Strange Wine

by Harlan Ellison

  “No, I just had the right amount of soul for your mother and she assumed.”

  “But, Joanie…”

  “You can call me Joan.”

  But he never called her the Maid of Orléans. And they lived happily ever after, in a castle not all that neat.

  A MINI-GLOSSARY OF YIDDISH WORDS USED IN “MOM”

  bummerkeh (bu-er-keh): A female bum; generically, a “loose” lady.

  “Eli Eli” (á-lee á-lee): Well-known Hebrew-Yiddish folk song composed in 1896 by Jacob Koppel Sandler. Title means “My God, my God.” Opens with a poignant cry of perplexity: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” from Psalm 22:2 of the Old Testament. Owes its popularity to Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt, who recorded and sang it many times as an encore during concerts in early 1900s. Al Jolson also did rather well with it. Not the kind of song Perry Como or Bruce Springsteen would record.

  fressing (fresś-ing): To eat quickly, noisily; really stuffing one’s face; synonymous with eating mashed potatoes with both hands.

  latkes: Pancakes, usually potato pancakes but can also be made from matzoh meal. When made by my mother, not unlike millstones.

  Litvak: A Jew from Lithuania; variously erudite but pedantic, thin, dry, humorless, learned but skeptical, shrewd and clever; but used in this context as a derogatory by Lance’s mom, who was a Galitzianer, or Austro-Polish Jew; the antipathy between them is said to go back to Cain and Abel, one of whom was a Litvak, the other a Galitzianer…but that’s just foolish. I guess.

  Momser: An untrustworthy person; a stubborn, difficult person; a detestable, impudent person; not a nice person.

  nafkeh: A nonprofessional prostitute; a bummer-keh (see above); not quite a hooker, but clearly not the sort of woman a mother would call “mine darling daughter-in-law.”

  nuhdzing: To pester, to nag, to bore, to drive someone up a wall. The core of the story. Practiced by mothers of all ethnic origins, be they Jewish, Italian, or WASP. To bore; to hassle; to be bugged into eating your asparagus, putting on your galoshes, getting up and taking her home, etc. Very painful.

  pupik: Navel. Belly button.

  shiksa: A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one.

  shmootz (shmootz): Dirt.

  shtumie: Lesser insult-value than calling someone a schlemiel (shleh-meal’). A foolish person, a simpleton; a consistently unlucky or unfortunate person; a social misfit; a clumsy, gauche, butterfingered person; more offhand than schlemiel, less significant; the word you’d use when batting away someone like a gnat.

  shtupping: Sexual intercourse.

  tante: Aunt.

  yenta: A woman of low origins or vulgar manners; a shrew; a shallow, coarse termagant; tactless; a gossipy woman or scandal spreader; one unable to keep a secret or respect a confidence; much of the nuhdz in her. If it’s a man, it’s the same word, a blabbermouth.

  INTRODUCTION TO: In Fear of K

  The demons that live within our skins are the worst. From time to time, when I write of the madness of men and women who savage one another, I am pilloried by readers who do not perceive my misery at how little we think of ourselves. They write me and accuse me of holier-than-thou attitudes, denying the demons I say are in them. “Not I!” they cry, and detail their good deeds. “And you’re no better than we,” they add. How right they are. The same furies reside in me. What they do not seem to understand is that I have a love-hate relationship with the human race. That I revere the nobility and the courage and the friendship in us, and despise the violence, cowardice, and rapaciousness that motivates us most of the time.

  I chuckle at the paper tiger of violence on television, that which provides rallying cries for self-serving petty politicians. We decry violence, and yet the most watched films and television series are those that come closest to satisfying our need for blood. What a duplicitous, mendacious species we are.

  The demons within us are only fear.

  And living with fear is a miserable way to exist.

  There is more violence in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than in an entire season of television cruelty.

  And there is more psychic violence in one night of the marriage of two of my dearest friends than in the streets of San Francisco on that same night. This story is an open letter to them. It says: Do not live in fear of K.

