The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison Page 28

  Connie leaped in the air, and came down on Danny’s foot.

  Mukhar was standing beside such a pile of tumbled miscellany that for a moment they could not separate him from the stuff, junk, things he sold.

  “We saw your sign,” Connie said.

  But Danny was more blunt, more direct. “There was an empty lot here; then a minute later, this shop. How come?”

  The little man stepped out from the mounds of dust-collectors and his little nut-brown, wrinkled face burst into a million-creased smile. “A fortuitous accident, my children. A slight worn spot in the fabric of the cosmos, and I have been set down here for…how long I do not know. But it never hurts to try and stimulate business while I’m here.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Danny said. He looked at Connie. Her expression was as blank as his own.

  “Oh!” Connie cried, and went dashing off into one of the side-corridors lined with curios. “This is perfect! Just what we need for the end table. Oh, Danny, it’s a dream! It’s absolutely the ne plus ultra!”

  Danny walked over to her, but in the dimness of the aisle between the curios he could barely make out what it was she was holding. He drew her into the light near the door. It had to be:

  Aladdin’s lamp.

  Well, perhaps not that particular person’s lamp, but one of the ancient, vile-smelling oil burning jobs: long thin spout, round-bottom body, wide, flaring handle.

  It was algae-green with tarnish, brown with rust, and completely covered by the soot and debris of centuries. There was no contesting its antiquity; nothing so time-corrupted could fail to be authentic. “What the hell do you want with that old thing, Connie?”

  “But Danny, it’s so per-fect. If we just shine it up a bit. As soon as we put a little work into this lamp, it’ll be a beauty.” Danny knew he was defeated…and she’d probably be right, too. It probably would be very handsome when shined and brassed-up.

  “How much?” he asked Mukhar. He didn’t want to seem anxious; old camel traders were merciless at bargaining when they knew the item in question was hotly desired.

  “Fifty drachmae, eh?” the old man said. His tone was one of malicious humor. “At current exchange rates, taking into account the fall of the Ottoman Empire, thirty dollars.”

  Danny’s lips thinned. “Put it down, Connie; let’s get out of here.”

  He started toward the door, dragging his wife behind him. But she still clutched the lamp; and Mukhar’s voice halted them. “All right, noble sir. You are a cunning shopper, I can see that. You know a bargain when you spy it. But I am unfamiliar in this time-frame with your dollars and your strange fast-food native customs, having been set down here only once before; and since I am more at ease with the drachma than the dollar, with the shekel than the cent, I will cut my own throat, slash both my wrists, and offer you this magnificent antiquity for…uh…twenty dollars?” His voice was querulous, his tone one of wonder and hope.

  “Jesse James at least had a horse!” Danny snarled, once again moving toward the door.

  “Fifteen!” Mukhar yowled. “And may all your children need corrective lenses from too much tv-time!”

  “Five; and may a hundred thousand syphilitic camels puke into your couscous,” Danny screamed back over his shoulder.

  “Not bad,” said Mukhar.

  “Thanks,” said Danny, stifling a smile. Now he waited.

  “Bloodsucker! Heartless trafficker in cheapness! Pimple on the fundament of decency! Graffito on the subway car of life! Thirteen; my last offer; and may the gods of ITT and the Bank of America turn a blind eye to your venality!” But his eyes held the golden gleam of the born haggler, at last, blessedly, in his element.

  “Seven, not a penny more, you Arabic anathema! And may a weighty object drop from a great height, flattening you to the niggardly thickness of your soul.” Connie stared at him with open awe and admiration.

  “Eleven! Eleven dollars, a pittance, an outright theft we’re talking about. Call the security guards, get a consumer advocate, gimme a break here!”

  “My shadow will vanish from before the evil gleam of your rapacious gaze before I pay a penny more than six bucks, and let the word go out to every wadi and oasis across the limitless desert, that Mohanadus Mukhar steals maggots from diseased meat, flies from horse dung, and the hard-earned drachmae of honest laborers. Six, fuckface, and that’s it!”

  “My death is about to become a reality,” the Arab bellowed, tearing at the strands of white hair showing under the fez. “Rob me, go ahead, rob me: drink my life’s blood! Ten! A twenty dollar loss I’ll take.”

