The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison Page 26

  He thought perhaps it had been an eclipse, that his deep concentration of his hopeless state had kept him from noticing.

  There was no sun.

  No sky. The ground beneath him was gone. He sat, merely sat, but on nothing, surrounded by nothing, seeing and feeling nothing save a vague chill. It was cold now, very cold now.

  After a long time he decided to stand and did stand: there was nothing beneath or above him. He stood in darkness.

  He could remember everything that had ever happened to him in his life. Every moment of it, with absolute clarity. It was something he had never experienced before. His memory had been no better or worse than anyone else’s, but he had forgotten all the details, many years in which nothing had happened, during which he had wasted time—almost as a mute witness at the dull rendition of his life.

  But now, as he walked through the limbo that was all he had been left of the world, he recalled everything perfectly. The look of terror on his mother’s face when he had sliced through the tendons of his left hand with the lid from the tin can of pink lemonade: he had been four years old. The feel of his new Thom McAn shoes that had always been too tight, from the moment they had been bought, but which he had been forced to wear to school every day, even though they rubbed him raw at the back of his heels: he had been seven years old. The Four Freshmen standing and singing for the graduation dance. He had been alone. He had bought one ticket to support the school event. He had been sixteen. The taste of egg roll at Choy’s, the first time. He had been twenty-four. The woman he had met at the library, in the section where they kept the book on animals. She had used a white lace handkerchief to dry her temples. It had smelled of perfume. He had been thirty. He remembered all the sharp edges of every moment from his past. It was remarkable. In this nowhere.

  And he walked through gray spaces, with the shadows of other times and other places swirling past. The sound of rushing wind, as though the emptiness through which he moved was being constantly filled and emptied, endlessly, without measure or substance.

  Had he known what emotions to call on for release, he would have done so. But he was numb in his skin. Not merely chilled, as this empty place was chilled, but somehow inured to feeling from the edge of his perceptions to the center of his soul. Sharp, clear, drawn back from the absolute past, he remembered a day when he had been eleven, when his mother had suggested that for his birthday they make a small party, to which he would invite a few friends. And so (he remembered with diamond-bright perfection) he had invited six boys and girls. They had never come. He sat alone in the house that Saturday, all his comic books laid out in case the cake and party favors and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey did not hold their attention sufficiently. Never came. It grew dark. He sat alone, with his mother occasionally walking through the living room to make some consoling remark. But he was alone, and he knew there was only one reason for it: they had all forgotten. It was simply that he was a waste of time for those actually living their lives. Invisible, by token of being unimportant. A thing unnoticed: on a street, who notices the mailbox, the fire hydrant, the crosswalk lines? He was an invisible, useless thing.

  He had never permitted another party to be thrown for him.

  He remembered that Saturday now. And found the emotion, twenty-six years late, to react to this terrible vanishment of the world. He began to tremble uncontrollably, and he sat down where there was nothing to sit down on, and he rubbed his hands together, feeling the tremors in his knuckles and the ends of his fingers. Then he felt the constriction in his throat, he turned his head this way and that, looking for a nameless exit from self-pity and loneliness; and then he cried. Lightly, softly, because he had no experience at it.

  A crippled old woman came out of the gray mist of nowhere and stood watching him. His eyes were closed, or he would have seen her coming.

  After a while, he snuffled, opened his eyes, and saw her standing in front of him. He stared at her. She was standing. At a level somewhat below him, as though the invisible ground of this nonexistent place was on a lower plane than that on which he sat.

  “That won’t help much,” she said. She wasn’t surly, but neither was there much succor in her tone.

  He looked at her, and immediately stopped crying.

  “Probably just got sucked in here,” she said. It was not quite a question, though it had something of query in it. She knew, and was going carefully.

  He continued to look at her, hoping she could tell him what had happened to him. And to her? She was here, too.

