The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison Page 11

  He was touching the ripped shade hanging in a living room window when he saw the headlights of the cars turning into the driveway. Three of them pulled in, bumper to bumper. Two more slewed in at the curb, their headlights flooding the living room with a dim glow. Doors slammed.

  Lestig crutched back and to the side.

  Hard-lined shapes moved in front of the headlights, seemed to be grouping, talking. One of them moved away from the pack and an arm came up, and something shone for a moment in the light; then a Stillson wrench came crashing through the front window in an explosion of glass.

  “Lestig, you motherfuckin’ bastard, come on out of there!”

  He moved awkwardly but silently through the living room, into the kitchen and down the basement stairs. He was careful opening the coal chute window from the bin, and through the narrow slit he saw someone moving out there. They were all around the house. Coal shifted under his foot.

  He let the window fall back smoothly and turned to go back upstairs. He didn’t want to be trapped in the basement. From upstairs he heard the sounds of windows being smashed.

  He took the stairs clumsily, clinging to the banister, his crutch useless, but moved quickly through the house and climbed the stairs to the upper floor. The top porch doorway was in what had been his parents’ room; he unlocked and opened it. The screen door was hanging off at an angle, leaning against the outer wall by one hinge. He stepped out onto the porch, careful to avoid any places where the falling tree had weakened the structure. He looked down, back flat to the wall, but could see no one. He crutched to the railing, dropped the aluminum prop into the darkness, climbed over and began shinnying down one of the porch posts, clinging tightly with his thighs, as he had when he’d been a small boy, sneaking out to play after he’d been sent to bed.

  It happened so quickly, he had no idea, even later, what had actually transpired. Before his foot touched the ground, someone grabbed him from behind. He fought to stay on the post, like a monkey on a stick, and even tried to kick out with his good foot; but he was pulled loose from the post and thrown down violently. He tried to roll, but he came up against a mulberry bush. Then he tried to dummyup, fold into a bundle, but a foot caught him in the side and he fell over onto his back. His smoked glasses fell off, and through the sooty fog he could just make out someone dropping down to sit on his chest, something thick and long being raised above the head of the shape…he strained to see…strained…

  And then the shape screamed, and the weapon fell out of the hand and both hands clawed at the head, and the someone staggered to its feet and stumbled away, crashing through the mulberry bushes, still screaming.

  Lestig fumbled around and found his glasses, pushed them onto his face. He was lying on the aluminum crutch. He got to his foot with the aid of the prop, like a skier righting himself after a spill.

  He limped away behind the house next door, circled and came up on the empty cars still headed-in at the curb, their headlights splashing the house with dirty light. He slid in behind the wheel, saw it was a stick shift and knew with one foot he could not manage it. He slid out, moved to the second car, saw it was an automatic, and quietly opened the door. He slid behind the wheel and turned the key hard. The car thrummed to life and a mass of shapes erupted from the side of the house.

  But he was gone before they reached the street.

  He sat in the darkness, he sat in the sooty fog that obscured his sight, he sat in the stolen car. Outside Teresa’s home. Not the house in which she’d lived when he’d left three years ago, but in the house of the man she’d married six months before, when Lestig’s name had been first splashed across newspaper front pages.

  He had driven to her parents’ home, but it had been dark. He could not—or would not—break in to wait, but there had been a note taped to the mailbox advising the mailman to forward all letters addressed to Teresa McCausland to this house.

  He drummed the steering wheel with his fingers. His right leg ached from the fall. His shirtsleeve had been ripped and his left forearm bore a long, shallow gash from the mulberry bush. But it had stopped bleeding.

  Finally, he crawled out of the car, dropped his shoulder into the crutch’s padded curve, and rolled like a man with sea legs, up to the front door.

  The white plastic button in the baroque backing was lit by a tiny nameplate bearing the word HOWARD. He pressed the button and a chime sounded somewhere on the other side of the door.

