The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison Page 29

  Then the walls turned red hot and melted, and then the lightning burned everything black, and finally Danny had had enough. He cracked, and went gibbering around the room, tripping over the man-eating vines that were growing out of the light sockets and the floorboards. He finally sat down in a huge puddle of monkey urine and cried till his face grew puffy and his eyes flame-red and his nose swelled to three times normal size.

  “I’ve got to get away from all this!” he screamed hysterically, drumming his heels, trying to eat his pants’ cuffs.

  you can divorce her, and that means you are voided out of the purchase contract: she wanted the lamp, not you, the djinn suggested.

  Danny looked up (just in time to get a ripe Black Angus meadow muffin in his face) and yelled, “I won’t! You can’t make me. We’ve only been married a week and four days and I won’t leave her!”

  Connie, covered with running sores, stumbled to Danny and hugged him, though he had turned to tapioca pudding and was melting. But three days later, when ghost images of people he had feared all his life came to haunt him, he broke completely and allowed Connie to call the rest home on the boa constrictor that had once been the phone. “You can come and get me when this is over,” he cried pitifully, kissing her poison ivy lips. “Maybe if we split up, he’ll have some mercy.” But they both doubted it.

  When the downstairs buzzer rang, the men from the Home for the Mentally Absent came into the debacle that had been their apartment and saw Connie pulling her feet out of the swamp slime only with difficulty; she was crying in unison with Danny as they bundled him into the white ambulance. Unearthly laughter rolled around the sky like thunder as her husband was driven away.

  Connie was left alone. She went back upstairs; she had nowhere else to go.

  She slumped into the pool of molten slag, and tried to think while ants ate at her flesh and rabid rats gnawed off the wallpaper.

  i’m just getting warmed up, the djinn said from the lamp.

  Less than three days after he had been admitted to the Asylum for the Temporarily Twitchy, Connie came to get Danny. She came into his room; the shades were drawn, the sheets were very white; when he saw her his teeth began to chatter.

  She smiled at him gently. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you weren’t simply overjoyed to see me, Squires.”

  He slid under the sheets till only his eyes were showing. His voice came through the covers. “If I break out in boils, it will definitely cause a relapse, and the day nurse hates mess.”

  “Where’s my macho protective husband now?”

  “I’ve been unwell.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all over. You’re fit as a fiddle, so bestir your buns and let’s get out of here.”

  Danny Squires’ brow furrowed. This was not the tone of a woman with frogs in her hair. “I’ve been contemplating divorce or suicide.”

  She yanked the covers down, exposing his naked legs sticking out from the hem of the hospital gown. “Forget it, little chum. There are at least a hundred and ten positions we haven’t tried yet before I consider dissolution. Now will you get out of that bed and come on?”

  “But…”

  “…a thing I’ll kick, if you don’t move it.”

  Bewildered, he moved it.

  Outside, the Rolls-Royce waited with its motor running. As they came through the front doors of the Institute for the Neurologically Flaccid, and Connie helped Danny from the discharge wheelchair, the liveried chauffeur leaped out and opened the door for them. They got in the back seat, and Connie said, “To the house, Mark.” The chauffeur nodded, trotted briskly around and climbed behind the wheel. They took off to the muted roar of twin mufflers.

  Danny’s voice was a querulous squeak. “Can we afford a rented limo?”

  Connie did not answer, merely smiled, and snuggled closer to him.

  After a moment Danny asked, “What house?”

  Connie pressed a button on the console in the armrest and the glass partition between front and back seats slid silently closed. “Do me a favor, will you,” she said, “just hold the twenty questions till we get home? It’s been a tough three days and all I ask is that you hold it together for another hour.”

  Danny nodded reluctantly. Then he noticed she was dressed in extremely expensive clothes. “I’d better not ask about your mink-trimmed jacket, either, right?”

  “It would help.”

  He settled into silence, uneasy and juggling more than just twenty unasked questions. And he remained silent until he realized they were not taking the expressway into New York. He sat up sharply, looked out the rear window, snapped his head right and left trying to ascertain their location, and Connie said, “We’re not going to Manhattan. We’re going to Darien, Connecticut.”

