Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  Deszlow was to my left, cowering in the snow as the bolts of energy smashed over him.

  I brought down the pike.

  It flattened two of the little men at once, and the other three ran, slipping, back to the ship.

  I screamed something—I have no idea what—at Deszlow, and he flopped forward, grabbed at one end of the ship … and with all our strength we wrenched the ship free of the fissure.

  I struggled forward again, losing my grip, then regaining it. I could see jet tubes of some strange sort, protruding from the rear, and from within I heard the beginning of what must have been a generator whine.

  Together we lifted the ship, bumbled erect, and with a monstrous effort threw the ship as hard as we could, down the side of the mountain.

  They tried to get the engines started; we saw a blast of flame leap from the aft section of the ship, but in a second it went out as the ship struck an outcropping of rock, and twisted grotesquely. Their drive was useless, and as we stared wildly, the ship bounced, crashed, careened down the slope. Before it plunged into the snow-mists ten thousand feet below, we saw the little sliver of metal shine much more brightly, and then with a flash and a roar, erupt in flame and a scatter of metal and flesh.

  How bright it was against the killer snow.

  Somehow, we got down, carrying Rutledge’s body. His face was entirely gone, charred completely off. We never found enough of the ship to reconstruct even a small portion of it.

  We do not know why they were there. I don’t think we’ll ever know. Whether they were invaders from another planet, or just visitors … is something we will never know. But we know this: the little man who first accosted us had been trying to warn us away, had been trying to get to us to tell us about his ship and his companions. And if they were not malevolent, if they were not here to try conquest of some sort, why had they knifed him? Why did they destroy him when he was so close to speaking to us? Why did they fire on us?

  I don’t suppose it will outlast the first real slide or storm up there. Deszlow and I climbed back up to the 18,000 foot mark; later. No one will ever see it, but we had to put up a cross for that tiniest of allies.

  THE GODDESS IN THE ICE

  Just before nightfall the storm caught them, thirty-five hundred feet up the massif of the glacier, far above the timberline but still four days’ climb below the summit. As the wind rose, and below them they could hear the shock-crack of ice-formations shattering away from the glacier wall, they came upon the woman frozen in the ice.

  Rennels was the first over the crevasse, and as he turned side-wise, bracing himself to make the towline taut, he looked across the ledge to the niche in the snow.

  She was milky-white through the ice-block, but he had no doubt from the first that it was a woman, her eyes closed, hands at her sides, frozen solid into a silver-blue block of glacial ice.

  He found himself unable to turn away. Even as he stared dumbfounded at an impossibility, he was accepting it—because it was undeniably before him—and racing through theories of quick-freezing, glacial upheavals, historical precedent that would account for this incredible find.

  There was the shriek of an animal in the distance, and he came back from total involvement with the still figure in the ice to realize that Scotti and Kirth were yelling up through the rising wind at him.

  Quickly, he wound the nylon line tighter about himself, looped it over an outcropping of rock that was deeply coated with ice, for a slippage-lever, and began pulling the towline heavily.

  In a few minutes Scotti’s florid face came up over the far edge of the ledge, and then the puffy body, and then he was standing across the crevasse, hauling up Kirth. When the two of them were on the ledge, Rennels motioned them to leap the crevasse.

  And when they were all together, staring at the woman, finally, Scotti said something of awe and wonder. But the howling gale caught the words and threw them away into the deepening gloom.

  Kirth drew their faces close to his, and shouted, “We can’t stay on this ledge! The storm! It’ll blow us off! Find some shelter!”

  They split up and followed the ledge around the face of the massif, and Rennels found a deep cave that ran back for perhaps seventy feet. They met again in front of the woman and he told them. But strangely, none of them moved for the shelter. Instead, they each unshipped an icepick and began hacking at the ice that enclosed the woman.

  Finally, they chipped out a block of ice sis feet high and, pushing and shoving, worked it around the ledge and into the cave.

  Kirth lit the survival lamps from his pack and Scotti hung a tarp across the mouth of the cave. Rennels set up the portable heater, and in the shadowy interior of the glacier they settled down, all of them.

  Scotti. Kirth. Rennels … and the woman.

  All but one of the lamps had been extinguished. Shadows lay like broken bodies across the rough walls. Scotti was slugged down deeply in his thermal sleeping-bag, apparently asleep. Kirth sat with his back to the wall, pulling on a cup of black coffee.

  Rennels was hidden in the darkness.

  He was watching the woman.

  The ice had thawed slightly, and now she could be seen clearly.

  Rennels was hypnotized by her beauty.

  The single garment she wore resembled a light yellow chiton; it draped across her breasts, exposing one shoulder and an exquisitely-formed arm. It fell in pleats to her feet. It was almost Roman in design, but Rennels had had his degree in archeology, and he recognized it as Phoenician. There was no way of unraveling the mystery of how a Phoenician woman had come to be frozen in a glacier somewhere near the top of the world.

