Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  New Year’s Eve is a good time to think about it. So. This column.

  Thinking about when I’ll die. Mortality is the subject.

  I will die in 1973. Here is how it happened.

  I went to New York to be guest of honor at a science fiction convention called the Lunacon. To amortize the cost of the trip I accepted several lecture gigs in surrounding areas. So I went into Manhattan two weeks before the convention. I had just returned from speaking at Dartmouth, and was staying with my friend Max Katz, the Sesame Street segment director, in his Penthouse G on East 65th Street. Max and Karen were out when I taxied in from Kennedy International, and after putting away my overnight case I found the note they’d left for me: We went to dinner at The Proof of the Pudding. If you get in by nine, join us. Love, M&K.

  I looked at my watch. It was 9:28. Still time to meet them for a piece of Key West lime pie. I left the apartment and took the elevator to the lobby. The street was quiet and pleasant with an April breeze. I started to walk down 65th to First Avenue, carefully avoiding the piles of dog shit.

  Two guys in Army field jackets were coming toward me, up the street I instinctively tensed. I was in New York and could not forget that Karen had had her purse ripped off her shoulder in broad daylight in front of Bloomingdale’s, in front of hordes of people who would not help her as she struggled with the snatcher. New York was not what it had been when last I’d lived there, in 1961.

  As they came toward me they parted so I could walk between them. I guess I knew in my gut what was about to happen. They swung on me and jammed me against the brick wall of the poodle clipping joint down the street from Max’s building. They both had knives.

  “Gimme your wallet,” one of them said, not even lowering his voice. He pushed his knife against my collarbone. The other one smelled of fish.

  I remembered a way I’d confounded a mugger many years before. I began mumbling unintelligibly in what was supposed to be a foreign tongue, waving my hands feebly as if I didn’t understand English.

  “Your money, motherfucker … I’ll shove this in your fucking throat!”

  I rolled my eyes wildly and continued babbling.

  A group of people had come out of Max’s apartment building, were turning toward us. “Come on,” said the one who smelled of fish. “You cocksuckerl” the one with the knife at my collarbone said.

  They let go and moved off. I took two steps and felt the pain. I tried to turn, and saw the one who had done all the talking had spun and come back at me. The pain was in my back, below my right shoulderblade. It got worse. Doors slammed in my head. Everything went silver. I fell to my knees.

  The group from Max’s building walked past me. I fell down and lay there. In a little while I died.

  Max and Karen came home from dinner and didn’t find out I’d been killed outside their building till the next afternoon. Karen cried, the Lunacon had a minute of silence for me, and my replacement, Isaac Asimov, said dear good things about me, better than I deserved.

  I died on April 19th, 1973.

  I will die in 1981. Here is how it happened.

  I was living in Perthshire, in Scotland. I had had a bad cold for weeks. I was living alone. The girl who had been staying with me had gone away. I was writing DIAL 9 TO GET OUT at last. My big novel. The one that would finally break my name into the memory books of great writers. It had taken me ten years to get to it. I was deep in the writing. I didn’t eat regularly, I’ve never been one for cooking for myself. I developed pneumonia in that handsome old farmhouse.

  It killed me. I never finished the book. My stories were read for a few years, but soon went out of vogue.

  No one in that little Scottish town understood that as I lay there, doped up and dying, that the pathetic movements of my hands were my attempts to convey to the nurse or the doctor that I wanted my typewriter, that I wanted more than anything, more than even life, to finish that book.

  I died on December 11th, 1981.

  I will die in 1986. Here is how it happened.

  ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE had been published in March. Book-of-the-Month Club had taken it as its April selection. The film rights were being negotiated by Marty. It looked to be the best year I’d ever had.

  I was on a publicity tour for the book, fresh from a talk show over holovid. Oh, yes, I should mention holovid. After two-dimensional depth television, Westinghouse developed “feelie,” a rather euphemistic name for projected video, giving the vague impression of the actual presence in your living room of the actors. Then the cable people in conjunction with LaserScience, Ltd. of Great Britain combined holograms with 3-D projection techniques and came up with holovid, in which the viewer actually became a part of the show or studio audience.

