Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  There was something familiar about her. He thought for a moment that she might have been one of the tourists who had strolled past him during the day.

  She didn’t speak at first, and he felt he should ask her if she needed help. She seemed lost.

  But he didn’t want to start something. Who walks out of the ocean in the night?

  “How are you, Billy?” she said. Her voice was thick and cold. It was a voice that had not been used in a long time.

  “Some friends are going to be dropping by a little later,” she said. She was still looking past him, toward the town. He stole a glance over his shoulder, but the beach was empty, and nothing moving from the town. He thought of the ocean, of the sound of armies in conflict.

  “I wanted to say goodbye; you left and I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye.”

  Billy Dunbar knew who she was. He thought of flamethrowers and saw-grass and the sound of incoming rounds in a far place.

  “Get away from me,” he said. But she didn’t move.

  Oh, Christ, he thought. I’m losing it. I’ve got to get out of here.

  And the ocean turned to black glass and flowed off into darkness beyond the edge of the world.

  Gwen, he thought, and wanted more than anything to go back to the moment when he had slapped her and knocked the sunglasses from her face.

  “I have to go now,” she said. “But don’t be afraid. The others are coming later.”

  Then she turned, still a little bit drank and in love with the sound of the Malibu storm, and she walked back across the sea of black glass, into the faint glow of the scimitar blade hanging above him. And she was gone.

  When he got to his feet, to get out of there and find a place in Wiscasset to sleep, the world was, of course, no longer there.

  He had sought the edge of the world, and he had found it almost without trying, and here he would sit till the ghosts of Christmas Past had had their way with him.

  The terror was in not knowing. What, precisely, was the charge; what crime was he being set up to pay for?

  He was thirty-eight years old. He had outlived his father, and his mother, and was still here when others had already gone under. That was an achievement, of sorts. Simply to hang on, to maintain, to still be there when the last wave rolled back out to the deeps. Wasn’t that worth something? To survive! Wasn’t that worth the price of a little consideration?

  Three of them came walking in across the black glass.

  He knew at once who they would be. He still didn’t know their names, but he knew who they would be. He remembered a ghost story he’d heard at summer camp when he was a child, about the monkey’s paw, and about the thing that came to the door when the old couple wished for their dead son to return to them… and he was certain they would look horrible. They had sprayed.

  He tried to run, but there was nothing behind him. The Maine coast was gone, Wiscasset was gone, the world from which he had come on a bus—was gone.

  And he was here with those who, unlike him, had not survived.

  They came close and stood staring past him. And he understood now that, like the woman, they were looking beyond him to the world they had had stolen from them; the world he had fled. They could not return, but they wanted to see.

  And the realization overwhelmed him: he could not return. Even if he had wanted to.

  One of them had lost both his arms. He seemed to be reaching toward the vanished world. Like the recent amputee still lying in his hospital bed, feeling the itch of his phantom limb, he seemed to be reaching toward the years of his life that had never been lived. Another had only half a face. The wistful look that he cast into the darkness at the edge of the black glass was shced off. But he seemed to be content at the knowledge that his children were growing up well. The third man had a gaping hole where his abdomen should have been. He carried parts of himself in his bloody hands.

  They stared past Billy Dunbar and murmured softly.

  “Thanks for the word,” the one without arms said.

  “Helluva guy,” said the one with half a face.

  “Long time no see,” said the one without a stomach.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Billy said. He tried to keep his voice even, level, quiet, unashamed. He wasn’t ashamed; he hadn’t done anything wrong; he had survived; there wasn’t any sin in that. “There isn’t any sin in staying alive,” he said.

  “Okay,” said the one with no arms.

  “Have it your way,” said the one with half a face.

  “Absolutely,” said the one without a stomach.

  He turned and walked away from them. He tried to walk back into the darkness, but there was pressure in the air; as if some quivering, invisible membrane had been erected from shore to moon. So he walked away from them, parallel to the sea of black glass. Because he could not go back the way he had come, back to the world that no longer existed for him.

