Deathbird Stories

by Harlan Ellison

I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER ASK. I’M THE RIGHT WOMAN FOR YOU. GOD KNOWS YOU’VE HAD A CRUMMY TIME OF IT, AND I’M SENT TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR YOU. IT’S THE REAL LOVE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR, ROGER.

  “Where are you?”

  RIGHT HERE. IN THE LIGHTS.

  “I’m going to be sick.”

  RIGHT HERE, COME ON, ROGER, JUST FIRM UP NOW!

  “Haven’t I suffered enough already?”

  ROGER, SELF-PITY JUST WON’T GET IT. IT’S TRUE YOU’VE SUFFERED, AND THAT’S WHY YOU WIN THE LOTTERY OF LOVE WITH ME, BUT YOU’VE GOT TO STOP BEING MAUDLIN ABOUT IT.

  “Not only am I a put-together thing, a righteous freak, but now I’m going completely insane.”

  ROGER, WILL YOU HAVE A LITTLE TRUST, FOR GOD’S SAKE? I’M PART OF THE REPAYMENT FOR WHAT’S HAPPENED TO YOU. ALL IT TAKES IS BELIEF AND A COUPLE OF STEPS.

  He felt his right hand groping in the empty air around his right side–while his left hand sang “Pace, Pace, Mio Dio,” from La Forza del Destino–and he came up with an aquamarine Italian marble egg.

  “Listen, I think you’re terrific,” Roger said, playing for time.

  YOU’RE PLAYING FOR TIME.

  She’s on to me, Roger thought desperately. He flung the Italian marble egg at the neon wall sculptures, it struck, geysers of sparks erupted, a curtain caught fire, a woman’s dress went up in a puff of Gucci, people began shrieking, the ultraviolet dissipated in an instant, everything returned to normal, Roger was scared out of his mind…and he ran out of there as fast as he could.

  His finger had grown hoarse, and finally shut up.

  Roger called in sick and begged off work for a few days. They were understanding, but the big Labor Day weekend was coming up, they’d laid in a large stock of Sicilian switchblades and copies of the steamier works of Akbar del Piombo and Anonymous in the Travelers’ Companion series, and they expected him–neon coil, weird eye and metal finger included–on the ready line when the marks, kadodies and reubens fresh from Michigan’s Ionia State Fair descended on sinful Times Square. Roger mumbled various okays and went for extended walks along the night-hot Hudson River Drive.

  The big Spry sign blinking across the Hudson from Jersey caught his eye.

  YOU ARE THE DAMNEDEST, MOST OBSTINATE HUMAN BEING I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED, said the Spry sign, forming words it was clearly incapable of forming.

  Roger began running…blindly along the break-water. The sign gave him no peace. It continued jabbering at him. ROGER! FOR CRINE OUT LOUD, ROGER, WILL YOU STOP JUST A MOMENT AND LISTEN TO ME!

  He ran up West 114th Street, stumbling over a gentleman of the evening who was lying half in, half out of the doorway of an apartment building. Roger excused himself and would have waited for a response to make sure he had not damaged the fellow, but the man had somehow gotten his tongue stuck deep inside the neck of an empty Boone’s Farm Apple Wine bottle, and speech was beyond him.

  Roger grabbed an IRT express downtown, and sitting in the clattering hell of the subway car he tried to ignore the overhead fluorescents that babbled I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOUR SOUL, YOU CLOWN. I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU. ARE YOU BEING ASSAULTED BY LOVE EVERY DAY SO MUCH YOU CAN TURN DOWN A TERRIFIC OFFER LIKE THIS?

  Roger closed his eyes, It didn’t help. His chest coil was obviously activated and it was pulsing in time with the overheads. He opened his eyes and with a sudden weariness that had swept over him like a sea of sand he opened his mouth and gave a primal scream. No one in the subway car noticed.

  He got out on Times Square and, of course, she was everywhere. In the signs of the sea food restaurant on the other side of 42nd Street, in the marquees of the skin flick theaters, in the neon of the pornobook shops, in every flashing, bubbling, flickering, hallucinating light that made up the visual pollution by which Times Square proclaimed its wares and snagged its victims.

