“That would tear my heart out if I hadn’t been there when you kicked in my ribs, baby.” Her mouth made a small “o” of terror as she realized who Harry was, and she struggled to get away from him. He grabbed her arm and pulled it back up behind her. “Okay, Rapunzel, we’re going to go someplace and talk. And then I’m going to decide whether to kill you myself, or turn you over to the fuzz.”
The girl tried to break away, and he yanked the arm up more tightly. She subsided, and he said, “Move!” They walked across the Park, and so intent on the beautiful painful girl with him, and the fury of his emotions, had Harry become, that he did not see Candy raise himself jerkily on one elbow, and stare through slowly-clearing eyes as they walked.
Harry did not see Candy try to rise to one side, fall back, try again and this time succeed. Nor did he see Candy dragging himself erect, to steady himself on the tree.
Nor did he suspect Candy was watching them, following them as far as he could with his eyes, and slowly hobbling after them when his eyes could no longer track their passage.
Harry saw none of this, for he was suddenly locked in a tiny world with the blonde girl. Locked in, and possessing no keys.
“My name’s Marni,” she said, surly and frightened.
They were sitting on orange crates, on the roof of a tenement where Marni had told him she lived. Her story was that she and her older brother shared the apartment.
“Fat chance,” Harry snarled. “Which of those three animals that pounded me do you shack-up with?”
Her face grew red, then she snapped, “I’m not lying! You’ve got cause to be bugged at me, but I’m telling you the truth! My brother Bob and me are the only ones left; Mom and Dad got killed in the Remington Shirt fire two years ago August. It was in all the papers, you must’a read about it.”
Harry nodded.
“Well, I wasn’t old enough to shift for myself, and Bob has taken care of me ever since.”
“He’s done a lousy job, if you ask me,” Harry said.
“Yeah, well that’s what you think!”
“Yeah, exactly what I think! If I had a sister who was running around the streets like a tramp, balling with every rumdum and jerk, mugging guys outside of bowling alleys, switchin’ her butt through the Park in the middle of the day with bums, I think I’d take a club to her!”
Marni’s face grew furious. “A helluva lot you know! Listen, wise guy, on this block, in this turf, a girl don’t even breathe unless she belongs to a club; even a jerk like you outta know that.” Then a sadness passed across her fine features, and she started to cry again, softly. “It wasn’t like this when Mom and Dad were around. Then Bob and all of us used to go for a Sunday on the Staten Island Ferry, or out to Coney, or take a show at the Paramount. It was real nice; I was a kid then.
“But then Mom and Dad got caught on the tenth floor when the Remington went up, and Bob had to get another job to support the both of us, and I started waiting tables at Ken’s, down the block there.” She pointed over the side of the building, down into the street, where Harry saw a string of small shops and one-arm joints, one which said KEN’S EATS on the front window.
“Yeah, so?”
“So! So, I had to start walkin’ these streets again to get to and from, and one day this buncha bastards stopped me and backed me up against an alley wall and told me they thought I outta belong to the club. They was gonna do it to me right there in the alley—one guy had his hand in my bra and another one had his hand up my skirt—and I was scared out’a my mind. Then along came Andy, he was the Vice-Prez of the club, and he told ’em to back off me.
“So I kinda liked him, and he asked me if I’d be his girl, his deb, and I said yeah, because it was easier than gettin’ raped every time I went out for a loaf’a bread. And I hadda go through initiation—so don’t tell me about hard times, buddy—and I was Andy’s chick.”
Harry felt a tightness in his chest. “You must like this Andy a lot.”
Her face changed altogether. The lips drew back and her teeth seemed to become fanged. “I hate him! That filthy bastard. He’s made me do things I can’t stand, I can’t look in a mirror. You, f’rinstance, I’m sorry about that, real sorry. But I had to help them, or they’d have beat me up…or worse.”
“You certainly seemed to be enjoying it.”
“I wasn’t. I even went to the hospital to find out if someone like you had been brought in. I finally found out you’d be okay.”
“No one told me.”
“I asked them not to. Told them I was an old girlfriend.” She grinned shyly at that. Harry smiled back at her.