  I was in Denver, preparing to be choppered over to the studio, when I fell ill. I was using depilatory on my beard in the hotel suite’s bathroom when I felt dizzy and suddenly keeled over. The publishers’ rep and the PR woman heard me crash and came running. They got me to the hospital where the phymech took readings. (A phymech is a robot physician, used primarily for running physicals and determining the nature of the illness. Lousy bedside manner, but they’ve cut down the incidence of improper analysis by eighty per cent over their human counterparts.)

  Hie judgment was cancer of the stomach.

  I went into surgery the next morning. It had spread, running wild, not even the anti-agapic drugs would work. I was fisted as terminal. Perhaps two weeks, the last five of those days heavily sedated against the pain. It was a shame: the Cancer Society was on the verge of a major breakthrough. Had I lived another five years, I‘d have seen cancer become no more serious than the flu.

  I spent the last two weeks in a hospital bed, a typewriter propped on a little table. The newspapers came and did their interviews briefly … I was abrupt with them, I’m afraid. I didn’t have too much time to talk, I had things to write.

  I finished my last novel in that bed, but the final twenty thousand words were rather garbled, I was so drugged, going in and out of consciousness. But I finished it, and was saved the horror of having another writer complete the work from my notes.

  When I died, I was not unhappy. I rather regretted being denied those last twenty years, though. I had such stories to write.

  I died on my birthday, May 27th, 1986.

  I died in 1977 when a right-winger shot me because I’d done an article in World magazine on President Goldwater, and how he should be indicted as a criminal for the war in Brazil.

  I died in 1979 in a plane crash in Ceylon. I was on my way to see Arthur Clarke. We were going to go scuba diving off the coast of coral. The plane exploded; I never knew what hit me. My fourth wife got the flight insurance.

  I died in 1982 during the worst blizzard the East Coast had ever seen. I froze to death in my car on a lonely Connecticut road where I’d run out of gas. Some asshole suggested that because I’d been frozen, they might try to cryogenically preserve me for restoration later. Fortunately, he was ignored.

  I died in 1990 from a sudden, massive coronary. I was sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon and felt the slam of it, and had just a moment to realize I was dying the same way my father had died. But he would never have a postage stamp commemorating his achievements.

  I died in 1998 from ptomaine poisoning in a sea food restaurant in the undersea resort city of Cayman. They had to wait three weeks to ship my carcass out; it would have been simpler to turn me into fish food and let my soul wander the Cayman Trench. I always hated the lack of imagination of Those in Power.

  I died in 2001 on my way back from Sweden. I died very peacefully, in my sleep, onboard the catamaran-cruiser Farragut, somewhere in mid-Atlantic. I died with a smile on my face, lying in bed, holding the Nobel Prize for Literature to my chest like a teddy bear.

  I died in 2010 from weary old age, surrounded by grandchildren and old friends who remembered the titles of my stories. I didn’t mind going at all, I was really tired.

  Hey!
You! The skinny sonofabitch with the scythe. I’m over here … Ellison. I saw you looking at me out of the corner of that empty socket in your skull-face, you sleazy eggsucker. Well, listen, m’man, understand this: since I know I’m going straight to Hell anyhow, and since I’ve always lived with the feeling that Heavens and Hells are sucker traps for the slow-witted and one should get as much goodie as one can while one is breathing, you’d better get used to the idea that you’re going to have to come and get me when my time’s up. Kicking and screaming, you blade-boned crop-killer. Hand to hand or at gunpoint, you’re going to have to fight me for my life.

  Because I’ve got too much stuff yet to do, too many stories yet to write, too many places I’ve never seen, too many books I’ve never read, too many women to admire, and too many laughs yet to cry. So don’t think I’ll be a cheap acquisition, clatterframe! And if you do get me, I’ll be the damnedest POW you ever saw. I’ll try and escape, and if I can’t, I’ll send back messages.