  In Fear of K

  “It is precisely at their worst that human beings are most interesting.”

  H. L. Mencken, 12 Jan 43

  “He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.”

  William Dean Howells, Pordenone, Act IV

  They had been in the pit as long as either could remember; they had discussed it many times; neither could think of a time when they had not been in the pit. They had, perhaps, been there forever. It didn’t matter.

  There was no way out.

  Where they lived, in the single chamber, the greenglass walls were smooth and gave off a dull, constant, pale-emerald light; too dim and corrupt to ever see anything clearly or free of disquieting distortion, too bright to ever permit untroubled sleep. The chamber was perfectly circular, and the walls rose up slick and unbroken until they vanished in darkness. If there was an opening far above, it could neither be seen nor reached. They were two prisoners, condemned to live at the bottom of a well.

  There was one opening. It was a semicircular hole two heads taller than Noah. The opening looked out on the maze. If Claudia stepped two paces beyond the opening, just outside their living chamber, and looked to her left, she saw a dark rough-stone passage that followed the outside wall of the chamber. To her right was another, vanishing into darkness. Directly in front of her were seven more tunnels whose mouths were black and ominous. The ceiling above her was also rough dark stone, with tiny flecks of brightness that might have been tin.

  She had once ventured a few steps down the fourth of the seven tunnels, and two steps further it had branched in three directions. Clearly, what lay beyond the chamber was a maze. A black void of tunnels within tunnels within tunnels.

  But it was not the certainty of being lost forever in the tunnel maze that had kept her, or Noah, from venturing into that labyrinth. Even being lost, even to die attempting to find a way out would have been preferable to living alone with such a hated companion. Neither Claudia nor Noah went more than a step or two into the tunnels for another, more important reason. The creature lived in those tunnels. K lived in the tunnels.

  More than they despised each other, the man and the woman feared K. The central fact of their lives was fear of K. They had always lived in fear of K. There was nothing more important, nothing that dominated their waking and sleeping thoughts more than their fear of K. Survival, it seemed, depended on their fear of K. The unseen tormentor who roamed freely in those endless tunnels, who waited to kill them, devour them, who left them without peace or thoughts that were free of fear. Of K.

  Claudia came through the opening dragging the sheet of black, shining fabric. The ingots of food were stacked on the sheet. She came in backward, digging her bare feet in and yanking the sheet with difficulty.

  “You could help,” she said, over her shoulder.

  Noah looked up from his task. He looked at her, then went back to winding the oil-soaked rags around the flambeau.

  “Stop ignoring me, you sonofabitch! Help me with this!”

  He wound the rag tightly, pulling it till the fabric began to rip, tucked the end under to hold it in place, and did not look up. She waited the long moment, to see if he would assist her when his immediate task was finished, but he picked up another torch, selected another rag, and began working intently on the winding.

  Her face tightened, then relaxed into innocence as she said, “I only wanted help to get it in because I heard K down the right tunnel.”

  His head came up sharply, he got to his feet in an instant and grabbed the end of the fabric. With one intense yank he pulled the ingot-laden sheet into the center of the chamber. Without a word he bent to the arms store an
d lifted out a long metal rod with six propeller-shaped blades dangling from its end. With practiced ease he fitted the rod into an interlocked network of bars and swivel joints that opened into a tripod structure that braced against the walls. The rod with its blades protruded just beyond the chamber opening.

  “Give me a hand with this pump,” he said, hauling a generator from the pile of equipment. It was a hefty hand-crank generator on a tripod, with handles to crank on either side. He attached it to the end of the metal rod, sat down behind it, and began furiously bicycling the handles till the generator whirred to life. As he pumped faster and faster, the blades lifted and began to spin, forming a deadly circle of sharpened steel just beyond the chamber opening. Sparks leaped off the blades. Anything walking into that swirling circle would be sliced apart.

  “I said give me a hand, dammit!” he yelled.

  The woman ignored him.