“Do you still want to kill me?” she asked.
He shook his head. He was beginning to feel like a kid on his first date. After Korea and the hospital, and what they had told him, and then getting beaten up, and back into the hospital, not to mention the time spent looking for her, his emotions had gotten all clogged up. But he suddenly realized that he genuinely attracted to her. She was no kid, but there was a charming innocence about her, even after what she had been through, what they had made her do.
“Would you like to come downstairs for a cup of coffee?” she asked him. “I’m sure Bob has gone to his other job now. He works swing shift at night, and in the afternoon goes to a plumbing company to help out.”
Harry accepted, and they went down to the apartment. It was a typical Brooklyn railroad flat, a straight-thru, with the kitchen at the front. They sat around the table, and she made him a cup of instant coffee, which he hated, but somehow it tasted just fine, there with her.
They talked for a while longer, and then she said, “I’m sorry about what happened. I had to do it, but what happened inside the alley, I wasn’t putting that on. I really liked the way you looked, and you seemed to be such a nice guy.”
“Maybe under different circumstances,” Harry said gently, “it might have been different.”
She leaned across to smile at him, and almost without his knowing it, she had looped her arms around his neck and her mouth was tight to his. He knew she was no kid, but when her full mouth opened and the molten heat of her breath mingled with his, he forgot the scene in the bowling alley completely. He stood up, pulling her erect with him, and she flowed to him, and their bodies were tight together. She was more buoyantly built than he had thought, and he was barely aware of the fact that he was trying grind his body into hers.
Then she was murmuring, “W-we could go into th-the bedroom…uh…if you w-w-want to.”
So they walked close in each other’s arms, into the bedroom, and she pulled the shades, and he undressed her very slowly, very carefully, very lovingly, and her naked body was clean and sweet and perfect, as he had known it would be. Clean and white as she lay there quietly, waiting while he stripped out of his T-shirt and his slacks and came to her. They lay there quietly, side by side, for a long moment, then she gave a tiny moan of anxiety, as though she thought he was never, never coming to her, and her arms came up. He bent across her, then, and kissed her thoughtfully, longingly, in the hollow of her throat, her eyes, her breasts, and in an instant they were fused as a flame of passion leaped down between them, welding them together.
He did not know how long they lay there, straining, parrying, discovering each other, but he knew that even if Korea and the hospital had happened, it was not all in vain. If it had to be, at least he had this moment of pure, nameless, golden luxury.
He was murmuring fine things in her ears, and she was responding with little nibbling kisses, when they heard the banging at the front door.
Marni leaped up and pulled her clothes on quickly. “Bob!” she said. Adding nervously, “But—but he shouldn’t be back yet!”
Harry dressed as quickly as his pained rib cage would allow, and he followed her into the hall and down its length to the kitchen. The noise was incredible. Whoever was out there, whanging on that door, it wasn’t her brother. Then a voice came through the door, howling with frenzy, and another behind i
t, and a third. “Open the goddam door, open it you little scummy bitch, open that door!”
“Andy!” Marni hissed, and her eyes spread wide with terror.
“Get back there,” Harry commanded her, and shoved her back behind him, into the hall. At that moment the force of three bodies hit the door, and it bowed as though it were made of rubber.
It was a typical Brooklyn Flat, and the kitchen was very small. From the door to the opposite wall, across the room, was no more than twelve feet; and outside, the hall itself was narrow. If they hit that door hard enough, Harry thought frantically, and I open it, they ought to go straight across and hit the wall. That might give me time…
He stared across the room at the table, the refrigerator, the stove, the window that gaped directly across from the door…trying to estimate what obstructions they would carom off, till he could get at them.
Harry stepped behind the door, and as he heard the three bodies gathering force to strike again, he slipped the bolt. The door hung open, and the three heavies hit it full steam. The door rebounded off the inner wall, and Harry jumped back just in time to avoid being brained. The three bodies came hurtling through, and one of them went right on across the narrow kitchen, into the window, smashed it, and disappeared. All in one fluid movement. They could hear his scream all the way to the pavement four floors below. The thunk! as he struck concrete was sickening.
