Strange Wine

by Harlan Ellison

  I tried to remember what Carol looked like, but it wasn’t an image I could fix in my mind half as solidly as I had fixed the thought that this. Was. The. Last. Time.

  I stepped out of the service niche.

  The young-old bindlestiff who had followed me was standing there, silently waiting. At first I couldn’t even see him–there was only the vaguest lighter shade of darkness to my left, coming from around the bend and that oil drum full of fire–but I knew he was there. Even as he had known I was there, all the time. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t speak, and after a while I was able to discern his shape. Hands still deep in his pockets.

  “Something?” I said, more than a little belligerently.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Get out of my way.”

  He stared at me, sorrowfully, I thought, but that had to be nonsense. I thought.

  “Don’t make me have to hurt you,” I said.

  He stepped aside, still watching me.

  I started to move past him, down the channel.

  He didn’t follow, but I was walking backward to keep him in sight, and he didn’t take his eyes off mine.

  I stopped. “What do you want?” I asked. “Do you need some money?”

  He came toward me. Inexplicably, I wasn’t afraid he would try something. He wanted to see me more clearly, closer. I thought.

  “You couldn’t give me nothing I need.” His voice was rusted, pitted, scarred, unused, unwieldy.

  “Then why are you following me?”

  “Why’ve you come down here?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “You make it bad down here, mister. Why don’t you g’wan and go back upside, leave us alone?”

  “I have a right to be here.” Why had I said that?

  “You got no right to come down here; stay back upside where you belong. All of us know you make it bad, mister.”

  He didn’t want to hurt me, he just didn’t want me here. Not even right for these outcasts, the lowest level to which men could sink; even here I was beneath contempt. His hands were deep in his pockets. “Take your hands out of your pockets, slowly, I want to make sure you aren’t going to hit me with something when I turn around. Because I’m going on down there, not back. Come on now, do it. Slowly. Carefully.”

  He took his hands out of his pockets slowly, and held them up. He had no hands. Chewed stumps, glowing faintly green like the walls where I had descended from the manhole.

  I turned and went away from him.

  It grew warmer, and the phosphorescent green slime on the walls gave some light. I had descended as the channel had fallen away deeper under the city. This was a land not even the noble streetworkers knew, a land blasted by silence and emptiness. Stone above and below and around, it carried the river without a name into the depths, and if I could not return, I would stay here like the skids. Yet I continued walking. Sometimes I cried, but I don’t know why, or for what, or for whom. Certainly not for myself.

  Was there ever a man who had everything more than I had had everything? Bright words, and quick movements, soft cloth next to my skin, and places to place my love, if I had only recognized that it was love.

  I heard a nest of rats squealing as something attacked them, and I was drawn to a side tunnel where the shining green effluvium made everything bright and dark as the view inside the machines they used to have in shoe stores. I hadn’t thought of that in years. Until they found out that the X-rays could damage the feet of children, shoe stores used bulky machines one stepped up onto, and into which one inserted newly shod feet. And when the button was pushed a green X-ray light came on, showing the bones that lay beneath the flesh. Green and black. The light was green, and the bones were dusty black. I hadn’t thought of that in years, but the side tunnel was illuminated in just that way.

  An alligator was ripping the throats of baby rats.

  It had invaded the nest and was feeding mercilessly, tossing the bodies of the ripped and shredded rodents aside as it went for the defenseless smaller ones. I stood watching, sickened but fascinated. Then, when the shrieks of anguish were extinguished at last, the great saurian, direct lineal descendant of Rex, snapped them up one by one and, thrashing its tail, turned to stare at me.

  He had no hands. Chewed stumps, glowing faintly green like the walls.

  I moved back against the wall of the side tunnel as the alligator belly-crawled past me, dragging its leash. The thick, armored tail brushed my ankle and I stiffened.

  Its eyes glowed red as those of an Inquisition torturer.

  I watched its scaled and taloned feet leave deep prints in the muck underfoot, and I followed the beast, its trail clearly marked by the impression of the leash in the mud.

  Frances had a five-year-old daughter. She took the little girl for a vacation to Miami Beach one year. I flew down for a few days. We went to a Seminole village, where the old women did their sewing on Singer machines. I thought that was sad. A lost heritage, perhaps; I don’t know. The daughter, whose name I can’t recall, wanted a baby alligator. Cute. We brought it back on the plane in a cardboard box with air holes. Less than a month later it had grown large enough to snap. Its teeth weren’t that long, but it snapped. It was saying: this is what I’ll be: direct lineal descendant of Rex. Frances flushed it down the toilet one night after we’d made love. The little girl was asleep in the next room. The next morning, Frances told her the alligator had run off.

  The sewers of the city are infested with full-grown alligators. No amount of precaution and no forays by hunting teams with rifles or crossbows or flame throwers have been able to clear the tunnels. The sewers are still infested; workers go carefully. So did I.

  The alligator moved steadily, graceful in its slithering passage down one tunnel and into another side passage and down always down, steadily into the depths. I followed the trail of the leash.

