The Top of the Volcano

by Harlan Ellison

  She moaned softly, in pain, without the slightest trace of subliminal pleasure, and he could see she was biting her lower lip so fiercely that blood was beginning to coat her mouth. When the pain he saw in her face became more than he could bear, he reached up quickly and took her hands away with difficulty; breaking the circuit.

  Anna Picket’s legs went out and she keeled toward him. He tried to brace himself, but she hit him with full dead weight, and they went crashing to the floor entangled in the metal folding chair.

  Frightened, thinking insanely what if someone comes in and sees us like this, they’d think I was molesting her, and in the next instant thinking with relief she locked the door, and in the next instant his fear was transmogrified into concern for her. He rolled out from under her trembling body, taking the chair with him, wrapped around one ankle. He shook off the chair, and got to his knees. Her eyes were half-closed, the lids flickering so rapidly she might have been in the line of strobe lights.

  He hauled her around, settling her semi-upright with her head in his lap. He brushed the hair from her face, and shook her ever so lightly, because he had no water, and had no moist washcloth. Her breathing slowed, her chest heaved not quite so spastically, and her hand, flung away from her body, began to flex the fingers.

  “Ms. Picket,” he whispered, “can you talk? Are you all right? Is there some medicine you need…in your desk?”

  She opened her eyes, then, and looked up at him. She tasted the blood on her lips and continued breathing raggedly, as though she had run a great distance. And finally she said, “I could feel it in you when you walked in.”

  He tried to ask what it was she had felt, what it was in him that had so unhinged her, but she reached in with the flexing hand and touched his forearm.

  “You’ll have to come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “To meet the real REM Group.”

  And she began to cry. He knew immediately that she was weeping for him, and he murmured that he would come with her. She tried to smile reassurance, but there was still too much pain in her. They stayed that way for a time, and then they left the office building together.

  • • •

  They were impaired, every one of them in the sprawling ranch-style house in Hidden Hills. One was blind, another had only one hand. A third looked as if she had been in a terrible fire and had lost half her face, and another propelled herself through the house on a small wheeled platform with restraining bars to keep her from falling off.

  They had taken the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura, and had driven west on 101 to the Calabasas exit. Climbing, then dropping behind the hills, they had turned up a side road that became a dirt road that became a horse path, Lonny driving Anna Picket’s ’85 Le Sabre.

  The house lay within a bowl, completely concealed, even from the dirt road below. The horse trail passed behind low hills covered with mesquite and coast live oak, and abruptly became a perfectly surfaced blacktop. Like the roads Hearst had had cut in the hills leading up to San Simeon, concealing access to the Castle from the Coast Highway above Cambria, the blacktop had been poured on spiral rising cuts laid on a reverse bias.

  Unless sought from the air, the enormous ranch house and its outbuildings and grounds would be unknown even to the most adventurous picnicker. “How much of this acreage do you own?” McGrath asked, circling down the inside of the bowl.

  “All this,” she said, waving an arm across the empty hills, “almost to the edge of Ventura County.”

  She had recovered completely, but had said very little during the hour and a half trip, even during the heaviest weekend traffic on the 101 Freeway crawling like a million-wheeled worm through the San Fernando Valley out of Los Angeles. “Not a lot of casual drop-ins I should imagine,” he replied. She looked at him across the front seat, fully for the first time since leaving Santa Monica. “I hope you’ll have faith in me, trust me just a while longer,” she said.

  He paid strict attention to the driving.

  He had been cramped within the Buick by a kind of dull fear that strangely reminded him of how he had always felt on Christmas Eve, as a child, lying in bed, afraid of, yet anxious for, the sleep that permitted Santa Claus to come.

  In that house below lay something that knew of secret mouths and ancient winds from within. Had he not trusted her, he would have slammed the brake pedal and leaped from the car and not stopped running till he had reached the freeway.

  And once inside the house, seeing all of them, so ruined and tragic, he was helpless to do anything but allow her to lead him to a large sitting-room, where a circle of comfortable overstuffed chairs formed a pattern that made the fear more overwhelming.

  They came, then, in twos and threes, the legless woman on the rolling cart propelling herself into the center of the ring. He sat there and watched them come, and his heart seemed to press against his chest. McGrath, as a young man, had gone to a Judy Garland film festival at the Thalia in New York. One of the revived movies had been A Child Is Waiting, a nonsinging role for Judy, a film about retarded children. Sally had had to help him out of the theater only halfway through. He could not see through his tears. His capacity for bearing the anguish of the crippled, particularly children, was less than that of most people. He brought himself up short: why had he thought of that afternoon at the Thalia now? These weren’t children. They were adults. All of them. Every woman in the house was at least as old as he, surely older. Why had he been thinking of them as children?

  Anna Picket took the chair beside him, and looked around the circle. One chair was empty. “Catherine?” she asked.

  The blind woman said, “She died on Sunday.”

  Anna closed her eyes and sank back into the chair. “God be with her, and her pain ended.”

  They sat quietly for a time, until the woman on the cart looked up at McGrath, smiled a very kind smile, and said, “What is your name, young man?”

