“Mom died three years ago.”
He blinked again. His liver-spotted forehead drew down and he thought about it. “Yes. I’d forgotten. Why didn’t you call me up on the phone and tell me you were coming?”
He closed and locked the door behind me. I walked into the darkened living room, only faintly outlined by the hall light. He followed me. He was wearing something I had only seen in period movies, a long nightgown that reached to his thin calves, white with blue veins prominent. The fabric was rough cotton, and like his calves was veined with blue pinstriping. I turned around to look at him. In my head I said, “This is crazy. Look at him. He’s an old man. He won’t even remember. What’s the point of this?”
And Jerry Olander said, “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t remember. You remember. But if it makes you feel any better, tell him why you’ve come to kill him.”
“What are you doing here in the dead of night, I wish you’d called me up on the phone and told me,” Carl said.
I couldn’t see his face. He was standing with the hall light behind him. It was a black circle without feature. I said to him, “Do you remember a night a long time ago, in the red brick house you had on Maple Street, when Lillian was alive?”
“I remember the house. It was a small house. We had much bigger houses. Maybe you called and I was asleep.”
I moved toward him till he could see my face, lit along the sharp planes of cheeks and nose by the light over his shoulder. “I see it all now the way a little boy would see it, Uncle Carl. I’m looking out from under a dining room table, through the legs and cross-braces of chairs, watching you and my father on the screened back porch. You’re arguing. It was the first time I ever heard my father swear or raise his voice. I remember it very clearly, even if it isn’t true, because he was such a quiet person. You know that. He never raised his voice or got angry. He should have. He might not have died when he did, or died so miserably, if he’d raised his voice a few times.”
“What are you talking about?” Carl said. He was beginning to realize he wanted to be annoyed at his nephew barging in on him at three o’clock in the morning while he was still half-asleep. “Do you want something to eat? What are you doing here in Chicago? Don’t you live out there in California now?”
He hadn’t seen me in years. We had no contact. And here I stood before him, dragging him back through the dead years to a night he didn’t even remember. “Then you stood up and yelled at him, and he pushed back his chair till it fell over, and he yelled at you, and then you swung at him, and he hit you with a cushion off one of the chairs. And the next day he didn’t go down at seven-thirty to open the store while you stayed in and slept late and had a nice breakfast with Lillian. Do you remember all that, Uncle Carl?”
“Lillian is dead. She’s been gone a long time.”
I walked to the sofa and looked down. Then I walked back to him and took him by the arm. He resisted for a moment, but he was very old, and I wasn’t, and he came with me to the sofa, and I forced him to sit down. Then I took the pillow with the fringe, and I held it in one hand as I shoved him down, and held it over his face while he thrust himself up against it, until he stopped. It was over much more quickly than I’d thought. I’d always thought people struggle much harder to cling to life. But he was old, and his memories were gone.
And all the while I was begging Jerry Olander to stop. But he had spent four full years of wresting control from me, and in those four years of the war I had come to know he would win a battle or two. This was the first battle. And he had won. “Very efficient,” Jerry Olander said.
In the fourth year of the war with the homicidal maniac that had come to nest in my brain, a second hit was ordered. A woman I wasn’t even certain was still alive. She had had my dog gassed, put to sleep as they tell it to children, one summer when I was away at camp. Her name was Mrs. Corley, and she had lived down at the end of our street in Evanston.
I argued with Jerry Olander. “Why did you pick me to live in?” I had asked that question surely more than a hundred and fifty thousand times in four years.
“No particular reason. You haven’t got a wife, or many friends. You work at home most of the time—though I still can’t see how you make any kind of a living with that mail order catalogue—and nobody’s going to put you away too quickly because you talk to yourself.”
“Who are you?” I screamed, because I couldn’t get him out of me. He was like the eardrums refusing to pop when a plane lands. I couldn’t break his hold on me, no matter how hard I swallowed or held my nose and blew.
“The name is Jerry Olander,” he said, lightly, adding in an uncannily accurate imitation of Bogart, “and somebody’s always gotta take the fall, shweetheart.”
Then he made me go to the main branch of the public library, to look at all the telephone books. He didn’t have control of my vocal cords, couldn’t make my brain call the 312-555-1212 information operator in Chicago, to establish if Mrs. Corley still lived in Evanston. But he could make my legs carry me to my car, make my hands place themselves at 11:50 and 12:05 on the steering wheel, make my eyes run down the columns of names and phone numbers in the Evanston telephone directory in the library’s stacks.
She lived in the same house, at the same address, in the same world I had shared with her as a child.
Jerry Olander made my body drive to the savings and loan where I had my small account, made my right hand ink in the withdrawal slip, made my mouth smile as the teller handed me my last five hundred dollars.
And Jerry Olander made me tape the basement window of Mrs. Corley’s house before I broke it with a rock. Fighting him every step of the way, I was nonetheless made to walk silently through the basement to the steps, was made to climb them to the kitchen where I found old Mrs. Corley fixing herself a vegetarian dinner, and was made to tie and gag her.
