You're All Alone (illustrated) by Fritz Leiber Page B

doors for hours, as if he were on guard. I was lost and not one soul tried to save me, not even my man in the park.”
    SHE TOOK a drink and leaned back. “And then one autumn day when the clouds were low and the fallen leaves crackled under our feet, and we’d walked farther together than ever before, in fact a little way out of the park, I happened to look across the street and I noticed a spruce young man looking at us. I called my friend’s attention to him. He peered around through his thick glasses.
    “The next instant he had grabbed me tight above the elbow and was marching me ahead. He didn’t speak until we got around the corner. Then he said, in a voice I’d never heard him use before, ‘They have seen us. Get home.’
    “I started to ask questions, but he only said, ‘Don’t talk. Don’t look back.’ I was frightened and obeyed him.
    “In the hours afterwards my fear grew. I pictured ‘them’ in a hundred horrible ways. I went to sleep praying never to see the small dark man again and just be allowed to live my old stupid life.
    “Some time after midnight I awoke with my heart jumping, and there was Gigolo standing on the bedclothes spitting at the window. I made myself get up and tiptoe to it. Two dark things rose above the outside sill. They were the top of a ladder resting against it. I looked down. Light from the alley showed me the smiling face of the young man I’d seen across the street that afternoon. You know him, Carr. The one they call Dris—Driscoll Ames. He had two hands then. He reached them up to open the window.
    “I ran to my father’s and mother’s room. I called to them to wake up. I shook them. And then came the most terrible shock of my life. They wouldn’t wake, no matter what I did. Except that they breathed, they might have been dead. I remember pounding my father’s chest and digging my nails into his arms.
    “I think that even without Gigolo’s warning snarl and the sound of footsteps coming swiftly through the bathroom, I would have rushed out of the apartment, rather than stay a moment longer with those two living corpses who had brought me into the world.”
    Her voice was getting high. Carr looked uneasily down the empty, book-lined aisles.
    “I darted down the front stairs and there, peering at our mailbox, I saw an older man. You know him too, Carr. Wilson. He looked at me through the glass panel of the inner door and then he looked at my nightdress, and then he smiled like the young man on the ladder.
    “With steps pounding down the stairs there was only one way for me to go. I ran down through the basement, past the stone wash tubs and the padlocked storage rooms, and out into the dirty cement area-way. And there, standing in the alley, in the light of one high naked bulb, I saw my fairy godmother.”
    CARR BLINKED. She smiled thinly and said, “Oh yes, my fairy godmother, just like Cinderella’s, come to rescue me. A tall beautiful golden-haired woman in a golden evening dress. There was a black band around her wrist, like the strap of a handbag.
    “Then I saw that the black band was a leash, and at the other end of the leash was a huge hound that stood high as her waist and was dirty gray like the fence behind them. It was snuffing at the rubbish.
    “Then Hackman—for of course it was she—saw me crouching under the back porches and her lips formed in a smile, but it was different from the men’s smiles, because it was at the thought that the hound would get me before the men.
    “Just at that moment Gigolo shot past my legs with a squalling cry and hurtled off down the alley. With a great bound the hound was after him, dragging my fairy godmother after him stumbling and slipping, ignoring her curses and frantic commands, dirtying her lovely golden gown. And I was racing off in the opposite direction, the hound’s baying filling my ears.
    “I ran for blocks, turning corners, cutting across lawns, before I stopped—and then only because I