  And it’ll drive your bony ass crazy, Mr. D., because I’ll be the first one to write about what it’s like over there in your country.

  • This essay-fiction, written as a speculative lark for The Harlan Ellison Hornbook column in the now-defunct Los Angeles Free Press in January of 1973, recently almost became redundant. On May 20th, 1982, at approximately 2:45 pm, the Author, in company with his Executive Assistant, Marty Clark, crashed his beloved 1967 Camaro (mileage 170,000) at a speed of 55 mph on the San Diego Freeway. Both the Author and Ms. Clark came as close as they have ever been to the boneyard, yet they escaped the wreck unscathed. Having now bypassed the first two demises in this essay, the Author contends he will live forever. This does not delight the Author’s enemies.

  3 TALES FROM THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

  TRACKING LEVEL

  Claybourne’s headlamp picked out the imprint at once. It was faint in the beam, yet discernible, with the telltale mark of the huge, three-toed foot. He was closer than ever.

  He drew a deep breath, and the plastic air-sack on his breather mask collapsed inward. He expelled the breath slowly, watching the diamond-shaped sack expand once more.

  He wished wildly for a cigarette, but it was impossible. First because the atmosphere of the tiny planetoid would not keep one going, and second because he’d die in the thin air.

  His back itched, but the loose folds of the protective suit prevented any lasting relief, for all his scratching.

  The faint starlight of shadows crossing the ground made weird patterns. Claybourne raised his head and looked out across the plain of blue saw-grass at the distant mountains. They looked like so many needles thrust up through the crust of the planetoid. They were angry mountains. No one had ever named them; which was not strange, for nothing but the planetoid itself had been named.

  It had been named by the first expedition to the Antares Cluster. They had named it Selangg—after the alien ecologist who had died on the way out.

  They recorded the naming in their log, which was fortunate, because the rest of them died on the way back. Space malady, and an incomplete report on the planetoid Selangg, floating in a death ship around a secondary sun of the Partias Group.

  He stood up slowly, stretching slightly to ease the tension of his body. He picked up the molasses-gun and hefted it absently. Off to his right he heard a scampering, and swung the beam in its direction.

  A tiny, bright-green animal scurried through the crewcut desert saw-grass.

  Is that what the fetl lives on? he wondered.

  He actually knew very little about the beast he was tracking. The report given him by the Institute at the time he was commissioned to bring the fetl back was, at best, sketchy; pieced together from that first survey report.

  The survey team had mapped many planetoids, and only a hurried analysis could be made before they scuttled to the next world. All they had listed about the fetl was a bare physical description— and the fact that it was telekinetic.

  What evidence had forced this conclusion was not stated in the cramped micro-report, and the reason died with them.

  “We want this animal badly, Mr. Claybourne,” the Director of the Institute had said.

  “We want him badly because he just may be what this report says. If he is, it will further our studies of extra-sensory perception tremendously. We are willing to pay any reasonable sum you might demand. We have heard you’re the finest wild-game hunter on the Periphery.

  “We don’t care how you do it, Mr. Claybourne, but we want the fetl brought back alive and unharmed.”

  Claybourne had accepted immediately. This job had paid a pretty sum—enough to complete his plans to kill Carl Garden.

  The prints paced away, clearly indicating the beast was heading for refuge in the mountains. He studied the flat surface of the grassy desert, and heaved a sigh.

  He’d been at it three weeks, and all he’d found had been tracks. Clear, unmistakable tracks, and all leading toward the mountains. The beast could not know it was being tracked, yet it continued moving steadily.

  The pace had worn away at Claybourne. He gripped the molasses-gun tighter, swinging it idly in small, wary arcs. He had been doing that—unknowing—for several days. The hush of the planetoid was working on him.