But when I refused to go further, Jerry Olander’s voice played Pied Piper to the living dead in the quicklime pit of memory, and another shambling, rotted thing dragged itself up onto the landscape of my mind, and I saw myself as a child, coming home from a ghastly month at some nameless summer camp. And, of course, the name was right there, unremembered for thirty years, just as fresh as if I had come home yesterday. Camp Bellefaire. On Lake Belle. I had hated it, had pleaded with my mother and father every Sunday when they had come to visit me—like seeing a Death Row resident during visitation hours—”Please take me home, Momma, Poppa, please. I don’t like it here!” But they had never understood that there are some children for whom organized activities in which they can never distinguish themselves is a special sort of debasement.
And I had come home gladly, to see Charlie, my dog; to move around freely in my room with the Erector set and the comic books and my very own radio; to build Stukas and Lightnings and Grumman seaplanes, and smell TesTor’s cement once again.
And Charlie was dead. “Do you remember that summer, Mrs. Corley?” I heard myself saying, and Jerry Olander wasn’t making me say it. “Do you remember how you told the man at the pound that the dog was running loose for a week? Do you remember how you found Charlie’s tags caught on your bush in the backyard, and didn’t turn them in? I remember, Mrs. Corley, because you told Mrs. Abrams next door, and she told my Momma, and I overheard my Momma telling my Poppa. You knew who Charlie belonged to, Mrs. Corley; he’d lived here for ten years, so you had to know.”
And then I pushed Mrs. Corley to her knees, and turned on all four jets of the gas range, and opened the oven and put her head inside while she struggled, and hit her once sharply behind the left ear, and laid her head down on the open door of the oven, left her kneeling there in prayer, final prayer, ultimate prayer… and went away.
“I liked the part about the dog tags best,” Jerry Olander said, on the plane back to California.
In the fourth year of the war with that evil intelligence in my brain, I was ordered to kill, and did kill, seven people, including my Uncle Carl and old Mrs. Corley. And each one
made me sick to think about it. I had no idea if Jerry Olander was merely the product of my own mind, a sick and twisted, deranged and malevolent phantom of a personality that had finally split, or if he was a disembodied spirit, an astral projection, a dybbuk or poltergeist or alien from the center of the Earth that had come to wreak murder on the race of humans, using me as his unwitting tool. I have seen enough motion pictures, read enough mystery stories, seen enough television programs in which a man’s evil nature takes him over, to know that is the most rational answer.
There is no reason to believe me, but I swear, Jerry Olander never came from within me. He was from outside, a rejected thing. And he inhabited me without my consent. It had been war, and he had won battle after battle, and I knew if those killings were ever traced to me I would spend the rest of my life in a home for the criminally insane… but further than saying, as quietly and as miserably as I can… I was not Jerry Olander… what can I say to convince…
And finally, it came the time I had known would arrive, from the moment he ordered the death of my Uncle Carl.
Jerry Olander said to me, as the fourth year of the war drew to an end, “Now it’s time to kill Nancy.”
“No!” I screamed. “No. I won’t do it. I’ll kill myself first. You can’t make me, there’s no way you can make me, I’ll fight you, you’re not going to make me do that!”
Nancy was my ex-wife. She had left me, but there wasn’t the faintest vestige of bad feeling in me about it. She had made her reasons for wanting a divorce plain to me, and they were good and sound reasons. We had been married when we were too young to know better, and through the years we had loved each other. But Nancy had learned she was more than a wife, that she had never been provided the opportunity to know herself, to expand herself, to fulfill the dreams she had had. And we had parted with love.
Now she lived in Pasadena, working with an orthopedic shoe company that had designed a special footgear for those who suffered with Hansen’s Disease. Her life was full, she was responsible and settled, mature and wonderful. We talked from time to time, occasionally had dinner together.
I meant her no harm.
“There’s no sense to this!” I said, pleading with Jerry Olander. “There’s no sense to any of this. Please let me alone, let me kill myself if that’ll give you some satisfaction! But don’t try to make me do this!”
“It all makes sense,” he said, getting nastily quiet. “Everything you do is colored by those memories. How many nights have you lain awake in pain from a toothache, rather than going to a dentist because the family sent you to Cousin Franklyn to save a few dollars on dental bills? How many of your teeth that might have been saved did he pull because he was no damned good, should have been a butcher instead of a dentist? You’re afraid of dentists to this day because of Cousin Franklyn. And how many women who might have loved you have you walked away from, picked fights with, ignored, considered better or worse than you, not your ‘type,’ because of Peggy Mantle and the way she laughed at you when you were fifteen? How many times have you walked past a store where you needed to buy something, because you remembered the way old man Clareborne threw you out of his department store when you were a little boy? How much of what you think is free will is just a programmed reaction to things you’ve buried, memories you don’t want to remember, pains and slights and affronts you suffered as a child? How many, chum? How goddam many? Oh, there’s sense here!”
Jerry Olander had me walk across the room. To the telephone.
“But I’m all alone now. I have no one. No wife, no children, no mother, no father, not even too many people I can call friends. I’m all alone; won’t you leave me Nancy!”
I began to dial a number.