  “Darien? Who the hell do we know in Darien?”

  “Well, Upjohn, for one, lives in Darien.”

  “Upjohn!?! Ohmigod, he’s fired me and sent the car to bring me to him so he can have me executed! I knew it!”

  “Squires,” she said, “Daniel, my love, Danny heart of my heart, will you just kindly close the tap on it for a while! Upjohn has nothing to do with us any more. Nothing at all.”

  “But…but we live in New York!”

  “Not no more we don’t.”

  Twenty minutes later they turned into the most expensive section in Darien and sped down a private road.

  They drove an eighth of a mile down the private road lined with Etruscan pines, beautifully maintained, and pulled into a winding driveway. Five hundred yards farther, and the drive spiraled in to wind around the front of a huge, luxurious, completely tasteful Victorian mansion. “Go on,” Connie said. “Look at your house.”

  “Who lives here?” Danny asked.

  “I just told you: we do.”

  “I thought that’s what you said. Let me out here, I’ll walk back to the nuthouse.”

  The Rolls pulled up before the mansion, and a butler ran down to open the car door for them. They got out and the servant bowed low to Connie. Then he turned to Danny. “Good to have you home, Mr. Squires,” he said. Danny was too unnerved to reply.

  “Thank you, Penzler,” Connie said. Then, to the chauffeur, “Take the car to the garage, Mark; we won’t be needing it again this afternoon. But have the Porsche fueled and ready; we may drive out later to look at the grounds.”

  “Very good, Mrs. Squires,” Mark said. Then he drove away.

  Danny was somnambulistic. He allowed himself to be led into the house, where he was further stunned by the expensive fittings, the magnificent halls, the deep-pile rugs, the spectacular furniture, the communications complex set into an entire wall, the Art Deco bar that rose out of the floor at the touch of a button, the servants who bowed and smiled at him, as if he belonged there. He was boggled by the huge kitchen, fitted with every latest appliance; and the French chef who saluted with a huge ladle as Connie entered.

  “Wh-where did all this come from?” He finally gasped out the question as Connie led him upstairs on the escalator.

  “Come on, Danny; you know where it all came from.”

  “The limo, the house, the grounds, the mink-trimmed jacket, the servants, the Vermeer in the front hall, the cobalt-glass Art Deco bar, the entertainment center with the beam television set, the screening room, the bowling alley, the polo field, the Neptune swimming pool, the escalator and six-strand necklace of black pearls I now notice you are wearing around your throat…all of it came from the genie?”

  “Sorta takes your breath away, don’t it?” Connie said, ingenuously.

  “I’m having a little trouble with this.”

  “What you’re having trouble with, champ, is that Mas’úd gave you a hard time, you couldn’t handle it, you crapped out, and somehow I’ve managed to pull it all out of the swamp.”

  “I’m thinking of divorce again.”

  They were walking down a long hall lined with works of modern Japanese illustration by Yamazaki, Kobayashi, Takahiko Li, Kenzo Tanii an
d Orai. Connie stopped and put both her hands on Danny’s trembling shoulders.

  “What we’ve got here, Squires, is a bad case of identity reevaluation. Nobody gets through all the battles. We’ve been married less than two weeks, but we’ve known each other for three years. You don’t know how many times I folded before that time, and I don’t know how many times you triumphed before that time.

  “What I’ve known of you for three years made it okay for me to marry you; to think ‘This guy will be able to handle it the times I can’t.’ That’s a lot of what marriage is, to my way of thinking. I don’t have to score every time, and neither do you. As long as the unit maintains. This time it was my score. Next time it’ll be yours. Maybe.”

  Danny smiled weakly. “I’m not thinking of divorce.”

  Movement out of the corner of his eye made him look over his shoulder.

  An eleven-foot-tall black man, physically perfect in every way, with chiseled features like an obsidian Adonis, dressed in an impeccably-tailored three-piece Savile Row suit, silk tie knotted precisely, stood just in the hallway, having emerged from open fifteen-foot-high doors of a room at the juncture of corridors.

