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

  I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past. But I was selling with both hands. And when I finally glanced over at Jeffty, half an hour later, he looked like another child.

  He was sweating. That terrible fever sweat when you have stomach flu. He was pale, as pasty and pale as a worm, and his little hands were gripping the arms of the chair so tightly I could see his knuckles in bold relief. I dashed over to him, excusing myself from the middle-aged couple looking at the new 21” Mediterranean model.

  “Jeffty!”

  He looked at me, but his eyes didn’t track. He was in absolute terror. I pulled him out of the chair and started toward the front door with him, but the customers I’d deserted yelled at me, “Hey!” The middle-aged man said, “You wanna sell me this thing or don’t you?”

  I looked from him to Jeffty and back again. Jeffty was like a zombie. He had come where I’d pulled him. His legs were rubbery and his feet dragged. The past, being eaten by the present, the sound of something in pain.

  I clawed some money out of my pants pocket and jammed it into Jeffty’s hand. “Kiddo…listen to me…get out of here right now!” He still couldn’t focus properly. “Jeffty,” I said as tightly as I could, “listen to me!” The middle-aged customer and his wife were walking toward us. “Listen, kiddo, get out of here right this minute. Walk over to the Utopia and buy the tickets. I’ll be right behind you.” The middle-aged man and his wife were almost on us. I shoved Jeffty through the door and watched him stumble away in the wrong direction, then stop as if gathering his wits, turn and go back past the front of the Center and in the direction of the Utopia. “Yes sir,” I said, straightening up and facing them, “yes, ma’am, that is one terrific set with some sensational features! If you’ll just step back here with me…”

  There was a terrible sound of something hurting, but I couldn’t tell from which channel, or from which set, it was coming.

  • • •

  Most of it I learned later, from the girl in the ticket booth, and from some people I knew who came to me to tell me what had happened. By the time I got to the Utopia, nearly twenty minutes later, Jeffty was already beaten to a pulp and had been taken to the Manager’s office.

  “Did you see a very little boy, about five years old, with big brown eyes and straight brown hair…he was waiting for me?”

  “Oh, I think that’s the little boy those kids beat up?”

  “What!?! Where is he?”

  “They took him to the Manager’s office. No one knew who he was or where to find his parents—”

  A young girl wearing an usher’s uniform was kneeling down beside the couch, placing a wet paper towel on his face.

  I took the towel away from her and ordered her out of the office.

  She looked insulted and she snorted something rude; but she left. I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to swab away the blood from the lacerations without opening the wounds where the blood had caked. Both his eyes were swollen shut. His mouth was ripped badly. His hair was matted with dried blood.

  He had been standing in line behind two kids in their teens. They started selling tickets at 12:30 and the show started at 1:00. The doors weren’t opened till 12:45. He had been waiting, and the kids in front of him had had a portable radio. They were listening to the ball game. Jeffty had wanted to hear some program, God knows what it might have been, Grand Central Station, Let’s Pretend, The Land of the Lost, God only knows which one it might have been.

  He had asked if he could borrow their radio to hear the program for a minute, and it had been a commercial break or something, and the kids had given him the radio, probably out of some malicious kind of courtesy that would permit them to take offense and rag the little boy. He had changed the station…and they’d been unable to get it to go back to the ball game. It was locked into the past, on a station that was broadcasting a program that didn’t exist for anyone but Jeffty.

  They had beaten him badly…as everyone watched.

  And then they had run away.

  I had left him alone, left him to fight off the present without sufficient weaponry. I had betrayed him for the sale of a 21” Mediterranean console television, and now his face was pulped meat. He moaned something inaudible and sobbed softly.

  “Shhh, it’s okay, kiddo, it’s Donny. I’m here. I’ll get you home, it’ll be okay.”

  I should have taken him straight to the hospital. I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have. I should have done that.

  When I carried him through the door, John and Leona Kinzer just stared at me. They didn’t move to take him from my arms. One of his hands was hanging down. He was conscious, but just barely. They stared, there in the semi-darkness of a Saturday afternoon in the present. I looked at them. “A couple of kids beat him up at the theater.” I raised him a few inches in my arms and extended him. They stared at me, at both of us, with nothing in their eyes, without movement. “Jesus Christ,” I shouted, “he’s been beaten! He’s your son! Don’t you even want to touch him? What the hell kind of people are you?!”

  Then Leona moved toward me very slowly. She stood in front of us for a few seconds, and there was a leaden stoicism in her face that was terrible to see. It said, I have been in this place before, many times, and I cannot bear to be in it again; but I am here now.

  So I gave him to her. God help me, I gave him over to her.

  And she took him upstairs to bathe away his blood and his pain.

  John Kinzer and I stood in our separate places in the dim living room of their home, and we stared at each other. He had nothing to say to me.

  I shoved past him and fell into a chair. I was shaking.

  I heard the bath water running upstairs.

  After what seemed a very long time Leona came downstairs, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat down on the sofa and after a moment John sat down beside her. I heard the sound of rock music from upstairs.