The phone began to ring.
“You’re not alone, chum,” Jerry Olander said softly. “I’m right here with you. And I’ve got a long, long memory.”
The receiver was picked up at the other end and a voice said, “Hello.”
Zombie things from the quicklime pit began emerging, one after another of them; dozens of them, summoned by Jerry Olander’s long, long memory. I wanted to shout, to make a terrible dying sound, to clarion a warning, and found I could not even do that. In the fourth year of our war, Jerry Olander had even gained control of my words, and I had lost, I had lost, I had lost!
“Hi, Nancy,” I heard myself saying, “what are you doing for dinner tonight?”
Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, c. 1861
Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage
Introduction
In recent years—and you’ve probably heard me bitching about this elsewhere—writers of contemporary fantasy have come in for considerable attention from Academe. I’ve been spared more of that kind of literary disembowelment than, say, Bradbury or Heinlein or Le Guin, mostly because I tend to move too fast and too shiftily for any publish-or-perish professor to get a handle on me. (There are those who contend I’m unworthy of serious attention, and to them a tip of the hat. I have this paranoid belief that the more acceptable one becomes to the Establishment, the less dangerous and troublesome is one’s work.)
Notwithstanding these baseless canards, there have been essays and monographs and even treatises published in learned journals about the rampant symbolism in my stories, my preoccupation with the Machine As God, the deeply religious anti-religiousness in Deathbird Stories, obvious uses of the Jungian archetypes, the crucifixion and resurrection symbology peppered through my stories, and the frequency of the use of the word “ka-ka.”
I am always startled at the depths revealed in my stories by these erudite critics. I try not to argue with them. I just smile knowingly and respond, “You little devil, you. You found me out!”
The more profound they think they are, the more they require their students to read you; and that means the poor kids have to buy the books containing my stories. And that means a fat and happy life of work, free from the horrors of maybe having to write television scripts. So who am I to say nay, who am I to suggest they’re stuffed topfull of wild blueberry muffins?
What is beginning to unman me is that this plague seems to be spreading to my readers. Now I conceive of all of you as the noblest, wittiest, most intelligent audience in the world. Otherwise you’d be off reading ka-ka like that proffered by Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon, to name only two of the creative typists masquerading as writers.
Well, sir. You can imagine my horror and surprise when I received a letter last February from a reader that went like this: [Letter reprinted by permission of James Griffin, Philadelphia, Pa.]
Dear Mr. Ellison:
Last summer I found, by accident, your story “Croatoan” and was disturbed and excited by the resemblances to the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid. There were too many to be accidental, but I still couldn’t imagine you following Vergil intentionally, even to the meeting with the man with no hands. I was afraid I had stumbled on something out of the universal subconscious, and felt responsible for doing something about it.
Tonight I browsed through Strange Wine and noticed the references to Isak Dinesen and [Cyril Connolly’s book of essays] The Unquiet Grave. I read the story again and wondered why the comparison of the child to a lemur hadn’t tipped me off. I’m relieved to think you knew what you were doing.
Thanks for giving us, along with a good story, new ways to think about Vergil.
Sincerely yours, James Griffin
What can I say? Humbly, I bow my head and dimple winsomely. Paw the dirt with my hoof, tug my forelock, suck my thumb and murmur aw, shucks. You’re very perceptive. That’s exactly what I was doing. You little devil, you. You found me out!
There’s just one small glitch in the smooth flow.
I’ve never read Vergil’s Aeneid.
The story you are about to read is stuffed full of very conscious symbolism. Catch it now, friends; I don’t do it that often; maybe three t
imes in twenty-five years.
This story was written in direct response to the killing pain of my last wife taking off with another guy. The pain lasted at least twelve minutes, which is the actually recorded duration of genuine’ pain. Everything over twelve minutes is self-indulgence and pointless attempts to make the first twelve minutes seem more important. We are a vainglorious species, and if we were able to cop to the fact that even the most sauvage of what the French call la grande passion commands only twelve true minutes of intense pain before it begins to mellow, we would all dash to the cliffs and do a lemming. So we justify it by enhancing it, by making it seem more important, more consuming. We wander around for twenty years after the affair has broken up, beating our breasts and wailing at the sky.
No nobler than you, I wandered for several months after my last marriage broke up, beating my breast and wailing at the sky, not to mention my friends, who (with uncommon good sense) told me to shut up already. And one night, during a performance of Jacques Brei Is Alive and Well in Paris, a line from one of his wonderful songs struck right to the core of my lost love, and I wrote this story.
I wish to God I could remember what the line was.
“Quae nocent docent.”
Then, and only then, like some mysterious Prisoner in the Iron Mask hidden from everyone’s sight, only then, when the gigantic vessel slipped out of normal continuity and entered the megaflow, only then did the man they called Moth emerge from his stateroom.
As the immense tambour shields rolled down into the body of the vessel, exposing the boiling white jelly that was the megaflow surging past beyond the great crystal ports, the door to his stateroom rolled up and he emerged, dressed entirely in white. Clown-white circles around his dark, haunted eyes. Everyone looked and stopped talking.