by Robert Bloch
Harvey went to Italy and immersed himself in Renaissance art. He journeyed to Spain and somehow he found he'd started to drink. A girl he met introduced him to some little capsules her friends smuggled in from Portugal. At the end of another six months he was picked up in the streets of Seville and shipped back home through the kindly offices of the American consulate.
They put him in Bellevue and then in a private san upstate. Harvey kicked the habit and emerged after a loss of four months and forty pounds.
He ended up, as do most seekers after Truth, on the confessional couch of a private-psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist decided that perhaps Walt Disney was to blame for it all.
Harvey admitted the man had an interesting argument. He was able, after many sessions, to recall his first visit to the movies when he'd come to America. Uncle Frank and Aunt Lorraine had taken him to see what was perhaps the most famous short cartoon of the Depression era—The Three Little Pigs.
He could recreate quite vividly, without the aid of narco-hypnosis, the strong fear-reaction engendered by the sight of the Big Bad Wolf stalking the helpless pigs. He remembered how the Wolf huffed and puffed and blew the straw house in. What happened immediately thereafter he did not know, because it was then that he had been carried, screaming, from the theater.
It was, the psychiatrist averred, a "traumatic incident." And now, as an adult, Harvey had read a great deal about animated cartoons and their possible effect on children. Following the success of The Three Little Pigs it seemed as if the entire concept of cartoon-making underwent a drastic change. In place of playful Pluto and droll Donald Duck came a horde of ferocious bulldogs, gigantic cats with slavering fangs; huge animal menaces who tormented smaller creatures and sought to devour them in their great red maws.
But, if anything, their little intended victims were worse; they always outwitted the hulking pursuers and seemed to take fiendish delight in sadistic revenge. One animal was always crushing another under a truck or a steamroller; pushing his enemy off a steep cliff, blasting his head open with a shotgun, blowing him up with dynamite, dragging his body across the teeth of a great circular saw. During the years, the so-called "kiddy matinee" became a horror-show, a Grand Guignol of the animal kingdom in which atrocious crimes and still more atrocious punishments flashed in fantastic fashion across the screen in lurid color, to the accompaniment of startlingly realistic shrieks, groans, screams of agony, and cruel laughter.
Parents who carefully and conscientiously shielded their supposedly innocent youngsters from the psychological pitfalls of the dreaded comic-books were quite content to listen to the same moppets shriek uncontrollably at the sight of a twenty-foot-high animated hyena being burned to death while the happy little rabbit squealed in ecstatic glee.
Harvey had read about this and he listened when the psychiatrist told him there was probably no harm in such fantasies—to the average child it was merely a vicarious outlet for aggression. Such a child unconsciously identified with the small animal who destroyed the larger tormenter: the bigger creature symbolized Daddy or Mama or some authority-figure, and it was satisfying to witness their defeat. The weapons employed were direct concepts and representations of adult civilization and its artifacts. Most children were exposed to such films from infancy on and grew up without psychic damage. As normal adult human beings they were able to go out into the world and fight its battles. Indeed, it was the avowed purpose of many psychiatrists to keep them "mentally fit" during real battles, so that they could continue to spray liquid fire from flame-throwers upon enemy soldiers cowering in tanks, or drop bombs on unseen thousands of women and children.
It was merely unfortunate, said the psychiatrist (at $50 an hour) that Harvey had been brought up away from the influences of normal society and abruptly exposed to the symbolism of the cartoon. And there were, of course, other factors.
The fact that Harvey's last name happened to be Wolf—so that his little American playmates insisted on calling him "The Big Bad Wolf" when they innocently ganged up on him at recess and tried to emulate the punishments inflicted by the heroic little pigs in the film.
The fact that Harvey, instead of acting like any normal, red-blooded American boy and fighting back against the six or eight older bullies who came after him with planks and stones, chose to cry and bleed instead.
The fact that Harvey soon underwent another traumatic cinematic experience when he saw a picture called The Wolf Man and its sequels, and gradually came to accept and identify with the role symbolized by his last name.
