Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  “Not bad,” said Mukhar.

  “Thanks,” said Danny, stifling a smile. Now he waited.

  “Bloodsucker! Heartless trafficker in cheapness! Pimple on the fundament of decency! Graffito on the subway car of life! Thirteen; my last offer; and may the gods of ITT and the Bank of America turn a blind eye to your venality!” But his eyes held the golden gleam of the born haggler, at last, blessedly, in his element.

  “Seven, not a penny more, you Arabic anathema! And may a weighty object drop from a great height, flattening you to the niggardly thickness of your soul.” Connie stared at him with open awe and admiration.

  “Eleven! Eleven dollars, a pittance, an outright theft we’re talking about. Call the security guards, get a consumer advocate, gimme a break here!”

  “My shadow will vanish from before the evil gleam of your rapacious gaze before I pay a penny more than six bucks, and let the word go out to every wadi and oasis across the limitless desert, that Mohanadus Mukhar steals maggots from diseased meat, flies from horse dung, and the hard-earned drachmae of honest laborers. Six, fuckface, and that’s it!”

  “My death is about to become a reality,” the Arab bellowed, tearing at the strands of white hair showing under the fez. “Rob me, go ahead, rob me; drink my life’s blood! Ten! A twenty dollar loss I’ll take.”

  “Okay, okay.” Danny turned around and produced his wallet. He pulled out one of the three ten dollar bills still inside and, turning to Connie, said, “You sure you want this ugly, dirty piece of crap?” She nodded, and he held the bill naked in the vicinity of the little merchant. For the first time Danny realized Mukhar was wearing pointed slippers that curled up; there was hair growing from his ears.

  “Ten bucks.”

  The little man moved with the agility of a ferret, and whisked the tenner from Danny’s outstretched hand before he could draw it back. “Sold!” Mukhar chuckled.

  He spun around once, and when he faced them again, the ten dollars was out of sight. “And a steal, though Allah be the wiser; a hot deal, a veritable steal, blessed sir!”

  Danny abruptly realized he had been taken. The lamp had probably been picked up in a junkyard and was worthless. He started to ask if it was a genuine antique, but the piles of junk had begun to waver and shimmer and coruscate with light. “Hey!” Danny said, alarmed, “What’s this now?”

  The little man’s wrinkled face drew up in panic. “Out! Get out, quick! The timeframe is sucking back together! Out! Get out now if you don’t want to roam the eternities with me and this shop … and I can’t afford any help! Out!”

  He shoved them forward, and Connie slipped and fell, flailing into a pile of glassware. None of it broke. Her hand went out to protect herself and went right through the glass. Danny dragged her to her feet, panic sweeping over him … as the shop continued to waver and grow more indistinct around them.

  “Out! Out! Out!” Mukhar kept yelling.

  Then they were at the door, and he was kicking them—literally planting his curl-slippered foot in Danny’s backside and shoving— from the store. They landed in a heap on the sidewalk. The lamp bounced from Connie’s hand and went into the gutter with a clang. The little man stood there grinning in the doorway, and as the shop faded and disappeared, they heard him mumble happily, “A clear nine-seventy-five profit. What a lemon! You got an Edsel, kid, a real lame piece of goods. But I gotta give it to you; the syphilitic camel bit was inspired.”

  Then the shop was gone, and they got to their feet in front of an empty, weed-overgrown lot.

  A lame piece of goods?

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you’re answering me?”

  “I was raised polite.”

  “Danny, talk to me … come on!”

  “The answer is no. I’m not going to talk about it.”

  “We have to!”

  “Not only don’t we have to, I don’t want to, ain’t going to, and shut up so I can go to sleep.”

  “We’ve been lying here almost an hour. Neither one of us can sleep. We have to discuss it, Danny.”

  The light went on over his side of the bed. The single pool of illumination spread from the hand-me-down daybed they had gotten from Danny’s brother in New Jersey, faintly limning the few packing crates full of dishes and linens, the three Cuisinarts they’d gotten as wedding gifts, the straight-back chairs from Connie’s Aunt Medora, the entire bare and depressing reality of their first home together.

