Deathbird Stories

by Harlan Ellison

  But she had tossed her head, defiance, and had entered the shop, leaving him standing in the alley. Niven had followed her, hoping she would turn in an instant, and come out again, and he would find the words. But she had gone deeper into the musky dimness of the shop, and the old prognosticator had begun casting the runes, had begun mixing the herbs and bits of offal and vileness he averred were necessary for truth and brightness in the visions. A bit of wild dog hair. A strip of flesh from the instep of a drowned child. Three drops of menstrual blood from a whole. The circular sucker from the underside of a polyp’s tentacle. Other things. Unspeakable, nameless, foul-smelling, terrible.

  And then, strangely, he had said he would not tell the future of Berta…but of Niven.

  There in the fetid closeness of a shop whose dimensions were lost in dusk, the old Mexican said Niven was a man without belief, without faith, without trust, and so was damned; a man doomed and forsaken. He said all the dark and tongueless things Niven had never been able to say of himself. And Niven, in fury, in frenzy brought on by a hurricane of truth, smashed the old man, swung across the little round table with all the strength in his big body, clubbed the old man, and in the same movement swept the strange mixed ingredients from the filthy table, as Berta screamed–from somewhere far away.

  And in that instant, a silent explosion. A force and impact that had hurled him out of himself. In that timeless, breathless instant Niven had been there/not-there. He had somehow inexplicably been moved elsewhere. In a bowl, in a valley, in a land, in a time or place or somewhere facing a minotaur. A creature of mythology, a creature from the past of man’s fables.

  Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.

  Facing a live minotaur just a moment ago. Facing the creature that had left the world before there had been a name to fit the men that Niven had become. A god without worshippers, this minotaur. In a world that did not believe, facing a man who did not believe.

  And in that instant–like the previous instant of truth–Niven was all the men who had forsaken their gods. Who had allowed the world to tell them they were alone; and believed it. Now he had to face one of the lost gods. A god who now sought revenge on the race of Men who had devised machines that would banish them from the real world.

  Down and down and down into the waters of nowhere Niven plunged, all thoughts simply one thought, all memories crashing and jarring, all merged and melded and impinging upon a dense tapestry of seaweed images.

  His breath seemed to clog in his throat. His stomach bulged with the amount of water he had swallowed, with the pressure on his temples, with the blackness that deluged him behind his eyes. Niven felt memory depart and consciousness at once returning–and leaving. He was coming back from the past to awareness, only to let it slip away finally as he drowned.

  He made feeble swimming motions, overhand movements of arms that had sensation only by recall, not by his own volition. He moved erratically in the water, as thick as gelatin, and his movement toward the bottomless bottom was arrested, He moved up-ward through the water now, and saw a dim light, far ahead and above him.

  An eternity. There. Toward it he struggled, and when he thought it was ended, he reached a ledge. He pulled himself toward it, and the dark water seeped through him till he was limp and dying. Then his head broke water. He was in an underground cavern. He spewed out mouthfuls of warm, evil-tasting water.

  For a very long time he lay half on the ledge, half in the water, till someone came and pulled him up. Niven lay there on his stomach, learning to live again, while the one who had saved him stood silently waiting. Niven tried to get to his feet, and he was helped. He could not see who the man was, though he could feel a long robe in the dimness, and there was a light, a sort of corona that seemed to come dimly from the man. Then together, with the man supporting him, Niven went away from there, and they climbed for a long while between walls of stone, to the world that was outside.

  He stood in the light, and was tired and sad and blinded by things he did not believe. Then the man left him, and as he walked slowly away, Niven recognized the beard and the infinitely sad eyes and the way he was dressed, and even the light.

  And Jesus left him, with a sad smile, and Niven stood alone, for another time that was long, and empty.

  Once, late that night, he thought he heard the bull-ram horn of Odin, ringing across this dim, shadowed land, but he could not be sure. And once he heard a sound of something passing, and when he opened his eyes to look it was a cat-headed woman, and he thought Bast, and she slipped smoothly away into the darkness without saying a word to him. And toward morning there was a light in the sky that seemed to be a burning chariot, Phaëthon the charioteer, Helios’s burning chariot, but that was probably the effects of the drowning, the hunger, the sorrow. He could not be certain.

