Stalking the Nightmare (2 page)

But even the earliest stories bear the unmistakable mark of Ellison. Take, for example, “Invulnerable,” one of my favorite stories in the present collection—in fact, I guess I’d go a step further (God hates a coward, right?) and say it’s
the
favorite, mostly because of the original way Harlan handles a very old idea—here is Superman and Krypto the Wonder Dog for thinking adults. Exactly how old is the tale? Without the lawyer’s page it’s impossible to tell, but it’s possible to don the old deerstalker hat and make a couple of Sherlock Holmes-type deductions just the same. First, “Invulnerable” was originally published in
Super-Science Fiction,
and the illustration (just a hasty pen-and-ink; you’re not missing a thing) is by Emsh, whose work I haven’t seen in years. So, still wearing the deerstalker hat, I’d guess . , . maybe 1957. How far off am I? Take a look at the lawyer’s page, if you want. If it’s more than five years either way, you’re welcome to a good horselaugh at my expense.*

• Readers of the above-entered praise, seeking in vain for the story “Invulnerable” (published in the April, 1957 issue of
Super-Science Fiction—
you get the Mad Hound of the Moors award for deductive logic, Steve), will be confused, bemused and even dismayed—as will Stephen King—to find the work absent from this book. I suppose some sort of explanation is in order. It goes like so: “Invulnerable” was one of the original selections included in the twenty tales slated for this collection. It was among the tearsheeted stories sent to Steve prior to final editing, so he could write his Foreword in a leisurely fashion. Subsequently, when I went back over the stories and read them more closely, I realized some of the older tales desperately needed extensive revision, updating, smoothing and rethinking. One of these stories was “Invulnerable.” I had forgotten that Steve mentioned it so prominently in his essay. The qualities admired by Steve are definitely present in the story, but the quality embodied in Steve’s remark that “there’s a certain amount of dating” was too great to allow to pass untended. Yet to leach out that dated aspect would have meant virtually writing a new story. I decided not to do it. I started revising the original manuscript, written very early in my career, and realized after three pages that the job was akin to rebuilding an edifice that had been burned to the ground, from bottom up. Instead of doing that, I decided to include a recent story, “Grail,” at twice or three times the length. So Stephen King has whetted your appetite for a “lost” story, one that I may some day rewrite and update completely. But search not for “Invulnerable” in these pages. It ain’t here.

—Harlan Ellison

So there’s a certain amount of dating in the story; it doesn’t just happen to the
best
of us, it happens to
all
of us. And yet, even ‘way back then, in those fabled Old Days when there was such an artist as Emsh and such an organ as
Super-Science Fiction,
we find Harlan Ellison’s true voice—clear in tone, dark in consideration. This was the era when science fiction’s really big guns-guys like Robert A. Heinlein, for instance—were touting space exploration as The Great Panacea for All Mankind, The Last Frontier, and The Solution to Just About Everything. There’s a certain amount of that in “Invulnerable” (but then, why not? I suspect there’s a certain amount of that wistful fairy-tale still in Harlan’s soul, and mine… and maybe in yours, too—read “Saturn, November 11th,” and see how you react), but Harlan also sounds the horn of the skeptic, loud and clear:

Forstner was waiting. He was surrounded by the top brass. The place was acrawl with guards; guards on the guards; and guards to guard the guard’s guards. The same old story. It wasn’t as noble an endeavour as they would have had me believe.

It was an arms race, an attempt for superiority of space before someone else got there…

Yeah, it was an arms race. We all know that … now. But to have said it back in the days when Good Old General Ike was still the top hand in the old Free World Corral (and let’s not forget his chief ramrod, good old Tricky Dick Nixon—I know we’d like to, but maybe we’d better not), when Reddy Kilowatt was supposed to be our friend and nuclear power was going to solve all of our energy problems, back when the only two stated reasons we had for getting Up There was to beat the Russians and to study the sxm’s corona for the International Geophysical Year (which every subscriber to
My Weekly Reader
knew as IGY) … to have had such a dark thought back in those days—and about
us
as well as
them—
well, that was tantamount to treason. It’s a little amazing that Harlan got it into print … unless you know Harlan, of course. And it’s
damn
fine to have it here, preserved between the boards of one of the admirable Phantasia Press books.