  “Uh…” Danny said.

  Connie looked over her shoulder. “Hi, Mas’úd. Squires, I would like you to meet Mas’úd Jan bin Jan, a Mazikeen djinn of the ifrit, by the grace of Sulaymin, master of all the jinni, though Allah be the wiser. Our benefactor. My friend.”

  “How good a friend?” Danny whispered, seeing the totem of sexual perfection looming eleven feet high before him.

  “We haven’t known each other carnally, if that’s what I perceive your squalid little remark to mean,” she replied. And a bit wistfully she added, “I’m not his type. I think he’s got it for Lena Horne.” At Danny’s semi-annoyed look she added, “For god’s sake, stop being so bloody suspicious!”

  Mas’úd stepped forward, two steps bringing him the fifteen feet intervening, and proffered his greeting in the traditional Islamic head-and-heart salute, flowing outward, a smile on his matinee idol face. “Welcome home, Master. I await your smallest request.”

  Danny looked from the djinn to Connie, amazement and copelessness rendering him almost speechless. “But…you were stuck in the lamp…bad-tempered, oh boy were you bad-tempered…how did you…how did she…”

  Connie laughed, and with great dignity the djinn joined in.

  “You were in the lamp…you gave us all this…but you said you’d give us nothing but aggravation! Why?”

  In deep, mellifluous tones Danny had come to associate with a voice that could knock high-flying fowl from the air, the djinn smiled warmly at them and replied, “Your good wife freed me. After ten thousand years cramped over in pain with an eternal bellyache, in that most miserable of dungeons, Mistress Connie set me loose. For the first time in a hundred times ten thousand years of cruel and venal master after master, I have been delivered into the hands of one who treats me with respect. We are friends. I look forward to extending that friendship to you, Master Squires.” He seemed to be warming to his explanation, expansive and effusive. “Free now, permitted to exist among humans in a time where my kind are thought a legend, and thus able to live an interesting, new life, my gratitude knows no bounds, as my hatred and anger knew no bounds. Now I need no longer act as a Kako-daemon, now I can be the sort of ifrit Rabbi Jeremiah bin Eliazar spoke of in Psalm XLI.

  “I have seen much of this world in the last three days as humans judge time. I find it most pleasing in my view. The speed, the shine, the light. The incomparable Lena Horne. Do you like basketball?”

  “But how? How did you do it, Connie? How? No one could get him out…”

  She took him by the hand, leading him toward the fifteen-foot-high doors. “May we come into your apartment, Mas’úd?”

  The djinn made a sweeping gesture of invitation, bowing so low his head was at Danny’s waist as he and Connie walked past.

  They stepped inside the djinn’s suite and it was as if they had stepped back in time to ancient Basra and the Thousand Nights and a Night. Or into a Cornel Wilde costume epic.

  But amid all the silks and hangings and pillows and tapers and coffers and brassware, there in the center of the foyer, in a Lucite case atop an onyx pedestal, lit from an unknown source by a single glowing spot of light, was a single icon.

  “Occasionally magic has to bow to technology,” Connie said. Danny moved forward. He could not make out what the item lying on the black velvet pillow was. “And sometimes ancient anger has to bow to common sense.”

  Danny was close enough to see it now.

  Simple. It had been so simple. But no one had thought of it before. Probably because the last time it had been needed, by the lamp’s previous owner, it had not existed.

  “A can opener,” Danny said. “A can opener!?! A simple, stupid, everyday can opener!?! That’s all it took? I had a nervous breakdown, and you figured out a can opener?”

  “Can do,” Connie said, winking at Mas’úd.

  “Not cute, Squires,” Danny said. But he was thinking of the diamond as big as the Ritz.

