I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Ellison, Harlan;

  Out on the reefs, the wind–vessel, with its adamantine trim, with its onyx and alabaster sails, with its marvelous magical swiftness, sank beneath the waters without a murmur

  (unless those silent insane shrieggggngggg wails were the sounds of men shackled helplessly to an open coffin) and all that could be heard was the pounding war drums of the waves, and the gutted, emptying, shrill keen of an animal whose throat has been slashed—the sound of the colors fading back to their million lairs around the universe, till they would be called again. Then after a while, even the waters smoothed.

  Crickets gossiped shamelessly, close beside his head. He awoke to find his eyes open, staring up into a pale, cadaverous paper–thin cut–out that was the moon. Clouds scudding across its mottled slimness sent strange shadows washing across the night sky, the beach, the jungle, Warren Glazer Griffin.

  Well, I certainly messed that up, was his first thought, and in an instant the thought was gone, and the Nordic god–man’s thoughts superimposed more strenuously. Griffin felt his arms out wide on the white sand, and scraped them across the clinging grains till he was able to jack himself up, straining his back heavily. Propped on elbows, legs spread–eagled before him, he stared out to sea, to the great barrier wall that encircled the island, and scanned the dark expanse for some sign of ship or men. There was nothing. He let his mind linger for long moments on the vanity and ego that had cost so many lives.

  Then he climbed painfully to his feet, and turned to look at the island. Jungle rose up in a thick tweedy tangle, as high as the consumptive moon, and the warp of dark vine tracery merged with a woof of sounds. Massed sounds, beasts, insects, night birds, unnameable sounds that chittered and rasped and howled and shrieked—even as his men had shrieked—and the scent–sounds of moist meat being ripped from the carcass of an ambushed soft creature was predominant. It was a living jungle, a presence in itself.

  He pulled his sword, and struck off across the strand of white shadowed sand toward the rim edge of the tangle. In there somewhere, waited the girl, and the mist–devil, and the promise of life forever, here in this best of all possible worlds, his own Heaven, which he had made from a lifetime of dreams…

  Yet the dream seemed relentlessly nightmarish, for the jungle resisted him, clawed at him, tempted yet rebuffed him. Griffin found himself hacking at the thick–fleshed twined and interwoven wall of foliage with growing ferocity. His even white teeth, beautifully matched and level, locked in a solid enamel band, and his eyes narrowed with frenzy. The hours melted into a shapeless colloid, and he could not tell whether he was making his way through the dense greenmass, or standing still while the jungle crawled imperceptibly toward him, filling in behind the clots he was hacking away. And darkness, suffocating, in the jungle.

  Abruptly, he lunged forward against a singularly rugged matting of interlocked tree branches and hurled himself through the break, as it fell away, unresisting. He was in the clear. At the top of a rise that sloped away below him in softly–curved smoothness, toward a rushing stream of gently–whispering white water. Around small stones it raced, gathering speed, a gentle moist animal streaking toward a far land.

  Griffin found himself loping down the hill, toward the bank of the stream, and as he ran, his body grew more and more his own. The hill grew up behind him, and the stream came toward him with gentleness, and he was there: time was another thing here, not forced, not necessary, a pastel passage, without hard edges.

  He followed the stream, skirting banks of thickets and trees that seemed to be windswept in their topmost branches, and the stream became a river, and the river rushed to rapids, and then suddenly there were falls. Not great thundering falls down which men might be swept in fragile canoes, but murmuring ledges and sweeps down which the white water surged sweetly, carrying tinges of color from the banks, carrying vagrant leaves and blades of grass, gently, tenderly, comfortingly. Griffin stood silently, watching the waterfall, sensing more than he saw, understanding more than even his senses could tell him. This was, indeed, the Heaven of his dreams, a place to spend the rest of forever, with the wind and the water and the world another place, another level of sensing, another bad dream had many long times before. This was reality, an only reality for a man whose existence had been not quite bad, merely insufficient; tenable, but hardly enriching. For a man who had lived a life of not quite enough, this was all that there ever could be of goodness and brilliance and light. Griffin moved toward the falls.

