The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison Page 21

  He took it to the edge of the beach and sat down.

  It was just a box. A plain wooden box, very much like an old cigar box, but larger. He turned it over and over and was not at all surprised to find it bore no arcane hieroglyphics or occult symbols. It wasn’t that kind of treasure. Then he turned it right side up and pried open the lid. His soul was inside. It was not what he had expected to find, not at all. But it was what had been missing from the cache.

  Holding it tightly in his fist, he walked up past the fast-filling hole in the green sand, toward the bastion on the high ground.

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  T.S. ELIOT

  Once inside the brooding darkness of the fortress—and finding the entrance had been disturbingly easier than he had expected—there was no way to go but down. The wet, black stones of the switchback stairways led inexorably downward into the bowels of the structure, clearly far beneath the level of the pancreatic sea. The stairs were steep, and each step had been worn into smooth curves by the pressure of feet that had descended this way since the dawn of memory. It was dark, but not so dark that Talbot could not see his way. There was no light, however. He did not care to think about how that could be.

  When he came to the deepest part of the structure, having passed no rooms or chambers or openings along the way, he saw a doorway across an enormous hall, set into the far wall. He stepped off the last of the stairs, and walked to the door. It was built of crossed iron bars, as black and moist as the stones of the bastion. Through the interstices he saw something pale and still in a far corner of what could have been a cell.

  There was no lock on the door.

  It swung open at his touch.

  Whoever lived in this cell had never tried to open the door; or had tried and decided not to leave.

  He moved into deeper darkness.

  A long time of silence passed, and finally he stooped to help her to her feet. It was like lifting a sack of dead flowers, brittle and surrounded by dead air incapable of holding even the memory of fragrance.

  He took her in his arms and carried her.

  “Close your eyes against the light, Martha,” he said, and started back up the long stairway to the golden sky.

  • • •

  Lawrence Talbot sat up on the operating table. He opened his eyes and looked at Victor. He smiled a peculiarly gentle smile. For the first time since they had been friends, Victor saw all torment cleansed from Talbot’s face.

  “It went well,” he said. Talbot nodded.

  They grinned at each other.

  “How’re your cryonic facilities?” Talbot asked.

  Victor’s brows drew down in bemusement. “You want me to freeze you? I thought you’d want something more permanent…say, in silver.”

  “Not necessary.”

  Talbot looked around. He saw her standing against the far wall by one of the grasers. She looked back at him with open fear. He slid off the table, wrapping the sheet upon which he had rested around himself, a makeshift toga. It gave him a patrician look.

  He went to her and looked down into her ancient face. “Nadja,” he said, softly. After a long moment she looked up at him. He smiled and for an instant she was a girl again. She averted her gaze. He took her hand, and she came with him, to the table, to Victor.

  “I’d be deeply grateful for a running account, Larry,” the physicist said. So Talbot told him; all of it.

  “My mother, Nadja, Martha Nelson, they’re all the same,” Talbot said, when he came to the end, “all wasted lives.”

  “And what was in the box?” Victor said.

  “How well do you do with symbolism and cosmic irony, old friend?”

  “Thus far I’m doing well enough with Jung and Freud,” Victor said. He could not help but smile.

  Talbot held tightly to the old technician’s hand as he said, “It was an old, rusted Howdy Doody button.”

  Victor turned around.

  When he turned back, Talbot was grinning. “That’s not cosmic irony, Larry…it’s slapstick,” Victor said. He was angry. It showed clearly.

  Talbot said nothing, simply let him work it out.

  Finally Victor said, “What the hell’s that supposed to signify, innocence?”

  Talbot shrugged. “I suppose if I’d known, I wouldn’t have lost it in the first place. That’s what it was, and that’s what it is. A little metal pinback about an inch and a half in diameter, with that cockeyed face on it, the orange hair, the toothy grin, the pug nose, the freckles, all of it, just the way he always was.” He fell silent, then after a moment added, “It seems right.”