  “Okay!” he howled, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as the mobs split around him. “Okay! I quit! I’ve had enough! I give up! Name it, just name it, I’ll do it! I’ve had the course! I’m only human and I’ve had it!”

  TERRIFIC! AT LONG LAST! said the neon come-ons. THERE’S A LADDER OVER THERE BY THAT MOVIE, SEE IT?

  Roger looked and, yes, there was a twenty-foot ladder up under the marquee of a movie house playing a double bill comprising Leather Lovers and Rebecca of Sinnybrook Farm. “Now what?” Roger said, softly.

  I CAN’T HEAR YOU, the neon replied.

  “I said: What the hell now, you goddam pain in the ass!” he screamed, at the highest decibel count he had ever achieved, his throat going raw. People shied away.

  CLIMB UP THE LADDER, YOU SWEET THING.

  “Oh, God,” Roger mumbled, “this is just terrible; just terrible. I hate this a lot.”

  But he climbed the ladder, just as the assistant manager of the theater–a zit-laden young man in a soiled tuxedo and argyle socks–emerged from the lobby carrying the heavy boxes of marquee letters to change the bill. “Hey! Hey, you! Weirdo, what the gahdam flop hell you think you’re doin’? Get offa there you freako-pervo-devo!”

  Roger went up and up, and when he was standing at the top he was on a level with the neon theater name. It said, very suddenly, TAKE ME! TAKE ME NOW!

  And for no particular reason Roger could name, he reached out with both hands, swung himself onto the marquee, and–ripping open his shirt so his coil was exposed–he slammed himself against the love-message.

  There was a blinding flash of light that pulsed and continued flashing like endless novae, over and over and over resembling–said a narcotics squad cop who had worked on the ski patrol at Stowe, Vermont–who happened to be emerging from the theater handcuffed to two Queens junkies he’d caught scoring in the highest row of the balcony–resembling nothing so much as the sunlight glassflashing off the thin crust of ice-over-powder at the summit of a snow-covered mountain.

  Someone else said it was the exact color of tuna fish salad.

  But when the light faded, Roger Charna was gone, all save the little finger of his left hand, lying on the sidewalk humming a medley of tunes from The Student Prince, Blossom Time and The Desert Song, a very peculiar eyeball that seemed to have developed a terrible case of glaucoma, and a dollar and thirty-five cents in change.

  Someone else said it was the exact color of the cardboard they used to reinforce his shirts when they came from the Chinese hand laundry.

  And one thing more.

  Every neon sign in Times Square had a new color added to its spectrum. It seemed to reside somewhere between silver and orange, bled off into the ultraviolet and the infrared at one and the same time, had tinges of vermilion at the top and jade at the bottom, and resembled no other color ever seen by human eyes, The color sounded like a Louisville Slugger connecting solidly with a hardball in that special certain way that produces a line drive high into the right center bleachers. It smelled like a forest of silver pines just after the rain, with scents of camomile, juniper, melissa and mountain gentian thrown in. It felt like the flesh of a three-week-old baby’s instep. It tasted like lithograph ink, but there are people who like the taste of lithograph ink.

  Someone said it was the exact color of caring.

  On another plane of existence, where things were vastly different from those in the world that had given Roger Charna his neon chest spiral, observations were made and the new color was seen,

  “There it is,” they said.

  “Yep, there it is,” they said.

  “Took them long enough,” they said.

  “Well, now that they’re ready we can go and show them how to do it,” they said.

  “They’re going to like this,” they said.

  “A lot,” they said.

  And they set out immediately, and it took no time at all to get there, and when they arrived they changed everything and everyone enjoyed it a lot.

  And ever
yone said the angels were the exact color of charna, which wasn’t a bad name for it at all.

  Have you ever noticed: the most vocal superpatriots are the old men who send young men off to die. Well, it might just be that the heaviest reverential act when worshipping the god of war is to be the biggest mutherin traitor of them all. Check Spiro, I think he’s having a seizure.

  Basilisk

  What though the Moor the basilisk has slain

  And pinned him lifeless to the sandy plain,

  Up through the spear the subtle venom flies,

  The hand imbibes it, and the victor dies.