  “Lonny,” McGrath said. He watched as she rolled herself to his feet and put a hand on his knee. He felt warmth flow through him, and his fear melted. But it only lasted for a moment, as she trembled and moaned softly; as Anna Picket had done in the office. Anna quickly rose and drew her away from McGrath. There were tears in the cart-woman’s eyes.

  A woman with gray hair and involuntary head tremors, indicative of Parkinson’s, leaned forward and said, “Lonny, tell us.”

  He started to say tell you what? but she held up a finger and said the same thing again.

  So he told them. As best he could. Putting words to feelings that always sounded melodramatic; words that were wholly inadequate for the tidal wave of sorrow that held him down in darkness. “I miss them, oh God how I miss them,” he said, twisting his hands. “I’ve never been like this. My mother died, and I was lost, I was miserable, yes there was a feeling my heart would break, because I loved her. But I could handle it. I could comfort my father and my sister, I had it in me to do that. But these last two years…one after another…so many who were close to me…pieces of my past, my life…friends I’d shared times with, and now those times are gone, they slip away as I try to think of them. I, I just don’t know what to do.”

  And he spoke of the mouth. The teeth. The closing of that mouth. The wind that had escaped from inside him.

  “Did you ever sleepwalk, as a child?” a woman with a clubfoot asked. He said: yes, but only once. Tell us, they said.

  “It was nothing. I was a little boy, maybe ten or eleven. My father found me standing in the hallway outside my bedroom, at the head of the stairs. I was asleep, and I was looking at the wall. I said, ‘I don’t see it here anywhere.’ My father told me I’d said that; the next morning he told me. He took me back to bed. That was the only time, as best I know.”

  The women murmured around the circle to each other. Then the woman with Parkinson’s said, “No, I don’t think that’s anything.” Then she stood up, and came to him. She laid a hand on his forehead and said, “Go to sleep, Lonny.”

>   And he blinked once, and suddenly sat bolt upright. But it wasn’t an instant, it had been much longer. He had been asleep. For a long while. He knew it was so instantly, because it was now dark outside the house, and the women looked as if they had been savaged by living jungles. The blind woman was bleeding from her eyes and ears; the woman on the cart had fallen over, lay unconscious at his feet; in the chair where the fire victim had sat, there was now only a charred outline of a human being, still faintly smoking.

  McGrath leaped to his feet. He looked about wildly. He didn’t know what to do to help them. Beside him, Anna Picket lay slumped across the bolster arm of the chair, her body twisted and blood once again speckling her lips.

  Then he realized: the woman who had touched him, the woman with Parkinson’s, was gone.

  They began to whimper, and several of them moved, their hands idly touching the air. A woman who had no nose tried to rise, slipped and fell. He rushed to her, helped her back into the chair, and he realized she was missing fingers on both hands. Leprosy…no! Hansen’s disease, that’s what it’s called. She was coming to, and she whispered to him, “There…Teresa…help her…” and he looked where she was pointing, at a woman as pale as crystal, her hair a glowing white, her eyes colorless. “She…has…lupus…” the woman without a nose whispered.

  McGrath went to Teresa. She looked up at him with fear and was barely able to say, “Can you…please…take me to a dark place…?”

  He lifted her in his arms. She weighed nothing. He let her direct him up the stairs to the second floor, to the third bedroom off the main corridor. He opened the door; inside it was musty and unlit. He could barely make out the shape of a bed. He carried her over and placed her gently on the puffy down comforter. She reached up and touched his hand. “Thank you.” She spoke haltingly, having trouble breathing. “We, we didn’t expect anything…like that…”

  McGrath was frantic. He didn’t know what had happened, didn’t know what he had done to them. He felt awful, felt responsible, but he didn’t know what he had done!

  “Go back to them,” she whispered. “Help them.”

  “Where is the woman who touched me…?”

  He heard her sobbing. “She’s gone. Lurene is gone. It wasn’t your fault. We didn’t expect anything…like…that.”

  He rushed back downstairs.

  They were helping one another. Anna Picket had brought water, and bottles of medicine, and wet cloths. They were helping one another. The healthier ones limping and crawling to the ones still unconscious or groaning in pain. And he smelled the fried metal scent of ozone in the air. There was a charred patch on the ceiling above the chair where the burned woman had been sitting.

  He tried to help Anna Picket, but when she realized it was McGrath, she slapped his hand away. Then she gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth, and she began to cry again, and reached out to apologize. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry! It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t know…not even Lurene knew.” She swabbed at her eyes, and laid a hand on his chest. “Go outside. Please. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  A wide streak of dove-gray now bolted through her tangled hair. It had not been there before the instant of his sleep.