  “And now that you have it back, you don’t want to die?”

  “I don’t need to die.”

  “And you want me to freeze you.”

  “Both of us.”

  Victor stared at him with disbelief. “For God’s sake, Larry!”

  Nadja stood quietly, as if she could not hear them.

  “Victor, listen: Martha Nelson is in there. A wasted life. Nadja is out here. I don’t know why or how or what did it…but…a wasted life. Another wasted life. I want you to create her mite, the same way you created mine, and send her inside. He’s waiting for her, and he can make it right, Victor. All right, at last. He can be with her as she regains the years that were stolen from her. He can be—I can be—her father when she’s a baby, her playmate when she’s a child, her buddy when she’s maturing, her boyfriend when she’s a young girl, her suitor when she’s a young woman, her lover, her husband, her companion as she grows old. Let her be all the women she was never permitted to be, Victor. Don’t steal from her a second time. And when it’s over, it will start again…”

  “How, for Christ sake, how the hell how? Talk sense, Larry! What is all this metaphysical crap?”

  “I don’t know how; it just is! I’ve been there, Victor, I was there for months, maybe years, and I never changed, never went to the wolf; there’s no Moon there…no night and no day, just golden light and warmth, and I can try to make restitution. I can give back two lives. Please, Victor!”

  The physicist looked at him without speaking. Then he looked at the old woman. She smiled up at him, and then, with arthritic fingers, removed her clothing.

  When she came through the collapsed lumen, Talbot was waiting for her. She looked very tired, and he knew she would have to rest before they attempted to cross the orange mountains. He helped her down from the ceiling of the cave, and laid her down on soft, pale yellow moss he had carried back from the islets of Langerhans during the long trek with Martha Nelson. Side by side, the two old women lay on the moss, and Nadja fell asleep almost immediately. He stood over them, looking at their faces.

  They were identical.

  Then he went out on the ledge and stood looking toward the spine of the orange mountains. The skeleton held no fear for him now. He felt a sudden sharp chill in the air and knew Victor had begun the cryonic preservation.

  He stood that way for a long time, the little metal button with the sly, innocent face of a mythical creature painted on its surface in four brilliant colors held tightly in his left hand.

  And after a while, he heard the crying of a baby, just one baby, from inside the cave, and turned to return for the start of the easiest journey he had ever made.

  Somewhere, a terrible devil-fish suddenly flattened its gills, turned slowly bellyup, and sank into darkness.

  * * *

  Croatoan

  1976 Locus Poll Award: Best Short Story

  Beneath the city, there is yet another city: wet and dark and strange; a city of sewers and moist scuttling creatures and running rivers so desperate to be free not even Styx fits them. And in that lost city beneath the city, I found the child.

  Oh my God, if I knew where to start. With the child? No, before that. With the alligators? No, earlier.
With Carol? Probably. It always started with a Carol. Or an Andrea. A Stephanie. Always someone. There is nothing cowardly about suicide; it takes determination.

  “Stop it! Godammit, just stop it…I said stop…” And I had to hit her. It wasn’t that hard a crack, but she had been weaving, moving, stumbling: she went over the coffee table, all the fifty-dollar gift books coming down on top of her. Wedged between the sofa and the overturned table. I kicked the table out of the way and bent to help her up, but she grabbed me by the waist and pulled me down; crying, begging me to do something. I held her and put my face in her hair and tried to say something right, but what could I say?

  Denise and Joanna had left, taking the d&c tools with them. She had been quiet, almost as though stunned by the hammer, after they had scraped her. Quiet, stunned, dry-eyed but hollow-eyed; watching me with the plastic Baggie. The sound of the toilet flushing had brought her running from the kitchen, where she had lain on a mattress pad. I heard her coming, screaming, and caught her just as she started through the hall to the bathroom. And hit her, without wanting to, just trying to stop her as the water sucked the Baggie down and away.

