Stalking the Nightmare (35 page)

“You’re on the air, and you’re next to last, so make it good,”

His name was James Haralson, he was calling from Covina, and he said, “A TV evangelist Markus Osgood, awakes one fine morning in his huge bed to discover that during the night something inexplicable had occurred. His consciousness had slipped. Somehow, as he slept next to the lovely and beloved Catherine, his center-of-being, his point of view, his ‘I,’ had shifted from the usual spot in his head and was hovering near his left armpit.”

Ellison mumbled, “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

But Haralson was continuing. “Disconcerting, it was; and disorienting. But he makes do until that afternoon when, during his live, satellite-beamed, ocean-spanning ministry of the air, his consciousness starts slipping again. As he talks to the Orange County studio audience, he realizes his center-of-being is heading for his navel.”

“I’m going mad,” Ellison muttered. “I’ve gone mad; I’ve been sent to Hell and I’m never never going to be reprieved.”

Hodel rushed in quickly. “That’s an invalid concept. Consciousness isn’t in a certain location. It’s wherever you perceive it to be. In the Eighteenth Century they thought it was in the heart, the Greeks thought it was in the liver, which is why Prometheus had his liver chewed out by the big bird. Because of Freud we think consciousness is in the brain.”

Haralson argued. “Well, if he
thinks
it’s heading somewhere else, from his armpit to his navel to beyond … then it
could
be. So let Ellison say where it’s heading.”

Ellison drew a deep breath, sat up, laid his pipe on the studio table, leaned in close to the mike and said, “It’s heading for Provo, Utah, where it will meet a woman who works for the city sanitation department, in the typing pool; it will woo her, win her, marry her and have three children by her, one of which will be a waterhead like you.”

Then he slumped back in his chair. He closed his eyes.

“Uh …” Hodel said. “Uh … he was, uh, just kidding, Mr. Haralson. It’s been a long night. Just a joke.”

“Didn’t sound like a damned joke to me,” Haralson said. “I didn’t call in to be insulted.”

“Consider it lagniappe,” Ellison murmured.

Haralson hung up.

Hodel was now flat-out worried. Ellison was on the far side of flakey. This wasn’t such a good show any more. It was getting useless and nasty. He decided to take on the last caller himself.

He punched up the last call, signalling Burt Handelsman, c.e., to cut off all other incoming callers, and said, “Okay, you’re the last idea tonight. What’ve you got for us?”

“My name is Genadie Sverlow, and my idea is that the reason Sherlock Holmes never went after Jack the Ripper is that the Ripper was actually Dr. Watson, and Holmes knew it.”

Hodel heaved a sigh of relief. Synchronicity lived! His novel, ENTER THE LION, was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. It could not have been a better question.

“Glad you asked that,” Hodel said. “In point of fact, it couldn’t have been Watson. The reason is, if you’ll excuse the expression, elementary. Look: would you want Sherlock Holmes looking for
you?
Of course not. Watson
couldn’t
be the Ripper … he’d know that Holmes could spot him right off. Besides … it’s bad art. Too pat.”

Ellison stood up and stepped away from the microphone as Hodel went on. “There are other reasons, chronological ones, why he couldn’t have; but that’s the bottom line. It would have been too dangerous. Whatever else Watson was, he was no fool.”

Burt Handelsman, c.e., came to the window between the studio and the control booth and held up a note written with heavy felt-tip lines: THERE’S A GUY ON LINE 4 NAMED TIM LEWIS WHO SAYS HE HAD THE SAME STORY IDEA. WANT HIM?

Hodel signalled no, and drew a finger across his throat to indicate no more calls. Then, before the caller on the line could get him into further Holmesian minutiae, he cut the line. “Okay, that’s the end of the story ideas.”

He looked over at Ellison. The writer was standing with his face to the wall. The time was 11:26 turning to 27.

“Harlan?”

The writer turned slowly. His eyes were cold and faraway.

“We’ve got about thirty-three minutes. Want to just chat about what
you’re
writing these days?”

Ellison nodded wearily and fell into the seat again.

Then a voice came through the studio speaker. “May I impose, please, to enter your conversation?” It was a male voice.

Hodel snapped a look at the call director. All the lights were eut. He raised his eyes to B.H., c.e., and drew a finger across his throat sharply, urgently. “No more calls, please!” he said. But Handelsman was looking frantic. He waved wildly and indicated by his confusion that
he
wasn’t responsible for this call.

Hodel looked for the little red light on the mike pedestal that indicated the speaker phone was on. It was dark.

Ellison didn’t seem to realize what was happening.

What was happening, beyond reason, was that someone was coming in over the telephone lines … without using the telephone lines. Hodel decided to go with it—carefully.

“Do you have an idea for Harlan Ellison? It’s pretty late and we were just going to knock around some small talk.”

The voice said, “There is a concept of some interest. Postulate, if you will, an alien life-form; an intelligent, sensitive being who, for reasons we need not go into now, has been cast adrift. Marooned, if you will, in a dark place. Alone, left to drift between the stars. And there it waits, without light, without weight, without emotional sustenance, without the companionship of thinking, feeling beings. A thing without purpose. Waiting, forever waiting, drifting emptily in the stars.”

Burt was running around the control room trying to find the active link. He kept coming back to the window, pushing his nose against the glass and waving his arms wildly. It wasn’t happening, it simply could not, would not be happening!

“Where are you calling from?” Hodel asked.

“Nearby,” said the voice.

Hodel didn’t know what to do but continue talking.

“Well, that’s an interesting idea,” he said. “Maybe it’s not the newest idea, but—”

Ellison was leaning in to the mike. His eyes were closed, and his face looked strained. “But how do we know this being is as represented?” he said. His voice was calm now, all trace of his tension and hysteria gone.