  It would be better when the furniture they’d bought today was delivered. Later, it would be better. Now, it was the sort of urban landscape that drove divorcees and aging bachelors to jump down the airshaft at Christmastime.

  “I’m going to talk about it, Squires.”

  “So talk. I have my thumbs in my ears.”

  “I think we should rub it.”

  “I can’t hear you. It never happened. I deny the evidence of my senses. It never happened. I have these thumbs in my ears so I cannot hear a syllable of this craziness.”

  “For god’s sake, Squires, I was there with you today. I saw it happen, the same as you. I saw that weird little old man and I saw his funky shop come and go like a big burp. Now, neither of us can deny it!”

  “If I could hear you, I’d agree; and then I’d deny the evidence of my senses and tell you …” He took his thumbs from his ears, looking distressed… tell you with all my heart that I love you, that I have loved you since the moment I saw you in the typing pool at Upjohn, that if I live to be a hundred thousand years old I’ll never love any one or any thing as much as I love you this very moment; and then I would tell you to fuck off and forget it, and let me go to sleep so that tomorrow I can con myself into believing it never happened the way I know it happened.

  “Okay?”

  She threw back the covers and got out of bed. She was naked. They had not been married that long.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You know where I’m going.”

  He sat up in the daybed. His voice had no lightness in it. “Connie!”

  She stopped and stared at Mm, there in the light.

  He spoke softly. “Don’t. I’m scared. Please don’t.”

  She said nothing. She looked at him for a time. Then, naked, she sat down cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the daybed. She looked around at what little they had, and she answered him gently. “I have to, Danny. I just have to …if there’s a chance; I have to.”

  They sat that way, reaching across the abyss with silent imperatives, until—finally—Danny nodded, exhaled heavily, and got out of the daybed. He walked to one of the cartons, pulled out a dustrag, shook it clean over the box, and handed it to her. He walked over to the window ledge where the tarnished and rusted oil lamp sat, and he brought it to her.

  “Shine the damned thing, Squires. Who knows, maybe we actually got ourselves a 24 carat genie. Shine on, oh mistress of my Mesopotamian mansion.”

  She held the lamp in one hand, the rag in the other. For a few minutes she did not bring them together. “I’m scared, too,” she said, held her breath, and briskly rubbed the belly of the lamp.

  Under her flying fingers the rust and tarnish began to come away in spots. “We’ll need brass polish to do this right,” she said;

  but suddenly the ruin covering the lamp melted away, and she was rubbing the bright skin of the lamp itself.

  “Oh, Danny, look how nice it is, underneath all the crud!” And at that precise instant the lamp jumped from her hand, emitted a sharp, gray puff of smoke, and a monstrous voice bellowed out in the apartment:

  AH-HA! It screamed, louder than a subway train. AH-HA!

  FREE AT LAST! FREE-AS FREE AS I’LL EVER BE-AFTER TEN THOUSAND YEARS! FREE TO SPEAK AND ACT, MY WILL TO BE KNOWN!

  Danny went over backward. The sound was as mind-throttling as being at ground zero. The window glass blew out. Every light bulb in the apartment shattered. From the carton containing their meager chinaware came t
he distinct sound of hailstones as every plate and cup dissolved into shards. Dogs and cats blocks away began to howl. Connie screamed—though it could not be heard over the foghorn thunder of the voice—and was knocked head over ankles into a corner, still clutching the dustrag. Plaster showered down on the little apartment. The window shades rolled up.

  Danny recovered first. He crawled over a chair and stared at the lamp with horror. Connie sat up in the corner, face white, eyes huge, hands over her ears. Danny stood up and looked down at the seemingly innocuous lamp.

  “Knock off that noise! You want to lose us the lease?”

  CERTAINLY, OFFSPRING OF A WORM!

  “I said: stop that goddamn bellowing!”

  THIS WHISPER? THIS IS AS NAUGHT TO THE HURRICANE I SHALL LOOSE, SPAWN OF PARAMECIUM!

  “That’s it,” Danny yelled. “I’m not getting kicked out of the only apartment in the city of New York I can afford just because of some loudmouthed genie in a jug …”

  He stopped. He looked at Connie. Connie looked back at him.