  So he wandered. And time passed without ever moving. In the land without a name; and his name was Niven; but it was no more important a name than Apollo or Vishnu or Baal, for it was not a name believed in. It was only the name of a man who had not believed. And if gods cannot be called back, when their names have been known, then how can a man whose name was never known be called back?

  For him, his god had been Berta, but he had not given her an opportunity to believe in him. He had prevented her from having faith in him, and so there were no believers for a man named Niven, as there were no true believers for Serapis or Perseus or Mummu.

  Very late the next night, Niven realized he would always, always live in this terrible Coventry where old gods went to die; gods who would never speak to him; and with no hope of return.

  For as he had believed in no god…

  No god believed in him.

  Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson wrote, “Maybe God’s gone away, forgetting His promise He made that day: and we’re lost out here in the stars.” And maybe He/She’s just waiting for the right signal to come back, whaddaya think?

  Neon

  Truly concerned whether or not he would live, the surgeons labored for many hours over Roger Charna. They cryonically removed the pain areas in his anterior hypothalamic nucleus, and froze parts of him to be worked on later. Finally, it seemed they would be successful, and he would live. They bestowed on him three special gifts to this end: a collapsible metal finger, the little finger of the left hand; a vortex spiral of neon tubing in his chest, it glowed bright red when activated; and a right eye that came equipped with sensors that fed informational load from both the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the spectrum.

  He was discharged from the hospital and tried to reestablish the life-pattern he’d known before the accident, but it was useless. Ruth’s family had sent her abroad, and he had the feeling she had been more than anxious to go. She could not have helped seeing the Sunday supplement piece on the operation. His employers at the apartment house had been pleasant, but they made good sense when they said as a doorman he was useless to them. They gave him a month’s termination wages.

  He had no difficulty getting another job, happily enough. The proprietors of a bookstore on Times Square felt he was a marvelous publicity item, and they hired him on the spot. He worked the seven o’clock to three A.M. shift, selling paperbacks and souvenirs to tourists and the theater crowd.

  The first message he had from her was in the lightflesh of the Newsweek sign on the other side of 46th Street. He was sweeping out the front of the bookstore when he looked up and saw ROGER! UP HERE! ROGER! spelled out in the rapidly changing lights. It spasmed and changed and became an advertisement for timely news. He blinked and shook his head. Then he saw the crimson spiral shining through his shirt, flickering on and off. There was a soft cotton candy feeling in his stomach. He swept the cigarette butts and dustballs furiously…out onto the sidewalk and across the sidewalk and into the gutter. He walked back to the bookstore, looking up and over his shoulder only as he stepped through the doorway. The sign was as he had always seen it before.
Nothing strange there.

  At his dinner break, he walked to the papaya stand near the comer of 42nd and Broadway and stood at the counter chatting with Caruso (which was not his name, but because he wanted to become an opera singer and went into the basement of the juice stand and sang arias from Il Trovatore and I Pagliacci, that was the name by which he was known).

  “How do you feel?” Caruso asked him.

  “Oh, I’m okay. I’m a little tired.”

  “You been to the doctor?”

  “No. They said I didn’t need to come around unless I hurt or something seemed wrong.”

  “You got to take care of yourself. You can’t fool around with your health, yeah?” He was genuinely concerned.

  “How’re you?” Roger Charna asked. Caruso wrapped the semi-transparent square of serrated-edged paper around the hot dog and handed the bunned frank to him. Charna reached for the plastic squeeze-bottle of mustard.

  “Couldn’t be better,” Caruso said. He drew off a large papaya juice and slid it across the counter. “I’m into Gilbert & Sullivan. Pirates of Penzance. I hear there’s a big Gilbert & Sullivan revival coming on.”