  We came to a pool and it slid into the water like oil, its dead-log snout above the fetid foulness, its Torquemada eyes looking toward its destination.

  I thrust the iron rod down my pant leg, pulled my belt tight enough to hold it, and waded into the water. It came up to my neck and I lay out and began dog-paddling, using the one leg that would bend. The light was very green and sharp now.

  The saurian came out on the muck beach at the other side and crawled forward toward an opening in the tunnel wall. I crawled out, pulled the iron rod loose, and followed. The opening gave into darkness, but as I passed through, I trailed my hand across the wall and felt a door. I stopped, surprised, and felt in the darkness. An iron door, with an arched closure at the top and a latch. Studs, heavy and round and smelling faintly of rust, dotted the door.

  I walked through…and stopped.

  There had been something else on the door. I stepped back and ran my fingers over the open door again. I found the indentations at once, and ran my fingertips across them, trying to discern in the utter darkness what they were. Something about them…I traced them carefully.

  They were letters.. My fingers followed the curves.. Cut into the iron somehow.. What was a door doing down here?. The cuts seemed very old, weathered, scummy.. They were large and very regular.. They made no sense, no word formed that I knew.. And I came to the end of the sequence..

  CROATOAN. It made no sense. I stayed there a moment, trying to decide if it was a word the sanitation engineers might have used for some designation of a storage area perhaps. Croatoan. No sense. Not Croatian, it was Croatoan. Something nibbled at the back of my memory: I had heard the word before, knew it from somewhere, long ago, a vapor of sound traveling back on the wind of the past. It escaped me, I had no idea what it meant.

  I went through the doorway again.

  Now I could not even see the trail of the leash the alligator had dragged. I kept moving, the iron rod in my hand.

  I heard them coming toward me from both sides, and it was clearly alligators, many of them. From side passages. I stopped and reached out to find the wall of the channel
. I couldn’t find it. I turned around, hoping to get back to the door, but when I hurried back the way I thought I had come, I didn’t reach the door. I just kept going. Either I had gone down a fork and not realized the channel had separated, or I had lost my sense of direction. And the slithering sounds kept coming.

  Now, for the first time, I felt terror! The safe, warm, enfolding darkness of the underworld had, in an instant, merely by the addition of sounds around me, become a suffocating winding-sheet. It was as if I’d abruptly awakened in a coffin, buried six feet beneath the tightly stomped loam; that clogging terror Poe had always described so well because he had feared it himself…the premature burial. Caves no longer seemed comfortable.

  I began to run!

  I lost the rod somewhere, the iron bar that had been my weapon, my security.

  I fell and slid face first in the muck.

  I scrabbled to my knees and kept going. No walls, no light, no slightest aperture or outcropping, nothing to give me a sense of being in the world, running through a limbo without beginning, without end.

  Finally, exhausted, I slipped and fell and lay for a moment. I heard slithering all around me and managed to pull myself to a sitting position. My back grazed a wall, and I fell up against it with a moan of gratitude. Something, at least; a wall against which to die.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, waiting for the teeth.

  Then I felt something touching my hand. I recoiled with a shriek! It had been cool and dry and soft. Did I recall that snakes and other amphibians were cool and dry? Did I remember that? I was trembling.

  Then I saw light. Flickering, bobbing, going up and down just slightly, coming toward me.

  And as the light grew closer and brighter, I saw there was something right beside me; the something that had touched me; it had been there for a time, watching me.

  It was a child.

  Naked, deathly white, with eyes great and luminous, but covered with a transparent film as milky as a membrane, small, very young, hairless, its arms shorter than they should have been, purple and crimson veins crossing its bald skull like traceries of blood on a parchment, fine even features, nostrils dilating as it breathed shallowly, ears slightly tipped as though reminiscent of an elf, barefooted but with pads on the soles, this child stared at me, looked up at me, its little tongue visible as it opened its mouth filled with tiny teeth, trying to form sounds, saying nothing, watching me, a wonder in its world, watching me with the saucer eyes of a lemur, the light behind the membrane flickering and pulsing. This child.

  And the light came nearer, and the light was many lights. Torches, held aloft by the children who rode the alligators.

  Beneath the city, there is yet another city: wet and dark and strange.

  At the entrance to their land someone–not the children, they couldn’t have done it–long ago built a road sign. It is a rotted log on which has been placed, carved from fine cherry-wood, a book and a hand. The book is open, and the hand rests on the book, one finger touching the single word carved in the open pages. The word is CROATOAN.

  On August 13, 1590, Governor John White of the Virginia colony managed to get back to the stranded settlers of the Roanoke, North Carolina, colony. They had been waiting three years for supplies, but politics, foul weather and the Spanish Armada had made it impossible. As they went ashore, they saw a pillar of smoke. When they reached the site of the colony, though they found the stronghold walls still standing against possible Indian attacks, no sign of life greeted them. The Roanoke colony had vanished. Every man, woman, and child, gone. Only the word CROATOAN had been left. “One of the chiefe trees or postes at the right side of the entrance had the barke taken off, and 5. foote from the ground in fayre Capitall letters was grauen CROATOAN without any crosse or signe of distresse.”

