The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “Oh, wow... oh wow... baby you were beautiful you’re the heaviest cat there is I love you I love you...” The sea whispering in my ear. I started to come out of it—we were alive, out of there, in a cab home, they didn’t know who I was I had scared them off looking and left them a big deathday present... they had no reason to come looking...

  “Oh baby, and have I got a tasty surprise for you,” Robin said, seeing my mind back in my eyes. “Just rest easy baby, everything’s gonna be groovy... groovy... groovy... groovy...”

  I bolted the police lock behind us and only now, in my own dark apartment, did I start to feel safe, really safe from rising sun blood on white leather eyes of a million pistols—

  In the pitch blackness of the kitchen, I felt Robin’s arms around me, tasted her long lingering kiss from three cold universes away.

  “Oh man,” she sighed, “you were beautiful. I still don’t believe it, the way you rapped down those cats, heaviest dealers I ever saw... And the best is yet to come, baby. Go on into the living room, and turn on the light and I’ll have a big beautiful surprise for you.”

  I went into the living room, turned on the orange ceiling light, and grew on the couch like a vegetable. How groovy it was to be a vegetable growing in the hidden dark earth with not a care in the world... timeless mindless dark and drifting...

  Into my orange root-cellar stumbled a smiling girl with huge dark eyes and long black hair. The creature stood over me with her hands behind her back.

  “Man,” she said, “you are too much! Those freaks were the biggest dealers in town and they had just killed a man and you got away with pulling rank on them and you were stoned on acid! Too much! Man, we’re gonna make millions!”

  “What are you gibbering about, girl?” Why didn’t she leave me alone with my dark roots and soft silence?

  “You got the head to be the number one dealer in New York, maybe the country, and I got the connections to get us started. All we need is a big enough stake, and baby, thanks to that creep from California, we got it! Dig: while you were getting your coat, he stashed it under the sink.”

  And grinning like a lemur, she held up the second bottle of acid.

  “ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID—” I screamed. “After... after... after all that... another bottle of acid!” A monstrous insane joke—I was speaking its idiot punchline. But there was another bottle of acid! No joke—another bottle of deadmen mafia hoods narcs electric chair pistols Ali Blah-Blah and his Forty Fiends condition terminal ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID...

  “Hey man, what’s—?”

  I leaped to my feet screaming: “Down the toilet bowl! Hush that fucking stuff down the toilet bowl!”

  Robin backed away from me, clutching the bottle to her chest. “Are you crazy? Thousands of dollars worth of acid!”

  “Get that stuff the fuck out of here or get yourself the fuck out of here! Down the toilet—now!”

  “Come on, man, take it easy, you’re stoned...”

  “Me or the acid! You can’t have both! Hush it down the toilet or flush yourself down the toilet! Now! Now! NOW!”

  Backing towards the kitchen, Robin’s eyes got cold and hard like a million years of California Space Monster blood on shiny white formica table. “I don’t give up this acid for you or anyone else,” she said.

  “Then get yourself the fuck out of here!”

  Behind white leather eyeballs something warm and red and human seemed to pulse for a moment. “Come on Tom, you’re freaking, is all... I dig you... don’t do this to me... you’re stoned... you’re just stoned—”

  Stoned! I was really stoned, knew it because the universe had just hit me over the head with a gigantic club a huge voice screaming in my head: “THERE’LL ALWAYS BE ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID!”

  Robin was another bottle of acid! As long as there were Robins there’d be another bottle of acid! Acid boiled out of the blood of the blackest bowels of dead crawling things of night in the cesspool of the earth fermented bodies of Tex California in a million neon-blue pads “come on kid, the first one is free” Robin gobbled up by became the Vampire God of Acid!

  ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID!

  “Get out! Get out!” I screamed. “Don’t ever come back! Not another bottle of acid! Out! Out! Get the fuck out of here! You come here again and I’ll kill you!”

  Robin slithered into the kitchen like the black snake that ate the world holding up the acid daring me to take it baby you can be the greatest dealer in the world... Her lips trembling, her eyes heavy with held-back tears—but it was all a fucking fraud! The Great Bitch-Goddess Acid had no tears for man not sucked up in a spike from ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID!

