Darker Terrors Read online

  One: What of the peculiar Dr Fuchs? Well, Agnes never said it in so many words, but I got the impression that she had taken pity on the poor little man, that he had been someone who had loved her and followed her, and whose existence meant nothing without her in it, and so she had allowed him to assist her. She said he was her ‘spotter’. I didn’t ask what that meant, nor what it was he spotted. (Before I left Stock­holm, John-Henri called to say goodbye, and he told me he had found a pair of gloves, apparently the property of Fuchs, half-filled with foul-smelling water or sweat or some fishy liquid, but that Dr Fuchs, himself, had vanished, leaving an enormous hotel bill for John-Henri and the Conference to pay.)

  And two: I’ll bet you haven’t forgotten, have you?

  That’s right, Henry, the feather.

  I plucked it from the flank of an enormous roc that she had stalked and bagged and killed and stuffed. It hung from the ceiling in the Museum of Unimaginable Creatures, hung low enough so I could pluck one memento. I think, I guess, I, well I suppose I knew somewhere in my head or my heart, certainly not in my pants, that I was never going to get this prize, this treasure, this woman of all women. And so, in some part of my sense, I stole a token to keep my memory warm. It’s all I have, one flame-red feather from the flank of the roc that tried to carry off Sinbad the Sailor.

  And do you know why she renounced me, gave me a pass, shined me on, old Henry? I guess I begged a little, told her how good we were together and, yes, she admitted, that was so; but it was never gonna work. Because, Henry, she said …

  I was too easy a catch. I didn’t nearly put up the fight it would take to keep her hunter’s interest pinned.

  What’s that? Do I think I’ll ever see her again?

  Henry, I see her all the time. This world of you and the University and houses and streets and mailboxes and a drink in my hand … it’s all like a transparent membrane on which a movie picthuh is bein’ cast. And behind it, I see her. My Agnes, so fabulous. She’s in a rough-bark coracle, with a canvas sail ripped by terrible winds caused by the beating of a devil roc’s great feathered wings, as its spiked tail thrashes the emerald water into tidal spires. She holds a scimitar, and her jade-green eyes are wild; and I know the flame-feathered monster that seeks to devour her, capsize her, drag her down and feast on her delicious flesh – I know that poor dumb ravening behemoth hasn’t got the chance of a snowball in a cyclotron. In her path, in the fury of her flesh, no poor dumb beast has a chance. Not even – pardon the pun – the Roc of Agnes.

  Do I see her? Oh my, yes. I see her clearly, Henry. I may never see my world clearly again after walking the halls and galleries of the Cyclops Avenue Museum … but I’ll always see her.

  For a poor dumb beast, that vision and a goddam red feather is almost enough to get by on. Wouldja kindly, that Jack Daniel’s beside you. And then maybe I will go upstairs and try to catch a little sleep. Thank ya kindly, Henry.

