Stalking the Nightmare

In the control booth Burt Handelsman, crack engineer, signalled the lines were lighting up. “Okay, here’s our first call,” Hodel said, hitting one of the buttons on the call director. He threw the switch on the pedestal mike, permitting the caller’s voice to be heard in the booth. “You’re on the air,” he said.

  “Hi, this is Joanne Gutreimen. I have an idea for Harlan Ellison.”

  “Where are you calling from?” Hodel asked.

  “What?”

  “I asked where you’re calling from?”

  “I have an idea for Harlan Ellison.”

  “Yes, I know. But where are you?”

  “I’m here. In Hollywood. Where are you?”

  Ellison rolled his eyes. “What’s your idea, Ms. Gutreimen?”

  There was silence for a long moment. Hodel looked at Ellison and Ellison looked at Hodel. Both shrugged. Then the woman’s voice came through the speaker again. “I had this idea of … people are always writing about haunted houses … what about a haunted condominium?”

  Ellison rolled his eyes. “Fresh, daring, original. Walter Kerr in the New York Times.”

  “What?” the woman said.

  “Nothing,” Ellison. He tried rolling his eyes but they were starting to burn from all the activity. “Go on.”

  “Well, actually,” she said, “I was thinking about writing this myself … but couldn’t come up with any plot ideas. So I scrapped it. But I did get an idea from it for a terrific title.”

  “Thrill me,” Ellison said, holding his head.

  ” ‘Mondo Condo’,” she said.

  Hodel smiled. “Well, Harlan, there you go. Your first story collaboration idea tonight. What can you do with it?”

  “A high colonic comes immediately to mind,” Ellison said.

  “What?” the woman on the speaker said.

  “Nothing, nothing!” Ellison shouted. “Let me think a second. Talk to yourselves; I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Hodel began to whistle. He was a round little man with a kind face. For years he had worn eyeglasses hewn from the bottoms of Moet champagne jeroboams, but upon the accidental discovery that he was considered a sex object, he had been fitted with contact lenses. Even so, even with the naked teddybearness of his soft brown eyes revealed, no one called him Michael.

  “Okay, how about this,” Ellison said, interrupting Hodel’s whistling of Johann Friedrich Fasch’s Concerto in C Major for Bassoon, Strings and Continuo, “how about this is a recently-converted condo that was originally an apartment house built in the late 1920’s. The custodian or janitor was a vicious creep who’d never do any work for the tenants. Everybody hated him. One of those kind of tormented devils Lovecraft was always writing about. And the only pleasure he got was from strangling cats. Maybe the building had a lot of old ladies on welfare living there, see, and all of them had cats, the way old ladies on welfare always do. And every week some poor old lady’s tabby would disappear. And what was happening was that this terrible janitor was snatching them, bashing their heads against walls, drowning them, strangling them, tossing them into the furnace …”

  Hodel wrinkled up his face. “Yuccch.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ellison said cheerily, “it’s a healthier occupation than cheating on your income tax.

  “Anyhow, twenty years before, the janitor mysteriously disappeared. Not a trace was found of him, see. But now this expensive condo is being haunted by the sounds from the walls, a la Lovecraft. Ghastly sounds. Hideous sounds. The sounds of the ghost of the janitor being torn to shreds over and over by the ghosts of these demon cats he buried in the walls and basement of the building.”

  There was silence at both ends of the radio link.

  “How’s that grab ya?” Ellison asked.

  “You are a very disturbed person,” Joanne Gutreimen said softly. Then she hung up.

  “Go try to please people,” Ellison said.

  Hodel was staring at him with considerable distaste. “You don’t like cats, I gather.”

  “I don’t even like the cats you haven’t gathered,” Ellison said. He lit his pipe and puffed deeply. Hodel rolled his eyes and punched up another call. “You’re on the air,” he said.

  “Hi, Harlan,” a man said. “This is Mike Taylor. My idea is an old woman with a sharpened spoon and hypnotic powers who steals the eyes from men and women for their vision.”

  Ellison was silent for a moment. Hodel waited expectantly. There was the intimation of eye-rolling and head-holding.

