In that Angel of Truth, Blue Fairy, Delphic Oracle clarity Shelly understood exactly how dangerous Stag really was. Because Stag owned him, had always owned a piece of him, the best piece of him. He despised what he had done, what he had become in Stag’s service, because he was no better than the monster he had served.
His mouth stopped watering at the potentiality of success greater than before. His mouth went dry.
He gulped at the Tornado that had sat unnoticed on the table, but the dryness in his mouth remained. He sat there ashamed to his soul, frightened of his thoughts and desires, petrified with horror at how close he had come, how easy it would have been, how much he wanted it.
Stag was that part of him that had succeeded, that had transcended life and capacity and insecurity and even tragedy and the hot blood of his own destiny. Stag was that part of the failure named Morgenstern that could not be intimidated. And he wanted that Mr. Hyde to rule, to subjugate the rabble.
If he could have cried, if he’d known where to search inside himself for the purity that would permit tears, he would have dropped his face onto his forearms and cried like a coward.
But he was trapped inside Shelly Morgenstern and didn’t know where to find the key to let himself out of solitary, to find that purity that permits absolution.
And Stag was riding out the end of his song. He chorded a finish and left the small stage with the audience of drunks and slatterns and boastful bullies and insipid tourists banging glasses, tapping swizzle sticks, clapping hands, whistling with little fingers in the corners of mouths, cheering and hooting and begging to be allowed to rejoin the great meat gestalt again!
Stag had intended a demonstration. He had provided the parting of the Red Sea during the Second Coming as a prelude to The Rapture and Armageddon.
Stag plowed through the hands trying to touch and congratulate him and made it to Shelly’s table. He leaned the Gibson against the wall and sat down. Looking smug. Stag ruled. He hunched toward Shelly and the smile of power, of satisfaction was there, just the way it had been so long ago. He wasn’t a shadow, nervous, unsure, unable to gain the right feeling for the situation. Stag ruled. He had done the one thing in this life he was able to do better than anyone else, and now he wanted to throw it at Shelly.
Just as he had, almost ten years before, in a hotel room in Louisville, Kentucky. He was older; he was wearier; but he was still Stag Preston.
“Well…?” He grinned imperiously. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Shelly smiled and felt his gut constricting; the kid was going to say it. Don’t say it. Please, don’t say it, I may not be strong enough, it’s been a hard fight, I don’t want to reenter that arena. I’m not strong enough to fight them off any more. The animals still prowl, they just don’t like my brand of flesh. Please…
“You gonna help me, Shelly?”
He had asked, was asking again:
“You gonna help me get outta here, get back on the track? We can make a mint, Shel baby. I know I got it again. I’ve been workin’ the toilets for about eight months now, just seeing if I could put myself in shape, and I’m ready. I’m really ready. Whaddaya think?”
Answering was difficult, he was so frightened. It would be so easy. So terrifyingly easy. Was this the way the bombardier had felt as he sighted on Hiroshima in his Norden, got ready to send that first hell bomb on its way? Was this the feeling:
Chilled clean through.
Empty of everything but fear.
Unable to answer but trapped by eyes dark as pencil points. Was this the way it felt to know you could destroy the world with the flick of a finger?
He heard himself talking…
“Listen, kid, I think you’ve got it better than before. Sure, I’ll give you that break, Stag. I’ve got to make it now, but I won’t leave town till I talk to you again. You just wait, kid, you just wait…”
You just hold your breath.
You just sit and stare.
You just keep cool, I’ll be back.
And somehow, he was getting out of there. Somehow he was getting out of the line of those two radiating beams of black light from Stag Preston’s eyes. Somehow he was stumbling over chairs in his rush, and ducking under the velvet cord before Mario could unhook it. Somehow he was out into the cool and humid and sweaty neoned street, striding quickly away and around a corner and down a block and around two more fast corners in case he was being followed for more words, more glances, more pressure.
Finally, on a side street in New Orleans, down in an eddy in the swamp of life, Shelly Morgenstern stopped, and leaned against a building, and drew in breath raggedly. He pulled out a cigarette and his lighter, and joined them the way they had been intended.
He moved away from the building, under a street light, alone in the darkness surrounding that baleful spot of brilliance, and he pulled at the cigarette. It had not been as clean and neat and finished as he had thought. Life wasn’t like that. You ran into people again. You saw them straight up, singing, healed, the eyes dark and the hollows in the cheeks, and you knew they weren’t finished; that with the right touch, with the shove you could give them, with the power you could put in their hands, you could turn them on again, like a robot, ready to tear into the scene and start gnawing at people’s throats.
It could be done.
The power, the way, the method was there. If you wanted to do it.
Shelly Morgenstern stared up at the night sky of New Orleans, this last whirling eddy in the swamp that Stag Preston had made of his life, and the lives of too many others. Too many. And Shelly Morgenstern came to a very bitter, very brutal, very simple conclusion:
There are those people in this world who were born for evil. They never bring any real happiness to anyone; they can only cause misery, heartache and trouble. The Hitlers, the Capones, the little people with a touch of rot about them. Everyone knows someone like that. But few of them have any range and power; they’re limited. What if they get loose, gain status?
He drew deeply on his cigarette, and the glowing tip of it was like Stag Preston, back in the sleazy strip joint, glowing, waiting to be thrown into dry brush, to start the fire all over again, to burn out good ground and good crop and good timber. It was that easy.
He realized, quite clearly, that just as once before, when he had turned Stag Preston loose on the world, he was perhaps the only person who had the power to do it again. Few people would listen to a scarred guy singing in a low dive, and the chance of anyone with influence crossing the singer’s path again…well, it could happen, but that was art, fiction, not life. No. Stag was here to stay, unless…unless Shelly set him loose again.
All it would take would be that one little favor, that one little push, that one little nudge and break.
That’s all it would take.
“Sure, Stag,” he said to no one at all, “sure, I’ll give you a break. I’ll give us all a break. You can count on it, baby.” He took one last puff on the cigarette—the cigarette seemingly so harmless, like Stag Preston, but capable of cancer—and flipped it into the gutter. It landed with a shower of sparks, and Shelly walked away into the night, looking for a hot bowl of gumbo, leaving the cigarette butt and Stag Preston behind, to sink forever out of sight, each in its own gutter…harmlessly.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1961, 1975, 1982 by Harlan Ellison.
Renewed, © 1989, 2003 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4
976-0429-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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