  He would not walk out onto that smooth plain of dangerous nothingness. They had come from out there, she had come from out there, and he had known enough emptiness.

  He put out his hand, toward the pressure where Maine had been, and as he walked away from them he pushed, hoping he could find an opening. But the pressure was there, insistent, pressing back toward the palm of his hand.

  “Leaving again?” the one with half a smile called after him.

  “Getting the hell away from you guys!” he shouted back, not turning. “Just getting the hell away. I’ve had enough.”

  And the one with no arms had the last words: “Not nearly enough, fella.”

  Billy kept walking, and in a few moments they were lost in the darkness and he was alone once more.

  The moon did not move, there were no clouds, the sea was black glass and was content to keep its treasures.

  He walked until he could walk no more. Then he sat down, and waited. He was tired of running to find the answer. He would wait for the answer to come to him. Wasn’t that the way these things worked: there was an answer, someone somewhere had a point to make and would let him know what was in store for him soon enough. Then he would get through that, he would maintain, he would survive, damned well survive and worry about what came after … after.

  He put his hands in his jacket pockets, and felt the broken sunglasses he had picked up from the rocky shore. He let his hand stay there, hoping a bit of the warmth of the day still lay trapped in the wreckage. But it was cold; and he wondered why he wasn’t cold. There was nothing but night out here, at the edge of black glass; and it should have been cold.

  He sat, he waited, but no one came to tell him what he had done.

  And he survived.

  The woman from Malibu beach never came again. The three nameless shamblers never came again. Gwen did not come; the little girl who wanted a cheese sandwich from the moon never came; and he sat and waited.

  There on the shore of black glass, unable to return, unable to follow them to the place where those who had not survived found peace, he sat alone. Surviving.

  And sometime later, very much later, he knew what his crime had been, and why he would sit there on the shore for a time without end, a time without sunrise.

  His crime was not in surviving; it was that he felt no guilt or shame at having survived. He could not pay the price for his life. And now the checkout counter was closed at the end of day.

  FINAL TROPHY

  It was the grisliest trophy of them all. Hanging there in the main club room of the Trottersmen, it was a grim reminder that not all the members were idle playboys who had bought their memberships with animals shot from ambush in the interdicted kraals of Africa or the blue mist-jungles of Todopus III.

  It was a strange trophy, plaque-mounted between the head of a Coke’s hartebeest and the fanged jaws of a szlygor. There was the damndest watchfulness in the eyes.

  It had been Nathaniel Derr’s final grant to his club. A visitor to the Trottersmen’s gallery (invited down for the weekly open cocktail party) could walk th
rough room after room filled with the bloody booty of two hundred hunting expeditions Derr had commissioned. A visitor (whether hip-booted spacer or effete dignitary) would surely marvel at the quantity and diversity of wildlife Derr had mastered. Photoblox showed him proudly resting one foot on the blasted carcasses of Mountain Gorilla and Cape Lion, butchered Hook-lipped Rhino and puma. Hides with the Derr emblem branded on them festooned every wall: cheetah and javelina, Huanaco and Sika Deer, deeler and ferrlcat. The mounted heads were awesome: bull elephant and prestosaur, king cobra and desert wolf. The word hunter seemed weightless when applied to Nathaniel Derr; perhaps agent of destruction might have approached the reality.

  Even among the Trottersmen he had been sui generis. His fellow clubmen had called him a fanatic. Some even called him butcher—but not publicly. Nathaniel Derr had left the Trottersmen almost thirteen million dollars.

  And the final trophy.

  But if the visitor was particularly trustworthy, and if they had all taken several stingarees too many, and if the visitor wheedled properly, the Trottersmen might just tell him the story behind that gruesome trophy.

  The story of Nathaniel Derr’s last kill. And of his visit to the planet Ristable.

  The day, like all the days since he had arrived on Ristable, was too placid for Derr. Had the planet sported thirty-two kilometer an hour gales, or freezing snowstorms, or unbearable heat as in the veldt … then he would have gladly suffered, and even reveled in it. Discomfort was the hunter’s environment.