  “I already wrote that one,” Ellison said. “Sort of. It was called ‘Seeing’ and you can find it in my book, STRANGE WINE. It’s about these people who have mutated eyes and they can see special visions, the outline of a person’s future, all sorts of things. I called them ‘forever eyes’ and the story is about a bootleg operation that steals people’s ‘forever eyes.’”

  “Oh,” Mike Taylor said. “Okay, then forget it. But if you were going to steal my idea, you should have paid me.”

  “I wrote it in 1976. This is 1982 and you just called in with it. How did I steal it if I wrote it before you thought of it?”

  Taylor hmmmed for a moment, then said, “Everybody knows how clever you are.”

  “Right,” Ellison agreed. “Voodoo. Bye-bye, Mr. Taylor.”

  Hodel cut him off and hit another button.

  “You’re on the air with Hour 25 and Harlan Ellison.”

  “Hi, Mike; this is Buzz Dixon. Here’s my idea; let’s see what Ellison can do with it”

  “Me widdle heart am goin’ pitta-pat,” Ellison said into the microphone.

  Dixon cleared his throat and began talking very fast. “Bloodworld is a small, distant, barren planet enveloped in a dense, corrosive, poisonous atmosphere. It’s named for the dark red ‘blood’ that bubbles just below the planet’s outer crust-“

  “As opposed to its inner crust, I presume?” Ellison said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. Go on.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, this ‘blood’ is pumped up and refined into Immortaline, a dark black liquid with almost miraculous healing and life-prolonging properties. Immortaline is very, very expensive and is much sought after; for this reason Bloodworld’s location is kept strictly secret”

  “Even from its inhabitants,” Hodel said.

  Ellison made a tsk-tsking motion at the show’s host. Hodel spread his hands as if to say, your vicious sense of humor is catching, Ellison.

  Buzz Dixon said, “What?”

  “Nothing, nothing … go on,” Ellison said, sticking his tongue out at Hodel. In the control booth, Burt Handelsman, crack engineer, was rolling around on the floor.

  “Bloodworld, however, is sentient,” Dixon went on. “It’s a living planet with a form of logic vastly different from our own. Not different values, but an entirely different system of thinking and rationalizing. Bloodworld does share some concepts with humans which makes communication theoretically possible. For example, to both humans and Bloodworld, love is the highest emotion. But to Bloodworld, to love is to kill.”

  “Is that it?” Ellison said.

  “Yeah. What can you turn that into?”

  “The police is my first inclination,” Ellison said with a particularly snotty inflection. “But… um … lemme see … uh … okay, how’s this? First of all, we drop that bullshit about ‘to love is to kill.’ Let’s say a multi-planet consortium originating on Earth has planted a colony on Bloodworld to extract the goop that makes Immortaline. And let’s say that they’ve spent years terra-forming the planet so humans can live there. They’ve even brought in some samples of soil from Earth so they can grow trees that will produce enough oxygen to alter the atmosphere. And let’s say that this sentient planet, Bloodworld, has managed to tap into the sentient unconscious possessed by all planets, and it’s struck up this sort of colloquy with Earth. And they fall in love.

  “And Earth is made aware of Bloodworld’s love, and together they come to despise these crawling, d
estructive little bugs called human beings that have polluted the Earth and are now bleeding Bloodworld dry, as they have every other planet in the universe, and like a good James M. Cain thriller Bloodworld and Earth, sort of planetary Romeo and Juliet, decide to kill off the human race by altering the structure of Immortaline, so instead of giving eternal life to humans it makes them infertile, thereby programming the death of the species.

  “And the tragic kicker is that here’s Bloodworld, way out here in an arm of the Trifid Nebula, say, and good old Earth back there in the Milky Way, or wherever the hell we are, and they kill off the human race, but they can never get together. They are lovers separated by the universe. How’s that grab you?”

  Even Hodel nodded with appreciation. “Gee, that’s okay,” Dixon said.

  “Terrific,” Ellison replied. “Thank your mother for the chicken soup.” And Hodel cut him off.

  “You’re looking faint,” Hodel said.

  “I have an allergic response to lunacy. Makes me break out in the twitches. Takes large infusions of Dickens and Jorge Amado novels to bring me out of it.”

  “Would you settle for a Fresca?”

  “I’d sooner have a hysterectomy.”

  Hodel punched up another call. “You’re on the air with Hodel and Ellison. Be careful, he’s starting to glaze over.”

