Ellison Wonderland

by Harlan Ellison

  “Ha!” the terrible smile burst upon his face. His eyes bored across to the other’s. Krane turned white as Marmorth reached out, touched one piece he had been desperately hoping the older man would not consider.

  Marmorth felt an uncontrollable tightening in his throat as he realized the game would go on, and on, and on and . . .

  He unclenched his fist as the volcano leaped up around them.

  It was more than the inside of a volcanic cone, however. The corridor was there, too. The dung–brown walls of smooth rock shivered ever so slightly, and both men knew the silver corridor was just beyond their vision. They could see it glimmering with unreality.

  It was almost as though they were looking at a double exposure; an extinct volcano superimposed over the shining tube of the silver corridor.

  It isn’t far away, thought Marmorth. He felt, with a sudden release of nervous tension, Someone is going to win soon.

  He stared up at the faint patch of gray sky, visible through the roundly jagged opening at the cone’s top. The walls sloped down in a fluid concavity. Here and there across the rough floor of the cavern, stalagmites rose up in sharp spikes.

  And there — over and through the walls of the dead formations — the corridor hung faintly. A ghostly, shivering, not–quite–real shadow, inside the substance of their illusion.

  They stood and stared at each other. Each knowing they were not really in the heart of a volcano, but in a metal corridor. Each knowing they could die as easily by this illusion as they could at each other’s hands. Each asking the same questions.

  Was this the end? Were there a limited number of illusions to each affair? A set pattern to each duel? Who had won? Could there be a winner?

  They stared at each other, across the dusky interior of the extinct volcano.

  “I’m right,” said Krane, hesitantly.

  “You’re wrong,” answered Marmorth quickly. “I’m the one who’s right!”

  In a moment they were at it again, each screaming till his lungs were raw with the effort, and red patches had appeared in their cheeks. They paused for an instant, gathering air for another tirade, Krane looking about him for a weapon.

  They were both as they had begun. Naked save the breechclouts which clung to their buttocks.

  They resumed their shouting, the sound reverberating hollowly in the dim interior of the volcano. The sounds hit them, bounced across the stone walls, reverberated again. The fury had been built to a peak and pitch they both knew could not be exceeded. They had strained every last vestige of belief and conviction in their minds.

  As Marmorth realized he was at the pinnacle of his belief, he saw the same conviction come over Krane’s face. He knew that from here on in, it would be a physical thing, with both of them stalemated in illusory power.

  Then the woman–thing appeared.

  She plopped into being between them. She wasn’t human. There was no question about that. Marmorth took a halting step backward. Krane remained rooted, though his pale face had blanched an even more deadly shade. A strangled, “My God, what is it?” slipped past Marmorth’s lips.

  It was less than human, yet more than mortal; it was a travesty of a human being. A mad nightmare of a vision! Like some fearsome god of an ancient cult, it paused with long legs apart, hands on hips.

  The woman’s body was lush. Full, high breasts, trim stomach, exciting legs. Gorgeously proportioned and seductive, the torso and legs, the chest and arms, were normal — even exaggeratedly normal.

  But there all resemblance to a woman ceased.

  The head was a lizard–like thing, with elongated snout, wattles, huge glowing eyes set atop the skull. Looking out through flesh– sockets thick and deep — little hummocks atop the face — the eyes were small, crimson and cruel.

  The nose was almost nonexistent. Two breather–spaces pulsed, one on either side of a small rise in the yellowed, pocked flesh of the head.

  The mouth was a wide, gaping, and triangular orifice, with triple rows of shark teeth in the upper and lower jaws. The woman–thing looked like a gorgeous female — with the weirdly altered head of a crocodile.

  The ebony, leathery, bat’s wings rising from the shoulder blades — quivering — completed the frightening picture.

  Wisps of smoky, filmy garments were draped over the woman– thing’s shoulders, around her waist. She stood absolutely unmoving.

  Then she spoke to them.