  She answered the door wearing blue denim shorts and a man’s white shirt, buttondown and frayed; a husband’s castoff.

  “Vern…” Her voice cut off the sentence before she could say oh or what are you or they said or no!

  “Can I come in?”

  “Go away, Vern. My husband’s—”

  A voice from inside called, “Who is it, Terry?”

  “Please go away,” she whispered.

  “I want to know where Mom and Dad and Neola went.”

  “Terry?”

  “I can’t talk to you…go away!”

  “What the hell’s going on around here, I have to know.”

  “Terry? Someone there?”

  “Goodbye, Vern. I’m…” She slammed the door and did not say the word sorry.

  He turned to go. Somewhere great corded muscles flexed, a serpentine throat lifted, talons flashed against the stars. His vision fogged, cleared for a moment, and in that moment rage sluiced through him. He turned back to the door, and leaned against the wall and banged on the frame with the crutch.

  There was the sound of movement from inside, he heard Teresa arguing, pleading, trying to stop someone from going to answer the noise, but a second later the door flew open and Gary Howard stood in the doorway, older and thicker across the shoulders and angrier than Lestig had remembered him from senior year in high school, the last time they’d seen each other. The annoyed look of expecting Bible salesman, heart-fund solicitor, Girl Scout cookie dealer, evening doorbell prankster changed into a smirk.

  Howard leaned against the jamb, folded his arms across his chest so the off-tackle pectorals bunched against his Sherwood green tank top.

  “Evening, Vern. When’d you get back?”

  Lestig straightened, crutch jammed back into armpit. “I want to talk to Terry.”

  “Didn’t know just when you’d come rolling in, Vern, but we knew you’d show. How was the war, old buddy?”

  “You going to let me talk to her?”

  “Nothing’s stopping her, old buddy. My wife is a free agent when it comes to talking to ex-boyfriends. My wife, that is. You get the word…old buddy?”

  “Terry?” He leaned forward and yelled past Howard.

  Gary Howard smiled a ladies’-choice-dance smile and put one hand flat against Lestig’s chest. “Don’t make a nuisance of yourself, Vern.”

  “I’m talking to her, Howard. Right now, even if I have to go through you.”

  Howard straightened, hand still flat against Lestig’s chest. “You miserable cowardly sonofabitch,” he said, very gently, and shoved. Lestig flailed backward, the crutch going out from under him, and he tumbled off the front step.

  Howard looked down at him, and the president-of-the-senior-class smile vanished. “Don’t come back, Vern. The next time I’ll punch out your fucking heart.”

  The door slammed and there were voices inside. High voices, and then the sound of Howard slapping her.

  Lestig crawled to the crutch, and using the wall stood up. He thought of breaking in through the door, but he was Lestig, track…once…and Howard had been football. Still was. Would be, on Sunday afternoons with the children he’d made on cool Saturday nights in a bed with Teresa.

  He went back to the car and sat in the darkness. He didn’t know he’d been sitting there for some time, till the shadow moved up to the window and his head came around sharply.

  “Vern…?”

  “You’d better go back in. I don’t want to cause you any more trouble.”

  “He’s upstairs doing
some sales reports. He got a very nice job as a salesman for Shoop Motors when he got out of the Air Force. We live nice, Vern. He’s really very good to me…Oh, Vern…why? Why’d you do it?”

  “You’d better go back in.”

  “I waited, God you know I waited, Vern. But then all that terrible thing happened…Vern, why did you do it?”

  “Come on, Terry. I’m tired, leave me alone.”

  “The whole town, Vern. They were so ashamed. There were reporters and TV people, they came in and talked to everyone. Your mother and father, Neola, they couldn’t stay here any more.”

  “Where are they, Terry?”

  “They moved away, Vern. Kansas City, I think.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Neola’s living closer.”

  “Where?”

  “She doesn’t want you to know, Vern. I think she got married. I know she changed her name…Lestig isn’t such a good name around here any more.”