  “Could be worse,” she said, crossing her arms and shifting her weight off her twisted left leg. “I could’ve been a Saracen or a ribbon clerk or even one of those hairy prehumans.” He didn’t respond. He didn’t know what she was talking about. She smiled wryly, remembering. “First person I met was some kind of a retard, little boy about fifteen or so. Must have spent what there’d been of his life in some padded cell or a hospital bed, something like that. He just sat there and stared at me, drooled a little, couldn’t tell me a thing. I was scared out of my mind, ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. Wasn’t till a long time after that before I met someone spoke English.”

  He tried to speak and found his throat was dry. His voice came out in a croak. He swallowed and wet his lips. “Are there many other, uh, other people…we’re not all alone…?”

  “Lots of others. Hundreds, thousands, God only knows; maybe whole countries full of people here. No animals, though. They don’t waste it the way we do.”

  “Waste it? What?”

  “Time, son. Precious, lovely time. That’s all there is, just time. Sweet, flowing time. Animals don’t know about time.”

  As she spoke, a slipping shadow of some wild scene whirled past and through them. It was a great city in flames. It seemed more substantial than the vagrant wisps of countryside or sea-scenes that had been ribboning past them as they spoke. The wooden buildings and city towers seemed almost solid enough to crush anything in their path. Flames leaped toward the gray, dead skin sky; enormous tongues of crackling flame that ate the city’s gut and chewed the phantom image, leaving ash. (But even the dead ashes had more life than the grayness through which the vision swirled.)

  Ian Ross ducked, frightened. Then it was gone.

  “Don’t worry about it, son,” the old woman said. “Looked a lot like London during the big fire. First the plague, then the fire. I’ve seen its like before. Can’t hurt you. None of it can hurt you.”

  He tried to stand, found himself still weak. “But what is it?”

  She shrugged. “No one’s ever been able to tell me for sure. Bet there’s some around in here who can, though. One day I’ll run into one of them. If I find out and we ever meet again I’ll be sure to let you know. Bound to happen.” But her face grew infinitely sad and there was desolation in her expression. “Maybe. Maybe we’ll meet again. Never happens, but it might. Never saw that retarded boy again. But it might happen.”

  She started to walk away, hobbling awkwardly. Ian got to his feet with difficulty, but as quickly as he could. “Hey, wait! Where are you going? Please, lady, don’t leave me here all alone. I’m scared to be here by myself.”

  She stopped and turned, tilting oddly on her bad leg. “Got to keep moving. Keep going, you know? If you stay in one place you don’t get anywhere; there’s a way out…you’ve just got to keep moving till you find it.” She started again, saying, over her shoulder, “I guess I won’t be seeing you again; I don’t think it’s likely.”

  He ran after her and grabbed her arm. She seemed very startled. As if no one had ever touched her in this place during all the time she had been here.

  “Listen, you’ve got to tell me some things, whatever you know. I’m awfully scared, don’t you understand? You have to have some understanding.”

  She looked at him carefully. “All right, as much as I can, then you’ll let me go?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know what happened to me…or t
o you. Did it all fade away and just disappear, and everything that was left was this, just this gray nothing?”

  He nodded.

  She sighed. “How old are you, son?”

  “I’m thirty-seven. My name is Ian—”

  She waved his name away with an impatient gesture. “That doesn’t matter. I can see you don’t know any better than I do. So I don’t have the time to waste on you. You’ll learn that, too. Just keep walking, just keep looking for a way out.”

  He made fists. “That doesn’t tell me anything! What was that burning city, what are these shadows that go past all the time?” As if to mark his question a vagrant filmy phantom caravan of cassowary-like animals drifted through them.

  She shrugged and sighed. “I think it’s history. I’m not sure…I’m guessing, you understand. But I think it’s all the bits and pieces of the past, going through on its way somewhere.”

  He waited. She shrugged again, and her silence indicated—with a kind of helpless appeal to be let go—that she could tell him nothing further.

  He nodded resignedly. “All right. Thank you.”

