Stalking the Nightmare (33 page)

Ellison suddenly clapped his hands. “Hey, I’ve got a nifty idea.”

“But is it a peachy idea?”

“It is nifty, peachy, swell and even keen.

“If I had a dime for every clown who has ever come up to me at a cocktail party or a convention or at an autograph session and said, ‘Boy, have I got an idea for a story for
you,’
I’d have just a lotta dimes. So why don’t we invite your loyal cadre of freakos, devos and pervos to call in and offer ideas for stories that I will then attempt to whip into utter greatness?”

Hodel’s eyes sparkled. “How about that, Group Mind? A first, right here on
Hour 25.
Harlan Ellison will collaborate with you on an original idea. All of you who’ve been nurturing the secret belief that you can write, here’s your chance to see what kind of an inventive mind you’ve got.”

“And of course,” Ellison said, “if I sell the stories, IH acknowledge the contribution of the caller.”

“What about the money from the sale?” Hodel asked.

“What about it?” Ellison responded.

“Will you share it?”

“I’m willing to attempt a crazy stunt,” Ellison said. “That doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” He thought a moment. “My philosophy is the same as Robin Hood’s: steal from everybody and keep it all myself.”

In the control booth Burt Handelsman, crack engineer, signalled the lines were lighting up. “Okay, here’s our first call,” Hodel said, hitting one of the buttons on the call director. He threw the switch on the pedestal mike, permitting the caller’s voice to be heard in the booth. “You’re on the air,” he said.

“Hi, this is Joanne Gutreimen. I have an idea for Harlan Ellison.”

“Where are you calling from?” Hodel asked.

“What?”

“I asked where you’re calling from?”

“I have an idea for Harlan Ellison.”

“Yes, I know. But
where are you?”

“I’m here. In Hollywood. Where are you?”

Ellison rolled his eyes. “What’s your idea, Ms. Gutreimen?”

There was silence for a long moment. Hodel looked at Ellison and Ellison looked at Hodel. Both shrugged. Then the woman’s voice came through the speaker again. “I had this idea of … people are always writing about haunted houses … what about a haunted condominium?”

Ellison rolled his eyes. “Fresh, daring, original. Walter Kerr in the New York
Times.”

“What?” the woman said.

“Nothing,” Ellison. He tried rolling his eyes but they were starting to burn from all the activity. “Go on.”

“Well, actually,” she said, “I was thinking about writing this myself … but couldn’t come up with any plot ideas. So I scrapped it. But I
did
get an idea from it for a terrific title.”

“Thrill me,” Ellison said, holding his head.

” ‘Mondo Condo’,” she said.

Hodel smiled. “Well, Harlan, there you go. Your first story collaboration idea tonight. What can you do with it?”

“A high colonic comes immediately to mind,” Ellison said.

“What?” the woman on the speaker said.

“Nothing, nothing!” Ellison shouted. “Let me think a second. Talk to yourselves; I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Hodel began to whistle. He was a round little man with a kind face. For years he had worn eyeglasses hewn from the bottoms of Moet champagne jeroboams, but upon the accidental discovery that he was considered a sex object, he had been fitted with contact lenses. Even so, even with the naked teddybearness of his soft brown eyes revealed, no one called him Michael.

“Okay, how about this,” Ellison said, interrupting Hodel’s whistling of Johann Friedrich Fasch’s
Concerto in C Major for Bassoon, Strings and Continuo,
“how about this is a recently-converted condo that was originally an apartment house built in the late 1920’s. The custodian or janitor was a vicious creep who’d never do any work for the tenants. Everybody hated him. One of those kind of tormented devils Lovecraft was always writing about. And the only pleasure he got was from strangling cats. Maybe the building had a lot of old ladies on welfare living there, see, and all of them had cats, the way old ladies on welfare always do. And every week some poor old lady’s tabby would disappear. And what was happening was that this terrible janitor was snatching them, bashing their heads against walls, drowning them, strangling them, tossing them into the furnace …”

Hodel wrinkled up his face. “Yuccch.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ellison said cheerily, “it’s a healthier occupation than cheating on your income tax.