  Roger Charna ate without making a reply. He felt very sorry for Caruso. When he had first met him, the boy was not quite twenty, working at the stand, high hopes for a singing career. Now he was going to fat, his hair was thinning prematurely, and the dreams were only warm-bed whispers to impress the girls Caruso hustled off Times Square. It would come to nothing. Ten years from now, should Roger come back, he knew Caruso would still be there, singing in the basement, pulling 35¢ slices of pizza (that would probably cost $1.25) from the big Grimaldi oven, filling the sugar jars, carrying cases of Coke syrup downstairs to be stored, the dreams losing their color, gravity pulling it all down.

  Then he realized he might still be on Times Square, ten years from now. The pity backed up in its channel and washed over him.

  The 7-Up sign winked once and began pulsing. His chest spiral picked up the beat. Pain hit him. Roger looked up and the sign was flickering on and off. His chest spiral had changed color, now pulsed deep blue in sync with the 7-Up sign, right through his shirt. The girl on the sign moved smoothly and directly to stare down at him. Her mouth began moving. Roger Charna could not read lips.

  “Caruso.” The counterman turned from reloading the hot dog broiler and smiled. “Huh?” Roger pointed across the street, up at the 7-Up sign. “Take a look over there and tell me what you see.” Caruso moved to the end of the counter and stared up. “What?” Roger pointed to the sign. “The sign, the 7-Up sign.” Caruso looked again. “What am I supposed to see?” Roger sighed and finished his hot dog. “I think I’ll go see the doctor tomorrow morning.”

  “You got to take care of yourself. You been a very sick guy, yeah?”

  Roger nodded and laid out the coins in payment for the dog and papaya. Caruso pushed them back with the heel of his hand. “Iss onna house.” Roger found himself still nodding.

  The coins back in his pants pocket, he walked up Broadway to the bookstore, wishing the New York Times still had its neon newsservice on the island at 42nd Street.

  It might all come clear if whoever was trying to reach him had free access to unlimited language.

  By this time Roger knew either someone was trying to talk to him, or he was going insane. Odds were bad.

  He was invited to a party. He went because they asked him. He paid a dollar at the door: a woman who had her left breast removed for what he found out later were non-carcinogenic reasons, took the money. She was topless; she smiled a great deal. He also discovered, later in the evening, that these people had answered an advertisement in an underground newspaper. It had been headed with a photograph from Tod Browning’s Freaks–pinhead twins joined at the rump. Roger did not feel at ease with them.

  In the group was a man who sought carnal knowledge of blimps. He had been arrested three times for trying to fuck the Goodyear dirigible. Even among his own kind he was looked on with distaste; unable to find the species of sex partners his pathology demanded, he had grown steadily more perverted and had taken to attacking helicopters; the mere mention of an autogyro gave him a noticeable erection.

  He was offered a sloe gin fizz in a pink frosted glass by a young woman who removed her glass eye and sucked on it while discussing the moral imperatives of the sponge boycott in Brooksville, Florida. She rolled the eye around on her tongue and Roger walked away quickly.

  “The dollar was for the spaghetti,” explained a man with a prosthetic arm and a leather cone where his nose should have been. “My wife would have told you about that when she invited you, because you’re a celebrity and we certainly don’t want to charge you, but if we made an exception, well, everyone would want the dollar back. But you can have as much spaghetti as you want.” He pulled the cone forward on its elastic band and scratched at the raw, red scar-tissue beneath. “Actually, I’ll tell you what: come on in the bathroom for a couple of minutes and I can slip the buck back to you, they’ll never know.” Roger slipped sidewise around a bookcase and left the man scratching.

  The room was rather nice, large and airy, filled with kinetic sculptures and found object constructs that covered the walls and dominated the floor space. There were half a hundred light paintings of bent neon tubing and fluorescent designs. They looked expensive. Roger wondered why his dollar was necessary.

  Seven people were seated at the feet of a moon-faced woman perched on a three-legged aluminum stool. The entire left side of her face was blotched with a huge strawberry birthmark. She had a coatimundi on her shoulder; it was nibbling leaves of lettuce she had safety-pinned to her dress like epaulets.

