Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  He saw his hand reach for the doorknob. He entered the bookshop.

  They all looked up for a moment, registered nothing, the door closed behind him, they dropped their gazes to the pages. Now he was inside among them.

  “I’m certain I have it in hardcover, a very clean copy,” the little old turtle woman said. Her smile was toothless. How could there be fog in here?

  “I’m just browsing,” Cort said.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Everyone is just browsing.”

  She laid her hand on his arm and he shuddered. “Just till a restaurant opens.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He was having trouble breathing. The heartburn. “Is it always … does it always stay dark so late into the morning here?”

  “Unseasonal,” she said. “Look around. I have it here for you. Exactly.”

  He looked around. “I’m not looking for anything special.”

  She walked with him, her hand on his arm. “Neither were they.” She nodded at the crowd of men and women. “But they found answers here. I have a very fine stock.”

  No pages were turned.

  He looked over the shoulder of a middle-aged woman staring intentiy at a book with steel engravings on both open pages. The turtle said, “Her curiosity was aroused by the question ‘How was the first vampire created?’ Fascinating concept, isn’t it? If vampires can only be created by a normal human being receiving the bite of a vampire, then how was the first one created? She has found the answer here in my wonderful stock.” Cort stared at the book. One of the steel engravings was of Noah’s ark.

  But wouldn’t that mean there had to be two on board?

  The turtle drew him down the line of stacks. He paused behind a young man in a very tight T-shirt. He looked as if he had been working out. His head was bent so close to the open book in his hands that his straight blond hair fell over his eyes.

  “For years he has felt sympathetic pains with an unknown person,” the turtle confided. “He would sense danger, elation, lust, despair … none of his own making, and none having anything to do with his circumstance at that moment. Finally he began to realize he was linked with another. Like the Corsican Brothers. But his parents assured him he was an only child, there was no twin. He found the answer in this volume.” She made shoo’ing motions with her blue-veined hands.

  Cort peered around the young man’s head and hair. It was a book on African history. There were tears in the young man’s eyes; there was a spot of moisture on the verso. Cort looked away quickly; he didn’t want to intrude.

  Next in line was a very tall, ascetic looking man carefully holding a folio of pages that had obviously been written with a quill. By the flourishes and swirls of the writing, Cort knew the book had to be quite old and very likely valuable. The tortoise woman leaned in close, her head barely reaching Cort’s chest, and she said, “Sixteenth century. First Shakespeare folio. This gentleman wandered through most of his adult life, and decades of academic pursuits, tormented by the question of who actually wrote The Booke of Sir Thomas More: the Bard or his rival, Anthony Mun-day. There lies his answer, before his eyes. I have such a superior stock.”

  “Why doesn’t he … why don’t any of these people turn the page?”

  “Why bother? They’ve found the answer they sought.”

  “And there’s nothing more they want to know?”

  “Apparently not. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  Cort found it more chilling than interesting. Then the chill fastened itself permanently to his heart, like a limpet, with the unasked question, How long have these browsers been here like this?

  “Here’s a woman who always wanted to know if pure evil exists anywhere on the face of the earth.” The woman wore a mantilla over her shoulders, and she stared mesmerized at a book on natural history. “This man hungered for a complete list of the contents of the great Library of Alexandria, the subject matters contained on those half million handwritten papyrus scrolls at the final moment before the Library was torched in the Fifth Century.” The man was gray and wizened and his face had been incised with an expression of ancient weariness that reminded Cort of Stonehenge. He pored over two pages set so closely with infinitesimal typefaces that Cort could not make out a single word in the flyspecks. “A woman who lost her memory,” said the turtle, indicating with a nod of her tortoise head a beautiful creature festooned with silk scarves of a dozen different colors. “Woke up in a white slave brothel in Marrakech, ran for her life, has spent years wandering around trying to discover who she was.” She laughed a low, warm laugh. “She found out here. The whole story’s right there in that book.”

