Shatterday

by Harlan Ellison

  And we had discussed what Griswold had done to Poe.

  He had buried him for a hundred years.

  What a poor judge of human nature Poe had been. What an ass. But let the critic Daniel Hoffman (Doubleday, 1972) tell it:

  Most of all, [Poe’s] own Imp of the Perverse so arranged the history of his career that his literary executor was his most invidious enemy, the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold. This man, an ex-minister, a busybody of letters, an incessant anthologist and publicizer, a failed poetaster fattening on the writings of others as does a moth eating Gobelin tapestries, went to extraordinary pains, after Poe’s death, to present the deceased writer in a manner designed to make his name a household word for the dissolute, immoral, recklessly debauched. Griswold falsified the facts of Poe’s life, and he revised the texts of Poe’s letters, always with this calumnious end in view….

  The scoundrel’s punishment is this: he is now known everywhere, if known at all, as the maligner of a helpless genius; whereas had he done his job honestly, he’d have won his proper modest niche among the footnotes by which the nearly forgotten are saved from total oblivion.

  How better to keep me quiet? What insanity! I didn’t even know which of the many seamy facts of Jimmy’s life was the one that so paralyzed him with fear of its disclosure! I wouldn’t have talked about him; I wanted to be free of him. I simply wanted to be able to say, when asked, “Yeah, Kerch Crowstairs and I were close friends for over a quarter of a century; he’ll be missed; his like will never come again”; the usual bullshit. That’s all I wanted.

  But the crazy paranoid sonofabitch couldn’t even credit me with decent motivations after he was gone. My God, does fear have a life of its own, to keep feeding on the living after the carrier of the plague has gone down the hole?

  “Okay, you can start it again,” I said.

  Kenny Gross ran it back and hit the play button. Jimmy was in the middle of what he’d been saying when my heart had begun to slam at me. “—if they want to reprint even one of my commas.”

  He looked so damned innocent up there.

  Just chatting with his best friend; just asking his best chum buddy to take care of his memory.

  “Larry, you know I’m not afraid of dying. Not that, and nothing else. Not spiders, snakes, being burned, being crippled, heights, closed-in places, ridicule, rejection… none of them ever got to me. Very high pain threshold, remember? But it’s tomorrow that gets me, Larry. The day after you see this tape. Will they still read me? Will I be on the bookshelves, the Modern Library, matched sets in good bindings? That’s what I’m afraid of, Larry. Posterity. I want a chance to go on after I’m gone. Fifty years from now I want them to come back to my stuff, the way they did to Poe’s, and Dickens’s, and Conrad’s. I don’t want to wind up like Clark Ashton Smith or Cabell or the other Smith, Thorne Smith. I don’t want bits and pieces of my unfinished stories written by the literary vampires. You’ve got to promise me, Larry: nobody will ever touch one of the fragments in my file. I probably won’t know when I’m going to buy the farm, probably won’t have time to get into the file with a blowtorch and crisp all the false starts and half-attempts. I’ve got them locked up, everything that’s not finished, all in one file drawer in the office. Missy has the only other key. Get all that stuff out of there and burn it for me, buddy.

  “Pride isn’t part of it… honest to God it isn’t! You remember when we talked about Poe how I said he had the right idea, that it was the work, it was Art, that held the high road, not religion, or good deeds or friendship or patriotism? None of those. The stories, the books. That’s all you can put a bet on. That continues. And I couldn’t bear to think of some halfassed science fiction hack dredging up a line or two I started and didn’t know how to finish, and writing a whole fucking book off it, the way they’ve done to poor old Robert E. Howard, or ‘Doc’ Smith. They even did it to Poe and Jack London and… oh Christ, Larry, you know what I’m saying. Promise me!”

  He waited. He watched that camera and he waited, four months ago. I murmured, “I promise, Jimmy.”

  “You take care of me when I’m gone, Larry. You’re the only one I can trust to do it. Keep me alive, Larry.”