  “Look man... look man, you’re freaking out, but... but... I’m not taking this shit from anyone, you’re crazy—”

  I opened the door. “Out! Out, cunt!”

  “Eat shit, you gutless faggot!” she screamed like a harpy—and slammed the door in my face. Another bottle of acid! Another bottle of acid, oh Christ, another bottle of acid!

  I bolted the door behind her, then the police lock. Another bottle of acid! I still wasn’t safe! I wedged a kitchen chair under the doorknob. Still not safe! It was colorless, odorless, tasteless, the Devil’s own nerve gas! Could creep in through the windows in the water supply nobody was safe from it I wasn’t safe from it ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID—

  21 - “Break on Through to the Other Side...”

  —Another bottle of acid another bottle of acid... Oh Jesus, wouldn’t it ever stop? Why not just a harmless little blow your mind baby without Anne smack Robin acid dead bodies another bottle another bag another bag another fix one more time baby one for the road you could be number one dealer in a daisy-chain line from the tip of the needle to the navel of the universe down into blackness nothingness inside condition terminal... Why did they have to package crystal lovely nothingness in a spike in a cube in a joint in another bottle of acid and sell it through a long line of rotten-toothed vampires would suck you in suck you dry and fill you with the coal-black slime of final darkness in another fucking bottle of acid!

  I’m freaking out! a tiny lost part of me said—

  Another bottle of acid from cesspools of rotting teenyboppers with mottled teeth in the grave of the California Lizard—

  Gotta do something, gotta come out of it—

  Eat shit, you fucking gutless faggot eat shit eat smack eat me eat acid eat Anne eat Ali eat Terry Blackstone’s speed-soaked brain eat death—

  Gotta talk to somebody can talk me out of this I can’t maintain—

  Eat death eat garbage eat condition terminal gutless fucking motherfucker faggot eat another bottle of acid—

  Harvey! Harvey the Man! Harvey the Shrink! Harvey the Bringdown... Total Consciousness of the Total Void I was staring down into on the brink of a cliff a million miles high I was a million miles high and maybe Harvey had the Antidote Stomach Pump Acid-Eater machine.

  I slithered into the living room on a thousand ropy tentacles and chewed my way through piles of moldy paper until I came to the Foundation’s letterhead with Harvey’s emergency home phone number on it...

  I became a dialing-machine dialing a string of numbers on the bedroom phone till the dial seemed to be dialing me dialing the combination of a safe inside my head inside of which was the gaping monster of another bottle of—

  “Uh... huh...” said a voice on the other end of the vampire-thing sucking at my ear.

  “Tom Hollander...” I screamed. “You gotta do something it’s coming in the doors in the windows—”

  “What? What? Tom? What’s the matter? Take it easy. This is Harvey... Wha—?”

  “Another bottle of acid! They’re trying to get me to take another bottle of acid! She had it right here, another bottle of acid!”

  “You’re on acid?” Harvey’s electric voice said. Sounded better that way: IBM computer trip. “Take it easy, you must just be having a bad trip...”

  “A bad trip? Another bottle of acid and the California Lizar
d rotting in his own white leather blood and it’s coming in the air now another bottle of acid and they’re sucking me dry and pumping in void and it’s a bad trip? It’s a trip to Condition Terminal to the black—”

  “Take it easy! You’ve got to make it down to the Foundation. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

  “But—”

  The phone went dead. The motherfucker murdering speed-freak California Lizard bastard hung up on me with another bottle of acid stewing in my own cauldron of night’s black angels closing in filthy cocksucker leaving me to stew in my own another bottle of acid juices—Black void fading to red fury fading to—something snapping back into focus, like Harvey leaving me hanging was a hard slap of reality across the face. That what he wanted to do? Because he had done it, waiting there with salvation from the forces of dead dealers’ other bottles of acid could be the greatest dead vampire in the whole world of nightmare assassins—

  I had to get to the Foundation! Had to maintain! But it was coming in the door how could I go out into the night of blackness total void of another bottle of acid under every dark street corner waiting for me there in the rain in the dark in the long cold dark went on and on and on—

  From the sewer of memory the ghost of a moment: walking down Second Avenue in the rain trying to remember how once before on Romilar or something I had made time stop, turned myself into a walking-machine outside the timestream of my mind, and now I seemed to remember how I reached in and turned off the switch in my head...