  “Okay, okay.” Danny turned around and produced his wallet. He pulled out one of the three ten dollar bills still inside and, turning to Connie, said, “You sure you want this ugly, dirty piece of crap?” She nodded, and he held the bill naked in the vicinity of the little merchant. For the first time Danny realized Mukhar was wearing pointed slippers that curled up; there was hair growing from his ears.

  “Ten bucks.”

  The little man moved with the agility of a ferret, and whisked the tenner from Danny’s outstretched hand before he could draw it back. “Sold!” Mukhar chuckled.

  He spun around once, and when he faced them again, the ten dollars was out of sight. “And a steal, though Allah be the wiser; a hot deal, a veritable steal, blessed sir!”

  Danny abruptly realized he had been taken. The lamp had probably been picked up in a junkyard and was worthless. He started to ask if it was a genuine antique, but the piles of junk had begun to waver and shimmer and coruscate with light. “Hey!” Danny said, alarmed, “What’s this now?”

  The little man’s wrinkled face drew up in panic. “Out! Get out, quick! The time-frame is sucking back together! Out! Get out now if you don’t want to roam the eternities with me and this shop…and I can’t afford any help! Out!”

  He shoved them forward, and Connie slipped and fell, flailing into a pile of glassware. None of it broke. Her hand went out to protect herself and went right through the glass. Danny dragged her to her feet, panic sweeping over him…as the shop continued to waver and grow more indistinct around them.

  “Out! Out! Out!” Mukhar kept yelling.

  Then they were at the door, and he was kicking them—literally planting his curl-slippered foot in Danny’s backside and shoving—from the store. They landed in a heap on the sidewalk. The lamp bounced from Connie’s hand and went into the gutter with a clang. The little man stood there grinning in the doorway, and as the shop faded and disappeared, they heard him mumble happily, “A clear nine-seventy-five profit. What a lemon! You got an Edsel, kid, a real lame piece of goods. But I gotta give it to you; the syphilitic camel bit was inspired.”

  Then the shop was gone, and they got to their feet in front of an empty, weed-overgrown lot.

  A lame piece of goods?

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you’re answering me?”

  “I was raised polite.”

  “Danny, talk to me…come on!”

  “The answer is no. I’m not going to talk about it.”

  “We have to!”

  “Not only don’t we have to, I don’t want to, ain’t going to, and shut up so I can go to sleep.”

  “We’ve been lying here almost an hour. Neither of us can sleep. We have to discuss it, Danny.”

  The light went on over his side of the bed. The single pool of illumination spread from the hand-me-down daybed they had gotten from Danny’s brother in New Jersey, faintly limning the few packing crates full of dishes and linens, the three Cuisinarts they’d gotten as wedding gifts, the straight-back chairs from Connie’s Aunt Medora, the entire bare and depressing reality of their first home together.

  It would be better when the furniture they’d bought today was delivered. Later, it would be better. Now, it was the sort of urban landscape that drove divorcees and aging bachelors to jump down the airshaft at Christmastime.

  “I’m going to talk abou
t it, Squires.”

  “So talk. I have my thumbs in my ears.”

  “I think we should rub it.”

  “I can’t hear you. It never happened. I deny the evidence of my senses. It never happened. I have these thumbs in my ears so I cannot hear a syllable of this craziness.”

  “For god’s sake, Squires, I was there with you today. I saw it happen, the same as you. I saw that weird little old man and I saw his funky shop come and go like a big burp. Now, neither of us can deny it!”

  “If I could hear you, I’d agree; and then I’d deny the evidence of my senses and tell you…” He took his thumbs from his ears, looking distressed. “…tell you with all my heart that I love you, that I have loved you since the moment I saw you in the typing pool at Upjohn, that if I live to be a hundred thousand years old I’ll never love any one or any thing as much as I love you this very moment; and then I would tell you to piss off and forget it, and let me go to sleep so that tomorrow I can con myself into believing it never happened the way I know it happened.

  “Okay?”

  She threw back the covers and got out of bed. She was naked. They had not been married that long.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You know where I’m going.”

