Strange Wine

by Harlan Ellison

  The doorway closed, and all was as it had been before.

  As it closed, a paradoxical whirlpool was created in the megaflow, sucking back all the doomed souls but one.

  Margaret Thrushwood escaped undetected. Impossibly, for the very best records were always kept up to date in Hell, no notice was taken of her absence; and all was as it had been.

  But Margaret Thrushwood, recently quartered in Hell, was back in the world.

  There had been a multiple slaying in Downieville in 1935.

  There had been a house in Downieville that the residents called the Octagon House, because of the shape in which it had been built. Ramsdell had been the name of the family that had built and had lived in the Octagon House. The Ramsdells had been in mining and when the mine had played out they had gone into cattle and farming. Wealthy, friendly, interested in their community, giving and sharing during the Great Depression, they had been both loved and respected in Downieville.

  The slaughter at the Ramsdell Octagon House had shocked and infuriated the god-fearing townsfolk.

  Margaret Thrushwood, the housekeeper, thirty-one years old, had been the only person left alive in that abbatoir. Covered with blood and crying piteously, she had been found crouched down, half naked, in the dining room clogged with the bodies of the six Ramsdells, three of whom had been children. The townsfolk had dragged her from the house and drowned her in a nearby well. Lynching was commonplace in 1935.

  On Friday the 13th, on a day of chill winds and rivers that tried for a moment to run upstream, the burned and ruined shade of Margaret Thrushwood returned to Downieville.

  Henry “Doc” Thomas no longer lived there.

  He had died in 1961.

  The still-smoldering cinder that was the shade of Margaret Thrushwood did not linger long in Downieville; as Midgard, it had not long held the waiting shadow of Henry “Doc” Thomas. She continued searching; and when she realized he was not there, she gave a pitiful wail that made babies cry throughout the town; and she continued searching. He had not gone to Hell…she would have met him there and settled accounts between them. Again impossibly, defying all logic, refuting the commonly held belief that the universe balances itself in crystalline purity between good and evil, justice and injustice, Henry Thomas had been taken to Heaven.

  Freed from The Foul Place, Margaret Thrushwood crawled to Heaven to find the man who had taken her virginity.

  It was near twilight when she reached Heaven. The blessed host moved in slow and stately patterns. Heaven was a great pastel city, suffering from overcrowding. The faces of the residents seemed strained, but the sound of muted laughter was everywhere. It was considerably cooler than Hell had been. There were no birds in the sky. Crickets nattered.

  Margaret Thrushwood asked directions and was led by stages to a common square where a pool of pale golden water whispered gently against the coming of evening. And there, at the edge of the pool, she found Henry Thomas with his bare legs dangling in the water.

  She came up behind him and her hands clenched into fists without her knowledge. The clenching was painful: her hands were terribly burned. She wanted to hit him.

  She tried to speak, and found she could not. Was it too much emotion, or that she had not spoken in Hell (save to scream) for so very long? She tried again and managed to speak his name. “Doc.”

  A tremor passed through him, and he stared straight ahead. She said his name again. He turned his head slowly and looked up at her. As their eyes met, he began to cry.

  Hidden in the moment, was the memory of that evening.

  She sank to her knees beside him and looked at his face. It was twenty-six years older than the face that had compelled her love in 1935. Torment lay like a patina of dust across the fine features. He had not shaved. Perhaps he was not required to shave here. Perhaps he had been unshaved at the moment of his death. She wondered how he had died, but the thought was a vagrant breeze. She wanted to take his face in her blackened hands and feel once again the heat that came from him. But it was not possible. Too much time, too many moments in Hell, lay between them, as that evening lay between them.

  And he cried.

  Helplessly, he stared at her. He was totally and wholly at her command now. He whispered her name, then again. And the hearing of it, twice, so quickly like that, melted all the hatred in her. She leaned forward and put her sooty face against his shoulder. Black marks were left on his white flesh. She made gentle, baby-soothing sounds, even as her own body trembled. She had never seen him like this. The last time she had seen him had been that night as he…

  Heaven began to run at the edges.