  She turned with her bad leg trembling: she had stood with her weight on it for too long. And she started to walk off into the gray limbo. When she was almost out of sight, he found himself able to speak again, and he said…too softly to reach her…“Goodbye, lady. Thank you.”

  He wondered how old she was. How long she had been here. If he would one time far from now be like her. If it was all over and if he would wander in shadows forever.

  He wondered if people died here.

  Before he met Catherine, a long time before he met her, he met the lunatic who told him where he was, what had happened to him, and why it had happened.

  They saw each other standing on opposite sides of a particularly vivid phantom of the Battle of Waterloo. The battle raged past them, and through the clash and slaughter of Napoleon’s and Wellington’s forces they waved to each other.

  When the sliding vision had rushed by, leaving emptiness between them, the lunatic rushed forward, clapping his hands as if preparing himself for a long, arduous, but pleasurable chore. He was of indeterminate age, but clearly past his middle years. His hair was long and wild, he wore a pair of rimless antique spectacles, and his suit was turn-of-the-eighteenth-century. “Well, well, well,” he called, across the narrowing space between them, “so good to see you, sir!”

  Ian Ross was startled. In the timeless time he had wandered through this limbo, he had encountered coolies and Berbers and Thracian traders and silent Goths…an endless stream of hurrying humanity that would neither speak nor stop. This man was something different. Immediately, Ian knew he was insane. But he wanted to talk!

  The older man reached Ian and extended his hand. “Cowper, sir. Justinian Cowper. Alchemist, metaphysician, consultant to the forces of time and space, ah yes, time! Do I perceive in you, sir, one only recently come to our little Valhalla, one in need of illumination? Certainly! Definitely, I can see that is the case.”

  Ian began to say something, almost anything, in response, but the wildly gesticulating old man pressed on without drawing a breath. “This most recent manifestation, the one we were both privileged to witness was, I’m certain you’re aware, the pivotal moment at Waterloo in which the Little Corporal had his fat chewed good and proper. Fascinating piece of recent history, wouldn’t you say?”

  Recent history? Ian started to ask him how long he had been in this gray place, but the old man barely paused before a fresh torrent of words spilled out.

  “Stunningly reminiscent of that marvelous scene in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma in which Fabrizio, young, innocent, fresh to that environ, found himself walking across a large meadow on which men were running in all directions, noise, shouts, confusion…and he knew not what was happening, and not till several chapters later do we learn—ah, marvelous!—that it was, in fact, the Battle of Waterloo through which he moved, totally unaware of history in the shaping all around him. He was there, while not there. Precisely our situation, wouldn’t you say?”

  He had run out of breath. He stopped, and Ian plunged into the gap. “That’s what I’d like to know, Mr. Cowper: what’s happened to me? I’ve lost everything, but I can remember everything, too. I know I should be going crazy or frightened, and I am scared, but not out of my mind with it…I seem to accept this, whatever it is. I—I don’t know how to take it, but I know I’m not feeling it yet. And I’ve been here a long time!”

  The old man slipped his arm around Ian’s back and began walking with him, two gentlemen strolling in confidence on a summer afternoon by the edge of a cool park. “Quite correct, sir, quite correct. Dissociative behavior; mark of the man unable to accept his destiny. Accept it, sir, I urge you; and fascination follows. Perhaps even obsession, but we must run that risk, mustn’t we?”

  Ian wrenched away from him, turned to face him. “Look, mister, I don’t want to hear all that craziness! I want to know where I am and how I get out of here. And if you can’t tell me, then leave me alone!”