  And if there was more to that vile videotaped document I don’t remember it. After a while I was sitting there and the lights were on, and everybody else had left the room.

  He did it. The clever sonofabitch did it. He figured a way to keep me tied to him. He knew I’d do the job.

  I’d make sure there were regular retrospectives of his germinal stories; I’d write the best kind of interesting essays and articles about how significant Kercher O.J. Crowstairs had been in the parade of contemporary American letters; I’d set up seminars at the Modem Language Association conclaves; I’d edit anthologies of his work, putting the stories into fresh and insightful contexts; I’d keep him alive through his seriously considered work.

  And in the bargain I’d sublimate my own talent. I’d spend a part of every day living with Jimmy. I’d hear his voice and finally start writing the way he did. And if I ever ever ever figured out what it was I knew about him that made all of his life a he, I’d keep it to myself till the cancer killed me, too.

  And at last I know the nature of our friendship.

  Say goodbye to Laurence Kercher O.J. Bedloe.

  Django

  Introduction

  I wrote this story on the 8th and 9th day of November, 1977, sitting in the front window of the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore in Boston.

  Bill Desmond effected a sound hookup that permitted me to play the wonderful music of the French-Algerian guitar genius, Django Reinhardt, while I worked.

  Writing in the window was a promotional gimmick to bring people into the bookstore because the owners of the shop were footing my hotel bill while I was in Boston lecturing.

  As I wrote that story, I had the strangest feeling I was being watched from a far distance by someone no longer with us. Understand: I am a pragmatist. I do not believe in reincarnation or messages from Beyond or ghosts or even the Nameless Ones who lie sleeping in Ultimate Darkness. But I had a prickly feeling all that time in the window.

  And it unnerved me as I am seldom unnerved when writing. As if someone were over my shoulder, watching anxiously to make sure I did it right.

  Consequently, I had the feeling I’d written the story all wrong; that I didn’t really know what I was writing; that I didn’t understand my own subtext.

  When the story was finished I offered it to the editors of Galileo magazine who, not coincidentally, also own the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore. They had wanted a story from me for some time, and I’d promised them the fruits of my labors in their windows. I offered the story with trepidation.

  While I am occasionally rejected by magazines, even these days, it happens infrequently enough to scare the hell out of me when it seems possible. I suppose one is never inured to the fear of that kind of rejection.

  But they liked it, they bought it, they published it, and the story drew sufficient praise to dull my worries. Not enough praise to flense the fear completely, but sufficient to permit my continued arrogance.

  When you’re all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have.

  It often looks like egomania. I assure you it’s the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.

  It was not until the story was selected—in a blind judging by Poul Anderson, himself an excellent writer, who did not know who had written what—as the winner of the annual Galileo short story contest, from all the stories the magazine had published that year, that my fears were laid to rest.

  Success, no matter how complete, no matter how persistent and ongoing, cannot totally shield us from the mortal dreads.

  I wish it were otherwise, gentle readers, but the simple truth is that I am in the box with you.

  And there is alw
ays someone over your shoulder… watching.

  He stood in the Portobello Road and screamed up at the closed windows. “Anatole! Anatole, hey! Come to the window! Open up, hey, Anatole! The war’s started!”

  London, on that Sunday morning, was filled with the sound of air raid sirens. Unearthly wailing. Foreshadowed sounds. He stood there and screamed louder. Finally, a window on the third floor squeaked up in its tracks and Anatole’s white hair and white face were thrust out into the morning chill.

  He stared down at Michel, trying to focus him with sleep-bleary eyes. He worked his mouth to get the mugginess thinned. “Are you insane? It’s very early! Everyone is asleep!”

  Then he actually heard the sirens. He had been hearing them for some time, but had not codified the cacophony. Now he heard it. “What is that?”

  Michel shouted. “War. It’s the war; come down; I’m leaving!”

  “Leaving? Leaving where, you fool?”