  Another bottle of acid won’t work I can’t get there trapped in this cave of my own fright Harvey a million miles away in the warm sweet inner—

  —Door. Steps. Cold wind. Running. Lights. Cars. Arm waving. Cab. Motion through a whirling Christmas tree. Money passed from hand to hand. Slam of car door—

  —Sanctum of his Total Consciousness dream of OmOhm home on om...

  And I was standing on the cold empty street outside the Foundation staring at the glowing brass nameplate, while the night, a great sky of razorblades, was about to fall in on me in a million shearing fragments. I leaned on the bell—

  No no no not another bottle of acid not the sky falling in on chicken little gutless faggot you could be the number one murder on acid in the world with just another bottle, baby—

  The door was pressing against my face trying to kill me with secret vibrating death-ray of the California Lizard’s kamikaze white leather rising sun of blood... the buzzer... buzzer.

  I yanked the knob, leaned on the door, and it flew open and I fell inside, slammed the door behind me, but couldn’t find the police lock to lock out the universe of hungry razors of night battering the secret cave of orange desire—

  I loped up ten million stairs in total darkness on my hands and knees while thousands of razor-sharp mafia spades pounded on the door behind me with sharp glass medicine bottles—

  Drooling sweating oozing ichor I sensed a long black womb and halfway down it a warm yellow light. I ran down the womb down the hall mewling and screeching and tore open the door to:

  A small room. Just a gray carpet and a floor lamp and two overstuffed black velvet chairs. One chair was empty, but in the other sat a soft gray creature in a dirty white shirt and baggy gray pants.

  “Sit down,” said Harvey.

  I dissolved into a boiling pool of black jello in the empty chair and my eyestalks looked at Harvey; warm gray eyes behind his glasses like a cocker spaniel, a concerned tired grimy face, an ancient teddy-bear.

  It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  I sat there waiting for the teddybear to speak, to say something magic that would chase away demons of bottled of acid white leather spades in mafia suits pounding broken bottles on the door below—but the teddybear just sat there radiating quiet gray warmth out of its big rheumy eyes as we sat facing each other under the roof of its warm little cave insulated from the blackness outside far away outside by a million miles of orange cotton-candy insulation.

  The teddybear looked so sad and tired and worried staring at me with those great leaky eyes and not smiling, only those gray, sad, all-forgiving eyes in a pasty gray face looked totally blank. I wanted the teddybear to say something, anything, crack a smile, curse, scream, laugh, anything... But the silence hung like a curtain between us and the eyes of the teddybear told me I was going to have to break it.

  “Hey, man,” my voice managed to say, like something from a bottle, “I’m sorry I dragged you out of bed.”

  “If you’re sorry now, wait till you get my bill,” the Harveybear said—such a dumb Harvey-imitation of a psychiatrist telling a psychiatrist-joke that the air seemed bright with flakes of shiny gray plastic. But then the Harveybear finally smiled and the air suddenly crinkled around the smile-line-extensions and reality fractured along some new cleavage and some part of me that had gone on an immense dark journey best not to even remember was suddenly back.

  And the Harveybear had brought me back! Harvey—the Black Forest Cuckoo-Clock Builder Elf, the Control-Freak, the Psychic Castrator—Harvey Brustein had brought me back!

  “Jesus Christ, man,” I said, “did you do that on purpose?”

  “Do what on purpose?”

  “I was off on the dark side of nowhere gibbering and screaming inside and you brought me back. Just like that. Without even saying anything... How did you know...?”