“What do you mean, if I may ask?” said the voice.

“Well, what I mean is this,” Ellison said. “What if this creature, this sentience, this intelligence, was marooned by its own kind for reasons humans couldn’t even understand; but for some quality or maleficence that branded it forever as a life-form unfit to exist with—”

“With responsible beings?” the voice said.

“If you will. What if?”

“Then perhaps the lonely creature would wait until it could make contact, to fall back on the kindness of other decent, responsible beings.”

“Ah,” Ellison said, concentrating. “I see. Wait for some gullible, young species that would be so amazed it wouldn’t ask the proper questions. That would take this Trojan horse in, to succor it …”

“To warm it.”

“To nurture and protect it.”

“Yes, yes, that is exactly what I speak of. A new home without darkness, where the companionship of other thinking beings would return it to the community of intelligent beings.”

“I don’t think so,” Ellison said.

“What do you mean?” the voice said.

“What I mean,” Ellison said, now staring at the wall beyond the microphone, “is that we know about you. We’ve known about you for a long time. You don’t think they cast you out on their way past, and left you there to find a home, do you? They left records. We know what you are, and where you are. When we reach that pocket of space where you lie, we will do one of two things: ignore you … or destroy you.”

“You cannot destroy me.”

“You mean destroy that hypothetical creature we were talking about.”

“Yes. Hypothetical. It cannot be destroyed.”

“But it
can
be left to swim in blindness forever.”

The speaker went dead.

Ellison sank back in his seat.

Hodel stared at him. His mouth was open. In the control booth, Burt Handelsman, crack engineer, sat staring at the console.

After a while, Ellison rose, let out a long breath, and walked wearily toward the door of the studio. Hodel sat where he was. As Ellison opened the soundlock door, Hodel said, “Jesus, am I crazy, or did you just save the entire world?”

Ellison looked back over his shoulder and managed a faint smile. “I’m just your basic everyday Force for Good in Our Time,” he said. “And if I ever offer to talk to fans again, I want you to drive a stake through my heart.”

He walked out, the door sighed shut, and Mike Hodel realized it was still three minutes till midnight.

“Uh, this is KPFK-FM, 90.7 megahertz on your dial; and this has been
Hour 25.
Fm Mike Hodel; our crack engineer this evening has been Burt Handelsman; and for Terry Hodel, myself, and our guest, Harlan Ellison, this has been the hour that stretches.”

He paused a moment and added, “And to
all
our listeners, wherever they may be,
whatever
they may be, I haven’t the faintest idea what the hell went on here tonight.”

An excerpt from The Harlan Ellison Hornbook (1973)

Driving home from Norman Spinrad’s New Year’s Eve party at which I finally met Cass Elliot—as invigorating an experience as one could wish for the dawn of a new year—skimming the crusty ‘67 Camaro with its 56,000 miles of dead years in its metal bones through Beverly Hills, KFAC was working Ravel’s
Bolero.
Not tired, it was still early for a New Year’s Eve, something like one o’clock.

Thinking,

No. Woolgathering.
(The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
p. 1473, col. 2; woolgathering «. Absent-minded indulgence in fanciful daydreams.) That’s what I was doing: woolgathering.

Frequently, that’s how my writer’s mind conceives plots for stories, or more accurately, concepts for stories. The unconscious computer makes a storage bank search of idle thoughts looking for linkages, cross-references, points of similarity. When it finds something interesting, it checks it against all the muddle and mud swirling around in the cortex, and comes up with something that makes a story.

The elements this time were these:

1972 is gone. It’s a new year. 1973. Another year.

One year older. Moving on up the road toward the grave jutt the way old Camaro is moving on up the road to Beverly Glea. Traveling the road.

Harry Truman is gone. I miss him, Salty old Harry who told them all to go fuck themselves. Ten years ago he said he wouldn’t die for at least ten more because he had ten years’ work still to do in the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Ten years later, all the work done, almost to the month, he died. Did he know? Could I know when I’m going to die? Will I get to finish all the stories I have to write? Will I suddenly get rammed by a Pontiac Grand Am at the next light, centerpunched into an early oblivion? When will I die?

New Year’s Eve is a good time to think about it. So. This column.

Thinking about when I’ll die. Mortality is the subject.

I will die in 1973. Here is how it happened.

I went to New York to be guest of honor at a science fiction convention called the Lunacon. To amortize the cost of the trip I accepted several lecture gigs in surrounding areas. So I went into Manhattan two weeks before the convention. I had just returned from speaking at Dartmouth, and was staying with my friend Max Katz, the
Sesame Street
segment director, in his Penthouse G on East 65th Street. Max and Karen were out when I taxied in from Kennedy International, and after putting away my overnight case I found the note they’d left for me:
We went to dinner at The Proof of the Pudding. If you get in by nine, join us. Love, M&K.

I looked at my watch. It was 9:28. Still time to meet them for a piece of Key West lime pie. I left the apartment and took the elevator to the lobby. The street was quiet and pleasant with an April breeze. I started to walk down 65th to First Avenue, carefully avoiding the piles of dog shit.

Two guys in Army field jackets were coming toward me, up the street I instinctively tensed. I was in New York and could not forget that Karen had had her purse ripped off her shoulder in broad daylight in front of Bloomingdale’s, in front of hordes of people who would not help her as she struggled with the snatcher. New York was not what it had been when last I’d lived there, in 1961.

As they came toward me they parted so I could walk between them. I guess I knew in my gut what was about to happen. They swung on me and jammed me against the brick wall of the poodle clipping joint down the street from Max’s building. They both had knives.