7. Kill to maintain the integrity of your work.
HARLAN ELLISON, 1970
“Promises of Laughter” [3600] happened to me. The lady called “Holdie Karp” is a reasonably well-known author these days. She really did that to me, what happens to the dude in the story. And bow I wrote the yam was this: when the events of that night went down, I got so pissed off I got into my Austin-Healey and drove like a lunatic across the twisting, accident-laden Mulholland Drive to my house, ran at the typewriter like a Rams linebacker, banged out the story (sexual pun intended) in about two hours, yanked the carbon off the desk, got back in the Healey, hit Mulholland again, made the course in about thirteen minutes batting sixty all the way through the night and the fog, slammed into her driveway, and started kicking on her front door.
She came to the window, in her nightgown, obviously having been asleep, saw it was wild-eyed li’l ole me, and damn near didn’t open the door because she was afraid I’d knife her or something. But when she let it slide open just a crack, I shoved the manuscript into her hand, got back in my car and raced away…having had (I thought) the last fucking word, damn her eyes!
It appeared in a magazine containing one of the articles referred to in the story. She was furious. Everyone now knew our personal lives. So several months later she wrote her view of that incident.
It was a better story than mine.
We are friends to this day, “Holdie Karp” and I, and she writes for magazines and for one of New York’s biggest newspapers, and she taught me more about being a non-macho male than anyone I’ve ever met.
So the least I could do was to rewrite the story a little, to make it a fairer representation of her, uh, position on that fateful night.
I have no idea why people keep identifying me with the stuff in my stories.
Which brings me to the last story in the book, and the most recent one I’ve written. I wrote it for this book, and unless I sell it to a magazine in the next 5½ months…but we’ve been through that before. Anyhow. “Tired Old Man” [5000] was written in June of this year, 1975. It’s one of my most recent stories, so you can judge how I’m doing these days; but beyond that curious conceit, it is a story with a peculiar history, and one I’m inclined to tell you.
First, however, let me warn you. I am not the protagonist, Billy Landress, even though much of Billy’s career parallels mine and some of the things that happen to him in the story happened in a sorta kinda way, and some of the perceptions at which he arrives are ones I’ve lately come to hold as my own. Now I suppose all that disclaiming will convince those of you who believe in the “he protesteth too much” philosophy that I am Billy. Well, that only goes to show how little some of you understand about the art of creating fiction. A writer takes bits and pieces of himself—as Geoffrey Wolff put it in that quote leading off this introduction—he cannibalizes himself, and he applies a little meat here and a little meat there, and he comes up with a character that bears a resemblance to himself (because who do I know better than myself, for God’s sake), but who is a new person entirely. So don’t get all screwed up trying to fit me into Billy’s shoes.
Back to the story.
I was in New York on a visit about eight, ten, eleven years ago. I went to dinner with Bob Silverberg and Bobbie Silverberg, and after dinner we went to a gathering of the old Hydra Club. Willy Ley was there; it was shortly before that great and wonderful man died; it was good to see him again. And a bunch of other people, most of whom I didn’t know. And I wandered around and finally found myself sitting on the sofa next to a weary-looking old man in an easy chair. Marvelous conversationalist. We talked for almost an hour, until I got up and went to the kitchen where I found Bob with the late Hans Santesson, a dear friend and ex-editor of mine. I described the old man and asked who he was.
“That is Cornell Woolrich,” Hans said.
My mouth must have fallen open. I had been sitting next to one of the giants of mystery fiction, a man whose work I’d read and admired for twenty years, since I’d been a kid and discovered a copy of BLACK ALIBI after seeing the 1946 Val Lewton film, The Leopard Man. I was nine years old at the time, and the film made such an impression on me that I stayed on at the Lake Theater in Painesville, Ohio to see it three times on a Saturday. And it was the first time I ever really read those funny words that come at the beginning of the movie (I later learned those were the “credits”); the words that said “Screenplay by Ardel Wray, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich.”