  Margaret looked over Doc’s shoulder. The sky of Heaven was beginning to smear and drip. She had seen a house run that way once, just the year before, in 1934. Ultraviolet rays and moisture worked rapidly on the linseed-oil binder in paints of the time. Rain would get at the fascia and trim and produce what house painters called “chalking.” The colors would run. That was common in 1934, 1935.

  There was a trembling in the ground beneath them. The pale golden water of the pool gently swelled to the left, then to the right. It sloshed back and forth, overflowing first at one side, then the other.

  It grew much warmer. Margaret thought she heard the cry of a bird, but there were still no birds, no birds in the sky, nowhere in that smeared drizzle of heavenly sky-color running down.

  She held onto Doc as tightly as she could.

  The silvery light that had no source, that illuminated Heaven, dimmed; and disturbing cancers of darkness appeared here and there in the empty spaces around the square.

  Margaret pressed herself more tightly into Doc’s body, as she had that night. There in her servant’s room at the rear of the Octagon House. Oh. The room. She could see it now in her mind, just as fresh and sharp as it was…when? Was it that many years ago, just yesterday, back in 1935, just one real day ago when they dragged her out of the house and tied the wellrope around her ankles, and one of the men doubled his fist and hit her in the side of the head, and another man bounced her face off the bricks of the well, and they hoisted her up, dazed and squirming and crying and now completely naked, so embarrassed at her nakedness, and tipped her head down and threw her over the lip into darkness, way down there, all the way down there to The Foul Place–was it just a day ago in real time, or forty, fifty, a hundred years ago burning always burning? She could see the room, that sweet little room the Ramsdells had given her when she came to work for them, from Dr. Pulney’s in Oxnard. Through the big kitchen with the butcher’s-block table in the middle and the matched copper-bottom pans hanging from their hooks and the slick sweet smell of freshly-washed-down oilcloth on the breakfast nook table and the wood-burning stove the Ramsdells continued to use even though there was piped-in gas. Through the main pantry, the huge walk-in pantry with the circular staircase at the back wall, the staircase that led up to the second and third floors where the family had their bedrooms, where Mr. Ramsdell slept and could get up quietly in the middle of the night and come downstairs for a snack of some kind or other. And the door to her room, her servant’s room, she being the full-time paid-well just twenty-eight years old when she came to them housekeeper. Under the circular staircase that led up to Mr. Ramsdell who came down very late in the night for snacks, the door to her sweet and clean and neat as a pin room.

  The sky ran, the ground trembled, darkness swirled through Heaven and the blessed host ran in random directions trying to escape the increasing warmth; as Margaret Thrushwood clung to the weeping body of Doc Thomas, as she had that evening.

  “Don’t you want to know where my dream comes from?”

  He looked down at her and the smile came to his face even though he fought to contain it. “Why should I want to know where it comes from?”

  “Because it’s necessary to know that dreams come from someplace close. From someplace dear. Otherwise, they would be no better than wishes for money or great runs of land or all the caviar you could eat.�
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  “So tell me where the dream comes from.”

  She sat up on the bed in the small room at the rear of the huge pantry. She wore only a slip and her silk stockings. They had been making love on the bed, and her skin was pink from having been pressed; small marks on her breasts and upper arms testified to the intensity of her love; intense enough for her to give herself up to his need to nibble, even when it was risky, that someone might see the signs of passion.

  “My dream comes from seeing my mother. She was from Birmingham, in England. I told you that, didn’t I?”

  He smiled, as he had smiled at a child who had brought him a hummingbird with a broken wing just that morning. “Yes, you told me that.”

  “I knew I had. Come hold me and I’ll tell you more.”

  He slid back onto the bed and they lay side by side. He held her, with her chestnut hair which she had let down till it reached the back of her knees, all her beautiful hair, blanketing his naked body. Her head was pressed into the secret hollow under his chin, and he heard her speaking from far away. “My mother always worked; I cannot remember a time when she wasn’t working. My father died when I was very young. My mother told me that.”