  “D-do somethi-ing,” she gasped, fighting for air.

  I kept saying Carol, Carol, over and over, holding her, rocking back and forth, staring over her head, across the living room to the kitchen, where the edge of the teak dining table showed through the doorway, the amber-stained mattress pad hanging half over the edge, pulled loose when Carol had come for the Baggie.

  After a few minutes, she spiraled down into dry, sandpapered sighs. I lifted her onto the sofa, and she looked up at me.

  “Go after him, Gabe. Please. Please, go after him.”

  “Come on, Carol, stop it. I feel lousy about it…”

  “Go after him, you sonofabitch!” she screamed. Veins stood out on her temples.

  “I can’t go after him, dammit, he’s in the plumbing; he’s in the fucking river by now! Stop it, get off my case, let me alone!” I was screaming back at her.

  She found a place where untapped tears waited, and I sat there, across from the sofa, for almost half an hour, just the one lamp casting a dull glow across the living room, my hands clasped down between my knees, wishing she was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing everyone was dead…except the kid. But. He was the only one who was dead. Flushed. Bagged and flushed. Dead.

  When she looked up at me again, a shadow cutting off the lower part of her face so the words emerged from darkness, keynoted only by the eyes, she said, “Go find him.” I had never heard anyone sound that way, ever. Not ever. It frightened me. Riptides beneath the surface of her words created trembling images of shadow women drinking Drano, lying with their heads inside gas ovens, floating face up in thick, red bath water, their hair rippling out like jellyfish.

  I knew she would do it. I couldn’t support that knowledge. “I’ll try,” I said.

  She watched me from the sofa as I left the apartment, and standing against the wall in the elevator, I felt her eyes on me. When I reached the street, still and cold in the predawn, I thought I would walk down to the River Drive and mark time till I could return and console her with the lie that I had tried but failed.

  But she was standing in the window, staring down at me.

  The manhole cover was almost directly across from me, there in the middle of the silent street.

  I looked from the manhole cover to the window, and back again, and again, and again. She waited. Watching. I went to the iron cover and got down on one knee and tried to pry it up. Impossible. I bloodied my fingertips trying, and finally stood, thinking I had satisfied her. I took one step toward the building and realized she was no longer in the window. She stood silently at the curb, holding the long metal rod that wedged against the apartment door when the police lock was engaged.

  I went to her and looked into her face. She knew what I was asking: I was asking, Isn’t this enough? Haven’t I done enough?

  She held out the rod. No, I hadn’t done enough.

  I took the heavy metal rod and levered up the manhole cover. It moved with difficulty, and I strained to pry it off the hole. When it fell, it made a clanging in the street that rose up among the apartment buildings with an alarming suddenness. I had to push it aside with both hands; and when I looked up from that perfect circle of darkness that lay waiting, and turned to the spot where she had given me the tool, she was gone.

  I looked up; she was back in the window.

  The smell of the unwashed city drifted up from the manhole, chill and condemned. The tiny hairs in my nose tried to baffle it; I turned my head away.

  I never wanted to be an attorney. I wanted to work on a cattle ranch. But there was family money, and the need to prove myself to shadows who had been dead and buried with their owners long since. People seldom do what they want to do; they usually do what they are compelled to do. Stop me before I kill again. There was no rational reason for my descending into that charnel house stink, that moist darkness. No rational reason, but Denise and Joanna from the Abortion Center had been friends of mine for eleven years. We had been in bed together many times; long past the time I had enjoyed being in bed together with them, or they had enjoyed being in bed together with me. They knew it. I knew it. They knew I knew, and they continued to set that as one of the payments for their attendance at my Carols, my Andreas, my Stephanies. It was their way of getting even. They liked me, despite themselves, but they had to get even. Get even for their various attendances over eleven years, the first of which had been one for the other, I don’t remember which. Get even for many flushings of the toilet. There was no rational reason for going down into the sewers. None.

  But there were eyes on me from an apartment window.

