The Mind Spider and Other Stories by Fritz Leiber Page A

digging for my key, “—what will you do?"
    “As soon as we get inside,” Max said, “I’ll duck in your bedroom and shut the door. Pay no attention. Don’t come after me, whatever you hear. Is there a plug-in in your bedroom? I’ll need juice.”
    “Yes,” I told him, turning the key. “But the lights have been going off a lot lately. Someone has been blowing the fuses.” “That’s great,” he growled, following me inside.
    I turned on the lights and went in the kitchen, did the same there and came back. Max was still in the living room, bent over the table beside my typewriter. He had a sheet of light-green paper. He must have brought it with him. He was scrawling something at the top and bottom of it. He straightened up and gave it to me.
    “Fold it up and put it in your pocket and keep it on you the next few days,” he said.
    It was just a blank sheet of cracldingly thin light-green paper with “Dear Fred” scribbled at the top and “Your friend, Max Boumemann” at the bottom and nothing in between.
    “But what—?’’ I began, looking up at him.
    "Do as I sayl” He snapped at me. Then, as I almost flinched away from him, he grinned—a great big comradely grin.
    "Okay, let’s get working,” he said, and he went into the bedroom and shut the door behind him.
    I folded the sheet of paper three times and unzipped my wind-breaker and tucked it inside the breast pocket. Then I went to the bookcase and pulled at random a volume out of the top shelf—my psychology shelf, I remembered the next moment—and sat down and opened the book and looked at a page without seeing the print.
    And now there was time for me to think. Since I’d spoken of the red eyes to Max there had been no time for anything but to listen and to remember and to act. Now there was time for me to think.
    My first thoughts were: This is ridiculous! I saw something strange and frightening, sure, but it was in the dark, I couldn’t see anything clearly, there must be some simple natural explanation for whatever it was on the fire escape. I saw something strange and Max sensed, I was frightened and when I told him about it he decided to play a practical joke on me in line with that eternal gag he lives by. I’ll bet right now he’s lying on my bed and chuckling, wondering how long it’ll be before I—
    The window beside me rattled as if the wind had suddenly risen again. The rattling grew more violent—and then it ab-ruptly stopped without dying away, stopped with a feeling of tension, as if the wind or something more material were still pressing against the pane.
    And I did not turn my head to look at it, although (or perhaps because) I knew there was no fire escape or other support outside. I simply endured that sense of a presence at my elbow and stared unseeingly at the book in my hands, while my heart pounded and my skin froze and flushed.
    I realized fully then that my first skeptical thoughts had been the sheerest automatic escapism and that, just as I’d told Max, I believed with my whole mind in the black dog. I believed in the whole business insofar as I could imagine it. I believed that there are undreamed of powers warring in this universe. I believed that Max was a stranded time-traveHer and that in my bedroom he was now frantically operating some unearthly device to signal for help from some unknown headquarters. I believed that the impossible and the deadly was loose in Chicago.
    But my thoughts couldn’t carry further than that. They kept repeating themselves, faster and faster. My mind felt like an engine that is shaking itself to pieces. And the impulse to turn my head and look out the window came to me and grew.
    I forced myself to focus on the middle of the page where I had the book open and start reading.
    Jungs archetype transgress the harriers of time and space. More than that: they are capable of breaking the shackles of the laws of causality. They are endowed with frankly mystical “prospective”