  But this baby-bath of a world was serene, and calm, and unhurried.

  Nathaniel Derr did not care to have his hunter status challenged, even by the climate.

  He stared out of the slowly-moving halftrack truck, watching the waist-high, unbroken plain of dull russet grass whisper past. He felt the faint stirring of the winds as they ruffled his thick, gray hair.

  Derr was a big man: big of chest, big of hand. Big even in the way he watched, and the way he fondled the stet-rifle. As though he had been born with the gun grafted to him.

  His eyes had the telltale wrinkles around them that labeled him a watcher. In a stand of grass, in the bush, or waiting for a flight of mallards to honk overhead, he was a watcher. Again, there was something else, less simple, in his face.

  A hunter’s face …

  … but something else, too.

  “Hey, you!” he yelled over the noise of the truck’s antique water-piston engine. The nut-brown native who drove the halftrack paid no attention. The truck made too much noise. Den-yelled again, louder: “Hey, you! Dummy!” The native’s oblong head turned slightly; he inclined an ear; Derr yelled, “What is this we’re going to?”

  The native’s voice was deep and throaty, a typical Ristabite tone. “Ristable, shasir Derr.” Nothing more. He turned back to the driving.

  Derr let his heavy features settle down into a frown. The word “ristable” seemed to mean many things on this planet. First, it meant “home,” the name of the world; and now it was the name of a ceremony or something he was about to attend. He had heard it used several other ways during the past week.

  Nathaniel Derr turned his thoughts inward as the halftrack rolled over the grassland. The past week; he dwelled on it sequentially.

  When he had applied to the Mercantile System for supercargo passage on a liner out to the stars, he had hoped for bigger hunts, better kills, finer trophies. But though it had cost him more for this one trip than all the safaris he had staged on Earth—and they were many, many—so far his appetite had only been whetted. The szlygor he had bagged on Haggadore was a puny thing … even though it had gutted three of his bearers before he’d gotten the 50.50 charge into the beast’s brain. The prestosaur was big, but too cumbersome to have been any real threat. The ferrlcat and the deeler had been the roughest. The deeler was more an asp than a spider, but had exhibited the deadliest traits of both before he had slit its hood with his vibroblade. The ferrlcat had dropped from a feathery-leafed tree on Yawmac; and it was proof indeed that Derr’s age had not diminished his strength, for he had strangled the fearsome yellow feline. Even so, the vibrant surge of the maximum kill had been absent. Perhaps he had expected too much.

  But Ristable was just too dead, too boring, too unexciting.

  The planet was old; so ancient; all mountains had long since flattened away; undisturbed grassland swayed from one end of the single great continent to the other. The natives were simple, uncomplicated agrarian folk, who just happened to thresh from their grasses a sweet flour much enjoyed by gourmets on a hundred worlds, and worth all the plasteel hoes and rakes the mere-ships could trade.

  So here he was on Ristable, where the rubble of the glorious ancient cities lay at the edges of the grasslands, slowly dissolving into the land from which they had come.

  The past week had been one of utter boredom, while the natives went about their haggling, the mere-ship’s crew stretched and mildly leched, and the big red sun, Sayto, burned its way across the sky.

  No hunting, too much sleeping, and a growing disgust of the slothful natives. It was true they were anxious to learn about civilization—take the driver of this halftrack—but though they mimicked the Earthmen’s ways, still they were farmers, slow and dull. He had watched them all week, tending their farms, having community feasts, and taking care of the animals that lived out on the plains.

  In fact, today had been the first break in the monotony. Nerrows, the captain of the mere-ship, had come to him that morning, and offered him a chance to see a “ristable.”

  “I thought that was the name of the planet?” Derr had said, pulling on his bush-boots.

  Nerrows had thumbed his cap back on his crewcut head, and his slim face had broken lightly in a smile. “When these people come up with a good word, they don’t let it go easily. Yeah, that’s right. Hie planet is Ristable, but so are the animals out there.” He jerked a thumb at the grasslands lying beyond the hut. “And so is the ceremony they have once a week … ristable, that is.”