  Cort turned to her, firmly removing her withered claw from his arm.

  “And you ‘have it here for me,’ don’t you?”

  “Yes; I have it here. In my fine stock.”

  “What precisely do you have that I want? Here. In your fine stock.”

  He didn’t even need her to speak. He knew exactly what she would say. She would say, “Why, I have the answers you seek.” And then he would saunter around the bookshop, feeling superior to these poor devils who had been standing here God only knew how long, and finally he’d turn to her and smile and say, “I don’t even know the questions,” and they would both smile at that one-he like an idiot because it was the most banal of cliches, she because she’d known he would say something dithering like that— and he would refrain from apologizing for the passing stupidity; and then he would ask her the question and she would point out a shelf and say, “The book you want is right there,” and then she’d suggest he try pages such-and-such for exactly what he wanted to know: that which had driven him up the Coast.

  And if, ten thousand years later, the karmic essence of all that’s left of Sulayman the Magnificent, blessed be his name, Sulayman of the potent seal, Sultan and Master of all the djinn, of each and every class of jinni, ghiil, ifrit, si’la, div and iblis; if that transubstantiated essence comes ‘round again, like Halley’s comet come ‘round again; that transmogrified spirit circling back on its limitless hegira through crimson eternity … if it comes ‘round again it would find him, Cort—Dr. Alexander Cort, D.D.S., a Dental Corporation—still standing here elbow-to-elbow with the other browsers. Coelacanths outlined in shale, mastodons flash-frozen in ice, wasps embedded in amber. Gnotobiosis: forever.

  “Why do I have the feeling all this isn’t random?” Cort said to the old turtle woman. He began edging toward the door behind him. “Why do I have the feeling all this has been here waiting for me, just the way it was waiting for all the rest of these poor fucking losers? Why do I get the smell of rotting gardenias off you, old lady?” He was almost at the door.

  She stood in a cleared space in the center of the bookshop, staring at him.

  “You’re no different, Dr. Cort. You need the answers, the same as the rest.”

  “Maybe a little love potion … a powerstone … immortality … all that good jive. I’ve seen places like this in television shows. But I don’t bite, old lady. I have no need you can fill.” And his hand was on the door knob; and he was turning it; and he yanked; and the door opened to the ominous fog and the unending night and the waiting forest. And the old lady said, “Wouldn’t you like to know when you’ll have the best moment of your entire life?”

  And he closed the door and stood with his back against it.

  His smile was unhealthy. “Well, you got me,” he whispered.

  “When you’ll be happiest,” she said softly, barely moving her thin lips. “When you’ll be strongest, most satisfied, at the peak of your form, most in control, bravest, best-looking, most highly regarded by the rest of the world; your top moment, your biggest surge, your most golden achievement, that which forms the pattern for the rest of your life; the instant than which you will have no finer, if you live to be a thousand. Here in my fine stock I have a tome that will tell you the day, hour, minute, second of your noblest future. Just ask and it’s yours. I have it here
for you.”

  “And what does it cost me?”

  She opened her wet mouth and smiled. Her wrinkled little hands fell open palms up in the air before her. “Why, nothing,” she said. “Like these others … you’re just browsing, aren’t you?” The limpet chill that ossified his spine told him there were worse things than deals with the devil. Just browsing, as an example.

  “Well … ?” she asked, waiting.

  He thought about it, wetting his lips—suddenly gone dry now that the decisive moment was at hand. “What if it comes only a few years from now? What if I’ve only got a little while to achieve whatever it was I always wanted to achieve? How do I live with the rest of my life after that, knowing I’ll never be any better, any happier, any richer or more secure; knowing I’ll never top what I did in that moment? What’ll the rest of my life be worth?”

  The tiny turtle woman shouldered aside two browsers—who moved sluggishly apart as if turning in their sleep—and drew a short, squat book from a shelf at her waist level. Cort blinked quickly. No, she hadn’t drawn it out of the stacks. It had slid forward and jumped into her hand. It looked like an old Big Little Book.