  “Oh, my god,” she said.

  “It’s real,” he said.

  They got to their knees and crawled over. The lamp lay on its side on the floor at the foot of the daybed.

  “Are you really in there?” Connie asked.

  WHERE ELSE WOULD I BE, SLUT!

  “Hey, you can’t talk to my wife that way—”

  Connie shushed him. “If he’s a genie, he can talk any way he likes. Sticks and stones; namecalling is better than poverty.”

  “Yeah? Well, nobody talks to my-“

  “Put a lid on it, Squires. I can take care of myself. If what’s in this lamp is even half the size of the genie in that movie you took me to the Thalia to see…”

  “The Thief of Bagdad . . .1939 version … but Rex Ingram was just an actor, they only made him look big.”

  “Even so. As big as he was, if this genie is only half that big, playing macho overprotective chauvinist hubby—”

  SO HUMANS CONTINUE TO PRATTLE LIKE MONKEYS EVEN AFTER TEN THOUSAND YEARS! WILL NOTHING CLEANSE THE EARTH OF THIS RAUCOUS PLAGUE OF INSECTS?

  “We’re going to get thrown right out of here,” Danny said. His face screwed up in a horrible expression of discomfort.

  “If the cops don’t beat the other tenants to it.”

  “Please, genie,” Danny said, leaning down almost to the lamp. “Just tone it down a little, willya?”

  OFFSPRING OF A MILLION STINKS! SUFFER!

  “You’re no genie,” Connie said smugly. Danny looked at her with disbelief.

  “He’s no genie? Then what the hell do you think he is?”

  She swatted him. Then put her finger to her lips.

  THAT IS WHAT I AM, WHORE OF DEGENERACY!

  “No you’re not”

  I AM.

  “Am not.”

  AM.

  “Am not.”

  AM SO, CHARNEL HOUSE HARLOT! WHY SAY YOU NAY?

  “A genie has a lot of power; a genie doesn’t need to shout like that to make himself heard. You’re no genie, or you’d speak softly. You can’t speak at a decent level, because you’re a fraud.”

  CAUTION, TROLLOP!

  “Foo, you don’t scare me. If you were as powerful as you make out, you’d tone it way down.”

  is this better? are you convinced?

  “Yes,” Connie said, “I think that’s more convincing. Can you keep it up, though? That’s the question.”

  forever, if need be.

  “And you can grant wishes?” Danny was back in the conversation.

  naturally, but not to you, disgusting grub of humanity.

  “Hey, listen,” Danny replied angrily, “I don’t give a damn what or who you are! You can’t talk to me that way.” Then a thought dawned on him. “After all, I’m your master!”

  ah! correction, filth of primordial seas, there are some djinn who are mastered by their owners, but unfortunately for you i am not one of them, for i am not free to leave this metal prison, i was imprisoned in this accursed vessel many ages ago by a besotted sorcerer who knew nothing of molecular compression and even less of the binding forces of the universe, he put me into this thrice-cursed lamp, far too small for me, and i have been wedged within ever since, over the ages my good nature has rotted away, i am powerful, but trapped, those who own me cannot request anything and hope to realize their boon, i am unhappy, and an unhappy djinn is an evil djinn. were i free, i might be your slave; but as i am now, i will visit unhappiness on you in a thousand forms!

  Danny chuckled. “The hell you will. I’ll toss you in the incinerator.”

  ah! but you cannot, once you have bought the lamp, you cannot lose it, destroy it or give it away, only sell it. i am with you forever, for who would buy such a miserable lamp?

  And thunder rolled in the sky.

  “What are you going to do?” Connie asked.

  do? just ask me for something, and you shall see!

  “Not me,” Danny said, “you’re too cranky.”

  wouldn’t you like a billfold full of money?

  There was sincerity in the voice from the lamp.

  “Well, sure, I want money, but—”

  The djinn’s laughter was gigantic, and suddenly cut of! by the rain of frogs that fell from a point one inch below the ceiling, clobbering Danny and Connie with small, reeking, wriggling green bodies. Connie screamed and dove for the clothes closet. She came out a second later, her hair full of them; they were falling in the closet, as well. The rain of frogs continued and when Danny opened the front door to try and escape them, they fell in the hall.