But I promised not to chew your food for you, didn’t I?

So I’ll get out of here now. Harlan’s going to come along very soon, grab you by the earlobe, and drag you off to a dozen different worlds. You’re going to be glad you went, I promise you (and you may be a little bit surprised to find you’ve made it back alive).

Just one final comment, and then I promise to go quietly: there’s no significant correlation between the quality of a writer’s writing and the quality of that same writer’s personality. When I tell you that reading Harlan is overwhelming enough to start me writing like the guy—taking his flavor as my mother said milk takes the flavor of whatever you put it next to in the icebox—I am speaking of ability, not personality.

Harlan Ellison’s personality is every bit as striking as his prose style, and this makes the man a pleasure to dine with, to visit, or to entertain. But let’s tell the gut-level, bottom-line truth. Most of you reading this are never going to eat a meal with Harlan, visit him in his home, or be visited by him. He gives of himself in a way that is profligate, almost dangerous—as does any writer worth his salt. He’ll tell you the truth in a manner which is sometimes infuriating (see “The Hour That Stretches” or “!!!The!!Teddy! Crazy! IShow!!!” in this volume, or the classic short story “Croatoan,” where Harlan managed to accomplish the mind-numbing feat of simultaneously pissing off the right-to-lifers and the women’s liberationists) and always entertaining … but don’t confuse these things with the man; do not assume that the work
is
the man. And ask yourself this: why in Christ’s name would you want to make
any
assumption about the man on the basis of his work?

I for one am sick unto death with the cult of personality in America—with the assumption that I should eat Famous Amos cookies because the dude is black and the dude is cool, that I should buy an Andy Warhol print because
People
magazine says he only owns two shirts and two pairs of shoes, that I should go to this movie because
Us
says the director has given up cocaine or that one because Rona Barrett says the director has recently taken it up. I am sick of being told to buy books because their writers are great cocksmen or heroic gays or because Norman Mailer got them sprung from jail.

It doesn’t last, friends and neighbors.

The cult of celebrity is cogitative shit running through the bowel of the intellect.

For whatever it’s worth, Harlan Ellison is a great man: a fast friend, a supportive critic, a ferocious enemy of the false and the foolish, maniacally funny, perhaps insecure (I’m not sure what to make of a man who doesn’t smoke or drink and who still has such crazed acid indigestion), but above all else, brave and true. If I knew I was going to be in a strange city without all the magical
gris-gris
of the late 20th century—Amex Card, MasterCard, Visa Card, Blue Cross card, driver’s license, Avis Wizard Number, Social Security number—and if I further knew I was going to have a severe myocardial infarction, and if I could pick one person in all the world to be with me at the moment I felt the hacksaw blade run down my left arm and the sledgehammer hit me on the left tit, that person would be Harlan Ellison. Not my wife, not my agent, not my editor, my accountant, my lawyer. It would be Harlan, because if anyone would see to it that I was going to have a fighting chance, it would be Harlan. Harlan would go running through hospital corridors with my body in his arms, commandeering stretchers, I.C. support units, O.R
.S,
and of course, World Famous Cardiologists. And if some admitting nurse happened to ask him about my Blue Cross/Blue Shield number, Harlan would probably bite his or her head off with a single chomp.

And do you know what?

It doesn’t matter a damn.