How I got hold of the novel, I don’t remember. But it was the first mystery fiction I’d ever read (excluding Poe, of course, all of whom I’d read by that time). Nine years old!
And in the years when I was voraciously devouring the works of every decent writer I could find, Woolrich (under his own name and his possibly even-more-famous pseudonym, “William Irish”) became a treasurehouse of twists and turns in plotting, elegant writing style, misdirection, mood, setting and suspense. God, the beautiful stories that man wrote. The “black book” series: THE BLACK ANGEL, THE BLACK CURTAIN, THE BLACK PATH OF FEAR. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and, many more times, BLACK ALIBI. And DEADLINE AT DAWN, PHANTOM LADY, NIGHTMARE. STRANGLER’S SERENADE, WALTZ INTO DARKNESS. And all the short stories!
Cornell Woolrich!
Jeeeezus, if Hans had said I was sitting next to Ernest fucking Hemingway it couldn’t have collapsed me more thoroughly. Bertrand Russell, Bob Feller, Dick Bong, Walt Kelly…all my heroes…it wouldn’t have gotten to me half as much, Cornell goddam Woolrich! I damn near fainted.
“But I thought he’d died years ago,” I said.
They laughed at me. He was old, no doubt about that, but he was very much alive. He wasn’t writing any more; his mother—whom he’d lived with through all of his adult life, in a resident hotel in Manhattan—had recently died; and he was just getting out and around.
I was flabbergasted. I’d sat and talked with Cornell Woolrich, one of my earliest writing heroes, and hadn’t even known it. I wanted to find him in that crowded apartment and just be near him for a while longer.
They were bemused by my goshwow attitude, but they were also a little perplexed. Hans said, “I do not remember seeing him here. Where is he?”
And I led them back to the easy chair in the far rear corner of the room. And he was gone. And he was nowhere in the apartment. And no one else had talked to him. And I never saw him again. And he died soon after that night, I learned later.
To this day, I’ve felt there was something strange and pivotal in my meeting with Woolrich. He could not possibly have known who I was, nor could he have much cared. But we talked writing, and I was the only one who saw or talked to him that night. I’m sure of that. Don’t ask me how I know, I cannot give you a rational explanation; and I firmly do not believe in ghosts or astrology or UFO’s or much else of the nonsense gobbledygook that people substitute for the ability to handle reality. But from the time I left him in that easy chair till the moment I went back to find him, I was right in front of the only exit from that apartment and there was no way he could have gotten past me without my seeing him.
For years I thought about that night in New York.
And one afternoon I sat down and wrote the first two pages of a story titled “Tired Old Man,” in which I thought I would fictionalize that evening, and (as I had with Leiber) pay homage to a writer whose words had so deeply affected me.
But the two pages went into the idea file, unresolved. They stayed there for six years, until earlier this month, June 1975. I was in the process of writing an original story for this book, and had started on another idea I’d had a while back, and in looking for the note for that story (which will be included in SHATTERDAY, coming from Pyramid in three months), I chanced upon the two pages of “Tired Old Man.” And without my even knowing why, or realizing what I was doing, in a lunatic move that could only make this book late to my publisher and late to the printer and late to the on-sale date and late to
your hands, I took up the writing of the story as if it had been six years earlier.
And as impossible as it had been for me to write it six years before, because I hadn’t known how to write it six years before, it was that easy for me to start with the very next sentence—as if I’d written the last word of the previous sentence only a moment earlier, not six years before—and go all the way through to the end in one sitting.
Marki Strasser in the story is Cornell Woolrich.
At least, in the impetus for the character. It isn’t supposed to be Woolrich in the story, it’s…well…that’s what the story is about, as you’ll see…but I wanted you to know how “Tired Old Man” came to be written; in answer to the people who always ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?”
And that brings me, at last, to the end of this introduction. I assure you when I started, some 42 typewritten pages earlier, I had no idea I’d run on like this.