  “Hi, Mike. This is Joyce Muskat.”

  “Hi, Joyce,” said Ellison. “Long time, no see. You have an idea?”

  “I certainly do. I was listening to you on the subject of cats. And since you’re obviously an aelurophile …”

  “Martians are warping your radio reception, Muskat,” Ellison said. “I’m an aelurophobe. I hate the little fuckers.”

  “In literary circles, Harlan, we call that irony,” she said gently, responding to the note of hysteria in his voice. “I understood your aversion. That’s why I want you to create a story about a cat that cries undrying tears. It’s a tabby cat. Its name is Thalassa.”

  Ellison stared at the wall. After a moment he began to moan. Then he began speaking in tongues.

  “I warned you,” Hodel said. “He’s gone over the edge.”

  “No, no … I’m fine … just fine,” Ellison croaked. “Let me think a moment. Undrying tears. That is to say, tears that don’t dry. It’s a tabby cat. A sweet, little, loveable tabby cat. Molasses is its name …”

  “Not molasses … Thalassa. The Greek personification of the sea,” she said.

  “Thalassa. Right. Sorry. My mind seems to be giving way. I can’t thank you enough for this idea, Joyce. You’re a brick.” He closed his eyes, rubbed his temples and thought.

  “The silence you hear is Ellison thinking,” Hodel told the audience. “While we’re waiting, let me tell you about my new wife, Nancy.”

  From behind closed eyes Ellison murmured, “I’m sure they live for the knowledge.”

  “My new wife, Nancy,” Hodel began, a thoroughly lachrymose expression suffusing his round little face, “is a woman of sterling qualities …”

  “The most sterling of which is that she’s brought her lunacy under control totally, save for having married you. Shut up, Hodel, I’ve got an idea for Muskat’s stupid concept.”

  “I’m sure they’re waiting with bated breath.”

  “The undrying tears the cat is crying are actually the legendary Waters of Nepenthe, the water of forgetfulness from Greek mythology. The cat is the eternal trustee of the potent waters, turned loose in ancient times to bring release from painful memories to mortals. The animal is thousands of years old. The cat is captured by an unscrupulous sort of person, like Stromboli the puppet master who chained up Pinocchio. He’s going to sell the undrying tears of Nepenthe for exorbitant rates. And, uh, I don’t know how I’d develop it, but in the end the cat would probably find a way to get the Stromboli creep to drink some of the tears, thereby forgetting what the cat is … and it would get away to continue its mission on earth.”

  “I like that,” Joyce Muskat said. “See, you’re not such an unfeeling prick, after all.”

  The rest of the hour went that way.

  John Ratner suggested two ideas: a parasitic business manager who finds he is becoming a character in his top client’s newest production; and a concept, nebulous in the extreme, about “beautiful people” in a Los Angeles where humans have grown fur coats on themselves and there’s no fashion industry. Ellison’s development of these were less than successful. He wound up apologizing. Ratner forgave him.

  Alan Chudnow called in with something different. A title. Just a title. “Dust is Falling at the Tower of Minos.” Ellison insulted his moustache, reaffirmed his desire to make it with his grandmother, and told him he’d file away the story title till he was ready to write a Samuel R. Delany-style trilogy. That time would come, Ellison assured Chudnow, soon after the writing of a novel featuring dragons, small people with furry feet and unicorns that responded to anyone who was not a virgin. “Tramp, slut unicorns,” Ellison said.

  Jon R. McKenzie offered the vaguest idea of the evening. “Two friends who grow apart, who change, yet remain the same, and come back together over the period 1970 to 1980.” Ellison had trouble with that one, finally falling back on a variation of his story “Shatterday,” by suggesting they were halves of the same person, traumatically severed in childhood, who had grown up in the same neighborhood without realizing they were the dark and light sides of the same persona. “And in the end,” Ellison said, drawing to a close with that idea, “the dark side becomes a killer and the light side becomes a priest; and in the concluding scene the good guy, Father Flotski, is outside the prison where the bad guy, Mad Dog Berkowitz is holed up with hostage guards, and Father Flotski is yelling up at him with a bullhorn, ‘Come on, you no-good kike, let the guards go before I have the Virgin Mary bite off your nose!’”