  “Nothing easier, my good man. Explanation is the least of it. Observation of phenomena, ah, that’s the key. You can follow? Well, then: we are victims of the law of conservation of time. Precisely and exactly linked to the law of the conservation of matter; matter, which can neither be created nor destroyed. Time exists without end. But there is an ineluctable entropic balance, absolutely necessary to maintain order in the universe. Keeps events discrete, you see. As matter approaches universal distribution, there is a counterbalancing, how shall I put it, a counterbalancing ‘leaching out’ of time. Unused time is not wasted in places where nothing happens. It goes somewhere. It goes here, to be precise. In measurable units (which I’ve decided, after considerable thought, to call ‘chronons’).”

  He paused, perhaps hoping Ian would compliment him on his choice of nomenclature. Ian put a hand to his forehead; his brain was swimming. “That’s insane. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Makes perfectly good sense, I assure you. I was a top savant in my time; what I’ve told you is the only theory that fits the facts. Time unused is not wasted; it is leached out, drained through the normal space-time continuum and recycled. All this history you see shooting past us is that part of the time-flow that was wasted. Entropic balance, I assure you.”

  “But what am I doing here?”

  “You force me to hurt your feelings, sir.”

  “What am I doing here?!”

  “You wasted your life. Wasted time. All around you, throughout your life, unused chronons were being leached out, drawn away from the contiguous universe, until their pull on you was irresistible. Then you went on through, pulled loose like a piece of wood in a rushing torrent, a bit of chaff whirled away on the wind. Like Fabrizio, you were never really there. You wandered through, never seeing, never participating, and so there was nothing to moor you solidly in your own time.”

  “But how long will I stay here?”

  The old man looked sad and spoke kindly for the first time: “Forever. You never used your time, so you have nothing to rely on as anchorage in normal space.”

  “But everyone here thinks there’s a way out. I know it! They keep walking, trying to find an exit.”

  “Fools. There is no way back.”

  “But you don’t seem to be the sort of person who wasted his life. Some of the others I’ve seen, yes, I can see that; but you?”

  The old man’s eyes grew misty. He spoke with difficulty. “Yes, I belong here…”

  Then he turned and, like one in a dream, lost, wandered away. Lunatic, observing phenomena. And then gone in the grayness of time-gorged limbo. Part of a glacial period slid past Ian Ross and he resumed his walk without destination.

  And after a long, long time that was timeless but filled with an abundance of time, he met Catherine.

  He saw her as a spot of darkness against the gray limbo. She was quite a distance away, and he walked on for a while, watching the dark
blotch against gray, and then decided to change direction. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered: he was alone with his memories, replaying again and again.

  The sinking of the Titanic wafted through him.

  She did not move, even though he was approaching on a direct line. When he was quite close he could see that she was sitting cross-legged on nothingness; she was asleep. Her head was propped in one hand, the bracing arm supported by her knee. Asleep.

  He came right up to her and stood there simply watching. He smiled. She was like a bird, he thought, with her head tucked under her wing. Not really, but that was how he saw her. Though her cupped hand covered half her face he could make out a sweet face, very pale skin, a mole on her throat; her hair was brown, cut quite short. Her eyes were closed: he decided they would be blue.

  The Greek senate, the age of Pericles, men in a crowd—property owners—screaming at Lycurgus’ exhortations in behalf of socialism. The shadow of it sailed past not very far away.

  Ian stood staring, and after a while he sat down opposite her. He leaned back on his arms and watched. He hummed an old tune the name of which he did not know.

  Finally, she opened her brown eyes and stared at him.

  At first momentary terror, shock, chagrin, curiosity. Then she took umbrage. “How long have you been there?”

  “My name is Ian Ross,” he said.

  “I don’t care what your name is!” she said angrily. “I asked you how long you’ve been sitting there watching me?”

  “I don’t know. A while.”

  “I don’t like being watched; you’re being very rude.”

  He got to his feet without answering, and began walking away. Oh well.

  She ran after him. “Hey, wait!”

  He kept walking. He didn’t have to be bothered like that. She caught up with him and ran around to stand in front of him. “I suppose you just think you can walk off like that!”

  “Yes, I can. I’m sorry I bothered you. Please get out of my way if you don’t want me around.”