“Anyhow, twenty years before, the janitor mysteriously disappeared. Not a trace was found of him, see. But now this expensive condo is being haunted by the sounds from the walls, a la Lovecraft. Ghastly sounds. Hideous sounds. The sounds of the ghost of the janitor being torn to shreds over and over by the ghosts of these demon cats he buried in the walls and basement of the building.”

There was silence at both ends of the radio link.

“How’s that grab ya?” Ellison asked.

“You are a very disturbed person,” Joanne Gutreimen said softly. Then she hung up.

“Go try to please people,” Ellison said.

Hodel was staring at him with considerable distaste. “You don’t like cats, I gather.”

“I don’t even like the cats you
haven’t
gathered,” Ellison said. He lit his pipe and puffed deeply. Hodel rolled his eyes and punched up another call. “You’re on the air,” he said.

“Hi, Harlan,” a man said. “This is Mike Taylor. My idea is an old woman with a sharpened spoon and hypnotic powers who steals the eyes from men and women for their vision.”

Ellison was silent for a moment. Hodel waited expectantly. There was the intimation of eye-rolling and head-holding.

“I already wrote that one,” Ellison said. “Sort of. It was called ‘Seeing’ and you can find it in my book, STRANGE WINE. It’s about these people who have mutated eyes and they can see special visions, the outline of a person’s future, all sorts of things. I called them ‘forever eyes’ and the story is about a bootleg operation that steals people’s ‘forever eyes.’”

“Oh,” Mike Taylor said. “Okay, then forget it. But if you were going to steal my idea, you should have paid me.”

“I wrote it in 1976. This is 1982 and you just called in with it. How did I steal it if I wrote it before you thought of it?”

Taylor hmmmed for a moment, then said, “Everybody knows how clever you are.”

“Right,” Ellison agreed. “Voodoo. Bye-bye, Mr. Taylor.”

Hodel cut him off and hit another button.

“You’re on the air with
Hour 25
and Harlan Ellison.”

“Hi, Mike; this is Buzz Dixon. Here’s my idea; let’s see what Ellison can do with it”

“Me widdle heart am goin’ pitta-pat,” Ellison said into the microphone.

Dixon cleared his throat and began talking very fast. “Bloodworld is a small, distant, barren planet enveloped in a dense, corrosive, poisonous atmosphere. It’s named for the dark red ‘blood’ that bubbles just below the planet’s outer crust-“

“As opposed to its
inner
crust, I presume?” Ellison said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Go on.”

“Oh, okay. Well, this ‘blood’ is pumped up and refined into Immortaline, a dark black liquid with almost miraculous healing and life-prolonging properties. Immortaline is very, very expensive and is much sought after; for this reason Bloodworld’s location is kept strictly secret”

“Even from its inhabitants,” Hodel said.

Ellison made a tsk-tsking motion at the show’s host. Hodel spread his hands as if to say,
your vicious sense of humor is catching, Ellison.

Buzz Dixon said, “What?”

“Nothing, nothing … go on,” Ellison said, sticking his tongue out at Hodel. In the control booth, Burt Handelsman, crack engineer, was rolling around on the floor.

“Bloodworld, however, is sentient,” Dixon went on. “It’s a living planet with a form of logic vastly different from our own. Not different values, but an entirely different system of thinking and rationalizing. Bloodworld does share some concepts with humans which makes communication theoretically possible. For example, to both humans and Bloodworld, love is the highest emotion. But to Bloodworld, to love is to kill.”

“Is that it?” Ellison said.

“Yeah. What can you turn that into?”

“The police is my first inclination,” Ellison said with a particularly snotty inflection. “But… um … lemme see … uh … okay, how’s this? First of all, we drop that bullshit about ‘to love is to kill.’ Let’s say a multi-planet consortium originating on Earth has planted a colony on Bloodworld to extract the goop that makes Immortaline. And let’s say that they’ve spent years terra-forming the planet so humans can live there. They’ve even brought in some samples of soil from Earth so they can grow trees that will produce enough oxygen to alter the atmosphere. And let’s say that this sentient planet, Bloodworld, has managed to tap into the sentient unconscious possessed by
all
planets, and it’s struck up this sort of colloquy with Earth. And they fall in love.