  She turned back and offered it to him. “Just browsing,” she said, moistly.

  He reached for it and stopped, curling his fingers back. She arched her finely-penciled eyebrows and gave him a bemused, quizzical look.

  “You’re awfully anxious to get me to read that book,” he said.

  “We are here to serve the public,” she said, amiably.

  “I have a question to ask you. No, two questions. There are two questions I want you to answer. Then I’ll consider browsing through your fine stock.”

  “If I can’t give you the answer—which is, after all, our business here—then I’m sure something in my fine stock has the proper response. But… take this book that you need, just hold it, and I’ll answer your question. Questions. Two questions. Very important, I’m sure.” She held out the squat little book. Cort looked at it. It was a Big Little Book, the kind he had had when he was a child; with pages of drawings alternating with pages of type, featuring comic strip heroes like Red Ryder or The Shadow or Skippy.

  Within reach, the answer to the question everyone wanted to ask; what will be the best moment of my life?

  He didn’t touch it.

  “IH ask, you’ll answer; then you got me … then I’ll do some browsing.”

  She shrugged, as if to say, as you choose.

  He thought: As you choose, so shall you reap.

  He said: “What’s the name of this bookshop?”

  Her face twitched. Cort had the sudden rash of memory from childhood, when he’d first been read the story of Rumpelstiltskin. The turtle woman’s face grew mean. “It doesn’t have a name. It just is.”

  “How do we find you in the Yellow Pages?” Cort said, taunting her. It was obvious he was suddenly in a position of power. Even though he had no idea from what source that power flowed.

  “No name! No name at all! We don’t need a name; we have a very select clientele! It’s never had a name! We don’t need any names!” Her voice, which had been turtle smooth and soft and chocolate, had become rusted metal scraping rusted metal. “No names, I don’t got to tell you no names, I don’t got to show you no stinkin’ badges!”

  She paused to let the bile recede, and in the eye of the silence Cort asked his second question. “What’s in this for you? Where’s your fix? Where’s the bottom-line profit on your p&l? What do you get out of this, frighty old lady?”

  Her mouth went tight. Her blazing eyes seemed both ancient and silvery with youthful ferocity. “Clotho,” she said. “Clotho: Rare Books.”

  He didn’t recognize the name, but from the way she said it, he knew he had pried an important secret from her; had done it, apparently, because he was the first to have asked; had done it as anyone might have done it, had they thought of it. And having asked, and having been answered, he knew he was safe from her.

  “So tell me, Miss Clotho, or Ms. Clotho, or Mrs., or whatever you happen to be: tell me … what do you get out of this? What coin of the realm do you get paid? You work this weird shop, you trap all these fools in here, and I’ll bet when I walk out of here, poof! It all vanishes. Goes back to Never-Never Land. So what kind of a home life do you have? Do you eat three squares a day? Do you have to change your Tampax when you get your period?

  Do you even get the menses? Or has menopause already passed you by? Immortal, maybe? Tell me, weird old turtle lady, if you live forever do you get change of life? Do you still want to get laid? Did you ever get laid? How’s your ka-ka, firm and hard? Do weirdy old fantastic ladies who vanish with their bookstore have to take a shit, or maybe not, huh?”

  She screamed at him. “You can’t talk like that to me! Do you know who I am?”

  He screamed right back at her. “Fuck no, I don’t know who the hell you are, and what’s more to the point, I don’t give a righteous damn who you are!”

  The zombie readers were now looking tip. They seemed distressed. As if a long-held trance was being broken. They blinked furiously, moved aimlessly; they resembled … groundhogs coming out to check their shadows.

  Clotho snarled at him, “Stop yelling! You’re making my customers nervous!”