  I crouched, dropped my legs over the lip of the open manhole, sat on the street for a moment, then slipped over the edge and began to climb down.

  Slipping into an open grave. The smell of the earth is there, where there is no earth. The water is evil; vital fluid that has been endlessly violated. Everything is covered with a green scum that glows faintly in the darkness. An open grave waiting patiently for the corpse of the city to fall.

  I stood on the ledge above the rushing tide, sensing the sodden weight of lost and discarded life that rode the waters toward even darker depths. My God, I thought, I must be out of my mind just to be here. It had finally overtaken me; the years of casual liaisons, careless lies, the guilt I suppose I’d always known would mount up till it could no longer be denied. And I was down here, where I belonged.

  People do what they are compelled to do.

  I started walking toward the arching passageway that led down and away from the steel ladder and the street opening above. Why not walk: aimless, can you perceive what I’m saying?

  Once, years ago, I had an affair with my junior partner’s wife. Jerry never knew about it. They’re divorced now. I don’t think he ever found out; she would have had to’ve been even crazier than I thought to tell him. Denise and Joanna had visited that time, too. I’m nothing if not potent. We flew to Kentucky together one weekend. I was preparing a brief, she met me at the terminal, we flew as husband and wife, family rate. When my work was done in Louisville, we drove out into the countryside. I minored in geology at college, before I went into law. Kentucky is rife with caves. We pulled in at a picnic grounds where some locals had advised us we could do a little spelunking, and with the minimal gear we had picked up at a sporting goods shop, we went into a fine network of chambers, descending beneath the hills and the picnic grounds. I loved the darkness, the even temperature, the smooth-surfaced rivers, the blind fish and water insects that scurried across the wet mirror of the still pools. She had come because she was not permitted to have intercourse at the base of Father Duffy’s statue on Times Square, in the main window of Bloomingdale’s, or on Channel 2 directly preceding The Late News. Caves were the next best thing.

  For my part, the thrill of winding down deeper and deeper into the earth—even tho
ugh graffiti and Dr. Pepper cans all along the way reminded me this was hardly unexplored territory—offset even her (sophomoric) appeals to “take her violently,” there on the shell-strewn beach of a subterranean river.

  I liked the feel of the entire Earth over me. I was not claustrophobic, I was—in some perverse way—wonderfully free. Even soaring! Under the ground, I was soaring!

  The walk deeper into the sewer system did not unsettle or distress me. I rather enjoyed being alone. The smell was terrible, but terrible in a way I had not expected.

  If I had expected vomit and garbage, this was certainly not what I smelled. Instead, there was a bittersweet scent of rot—reminiscent of Florida mangrove swamps. There was the smell of cinnamon, and wallpaper paste, and charred rubber; the warm odors of rodent blood and bog gas; melted cardboard, wool, coffee grounds still aromatic, rust.

  The downward channel leveled out. The ledge became a wide, flat plain as the water went down through drainage conduits, leaving only a bubbling, frothy residue to sweep away into the darkness. It barely covered the heels of my shoes. Florsheims, but they could take it. I kept moving. Then I saw the light ahead of me.

  It was dim, flickering, vanished for a moment as something obscured it from my view, moving in front of it, back again, dim and orange. I moved toward the light.

  It was a commune of bindlestiffs, derelicts gathered together beneath the streets for safety and the skeleton of camaraderie. Five very old men in heavy overcoats and three even older men in castoff army jackets…but the older men were younger, they only looked older: a condition of the skids. They sat around a waste barrel oil drum filled with fire. Dim, soft, withered fire that leaped and curled and threw off sparks all in slow motion. Dreamwalking fire; somnambulist fire; mesmerized fire. I saw an atrophied arm of flame like a creeper of kangaroo ivy emerge over the lip of the barrel, struggling toward the shadowed arch of the tunnel ceiling; it stretched itself thin, released a single, teardrop-shaped spark, and then fell back into the barrel without a scream.