  “But you didn’t believe her,” he said, softly.

  She sat up and stared at him. “Good lord, Doc, how did you know that?”

  He motioned her to resume the position. At that moment he coughed. He had been sick, a minor summer cold; but the cough was very loud. She grew alarmed, fell back upon him and put her hand over his mouth. “Shhhh. They’re eating dinner. They think I’m meditating. They mustn’t know you’re here…oh, Doc, why did you come here so early…?”

  “I couldn’t wait to see you.” His words were muffled by her hand. He kissed the palm against his lips.

  “Oh, you mustn’t. Not ever again. Late is the only time. Very very late, Doc.” Then she paused, as if considering something, and added, “But sometimes not too late at night.”

  He didn’t get a chance to ask her what that meant.

  “My father really ran off. Then my mother saved her money and followed him to New York. She got tired of waiting for him to send her the fare. He was a furniture refinisher. So she worked and saved it herself and came without telling him, because I think she wanted to catch him living with that girl, and he was, of course, and then he just ran off and left the both of them. My mother became friends with her; that was my Aunt Sally.”

  He slid her slip up her legs. She tried to push it back down, but his hand was there. “Oh,” she said, as if it were the first time, and again, when he had moved over her, “Oh.”

  The door opened.

  She heard the soft sound of the empty cardboard box she had placed against the door, moving across the floor. She had come to place the cardboard box there as a matter of course. Every night. So she would know, when she was asleep, if she was to be visited. Very, very late at night, some nights, Mr. Ramsdell came downstairs for a snack. Of some kind or other.

  She looked over Doc’s shoulder and he was watching them.

  He did not stop them.

  He watched until Doc was finished, muffling his sounds against the pillow; and then when Doc rose up slightly to look at her, to see if he was ahead or behind, and Doc saw she was staring past him, and he strained around to see what she was looking at, then he spoke to them: “I’ll have no whores under my roof. Be packed and gone before we’re done eating.”

  He turned, leaving the door open, and walked away, stooping from his six-foot height to pass under the circular staircase that led up to the bedrooms.

  Doc was braced with a hand on either side of her semi-naked body, staring down at her.

  “My mother was in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911,” she said. She spoke as if they had not been interrupted in their conversation, as if he had not made love to her again, as if they had not been discovered, as if Mr. Ramsdell had not looked at them with the burning eye of God, as if she had not been told to leave within minutes. “She always worked. That was where my dream came from.” Then she began to cry.

  Henry Thomas rose from her body and from her bed. He looked down at her. Then he looked at the open door and the cardboard box. He had wondered about the cardboard box. It wasn’t strong enough or heavy enough to keep anyone out. He had wondered why she had placed it there. And now he knew what she meant by her warning that he not come to visit very very late some nights.

  He seemed to shrink, then. To grow smaller. He was a tall man, a good and succoring height for a veterinarian who must reassure small children who came to him with the broken-winged hummingbird and the puppy with worms and the cat that had lost an eye in a fight. But he shrank. He withered. He fell in upon himself, making a terrible, heartbreaking, wounded sound.

  And then he went mad.

  He grabbed her from the bed by her long chestnut hair and threw her through the open door, across the linoleum floor of the pantry. He followed her, now suddenly growing large again, swelling as if filling with poison, and dragged her by the hair across the kitchen linoleum. She tried to turn over, and saw in his hand the cleaver from the rack on the wall. He had taken it, but she did not know when he had put his hand to it first.

  And then they were in the dining room, and Doc was screaming about theft and valuables that had been stolen and defilement and other insane things that made no sense, and then he was blood all over, and his hand went up and down in movements too swift to see, and there was blood on the walls and across the damask tablecloth, and there were spots of thick, terrible color on the crystal prisms of the low-hanging chandelier. And there was screaming.

  And then she was alone, lying in blood, half-naked, thirty-one years old, the only thing left alive in the dining room of the Octagon House.

  Until they came and put her down the well.