  Ahead, the towering bleakness of Selangg’s lone mountain range rose full-blown from the shadows of the plain. Up there. Twenty miles of stone jumbled and strewn piece on piece; seventeen thousand feet high. Somewhere in those rocks was an animal Claybourne had come halfway across the galaxy to find. An animal that was at this moment insuring Carl Garden’s death.

  He caught another print in the beam.

  He stooped to examine it There was a faint wash of sand across it, where the wind had scurried past. The foot-long paw-print lay there, mocking him, challenging him, asking him what he was doing here—so far from home, so far from warmth and life and ease.

  Claybourne shook his head, clearing it of thoughts that too easily impinged. He’d been paid half the sum requested, and that had gone to the men who were now stalking Garden back on Earth. To get the other half, he had to capture the fetl. The sooner that was done, the better.

  The fetl was near. Of that he was now certain. The beast certainly couldn’t go over the mountains and live. It had to hole up in the rocks somewhere.

  He rose, squinted into the darkness. He flicked the switch on his chest-console one more notch, heightening the lamp’s power. The beam drove straight ahead, splashing across the gray, faceless rocks. Claybourne tilted his head, staring through the clear hood, till a sharply-defined circle of brilliant white stabbed itself onto the rock before him.

  That was going to be a job, climbing these mountains. He decided abruptly to catch five hours sleep before pushing up the flank of the mountains.

  He turned away, to make a resting place at the foot of the mountains, and with the momentary cessation of the tracking, found old thoughts clambering back into his mind.

  Shivering inside his protection suit—though none of the chill of Selangg could get through to him—he inflated the foam-rest attached to the back of his suit. He lay down, in the towering ebony shadows, looking up at the clear, eternal night sky. And he remembered.

  Claybourne had owned his own fleet of cargo vessels. It had been one of the larger chains, including hunting ships and cage-lined shippers. It had been a money-making chain, until the inverspace ships had come along, and thrown Claybourne’s obsolete fuel-driven spacers out of business.

  Then he had taken to blockade-running and smuggling, to ferrying slaves for the outworld feudal barons, gun-running and even spaceway robbery.

  Through that period he had cursed Carl Garden. It had been Garden all the way—Garden every step of the way—who had been his nemesis.

  When they finally caught him—just after he had dumped a cargo of slaves into the sun, to avoid customs conviction—they canceled his commission, and refused him pilot status. His ships had been sold at auction.

  That had stre
ngthened his hatred for Garden. Garden had bought most of the fleet. For use as scum-ships and livestock carriers.

  It had been Garden who had invented the inverspace drive. Garden who had undercut his fleet, driving Claybourne into receivership. And finally, it had been Garden who had bought the remnants of the fleet.

  Lower and lower he sank; three years as a slush-pumper on freighters, hauling freight into shining spacers on planets that had not yet received power equipment, drinking and hating.

  Till finally—two years before—he had reached the point where he knew he would never rest easily till he had killed Garden.

  Claybourne had saved his money. The fleshpots of the Periphery had lost him. He gave up liquor and gambling.

  The wheels had been set in motion.

  People were working, back on Earth, to get Garden. He was being pursued and harried, though he never knew it. From the other side of the galaxy, Claybourne was hunting, chasing, tracking his man. And one day, Garden would be vulnerable. Then Claybourne would come back.

  To reach that end, Claybourne had accepted the job from the Institute.

  In his rage to acquire money for the job of getting his enemy, Claybourne had built a considerable reputation as wild-game hunter. For circuses, for museums and zoos, he had tracked and trapped thousands of rare life-forms on hundreds of worlds.

  They had finally contacted him on Bouyella, and offered him the ship, the charter, and exactly as much money as he needed to complete the job back on Earth.

  Arrangements had been quickly made, half the pay had been deposited to Claybourne’s accounts (and immediately withdrawn for delivery to certain men back home), and he had gone out on the jump to Selangg.

  This was the last jump, the last indignity he would have to suffer. After Selangg—back to Earth. Back to Garden.