Because time flies, friends.
Tempos
just keeps
fugit-
ing right along. And as 1982 becomes 1992 becomes 2022 becomes 2222, no one is going to care that Ellison once wrote stories in bookshop windows, or drove an old Camaro with cheerful, adroit, scary, leadfooted abandon, or that Stephen King (“Who’s that, Tonto?” “Me don’t know for sure,
Kemo sabe,
but him write just like Harlan Ellison”) once nominated him The Man I Would Most Like to Have With Me in a Strange City When My Ventricles Go on Holiday. Because by 2222, the people reading fiction (always assuming there are any people
left
in 2222, ha-ha) aren’t going to have a
hope
of taking dinner with Harlan, or shooting a rack of eight-ball with hi
m
, or listening to him hold forth on the subject of why Ronald Reagan would be a better President if he 1) lit a firecracker 2) put the firecracker between his teeth, and 3) jammed his head up his ass. By 2222, Harlan will have put on his boogie shoes and shuffled off to whatever Something or Nothing awaits us beyond this Vale of Quarter Pounders.

If the cult of celebrity sucks (and take your Uncle Stevie’s word for it; it does indeed suck that fabled Hairy Bird), it sucks because it’s as disposable as a Handi-Wipe or a Glad Bag or the latest record by the latest Group of the Moment. Andy Warhol ushered in the celebrity era by proclaiming that, in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. But fifteen minutes isn’t a very long time; while any number of you guys and gals out there may have read the science fiction of H.G. Wells or the mysteries of Wilkie Collins, how many of you have read such big bestsellers of thirty plus years ago as
LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, FOREVER AMBER,
or
PEYTON PLACE?

You don’t make it over the long haul on the basis of your personality. Fifteen years after the funny guys and the dynamic guys and the spellbinders croak, nobody remembers who the fuck they were.

Luckily, Harlan Ellison has got it both ways—but don’t concern yourself with the personality. Instead, dig into the collection which follows. There’s something better, more lasting, and
much
more important than personality going on here: you’ve got a good, informed writer working well over a span of years, learning, spinning tales, laying in the needle, doing handstands and splits and pratfalls … entertaining you goddammit! Everything else put aside, is
anything
better than that? I don’t think so. And so I’ll just close by saying it for you:

Thank you, Harlan. Thank you, man.

—Stephen King Bangor, Maine

QUIET LIES THE LOCUST TELLS

She thinks we were all killed when they made the Great Sweep, but I escaped in the mud.

I was there when the first dreams came off the assembly line. I was there when the corrupted visions that had congealed in the vats were pincered up and hosed off and carried down the line to be dropped onto the rolling belts. I was there when the first workmen dropped their faceplates and turned on their welding torches. I was there when they began welding the foul things into their armor, when they began soldering the antennae, bolting on the wheels, pouring in the eye-socket jelly. I was there when they turned the juice on them and I was there when the things began to twitch.

No wonder She wanted all of us dead. Witnesses to their birth, to their construction, to their release into the air—not good. The myrmidons were loosed on the Great Sweep.

I think I am the last one left alive. The last one who can create dreams and not nightmares. I am the locust.

The reversal is sweet. What we always knew to be nightmares— the empty lives, the twisted language, the squeezing of the soul —they now call dreams. What we looked high to see as dreams-silliness, castles in the sky, breathing deeply on windy afternoons-She has commanded be termed nightmares, lies. I am the locust. I tell quiet lies. Called nightmares. That are truly fine dreams.

I swam in the mud till I was the color of the land. And made my escape. Overhead I saw the corrupted things soaring off to spread their rigor of obedience and fear and hatred. For many days I lay there, hidden, turning on my back for the rain, trapping small fish and insects for my food. Finally, when the Great Sweep was done and all my brothers and sisters were dead or locked away in madhouses, I went to the forest.

But like the locust that the Middle Ages saw as the symbol of passion, I will live forever. I will tell my quiet lies and no matter how blindly the people follow their instructions, in every generation there will be a hundred, perhaps a thousand, if chance is with them even a hundred thousand, who will keep the quiet lies alive. To be told late at night to the children. With their bright eyes they will pay attention, and the dreams that have been outlawed, now called nightmares, will take root and spread.