  He continued bicycling his arms furiously; then his brow furrowed and he slowed his movements, gradually letting the blades droop. Finally, he stopped the cranking and the sparks died and the blades fell. He turned to look at the woman. She was grinning nastily.

  “Thanks for the help, bastard,” she said, smiling.

  He started to rise, his left hand forming into a fist; she saw the movement and stepped quickly to the arms store, picked up a mace constructed of a hexagonal chunk of greenglass studded with sharp points on its planed surfaces. “You don’t want to try that, Noah.” He settled back behind the hand generator.

  “I should’ve known,” he said. “I didn’t hear the song.”

  “You should’ve known a lot of things, like how to get out of here. But you never learned.” She dropped the mace back into the pile of weapons and returned to the ingots of food. She lifted one in each hand and took two steps toward the depleted pyramid of ingots against the curving rear section of the chamber when Noah rolled out from behind the generator, got his legs under him, and sprang up in her path. Without taking aim he jacked his left fist into her stomach. Claudia staggered backward, the ingots falling to the floor. The force of his blow doubled her over, even as she stumbled away from him. He followed her, moving in from the side, his eyes narrowed; she tried to keep away from him, but he backed her around toward the tangle of woven mats and fiber blankets that served as sleeping area. The pain in her stomach kept her from straightening up, prevented her from taking an offensive stance against him.

  Suddenly Noah rushed her, and she tried to pivot out of his way; her feet tangled in the sleeping gear and she went down. As he rocked back to kick her, she scrambled sidewise, flinging the blankets with her feet; they snarled around him and he tried to stamp loose.

  Almost casually, Claudia extricated herself as Noah spun about trying to free himself. She got to her feet, set herself with legs apart, and as Noah kicked loose of the blankets she gave a short leap and kicked him with the edge of her foot, squarely in the mouth.

  He was lifted off the floor, arms wide, and was driven backward with such force that he hit the wall and crumpled up against it. He sank down, stunned, and lay unmoving, eyes glazed, blankets half-covering him.

  “Take a little nap,” she said. “I’ll wake you when dinner’s ready.” She went back to the ingots of food.

  It had left food. Then it had lounged. Drinking from them. But the greenglass walls came between them. Its thirst could not be slaked. It edged nearer. It drank but could not drink enough. It began to whine with the need.

  “I wonder where the food comes from,” she said.

  “You always wonder where it comes from. It just comes, that’s all. Stop talking about it.” He ripped loose a warm chunk of the quarter-ingot and shoved it into his mouth. “It’s rubbery this time.”

  “Fat lot I have to talk to you about if I don’t talk about where the food comes from. How’s your mouth?”

  He touched his ripped lip. “It hurts.”

  She laughed. “Doesn’t seem to be interfering with your gorging yourself.”

  “I have to keep my strength up. K’s going to come soon; I can feel it.”

  She got up and walked around the chamber counterclockwise. She always walked counterclockwise. He walked around the chamber clockwise.

  “You’re making me nervous,” he said, not looking up. “Can’t you at least stay seated till I’m done eating?”

  “Your strength,” she said, walking. “That’s fabulous! Who saved your gut the last time? Your strength. Right, Noah: keep it up, so you’ll have the wherewithal to scream for help during and cry a lot after.” She walked. “Strength,” she murmured once more, softly.

  “Listen, dammit, if you don’t like it here, why don’t you just take off. There’s a whole world of tunnels out there. Pick any one of them and just go.”

  She stopped directly in front of him, looming over him as he ate, her hands on her hips, balled into fists, her face reddening. “This is as much my chamber as yours. You get out. You’re the one with ‘strength’! Take your torches–your stupid torches–you’ve been working on them as long as I can remember–take the damned things and go find a way out of the tunnels yourself!” She was trembling with rage.

  Then they heard the song.

