Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber Read Free Page B

The doctor, he told himself, would clear everything up. He could almost fancy the doctor 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 hour,” 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 returned and he let his joking mystification of Miss Millick run away with him until he realized that 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 neomedieval 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 already 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 doctor.
    “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 expression was toneless.
“I don’t know. I don’t suppose so,” answered Catesby, long-lost emotions flooding back into his voice. “It’s all so 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 sitting 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