  “Would you like a piece of nice pound cake?” Leona said.

  I didn’t answer. I was listening to the sound of the music. Rock music. On the radio. There was a table lamp on the end table beside the sofa. It cast a dim and futile light in the shadowed living room. Rock music from the present, on a radio upstairs? I started to say something, and then knew…Oh, God…no!

  I jumped up just as the sound of hideous crackling blotted out the music, and the table lamp dimmed and dimmed and flickered. I screamed something, I don’t know what it was, and ran for the stairs.

  Jeffty’s parents did not move. They sat there with their hands folded, in that place they had been for so many years.

  I fell twice rushing up the stairs.

  • • •

  There isn’t much on television that can hold my interest. I bought an old cathedral-shaped Philco radio in a secondhand store, and I replaced all the burnt-out parts with the original tubes from old radios I could cannibalize that still worked. I don’t use transistors or printed circuits. They wouldn’t work. I’ve sat in front of that set for hours sometimes, running the dial back and forth as slowly as you can imagine, so slowly it doesn’t look as if it’s moving at all sometimes.

  But I can’t find Captain Midnight or The Land of the Lost or The Shadow or Quiet, Please.

  So she did love him, still, a little bit, even after all those years. I can’t hate them: they only wanted to live in the present world again. That isn’t such a terrible thing.

  It’s a good world, all things considered. It’s much better than it used to be, in a lot of ways. People don’t die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it?

  Isn’t it?

  Tell me.

  Somebody please tell me.

  * * *

  Count the Clock That Tells the Time

  1979 Locus Poll Award: Short Story

  When I do count the clock that tells the time,

  And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

  Wh
en I behold the violet past prime,

  And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;

  When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

  Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

  And summer’s green all girdled up in sheaves

  Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

  Then of thy beauty do I question make,

  That thou among the wastes of time must go…

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  the XIIth Sonnet

  Waking in the cool and cloudy absolute dead middle of a Saturday afternoon, one day, Ian Ross felt lost and vaguely frightened. Lying there in his bed, he was disoriented; and it took him a moment to remember when it was and where he was. Where he was: in the bed where he had awakened every day of his thirty-five-year-old life. When it was: the Saturday he had resolved to spend doing something. But as he lay there he realized he had come to life in the early hours just after dawn, it had looked as though it would rain, the sky seen through the high French windows, and he had turned over and gone back to sleep. Now the clock-radio on the bedside table told him it was the absolute dead middle of the afternoon; and the world outside his windows was cool and cloudy.

  “Where does the time go?” he said.

  He was alone, as always: there was no one to hear him or to answer. So he continued lying there, wasting time, feeling vaguely frightened. As though something important were passing him by.

  A fly buzzed him, circled, buzzed him again. It had been annoying him for some time. He tried to ignore the intruder and stared off across Loch Tummel to the amazing flesh tones of the October trees, preparing themselves for winter’s disingenuous attentions and the utter absence of tourism. The silver birches were already a blazing gold, the larches and ash trees still blending off from green to rust; in a few weeks the Norway spruces and the other conifers would darken until they seemed mere shadows against the slate sky.

  Perthshire was most beautiful at this time of year. The Scottish travel bureaus had assured him of that. So he had come here. Had taken the time to learn to pronounce the names—Schiehallion, Killiecrankie, Pitlochry, Aberfeldy—and had come here to sit. The dream. The one he had always held: silent, close to him, unspoken, in his idle thoughts. The dream of going to Scotland. For what reason he could not say. He had never been here, had read little of this place, had no heritage of Scotsmen, ancestors calling from the past. But this was the place that had always called, and he had come.

  For the first time in his life, Ian Ross had done something. Thirty-seven years old, rooted to a tiny apartment in Chicago, virtually friendless, working five days a week at a drafting table in a firm of industrial designers, watching television till sign-off, tidying the two-and-a-half rooms till every picture hung from the walls in perfect true with the junctures of walls and ceiling, entering each checkbook notation in the little ledger with a fine point ink pen, unable to remember what had happened last Thursday that made it different from last Wednesday, seeing himself reflected in the window of the cafeteria slowly eating the $2.95 Christmas Dinner Special, a solitary man, somehow never marking the change of the seasons save to understand only by his skin that it was warmer or colder, never tasting joy because he could never remember having been told what it was, reading books about things and subject matter, topics not people, because he knew so few people and knew none of them, drawing straight lines, feeling deserted but never knowing where to put his hands to relieve that feeling, a transient man, passing down the same streets every day and perceiving only dimly that there were streets beyond those streets, drinking water, and apple juice, and water, replying when he was addressed directly, looking around sometimes when he was addressed to see if it was, in fact, himself to whom the speaker was speaking, buying gray socks and white undershorts, staring out the windows of his apartment at the Chicago snow, staring for hours at the invisible sky, feeling the demon wind off Lake Michigan rattling the window glass in its frame and thinking this year he would re-putty and this year failing to re-putty, combing his hair as he always had, cooking his own meals, alone with the memories of his mother and father who had died within a year of each other and both from cancer, never having been able to speak more than a few awkward sentences to any woman but his mother…Ian Ross had lived his life like the dust that lay in a film across the unseen top of the tall wardrobe cabinet in his bedroom: colorless, unnoticed, inarticulate, neither giving nor taking.