  From the darkness beyond their living space the sound rose and fell, at first distantly, then nearer, rising and falling in measured cadence, each time climbing to a new level of intensity that made their skin prickle and the roots of their hair itch. They could not move; there was a force, a restraint, a repulsion, an invisible spiderwebbing of tone that froze them where they were. No names for the sound it seemed to be. They had always been in the chamber and they did not have referents. They were held in stasis by the threat of the song…a song they could never identify as, perhaps, the shrieking wail of flying reptiles on the wind.

  K was coming for them.

  Abruptly, as if wrenching themselves from quicksand, they began to move, very quickly now, as the song grew louder and closer.

  It drank from their mutual hatred and their fear. A pool dark and thick and bubbling. Without bottom, without the possibility of depletion. It drank and was still thirsty. It had not always been in the labyrinth. It had come from a far place, through a maze of quite another sort; how it had come to be here, it did not understand. There were many things it did not understand, things only vaguely realized, needs that were overwhelming, powerful, all-consuming. How it had come from that far place to this place was beyond its ability to understand, but it knew it could never return, and it had been sad, tormented, lost, and alone; and it had begun to starve. Then it had chanced upon them, and they had fed it as it lay in shadows watching them. And it had taken them, and wiped them, and constructed this place, and they had existed together symbiotically for a very long time. It meant them no harm, but that was something they could never know. If they knew, they would stop feeding it, and it would die. Crying with the need, it came to them periodically, and their terror and their loathing for one another sustained it. At times it gave them dreams, and they began to call it K; that was their interpretation of its concept for itself. And it had come to call itself K, as well. But as time passed, it felt the need for more; for greater draughts of what they felt; and so it came to them, wailing of its need.

  “There, down tunnel number two. You can see the light.”

  “For God’s sake, Noah, those knives won’t stop it; we’ve got to lay out the stickys.”

  He bicycled his hands faster and faster, the knives whirling at the end of the steel rod, their edges emitting sparks, tiny glass-cracks of electricity leaping from the circle of steel to the motes of tin in the ceiling beyond the chamber. Noah had begun to believe they were not tin; he thought he remembered that tin was nonconductive; but he wasn’t certain.

  “It steps over the stickys,” Noah said, breathing raggedly. “It can’t get through this.”

  “What if it isn’t solid flesh. What if it’s just a gas or light or something elemental?”

  “It can’t be. If it we
re, we’d be dead long ago! Help me, here! My arms are getting tired.”

  He gave it one last furious revolution and leaped away. She slid into the position he had vacated and took up the hand-cranking without losing power. Noah went to the huge pile of torches he had wound with rags and lit one from the flame they always kept burning in the ingot pot. The torch had been soaked in a fluid that burned, a fluid they could not name but which they always found when they went to retrieve supplies left outside their chamber. The flambeau leaped into yellow-blue life and Noah positioned himself just inside the opening, directly behind the whirling circle of knife blades. They could hear K coming.

  The light wavered and flickered down the tunnel, coming toward them like a fireball. “Here he comes!” Noah shouted. The song was overwhelming now, thundering against their ears in a rising shriek that was a mixture of pain and hunger and something else: an inarticulate ululation of nameless language, as though something unseen were trying to teach itself to speak with vocal cords that were never meant to form words.

  And K rushed toward them.

  They screamed, because they could not keep themselves from screaming, and something huge and flaming and shapeless boiled out of the tunnel, burning their eyes till they closed them against the sight, and they could not see K’s shape–they had never seen K’s shape–and the knives whirled as Claudia pumped faster and faster, driven on mercilessly by a fear that rose up in her throat and made her gag. There was nothing but fear at that instant, nothing but terror of being overrun by that thing from the second tunnel.

  It ran into the blades, there was a timeless instant in which pumping grew more difficult, as though something were actually being chewed by the blades, then a terrible howl of rage and pain, and Noah hurled the flaming torch over the knives, into the very center of the bubbling light that surrounded K, and the light flared up as though dry tinder had caught, there was the whine of power being drained away, and then the boiling light that surrounded K receded quickly, back down the second tunnel.