  –Lucan: Pharsalia (Marcus Annaeus Lacanus, A.D. 39-65)

  Returning from a night patrol beyond the perimeter of the firebase, Lance Corporal Vernon Lestig fell into a trail trap set by hostiles. He was bringing up the rear, covering the patrol’s withdrawal from recently over-run sector eight, when he fell too far behind and lost the bush track. Though he had no way of knowing he was paralleling the patrol’s trail, thirty yards off their left flank, he kept moving forward hoping to intersect them. He did not see the pungi stakes set at cruel angles, frosted with poison, tilted for top-point efficiency, sharpened to infinity.

  Two set close together penetrated the barricade of his boot; the first piercing the arch and his weight driving it up and out to emerge just below the anklebone, still inside the boot; the other ripping through the sole and splintering against the fibula above the heel, without breaking the skin.

  Every circuit shorted out, every light bulb blew, every vacuum imploded, snakes shed their skins, wagon wheels creaked, plate-glass windows shattered, dentist drills ratcheted across nerve ends, vomit burned tracks up through throats, hymens were torn, fingernails bent double dragged down blackboards, water came to a boil; lava. Nova pain. Lestig’s heart stopped, lubbed, began again, stuttered; his brain went dead refusing to accept the load; all senses came to full stop; he staggered sidewise with his untouched left foot, pulling one of the pungi stakes out of the ground, and was unconscious even during the single movement; and fainted, simply directly fainted with the pain.

  This was happening: great black gap-mawed beast padding through outer darkness toward him. On a horizonless journey through myth, coming toward the moment before the piercing of flesh. Lizard dragon beast with eyes of oil-slick pools, ultraviolet death colors smoking in their depths. Corded silk-flowing muscles sliding beneath the black hairless hide, trained sprinter from a lost land, smoothest movements of choreographed power. The never-sleeping guardian of the faith, now gentlestepping down through mists of potent barriers erected to separate men from their masters.

  In that moment before boot touched the bamboo spike, the basilisk passed through the final veils of confounding time and space and dimension and thought, to assume palpable shape in the forest world of Vernon Lestig. And in the translation was changed, altered wonderfully. The black, thick and oily hide of the death-breath dragon beast shimmered, heat lightning across flat prairie land, golden flashes seen spattering beyond mountain peaks, and the great creature was a thousand colored. Green diamonds burned up from the skin of the basilisk, the deadly million eyes of a nameless god. Rubies gorged with the water-thin blood of insects sealed in amber from the dawn of time pulsed there. Golden jewels changing from instant to instant, shape and scent and hue…they were there is the tapestry mosaic of the skin picture. A delicate, subtle, gaudy flashmaze kaleidoscope of flesh, taut over massive muscled threats.

  The basilisk was in the world.

  And Lestig had yet to experience his pain.

  The creature lifted a satin-padded paw and laid it against the points of the pungi stakes. Slowly, the basilisk relaxed and the stakes pierced the rough sensitive blackmoon shapes of the pads. Dark, steaming serum flowed down over the stakes, mingling with the Oriental poison. The basilisk withdrew its paw and the twin wounds healed in an instant, closed over and were gone.

  Were gone. Bunching of muscles, a leap into air, a cauldron roiling of dark air, and the basilisk sprang up into nothing and was gone. Was gone.

  As the moment came to an exhalation of end, and Vernon Lestig walked onto the pungi stakes.

  It is a well-known fact that one whose blood slakes the thirst of the vrykolakas, the vampire, himself becomes one of the drinkers of darkness, becomes a celebrant of the master deity, becomes himself possessed of the powers of the disciples of that deity.

  The basilisk had not come from the vampires, nor were his powers those of the blood drinkers. It was not by chance that the basilisk’s master had sent him to recruit Lance Corporal Vernon Lestig. There is an order to the darkside universe.

  He fought consciousness, as if on some cellular level he knew what pain awaited him with the return of his senses. But the red tide washed higher, swallowed more and more of his deliquescent body, and finally the pain thundered in from the blood-sea, broke in a long, curling comber and coenesthesia was upon him totally. He screamed and the scream went on and on for a long time, till they came back to him and gave him an injection of something that thinned the pain, and he lost contact with the chaos that had been his right foot.

