ ON… BATTLESHIP SUNK…

BLACKOUT EXPECTED HERE… DRIVEN BACK."

But sitting in the stuffy solemnity of the street car, it was impossible

to keep from thinking of it any longer. Besides, the stale medicinal

smell of the yellow woodwork immediately brought back the

memory of that other smell. David Lashley clenched his hands in

his overcoat pockets and asked himself how it was possible for a

grown man to be so suddenly overwhelmed by a fear from

childhood. Yet in the same instant he knew with terrible certainty

that this was no childhood fear, this thing that had pursued him up

the years, growing ever more vast and menacing, until, like the

demon wolf Fenris at Ragnorak, its gaping jaws scraped heaven and

earth, seeking to open wider. This thing that had dogged his

footsteps, sometimes so far behind that he forgot its existence, but

now so close that he could almost feel its cold sick breath on his

neck. Werewolves? He had read up on such things at the library,

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fingering dusty books in uneasy fascination, but what he had read

made them seem innocuous and without significance—dead

superstitions—in comparison with this thing that was part and

parcel of the great sprawling cities and chaotic peoples of the

twentieth century, so much a part that he, David Lashley, winced at

the endlessly varying howls and growls of traffic and industry—

sounds at once animal and mechanical; shrank back with a start

from the sight of headlights at night—those dazzling, unwinking

eyes; trembled uncontrollably if he heard the scuffling of rats in an

alley or caught sight in the evenings of the shadowy forms of lean

mongrel dogs looking for food in vacant lots. "Sniffling and

snuffling," his mother had said. What better words would you want

to describe the inquisitive, persistent pryings of the beast that had

crouched outside the bedroom door all night in his dreams and then

finally pushed through to plant its dirty paws on his chest. For a

moment, he saw superimposed on the yellow ceiling and garish

advertising placards of the street car, its malformed muzzle… the

red eyes like thickly scummed molten metal… the jaws slavered

with thick black oil…

Wildly he looked around at his fellow-passengers, seeking to blot

out that vision, but it seemed to have slipped down into all of them,

infecting them, giving their features an ugly canine cast—the slack,

receding jaw of an otherwise pretty blond, the narrow head and

wide-set eyes of an unshaven mechanic returning from the night

shift. He sought refuge then in the open newspaper of the man

sitting beside him, studying it intently without regard for the

impression of rudeness he was creating. But there was a wolf in the

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cartoon, and he quickly turned away to stare through the dusty pane

at the stores sliding by. Gradually the sense of oppressive menace

lifted a little. But the cartoon had established another contact in his

brain—the memory of a cartoon from the First World War. What

the wolf or hound in that earlier cartoon had represented—war,

famine, or the ruthlessness of the enemy—he could not say, but it

had haunted his dreams for weeks, crouched in corners, and waited

for him at the head of the stairs. Later he had tried to explain to

friends the horrors that may lie in the concrete symbolisms and

personifications of a cartoon if interpreted naively by a child, but

had been unable to get his idea across.

The conductor growled out the name of a downtown street, and

once again he lost himself in the crowd, finding relief in the never-

ceasing movement, the brushing of shoulders against his own.

But as the time-clock emitted its delayed musical bong! and he

turned to stick his card in the rack, the girl at the desk looked up and

remarked, "Aren't you going to punch in for your dog, too?"

"My dog?"

"Well, it was there just a second ago. Came in right behind you,

looking as if it owned you—I mean you owned it." She giggled

briefly through her nose. "One of Mrs. Montmorency's mastiffs

escaped from the chauffeur and wandering around the store, I

presume."

He continued to stare at her blankly. "A joke," she explained

patiently, and returned to her work.

"I've got to get a grip on myself," he found himself muttering tritely

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The Hound

as the elevator lowered him noiselessly to the basement.

"I've got to get a grip on myself," he kept repeating as he hurried to

the locker room, left his coat and lunch, gave his hair a quick

careful brushing, hurried again through the still-empty aisles, and

slipped in behind the socks-and-handkerchiefs counter. "It's just

nerves. I'm not crazy. But I got to get a grip on myself."

"What do you mean, talking to yourself and not noticing anybody?

Don't you know that's the first symptom of insanity?"

Gertrude Rees had stopped on her way over to neckties. Light

brown hair, faultlessly waved after the fashion of department-store

salesgirls, framed a serious, not-too-pretty face.

"Just jittery, I guess," he murmured. "Sorry." What else could you

say? Even to Gertrude?

"I guess all of us get that way sometimes these days, pal," she

answered. Her hand slipped across the counter to squeeze his for a

moment. "Buck up."

But even as he watched her walk away, his hands automatically

arranging display boxes, the new question was furiously hammering

in his brain. What else could you say? What words could you use to

explain it? Above all, to whom could you tell it? A dozen names

printed themselves in his mind and were as quickly discarded.

One remained. Tom Goodsell. Tom was a screwball with a lot of

common sense. Liked to talk about queer things. He would tell

Tom. Tonight, after the fire warden's class.

Shoppers were already filtering down into the basement. "He wears

size eleven, madam? Yes, we have some new patterns in. These are

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silk and lisle." But their ever-increasing numbers gave him no sense

of security. Crowding the aisles, they became shapes behind which

something might hide. He was continually peering past them. A

little child who wandered behind the counter and pushed at his knee

gave him a sudden fright.

Lunch came early for him. He arrived at the locker room in time to

catch hold of Gertrude Rees as she retreated uncertainly from the

dark doorway.

"Dog," she gasped. "Huge one. Gave me an awful start. Talk about

jitters! Wonder where he ever came from? Watch out. He looked

nasty."

But David, impelled by sudden recklessness born of fear and shock,

was already inside and switching on the light.

"No dog in sight," he told her. His face was whiter than hers.

"You're crazy. It must be there." Her face, gingerly poked through

the doorway, lengthened in surprise. "But I tell you I—. Oh, I guess

it must have pushed out through the other door."

He did not tell her that the other door was bolted.

"I suppose a customer brought it in," she rattled on, nervously.

"Some of them can't seem to shop unless they've got a pair of

Russian wolfhounds. Though that kind usually keeps out of the

bargain basement. I suppose we ought to find it before we eat lunch.

It looked dangerous—"

But he hardly heard her. He had just noticed that his locker was

open, and his overcoat dragged down on the floor. The brown paper

bag containing his lunch had been torn open, and the contents

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Fritz Leiber - The Hound

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