  It was not mental. It actually sounded, but not from the body before them. They knew it was — her? — but it did not come from her at all. The fearful mouth remained almost shut, propped slightly open on the sharp tiers of teeth.

  The voice issued from the walls, from the tips of the stalactites, from the high, arching roof of the volcano; it boomed from the rocky floor — it even floated down the length of the infinitely–stretching corridor.

  The voice spoke in thunder, yet softly.

  Well, Gentlemen?

  Krane stared for a second at the woman–thing; then he looked about wildly, trying to find the source of the voice. His head swung back and forth as though it were manipulated by strings from above. “Well, what?” he shouted to no one.

  Have you realized the truth yet?

  “What truth? What are you talking about? Who is that? Is it you?” chimed in Marmorth, bathed in sudden fear.

  The corridor shimmered oddly, just behind the stone walls of the volcano.

  I’m a voice, Gentlemen. A voice and an illusion. Just an illusion, that’s all, Gentlemen. Just an illusion from both of your minds. Made of equal portions of your mind. For you are each as strong as the other.

  There was a pause. Marmorth could not speak. Then:

  But tell me, have you realized what you should have known before you were foolish enough to enter the corridor?

  Krane looked at Marmorth with suspicion. For the first time it seemed to occur to him that perhaps this was a trick on the other’s part. Marmorth, recognizing the glance, shrugged his shoulders eloquently.

  He found his voice. “No! Tell us, then! What should we have known?”

  The only real answer as to who is right: which Theorem is the correct one!

  “Tell me, tell me!” they shouted, almost together.

  There was silence for a moment. The woman–thing ran a scarlet–tipped hand across the hideous lizard snout, as though searching for a way to phrase what was coming. Then the single word sounded in the heart of the volcano.

  Neither.

  Krane and Marmorth stared past the woman–thing, stared at each other in confusion. “N–neither?” shouted Marmorth incredulously. “Are you mad? Of course one of us is right! Me!” He was shaking fists at the gruesome being before him. Illusion, perhaps; but an illusion that was goading him.

  “Prove it! Prove it!” screamed Krane, stepping forward, flat–footedly, as though seeking to strike the woman–thing.

  Then the voice gave them the solution and the proof that neither could contest, for both knew it to be true on a level that defied mere conviction.

  You are both egomaniacs. You could not possibly be convinced of the other’s viewpoint. Not in a hundred million years. Any message dies between you. You are both too tightly ensnared in yourselves!

  The woman–thing suddenly began to shiver. She became indistinct, and there were many shadow–forms of her, surrounding her body like halos. Abruptly, she disappeared from between them — leaving them alone in the quickening darkness of the volcano’s throat.

  Alone. Staring at each other with dawning comprehension, dawning belief.

  They both realized it at the same moment. They both had the conviction of their cause, yet they both knew the woman–thing had been right.

  “Krane,” said Marmorth, starting toward the black–bearded man, “she’s right, you know. Perhaps we can get together and figure . .
. ”

  The other had started toward the older man as he had spoken.

  “Yes, perhaps there’s something in what you say. Perhaps there’s a . . . ”

  At the instant they both realized it — the instant each considered the other’s viewpoint — the illusion barriers shattered, of course, and the red–hot lava poured in on them, engulfing both men completely in a blistering inferno.

  What kind of a culture are we breeding around us? A society in which everyone tries to be average, right on the norm, the common denominator, the median, the great leveler. College kids demonstrating a callow conservatism that urges them not to stick their heads above the crowd, not to be noticed. Political candidates so bland they must of necessity be faceless to gain identification with their equally faceless constituents. A sameness in thinking, in demeanor, in dress, in goals, in desires. More than the obvious threats of cobalt bombs, World Communism, famine, plague, pestilence or the insidious ennui of Barry Manilow, I fear for the safety of my country and its people from this creeping paralysis of the ego. I have tried to say something about it in

  All the Sounds of Fear

  “Give me some light!”