  He went outside and stood under the stars. It was night, but it had not been night before Lurene had touched him. He stared up at the cold points of light, and the sense of irreparable loss overwhelmed him. He wanted to sink to his knees, letting his life ebb into the ground, freeing him from this misery that would not let him breathe. He thought of Victor, and the casket being cranked down into the earth, as Sally clung to him, murmuring words he could not understand, and hitting him again and again on the chest; not hard, but without measure, without meaning, with nothing but simple human misery. He thought of Alan, dying in a Hollywood apartment from AIDS, tended by his mother and sister who were, themselves, hysterical and constantly praying, asking Jesus to help them; dying in that apartment with the two roommates who had been sharing the rent, keeping to themselves, eating off paper plates for fear of contracting the plague, trying to figure out if they could get a lawyer to force Alan’s removal; dying in that miserable apartment because the Kaiser Hospital had found a way around his coverage, and had forced him into “home care.” He thought of Emily, lying dead beside her bed, having just dressed for dinner with her daughter, being struck by the grand mal seizure and her heart exploding, lying there for a day, dressed for a dinner she would never eat, with a daughter she would never again see. He thought of Mike, trying to smile from the hospital bed, and forgetting from moment to moment who Lonny was, as the tumor consumed his brain. He thought of Ted seeking shamans and homeopathists, running full tilt till he was cut down. He thought of Roy, all alone now that DeeDee was gone: half a unit, a severed dream, an incomplete conversation. He stood there with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth, trying to ease the pain.

  When Anna Picket touched him, he started violently, a small cry of desolation razoring into the darkness.

  “What happened in there?” he demanded. “Who are you people? What did I do to you? Please, oh please I’m asking you, tell me what’s going on!”

  “We absorb.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “We take illness. We’ve always been with you. As far back as we can know. We have always had that capacity, to assume the illness. There aren’t many of us, but we’re everywhere. We absorb. We try to help. As Jesus wrapped himself in the leper’s garments, as he touched the lame and the blind, and they were healed. I don’t know where it comes from, some sort of intense empathy. But…we do it…we absorb.”

  “And with me…what was that in there…?”

  “We didn’t know. We thought it was just the heartache. We’ve encountered it before. That was why Tricia suggested you come to the Group.”

  “My wife…is Tricia one of you? Can she…take on the…does she absorb? I lived with her, I never—”

  Anna was shaking her head. “No, Tricia has no idea what we are. She’s never been here. Very few people have been so needing that I’ve brought them here. But she’s a fine therapist, and we’ve helped a few of her patients. She thought you…” She paused. “She still cares for you. She felt your pain, and thought the Group might be able to help. She doesn’t even know of the real REM Group.”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders, intense now.

  “What happened in there?”

  She bit her lip and closed her eyes tightly against the memory. “It was as you said. The mouth. We’d never seen that before. It, it opened. And then…and then…”

  He shook her. “What!?!”

  She wailed against the memory. The sound slammed against him and against the hills and against the cold points of the stars. “Mouths. In each of us! Opened. And the wind, it, it just, it just hissed out of us, each of us. And the pain we held, no, that they held—I’m just their contact for the world, they can’t go anywhere, so I go and shop and bring and do—the pain they absorbed, it, it took some of them. Lurene and Margid…Teresa won’t live…I know…”

  McGrath was raving now. His head was about to burst. He shook her as she cried and moaned, demanding, “What’s happening to us, how could I do such an awfulness to you, why is this being done to me, to us, why now, what’s going wrong, please, you’ve got to tell me, you’ve got to help me, we’ve got to do something—”

  And they hugged each other, clinging tightly to the only thing that promised support: each other. The sky wheeled above them, and the ground seemed to fall away. But they kept their balance, and finally she pushed him to arm’s length and looked closely at his face and said, “I don’t know. I do not know. This isn’t like anything we’ve experienced before. Not even Alvarez or Ariès know about this. A wind, a terrible wind, something alive, leaving the body.”

  “Help me!”

  “I can’t help you! No one can help you, I don’t think anyone can help you. Not even Le Braz…”

  He clutched at the name. “Le Braz!
Who’s Le Braz?”

  “No, you don’t want to see Le Braz. Please, listen to me, try to go off where it’s quiet, and lonely, and try to handle it yourself, that’s the only way!”

  “Tell me who Le Braz is!”

  She slapped him. “You’re not hearing me. If we can’t do for you, then no one can. Le Braz is beyond anything we know, he can’t be trusted, he does things that are outside, that are awful, I think. I don’t really know. I went to him once, years ago, it’s not something you want to—”

  I don’t care, he said. I don’t care about any of it now. I have to rid myself of this. It’s too terrible to live with. I see their faces. They’re calling and I can’t answer them. They plead with me to say something to them. I don’t know what to say. I can’t sleep. And when I sleep I dream of them. I can’t live like this, because this isn’t living. So tell me how to find Le Braz. I don’t care, to Hell with the whole thing, I just don’t give a damn, so tell me!

  She slapped him again. Much harder. And again. And he took it. And finally she told him.

  He had been an abortionist. In the days before it was legal, he had been the last hope for hundreds of women. Once, long before, he had been a surgeon. But they had taken that away from him. So he did what he could do. In the days when women went to small rooms with long tables, or to coat hangers, he had helped. He had charged two hundred dollars, just to keep up with supplies. In those days of secret thousands in brown paper bags stored in clothes closets, two hundred dollars was as if he had done the work for free. And they had put him in prison. But when he came out, he went back at it.

  Anna Picket told McGrath that there had been other…