  “I’ve got to talk to her, Terry. Please. You’ve got to tell me where she is.”

  “I can’t, Vern. I promised.”

  “Then call her. Do you have her number? Can you get in touch with her?”

  “Yes, I think so. Oh, Vern…”

  “Call her. Tell her I’ll stay here in town till I can talk to her. Tonight. Please, Terry!”

  She stood silently. Then said, “All right, Vern. Do you want her to meet you at your house?”

  He thought of the hard-lined shapes in the glare of headlamps, and of the thing that had run screaming as he lay beside the mulberry bush. “No. Tell her I’ll meet her in the church.”

  “St. Matthew’s?”

  “No. The Harvest Baptist.”

  “But it’s closed, it has been for years.”

  “I know. It closed down before I left. I know a way in. She’ll remember. Tell her I’ll be waiting.”

  Light erupted through the front door, and Teresa Howard’s face came up as she stared across the roof of the stolen car. She didn’t even say goodbye, but her hand touched his face, cool and quick; and she ran back.

  Knowing it was time once again to travel, the dragon-breath deathbeast eased sinuously to its feet and began treading down carefully through the fogs of limitless forever. A soft, expectant purring came from its throat, and its terrible eyes burned with joy.

  He was lying full out in one of the pews when the loose boards in the vestry wall creaked, and Lestig knew she had come. He sat up, wiping sleep from his fogged eyes, and replaced the smoked glasses. Somehow, they helped.

  She came through the darkness in the aisle in front of the altar, and stopped. “Vernon?”

  “I’m here, Sis.”

  She came toward the pew, but stopped three rows away. “Why did you come back?”

  His mouth was dry. He would have liked a beer. “Where else should I have gone?”

  “Haven’t you made enough trouble for Mom and Dad and me?”

  He wanted to say things about his right foot and his eyesight, left somewhere in Southeast Asia. But even the light smear of skin he could see in the darkness told him her face was older, wearier, changed, and he could not do that to her.

  “It was terrible, Vernon. Terrible. They came and talked to us and they wouldn’t let us alone. And they set up television cameras and made movies of the house and we couldn’t even go out. And when they went away the people from town came, and they were even worse, oh God, Vern, you can’t believe what they did. One night they came to break things, and they cut down the tree and Dad tried to stop them and they beat him up so bad, Vern. You should have seen him. It would have made you cry, Vern.”

  And he thought of his foot.

  “We went away, Vern. We had to. We hoped—” She stopped.

  “You hoped I’d be convicted and shot or sent away.”

  She said nothing.

  He thought of the hooch and the smell.

  “Okay, Sis. I understand.”

  “I’m sorry, Vernon. I’m really sorry, dear. But why did you do this to us? Why?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time, and finally she came to him, and put her arms around him and kissed his neck, and then she slipped away in the darkness and the wall boards creaked, and he was alone.

  He sat there in the pew, thinking nothing. He stared at the shadows till his eyes played him tricks and he thought he saw little speckles of light dancing. Then the light glimmers changed and coalesced and turned red and he seemed to be staring first into a mirror, and then into the eyes of some monstrous creature, and his head hurt and his eyes burned…

  And the church changed, melted, swam before his eyes and he fought for breath, and pulled at his throat, and the church re-formed and he was in the hooch again; they were questioning him.

  He was crawling.

  Crawling across a dirt floor, pulling himself forward with his fingers leaving flesh-furrows in the earth, trying to crawl away from them.

  “Crawl! Crawl and perhaps we will let you live!”

  He crawled and their legs were at his eye level, and he tried to reach up to touch one of them, and they hit him. Again and again. But the pain was not the worst of it. The monkey cage where they kept him boxed for endless days and nights. Too small to stand, too narrow to lie down, open to the rain, open to the insects that came and nested in the raw stump of his leg, and laid their eggs, and the itching that sent lilliputian arrows up into his side, and the light that hung from jerry-rigged wires through the trees, the light that never went out, day or night, and no sleep, and the questions, the endless questions…and he crawled…God how he crawled…if he could have crawled around the world on both bloody hands and one foot, scouring away the knees of his pants, he would have crawled, just to sleep, just to stop the arrows of pain…he would have crawled to the center of the earth and drunk the menstrual blood of the planet…for only a time of quiet, a straightening of his legs, a little sleep…

  Why did you do this to us, why?

