The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)
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Beth caught it all in jagged flashes—the man, the woman,
the knife, the blood, the expressions on the faces of those
watching from the windows. Then lights clicked off in the
windows, but they still stood there, watching.
She wanted to yell, to scream, “ What are you doing to
that woman?” But her throat was frozen, two iron hands that
had been immersed in dry ice for ten thousand years clamped
around her neck. She could feel the blade sliding into her
own body.
Somehow—it seemed impossible but there it was down
there, happening somehow—the woman struggled erect and
pulled herself off the knife. Three steps, she took three steps
and fell into the flower bed again. The man was howling now,
like a great beast, the sounds inarticulate, bubbling up from
his stomach. He fell on her and the knife went up and came
down, then again, and again, and finally it was all a blur of
motion, and her scream of lunatic bats went on till it faded
off and was gone.
Beth stood in the darkness, trembling and crying, the sight
filling her eyes with horror. And when she could no longer
bear to look at what he was doing down there to the unmoving piece of meat over which he worked, she looked up and around at the windows of darkness where the others stilf
stood—even as she had stood—and somehow she could see
their faces, bruise-purple with the dim light from the mercury
lamps, and there was a universal sameness to their expressions. The women stood with their nails biting into the upper arms of their men, their tongues edging from the comers of
their mouths; the men were wild-eyed and smiling. They all
looked as though they were at cock fights. Breathing deeply.
Drawing some sustenance from the grisly scene below. An
exhalation of sound, deep, deep, as though from caverns beneath the earth. Flesh pale and moist.
And it was then that she realized the courtyard had grown
foggy, as though mist off the East River had rolled up 52nd
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Street in a veil that would obscure the details of what the
knife and the man were still doing . . . endlessly doing it
. . . long after there was any joy in it . . . still doing it . . .
again and again . . .
But the fog was unnatural, thick and gray and filled with
tiny scintillas of light. She stared at it, rising up in the empty
space of the courtyard. Bach in the cathedral, stardust in a
vacuum chamber.
Beth saw eyes.
There, up there, at the ninth floor and higher, two great
eyes, as surely as night and the moon, there were eyes. And—
a face? Was that a face, could she be sure, was she imagining
it . . . a face? In the roiling vapors of chill fog something
lived, something brooding and patient and utterly malevolent
had been summoned up to witness what was happening down
there in the flower bed. Beth tried to look away, but could
not. The eyes, those primal burning eyes, filled with an abysmal antiquity yet frighteningly bright and anxious like the eyes of a child; eyes filled with tomb depths, ancient and
new, chasm-filled, burning, gigantic and deep as an abyss,
holding her, compelling her. The shadow play was being
staged not only for the tenants in their windows, watching
and drinking of the scene, but for some other. Not on frigid
tundra or waste moors, not in subterranean caverns or on
some faraway world circling a dying sun, but here, in the
city, here the eyes of that other watched.
Shaking with the effort, Beth wrenched her eyes from those
burning depths up there beyond the ninth floor, only to see
again the horror that had brought that other. And she was
struck for the first time by the awfulness of what she was
witnessing, she was released from the immobility that had
held her like a coelacanth in shale, she was filled with the
blood thunder pounding against the membranes of her mind:
she had stood there! She had done nothing, nothing! A woman
had been butchered and she had said nothing, done nothing.
Tears had been useless, tremblings had been pointless, she
had done nothingl
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Harlan Ellison
Then she heard hysterical sounds midway between laughter
and giggling, and as she stared up into that great face rising
in the fog and chimneysmoke of the night, she heard herself
making those deranged gibbon noises and from the man below a pathetic, trapped sound, like the whimper of whipped dogs.
She was staring up into that face again. She hadn’t wanted
to see it again—ever. But she was locked with those smoldering eyes, overcome with the feeling that they were childlike, though she knew they were incalculably ancient.
Then the butcher below did an unspeakable thing and Beth
reeled with dizziness and caught the edge of the window
before she could tumble out onto the balcony; she steadied
herself and fought for breath.
She felt herself being looked at, and for a long moment of
frozen terror she feared she might have caught the attention
of that face up there in the fog. She clung to the window,
feeling everything growing faraway and dim, and stared
straight across the court. She was being watched. Intently.
By the young man in the seventh-floor window across from
her own apartment. Steadily, he was looking at her. Through
the strange fog with its burning eyes feasting on the sight
below, he was staring at her.
As she felt herself blacking out, in the moment before unconsciousness, the thought flickered and fled that there was something terribly familiar about his face.