  But it was not that mystery that held him.

  It was her face.

  The features were indescribably beautiful. The body would have made Helen of Troy jealous.

  Rennels stared without blinking.

  And in the corner, Scotti watched, from his sleeping-bag, feigning sleep. And Kirth watched, breathing deeply.

  But it was to Rennels that the vision came first.

  As he studied her in the ice, everything seemed to grow gray and distant, and he was somehow separating from his body, standing and looking down at himself there in the shadows. Then he turned, and went toward the ice-block, into and through it.

  And the woman was waiting for him.

  She opened her eyes, which were green and deep and seemed to swirl with a languid smoke of sensuality. She raised her arms to him, and the chiton pulled tightly across her breasts. Rennels came to her, and she touched him lightly on the side of the face.

  It was a touch of the wind.

  “Who are you?” he asked, with wonder.

  “Ilira,” she said. Her voice was not sound, but something deeper, more omnipresent, entering his mind and expanding, filling him with a sense of her being.

  “How-“

  “How did I come here?”

  He nodded. She smiled a soft, sad smile. And he saw that she had a charming overbite that just faintly pressed the full roundness of her lower lip.

  “The Priests of the temple. I was found to be blasphemous in my worships, I was a Goddess of the temple. So they condemned me to eternal sleep in the ice lands. But now you’ve come to me.”

  It seemed all so right, so simple, so direct.

  He had freed her, and now she was his.

  He moved closer to her, and she slipped her cool arms about his neck, drawing his face to hers. Around them the mist grew up and flooded the world, covering them in a soft gray blanket.

  He could feel the length of her, down his body, and he realized with an electric shock that he was about to make love to a woman whose race had died thousands of years before … a woman who must be part witch … a woman whose lovemaking would be informed by the strange practices and passions of a pagan world.

  But she did not give him time to wonder.

  Her sleep in the ice might have been a second, or an eternity, so starved for his body did she seem.

 
Rennels came back to himself lying on the stone floor. He had fainted. Had it been a dream? Some kind of snow vision that days up here had induced? No, there was a languor in his body that he knew was real And yet a hunger, greater than any he had ever known.

  And a message:

  The other two will want me. If you want me, you will have to win me, free me, to have me.

  In his sleeping-bag, Scotti was just coming awake, his breath ragged in his throat. On the far side of the cave Kirth was wedged into the rocks, his eyes glazed.

  Each had had the dream. Each had enjoyed the favors of the goddess.

  Rennels paused only a second as the knowledge flooded in on him—that both Kirth and Scotti had known her body—and he lunged for his icepick …

  Suddenly, each of them had a weapon.

  Kirth with the skinning knife, Scotti with a piton, and Rennels swinging the icepick with such violence that he caught Scotti rising from the sleeping-bag and imbedded the point in his left temple. Scotti screamed with pain and died as Kirth panicked and tried to escape from the mad slashings and whirlings of Rennels’ weapon. He plunged toward the mouth of the cave, smacked against the block of ice with the woman still asleep in its center, and caromed off, entangling himself in the tarpaulin that kept out the storm.

  Rennels lurched forward and sank the icepick in his back, but Kirth did not die. He fumbled around the tarp and stood on the ledge, the night wind screaming curses at him.

  Rennels threw aside the tarp and hurled himself at the wounded man. Kirth was rocked by the assault and with a flailing of arms and legs plunged face-forward off the ledge, his terrifying scream mingling and then disappearing into the blinding snow and the night.

  Rennels stood alone on the ledge, hearing the crashing, rolling sound of thunder that was Kirth plunging to his doom.

  Then he went back inside. To Ilira.

  He stood silently, watching her sleep, for a very long time. Then he began chipping away the ice-block carefully.

  Toward morning she was divested of her ice garment, and as the relative warmth of the cave reached her, Rennels witnessed the miracle of the woman’s rebirth.

  For thousands of years she had been a prisoner of the ice, put there by the Phoenician wizards who had known the dark arts of Lemuria and Mu and Atlantis, of Stygia and Egupt before it was Egypt.

  And as Rennels stood waiting, she came awake, her eyes opening with almond-shaped beauty to see him as he now was.

  Then she came to him, and enfolded him.

  In an instant, it was reality for Rennels again. The scent and sense of her overpowering him. But he had only that one last moment of sensual delight to ponder, for in the next instant Ilira was standing alone as the shower of pale silver sand that had been Rennels sifted down over her arms, and dusted the stone floor of the cave.

  Then she turned, and went out into the night.

  Ten thousand years before they had stopped her, the Priests who had known what she was. But now was another time, a later time, and she would complete her destiny. It did not matter what governments or cultures ruled the world. Ilira would subjugate them to her will,

  For her weapon was herself. And there was no man born of man-and-woman who could say no to the terrors and passions of her body.

  She disappeared into the storm. The storm that inexplicably blew around and over her, but did not touch her.

  In the cave, the pale silver sands tossed and roiled and finally, were dispersed, leaving behind nothing.

