and then stopped. “ I ’ll send Mr. Allison in after some groceries tomorrow,” she said.
“ You got all you need till then,” Mr. Babcock said, satisfied; it was not a question, but a confirmation.
After she hung up, Mrs. Allison went slowly out to sit
again in her chair next to her husband. “ He won’t deliver,”
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she said. “ You’ll have to go in tomorrow. We’ve got just
enough kerosene to last till you get back.’’
“ He should have told us sooner,” Mr. Allison said.
It was not possible to remain troubled long in the face
of the day; the country had never seemed more inviting, and
the lake moved quietly below them, among the trees, with
the almost incredible softness of a summer picture. Mrs. Allison sighed deeply, in the pleasure of possessing for themselves that sight of the lake, with the distant green hills beyond, the gentleness of the small wind through the trees.
The weather continued fair; the next morning Mr. Allison,
duly armed with a list of groceries, with “ kerosene” in large
letters at the top, went down the path to the garage, and Mrs.
Allison began another pie in her new baking dishes. She had
mixed the crust and was starting to pare the apples when Mr.
Allison came rapidly up the path and flung open the screen
door into the kitchen.
“ Damn car won’t start,” he announced, with the end-of-
the-tether voice of a man who depends on a car as he depends
on his right arm.
“ What’s wrong with it?” Mrs. Allison demanded, stopping with the paring knife in one hand and an apple in the other. “ It was all right on Tuesday. ’ ’
“ Well,” Mr. Allison said between his teeth, “ it’s not all
right on Friday.”
“ Can you fix it?” Mrs. Allison asked.
“ N o,” Mr. Allison said, “ I can not. Got to call someone,
I guess.
“ Who?” Mrs. Allison asked.
“ Man runs the filling station, I guess.” Mr. Allison moved
purposefully toward the phone. “ He fixed it last summer one
tim e.”
A little apprehensive, Mrs. Allison went on paring apples absentmindedly, while she listened to Mr. Allison with the phone, ringing, waiting, ringing, waiting, finally giving
the number to the operator, then waiting again and giving the
The Summer People
173
number again, giving the number a third time, and then slamming down the receiver.
“ No one there,” he announced as he came into the kitchen.
“ He’s probably gone out for a minute,” Mrs. Allison said
nervously; she was not quite sure what made her so nervous,
unless it was the probability of her husband’s losing his temper completely. “ He’s there alone, I imagine, so if he goes out there’s no one to answer the phone.”
“ That must be it,” Mr. Allison said with heavy irony. He
slumped into one of the kitchen chairs and watched Mrs.
Allison paring apples. After a minute, Mrs. Allison said
soothingly, “ Why don’t you go down and get the mail and
then call him again?”
Mr. Allison debated and then said, “ Guess I might as
well.” He rose heavily and when he got to the kitchen door
he turned and said, “ But if there’s no mail—” and leaving
an awful silence behind him, he went off down the path.
Mrs. Allison hurried with her pie. Twice she went to the
window to glance at the sky to see if there were clouds coming up. The room seemed unexpectedly dark, and she herself felt in the state of tension that precedes a thunderstorm, but
both times when she looked the sky was clear and serene,
smiling indifferently down on the Allisons’ summer cottage
as well as on the rest of the world. When Mrs. Allison, her
pie ready for the oven, went a third time to look outside, she
saw her husband coming up the path; he seemed more cheerful, and when he saw her, he waved eagerly and held a letter in the air.
“ From Jerry,” he called as soon as he was close enough
for her to hear him, “ at last—a letter!” Mrs. Allison noticed
with concern that he was no longer able to get up the gentle
slope of the path without breathing heavily; but then he was
in the doorway, holding out the letter. “ I saved it till I got
here,” he said.
Mrs. Allison looked with an eagerness that surprised her
on the familiar handwriting of her son; she could not imagine
why the letter excited her so, except that it was the first they
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Shirley Jackson
had received in so long; it would be a pleasant, dutiful letter,
full of the doings of Alice and the children, reporting progress with his job, commenting on the recent weather in Chicago, closing with love from all; both Mr. and Mrs. Allison could, if they wished, recite a pattern letter from either of
their children.
Mr. Allison slit the letter open with great deliberation, and
then he spread it out on the kitchen table and they leaned
down and read it together.