The fact that Harvey seemed to have totally misinterpreted the message; to him it wasn't important that the Wolf was destroyed, but that he was revived again in the sequels.
Regrettably, said the psychiatrist (at great and expensive length) he seemed to have equated acceptance of his Wolf role with survival. As an adult, he had become a Lone Wolf, moving away from the pack. And his self-styled search for Truth was merely a search for the Father-Image, denied him in childhood.
Harvey attempted, at one point in his analysis, to talk about the Black Skelm and that fantastic fever-dream atop the berg. The psychiatrist listened, made notes, nodded gravely, inquired into the duration of his subsequent illness, and went back to his theory about the traumatic effect of the films. What had Harvey thought when the Wolf Man was beaten to death with a cane by his father in the movie? Did Claude Rains, as the father, remind Harvey of his own parent? Did he perceive the phallic symbolism of the silver cane used as an instrument of punishment? And so on, blah, blah, blah—until Harvey Wolf got up from the couch and walked out again.
Psychotherapy had its own truths, but its methodology was still magic. One had to believe in certain formulae, in spells and incantations designed to cast out demons. At the same time there was this pitiful insistence upon a "realistic" interpretation; an attempt to reconcile frankly magical methodology with the so-called "normal" world.
Perhaps it was silly to compromise. The therapy sessions had caused Harvey to think about the Black Skelm once more, for the first time in twenty years. He remembered how the little shriveled savage had spoken of Einstein, and of Apollonius of Tyana. He had sat all alone in a bat-cave atop a mountain, drinking warm blood from a skull, but he knew. He had a surety which science and philosophy and art only adumbrated, and the source of his knowledge must be magical insight.
Harvey moved down into the Village and began to fill his ramshackle apartment with books on occultism and theosophy. He avoided the local Beat types, but inevitably the word leaked out. The crackpots came to call, and eventually he met a girl named Gilda who claimed to be one of the innumerable illegitimate offspring of the late Aleister Crowley.
Soon he found himself standing in a darkened room, facing the East, with a steel dagger in his right hand. He touched his forehead saying, in the Hebrew tongue, Ateh; touched his breast and murmured Malkuth; touched his right shoulder as he intoned Ve-Geburah and his left as he muttered Ve-Gedullah. Clasping his hands upon the breast, with dagger pointed upwards, he shouted Le-Olahm, Aum.
Nothing happened.
Gilda's further experiments in sex-magic were equally (and fortunately) nonproductive. She attempted to interest him in a Black Mass, but before details could be arranged she ran off with a young man who yapped obscene ballads in public places but was granted the protection the law affords a folk-singer.
Harvey Wolf decided that he would continue his search alone.
During the year that followed he made many contacts and experiments. Undoubtedly he met with followers of Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley. Quite certainly he investigated the effects of lysergic acid and peyote.
Both produced the same trance phenomena. Harvey found himself regressing, the film of his life running backwards, until he reached the point where he was enveloped in the billowing black bat-cloud from the berg. The little red eyes swirled firefly fashion all round him, then vanished into a greater darkness. He stood alone on the mountain.
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nbsp; Yet not quite alone, because the Black Skelm was there, pointing to the path and whispering, "I have waited long, baas. The time has come when we must journey together."
The message was manifest; Harvey Wolf knew he would go back to Africa.
Another Wolfe had said You Can't Go Home Again, and in his more objective moments Harvey knew this was right. Twenty years had passed and nothing was left of the Africa he'd known. The world kept changing.
There were new governments with new slogans, new reasons to hate their neighbors, and new weapons poised to punish them. A new spurt of population, subject to new mutations of disease, sought new areas of conquest. Missiles had reached the moon and Man would follow, then go on to the stars with his civilized cargo of bombs, chewing gum, carbon monoxide, and laxatives. Eventually the millennium would come; a Soviet Federated Socialist Republic of the Solar System or a United Interplanetary States. If the former prevailed, Saturn would be set up as the new Siberia; if democracy triumphed, special facilities for certain groups would be set up on Pluto—separate, but equal, of course.