  He sat up in the daybed. His voice had no lightness in it. “Connie!”

  She stopped and stared at him, there in the light.

  He spoke softly. “Don’t. I’m scared. Please don’t.”

  She said nothing. She looked at him for a time. Then, naked, she sat down cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the daybed. She looked around at what little they had, and she answered him gently. “I have to, Danny. I just have to…if there’s a chance; I have to.”

  They sat that way, reaching across the abyss with silent imperatives, until—finally—Danny nodded, exhaled heavily, and got out of the daybed. He walked to one of the cartons, pulled out a dustrag, shook it clean over the box, and handed it to her. He walked over to the window ledge where the tarnished and rusted oil lamp sat, and he brought it to her.

  “Shine the damned thing, Squires. Who knows, maybe we actually got ourselves a 24 carat genie. Shine on, oh mistress of my Mesopotamian mansion.”

  She held the lamp in one hand, the rag in the other. For a few minutes she did not bring them together. “I’m scared, too,” she said, held her breath, and briskly rubbed the belly of the lamp.

  Under her flying fingers the rust and tarnish began to come away in spots. “We’ll need brass polish to do this right,” she said; but suddenly the ruin covering the lamp melted away, and she was rubbing the bright skin of the lamp itself.

  “Oh, Danny, look how nice it is, underneath all the crud!” And at that precise instant the lamp jumped from her hand, emitted a sharp, gray puff of smoke, and a monstrous voice bellowed in the apartment:

  AH-HA! It screamed, louder than a subway train. AH-HA!

  FREE AT LAST! FREE—AS FREE AS I’LL EVER BE—AFTER TEN THOUSAND YEARS! FREE TO SPEAK AND ACT, MY WILL TO BE KNOWN!

  Danny went over backward. The sound was as mind-throttling as being at ground zero. The window glass blew out. Every light bulb in the apartment shattered. From the carton containing their meager chinaware came the distinct sound of hailstones as every plate and cup dissolved into shards. Dogs and cats blocks away began to howl. Connie screamed—though it could not be heard over the foghorn thunder of the voice—and was knocked head over ankles into a corner, still clutching the dustrag. Plaster showered in the little apartment. The window shades rolled up.

  Danny recovered first. He crawled over a chair and stared at the lamp with horror. Connie sat up in the corner, face white, eyes huge, hands over her ears. Danny stood and looked down at the seemingly innocuous lamp.

  “Knock off that noise! You want to lose us the lease?”

  CERTAINLY, OFFSPRING OF A WORM!

  “I said: stop that goddam bellowing!”

  THIS WHISPER? THIS IS NAUGHT TO THE HURRICANE I SHALL LOOSE, SPAWN OF PARAMECIUM!

  “That’s it,” Danny yelled. “I’m not getting kicked out of the only apartment in the city of New York I can afford just because of some loudmouthed genie in a jug…”

  He stopped. He looked at Connie. Connie looked back at him.

  “Oh, my god,” she said.

  “It’s real,” he said.

  They got to their knees and crawled over. The lamp lay on its side on the floor at the foot of the daybed.

  “Are you really in there?” Connie asked.

  WHERE ELSE WOULD I BE, SLUT!

  “Hey, you can’t talk to my wife that way—”

  Connie shushed him. “If he’s a genie, he can talk any way he likes. Sticks and stones; namecalling is better than poverty.”

  “Yeah? Well, nobody talks to my—”

  “Put a lid on it, Squires. I can take care of myself. If what’s in this lamp is even half the size of the genie in that movie you took me to the Thalia to see…”

  “The Thief of Bagdad…1939 version…but Rex Ingram was just an actor, they only made him look big.”

  “Even so. As big as he was, if this genie is only half that big, playing macho overprotective chauvinist hubby—”

  SO HUMANS CONTINUE TO PRATTLE LIKE MONKEYS EVEN AFTER TEN THOUSAND YEARS! WILL NOTHING CLEANSE THE EARTH OF THIS RAUCOUS PLAGUE OF INSECTS?

  “We’re going to get thrown right out of here,” Danny said. His face screwed up in a horrible expression of discomfort.

  “If the cops don’t beat the other tenants to it.”