  Lava filled the Heavenly pool. It had seeped in through fissures at the bottom, and the pale golden water had been dissipated as steam. Now it boiled up, green and black and angry crimson just beneath the crackling, shifting crust.

  Margaret Thrushwood clung to Henry Thomas and felt their bodies trembling in unison. “Why did you leave me?” she said, so softly he could barely hear her above the crackling of the lava.

  Then she was pulling him to his feet, and she noticed that though his bare legs had been submerged in the pool, in the lava, they were untouched. In The Foul Place she had been sent to the lava baths. It was not the same. That was probably the chief difference between Heaven and Hell.

  She took him away from the pool, and they stood near one of the pastel walls even as it developed jagged lightning-fork rents in its smooth face. The air was thick and charged.

  Then God came to them and whatever else was sad or funny or according to legend or cleverly beyond anyone’s imagining, there was nothing humorous about God in Their multiplicity. They came to Margaret Thrushwood and the trembling shade that was Henry “Doc” Thomas, and They said, “You are an alien flesh here. You cannot stay.”

  “I won’t go back,” said Margaret Thrushwood, speaking to Them more boldly than she had ever spoken before either in life or in death, speaking to Them as though They were not God at all, just speaking up boldly. “It was a mistake. I never did anything wrong. He did it all, and then he ran away and I never had a chance. You should know that! You keep records, don’t you?”

  But God insisted, pointing back the way Margaret Thrushwood had crawled.

  “Take him down there,” she said. Then she caught herself. “No, I didn’t mean that. Let him be. He couldn’t make it down there.”

  God was pulling her by the arm. “All right, all right! Don’t pull me, I can go on my own, thank you.” And God let go of her arm and she said to Them, “Give me a second.” And God waited, but not patiently, because Heaven was fracturing at every juncture.

  Margaret took Henry Thomas’ face in her hands, and looked into his eyes, and she realized he had grown shorter and she had grown taller, just as it had happened that night.
She leaned in close to him and murmured, “They did it wrong, Doc. They made mistakes. And they’ll keep it this way, just because everyone wants to believe it. They don’t want to know the truth, Doc. It’s easier for everyone this way. If enough people believe the fantasy, well, then it becomes the reality. But we know, Doc. We know who belongs where, don’t we?”

  And she kissed him gently, and patted his cheek, and shook her head at the stupidity of it all; she looked at God and They looked back at her impatiently. “There are some people who just shouldn’t be allowed to fool around with love,” she said to God. “He was irrational. What did Mr. Ramsdell matter? What did any of it matter?”

  Then God led her away, back toward The Foul Place.

  When they reached the doorway, God knocked, and after a little while the doorway opened, loosing a terrible smell. “I can make it by myself from here,” Margaret Thrushwood said, drawing herself up regally. She stepped across the threshold, but just as the door was closing, she turned to God and said, “When you see Mr. Ramsdell, give him my regards.”

  Then she walked inside and the doorway closed again.

  And the last thing God saw, as Margaret Thrushwood crawled down into crimson darkness, was a short, shadowy figure just inside the portal. The figure was naked, and smoldering, and held a paint brush and a palette.

  Covering the walls of Hell, just inside the portal, was a fresco of roses so painfully beautiful to behold that They could not wait to get back to find Michelangelo, to tell him about the grandeur They had beheld, there in that most unlikely of places.

  INTRODUCTION TO: The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat

  Because of the widespread intelligence of my intractability with publishers and editors who feel it is their god-given right to revise what an author puts on paper, because of this knowledge throughout the length and breadth of the publishing industry, when someone buys a story from me they know the contract will include a clause that forbids their altering even a comma without my written permission. If it’s wrong, I’ll no doubt change it when it’s pointed out to me. I’m not an amateur. But the indiscriminate and foolish meddling of self-important copyeditors and recent graduates of the Seven Sisters is a kind of literary vampirism I will not tolerate. If there are to be mistakes in a story, let them be mine, for which I assume full responsibility. And as for my style and syntax, well, they may not be Cyril Connolly or Jacques Barzun, but by Crom they’re mine!