  He slammed the door—he realized he was still naked—and covered his head with his hands. The frogs fell, writhing, stinking, and then they were knee-deep in them, with little filthy, warty bodies jumping up at their faces.

  what a lousy disposition i’ve got! the djinn laughed. And he laughed again, a clangorous peal that was silenced only when the frogs stopped, disappeared, and the flood of blood began.

  It went on for a week.

  They could not get away from him, no matter where they went. They were also slowly starving: they could not go out to buy groceries without the earth opening under their feet, or a herd of elephants chasing them down the street, or hundreds of people getting violently ill and vomiting on them. So they stayed in and ate what canned goods they had stored up in the first four days of their marriage. But who could eat with locusts filling the apartment from top to bottom, or snakes that were intent on gobbling them up like little white rats?

  First came the frogs, then the flood of blood, then the whirling dust storm, then the spiders and gnats, then the snakes and then the locusts and then the tiger that had them backed against a wall and ate the chair they used to ward him off. Then came the bats and the leprosy and the hailstones and then the floor dissolved under them and they clung to the wall fixtures while their furniture —which had been quickly delivered (the moving men had brought it during the hailstones)—fell through, nearly killing the little old lady who lived beneath them.

  Then the walls turned red hot and melted, and then the lightning burned everything black, and finally Danny had had enough. He cracked, and went gibbering around the room, tripping over the man-eating vines that were growing out of the light sockets and the floorboards. He finally sat down in a huge puddle of monkey urine and cried till his face grew puffy and his eyes flame-red and his nose swelled to three times normal size.

  “I’ve got to get away from all this!” he screamed hysterically, drumming his heels, trying to eat his pants’ cuffs.

  you can divorce her, and that means you are voided out of the purchase contract: she wanted the lamp, not you, the djinn suggested.

  Danny looked up (just in time to get a ripe Black Angus meadow muffin in his face) and yelled, “I won’t! You can’t make me. We’ve only been married a week and four days and I won’t leave her!”

  Connie, covered with running sores, stumbled to Danny and hugged h
im, though he had turned to tapioca pudding and was melting. But three days later, when ghost images of people he had feared all his life came to haunt him, he broke completely and allowed Connie to call the rest home on the boa constrictor that had once been the phone. “You can come and get me when this is over,” he cried pitifully, kissing her poison ivy Hps. “Maybe if we split up, he’ll have some mercy.” But they both doubted it.

  When the downstairs buzzer rang, the men from the Home for the Mentally Absent came into the debacle that had been their apartment and saw Connie pulling her feet out of the swamp sHme only with difficulty; she was crying in unison with Danny as they bundled him into the white ambulance. Unearthly laughter rolled around the sky like thunder as her husband was driven away.

  Connie was left alone. She went back upstairs; she had nowhere else to go.

  She slumped down in the pool of molten slag, and tried to think while ants ate at her flesh and rabid rats gnawed off the wallpaper.

  I’m just getting warmed up, the djinn said from the lamp.

  Less than three days after he had been admitted to the Asylum for the Temporarily Twitchy, Connie came to get Danny. She came into his room; the shades were drawn, the sheets were very white; when he saw her his teeth began to chatter.

  She smiled at him gently. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you weren’t simply overjoyed to see me, Squires.”

  He slid under the sheets till only his eyes were showing. His voice came through the covers. “If I break out in boils, it will definitely cause a relapse, and the day nurse hates mess.”

  “Where’s my macho protective husband now?”

  “I’ve been unwell.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all over. You’re fit as a fiddle, so bestir your buns and let’s get out of here.”

  Danny Squires’s brow furrowed. This was not the tone of a woman with frogs in her hair. “I’ve been contemplating divorce or suicide.”

  She yanked the covers down, exposing his naked legs sticking out from the hem of the hospital gown. “Forget it, little chum. There are at least a hundred and ten positions we haven’t tried yet before I consider dissolution. Now will you get out of that bed and come on?”