Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

greenish white nor any common fish color, but palely-pinkish, flesh-colored in fact. And it didn’t seem so much a fish as a tadpole⁠—at least its visible half had a slightly oversize head shaped like a bullet that has mushroomed a little, and two tiny writhing arms or appendages of some sort⁠—and it felt as if it had rather large hips for a fish or even a tadpole. Equip a two-months human embryo with a finny tail, give it in addition a precocious feminine sexiness, and you’d get something of the same effect.

But all that was nothing. The trouble was that it had a face⁠—a tiny face, of course, and rather goggly-ghostly like a planarian’s, but a face nevertheless, a human-looking face, and also (here was the real trouble) a face that bore a grotesque but striking resemblance to that of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich.

Simon’s fingers tightened convulsively. Simultaneously the slippery creature gave a desperate wriggle. It shot into the air in a high curve and fell into the scant inch of space between the bathtub and the wall.

The next half hour was hectic in a groveling sort of way. Retrieving anything from behind Simon’s ancient claw-footed bathtub was a most difficult feat. There was barely space to get an arm under it and at one point the warping of the floor boards prevented even that. Besides, there was the host of dust-shrouded objects it had previously been too much trouble to tease out⁠—an accumulation of decades. At first Simon tried to guide himself by the faint flopping noises along the hidden base of the wall, but these soon ceased.

Being on your knees and your chest with an ear against the floor and an arm strainingly outstretched is probably not the best position to assume while weird trains of thought go hooting through your head, but sometimes it has to happen that way. First came a remembered piece of neighborhood lore that supported the possibility of a connection between the house next door and the tiny pink aquatic creature now suffering minute agonies behind the bathtub. No one knew what ancient and probably larceny-minded amateur plumber was responsible, but the old-timers assured Simon there was a link between the water supply of the Russians’ house with its aerial cistern and that of the building containing Simon’s studio and several smaller apartments; at any rate they maintained that there had been a time during the period when the bootlegger was storing hooch in the water tank that several neighborhood cold-water taps were dispensing a weak but nonetheless authoritative mixture of bourbon and branch water.

So, thought Simon as he groped and strained, if the Russians were somehow responsible for this weird fishlet, there was no insuperable difficulty in understanding how it might have gotten here.

But that was the least of Simon’s preoccupations. He scrabbled wildly and unsuccessfully for several minutes, and then realizing he would never get anywhere in this unsystematic manner, he began to remove the accumulated debris piece by piece: dark cracked ends of soap, washrags dried out in tortured attitudes, innumerable dark-dyed cigarette stumps, several pocket magazines with bleached wrinkled pages, empty and near-empty medicine bottles and pill vials, rusty hairpins, bobby pins, safety pins, crumpled toothpaste tubes (and a couple for oil paint), a gray toothbrush, a fifty-cent piece and several pennies, the mummy of a mouse, a letter from Picasso, and last of all, from the dark corner behind the bathtub’s inside claw, the limp pitiful thing he was seeking.

It was even tinier than he’d thought. He carefully washed the dust and flug off it, but it was clearly dead and its resemblance to Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich had become problematical⁠—indeed, Simon decided that someone seeing it now for the first time would think it a freak minnow or monstrous tadpole and nothing more, though mutation or disease had obviously been at work. The illusion of a miniature mermaid still existed in the tapering tail and armlike appendages, but it was faint. He tried to remember what he knew about salamanders⁠—almost nothing, it turned out. He thought of embryos, but his mind veered away from the subject.

He wandered back into the studio carrying the thing in his hand. He climbed the stepladder by the north window and studied the house next door. What windows he could see were dark. He got a very vague impression that the roof had changed. After he had strained his eyes for some time he fancied he could see a faint path of greenish luminescence streaming between the pent-shack and the water-tank, but it was very faint indeed and might only be his vision swimming.

He climbed down the stepladder and stood for a moment weighing the tiny dead thing in his hand. It occurred to him that one of his friends at the university could dig up a zoologist to pass on his find.

But Simon’s curiosity was more artistic than scientific. In the end he twisted a bit of cellophane around the thing, placed it on the ledge of his easel and went off to bed⁠ ⁠… and to a series of disturbingly erotic dreams.

Next day he got up late and, after breakfasting on black coffee, gloomed around the studio for a while, picking things up and putting them down. He glanced frequently at the stepladder, but resisted the temptation to climb up and have another look next door. Sighing, he thumbtacked a sheet of paper to a drawing board and half-heartedly began blocking in a female figure. It was insipid and lifeless. Stabbing irritably at the heavy curve of the figure’s hip, he broke his charcoal. “Damn!” he said, glaring around the room. Abandoning all pretense, he threw the charcoal on the floor and climbed the stepladder. He pressed his nose against the glass.

In daylight, the adjoining roof looked bare and grimy. There was a big transparent pipe running between the water tank and the shack, braced in two places by improvised-looking wooden scaffolding. Listening intently, Simon thought he could hear a motor going in the shack.