  Cry: tormented, half–moan half–chant, cast out against a whispering darkness; a man wound in white, arms upflung to roistering shadows, sooty sockets where eyes had been, pleading, demanding, anger and hopelessness, anguish from the soul into the world. He stumbled, a step, two, faltering, weak, the man returned to the child, trying to find some exit from the washing sea of darkness in which he trembled.

  “Give me some light!”

  Around him a Greek chorus of susurrating voices. Plucking at his garments, he staggered toward an intimation of sound, a resting place, a goal. The man in pain, the figure of all pain, all desperation, and nowhere in that circle of painful light was there release from this torment. Sandaled feet stepping, each one above an abyss, no hope and no safety; what can it mean to be so eternally blind?

  Again: “Give me some light!”

  The last tortured ripping of the words from a throat raw with the hopelessness of salvation. Then the man sank to the shadows that moved in on him. The face half–hidden in chiaroscuro, sharp black, blanched white, down and down into the grayness about his feet, the circle of blazing white light pinpointing him, a creature impaled on a pin of brilliance, till closing, closing, closing it swallowed him, all gone to black, darkness within and without, black even deeper, nothing, finis, end, silence.

  Richard Becker, Oedipus, had played his first role. Twenty–four years later, he would play it again, as his last. But before that final performance’s curtain could be rung, twenty–four years of greatness would have to strut across stages of life and theatre and emotion.

  Time passing.

  When they had decided to cast the paranoid beggar in Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker had gone to the Salvation Army retail store, and bought a set of rags that even the sanctimonious saleswomen staffing the shop had tried to throw out as unsalable and foul. He bought a pair of cracked and soleless shoes that were a size too large. He bought a hat that had seen so many autumns of rain its brim had bowed and withered under the onslaught. He bought a no–color vest from a suit long since destroyed, and a pair of pants whose seat sagged baggily, and a shirt with three buttons gone, and a jacket that seemed to symbolize every derelict who had ever cadged an hour’s sleep in an alley.

  He bought these things over the protests of the kindly, white– haired women who were doing their bit for charity, and he asked if he might step into the toilet for a few moments to try them on; and when he emerged, his good tweed jacket and dark slacks over his arm, he was another man entirely. As though magically, the coarse stubble (that may have been there when he came into the store, but he seemed too nice–looking a young man to go around unshaved) had sprouted on his sagging jowls. The hair had grown limp and off–gray under the squashed hat. The face was lined and planed with the depravities and deprivations of a lifetime lived in gutters and saloons. The hands were caked with filth, the eyes lusterless and devoid of personality, the body grotesquely slumped with the burden of mere existence. This old man, this skid from the Bowery, how had he gotten into the toilet, and where was the nice young man who had gone in wearing that jacket and those slacks? Had this creature somehow overpowered him (what foul weapon had this feeble old man used to subdue a vital, strong youth like that)? The white–haired Good Women of Charity were frozen with distress as they imagined the strong–faced, attractive youth, lying in the bathroom, his skull crushed by a length of pipe.

  The old bum extended the jacket, the pants, and the rest of the clothing the young man had been wearing, and in a voice that was thirty years younger than the body from which it spoke, he explained, “I won’t be needing these, ladies. Sell them to someone who can make good use of them.” The voice of the young man, from this husk.

  And he paid for the rags he wore. They watched him as he limped and rolled through the front door, into the filthy streets; another tramp gone to join the tide of lost souls that would inevitably become a stream and a river and an ocean of wastrels, washing finally into a drunk tank, or a doorway, or onto a park bench.

  Richard Becker spent six weeks living on the Bowery; in fleabags, abandoned warehouses, cellars, gutters, and on tenement rooftops, he shared and wallowed in the nature and filth and degradation of the empty men of his times.

  For six weeks he was a tramp, a thoroughly washed-out hopeless rumdum, with rheumy eyes and palsied wrists and a weak bladder.