The other two—one of them was Candy from the park, still carrying himself with pain from the beating Harry had given him—caught themselves. Candy on the side of the refrigerator, and the remaining gang member—obviously Marni’s Andy—across the table.
Andy came erect, and stared at them with open hatred in his ruthless young face. “So you was ballin’ with him! I can tell. So you was doin’ it with him, you filthy slut! I’m gonna take him, an’ then I’m gonna cut you up real slow and nice, in little ribbons, and dump you in every garbage bucket on this block!” And as he said it, his hand snaked down into his boot, and came up with a knife.
He pressed the stud on the side, and six inches of honed German steel leaped into view with a snick!
He dropped into a crouch, and Candy moved in high behind him. Harry squared off with a little fist: primary Tai Kwan Do stance.
Marni screamed, high and keening.
Andy lurched forward, Harry slipped aside, and before Andy could bring the blade back into strike position, he was inside his guard, his flattened wedge of a left hand came screaming out in a wide, flat arc, and took Andy straight across the upper lip. Andy shrieked in a woman’s tone, and the knife went clattering under the stove, and he fell backward with blood crimsoning his face. The nose was broken, and the skull formation damaged. He flailed back into Candy, who tried to get out of the way as blood spattered the linoleum. Harry was on them in an instant. Two quick chops, and a savate kick, and Candy went down for good.
“Call the police, Marni,” Harry gasped, leaning against the wall. “Tell ’em come get them. I think the one downstairs is gone; and if they don’t hurry, Andy’ll book, too.”
She went to call the police, and came back to him.
They waited in silence, his hand in hers, and when it was finally over, when they took the two gang kids away, Harry was alone with her.
“I—I’d like to be your g—girl now, Harry,” she said, very young and very embarrassed.
“I think I’d like that just fine,” Harry said. But there was a knot in his chest, even as he said it. The knot was more than emotion. It was something growing in there, something he picked up in Korea, something the doctors at the hospital said would kill him soon. Not in a week, or a year, perhaps, but soon enough.
He had been drinking and wasting his time till it caught up with him, until that night when she had flirted with him and his life—what was left of it—had been given over to finding her. And somehow, it was all for the best. Because now, for however long he had—and he would not tell her it was coming—he had something to live for, someone to cling to.
And for the first time he didn’t mind that he was going to die. He had never really cared, and that was why he had taken the chances he had, but now it mattered, now he wanted to stay around, to see how golden he and Marni could get.
And it was a fairy tale.
They would live happily ever after.
But this was a modern fairy tale.
So they would not live happily ever after—forever.
Not forever.
No one ever does.
CHRONOLOGY
OF BOOKS BY
HARLAN ELLISON
1958-2012
NOVELS:
WEB OF THE CITY [1958]
THE SOUND OF A SCYTHE [1960] [2011]
SPIDER KISS [1961]
SHORT NOVELS:
DOOMSMAN [1967]
ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE [1980]
RUN FOR THE STARS [1991]
MEFISTO IN ONYX [1993]
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS:
THE DEADLY STREETS [1958]
SEX GANG (as by “Paul Merchant”) [1959]
A TOUCH OF INFINITY [1960]
CHILDREN OF THE STREETS [1961]
GENTLEMAN JUNKIE and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation [1961]
ELLISON WONDERLAND [1962]
PAINGOD and Other Delusions [1965]
I HAVE NO MOUTH & I MUST SCREAM [1967]
FROM THE LAND OF FEAR [1967]
LOVE AIN’T NOTHING BUT SEX MISSPELLED [1968]
THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD [1969]
OVER THE EDGE [1970]
ALL THE SOUNDS OF FEAR
(British publication only) [1973]
DE HELDEN VAN DE HIGHWAY
(Dutch publication only) [1973]
APPROACHING OBLIVION [1974]
THE TIME OF THE EYE (British publication only) [1974]
DEATHBIRD STORIES [1975]
NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS [1975]
HOE KAN IK SCHREEUWEN ZONDER MOND
(Dutch publication only) [1977]
STRANGE WINE [1978/2004]
SHATTERDAY [1980]
STALKING THE NIGHTMARE [1982]
ANGRY CANDY [1988]
ENSAMVÄRK (Swedish publication only) [1992]
JOKES WITHOUT PUNCHLINES [1995]
BCE 3BYKN CTPAXA (ALL FEARFUL SOUNDS)
(Unauthorized Russian publication only) [1997]
THE WORLDS OF HARLAN ELLISON (Authorized
Russian publication only) [1997]
SLIPPAGE [1997]
KOLETIS, KES KUULUTAS ARMASTUST MAAILMA
SÜDAMES (Estonian publication only) [1999]
LA MACHINE AUX YEUX BLEUS (French publication only) [2001]
TROUBLEMAKERS [2001]
PTAK SMIERCI (THE BEST OF HARLAN ELLISON)
(Polish publication only) [2003]
DEATHBIRD STORIES (Expanded edition) [2011]
PULLING A TRAIN [2012]
GETTING IN THE WIND [2012]
OMNIBUS VOLUMES:
FANTASIES OF HARLAN ELLISON [1979]
DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH [1991]
COLLABORATIONS:
PARTNERS IN WONDER: Collaborations with
14 Other Wild Talents [1971]
THE STARLOST: PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES
(With Edward Bryant) [1975]
MIND FIELDS: 33 STORIES INSPIRED BY
THE ART OF JACEK YERKA [1994]
I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM:
The Interactive CD-Rom (Co-Designed with
David Mullich and David Sears) [1995]
“REPENT, HARLIQUIN!” SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN (Rendered paintings by Rick Berry) [1997]
2000X (Host and Creative Consultant of National Public Radio episode series) [2000-2001]
THE DISCARDED (with Josh Olson) [2011]
GRAPHIC NOVELS:
DEMON WITH A GLASS HAND (adaptation with
Marshall Rogers) [1986]
NIGHT AND THE ENEMY (adaptation with Ken Steacy) [1987]
VIC AND BLOOD: THE CHRONICLES OF A BOY AND
HIS DOG (adaptation with Richard Corben) [1989]
HARLAN ELLISON’S DREAM CORRIDOR,
Volume One [1996]
VIC AND BLOOD: THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES
OF A BOY AND HIS DOG (adaptation with
Richard Corben) [2003]
HARLAN ELLISON’S DREAM CORRIDOR,
Volume Two [2007]
PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES (art by Alan Robinson
and John K. Snyder III) [2010/2011]
NON-FICTION & ESSAYS:
MEMOS FROM PURGATORY [1961]
THE GLASS TEAT: Essays of Opinion on Television [1970]
THE OTHER GLASS TEAT: Further Essays of Opinion
on Television [1975]
THE BOOK OF ELLISON (edited by Andrew Porter) [1978]
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS IN THE PROCRUSTEAN BED
(edited by Marty Clark) [1984]
AN EDGE IN MY VOICE [1985]
HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING [1989]
THE HARLAN ELLISON HORNBOOK [1990]
BUGF#CK! The Useless Wit & Wisdom of Harlan Ellison (edited by Arnie Fenner) [2011]
SCREENPLAYS & SUCHLIKE:
THE ILLUSTRATED HARLAN ELLISON (edited by
Byron Preiss) [1978]
HARLAN ELLISON’S MOVIE [1990]
I, ROBOT: THE ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY (based
on Isaac Asimov’s story-cycle) [1994]
THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER [1996]
RETROSPECTIVES:
ALONE AGAINST TOMORROW: A 10-year Survey [1971]
THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON: A 35-year Retrospective
(edited by Terry Dowling, with Richard Delap &
Gil Lamont) [1987]
THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON: A 50-year Retrospective
(edited by Terry Dowling) [2001]
UNREPENTANT: A Celebration of the Writing of Harlan Ellison (edited by Robert T. Garcia) [2010]
AS EDITOR:
DANGEROUS VISIONS [1967]
Pulling A Train Page 13