But it’s nice getting together with you like this, if for no other reason than to keep out the darkness for just a few minutes longer. And in the course of writing these words, I went back and read the section of BLACK ALIBI in which the young girl, Teresa Delgado, is stalked and killed by the black panther as she screams for her mother to open the door and let her in. And it still conjures up the stark terror I first felt when I saw it in a Val Lewton film at the age of nine.
And for giving rebirth to that “tolerable terror” I thank you. We’ve got to get together again like this.
That is, if you get through the night.
HARLAN ELLISON Los Angeles
END EXCERPT
THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS
On the night after the day she had stained the louvered window shutters of her new apartment on East 52nd Street, Beth saw a woman slowly and hideously knifed to death in the courtyard of her building. She was one of twenty-six witnesses to the ghoulish scene, and, like them, she did nothing to stop it.
She saw it all, every moment of it, without break and with no impediment to her view. Quite madly, the thought crossed her mind as she watched in horrified fascination, that she had the sort of marvelous line of observation Napoleon had sought when he caused to have constructed at the Comédie-Française theaters, a curtained box at the rear, so he could watch the audience as well as the stage. The night was clear, the moon was full, she had just turned off the 11:30 movie on channel 2 after the second commercial break, realizing she had already seen Robert Taylor in Westward the Women, and had disliked it the first time; and the apartment was quite dark.
She went to the window, to raise it six inches for the night’s sleep, and she saw the woman stumble into the courtyard. She was sliding along the wall, clutching her left arm with her right hand. Con Ed had installed mercury-vapor lamps on the poles; there had been sixteen assaults in seven months; the courtyard was illuminated with a chill purple glow that made the blood streaming down the woman’s left arm look black and shiny. Beth saw every detail with utter clarity, as though magnified a thousand power under a microscope, solarized as if it had been a television commercial.
The woman threw back her head, as if she were trying to scream, but there was no sound. Only the traffic on First Avenue, late cabs foraging for singles paired for the night at Maxwell’s Plum and Friday’s and Adam’s Apple. But that was over there, beyond. Where she was, down there seven floors below, in the courtyard, everything seemed silently suspended in an invisible force-field.
Beth stood in the darkness of her apartment, and realized she had raised the window completely. A tiny balcony lay just over the low sill; now not even glass separated her from the sight; just the wrought-iron balcony railing and seven floors to the courtyard below.
The woman staggered away from the wall, her head still thrown back, and Beth could see she was in her mid-thirties, with dark hair cut in a shag; it was impossible to tell if she was pretty: terror had contorted her features and her mouth was a twisted black slash, opened but emitting no sound. Cords stood out in her neck. She had lost one shoe, and her steps were uneven, threatening to dump her to the pavement.
The man came around the corner of the building, into the courtyard. The knife he held was enormous—or perhaps it only seemed so: Beth remembered a bone-handled fish knife her father had used one summer at the lake in Maine: it folded back on itself and locked, revealing eight inches of serrated blade. The knife in the hand of the dark man in the courtyard seemed to be similar.
The woman saw him and tried to run, but he leaped across the distance between them and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back as though he would slash her throat in the next reaper-motion.
Then the woman screamed.
The sound skirled up into the courtyard like bats trapped in an echo chamber, unable to find a way out, driven mad. It went on and on…
The man struggled with her and she drove her elbows into his sides and he tried to protect himself, spinning her around by her hair, the terrible scream going up and up and never stopping. She came loose and he was left with a fistful of hair torn out by the roots. As she spun out, he slashed straight across and opened her up just below the breasts. Blood sprayed through her clothing and the man was soaked; it seemed to drive him even more berserk. He went at her again, as she tried to hold herself together, the blood pouring down over her arms.
She tried to run, teetered against the wall, slid sidewise, and the man struck the brick surface. She was away, stumbling over a flower bed, falling, getting to her knees as he threw himself on her again. The knife came up in a flashing arc that illuminated the blade strangely with purple light. And still she screamed.