  A man who bore a startling resemblance to a plucked carrion bird snagged Roger’s arm as he moved toward the front door. He stammered hideously. “Uh…uh…uh…” he babbled, till something snapped in his right cheek and he launched into a convoluted diatribe that began with a confession of his having been defrocked as a molecular biologist, veered insanely through a recitation of the man’s affection for Bermuda shorts, and reached a far horizon at which he said, with eyes rolling: “Now everybody doesn’t know this,” and he pulled Roger closer, “but the universe, the entire frigging universe is going to collapse around everyone’s ears in just seventy-two billion years. I smoke a lot.”

  Roger skinned loose, and turning, thumped against a dwarf who had been surreptitiously trying to look up the skirt of a young woman with a harelip. “Excuse me,” Roger said, assisting the dwarf to his feet. He brushed him off and started to move, but the dwarf had thrown both arms around Roger’s leg. “They remaindered me,” the dwarf said, rather pathetically. “Before, I swear before the damned book had a chance, they remaindered me. Can you perceive the pain, the exquisite pain of being carried into Marlboro’s on Third and seeing a stack, a virtual, a veritable, I mean motherGod a phallic Annapurna mountain of copies of the finest, what I mean the sincerest study of the anopheles mosquito ever written. That book was a work of love, excuse me for using the word but I mean to say ardor; and those butchers at Doubleday, those mau-maus, my God, they’re vivisectionists, for Pete’s sake…if he were alive today, Ferdinand de Lesseps would absolutely whirl in his grave.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Roger said, trying to pry his leg loose. The dwarf unwound and sat there looking frayed. Roger smiled self-consciously and moved away. He started back for the door.

  Everything dropped into the ultraviolet.

  The little finger of his left hand began to resonate with the tinny voice of Times Square Caruso hashing out “I’m Called Little Buttercup” as the neon spiral in his chest gave him a shock and began flickering in gradually bloodier shades of crimson. Caruso segued into Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny,” a tune Roger was certain the papaya juice stand attendant had never heard.

  The ultraviolet smelled purple; it sounded like the nine-pound hammers of Chine
se laborers striking the rails of the Union Pacific Railroad; it sprang out as auras and halos and nimbuses around everyone in the room; Roger clutched his chest.

  His eyes rolled up in his head and the images burned there like the braziers of Torquemada’s dungeons. He blinked and his eyes rolled down again bringing with them images as burning bright as the crosses of Ku Klux Klansmen in Selma, Alabama: it was all in his right eye. He feared what lay ahead in the infrared. But that never happened; it was all in the ultraviolet.

  The room burned around the edges, deep purple and a kind of red that he realized–with some embarrassment–matched up only with the red just inside the slit in the head of his penis during his recurring bouts with prostatitis. Every neon sculpture and fluorescent painting in the room was jangling at him. A half a hundred roadsigns from someone who was trying to talk to him. I believe I’m a closet psychotic, he thought, but nothing stopped.

  The neon tubes on the walls writhed with the burning edges of the soft-boiled sun as it bubbled down into the black horizon. They re-formed and slopped color words of pink and vermilion across the airy walls.

  ROGER, YOU’RE MAKING IT MURDER TO GET THROUGH TO YOU.

  He tried running, but all the movement was inside his skin; none of it got to the outside.

  I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU PREFER THE COMPANY OF THESE DISGUSTING PERVERTS. LOOK, I LOVE YOU, THAT’S THE LONG, THE SHORT AND THE COLOR OF IT, ROGER. WHAT SAY?

  His metal little finger was singing the bell song from Lakmé and he hated it. His chest spiral was bubbling and he had the immediate fear his shirt would catch fire. All the women in the room were frozen in place, their hair vibrating like cilia, each strand standing up and away individually, emitting purple sparks like St. Elmo’s fire. The men looked like X-rays of rickets cases.

  “Who are you?” Roger said in a choked voice.