Harvey Wolf made one last effort to escape such cynical considerations and their consequences. He became an ascetic; a disciple of Raja, Brahma, and Hatha Yoga. He took a cabin in the Arizona desert and here he meditated, fasted, and grew faint.
And the Black Skelm came into his dreams and chanted, "This is not the path. Come to me. I have found the way."
So, in the end, Harvey returned to the dark womb—to the Africa of his birth.
He found a new spirit at the Cape; apartheid had arisen, sanctioned by the sanctimonious and condoned by the cartel of dedicated men whose mission it was to artificially inflate the price of diamonds with which the wealthy bedeck their wives and their whores.
At first they would not even give Harvey permission to journey upcountry, but his father's name—and a distribution of his father's money—helped.
This time Harvey made the trip in a chartered plane, which set him down on the flat veldt near the old place and (in accordance with orders) left him there.
The old place had changed, of course. Kassie, Jorl, Swarte, and others were gone, and no herds of humpbacked cattle roamed over the plain. The great house was deserted, or almost so; Harvey prowled the ruins for ten minutes before the elderly man with the rifle ventured forth from an outbuilding and leveled his weapon at him in silent menace.
"Jong Kurt!" Harvey cried. And the old man blinked, not recognizing him at first—just as Harvey didn't recognize a Kurt whom the years had robbed of any right to retain his nickname.
Kurt lowered his rifle and wept. He wept for the passing of the old place, for the death of Mama, for the changes which had come to both of them. Did the baas remember the way it had been? Did he remember the night Kurt had carried him, faint with delirium, down the mountainside?
"Yes, I remember," Harvey murmured. "I remember it very well."
"When you left, your father sold the cattle. The boys went into the mines, everybody left. Only Mama and I stayed on alone. Now she is gone, too." Kurt knuckled his eyes.
"And the Black Skelm?" Harvey said. "What happened to him?"
"He is dead," Kurt answered, shaking his head solemnly.
"Dead?" Harvey stiffened in the suddenness of the thought. "Do you mean that you—"
Kurt nodded. "Your father gave orders. The day after you went to the Cape, I took the dogs up to the berg. I meant to hunt him down, the verdamte scoundrel."
"You found him there?"
The old man shrugged. "Only the bones. Picked clean, they were, on the side of the ledge near the mouth of the cave. The carrion had fed his vultures for the last time."
Kurt wheezed and slapped his thigh, and he did not see the pain in Harvey's eyes.
"But why do we stand here, baas? You will stay the night with me, eh? Your plane does not return before tomorrow?"
Harvey murmured an acceptance of the invitation. It was true, his plane would not return until the next day. He'd thought to spend the interval in ascending the berg, but there was no need now. The Black Skelm was dead. You Can't Go Home Again.
Kurt had comfortable quarters in one of the smaller outbuildings. Game was scarce, but there was eland steak for dinner. The old man had learned to brew beer in the traditional Kaffir fashion, and after the meal he sat reminiscing with the young baas and drinking toasts to the past. Finally he succumbed to stuporous slumber.
Harvey stretched out on a bunk and tried to sleep. Eventually he succeeded. Then the bat came.
It flew in through the open window and nuzzled at his chest, brushing its leathery wings against his face and nuzzling him with tiny teeth that grazed but did not bite. It chittered faintly.
Harvey awoke to a moment of horror; horror which subsided when the bat withdrew to a corner of the room. Kurt snored on, stentoriously, and Harvey sat up, brushing at the black, winged creature in an effort to drive it back out through the window.
The bat wheeled about his head, squeaking furiously. Harvey rose, flailing his arms. He opened the door. The bat hung in the doorway. Harvey beat at it. It whirled just out of arm's reach. Then it hung suspended in midair and waited.
Harvey advanced. He stood gazing across the moonlit emptiness of the veldt—a lake of shimmering silver beyond which towered the black hulk of the berg.