Lights came on in dozens of apartments and people appeared at windows.
He drove the knife to the hilt into her back, high on the right shoulder. He used both hands.
Beth caught it all in jagged flashes—the man, the woman, the knife, the blood, the expressions on the faces of those watching from the windows. Then lights clicked off in the windows, but they still stood there, watching.
She wanted to yell, to scream, “What are you doing to that woman?” But her throat was frozen, two iron hands that had been immersed in dry ice for ten thousand years clamped around her neck. She could feel the blade sliding into her own body.
Somehow—it seemed impossible but there it was down there, happening somehow—the woman struggled erect and pulled herself off the knife. Three steps, she took three steps and fell into the flower bed again. The man was howling now, like a great beast, the sounds inarticulate, bubbling up from his stomach. He fell on her and the knife went up and came down, then again, and again, and finally it was all a blur of motion, and her scream of lunatic bats went on till it faded off and was gone.
Beth stood in the darkness, trembling and crying, the sight filling her eyes with horror. And when she could no longer bear to look at what he was doing down there to the unmoving piece of meat over which he worked, she looked up and around at the windows of darkness where the others still stood—even as she stood—and somehow she could see their faces, bruise-purple with the dim light from the mercury lamps, and there was a universal sameness to their expressions. The women stood with their nails biting into the upper arms of their men, their tongues edging from the corners of their mouths; the men were wild-eyed and smiling. They all looked as though they were at cock fights. Breathing deeply. Drawing some sustenance from the grisly scene below. An exhalation of sound, deep, deep, as though from caverns beneath the earth. Flesh pale and moist.
And it was then that she realized the courtyard had grown foggy, as though mist off the East River had rolled up 52nd Street in a veil that would obscure the details of what the knife and the man were still doing…endlessly doing it…long after there was any joy in it…still doing it…again and again…
But the fog was unnatural, thick and gray and filled with tiny scintillas of light. She stared at it, rising up in the empty space of the courtyard. Bach in the cathedral, Stardust in a vacuum chamber.
Beth saw eyes.
There, up there, at the ninth floor and higher, two great eyes, as surely as night and the moon, there were eyes. And—a face? Was that a face, could she be sure, was she imagining it…a face? In the roiling vapors of chill fog something lived, something brooding and patient and utterly malevolent had been summoned up to witness what was happening down there in the flower bed. Beth tried to look away, but could not. The eyes, those primal burning eyes, filled with an abysmal antiquity yet frighteningly bright and anxious like the eyes of a child; eyes filled with tomb depths, ancient and new, chasm-filled, burning, gigantic and deep as an abyss, holding her, compelling her. The shadow play was being staged not only for the tenants in their windows, watching and drinking of the scene, but for some other. Not on frigid tundra or waste moors, not in subterranean caverns or on some faraway world circling a dying sun, but here, in the city, here the eyes of that other watched.
Shaking with the effort, Beth wrenched her eyes from those burning depths up there beyond the ninth floor, only to see again the horror that had brought that other. And she was struck for the first time by the awfulness of what she was witnessing, she was released from the immobility that had held her like a coelacanth in shale, she was filled with the blood thunder pounding against the membranes of her mind: she had stood there! She had done nothing, nothing! A woman had been butchered and she had said nothing, done nothing. Tears had been useless, tremblings had been pointless, she had done nothing!
Then she heard hysterical sounds midway between laughter and giggling, and as she stared up into that great face rising in the fog and chimney smoke of the night, she heard herself making those deranged gibbon noises and from the man below a pathetic, trapped sound, like the whimper of whipped dogs.
She was staring up into that face again. She hadn’t wanted to see it again—ever. But she was locked with those smoldering eyes, overcome with the feeling that they were childlike, though she knew they were incalculably ancient.
No Doors No Windows Page 4