  Derr had perked up sharply. “What ceremony?”

  Nerrows smiled again, and said, “You know what the word ‘ristable’ means in this usage? I didn’t think so; it means, literally, ‘Kill Day.’ Want to take it in? The ship won’t be unsaddled here more than a couple days, so you’d better take in all you can.”

  Derr stood up, smoothing out his hunt-jacket, slipping into it, sealing it shut. “Is it safe? They won’t try to lynch me for observing the secret ceremony, or anything?”

  Nerrows waved away the worried comment. “Safest planet on our route. These people haven’t had wars since before man was born. You’re completely safe, Derr.”

  The hunter clapped the captain on his thin shoulders, wondering inwardly how such a scrawny sample could get to be a mere-ship officer … he’d never make it where it counted … as a hunter. “Okay, Captain, thanks a lot. Got someone who can direct me out there?”

  Derr tapped the native again. “How much farther?” The native’s horny shoulders bobbed. “Ten, ‘leven k’lometer, shasir Derr. Big ristable today.”

  Derr pulled a black cigar from the cartridge ring, one of ten in a broken row across his jacket. He fit it. Drew deeply. He never kept extra cartridges in the rings; if he hadn’t bagged his quarry by the time the stet-rifle was empty, Derr felt he deserved to die. That was his philosophy. He drew down on the black cigar, let a heavy cloud of smoke billow up over his head.

  The ancient water-piston halftrack rolled steadily out into the grasslands.

  They passed a pile of rubble; Derr recognized it as another of the lost cities. The faintly pink columns rose spiraling, then broke with ragged abruptness. Strangely-pyramidal structures split down the middle. Carved figures with smashed noses, broken arms, shattered forms … forms which could not be understood … hu-manoid or something else?

  As they came abreast of the ruined city with huge clumps of grass growing up in its middle, Derr crossed his legs in the back seat, and he said, “Those cities, w
ho made them?”

  The native shrugged. “Don’t know. Ristable.”

  Ristable again.

  The halftrack passed walking natives, heading toward a plume of gray smoke that twisted out of the grasslands ahead. Eventually, they drew up on the edge of a widely-cleared dirt area. Surrounded by the waist-high russet grass on all sides, it was like a bald spot on someone’s head. The dirt was packed solid and hard with the footprints of a hundred thousand bare feet. The smoke rose from a large bonfire used to summon the natives. Even as Derr watched, the crowd that had already gathered swelled at the edges.

  Strangely enough, a path quite wide and straight leading out to the grasslands was left in the circle of natives.

  “What’s that?” Derr asked the driver, motioning to the circle, to the path, to the Ristabites watching at nothing. The native motioned him to silence and Derr realized, for the first time, that there wasn’t a sound in the crowd. The natives, male and female, children and old dark-brown crones, stood silently, shifting their feet, watching, but not speaking.

  “Come on, boy, open up!” Derr prodded the native angrily. “What’s this whole thing … what’s that path there … ?”

  The native spun around, looked at Derr for a moment in annoyance and open anger, and then vaulted out of the halftrack. In a moment he was lost in the crowd.

  Derr had no other choice: he slung the stet-rifle over his shoulder, and slid up onto the rollbar between the driver’s cab and the back seat, getting a better view of what was happening.

  What was happening, as he settled himself, was that a medium-sized animal—the ones taken care of by the natives, and labeled, inevitably, ristables—was loping in from the grasslands; on six double-jointed legs.

  It was the size of a large horse, or a small black bear. It was dull gray in color, mottled with whitish spots along the underbelly. Its chest was massive. It was built as an allosaurus might have been. Smooth front that rose straight up to a triangular skull with huge, pocketed eyes set forward on each side of the head. The back sloped sharply at forty-five degrees, ending in a horny tail. The head was darker gray, and had one gigantic unicorn-like horn protruding from a space midway between the eyes. No … as Derr watched it coming closer, he saw that the horn was not single; there was a smaller, less apparent horn stuck down near the base of the larger one.