  One by one the weeks mounted to six, and on the first day of casting for Sweet Miracles, the Monday of the seventh week, Richard Becker arrived at the Martin Theater, where he auditioned for the part in the clothes he had worn for the past six weeks.

  The play ran for five hundred and eighteen performances, and Richard Becker won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award as the finest male performer of the year. He also won the Circle Award as the most promising newcomer of the year.

  He was twenty–two years old at the time.

  The following season, after Sweet Miracles had gone on the road, Richard Becker was apprised, through the pages of Variety, that John Foresman & T. H. Searle were about to begin casting for House of Infidels, the new script by Odets, his first in many years. Through friends in the Foresman and Searle offices, he obtained a copy of the script, and selected a part he considered massive in its potentialities.

  The role of an introspective and tormented artist, depressed by the level of commercialism to which his work had sunk, resolved to regain an innocence of childhood or nature he had lost, by working with his hands in a foundry.

  When the first night critics called Richard Becker’s conception of Tresk, the artist, “a pinnacle of thespic intuition” and noted, “His authority in the part led members of the audience to ask one another how such a sensitive actor could grasp the rough unsubtle life of a foundry–worker,” they had no idea that Richard Becker had worked for nearly two months in a steel stamping plant and foundry in Pittsburgh. But the makeup man on House of Infidels suspected Richard Becker had once been in a terrible fire, for his hands were marked by the ravages of great heat.

  After two successes, two conquests of Broadway, two characterizations that were immediately ranked with the most brilliant Schubert Alley had ever witnessed, Richard Becker’s reputation began to build a legend.

  “The Man Who Is “The Method”, they called him, in perceptive articles and interviews. Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio, when questioned, remarked that Becker had never been a student, but had the occasion arisen, he might well have paid him to attend. In any event, Richard Becker’s command of the Stanislavski theory of total immersion in a part became a working example of the validity of the concept. No mere scratcher and stammerer, on a stage Richard Becker was the man he pretended to be.

  Of his private life little was written; he let it be known that if h
e was to be totally convincing in a characterization, he wanted no intrusive shadow of himself standing between the audience and the image he offered.

  Hollywood’s offers of stardom were refused, for as Theatre Arts commented in a brief feature on Richard Becker:

  The gestalt that Becker projects across a row of footlights would be dimmed and turned two–dimensional on the Hollywood screen. Becker’s art is an ultimate distillation of truth and metamorphosis that requires the reality of stage production to retain its purity. It might even be noted that Richard Becker acts in four dimensions, as opposed to the merely craftsmanlike three of his contemporaries. Surely no one could truly argue with the fact that watching a Becker performance is almost a religious experience. We can only congratulate Richard Becker on his perceptiveness in turning down studio bids.

  The years of building a backlog of definitive parts (effectively mining them for other actors who were condemned to play them after Becker had said all there was to say) passed, as Richard Becker became, in turn, a Hamlet that cast new lights on the Freudian implications of Shakespeare . . . a fiery Southern segregationist whose wife reveals her octaroon background . . . a fast–talking salesman come to grips with futility and cowardice . . . a many–faceted Marco Polo . . . a dissolute and totally amoral pimp, driven by a loathing for women, to sell his own sister into evil . . . a ruthless politician, dying of cancer and senility . . .

  And the most challenging part he had ever undertaken, the re– creation, in the play by Tennessee Williams, of the deranged religious zealot, trapped by his own warring emotions, into the hammer– murder of an innocent girl .

  When they found him, in the model’s apartment off Gramercy Place, they were unable to get a coherent story of why he had done the disgusting act, for he had lapsed into a stentorian tone of Biblical fervor, pontificating about the blood of the lamb and the curse of Jezebel and the eternal fires of Perdition. The men from Homicide East included in their ranks a rookie, fresh to the squad, who became desperately ill at the sight of the fouled walls and the crumpled form wedged into the tiny kitchenette; he became violently ill, and was taken from the apartment a few minutes before Richard Becker was led away.