  * * *

  Paladin of the Lost Hour

  1986 Hugo Award: Best Novelette; Locus Poll Award: Best Novelette

  teleplay – 1987 Writers Guild of America: Best Anthology Episode/Single Program

  This was an old man. Not an incredibly old man: obsolete, spavined; not as worn as the sway-backed stone steps ascending the Pyramid of the Sun to an ancient temple; not yet a relic. But even so, a very old man, this old man perched on an antique shooting stick, its handles opened to form a seat, its spike thrust at an angle into the soft ground and trimmed grass of the cemetery. Gray, thin rain misted down at almost the same angle as that at which the spike pierced the ground. The winter-barren trees lay flat and black against an aluminum sky, unmoving in the chill wind. An old man sitting at the foot of a grave mound whose headstone had tilted slightly when the earth had settled; sitting in the rain and speaking to someone below.

  “They tore it down, Minna.

  “I tell you, they must have bought off a councilman.

  “Came in with bulldozers at six o’clock in the morning, and you know that’s not legal. There’s a Municipal Code. Supposed to hold off till at least seven on weekdays, eight on the weekend; but there they were at six, even before six, barely light for godsakes. Thought they’d sneak in and do it before the neighborhood got wind of it and called the landmarks committee. Sneaks: they come on holidays, can you imagine!

  “But I was out there waiting for them, and I told them, ‘You can’t do it, that’s Code number 91.3002, sub-section E,’ and they lied and said they had special permission, so I said to the big muckymuck in charge, ‘Let’s see your waiver permit,’ and he said the Code didn’t apply in this case because it was supposed to be only for grading, and since they were demolishing and not grading, they could start whenever they felt like it. So I told him I’d call the police, then, because it came under the heading of Disturbing the Peace, and he said…well, I know you hate that kind of language, old girl, so I won’t tell you what he said, but you can imagine.

  “So I called the police, and gave them my name, and of course they didn’t get there till almost quarter after seven (which is what makes me think they bought off a councilman), and by then those ’dozers had leveled most of it. Doesn’t take long, you know that.

  “And I don’t suppose it’s as great a loss as, maybe, say, the Great Library of Alexandria, but it was the last of the authentic Deco design drive-ins, and the carhops still served you on roller skates, and it was a landmark, and just about the only place left in the city where you could still get a decent grilled cheese sandwich pressed very flat on the grill by one of those weights they used to use, made with real cheese and not that rancid plastic they cut into squares and call it ‘cheese food.’

  “Gone, old dear, gone and mourned. And I understand they plan to put up another one of those mini-malls on the site, just ten blocks
away from one that’s already there, and you know what’s going to happen: this new one will drain off the traffic from the older one, and then that one will fail the way they all do when the next one gets built, you’d think they’d see some history in it; but no, they never learn. And you should have seen the crowd by seven-thirty. All ages, even some of those kids painted like aborigines, with torn leather clothing. Even they came to protest. Terrible language, but at least they were concerned. And nothing could stop it. They just whammed it, and down it went.

  “I do so miss you today, Minna. No more good grilled cheese.” Said the very old man to the ground. And now he was crying softly, and now the wind rose, and the mist rain stippled his overcoat.

  Nearby, yet at a distance, Billy Kinetta stared down at another grave. He could see the old man over there off to his left, but he took no further notice. The wind whipped the vent of his trenchcoat. His collar was up but rain trickled down his neck. This was a younger man, not yet thirty-five. Unlike the old man, Billy Kinetta neither cried nor spoke to memories of someone who had once listened. He might have been a geomancer, so silently did he stand, eyes toward the ground.

  One of these men was black; the other was white.

  Beyond the high, spiked-iron fence surrounding the cemetery two boys crouched, staring through the bars, through the rain; at the men absorbed by grave matters, by matters of graves. These were not really boys. They were legally young men. One was nineteen, the other two months beyond twenty. Both were legally old enough to vote, to drink alcoholic beverages, to drive a car. Neither would reach the age of Billy Kinetta.

  One of them said, “Let’s take the old man.”

  The other responded, “You think the guy in the trenchcoat’ll get in the way?”

  The first one smiled; and a mean little laugh. “I sure as shit hope so.” He wore, on his right hand, a leather carnaby glove with the fingers cut off, small round metal studs in a pattern along the line of his knuckles. He made a fist, flexed, did it again.