  Because I’m a human being and I’m weak and no one should be expected to be able to take it. Because I’m a man and not a book of rules that says I have to take it. Because I was in a place without sleep and I didn’t want to be there and there was no one to save me. Because I wanted to live.

  He heard boards creaking.

  He blinked his eyes and sat silently and listened, and there was movement in the church. He reached for his smoked glasses, but they were out of reach, and he reached farther and the crutch slid away from the pew seat and dropped with a crash. Then they were on him.

  Whether it was the same bunch he never knew.

  They came for him and vaulted the pews and smashed into him before he could use whatever it was he’d used on the kid at the house, the kid who lay on a table in the City Hall, covered with a sheet through which green stains and odd rotting smells oozed.

  They jumped him and beat him, and he flailed up through the mass of bodies and was staring directly into a wild-eyed mandrill face, and he looked at him.

  Looked at him. As the deathbeast struck.

  The man screamed, clawed at his face, and his face came away in handfuls, the rotting flesh dripping off his fingers. He fell back, carrying two others with him, and Lestig suddenly remembered what had happened in the hooch, remembered breathing and looking and here in this house of a God gone away he spun on them, one by one, and he breathed deeply and exhaled in their faces and stared at them across the evil night wasteland of another universe, and they shrieked and died and he was all alone once more. The others, coming through the vestry wall, having followed Neola, having been telephoned by Gary Howard, who had beaten the information from his wife, the others stopped and turned and ran…

  So that only Lestig, brother to the basilisk, who was itself the servant of a nameless dark one far away, only Lestig was left standing amid the twisted body shapes of things that had been men.

  Stood alone, felt the power and the fury pulsing in him, felt his eyes glowing, felt the death that lay on his tongue
, deep in his throat, the wind death in his lungs. And knew night had finally fallen.

  They had roadblocked the only two roads out of town. Then they took eight-cell battery flashlights and Coleman lanterns and cave-crawling lamps, and some of them who had worked the zinc mine years before, they donned their miner’s helmets with the lights on them, and they even wound rags around clubs and dipped them in kerosene and lit them, and they went out searching for the filthy traitor who had killed their sons and husbands and brothers, and not one of them laughed at the scene of crowd lights moving through the town, like something from an old film. A film of hunting the monster. They did not draw the parallel, for had they drawn the parallel, they would still never have laughed.

  And they searched through the night, but did not find him. And when the dawn came up and they doused their lamps, and the parking lights replaced headlights on the caravans of cars that ringed the town, they still had not found him. And finally they gathered in the mall, to decide what to do.

  And he was there.

  He stood on the Soldiers and Sailors Monument high above them, where he had huddled all through the night, at the feet of a World War I doughboy with his arm upraised and a Springfield in his fist. He was there, and the symbolism did not escape them.

  “Pull him down!” someone shouted. And they surged toward the marble-and-bronze monument.

  Vernon Lestig stood watching them come toward him, and seemed unconcerned at the rifles and clubs and war-souvenir Lugers coming toward him.

  The first man to scale the plinth was Gary Howard, with the broken-field cheers of the crowd smile on his face. Lestig’s eyes widened behind the smoked glasses, and very casually he removed them, and he looked at the big, many-toothed car salesman.

  The crowd screamed in one voice and the forward rush was halted as the still-smoking body of Teresa’s husband fell back on them, arms flung out wide, torso twisted.

  In the rear, they tried to run. He cut them down. The crowd stopped. One man tried to raise a revolver to kill him, but he dropped, his face burned away, smoking pustules of ruined flesh where his eyes had been.