  Harlan Ellison® has been called ‘one of the greatest living American short story writers’ by the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times said, ‘It’s long past time for Harlan Ellison to be awarded the title: 20th Century Lewis Carroll’. In a career spanning sixty years, he has won more awards for the 114 books he has written or edited, the more than 1,700 stories, essays, articles and newspaper columns, the two dozen teleplays and a dozen motion pictures he has created, than any other living fantasist. His recent publications include I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay, Brain Movies volumes 1-6 and The Top of the Volcano: The Award Winning Stories and the Script for The City on the Edge of Forever. Over the next few years Ellison’s own imprimatur, Edgeworks Abbey will be releasing new titles at HarlanEllisonbooks.com. About the origin of ‘The Museum on Cyclops Avenue’, the author has the following to say (written, amazingly, from his recovery bed four days after quadruple heart-bypass surgery in April 1996): ‘As much as any story I’ve written – and I find that I am as secretly fond of this story as the best of the more than 1,700 stories I’ve written over the past forty-plus years – this speaks to the lovely quote from Bernard Malamud: “Art lives on surprise. A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading”. Susan and I were Guests of Honour (along with ex-KGB chief Boris Pankin) at the prestigious International Book Fair in Goteberg in 1992. During the trip, I wrote large portions of what became my short novel Mefisto in Onyx. And I realised, much later, that whether writing on the floor of the huge convention before hundreds of bewildered attendees who couldn’t understand that creation occurs everywhere and doesn’t always need a velvet-lined closet, or on pillows in a hotel room, that Sweden was a particularly salutary venue to produce contemporary fantasy, light or dark. So it was with a frisson of familiarity that I found myself, as I started writing this story, three years later … returning to a memory of Stockholm. Had no idea as I sat down to write, to do this “story behind the cover” to fit an existing painting by Ron Brown for the fifth issue of my comic book, Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor (quarterly, from Dark Horse), that I was embarking on a story to be told entirely in dialect by a tenured Professor of Classics from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (where I’d lectured some years earlier), recollecting incidents that had happened to him in Sweden. Most peculiar. The voice, the venue, the congeries of disparate elements, the use of my close friends John-Henri Holmberg and Richard Fuchs, all in the service of explaining what was going on in this ‘heroic’ painting Ron Brown had done for my comic. (Every issue, I’d pick some piece of specially-painted or already-existing unpublished Fine Art, and write a story from scratch to fit the vision that would be used as a cover for the comic. It was a great game. I enjoyed it immensely). Incidentally, only the name “Dr Richard Fuchs” bears relation to the real, extremely charming Dr Fuchs, who is a Swedish best-selling author and a swell guy, who permitted me to make him odd and ominous for this tale. I had no idea where I was going when I started. That I began with the feather is to me another example of how secure I’ve become – as all writers must become, I believe – in trusting the talent. The onboard expertise and cleverness of the unconscious are the best helpmeets to integrating the elements of a story … particularly if you begin tabula rasa. This is one of those stories that truly told itself. I just went along for the ride.’ It should be noted that ‘The Museum on Cyclops Avenue’ also stands as a tribute to the late Robert Bloch. As Ellison explains: ‘I have always written my stories on Olympia office standard or portable typewriters. Bob Bloch also wrote on Olympias. When Bob died, he passed on to me two of his machines. This story was written on one of those typewriters, completed on 5 July, 1995. The work goes on.’

  Free Dirt

  RAY BRADBURY

  THE CEMETERY WAS in the centre of the city. On four sides, it was bounded by gliding streetcars on glistening blue tracks and cars with exhaust fumes and sound. But, once inside the wall, the world was lost. For half a mile in four directions, the cemetery raised midnight trees and headstones that grew from the earth, like pale mushrooms, moist and cold. A gravel path led back into darkness and within the gate stood a Gothic Victorian house with six gables and a cupola. The front porch light showed an old man there alone, not smoking, not reading, not moving, silent. If you took a deep breath, he smelled of the sea, of urine, of papyrus, of kindling, of ivory, and of teak. His false teeth moved his mouth automatically when it wanted to talk. His tiny yellow seed eyes twitched and his poke-hole nostrils thinned as a stranger crunched up the gravel path and set foot on the porch step.

  ‘Good evening!’ said the stranger, a young man, perhaps twenty.

  The old man nodded, but his hands lay quietly on his knees.

  ‘I saw that sign out front,’ the stranger went on. “‘Free Dirt”, it said.’

  The old man almost nodded.

  The stranger tried a smile. ‘Crazy, but that sign caught my eye.’

  There was a glass fan over the front door. A light shone through this glass fan, coloured blue, red, yellow, and touched the old man’s face. It
seemed not to bother him.

  ‘I wondered, free dirt? Never struck me you’d have much left over. When you dig a hole and put the coffin in and refill the hole, you haven’t much dirt left, have you? I should think …’

  The old man leaned forward. It was so unexpected that the stranger pulled his foot off the bottom step. ‘You want some?’ said the old man.

  ‘Why, no, no, I was just curious. Signs like that make you curious.’

  ‘Set down,’ said the old man.

  ‘Thanks.’ The young man sat uneasily on the steps. ‘You know how it is, you walk around and never think how it is to own a graveyard.’

  ‘And?’ said the old man.

  ‘I mean, like how much time it takes to dig graves.’

  The old man leaned back in his chair. ‘On a cool day, two hours. Hot day, four. Very hot day, six. Very cold day, not cold so it freezes, but real cold, a man can dig a grave in one hour so he can head in for hot chocolate, brandy in the chocolate. Then again you get a good man on a hot day, he’s no better than a bad man in the cold. Might take eight hours to open up, but there’s easy digging soil here. All loam, no rocks.’