  Three subsequent phone calls accused Ellison of being an anti-Semite. Ellison responded by saying, “Some of my best friends are Jews. Like my mother. My father. Me.”

  Jeff Rubenstein came on the air reminding Ellison he was the manager of a Crown Books shop in the San Fernando Valley where Ellison shopped. “What’s your idea?” Ellison asked.

  He wished he hadn’t “How about the domestication of Arabian camels to be used as race animals for American racetrack betting; and National Football League players all want to ride them as jockeys.”

  “Jeff,” Ellison said, “you are a good and decent human being, and I thank you for all your courtesy when I come into Crown, but that is in the top tenth of the first percentile of lamebrained ideas I have ever had thrown at me.”

  “In other words, you’re giving up, admitting defeat, is that it?” Hodel said. Ellison threw the can of Fresca past his head.

  “I’m not admitting defeat,” Ellison said. “I just need a while to let this one percolate. It ain’t easy.”

  “Okay, we’ll take another call.”

  “My name is Dan Turner. How about a story in which someone invents a way for individuals to get what they deserve?”

  Ellison smiled. “Not what they want… what they deserve?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s easy. The guy who develops the gizmo has been in love with this beautiful, witty, intelligent woman all his life, but she won’t have anything to do with him. Contrariwise, there’s this plain-looking woman—not ugly, just sort of average—who’s been in love with him, and she can’t get him. Well, when he’s busy turning this gizmo on people, giving them what they deserve, someone turns it on him …”

  “And he gets the plain woman, right?” Hodel said.

  “Wrong. He gets a thoroughly rotten woman. He didn’t even deserve the nice, decent, average woman.”

  “It doesn’t knock me out,” Hodel said.

  “The original idea didn’t send me to the moon, either, Hodel. I’m dancing as fast as I can here.”

  Hodel punched up another call. Ellison was beginning to reel. He had the feeling he had been sucked headfirst into
the collective head of science fiction fandom, and he didn’t like the neighborhood. “You’re on the air.”

  “Hi, I’m Charles Garcia, and my topic for a story is another story about the little blue Jewish aliens with wheels who needed a minyan for their dying planet; and throw in something about the Pope, if possible.”

  “You mean you want me to write a sequel to I’m Looking for Kadak’?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Mr. Garcia, that’s not an idea. I did that one already.”

  “Oh.” He sounded wounded. “Okay.” And he rang off.

  Ellison looked chagrined. “I think I hurt his feelings.”

  “As opposed to the thousands you’ve insulted tonight who are probably all slashing their wrists or mailing you bombs,” Hodel said wryly.

  “Yeah, well … I didn’t mean to upset Garcia.”

  Hodel put on another caller. Mayer Alan Brenner.

  “I know you,” Ellison said.

  “You sure do. And I’ve got a beauty for you.”

  “Be still my heart,” Ellison said, sinking down on his spine.

  “It’s an excerpt from NORTHEAST TREE AND STREAM,” Mayer said. “A short natural history of the famous Chesapeake Tree-Climbing Octopus …”

  “Why me?” Ellison groaned. “Which God did I offend?”

  “All of them,” said Hodel.

  Mayer went on, undaunted by sounds of pain coming over his radio. “This retiring and rarely-glimpsed creature lives in the many quiet estuaries of the Chesapeake system. Early each morning the octopus leaves the water and crawls up the trunk of a shoreside tree. It makes its way precariously onto a branch overhanging the water, where it waits for its prey to pass underneath.”

  Silence ensued. Dead air hung heavily in the night.

  Finally, Ellison said, “And that’s it, right? That’s the idea, right, Mayer?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  More silence. Then, in a very soft, very tired voice, Ellison said, “These blue-skinned Jewish aliens with wheels come down to Earth and kidnap the Pope so they can have a race on Arabian camels to establish whether Jews or Gentiles are worthiest to live in the universe, and the Pope gets all these NFL players to ride as his team, because they’re all Polish or black and not a Jew in the lot, and they have this watercourse raceway and they race for the universe, and as they come under this tree in the Chesapeake system the octopus drops out of a tree and eats every last, fucking one of them, football players, Jewish aliens, the Pope, the camels, Brian Sipe and Terry Bradshaw and Walter Payton and you too Mayer!”