" Dear Mother and D a d ,” it began, in Jerry’s familiar,
rather childish, handwriting, ‘‘Am glad this goes to the lake
as usual, we always thought you came back too soon and
ought to stay up there as long as you could. Alice says that
now that you 're not as young as you used to be and have no
demands on your time, fewer friends, etc., in the city, you
ought to get what fun you can while you can. Since you two
are both happy up there, i t ’s a good idea fo r you to stay. ”
Uneasily Mrs. Allison glanced sideways at her husband;
he was reading intently, and she reached out and picked up
the empty envelope, not knowing exactly what she wanted
from it. It was addressed quite as usual, in Jerry’s handwriting, and was postmarked Chicago. Of course it’s postmarked Chicago, she thought quickly, why would they want to postmark it anywhere else? When she looked back down at the letter, her husband had turned the page, and she read on with
him: ‘‘—and o f course i f they get measles, etc., now, they
will be better o ff later. Alice is well, o f course, me too. Been
playing a lot o f bridge lately with some people you don’t
know, named Carruthers. Nice young couple, about our age.
Well, will close now as I guess it bores you to hear about
things so fa r away. Tell Dad old Dickson, in our Chicago
office, died. He used to ask about Dad a lot. Have a good
time up at the lake, and don’t bother about hurrying back.
Love from all o f us, Jerry. ”
“ Funny,” Mr. Allison commented.
“ It doesn’t sound like Jerry,” Mrs. Allison said in a small
voice. “ He never wrote anything like . . .” she stopped.
The Summer People
175
“ Like what?” Mr. Allison demanded. “ Never wrote anything like what? ’ ’
Mrs. Allison turned the letter over, frowning. It was impossible to find any sentence, any word, even, that did not sound like Jerry’s regular letters. Perhaps it was only that the
letter was so late, or the unusual number of dirty fingerprints
on the envelope.
“ I don’t k n o w ” she said impatiently.
“ Going to try that phone call again,” Mr. Allison said.
Mrs
. Allison read the letter twice more, trying to find a
phrase that sounded wrong. Then Mr. Allison came back and
said, very quietly, “ Phone’s dead.”
“ What?” Mrs. Allison said, dropping the letter.
“ Phone’s dead,” Mr. Allison said.
The rest of the day went quickly; after a lunch of crackers
and milk, the Allisons went to sit outside on the lawn, but
their afternoon was cut short by the gradually increasing storm
clouds that came up over the lake to the cottage, so that it
was as dark as evening by four o’clock. The storm delayed,
however, as though in loving anticipation of the moment it
would break over the summer cottage, and there was an occasional flash of lightning, but no rain. In the evening Mr.
and Mrs. Allison, sitting close together inside their cottage,
turned on the battery radio they had brought with them from
New York. There were no lamps lighted in the cottage, and
the only light came from the lightning outside and the small
square glow from the dial of the radio.
The slight framework of the cottage was not strong enough
to withstand the city noises, the music and the voices, from
the radio, and the Allisons could hear them far off echoing
across the lake, the saxophones in the New York dance band
wailing over the water, the flat voice of the girl vocalist going
inexorably out into the clean country air. Even the announcer, speaking glowingly of the virtues of razor blades, was no more than an inhuman voice sounding out from the
Allisons’ cottage and echoing back, as though the lake and
the hills and the trees were returning it unwanted.
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Shirley Jackson
During one pause between commercials, Mrs. Allison
turned and smiled weakly at her husband. “ I wonder if we’re
supposed to . . . do anything,” she said.
“ No,” Mr. Allison said consideringly. “ I don’t think so.
Just wait.”
Mrs. Allison caught her breath quickly, and Mr. Allison
said, under the trivial melody of the dance band beginning
again, “ The car had been tampered with, you know. Even I
could see that.”
Mrs. Allison hesitated a minute and then said very sofdy,
“ I suppose the phone wires were cut.”
“ I imagine so,” Mr. Allison said.
After a while, the dance music stopped and they listened
attentively to a news broadcast, the announcer’s rich voice
telling them breathlessly of a marriage in Hollywood, the
latest baseball scores, the estimated rise in food prices during
the coming week. He spoke to them, in the summer cottage,
quite as though they still deserved to hear news of a world
that no longer reached them except through the fallible batteries on the radio, which were already beginning to fade, almost as though they still belonged, however tenuously, to
the rest of the world.
Mrs. Allison glanced out the window at the smooth surface
of the lake, the black masses of the trees, and the waiting
storm, and said conversationally, “ I feel better about that
letter of Jerry’s .”
“ I knew when I saw the light down at the Hall place last
night,” Mr. Allison said.
The wind, coming up suddenly over the lake, swept around
the summer cottage and slapped hard at the windows. Mr.
and Mrs. Allison involuntarily moved closer together, and
with the first sudden crash of thunder, Mr. Allison reached
out and took his wife’s hand. And then, while the lightning
flashed outside, and the radio faded and sputtered, die two
old people huddled together in their summer cottage and
waited.