“And Earth is made aware of Bloodworld’s love, and together they come to despise these crawling, destructive little bugs called human beings that have polluted the Earth and are now bleeding Bloodworld dry, as they have every other planet in the universe, and like a good James M. Cain thriller Bloodworld and Earth, sort of planetary Romeo and Juliet, decide to kill off the human race by altering the structure of Immortaline, so instead of giving eternal life to humans it makes them infertile, thereby programming the death of the species.

“And the tragic kicker is that here’s Bloodworld, way out
here
in an arm of the Trifid Nebula, say, and good old Earth back there in the Milky Way, or wherever the hell we are, and they kill off the human race, but they can never get together. They
are
lovers separated by the universe. How’s that grab you?”

Even Hodel nodded with appreciation. “Gee, that’s okay,” Dixon said.

“Terrific,” Ellison replied. “Thank your mother for the chicken soup.” And Hodel cut him off.

“You’re looking faint,” Hodel said.

“I have an allergic response to lunacy. Makes me break out in the twitches. Takes large infusions of Dickens and Jorge Amado novels to bring me out of it.”

“Would you settle for a Fresca?”

“I’d sooner have a hysterectomy.”

Hodel punched up another call. “You’re on the air with Hodel and Ellison. Be careful, he’s starting to glaze over.”

“Hi, Mike. This is Joyce Muskat.”

“Hi, Joyce,” said Ellison. “Long time, no see. You have an idea?”

“I certainly do. I was listening to you on the subject of cats. And since you’re obviously an aelurophile …”

“Martians are warping your radio reception, Muskat,” Ellison said. “I’m an aeluro
phobe.
I hate the little fuckers.”

“In literary circles, Harlan, we call that irony,” she said gently, responding to the note of hysteria in his voice. “I understood your aversion. That’s why I want you to create a story about a cat that cries undrying tears. It’s a tabby cat. Its name is Thalassa.”

Ellison stared at the wall. After a moment he began to moan. Then he began speaking in tongues.

“I warned you,” Hodel said. “He’s gone over the edge.”

“No, no … I’m fine … just
fine,”
Ellison croaked. “Let
me
think a moment. Undrying tears. That is to say, tears that don’t dry. It’s a tabby cat. A sweet, little, loveable tabby cat. Molasses is its name …”

“Not
molasses
… Thalassa. The Greek personification of the sea,” she said.

“Thalassa. Right. Sorry. My mind seems to be giving way. I can’t thank you enough for this idea, Joyce. You’re a brick.” He closed his eyes, rubbed his temples and thought.

“The silence you hear is Ellison thinking,” Hodel told the audience. “While we’re waiting, let me tell you about my new wife, Nancy.”

From behind closed eyes Ellison murmured, “I’m sure they
live
for the knowledge.”

“My new wife, Nancy,” Hodel began, a thoroughly lachrymose expression suffusing his round little face, “is a woman of sterling qualities …”

“The most sterling of which is that she’s brought her lunacy under control totally, save for having married you. Shut up, Hodel, I’ve got an idea for Muskat’s stupid concept.”

“I’m sure they’re waiting with bated breath.”

“The undrying tears the cat is crying are actually the legendary Waters of Nepenthe, the water of forgetfulness from Greek mythology. The cat is the eternal trustee of the potent waters, turned loose in ancient times to bring release from painful memories to mortals. The animal is thousands of years old. The cat is captured by an unscrupulous sort of person, like Stromboli the puppet master who chained up Pinocchio. He’s going to sell the undrying tears of Nepenthe for exorbitant rates. And, uh, I don’t know how I’d develop it, but in the end the cat would probably find a way to get the Stromboli creep to drink some of the tears, thereby forgetting what the cat is … and it would get away to continue its mission on earth.”