Then, oh so strange…
Ernest started at the rear of the Packard. His long, delicate, pale fingers barely touched the metal. They grazed the green rusted hide of the ailing creature, and traced four thin lines from the rear fender forward, as he walked to the front of the machine. The light touch of someone getting to know someone. He stood in front of the car for a minute (while the fools roared and beat each other on the back), head cocked to one side, the hair hanging down over his right eye; listening. Then he touched the grille.
When Selena had angrily opened the hood for the gum-chewer, it had sprung up just as angrily on its counterbalanced springs, clanging fully open and quivering.
The grille opened smoothly now. Smoothly, slowly, as though exposing its interior to the gentle ministrations of a physician with the power of mist and cool.
Then Ernest laid his hands on the engine.
He touched it.
He touched it all over.
He pressed it. Sensuously. Charmingly.
As they watched, his hands caressed the engine.
Lightly.
He leaned in, and listened to the machine silently.
He talked to the machine. Silently.
Then he reached far up under the engine, where there was only darkness, and he moved his fingers delicately.
Selena watched, amazed. It was lunacy, of course, but the way he moved, the sureness and coordination in his hands. It was the joy of watching a good shoemaker at his last, the pleasure of watching a skilled cabinetmaker rabbet-joining two perfectly planed surfaces, the exquisite wonder of a sculptor forming grandeur from base rock; he talked to the machine.
After a while, he brought his hands back up into sight, and they held a twisted twig of metal, brightly smeared down one side where its surface had been scored and abraded.
“Fell down into the engine,” he said.
His voice was a small child’s voice; the voice of a boy not yet a man, who seldom spoke.
“Can you repair it?” Selena demanded…gently.
He nodded.
The three fools were giggling now, holding their sides from the pain. Ernest went past them into the gas station. In a moment he came out with a plain black wire coat-hanger. He took a pair of wire-snips from a heavily laden workbench just inside the door of the garage, and snipped off a straight piece nine inches long. He laid the wire-snips where he had found them, returned the useless coat-hanger to the station, and came back to the car.
He took the nine-inch piece of coat-hanger in his left hand, and with his right he began to bend it.
He should not have been able to bend it so intricately, over such a short span, but Selena watched with growing wonder as he did precisely that. The final shape was something unlike a helix, and something unlike a Möbius, and something unlike a button-hook. It was something else.
Then he reached down, back into nowhere, where he had been, and he did things inside the engine. When his hands emerged, the metal had been left inside. There was grease on his hands, and none on his jacket.
“Well?” Selena demanded. Gently.
Ernest nodded toward the car, and she knew he wanted her to start it up. She got in, turned the key, and listened to the instant surge of thrumming power that coursed through the Packard. It sounded strong, potent, impressive. The sound not even a new car makes.
She turned it off, and got out. She had two dollars in change in her purse. She offered it to him, but he shyly smiled, a childlike grin of embarrassment, and thanked her no ma’am thank you very much. Then he bobbled back down the street, and was gone.
Selena stood there with the silver in her hand; she wore an empty, startled expression of what happened.
The three fools were now prostrate, clutching one another for support even on the ground.
“All right, you three incompetents!” she snapped.
They stopped laughing instantly.
“Ernest fix y’up real good, Ma’am?” the youngest asked, snickering.
“He did a hell of a lot more than any of you idiots!”
The old one stared at her smoothly. He wasn’t laughing now. “Guess you’ll be movin’ on now, that right?”
Selena was not moving on.
“Where can I stay overnight in this cemetery? There’s a storm brewing and I’m not going on till I find someone in this idiot town who can give me a straight answer how to get back on the main road. If I take directions from any one of you, I’m liable to wind up in Nome, Alaska.”
The old one looked at her.
The other two looked at each other.
One of them bit his lip.
One of them coughed into his sleeve.
One of them licked his lips, hoping.
She went to the boarding house. Her room was on the first floor, in the rear. It was cold, and it smelled of mildew. She undressed in the dark and used the bath down the hall. Then she came back and started to get into bed. As she pulled back the thin blanket, she felt him staring at her. She turned toward the window, and for a moment she thought it might be the youngest of the three fools, and she made an instinctive movement to cover herself with the blanket. But the feeling passed, and she knew it was him: that Ernest.
Dark in the night, wrapped in rain, silent staring, tensed and trembling, molded into shadow, as the storm broke in fragments of sound and light that formed a pattern of violence only hinted at by the earlier holocaust. Jagged scythes of lightning ripped away the darkness and blasted the earth. A tongue of flame from a thunder dragon crushed, seared, and vaporized a tree stump. In the darkness he did not move. Flame lived beside him as the stump returned to its component parts. Rain made a second face on him, filling his eyes and draining down through his hair into his waiting mouth. Wide-eyed and wondrous, he saw her there in the window, only faintly seen through the deepest shadow.
Selena lived to manipulate.
Nowhere is the desolate countryside of the amoralist soul. The twisted, blasted, blackened wreckage littering a landscape of lava pits and brine holes and quicklime pools. Selena, naked, pulse throbbing in her wrist, muscle quivering on the fleshy inner surface of her thigh, smelling sweetly of sudden woman sweat, found her great gambit.