  “I’m going. Back to France. The war!”

  “Don’t be a fool, Michel. We have a concert tonight.”

  “Piss on the concert. I’m leaving! Come down now. I didn’t know war had been declared, but I’m off now!”

  “What do you expect me to do about it? Do you think I can go off and stop it like Chamberlain? I’m a violinist, not a political person!”

  “If you don’t come down straightaway, I’m off without you!”

  “We have contracts! The tour! We will be sued, you fool! Stay in England, play your guitar! You’re no young boy, you’re no soldier… they have enough young boys to play soldier… you’re a musician… come back… Michel! Michel! Come back, you idiot!”

  But he ran down the road and fought in the underground with the maquis, and he lost the ring finger and the little finger of his fretting hand, his left hand, and he never saw Anatole, the combo’s violinist, ever again. He became a jazz legend.

  His name was Michel Hervé and he died honorably.

  Silver droplets fell on the black river. Spattering and then shattering as moonlight carried the molten silver downstream. He sat by the edge of the river, contemplating onyx. He held his guitar tightly, as he had held the manila rappelling sling during that last suspension traversal before the others fell to their death. He thought about them, Bernot and Claudeville and little Gaston, lying dead at the bottom of the crevasse, and he clutched the guitar more tightly. He wanted to play something for them, but he had lost his sentimentality at least a year before, in the face of withering fire from a water-cooled machine gun; and playing a new composition for broken corpses was beyond him now.

  He sensed movement at the edge of the river, almost directly across from him where silt had built up the shore and a crossing was possible. He sat very still, hoping the shadows cast by the trees still cloaked him from the eye of the moon. It was an animal.

  Something sleek and quick. It dipped its head and thrust its muzzle into the black water. And drank, Something oily and thick extruded itself from the water and wrapped itself around the animal’s neck. There was a moment of slithering, tightening; then the cracking of a twig. The tentacle withdrew below the onyx surface of unrippled water, dragging the dead animal by its neck. A courteous plash of water, and the bank of the river was silent again.

  He edged back.

  Now he was afraid to play in the darkness. Calling up that killer from the river was a terrifying possibility. And so he sat quietly, holding the guitar tightly; and finally, he slept.

  Beside him, the canister of radioactive isotopes cooked, holding death, promising nirvana.

  There were wolves in the hollow, and they were eating. Whatever was being eaten was screaming, still alive and very much in pain. He detoured around the rim of the bowl, dragging the canister behind him through the golden sand at the end of a twenty-five-foot length of climbing rope. He had been traveling exclusively by night, burrowing into the sand during the day, hiding from roaming skirmisher packs of Nazi stürmerkommandos, the canister leaking its death in a pit fifty yards away.

  On the rim, someone had erected a cairn of stones, pried out of the desert from God only knew where. He had not seen a rock or stone for days. The cairn seemed to be an altar of some sort. He decided to pause there, and have something to eat. He fancied strawberries, but all he had left was the heel of the rye bread and some carrots. He settled slowly to the ground, leaned back against the cairn of dark stones, and took the bread from his jacket pocket.

  He ate with eyes closed, pretending to rest. Perhaps there would be a sun tomorrow. For many days now he had been hoping for a sun, any kind of sun. It might tell him where he was. He had the carrots lined up like pens in his inside jacket pocket, with the bushy leaves bunched against his armpit. He withdrew one and took a bite. If there was a sun tomorrow, he would see what color it was, and that might at least tell him if he was still in the world. But what if the sun came up green or blue?

  He lay back against the altar with eyes closed and thought about little Gaston. His smile, the dimple that appeared in his chin when he smiled. Lying dead at the bottom of the crevasse now, unsmiling. They shouldn’t have used manila. Would hemp have been any better? Probably not. But climbing had been the only way to escape.

  He had trouble putting it all in sequence. Every time he tried, the music would run through his head and he would make up a new tune. He wanted to playa few of them, but there was always the chance that the Nazis were on his trail, following the sound of the music in his head.