  Until one day he had said, “Where does the time go?” And in the months following those words he had come to realize he had not, in any remotely valuable manner, lived his life. He had wasted it. Months after the first words came, unbidden and tremulous, he admitted to himself that he had wasted his life.

  He resolved to actualize at least the one dream. To go to Scotland. Perhaps to live. To rent or even buy a crofter’s cottage on the edge of a moor, or overlooking one of the lochs he had dreamed about. He had all the insurance money still put by, he hadn’t touched a cent of it. And there, in that far, chill place in the north he would live…walking the hills with a dog by his side, smoking a pipe that trailed a fragrant pennant of blue-white smoke, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a fleece-lined jacket. He would live there. That was the dream.

  So he had taken the vacations he had never taken, all of them at one time, saved up from eleven years at the drafting table, and he flew to London. Not directly to Edinburgh, because he wanted to come upon the dream very slowly, creep up on it so it wouldn’t vanish like a woodland elf hiding its kettle of gold.

  And from King’s Cross Station he had taken the 21.30 sleeper to Edinburgh, and he had walked the Royal Mile and gazed in wonder at Edinburgh Castle high on the bluff overlooking that bountiful city, and finally he had rented a car and had driven north out the Queensferry Road, across the bridge that spanned the Firth of Forth, on up the A-90 till he reached Pitlochry. Then a left, a random left, but not so random that he did not know it would come out overlooking the Queen’s View, said to be the most beautiful view in the world, certainly in Scotland, and he had driven the twisting, narrow road till he was deep in the hills of Perth.

  And there he had pulled off the road, gotten out of the car, leaving the door open, and walked away down the October hills to sit, finally and at last, staring at the loch, green and blue and silent as the mirror of his memory.

  Where only the buzzing fly reminded him of the past.

  He had been thirty-five when he said, “Where does the time go?” And he was thirty-seven as he sat on the hill.

  And it was there that the dream died.

  He stared at the hills, at the valley that ran off to left and right, at the sparkling water of the loch, and knew he had wasted his time again. He had resolved to do something; but he had done nothing. Again.

  There was no place for him here.

  He was out of phase with all around him. He was an alien object. A beer can thrown into the grass. A broken wall untended and falling back into the earth from which it had been wrenched stone by stone.

  He felt lonely, starved, incapable of clenching his hands or clearing his throat. A ruin from another world, set down in foreign soil, drinking air that was not his to drink. There were no tears, no pains in his body, no deep and trembling sighs. In a moment, with a fly buzzing, the dream died for him. He had not been saved; had, in fact, come in an instant to understand that he had been a child to think it could ever change. What do you want to be when you grow up? Nothing. As I have always been nothing.

  The sky began to bleach out.

  The achingly beautiful golds and oranges and yellows began to drift toward sepia. The blue of the loch slid softly toward chalkiness, like an ineptly prepared painting left too long in direct sunlight. The sounds of birds and forest creatures and insects faded, the gain turned down slowly. The sun gradually cooled for Ian Ross. The sky began to bleach out toward a gray-white newsprint colorlessness. The fly was gone. It was cold now; very cold now.

  Shadows began to s
uperimpose themselves over the dusty mezzotint of the bloodless day:

  A city of towers and minarets, as seen through shallow, disturbed water; a mountain range of glaciers with snow untracked and endless as an ocean; an ocean, with massive, serpent-necked creatures gliding through the jade deeps; a parade of ragged children bearing crosses hewn from tree branches; a great walled fortress in the middle of a parched wasteland, the yellow earth split like strokes of lightning all around the structure; a motorway with hundreds of cars speeding past so quickly they seemed to be stroboscopic lines of colored light; a battlefield with men in flowing robes and riding great-chested stallions, the sunlight dancing off curved swords and helmets; a tornado careening through a small town of slatback stores and houses, lifting entire buildings from their foundations and flinging them into the sky; a river of lava bursting through a fissure in the ground and boiling toward a shadowy indication of an amusement park, with throngs of holiday tourists moving in clots from one attraction to another.

  Ian Ross sat, frozen, on the hillside. The world was dying around him. No…it was vanishing, fading out, dematerializing. As if all the sand had run out of the hourglass around him: as if he were the only permanent, fixed and immutable object in a metamorphosing universe suddenly cut loose from its time-anchor.

  The world faded out around Ian Ross, the shadows boiled and seethed and slithered past him, caught in a cyclonic wind tunnel and swept away past him, leaving him in darkness.

  He sat now, still, quiet, too isolated to be frightened.

  He thought perhaps clouds had covered the sun.

  There was no sun.