  When he came back again, it was dark and at first he thought it was night; but when he opened his eyes it was still dark. His right foot itched mercilessly. He went back to sleep, no coma, sleep.

  When he came back again, it was still night and he opened his eyes and he realized he was blind. He felt straw under his left hand and knew he was on a pallet and knew he had been captured; and then he started to cry because he knew, without even reaching down to find out, that they had amputated his foot. Perhaps his entire leg. He cried about not being able to run down in the car for a pint of half-and-half just before dinner; he cried about not being able to go out to a movie without people trying not to see what had happened to him; he cried about Teresa and what she would have to decide now; he cried about the way clothes would look on him; he cried about the things he would have to say every time; he cried about shoes; and so many other things. He cursed his parents and his patrol and the hostiles and the men who had sent him here and he wanted, wished, prayed desperately that any one of them could change places with him. And when he was long finished crying, and simply wanted to die, they came for him, and took him to a hooch where they began questioning him. In the night. The night he carried with him.

  They were an ancient people, with a heritage of enslavement, and so for them anguish had less meaning than the thinnest whisper of crimson cloud high above a desert planet of the farthest star in the sky. But they knew the uses to which anguish could be put, and for them there was no evil in doing so: for a people with a heritage of enslavement, evil is a concept of those who forged the shackles, not those who wore them. In the name of freedom, no monstrousness is too great.

  So they tortured Lestig, and he told them what they wanted to know. Every scrap of information he knew. Locations and movements and plans and defenses and the troop strength and the sophistication of armaments and the nature of his mission and rumors he’d picked up and his name and his rank and every serial number he could think of, and the street address of his home in Kansas, and the sequence of his driver’s license, and his gas credit card number and the telephone number of Teresa. He told them everything.

  As if it were a reward for having held nothing back, a gummed gold star placed beside his chalked name on a blackboard in a kindergarten schoolroom, his eyesight began to come back slightly. Flickering, through a haze of gray; just enough light permitted through to show him shapes, the change from daylight to darkness; and it grew stronger, till he could actually see for whole minutes at a time…then blindness again. His sight came and went, and when they realized he could see them, they resumed the interrogations on a more strenuous level. But he had nothing left to tell; he had emptied himself.

  But they kept at him. They threatened to hammer bamboo slivers into his damaged eyeballs. They hung h
im up on a shoulder-high wooden wall, his arms behind him, circulation cut off, weight pulling the arms from their shoulder sockets, and they beat him across the belly with lengths of bamboo, with bojitsu sticks. He could not even cry any more. They had given him no food and no water and he could not manufacture tears. But his breath came in deep, husking spasms from his chest, and one of the interrogators made the mistake of stepping forward to grab Lestig’s head by the hair, yanking it up, leaning in close to ask another question, and Lestig–falling falling–exhaled deeply, struggling to live; and there was that breath, and a terrible thing happened.

  When the reconnaissance patrol from the firebase actualized control of the hostile command position, when the Huey choppers dropped into the clearing, they advised Supermart HQ that every hostile but one in the immediate area was dead, that a Marine Lance Corporal named Lestig, Vernon C. 526-90-5416, had been found lying unconscious on the dirt floor of a hooch containing the bodies of nine enemy officers who had died horribly, most peculiarly, sickeningly, you’ve gotta see what this place looks like, HQ, jesus you ain’t gonna believe what it smells like in here, you gotta see what these slopes look like, it musta been some terrible disease that could of done this kinda thing to ‘em, the new Lieutenant got really sick an’ puked and what do you want us to do with the one guy that crawled off into the bushes before it got him, his face is melting, and the troops’re scared shitless and…

  And they pulled the recon group out immediately and sent in the Intelligence section, who sealed the area with Top Security, and they found out from the one with the rotting face–just before he died–that Lestig had talked, and they medevacked Lestig back to a field hospital and then to Saigon and then to Tokyo and then to San Diego and they decided to court-martial him for treason and conspiring with the enemy, and the case made the papers big, and the court-martial was held behind closed doors and after a long time Lestig emerged with an honorable and they paid him off for the loss of his foot and the blindness and he went back to the hospital for eleven months and in a way regained his sight, though he had to wear smoked glasses.