Out there, she thought. This child who has never been with a woman, who has never sunk himself hard into the body of a woman like me. Whatever he is, magician, maniac, wild psi talent, elf gnome troll leprechaun, whatever he is, there’s one thing he’s not. Yet. Gambit. Point counterpoint. What would it be like to do it with someone like him? I thought at first he was an idiot, a retarded thing. But he isn’t. He has a power. And I have a power. Let him feed me that power through the soft place.
In the darkness, Ernest watched her come to the window, her white flesh shining out at him, as she opened the window, raising it, cutting off the vision at the breasts. Then she stepped over the sill, into the thundering rain, and down in the running Carolina mud, and she came to him, standing beside the smoking burning stump that had been blasted by a God.
He could not move. He held animal still as she moved up to him and the rain washed her body with streaks of topaz, like the lines on a blueprint, and yellow ochre. Her body, a naked woman’s body, a miracle in brightness. His belly heaved as he fought for air. Electricity surged and pulsed in the night.
Then she undressed him, carefully, slowly, with subterfuge and stealth, and laid his naked white smooth body down in the mud, and she became more a woman as he became a man for the first time.
She led him the way, guiding him, her own special way, the way only special certain women have that way; it was not the way he could have found with a local town girl; but then, like everyone in the town, they laughed at him.
She did not laugh at him.
Not at first.
No God is sane. How could it be? To be a Man is so much less taxing, and most men are mad. Consider the God. How much more deranged the Gods must be, merely to exist. There can be no doubt: consider the Universe and the patterns wi
thout reason upon which it is run. God is mad. The God of Music is mad. The Timegod is punctual, but he is mad. And the Machine God is mad. He has made the bomb and the pill and the missile and the acid and the electric chair and the laser and the embalming fluid and the thalidomide baby in his own image. For the lunatic Gods there are minuscule pleasures. The beloved of the Gods are the best, the most highly treasured, the most zealously guarded. God is brutal, God is mad, God is vengeful. But all Gods revere innocence. The lamb, the child, the song. To steal these, is to steal from the mad Gods…
Daylight came like a drunk climbing down off a week’s binge. Colorless, nervous, tremblingly, wan and wasted.
In front of the gas station, the old one sat silently, flaking out the grime from beneath his fingernails with the plastic edge of a gas credit card someone had driven off and left behind.
Water ran in gullies through the center of Petrie, North Carolina, and returned somewhere to the land to rise and wait to fall again another time.
When the old man saw Ernest walking through town, he sat forward on his chair, his mouth a little open, and he could not believe. The boy walked like you or me. Gone was the loose-jointedness at which everyone laughed.
Gone was the slack mouth at which everyone laughed.
Gone was the wild look in the eye at which everyone laughed.
Gone was the adolescent silliness at which everyone laughed.
Gone was the power.
Later that day, when she did not answer the furious pounding on the door of the boarding house, they sent the youngest of the three who hung out at the gas station around by the window. He found it open. He stared inside, and started to run back inside to tell them, but he licked his lips, knowing he had lost his chance, and climbed up into the room, and touched her body for a few moments before unbolting the door.
Dried Carolina mud covered her body, as though she had been rolling sensuously in it when it had been soft and wet. There was blood on the inside of her thighs, but that wasn’t what had killed her.
They could not tell what had killed her.
She did not look peaceful, as if she had died in her sleep; Selena had died reluctantly, fighting every squeeze of the way. She did not look peaceful.
There was not a mark on her.
But one of the crowd lounging in and out of the room said it; he didn’t know he’d said it, but he did: he said, “Looks like somethin’ stopped her pump.”
The Packard ran so well, so beautifully, they could not bear to junk it. So they kept it, and for years thereafter it ran without the slightest difficulty. It ran and ran, and gave generous gas mileage.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Foreword: “The Frontiers of Edgeville” by Norman Spinrad; copyright © 1970, 1996 by Norman Spinrad.
Introduction: “Brinksmanship,” copyright © 1970 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1998 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Revised version © 1996 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Pennies, Off a Dead Man’s Eyes,” copyright © 1969 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“The End of the Time of Leinard,” copyright © 1958 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1986 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Revised version © 1988 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“3 Faces of Fear: An Essay,” copyright © 1966 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1994 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Blind Lightning,” copyright © 1956 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1984 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Walk the High Steel” (by “Cordwainer Bird”), copyright © 1964 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1992 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Shadow Play” (under the title “Revolt of the Shadows”), copyright © 1957 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Revised version © 1996 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“The Words in Spock’s Mouth,” copyright © 1968 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1996 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“From a Great Height,” copyright © 1996 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Night Vigil” (under the title “Yellow Streak Hero”), copyright © 1957 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Xenogenesis,” copyright CO 1984, 1990 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Rock God,” copyright © 1969 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Ernest and the Machine God,” copyright © 1968 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1996 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
Copyright © 1970 by Harlan Ellison
Copyright © 1996 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation, Renewed 1998
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-0447-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Over the Edge Page 23