It rained the next day. East 52nd Street was slick and shining with the oil rainbows. The rain washed the dog turds into the gutters and nudged them down and down to the catch-basin openings. People bent against the slanting rain, hidden
beneath umbrellas, looking like enormous, scurrying black
mushrooms. Beth went out to get the newspapers after the
police had come and gone.
The news reports dwelled with loving emphasis on the
twenty-six tenants of the building who had watched in cold
interest as Leona Ciarelli, 37, of 455 Fort Washington Ave
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183
nue, Manhattan, had been systematically stabbed to death by
Burton H. Wells, 41, an unemployed electrician, who had
been subsequently shot to death by two off-duty police officers when he burst into Michael’s Pub on 55th Street, covered with blood and brandishing a knife that authorities later identified as the murder weapon.
She had thrown up twice that day. Her stomach seemed
incapable of retaining anything solid, and the taste of bile lay
along the back of her tongue. She could not blot the scenes
of the night before from her mind; she re-ran them again and
again, every movement of that reaper arm playing over and
over as though on a short loop of memory. The woman’s head
thrown back for silent screams. The blood. Those eyes in the
fog.
She was drawn again and again to the window, to stare
down into the courtyard and the street. She tried to superimpose ov
er the bleak Manhattan concrete the view from her window in Swann House at Bennington: the little yard and
another white, frame dormitory; the fantastic apple trees; and
from the other window the rolling hills and gorgeous Vermont countryside; her memory skittered through the change of seasons. But there was always concrete and the rain-slick
streets; the rain on the pavement was black and shiny as
blood.
She tried to work, rolling up the tambour closure of the
old rolltop desk she had bought on Lexington Avenue and
hunching over the graph sheets of choreographer’s charts. But
Labanotation was merely a Jackson Pollock jumble of arcane
hieroglyphics to her today, instead of the careful representation of eurhythmies she had studied four years to perfect.
And before that, Farmington.
The phone rang. It was the secretary from the Taylor Dance
Company, asking when she would be free. She had to beg
off. She looked at her hand, lying on the graph sheets of
figures Laban had devised, and she saw her fingers trembling.
She had to beg off. Then she called Guzman at the Downtown
Ballet Company, to tell him she would be late with the charts.
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Harlan Ellison
“ My God, lady, I have ten dancers sitting around in a
rehearsal hall getting their leotards sweaty! What do you expect me to do?”
She explained what had happened the night before. And
as she told him, she realized die newspapers had been justified in holding that tone against the twenty-six witnesses to the death of Leona Ciarelli. Paschal Guzman listened, and
when he spoke again, his voice was several octaves lower,
and he spoke more slowly. He said he understood and she
could take a little longer to prepare the charts. But there was
a distance in his voice, and he hung up while she was thanking him.
She dressed in an argyle sweater vest in shades of dark
purple, and a pair of fitted khaki gabardine trousers. She had
to go out, to walk around. To do what? 1b think about other
things. As she pulled on the Fred Braun chunky heels, she
idly wondered if that heavy silver bracelet was still in the
window of Georg Jensen’s. In the elevator, the young man
from the window across the courtyard stared at her. Beth felt
her body begin to tremble again. She went deep into the
comer of the box when he entered behind her.
Between the fifth and fourth floors, he hit the o ff switch
and the elevator jerked to a halt.
Beth stared at him and he smiled innocently.
“ Hi. My name’s Gleeson, Ray Gleeson, I ’m in 714.”
She wanted to demand he turn the elevator back on, by
what right did he presume to do such a thing, what did he
mean by this, turn it on at once or suffer the consequences.
That was what she wanted to do. Instead, from the same
place she had heard the glibbering laughter the night before,
she heard her voice, much smaller and much less possessed
than she had trained it to be, saying, “ Beth O ’Neill, I live
in 701.”
The thing about it, was that the elevator was stopped. And
she was frightened. But he leaned against the paneled wall,
very well dressed, shoes polished, hair combed and probably
blown dry with a hand (fryer, and he talked to her as if they
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185
were across a table at L’Argenteuil. “ You just moved in,
huh?”
“ About two months ago.”
‘ ‘Where did you go to school? Bennington or Sarah Lawrence?”
“ Bennington. How did you know?”
He laughed, and it was a nice laugh. “ I ’m an editor at a
religious book publisher; every year we get half a dozen Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Smith girls. They come hopping in like grasshoppers, ready to revolutionize the publishing
industry.”
“ What’s wrong with that? You sound like you don’t care
for them.”
