The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison

by Harlan Ellison

  6

  Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djam karet. We are the cavalry. We’re here. Put away the pills. We’ll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it’ll be your turn to help us.

  7

  You woke in the night, last night, and the fiery, bony hand was enscribing mystic passes in the darkness of your bedroom. It carved out words in the air, flaming words, messages that required answers. One picture is worth a thousand words, the hand wrote. “Not in this life,” you said to the dark and the fire. “Give me one picture that shows how I felt when they gassed my dog. I’ll take less than a thousand words and make you weep for the last Neanderthal crouched at the cliff’s edge at the moment he realized his kind were gone…show me your one picture. Commend to me the one picture that captures what it was like for me in the moment she said it was all over between us. Not in this life, Bonehand.” So here we are, once again in the dark, with nothing between us in this hour that stretches but the words. Sweet words and harsh words and words that tumble over themselves to get born. We leave the pictures for the canvas of your mind. Seems only fair.

  8

  Rain fell in a special pattern. I couldn’t believe it was doing that. I ran to the other side of the house and looked out the window. The sun was shining there. I saw a hummingbird bury his stiletto beak in a peach on one of the trees, like a junkie who had turned himself into the needle. He sucked deeply and shadows flowed out of the unripe peach: a dreamy vapor that enveloped the bird, changing its features to something jubilantly malevolent. With juice glowing in one perfect drop at the end of its beak, it turned a yellow eye toward me as I pressed against the window. Go away, it said. I fell back and rushed to the other side of the house where rain fell in one place on the sunny street. In my soul I knew that not all inclement weather meant sorrow, that even the brightest day held dismay. I knew this all had meaning, but there was no one else in the world to whom I could go for interpretation. There were only dubious sources, and none knew more than I, not really. Isn’t that the damnedest thing: there’s never a good reference when you need one.

  9

  Through the jaws of night we stormed, banners cracking against the icy wind, the vapor our beasts panted preceding us like smoke signals, warning the enemy that we looked forward to writing our names in the blood of the end of their lives. We rode for Art! For the singing soul of Creativity! Our cause was just, because it was the only cause worth dying for. All others were worth living for. They stood there on the black line of the horizon, their pikes angrily tilted toward us. For Commerce, they shouted with one voice. For Commerce! And we fell upon them, and the battle was high wave traffic, with the sound of metal on metal, the sound of hooves on stone, the sound of bodies exploding. We battled all through the endless midnight till at last we could see nothing but hills and valleys of dead. And in the end, we lost. We always lost. And I, alone, am left to tell of that time. Only I, alone of all who went to war to measure the height of the dream, only I remain to speak to you here in the settling silence. Why do you feel diminished…you weren’t there…it wasn’t your war. Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved.

  10

  Hear the music. Listen with all your might, and you needn’t clap to keep Tinker Bell from going into a coma. The music will restore her rosy cheeks. Then seek out the source of the melody. Look long and look deep, and somewhere in the murmuring world you will find the storyteller, there under the cabbage leaves, singing to herself. Or is that a she? Perhaps it’s a he. But whichever, or whatever, the poor thing is crippled. Can you see that now? The twisting, the bending, the awkward shape, the milky eye, the humped back, do you now make it out? But if you try to join in, to work a duet with wonder, the song ceases. When you startle the cricket its symphony ceases. Art is not by committee, nor is it by wish-fulfillment. It is that which is produced in the hour that stretches, the timeless time wherein all songs are sung. In a place devoid of electrical outlets. And if you try to grasp either the singer or the song, all you will hold is sparkling dust as fine as the butter the moth leaves on glass. How the bee flies, how the lights go on, how the enigma enriches and the explanation chills…how the music is made…are not things we were given to know. And only the fools who cannot hear the song ask that the rules be posted. Hear the music. And enjoy. But do not cry. Not everyone was intended to reach A above high C.

  11

  Ah, there were giants in the land in those days. There was a sweet-faced, honey-voiced girl named Barbara Wire, whom we called Nancy because no one had the heart to call her Barb Wire. She tossed a salamander into a window fan to see what would happen. There was Sofie, who had been bitten by The Sun Also Rises at a tender age, and who took it as her mission in life to permit crippled virginal boys the enjoyment of carnal knowledge of her every body part: harelips, lepers, paraplegics, albinos with pink eyes, aphasiacs, she welcomed them all to her bed. There was Marissa, who could put an entire unsegmented fried chicken in her mouth all at once, chew without opening her lips or dribbling, and who would then delicately spit out an intact skeleton, as dry and clean as the Gobi Desert. Perdita drew portraits. She would sit you down, and with her pad and charcoal, quickly capture the depth and specificity of your most serious flaws of honor, ethic and conscience, so accurately that you would rip the drawing to pieces before anyone else could see the nature of your corruption. Jolanda: who stole cars and then reduced them to metal sculpture in demolition derbies, whose residence was in an abandoned car-crusher. Peggy: who never slept but told endlessly of her waking dreams of the things the birds told her they saw from on high. Naomi: who was white, passing for black, because she felt the need to shoulder some of the guilt of the world. Ah, there were giants in the land in those days. But I left the room, and closed the door behind me so that the hour that stretches would not leak out. And though I’ve tried portal after portal, I’ve never been able to find that room again. Perhaps I’m in the wrong house.