  The darkness grew darker.

  Glowing in the dimensionless whispering dimness, Griffin saw a scene that could only have come from his dreams. The girl, naked white against the ledges and slopes of the falls, water cascading down her back, across her thighs, cool against her belly, her head laid back and white water bubbling through the shining black veil of her hair, touching each strand, silkily shining it with moisture; her eyes closed in simple pleasure; that face, the right face, the special face, the certain face of the woman he had always looked for without looking, hunted silently for, without acknowledging the search; lusted for, without feeling worthy of the hunger.

  It was the woman his finest instincts had needed to make them valid; the woman who not only gave to him, but to whom he could give; the woman of memory, of desire, of youth, of restlessness, of completion. A dream. And here, against the softspeaking bubbling water, a reality. Glowing magically in the night, the girl raised a hand languidly and with joy, simple unspoken joy, and Griffin started toward her as the mist–devil materialized. Out of the foam spray, out of the night, out of the suddenly rising chill fog and vapor and cloud–slime, out of starshine and evil mists without proper names, the devil that guarded this woman of visions, materialized. Giant, gigantic, massive, rising higher and higher, larger, more intensely defined against nightness, the devil spread across the sky in a towering, smooth–edged reality.

  Great sad eyes, the white molten centers of rat holes in which whirlwinds lived. A brow: massive leaded furrows drawing down in unctuous pleasure at sight of the girl, creature this horrendous, creature this gigantic, liaison with white flesh? The thought skittered like a poisoned rodent across the floor of Griffin’s mind, like a small creature with one leg torn off, pain and blood–red ganglia of conception, then lost itself in the bittersweet crypt beneath thoughts: too repugnant, too monstrous for continued examination. And the mist–devil rose and rose and expanded, and bellows–blew its chest to horizon–filling proportions. Griffin fell back into shadows lest he be seen.

  More, greater, still more massive it rose, filling the night sky till it obscured the moon, till nightbirds lived in its face, till molten tremblings—the very stars—served it as exhalations of breath. The mouth of a maniac millions magnified, was its mouth. Terror and fear and whimperings from far underground were the lines of character in a face incalculably old, ancient, decayed with a time that could not be called time by men. And it was one with this woman. It consorted, filthy liaison, subliminal haunted pleiocene gonadal urgings, it and woman, force incarnate and gentle labial moistures. This: the terrible end–hunger of a million billion eons of forced abstinence.

  The forever paramour, the eternity lecher, the consumed–by–desire that rose and rose and blotted the world with its bulk. The mist–devil Warren Glazer Griffin had to kill, before he could live forever in his dreams.

  Griffin stood back in shadows, trembling within the golden body he wore. Now, abruptly, he was two men once again. The god with his sword, the mortal with his fear. And he swore to himself that he could not do it, could not—even crying inside that poor glorious shell—and could not, and was terribly afraid. But then, as he watched, the mist–devil seemed to implode, drew in upon himself, shrinking shrinking shrinking down and down and down into a smaller tighter neater less infinitely tinier replica of himself, like a gas–filled balloon suddenly released from the hand of a child, whipping, snapping, spinning through the air growing smaller as it lost its muscled tautness…

  And the mist�
�devil became the size of a man.

  And it went to the woman.

  And they made love.

  Griffin watched in disgust and loathing as the creature that was age, that was night, that was fear, that was everything save the word human, placed hands on white breasts, placed lips on pliant red mouth, placed thighs around belly, and the woman’s arms came up, and embraced the creature of always, and they locked in twisting union, there in the white bubbling water, with the stars shrieking overhead and the moon a bloating madness careening down a sinkhole of space, as Warren Glazer Griffin watched the woman of all his thoughts take in the manhood of something anything but man. And silently, like a footpad, Griffin crept up behind the devil of mist, locked in trembling consumation of desire, and linking his wet and sticky hands about the hilt of the weapon, he raised it up over his head, spread–legged like an executioner, and drove the blade viciously, but at an angle, downdowndown and with the thickrasping crunch of metal through meat, into and out the other side of the neck of the creature.