“ Oh, I love them, they’re marvelous. They think they know
how to write better than the authors we publish. Had one
darlin’ little item who was given galleys of three books to
proof, and she rewrote all three. I think she’s working as a
table-swabber in a Horn & Hardart’s now.”
She didn’t reply to that. She would have pegged him as an
anti-feminist, ordinarily, if it had been anyone else speaking.
But the eyes. There was something terribly familiar about his
face. She was enjoying the conversation; she rather liked him.
“ What’s the nearest big city to Bennington?”
“ Albany, New York. About sixty miles.”
“ How long does it take to drive there?”
“ From Bennington? About an hour and a half.”
“ Must be a nice drive, that Vermont country, really pretty.
They went coed, I understand. How’s that working out?”
“ I don’t know, really.”
“ You don’t know?”
“ It happened around the time I was graduating.”
“ What did you major in?”
“ I was a dance major, specializing in Labanotation. That’s
the way you write choreography.”
“ It’s all electives, I gather. You don’t have to take anything
required, like sciences, for example.” He didn’t change tone
as he said, “ That was a terrible thing last night. I saw you
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Harlan Ellison
watching. I guess a lot of us were watching. It was a really
terrible thing.”
She nodded dumbly. Fear came back.
“ I understand the cops got him. Some nut, they don’t even
know why he killed her, or why he went charging into that
bar. It was really an awful thing. I ’d very much like to have
dinner with you one night soon, if you’re not attached.”
“ That would be all right.”
‘‘Maybe Wednesday. There’s an Argentinian place I know.
You might like it.”
‘‘That would be all right.”
‘‘Why don’t you turn on the elevator, and we can go,” he
said, and smiled again. She did it, wondering why she had
stopped the elevator in the first place..
On her third date with him, they had their first fight. It was
at a party thrown by a director of television commercials. He
lived on the ninth floor of their building. He had just done a
series of spots for Sesame Street (the letters “ U ” for Underpass, “ T” for Tbnnel, lowercase “ b ” for boats, *‘c ” for cars; the numbers 1 to 6 and the numbers 1 to 20; the words
light and dark) and was celebrating his move from the arena
of commercial tawdriness (and its attendant $75,000 a year)
to the sweet fields of educational programming (and its accompanying descent into low-pay respectability). There was a logic in his joy Beth could not quite understand, and
when she talked with him about it, in a far comer of the
kitchen, his arguments didn’t seem to parse. But he seemed
happy, and his girlfriend, a long-legged ex-model from Philadelphia, continued to drift to him and away from him, like some exquisite undersea plant, touching his hair and kissing
his neck, murmuring words of pride and barely submerged
sexuality. Beth found it bewildering, though the celebrants
were all bright and lively.
In the living room, Ray was sitting on the arm of the sofa,
hustling a stewardess named Luanne. Beth could tell he was
hustling; he was trying to look casual. When he wasn’t hus
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187
tling, he was always intense, about everything. She decided
to ignore it, and wandered around the apartment, sipping at
a Tanqueray and tonic.
There were framed prints of abstract shapes clipped from
a calendar printed in Germany. They were in metal Bonniers
frames.
In the dining room a huge door from a demolished building
somewhere in the city had been handsomely stripped, teaked
and refinished. It was now the dinner table.
A Lightolier fixture attached to the wall over the bed swung
out, levered up and down, tipped, and its burnished globe-
head revolved a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
She was standing in the bedroom, looking out the window,
when she realized this had been one of the rooms in which
light had gone on, gone off; one of the rooms that had contained a silent watcher at the death of Leona Ciarelli.
When she returned to the living room, she looked around
more carefully. With only three or four exceptions—the stewardess, a young married couple from the second floor, a stockbroker from Hemphill, Noyes —everyone at the party had
been a witness to the slaying.
“ I ’d like to go,” she told him.
“ Why, aren’t you having a good time?” asked the stewardess, a mocking smile crossing her perfect little face.
“ Like all Bennington ladies,” Ray said, answering for
Beth, “ she is enjoying herself most by not enjoying herself
at all. It’s a trait of the anal retentive. Being here in someone
else’s apartment, she can’t empty ashtrays or rewind the toilet
paper roll so it doesn’t hang a tongue, and being tightassed,
her nature demands we go.
“ All right, Beth, let’s say our goodbyes and take off. The
Phantom Rectum strikes again.”
She slapped him and the stewardess’s eyes widened. But
the smile remained frozen where it had appeared.
He grabbed her wrist before she could do it again. “ Gar-
banzo beans, baby,” he said, holding her wrist tighter than
necessary.