Harlan Ellison
The Whimper o r Whipped Dogs
Harlan Ellison, the popular fantasist, when he writes in
the horror mode, is a conduit through whom the horrors
of everyday life are transformed into fictions that reawaken us, reconnect us to those daily horrors to which we have become desensitized by conventional wisdom
and by habit. Ellison strives for extreme effects. Stephen
King has called him the greatest contemporary horror
writer: "H e sums up, for me, the finest elements of the
term . . . in his short stories of fantasy and horror, he
strikes closest to all those things which horrify and
amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives.” (Danse Macabre, p. 369) "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" is a violent fantasia on everyday life in
the big city with a dystopian moral and is one of the
landmarks of contemporary horror fiction. It won for Ellison an Edgar Award in 1974 from the Mystery Writers of America and remains his quintessential work of horror.
On the night after the day she had stained the louvered
window shutters of her new apartment on East 52nd
Street, Beth saw a woman slowly and hideously knifed to
death in the courtyard of her building. She was one of twenty-
six witnesses to die ghoulish scene, and, like them, she did
nothing to stop it.
177
178
Harlan Ellison
She saw it all, every moment of it, without break and with
no impediment to her view. Quite madly, the thought crossed
her mind as she watched in horrified fascination, that she had
the sort of marvelous line of observation Napoleon had sought
when he caused to have constructed at the Comedie-Frangaise
theaters, a curtained box at the rear, so he could watch the
audience as well as the stage. The night was clear, the moon
was full, she had just turned off the 11:30 movie on channel 2
after the second commercial break, realizing she had already
seen Robert Taylor in Westward the Women, and had disliked it
the first time; and the apartment was quite dark.
She went to the window, to raise it six inches for the night’s
sleep, and she saw the woman stumble into the courtyard.
She was sliding along the wall, clutching her left arm with
her right hand. Con Ed had installed mercury-vapor lamps
on the poles; there had been sixteen assaults in seven months;
the courtyard was illuminated with a chill purple glow that
made the blood streaming down the woman’s left arm look
black and shiny. Beth saw every detail with utter clarity, as
though magnified a thousand power under a microscope, solarized as if it had been a television commercial.
The woman threw back her head, as if she were trying to
scream, but there was no sound. Only the traffic on First
Avenue, late cabs foraging for singles paired for the night at
Maxwell’s Plum and Friday’s and Adam’s Apple. But that was
over there, beyond. Where she was, down there seven floors
below, in the courtyard, everything seemed silently suspended in an invisible force-field.
Beth stood in the darkness of her apartment, and realized
she had raised the window completely. A tiny balcony lay
just over the low sill; now not even glass separated her from
the sight; just the wrought-iron balcony railing and seven
floors to the courtyard below.
The woman staggered away from the wall, her head still
thrown back, and Beth could see she was in her mid-thirties,
/> with dark hair cut in a shag; it was impossible to tell if she
was pretty: terror had contorted her features and her mouth
The Whimper o f Whipped Dogs
179
was a twisted black slash, opened but emitting no sound.
Cords stood out in her neck. She had lost one shoe, and her
steps were uneven, threatening to dump her to the pavement.
The man came around the comer of the building, into the
courtyard. The knife he held was enormous—or perhaps it
only seemed so: Beth remembered a bone-handled fish knife
her father had used one summer at the lake in Maine: it
folded back on itself and locked, revealing eight inches of
serrated blade. The knife in the hand of the dark man in the
courtyard seemed to be similar.
The woman saw him and tried to run, but he leaped across
the distance between them and grabbed her by the hair and
pulled her head back as though he would slash her throat in
the next reaper-motion.
Then the woman screamed.
The sound skirled up into the courtyard like bats trapped
in an echo chamber, unable to find a way out, driven mad.
It went on and on . . .
The man struggled with her and she drove her elbow into
his sides and he tried to protect himself, spinning her around
by her hair, the terrible scream going up and up and never
stopping. She came loose and he was left with a fistful of
hair tom out by the roots. As she spun out, he slashed straight
across and opened her up just below the breasts. Blood
sprayed through her clothing and the man was soaked; it
seemed to drive him even more berserk. He went at her again,
as she tried to hold herself together, the blood pouring down
over her arms.
She tried to run, teetered against the wall, slid sidewise,
and the man struck the brick surface. She was away, stumbling over a flower bed, falling, getting to her knees as he threw himself on her again. The knife came up in a flashing
arc that illuminated the blade strangely with purple light.
And still she screamed.
Lights came on in dozens of apartments and people appeared at windows.
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Harlan Ellison
He drove the knife to the hilt into her back, high on the
right shoulder. He used both hands.
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 22