  It drew in a hideous world–load of air, gasping it up and into torn flesh, a rattling distended neck–straining blowfish mass of air, that ended with a sound so high and pathetic that skin prickled up and down Griffin’s cheeks, his neck, his back, and the monstrous creature reached off to nowhere to pull out the insane iron that had destroyed him, and the hand went to another location, and the blade was ripped free by Griffin, as the devil rose off the woman, dripping blood and dripping the fluid of love and dripping life away in every instant, careening into the falls with deadfish stains of all–colored blood in the wake, and turned once, to stare full into Griffin’s face with a look that denounced him:

  From behind!

  From behind!

  Was gone. Was dead. Was floated down waterfalls to deep stygian pools of refuse and rubble and rust. To silt bottoms where nothing mattered, but gone.

  Leaving Warren Glazer Griffin to stand with blood that had spurted up across his wide golden chest, staring down at the woman of his dreams, whose eyes were cataracted with frenzy and fear. All the dream orgies of his life, all the wild couplings of his adolescent nightmares, all the wants and hungers and needs of his woman sensings, were here.

  The girl gave only one shrill howl before he took her. He had thoughts all during the frantic struggle and just at the penetration: womanwhore slutlover trollopmine over and over and over and over and when he rose from her, the eyes that stared back at him, like leaves in snow, on the first day of winter. Empty winds howled down out of the tundras of his soul. This was the charnel house of his finest fantasies. The burial ground of his forever. The garbage dump, the slain meat, the putrefying reality of his dreams and his Heaven.

  Griffin stumbled away from her, hearing the shrieks of men needlessly drowned by his vanity, hearing the voiceless accusation of the devil proclaiming cowardice, hearing the orgasm–condemnation of lust that was never love, of brute desire that was never affection, and realizing at last that these were the real substances of his nature, the true faces of his sins, the marks in the ledger of a life he had never led, yet had worshipped silently at an altar of evil.

  All these thoughts, as the guardian of Heaven, the keeper at the gate, the claimer of souls, the weigher of balances, advanced on him through the night.

  Griffin looked up and had but a moment to realize he had not succeeded in winning his Heaven…as the seventy–eight–foot creature he could have called nothing less than a dragon opened its mouth that was all the world and judgment, and ground him to senseless pulp between rows of triple–fanged teeth.

  When they dug the body out of the alley, it made even the hardened construction workers and emergency squad cops ill. Not one bone was left unbroken. The very flesh seemed to have been masticated as if by a nation of cannibal dogs. Even so, the three innured excavators who finally used winding sheets and shovels to bring the shapeless mass up from its eleven foot grave, agreed that it was incredible, totally passed belief, that the head and face were untouched.

  And they all agreed that the expression on the face was not one of happiness. There were many possible explanations for that expression, but none of them would have said terror, for it was not terror. They would not have said helplessness, for it was not that, either. They might have settled on a pathetic sense of loss, had their sensibilities run that deep, but none of them would have felt that the expression said, with great finality: a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams.

  It did not rain that night, anywhere in the known universe.