  12

  I woke at three in the morning, bored out of sleep by dreams of such paralyzing mediocrity that I could not lie there and suffer my own breathing. Naked, I padded through the silent house: I knew that terrain as my tongue knows my palate. There were rolls of ancient papyrus lying on a counter. I will replace them, high in a dark closet, I thought. Then I said it aloud…the house was silent, I could speak to the air. I took a tall stool and went to the closet, and climbed up and replaced the papyrus. Then I saw it. A web. Dark and billowing in the corner of the ceiling, not silvery but ashy. Something I could not bear to see in my home. It threatened me. I climbed down, moved through the utter darkness, and struggled with the implements in the broom closet, found the feather duster, and hurried back. Then I killed the foaming web and left the closet. Clean the feather duster, I thought. In the back yard I moved to the wall, and shook it out. Then, as I returned, incredible pain assaulted me. The cactus pup with its cool, long spikes had imbedded itself in the ball of my naked right foot. My testicles shrank and my eyes watered. I took an involuntary step, and the spines drove deeper. I reached down to remove the agony and a spike imbedded itself in my thumb. I shouted. I hurt. Limping, I got to the kitchen. In the light of the kitchen I tried to pinch out the spines. They were barbed. They came awa
y with bits of flesh attached. The poison was already spreading. I hurt very much. I hobbled to the bathroom to put antiseptic or the Waters of Lethe on the wounds. They bled freely. I salved myself, and returned to the bed, hating my wife who slept unknowing; I hated my friend who lay dreaming in another part of the house. I hated the world for placing random pain in my innocent path. I lay down and hated all natural order for a brief time. Then I fell fast asleep. Relieved. Boredom had been killed with the billowing web. Somehow, the universe always provides.

  13

  Like all men, my father was a contradiction in terms. Not more than two or three years after the Great Depression, when my family was still returning pop bottles for the few cents’ deposit, and saving those pennies in a quart milk bottle, my father did one of the kindest things I’ve ever known: he hired a man as an assistant in his little store; an assistant he didn’t really need and couldn’t afford. He hired the man because he had three children and couldn’t find a job. Yet not more than a week later, as we locked up the stationery shop late on a Saturday night, and began to walk down the street to the diner where we would have our hot roast beef sandwiches and french fries, with extra country gravy for dipping the fries, another man approached us on the street and asked for twenty-five cents to buy a bowl of soup. And my father snarled, “No! Get away from us!” I was more startled at that moment than I had ever been—or ever would be, as it turned out, for my father died not much later that year—more startled than by anything my father had ever said or done. If I had known the word at that age—I was only twelve—I would have realized that I was dumbfounded. My gentle father, who never raised his voice to me or to anyone else, who was unfailingly kind and polite even to the rudest customer, who has forever been a model of compassion for me, my father had grown icy and stony in that exchange with an innocent stranger. “Dad,” I asked him, as we walked away from the lonely man, “how come you didn’t give that fellah a quarter for some soup?” He looked down at me, as if through a crack in the door of a room always kept locked, and he said, “He won’t buy a bowl of soup. He’ll only buy more liquor.” Because my father never lied to me, and because I knew it was important for him always to tell me the truth, I didn’t ask anything more about it. But I never forgot that evening; and it is an incident I can never fit into the film strip of loving memories I run and rerun starring my father. Somehow I feel, without understanding, that it was the most important moment of human frailty and compassion in the twelve years through which I was permitted to adore my father. And I wonder when I will grow wise enough to understand the wisdom of my father.

  Thus, my gift. There were six more selections from the scroll of the Promontorium Sacrum, but once having entered them here, I realized they would cause more harm than good. Tell me truly: would you really want the power to bend others to your will, or the ability to travel at will in an instant to any place in the world, or the facility for reading the future in mirrors? No, I thought not. It is gratifying to see that just the wisdom imparted here has sobered you to that extent.

  And what would you do with the knowledge of shaping, the talent for sending, the capturing of rainbows? You already possess such powers and abilities as the world has never known. Now that I’ve left you the time to master what you already know, you should have no sorrow at being denied these others. Be content.

  Now I take my leave. Passage of an instant sort has been arranged. Vizinczey, the I that I became, goes finally on the journey previously denied. Until I had fulfilled the dying request of Mr. Brown, I felt it was unfair of me to indulge myself. But now I go to the sacred promontory; to return the scroll; to sit at the base of the golden mushroom trees and confabulate with astonishing creatures. Perhaps I will take a camera, and perhaps I will endeavor to send back a snap or two, but that is unlikely.