  ‘I’m curious about winter.’

  ‘In blizzards we got a ice-box mausoleum to stash the dead – undelivered mail – until spring and a whole month of shovels and spades.’

  ‘Seeding and planting time, eh?’ The stranger laughed.

  ‘You might say that.’

  ‘Don’t you dig in winter anyhow? For special funerals? Special dead?’

  ‘Some yards got a hose-shovel contraption. Pump hot water through the blade; shape a grave quick, like placer mining, even with the ground an ice pond. We don’t cotton to that. Use picks and shovels.’

  The young man hesitated. ‘Does it bother you?’

  ‘You mean, I get scared ever?’

  ‘Well … yes.’

  The old man took out and stuffed his pipe with tobacco, tamped it with a calloused thumb, lit it, and let out a small stream of smoke.

  ‘No,’ he said at last.

  The young man’s shoulders sank.

  ‘Disappointed?’ said the old man.

  ‘I thought maybe once …?’

  ‘Oh, when you’re young maybe. One time …

  ‘Then, there was a time!’ The young man shifted up a step.

  The old man glanced at him sharply. ‘One time.’ He stared at the marbled hills and the dark trees. ‘My grandpa owned this yard. I was born here. A gravedigger’s son learns to ignore things.’

  The old man took a number of deep puffs and said, ‘I was just eighteen, folks off on vacation, me left to tend things alone, mow the lawn, dig holes, and such. Alone, four graves to dig in October and a cold came hard off the lake, frost on the graves, tombstones like snow, ground froze solid.

  ‘One night I walked out. No moon. Hard grass under foot, could see my breath, hands in my pockets, walking, listening.’

  The old man exhaled frail ghosts from his thin nostrils. ‘Then I heard this sound, deep under. I froze. It was a voice, screaming. Someone woke up buried, heard me walk by, cried out. I just stood. They screamed and screamed. Earth banged. On a cold night, ground’s like porcelain, rings, you see?

  ‘Well.’ The old man shut his eyes to remember. ‘I stood like the wind off the lake stopped my blood. A joke? I searched around and thought, Imagination! No, it was underfoot, sharp, clear. A woman’s voice. I knew all the gravestones.’ The old man’s eyelids trembled. ‘Could recite them alphabetical, year, month, day. Name any year, and I’ll tell. 1899? Jake Smith departed. 1923? Betty Dallman lost. 1933? P.H. Moran! Name a month. August? August last year, buried Henrietta Wells. August 1918? Grandma Hanlon, whole family! Influenza! Name a day. August fourth? Smith, Burke, Shelby carried off. Williamson? He’s on that hill. Douglas? By the creek …

  The story,’ the young man urged.

  ‘Eh?’

  The story you were telling.’

  ‘Oh, the voice below? Well, I knew all the stones. Standing there I guessed that voice out of the ground was Henrietta Fremwell, fine girl, twenty-four years, played piano at the Elite Theatre. Tall, graceful, blonde. How did I know her voice? I stood where there was only men’s graves. Hers was the only woman’s. I ran to put my ear on her stone. Yes! Her voice, way down, screaming!

  ‘“Miss Fremwell!” I shouted.

  ‘“Miss Fremwell!” I yelled again.

  ‘Deep down I heard her, only weeping now. Maybe she heard me, maybe not. She just cried. I ran downhill so fast I tripped and split my head on a stone, got up, screamed myself. Got to the tool shed, all blood, dragged out the tools, and just stood there with one shovel. The ground was ice solid. I fell back against a tree. It would take three minutes to get back to her grave and eight hours to dig to her box. The ground was like glass. A coffin is a coffin; only so much space for air. Henrietta had been buried two days before the freeze, been asleep all that time, using up air, and it rained just before the cold spell and the earth over her, soaked with rainwater, now froze. I’d have to dig maybe eight hours. And the way she cried, there wasn’t another hour of air left.’

  The old man’s pipe had gone out. He rocked in his chair, back and forth, back and forth, silently.

  ‘But,’ said the young man, ‘what did you do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said the old man.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing I could do. That ground was solid. Six men couldn’t have dug that grave. No hot water near. And she might’ve been screaming hours before I heard, so …’

  ‘You did … nothing?’