The bat cheeped and flapped its wings before him. Suddenly Harvey conceived the odd notion that the wings were beckoning. The bat wanted to him to follow.
Then he knew. The Black Skelm wasn't dead. He was waiting for Harvey, there on the mountain. He had sent a messenger, a guide.
Harvey didn't hesitate. He went out into the moonlit plain and it was like the first time. Now he was a grown man in boots instead of a child in rawhide veldschoen, and it was night instead of day, but nothing had changed. Even the odd delirium rose to envelop him once again; not the fever born of the hot sun but the chill of the cold moon. He trudged across the silver silence of the sand and the bat swooped in sinister silhouette before him. When Harvey reached the krantz he almost decided to turn back; this was no mysterious midnight mission, only the tipsy fugue of an overimag-inative man unused to the potency of Kaffir beer.
But they were waiting for him there in the shadows; huddled in teeming thousands, their tiny red eyes winking a greeting. And now they all rose about him, covering him in a living cloak. He glanced back and found they had closed in solidly, forming a living barrier against retreat. The acrid stench was in itself a wall through which he dared not pass, so he went forward, up to the winding pad which took him, toiling, to the top of the berg.
He saw the mouth of the cave looming before him, and then all vision faded as the moon was blotted out by a cloud—a cloud of wavering wings. The bats flew off and he stood alone on the mountain-top.
The Black Skehn came out of the cave.
"You are alive," whispered Harvey. "I knew it. But Kurt spoke of finding bones—"
"I placed them there for that purpose." The Black Skelm wove his wrinkles into a smile. "I did not wish to be disturbed until you returned. I have waited a long time, baas."
"Why didn't you summon me sooner?"
"There were things you had to learn for yourself. Now you are ready, having seen the world. Is it not as I described?"
"Yes." Harvey nodded at the gnarled little black man. "But how could you know these things? I mean—"
He hesitated, but the Black Skelm grinned. "You mean I am an ignorant old savage, a witch-doctor who believes in animism and amulets." He scratched his grisly chest. "Whereas you are a man of worldly wisdom. Tell me—what is Jack Paar really like?"
Harvey blinked, and the old man chuckled. "You are so naive in your sophistication! Baas, I have seen far more than you in your brief lifetime. Although my base body sat and shriveled in this cave, my spirit ventured afar. I have been with you throughout your wanderings. I was in the theater when you screamed; I sat with you in seminars; I felt the caress of the woman with the silver-tipped whips;
I was one with you when you raised the dagger to invoke the All-Being. There are ways of transcending space and time."
"But that's impossible!" Harvey muttered. "I can't think—"
"Don't try to think." The Black Skelm rose, slowly and stiffly. "One does not learn through processes of organized logic, for the world is not a logical place. Indeed, it is not a place at all—merely an abstract point in infinity. True knowledge is institutional; an impressionary process which might be labelled as heuristics."
Harvey shook his head. "You drink cattle-blood and summon bats, and you speak of heuristics—unbelievable."
"Yet you believe."
"I believe. But I don't understand. You have these powers. Why live like an animal in a cave when you might have gone forth to rule the world?"
"The world?" The old man put his hand on Harvey's shoulder; the weight was as slight as a sere and blackened leaf. "Look down there."
Together they stared at the silvery veldt.
"The world is a plain," said the Black Skelm. "And beyond, as we know, are the cities of the plain. Do you remember what happened to those cities? Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven, and he overthrew those cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. Remember?"
"Yes. You're trying to tell me that the world will soon come to an end."
"Can you doubt it, after what you've seen?"
"No."
"The Lord remembered Abraham and brought him to the safety of the hills." The black man smiled, but Harvey stared at him.
"Is that why you sent for me? Because you're—"
"God?" The black man shook his head. "Not yet. I have not chosen. That is why I waited for you. Perhaps you can help me choose."
"I don't understand—"
"Every man is God, or contains within him the seed of godhead. Look." The Black Skelm fumbled with a little leather pouch at his waist and drew forth a dark, shrivelled object.