  I go contentedly, for all my youthful crimes, having left this a prettier venue than I found it.

  And finally, for those of you who always wash behind your ears because, as children, you heeded the admonition “go wash behind your ears,” seeing motion pictures of children being examined by their parents before being permitted to go to the dinner table, remembering the panels in comic strips in which children were being told, “Go back and wash behind your ears,” who always wondered why that was important—after all, your ears fit fairly closely to your head—who used to wonder what one could possibly have behind one’s ears—great masses of mud, dangerous colonies of germs, could vegetation actually take root there, what are we talking about and why such obsessive attention to something so silly?—for those of you who were trusting enough to wash behind your ears, and still do…for those of you who know the urgency of tying your shoelaces tightly…who have no fear of vegetables or rust…I answer the question you raise about the fate of those tiny metal figurines left in eternal anguish on the floor of Mr. Brown’s drawing room. I answer the question in this way:

  There was a man standing behind you yesterday in the check-out line at the grocery store. You casually noticed that he was buying the most unusual combinations of exotic foods. When you dropped the package of frozen peas, and he stooped to retrieve it for you, you noticed that he had a regal, almost one might say militaristic bearing. He clicked his heels as he proffered the peas, and when you thanked him, he spoke with a peculiar accent.

  Trust me in this: not even if you were Professor Henry Higgins could you place the point of origin of that accent.

  Dedicated to the memory of Mike Hodel

  * * *

  The Function of Dream Sleep

  1989 Locus Poll Award: Best Novelette

  McGrath awoke suddenly, just in time to see a huge mouth filled with small, sharp teeth closing in his side. In an instant it was gone, even as he shook himself awake.

  Had he not been staring at the flesh, at the moment his eyes opened from sleep, he would have missed the faintest pink line of closure that remained only another heartbeat, then faded and was gone, leaving no indication the mouth had ever existed; a second—secret—mouth hiding in his skin.

  At first he was sure he had wakened from a particularly nasty dream. But the memory of the thing that had escaped from within him, through the mouth, was a real memory—not a wisp of fading nightmare. He had felt the chilly passage of something rushing out of him. Like cold air from a leaking balloon. Like a chill down a hallway from a window left open in a distant room. And he had seen the mouth. It lay across the ribs vertically, just below his left nipple, running down to the bulge of fat parallel to his navel. Down his left side there had been a lipless mouth filled with teeth; and it had been open to permit a breeze of something to leave his body.

  McGrath sat up on the bed. He was shaking. The Tensor lamp was still on, the paperback novel tented open on the sheet beside him, his body naked and perspiring in the August heat. The Tensor had been aimed directly at his side, bathing his flesh with light, when he had unexpectedly opened his eyes; and in that waking moment he had surprised his body in the act of opening its secret mouth.

  He couldn’t stop the trembling, and when the phone rang he had to steel himself to lift the receiver.

  “Hello,” he heard himself say, in someone else’s voice.

  “Lonny,” said Victor Kayley’s widow, “I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour…”

  “It’s okay,” he said. Victor had died the day before yesterday. Sally relied on him for the arrangements, and hours of solace he didn’t begrudge. Years before, Sally and he…then she drifted toward Victor, who had been McGrath’s oldest, closest…they were drawn to each other more and more sweetly till…and finally, McGrath had taken them both to dinner at the old Steuben Tavern on West 47th, that dear old Steuben Tavern with its dark wood booths and sensational schnitzel, now gone, torn down and gone like so much else that was…and he had made them sit side by side in the booth across from him, and he took their hands in his…I love you both so much, he had said…I see the way you move when you’re around each other…you’re both my dearest fr
iends, you put light in my world…and he laid their hands together under his, and he grinned at them for their nervousness…

  “Are you all right; you sound so, I don’t know, so strained?” Her voice was wide awake. But concerned.

  “I’m, yeah, I’m okay. I just had the weirdest, I was dozing, fell asleep reading, and I had this, this weird—” He trailed off. Then went back at it, more sternly: “I’m okay. It was a scary dream.”

  There was, then, a long measure of silence between them. Only the open line, with the sound of ions decaying.

  “Are you okay?” he said, thinking of the funeral service day after tomorrow. She had asked him to select the casket. The anodized pink aluminum “unit” they had tried to get him to go for, doing a bait-and-switch, had nauseated him. McGrath had settled on a simple copper casket, shrugging away suggestions by the Bereavement Counselor in the Casket Selection Parlor that “consideration and thoughtfulness for the departed” might better be served by the Monaco, a “Duraseal metal unit with Sea Mist Polished Finish, interior richly lined in 600 Aqua Supreme Cheney velvet, magnificently quilted and shirred, with matching jumbo bolster and coverlet.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I was watching television, and they had a thing about the echidna, the Australian anteater, you know…?” He made a sound that indicated he knew. “And Vic never got over the trip we took to the Flinders Range in ’82, and he just loved the Australian animals, and I turned in the bed to see him smiling…”