  This is the end of the book. One of my favorite stories. Also, the last introduction. Peculiar thing about these introductions: they began as simply random notes on theme in my first collection. Then, as the years have passed, they have become more and more important, more integrated with what I’ve been trying to say in my fiction. The response to them is mixed. There are reviewers and critics and fans who think the stories should be thrown out, and the introductions kept; perhaps an entire book of bibble–bibble–bibble. There is another faction that hates me so much personally, they cannot stand the intrusion of my personality. The stories they don’t seem to mind much (though they contend I’m a poor lousy hack with a tiny gift for explosiveness). But the intros drive them cockeyed. They pray that either I stop writing prefaces, or lightning strikes me in the spleen. There are some who enjoy the totality, who think they get more for their money and their enjoyment with this additional material specially–written for a book. And there are the vast multitudes who think the entire item ought to be burned as it comes off the presses. There are even a couple of people in Pocatello who’ve never heard of me, but mostly, they just stand around looking at the sky hoping to see another of them great silver birds go fly–fly to the sunset. Suffice it to say, I enjoy writing these little writer–to–reader liaisons, so get used to it, troops. Relief is nowhere in sight. But sometimes the background of a story is almost more interesting than the yarn I made from it. Take this story, for instance. Maggie lives! She is a tall blonde in Los Angeles. I never quite got her into bed, though it was close. I had dated her sporadically, for a year or so, back in 1963, and then lost track of her. Then, when Joseph E. Levine flew the cast and production people of “The Oscar” to Las Vegas for Tony Bennett’s opening at The Riviera, in conjunction with the film in which Tony was appearing, I met her again. It was very late. Everybody else had either gone to bed, or picked up some action, or were gambling. I was sitting alone at the blackjack table, in my tuxedo, when a hand was laid on my shoulder. I turned around and it was—whooops. I almost called her by her real name. It was Maggie. She was in the chorus line at one of the hotels, and I suspect she was hooking on the side. We talked and she invited me home with her. But it stirred up all sorts of remembrances of the chick, and most particularly the bedroom and bathroom of her apartment in Los Angeles. Strange that I would think of that, at that moment, but I remembered vividly walking into the bedroom the first time I came to pick her up. Everything was plush red velvet, like a New Orleans whorehouse. The bathroom fixtures were gold dolphins spewing out water. There was a frantic need to be elegant for this girl. She had come from simple beginnings, and “class” was her goal in this life. Somehow, seeing her again in Vegas, she fitted the town more precisely than anyone else I’d ever met. I hate Vegas. It represents a physical manifestation of evil in this country, for my money. (None of which I lose at the tables, incidentally; I’m phenomenally lucky.) But she fit. Not that she was evil, just that she was right for the town…a product of the times. So I suddenly had the alarming experience of my intellect getting the better of my gonads, and I turned down her offer of bed–service, because all at once, in a total presence of structure, the story that follows popped into my head. I bid her a suave adieu and dashed up to my room in The Riviera. I had my typewriter with me. I always have my typewriter with me, I stripped down naked (which is the way I write frequently) and started writing the
story. Between getting dressed and dashing downstairs to bug the casino manager for facts and specifics on slot machines (and incidentally, everything in this story is accurate), and sitting directly in the line of the air conditioning, by morning the story was half–finished and I had pleurisy. I went into a coma later that day, and they had to fly my unconscious carcass back to LA, where I went into a hospital, When I got out, l finished the yarn. I have seen “Maggie” several times since, but by now she is so firmly entrenched in my thinking as the character of the story, that I could no more bring myself to lay her than I could to re–visit Vegas. Both are deadly, and the further away from each of them I stay, the better. A note on style, before I go. I’ve tried in this story to give a sense of the immediacy, the whambangthankyoumaam of Vegas. The style I’ve employed is pure concussion. But I scream helplessly at the inadequacies of the lineal medium. There is a section herein, in which I try to convey a sense of impression of the moment of death. In films I could use effects. In type–on–paper it comes down to the enormously ineffectual italics, type tricks, staccato sentences and spacings of a man groping to expand his medium. Bear with me. It is experimentation, and unless typesetters and editors somehow develop the miracle talent of letting writers tear the form apart, to reassemble it in their individual ways, the best I’ll be able to do in terms of freedom of impact is what I got away with here in

  PRETTY MAGGIE MONEYEYES