  There was a Croatan island, but they were not there. There was a tribe of Hatteras Indians who were called Croatans, but they knew nothing of the whereabouts of the lost colony. All that remains of legend is the story of the child Virginia Dare, and the mystery of what happened to the lost settlers of Roanoke.

  Down here in this land beneath the city live the children. They live easily and in strange ways. I am only now coming to know the incredible manner of their existence. How they eat, what they eat, how they manage to survive, and have managed for hundreds of years, these are all things I learn day by day, with wonder surmounting wonder.

  I am the only adult here.

  They have been waiting for me.

  They call me father.

  INTRODUCTION TO: Working with the Little People

  One of the half dozen greatest, most original fantasists this country has ever produced said to me once, “It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if you finish it that day or the next: every day write a story.” I try to do that.

  I genuinely love writing. I consider myself one of the most blessed persons I know: I’m doing just what I want to do, just what all my good and bad karma got stored up for me to do. I write. Mornings, nights, in-betweens. I’d almost rather write than fuck. Sometimes it’s a difficult choice.

  Which means that I frequently write in peculiar places. I’ll be noting some of them as we go on through this book, but for openers, “Working with the Little People” was written in the front window of a bookstore in London: Words & Music, in Charing Cross Road, directly across from Foyle’s. I was doing a promotion for the hardcover publication of two of my books. It was an activity that seemed to unnerve a few conservative critics. Writers, they felt, should “Do It” in an Ivory Tower, not out there in the open, indecently, where everyone could see it being Done. “Doing It,” in their view, was akin to that other “Doing It.”

  But writing, like most holy chores, most miracles, needs to be done in the open, so everyone can see that imagination is everywhere, that there are no secrets, no cabals, no runes to be cast.

  All you need is talent, and the need to need to do it. If you follow me. And so, to all great, original fantasists, I say: Do It!

  Working with the Little People

  “Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.”

  Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)

  Nineteen years earlier, Noah Raymond had written his last fantasy. Since that time over four hundred brilliant stories had been published under his byline. All four hundred had come from his typewriter. What no one knew was that Noah Raymond had not written them. They had been written by gremlins.

  Success had come early to Raymond. He had sold his first story, “An Agile Little Mind,” to the leading fantasy pulp magazine of the period when he was seventeen. It was slug-lined as a First Story, and the craft and imagination it displayed made him an instant cause célèbre. He sold a dozen more stories in the next two years and came to the notice of the fiction editor of a major slick magazine.

  The slick paid twenty times what the pulps could afford; the response was from a much wider readership; and as the fiction editor was sleeping with the anthologist who annually cobbled up the most prestigious collection of The Year’s Best Short Stories, Noah Raymond found himself, four months short of his nineteenth birthday, with a novelette on that year’s table of contents between a pastiche by Katherine Anne Porter and a slice-of-life by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

  His first collection was published when he was twenty. Knopf. The promotion manager became enthralled with the book and sent it around to Saroyan and Capote and by special messenger to John Collier. The prepublication quotes in the Times Book Review section were awesome. The word “genius” appeared eight times in a half page.

  By the time he was twenty-five, because he was fecund, he had seven books to his credit and librarians did not file him under “science fiction/fantasy” but in the “modern literature” se
ction. At age twenty-six his first novel, Every Morning at First Light, was selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate and was nominated as one of the finalists for the National Book Award.

  His personal papers were solicited for preservation in the Archive Library at Harvard and he went on a critically and financially impressive European lecture tour. He was twenty-seven.

  In the month of August, on a Friday night–the 20th, to be exact–at twenty-three minutes to midnight, to be tedious about it–Noah Raymond ran dry. That simply, that easily, that directly, that horrifyingly…he ran dry.

  He wrote the last original word of the last original idea he had, and abruptly found himself flensed of even the tiniest scintilla of an idea for a new story. He had an assignment from the BBC to write an original story that could be adapted for an hour-long dramatic special, and he hadn’t the faintest inkling of what he could write about.

  He thought for the better part of an hour, and the only idea that came to him was about a mad, one-legged seaman hunting a big white fish. He thrust the idea from him forcibly; it was redolent with idiocy.

  For the first time in his life, since the first moment he realized he had the gift of storytelling, the magic gift of stringing words together so they plumbed the human heart, he was empty of new thoughts. No more strange little fables about the world as he wished it to be, the world that lived in his mind, a world peopled by characters full and firm and more real than those with whom he had to deal each day. His mind was a vast, empty plain without structure upon it or roll to its topography…with nothing in sight but gray vistas that extended to limitless horizons.

  All that night he sat before his typewriter, urging his mind to dream, to go away from him in wild journeys. But the dreams were empty husks and his mind came back from the journeys as devoid of thoughts as an earthworm.

  Finally, when dawn came up over the valley, he found himself crying. He leaned across the typewriter, put his head on the cool metal, and wept. He knew, with the terrible certainty that brooks no exceptions, that he was dry. He had written his last story. He simply had no more ideas. That was the end of it.