  Harvey smiled a knowing Buddha-smile. “I’ve used LSD in therapy,” he said, “so I’ve developed ways of bringing people out of acid bummers as a matter of necessity. Most people on bad trips feel threatened by their external reality in one way or another. So the first step is to present them with a non-threatening reality with which they want to and must deal: a quiet, concerned human being who is ready to listen but in no hurry to speak.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “You’re dealing with external reality now, aren’t you?”

  I wondered—I seemed to be alone with Harvey in a guru-cave in India, bodiless, floating, mind-to-mind telepathy. Reality—or something beyond the real?

  “I feel so strange,” I said. The shape of the words existed as emotions in my mouth. Nothing else that was me was real.

  “If we’re going to get anywhere, we’ll have to go back in there, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. And I knew he knew what I was saying when I said I knew. Back there into the darkness into the void into another bottle of acid. But somehow it was like looking at a movie of myself from far away—vague shadow-shapes shifting in an electric night...

  “Talking about it won’t be nearly as bad as living it,” Harvey said. “When you give a nightmare verbal symbols, it takes it away from the inside and puts it outside where you can look at it instead of being eaten by it. Try and tell me what happened...”

  “I just saw the hole in the bottom of Dope. Hole down into pools of black vomit and the whole universe is trying to push me through. But that’s not the worst of it—worst of it is that a big part of me wants to be pushed through.”

  “Why do you want to be pushed through?”

  “To get on the other side.”

  “Why do you want to get through to the other side?”

  “I don’t want to get through!” I screamed at him. “I just told you, it’s pools of black vomit in there death in there monsters in there wearing my face...”

  “But you just said part of you wanted to be pushed through. You’ll have to face that part of you. Why do you want to go on through?”

  The words bubbled up from my ectoplasmic gut to my flesh-and-blood lips: “Because it’s the other side! Any other side! Because this side sucks! Anything is better than reality on this side!”

  “Anything?”

  “Oh wow...” I moaned.

  Colored whirling lights seemed to halo the cosmic teddybear as a flash flared in my mind: blow your minds, baby, take a trip, flash, freak out; it was all the language of escape artists, refugees from an East Germany of the mind jumping off the top
of The Wall in a hail of reality’s bullets, not caring what we were jumping into as long as it was On The Other Side.

  “Have you ever really understood why you take drugs?” Harvey said. His eyes were huge tunnels into the center of the universe of my brain—could he read the flash in my mind?

  “Not until now,” I told him.

  It was so simple—drugs were the only way to look at reality from another side, only way to believe there was another side. Drugs were the sacrament of an Einsteinian god, a God of universal random chaos, God of the ultimate freedom of a table of random numbers, maybe not a very good god, but a god with my kind of style. Getting high was a cosmic good. But...

  But... white leather rising sun out of the moldering California Lizard in another bottle of acid you just couldn’t keep from taking that next fix of darkness and the merchants of void in a spike in a cap in another bottle of acid sucking you dry sucking you in and filling you with Condition Terminal darkness...

  “Perhaps not even now,” Harvey said. “Not completely.”

  “I know why I take drugs,” I insisted. “What I don’t know is where drugs take me...”

  “Which is what counts, isn’t it?” Harvey said. “I know why you take drugs and so do you: to see a better reality, a deeper vision, a more total view of the truth...”

  “No man,” I told him. “I’m not looking for any Oneness with the Cosmic All. A man needs more than one reality is all. Get stuck in one reality and you’re dead—”

  Whoom! Another massive flash hit me! That was it, that was the evil in Dope: dope-reality fought to trap you inside itself and shear off any vision into other realities. Paranoia of Dope was the same paranoia as Anti-Dope: stay in one fucking reality! You’ll turn to shit if you step outside your bag. Neither Dope nor Anti-Dope had a lock on Total Reality—to chase that down the infinite corridors of Dope was a ticket to gibbering paranoia: always the chance of finding it in another bottle of acid, one more fix. Dope, like nuclear power, had no morality; you used it or it used you. If you could maintain, you added snatches to your mosaic of reality, but if you lost, you lost heavy because surrender to pure force was surrender to chaos. Each trip was an existential moment: your whole universe was on the line.