  “Please, genie,” Danny said, leaning down almost to the lamp. “Just tone it down a little, willya?”

  OFFSPRING OF A MILLION STINKS! SUFFER!

  “You’re no genie,” Connie said smugly. Danny looked at her with disbelief.

  “He’s no genie? Then what the hell do you think he is?”

  She swatted him. Then put her finger to her lips.

  THAT IS WHAT I AM, WHORE OF DEGENERACY!

  “No you’re not.”

  I AM.

  “Am not.”

  AM.

  “Am not.”

  AM SO, CHARNEL HOUSE HARLOT! WHY SAY YOU NAY?

  “A genie has a lot of power; a genie doesn’t need to shout like that to make himself heard. You’re no genie, or you’d speak softly. You can’t speak at a decent level, because you’re a fraud.”

  CAUTION, TROLLOP!

  “Foo, you don’t scare me. If you were as powerful as you make out, you’d tone it way down.”

  is this better? are you convinced?

  “Yes,” Connie said, “I think that’s more convincing. Can you keep it up, though? That’s the question.”

  forever, if need be.

  “And you can grant wishes?” Danny was back in the conversation.

  naturally, but not to you, disgusting grub of humanity.

  “Hey, listen,” Danny replied angrily, “I don’t give a damn what or who you are! You can’t talk to me that way.” Then a thought dawned on him. “After all, I’m your master!”

  ah! correction, filth of primordial seas. there are some djinn who are mastered by their owners, but unfortunately for you i am not one of them, for i am not free to leave this metal prison. i was imprisoned in this accursed vessel many ages ago by a besotted sorcerer who knew nothing of molecular compression and even less of the binding forces of the universe. he put me into this thrice-cursed lamp, far too small for me, and i have been wedged within ever since. over the ages my good nature has rotted away. i am powerful, but trapped. those who own me cannot request anything and hope to realize their boon. i am unhappy, and an unhappy djinn is an evil djinn. were i free, i might be your slave; but as i am now, i will visit unhappiness on you in a thousand forms!

  Danny chuckled. “The hell you will. I’ll toss you in the incinerator.”

  ah! but you cannot. once you have bought the lamp, you cannot lose it, destroy it or give it away, only sell it. i am with you forever, for who would buy such
a miserable lamp?

  And thunder rolled in the sky.

  “What are you going to do?” Connie asked.

  do? just ask me for something, and you shall see!

  “Not me,” Danny said, “you’re too cranky.”

  wouldn’t you like a billfold full of money?

  There was sincerity in the voice from the lamp.

  “Well, sure, I want money, but—”

  The djinn’s laughter was gigantic, and suddenly cut off by the rain of frogs that fell from a point one inch below the ceiling, clobbering Danny and Connie with small, reeking, wriggling green bodies. Connie screamed and dove for the clothes closet. She came out a second later, her hair full of them; they were falling in the closet, as well. The rain of frogs continued and when Danny opened the front door to try and escape them, they fell in the hall. He slammed the door—he realized he was still naked—and covered his head with his hands. The frogs fell, writhing, stinking, and then they were knee-deep in them, with little filthy, warty bodies jumping up at their faces.

  what a lousy disposition i’ve got! the djinn said, and then he laughed. And he laughed again, a clangorous peal that was silenced only when the frogs stopped, disappeared, and the flood of blood began.

  It went on for a week.

  They could not get away from him, no matter where they went. They were also slowly starving: they could not go out to buy groceries without the earth opening under their feet, or a herd of elephants chasing them down the street, or hundreds of people getting violently ill and vomiting on them. So they stayed in and ate what canned goods they had stored up in the first four days of their marriage. But who could eat with locusts filling the apartment from top to bottom, or snakes that were intent on gobbling them up like little white rats?

  First came the frogs, then the flood of blood, then the whirling dust storm, then the spiders and gnats, then the snakes and then the locusts and then the tiger that had them backed against a wall and ate the chair they used to ward him off. Then came the bats and the leprosy and the hailstones and then the floor dissolved under them and they clung to the wall fixtures while their furniture—which had been quickly delivered (the moving men had brought it during the hailstones)—fell through, nearly killing the little old lady who lived beneath them.