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

“Now, Mother, don’t get excited,” he said soothingly. “Everything’s all right.”
    The father insane too, Carr thought. No, humoring her. Pretending to believe her hallucinations. That must be it.
    “Everything isn’t all right,” she contradicted tearfully. “I won’t have Jane practicing so much and taking those wild long walks by herself. Jane, you mustn’t—” Suddenly a look of fear came over her. “Oh don’t go. Please don’t go, Jane.” She stretched out her hand toward the hall as if to restrain someone. Carr shrank back. He felt sick. It was horrible that this mad old woman should resemble Jane.
    She dropped her hand. “She’s gone,” she said and began to sob.



The old man put his arm around her shoulders. “You’ve scared her off,” he said softly. “But don’t cry, Mother. Tell you what, let’s go sit in the dark for a while. It’ll rest you.” He urged her toward the sunporch. “Jane’ll be back in a moment, I’m sure.”
    Just then, behind Carr, the cat hissed and retreated a few steps higher, the vestibule door downstairs was banged open, there were loud footsteps and voices raised in argument.
    “I tell you, Hackman, I don’t like it that Dris excused himself tonight.”
    “Show some sense, Wilson! This afternoon you didn’t want him to come here at all.”
    “Not by himself, no. With us would be different.”
    “Pft! Do you always have to have the two of us in the audience when you chase girls?”
    The first voice was cool and jolly, the second brassy. They were those Carr had overheard in the cigarette shop.
    Before he had time to weigh his fears or form a plan, Carr had slipped through the door in front of him—Jane’s parents were out of sight—, tiptoed down the hallway leading to the back of the apartment, turned into the first room he came to, and was standing with his cheek to the wall, squinting back the way he had come.
    He couldn’t quite see the front door. But in a little while long shadows darkened the calcimine of the hallway.
    “I came to check on her first, to chase her second,” he heard Wilson say. “She doesn’t seem to be around.”
    “But we just heard the piano and we know she’s a music student.”
    “Use your head, Hackman! You know the piano would play whether she was here or not. If it plays when she’s not here, that’s the sort of proof we’re looking for.”
    Carr waited for the footsteps or voices of Jane’s parents. Surely they must be aware of the intruders. The sunporch wasn’t that isolated.
    Perhaps they were as terrified as he. “She’s probably wandered off to the back of the flat,” Hackman suggested.
    “Or hiding there,” Wilson amended. “And there may be photographs. Let’s look.”
    CARR WAS already retreating noiselessly across the fussy, old-fashioned bedroom toward where light poured into it from a white-tiled bathroom a short distance away.
    “Stop! Listen!” Wilson called. “The sunporch!”
    Footsteps receded down the hall, crossed the living room.
    “It’s the parents,” he heard Hackman say in the distance. “I don’t see the girl.”
    “Yet—listen to that!—they’re talking as if she might be here.”
    The footsteps and voices started to come back.
    “I told you I didn’t like it when Dris bowed out, Hackman. This makes me more suspicious.” For once the jolliness was absent from Wilson’s voice. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got in ahead of me and taken the girl somewhere.”
    “Dris wouldn’t dare do a thing like that!”
    “No?” The jolliness came back into Wilson’s voice, nastily. “Well, if he’s not with her, he’s fooling around with dead girls, you can bet.”
    “That’s a dirty lie!” Hackman snarled. “Dris might fool around with dead girls when we’re all having fun together. Naturally. But not by himself, not alone!”
    “You think you’re the whole show with him?”
    “Yes! You’re just jealous because I dropped you.”
    “Ha! I don’t