  It was still bothersome to him that they had managed to pull themselves through when Claudeville and Bernot and little Gaston had fallen and died. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair. He wanted desperately to play them a going-away song.

  He shifted around and unslung the guitar. He laid it on his lap and touched the strings. He wasn’t sure he could even play with two fingers missing, but the healing had somehow been speeded up by the passage through to this place, and he had been thinking for many days about how he could lay his hand on the neck to do what he wanted to do. It would be a different sound, but it might be a fine sound. He wanted to try, and to try this first time as a going-away song for them.

  Knowing he was taking a terrible chance, he raised the guitar and fitted himself to it. Then he began to play, very softly. It wasn’t one of the new tunes from his head, it was one little Gaston had enjoyed. “Rosetta.”

  It worked. The fingers that were left accommodated themselves and the song jumped up and out.

  He sat there on the golden sand, a carpet of black beneath him, without moon, and the bright snowfall of too many stars above, with his back to the dark altar, and he played. And the shapes that had waited in the darkness came to listen.

  One was a creature without eyes that sank its filaments into the sand and absorbed the sound by vibration. Another rolled into a ball and pulsed with soft pastel colors through its scales. Another looked like a flower but had feet and pods where hands should have been. There was a tall, thin one that hummed softly; and a snakelike creature with a woman’s face; and a paper-thin flying wing that swooped in to pick up the sound of “Rosetta” and then sailed away into darkness, only to return again and again as though refilling itself.

  After a long while, Michel Hervé realized he was not alone. Because his eyes had been closed, and because he had been living with the music, he had been in their company and had not known. He stopped playing.

  The flower began to wilt, the ball of pastel scales went gray, the flying wing sailed away and did not return, the creatures grew silent and hummed no more. He understood, and began strumming softly. They perked up. He smiled.

  “Do any of you speak?” he asked. There was no answer, but they listened. “We had to climb to escape the Boches,” he said, talking to them, not to himself, and letting the music of one of the new tunes flow along as background. “I’ll have to tell Bernot’s daughter how he died, if I ever get back. I could hear him asking for absolution as he fell. He was much older than Gaston, and I didn�
��t know him as much, but I think that long after I’ve forgotten certain things about Gaston, I’ll be able to smell Bernot’s pipe tobacco.”

  The flying wing sailed back overhead, dipped, caught a downdraft, swooped and filled itself with sound, and rose on its forked tail. It went straight up and was lost among the spilled milk of the stars.

  “The rope was frayed. I think it must have rubbed against some rocks. We didn’t see. We could have gotten away, I’m sure of that. Hemp. Perhaps we would have done better had we used hemp instead of manila. Some day they’ll make better ropes.”

  A gentle purple light began to seep out of the dark stones of the altar. Michel felt warmth at his back. He looked over his shoulder and the glow was growing, enveloping him. It was like a tepid bath. It cut off the chill of the night, but not the darkness. The darkness remained and the silent creatures remained, but the maquisards were dead and could not return.

  “They fell. And I fell with them. But something very peculiar happened. There was a place in the air, and I fell through it, and the others went down, but I didn’t. You may think it odd that I don’t question what happened. My mother was a gypsy. I don’t question such things. Or the music. Magic shouldn’t be questioned. If this is magic. I don’t know. But, listen, all of you, listen for a moment longer, then I’ll play you many songs, “Avalon” and “Nuages” and even a lovely song I know, “Stardust,” that you will enjoy. What I need to know is the way back. I don’t question, you understand, but I want to get back, to tell some people what happened to little Gaston and Claudeville; and I really must tell Bernot’s daughter that he died for her and for France. Can you understand what I’m asking? Do any of you speak?”

  But there was only silence.

  So he played the songs for them, because they would have spoken if they could. He knew that. And they enjoyed the music. He was a wonderful musician.