  “You mean I’m waking them up? C’mon, everybody, rise and shine! Swing on down! How ya fixed, destiny-wise?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Yeah? Maybe I will and maybe I won’t, old turtle. Maybe you answer my question what you were doing waiting here for me specially, and maybe I let these goofballs go back to their browsing.”

  She leaned in as close as she could to him, without touching him, and she hissed like a snake. Then she said tightly, “You! What makes you think it was you we wait for? We wait for everyone. This was your turn. They all get a turn, you’ll all get your turn in the browsing shop.”

  “What’s this ‘we5 business? Are you feeling imperial?”

  “We. My sisters and I.”

  “Oh, there’s more than one of you, is there? A chain bookstore. Very cute. But then I suppose you have branches these days, what with the competition from B. Dalton and Crown and Walden-books.”

  She clenched her teeth; and for the first time Cort could see that the old turtle actually had teeth inside those straight, thin lips. “Take this book or get out of my shop,” she said in a deadly whisper.

  He took the Big Little Book from her quivering hands.

  “I’ve never dealt with anyone as vile, as rude,” she snarled.

  “Customer is always right, sweetie,” he said. And he opened the book to precisely the right page.

  Where he read his finest moment. The knowledge that would make the remainder of his life an afterthought. An also-ran. Marking time. A steady ride on the downhill side.

  When would it come? A year hence? Two years? Five, ten, twenty-five, fifty, or at the blessed final moment of life, having climbed, climbed, climbed all the way to the end? He read …

  That his finest moment had come when he was ten years old. When, during a sandlot baseball game, a pick-up game in which you got to bat only if you put someone out, the best hitter in the neighborhood hit a shattering line drive to deepest center field where he was always forced to play, because he was no good at baseball, and he ran back and back and stuck up his bare hand and miraculously, as he, little Alex Cort, leaped as high as he could, miraculously the pain of the frazzled hardball as it hit his hand and stayed there was sweeter than anything he had ever felt before—or would feel again. The moment replayed in the words on the page of that terrible book. Slowly, slowly he sank to earth, his feet touching and his eyes going to his hand and there, in the red, anguished palm of his hand, without a trapper’s mitt, he held the hardest, surest home run line drive ever hit by anyone. He was the killer, the master of the world, the tallest thing on the face of the earth, big and bold and golden, adept beyond any telling, miraculous; a miracle, a walking miracle. It was the best moment o
f his fife.

  At the age of ten.

  Nothing else he would do in his life, nothing he had done between the age of ten and thirty-five as he read the Big Little Book, nothing he would do till he died at whatever number of years remained for him … nothing … nothing would match that moment.

  He looked up slowly. He was having trouble seeing. He was crying. Clotho was smiling at him nastily. “You’re lucky it wasn’t one of my sisters. They react much worse to being screwed with.”

  She started to turn away from him. The sound of his slamming the Big Little Book closed onto the counter of the showcase stopped her. He turned without saying a word and started for the door. Behind him he heard her hurrying after him.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Back to the real world.” He had trouble speaking; the tears were making him sob and his words came raggedly.

  “You’ve got to stay! Everyone stays.”

  “Not me, sweetie. The cheese stands alone.”

  “It’s all futile. You’ll never know grandeur again. It’s all dross, waste, emptiness. There’s nothing as good if you live to be a thousand.”

  He opened the door. The fog was out there. And the night. And the final forest. He stopped and looked down at her. “Maybe if I’m lucky I won’t live to be a thousand.”

  Then he stepped through the door of Clotho: Rare Books and closed it tightly behind him. She watched through the window as he began to walk off into the fog.

  He stopped and leaned in to speak as close to the glass as he could. She strained her weird little turtle face forward and heard him say, “What’s left may only be the tag-end of a shitty life … but it’s my shitty life.

  “And it’s the only game in town, sweetie. The cheese stands alone.”

  Then he walked off into the fog, crying; but trying to whistle.

  SCENES FROM THE REAL WORLD III