  ‘Something. Put the shovel back in the tool shed, locked it, and went back to the house and built a fire and drank some hot chocolate, shivering and shivering. Would you have done different?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Would you have dug for eight hours in hard ice rock so’s to reach her when she was truly dead of exhaustion, cold, smothered, and have to bury her all over again? Then call her folks and tell them?’

  The young man was silent. On the porch, the mosquitoes hummed about the naked light bulb.

  ‘I see,’ said the young man.

  The old man sucked his pipe. ‘I think I cried all night because there was nothing I could do.’ He opened his eyes and stared about, surprised, as if he had been listening to someone else.

  ‘That’s quite a story,’ said the young man.

  ‘No,’ said the old man. ‘God’s truth. Want to hear more? See that big stone with the ugly angel? That was Adam Crispin’s. Relatives fought, got a writ from a judge, dug him up hoping for poison. Found nothing. Put him back, but by that time, the dirt from his grave mixed with other dirts. We shovelled in stuff from all around. Next plot, the angel with broken wings? Mary Lou Phipps. Dug her up to lug her off to Elgin, Illinois. More relatives. Where she’d been, the pit stayed open, oh, three weeks. No funerals. Meanwhile, her dirt got cross-shovelled with others. Six stones over, one stone north, that was Henry Douglas Jones. Became famous sixty years after no one paid attention. Now he’s planted under the Civil War monument. His grave lay wide two months, nobody wanted to utilise the hole of a Southerner, all of us leaning North with Grant. So his dirt got scattered. That give you some notion of what that “Free Dirt” sign means?’

  The young man eyed the cemetery landscape. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘where is that dirt you’re handing out?’

  The old man pointed with his pipe, and the stranger looked and, indeed, by a nearby wall was a sizeable hillock some ten feet long by about three feet high, loam and grass tufts of many shades of tan, brown, and burnt umber. ‘Go look,’ said the old man.

  The young man walked slowly over to stand by the mound. ‘Kick it,’ said the old man. ‘See if it’s real.’ The young man kicked, and his face paled. Did you hear that?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said the old man, looking somewhere else. The stranger listened and shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well, now,’ said the old man, knocking out
the ashes from his pipe. ‘How much free dirt you need?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought.’

  ‘Yes, you have,’ said the old man, ‘or you wouldn’t have driven your lightweight delivery truck up by the gate. I got cat’s ears. Heard your motor just when you stopped. How much?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the young man uneasily. ‘My backyard’s eighty feet by forty. I could use a good inch of topsoil. So …?’

  ‘I’d say,’ said the old man, ‘half of that mound there. Hell, take it. Nobody wants it.’

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘I mean, that mound has been growing and diminishing, diminishing and growing, mixtures up and down, since Grant took Richmond and Sherman reached the sea. There’s Civil dirt there, coffin splinters, satin casket shreds from when Lafayette met the honour guards. Edgar Allan Poe. There’s funeral flowers, blossoms from ten hundred obsequies. Con­dolence card confetti for Hessian troopers, Parisian gunners who never shipped home. That soil is so laced with bone meal and casket corsages I should charge you to buy the lot. Grab a spade before I do.’

  ‘Stay right there.’ The young man raised one hand.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said the old man. ‘Nor is anyone else nearby.

  The half-truck was pulled up by the dirt mound and the young man was reaching in for a spade, when the old man said, ‘No, I think not.’

  The old man went on.

  ‘Graveyard spade’s best. Familiar metal, familiar soil. Easy digging, when like takes to like. So …’

  The old man’s head indicated a spade half-stuck in the dark mound. The young man shrugged and moved.

  The cemetery spade came free with a soft whispering. Pellets of ancient mound fell with similar whispers.

  He began to dig and shift and fill the back of his half-truck as the old man, from the corners of his eyes, observed, ‘It’s more than dirt, as I said. War of 1812, San Juan Hill, Manassas, Gettysburg, October flu epidemic 1918, all strewn from graves filled and evicted to be refilled. Various occupants leavened out to dust, various glories melted to mixtures, rust from metal caskets, coffin handles, shoelaces but no shoes, hairs long and short. Ever see wreaths made of hair saved to weave crowns to fix on mortal pictures? All that’s left of a smile or that funny look in the eyes of someone who knows she’s not alive any more, ever. Hair, epaulettes, not whole ones, but one strand of epaulettes, all there, along with blood that’s gone to silt.’