You're All Alone (illustrated) by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online

the door was a long room. A drab austerity, untidy rows of small tables, and a grimy floor littered with trodden cigarettes, all proclaimed the place to be the headquarters of a somber monomania.
    Some oldsters were playing near the door, utterly absorbed in the game. One with a dirty white beard was silently kibitzing, occasionally shaking his head, or pointing out with palsied fingers the move that would have won if it had been made.
    Carr and Jane walked quietly beyond them, found a box of men as battered by long use as the half obliterated board, and started to play.
    Soon the maddening, years-forgotten excitement gripped Carr tight. He was back in that dreadful little universe where the significance of things is narrowed down to the strategems whereby turreted rooks establish intangible walls of force, bishops slip craftily through bristling barricades, and knights spring out in sudden sidewise attacks, as if from crooked medieval passageways.
    They played three slow, merciless games. She won the first two. He finally drew the third, his king just managing to nip off her last runaway pawn. It felt very late, getting on toward morning.
    She leaned back massaging her face.
    “Nothing like chess,” she mumbled, “to take your mind off things.” Then she dropped her hands.
    TWO MEN were still sitting at the first table in their overcoats, napping over the board. They tiptoed past them and out into the hall and went down the stairs. An old woman was wearily scrubbing her way across the lobby, her head bent as if forever.
    In the street they paused uncertainly. It had grown quite chilly.
    “Where do you live?” Carr asked.
    “I’d rather you didn’t—” Jane began and stopped. After a moment she said, “All right, you can take me home. But it’s a long walk and you must still follow the leader.”
    The Loop was deserted except for the darkness and the hungry wind. They crossed the black Chicago River on Michigan Boulevard, where the skyscrapers are thickest. It looked like the Styx. They walked rapidly. They didn’t say anything. Carr’s arm was tightly linked around hers. He felt sad and tired and yet very much at peace. He knew he was leaving this girl forever and going back to his own world. Any vague notion he’d had of making her a real friend had died in the cold ebb of night.
    Yet at the same time he knew that she had helped him. All his worries and fears, including the big one, were gone. The events of the afternoon and early evening seemed merely bizarre, a mixture of hoaxes and trivial illusions. Tomorrow he must begin all over again, with his job and his pleasures. Marcia, he told himself, had only been playing a fantastic prank—he’d patch things up with her.
    As if sensing his thoughts, Jane shrank close to his side.
    Past the turn-off to his apartment, past the old white water tower, they kept on down the boulevard. It seemed tremendously wide without cars streaming through it.
    They turned down a street where big houses hid behind black space and trees.
    Jane stopped in front of a tall iron gate. High on one of the stone pillars supporting it, too high for Jane to see, Carr idly noted a yellow chalk-mark in the shape of a cross with dots between the arms. Wondering if it were a tramps’ sign commenting on the stinginess or generosity of the people inside, Carr suddenly got the picture his mind had been fumbling for all night. It fitted Jane, her untidy expensive clothes, her shy yet arrogant manner. She must be a rich man’s daughter, overprotected, neurotic, futilely rebellious, tyrannized over by relatives and servants. Everything in her life mixed up, futilely and irremediably, in the way only money can manage.
    “It’s been so nice,” Jane said in a choked voice, not looking at him, “so nice to pretend.”
    She fumbled in her pocket, but whether for a handkerchief or a key Carr could not tell. Something small and white slipped from her hand and fluttered through the fence. She pushed