  SCENES FROM THE REAL WORLD IV

  GOPHER IN THE GILLY

  A reminiscence of the carnival

  Stand behind the tent flap and look at their faces.

  You will learn all you’ll ever need to know about the darker side of human nature.

  (The Depression leached all joy from the people. Show biz called with its cheap wares, its momentary diversions. The movies did it. Cheap, took you away, and gave you memories to savor later. Carnivals were big. They circled the country. Cheap, gaudy, thrills. Today, no self-respecting carnival will carry a freak bally— a sideshow of malforms and sports. It’s ugly business. Cheap. But in those days, those cheap, ugly days of the Thirties, something was needed to pull in the rubes and the yokels and the kadodies. The freak top. Hurry, hurry, slide right in there, friend, and drag your lady with you, for the most exhilarating, most startling, most unbelievable sights that’ve ever graced your eyes. See Lena, the fattest woman in the world, four hundred pounds of quivering jelly … Lucifer, with a throat of asbestos and a stomach of steel, see him eat fire, chew nails, drink coal oil, wouldn’t it be nice to have him in your living room of a cold Kansas night… Rippo, the fish-boy: where you and I have arms and legs, Rippo has only gills and flippers … see and marvel … see the thing without a name, neither man nor beast, a creature out of bad dreams, he eats snakes, he bites the heads off chickens, ladies I cannot even describe in public the degradation in which this creature exists … but step up, step inside, see for yourself … see the largest gathering of freaks and marvels ever offered under one big top …)

  Stand behind the tent flap and look at their faces.

  You will learn all you’ll ever need to know about the darker side of human nature.

  (Ask any man of forty or fifty, who worked in a carny as a little boy. Ask him if he ever stood behind the flap of the freak top and watched—not the freaks, oh no, not those poor miserable things-ask him if he ever watched the faces of the people. The good people, the solid rural folk with their lives and their morals sunk deep in the Judeo-Christian Ethos. Ask that little boy, now grown to a man, and he will be reluctant to tell you what he saw. But press him nonetheless, and he will tell you of the expressions on the faces of the men as they watched the swaying milk udders of Lena, as they contemplated the sexual wonders implicit in the plastic body of the snake girl. But he will never tell you of the licked lips and bright eyes of the women as they passed and lingered to observe the pre-thalidomide monstrosity called the fish-boy, as they let their gaze wander over his barely concealed private parts, as they wondered—nakedly obvious in their rapturous stares—what it would be like to have those flippers touch their bodies, what it would be like to make love to something like that. The little boy will never tell the horror of fascination in the faces of a freak audience, of the women who wanted to couple with the geek, redolent in his own filth, of the men who trembled at the sight of the hermaphrodite; half-man, half-woman, how would one seduce such a thing? Once having stood behind the flap, once having seen the unmasked faces of the secret dreamers, one need never again ask how did the slaughter at My Lai come to be; one need never again wonder what it is in the American character that produces Richard Speck or Charles Manson or Charles Starkweather or Susan Atkins. One need never ask, for it is there in all of us, lying close to the surface of all of us who make up the great freak top audience. The Depression is gone, but the rural rubes are still with us, are still part of all of us. We still need our freaks. Without compassion, without sympathy, without love … with merely lust and fascination and repugnance that attracts more than it repels … we all come to the big show and lick our lips.)

  I was thirteen years old. Never mind why I ran away from home, that’s another story for another time. I did it; the dream of every middle-American boy in the early 1940’s; to run away and join the circus. I had read TOBY TYLER, or Ten Weeks with a Circus, and there was nothing more fascinating, nothing more swashbuckling, nothing more adventurous than to run off and join a circus.

  I never found a circus. But I found the ragbag carny those in the circuit call a “gilly.” The hit-and-run hundred-mile burn-the-lot operation that figure-eighted across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri, looping back through Kentucky to start its pattern all over again. Tri-States Shows it called itself, but you’d never find it listed in Amusement Business. It was a pure grifter’s carny, carrying a sorry menagerie, an ugly freak top, and more hanky-panks than I’ve seen at even the grungiest down-at-the-heels
county fairs.

  What did I do? I was a gopher.

  “Hey, kid, go fer some coffee.”

  “Hey, kid, go fer some canvas.”

  “Hey, kid, go fer that spieler, Sam.”

  Furless, beardless, clawless, I was a gopher.

  I was a honeydipper in the hyena cage, I was a shill for the hanky-panks, I was a lookout for the laws, I was a water boy for the girls working the kootch bally, I was a swamper in the cookhouse. I was three months worth of scut, and didn’t know how crooked the whole operation was, till we got busted in Kansas City, Missouri.

  The show had moll dips, it had cannons, it had boosters and paper-hangers, it had everything but a square deal for the marks who frequented the flat stores on the midway and came away lucky to have their shoe soles.

  One of the cannons tried to whomp a guy for his wallet in K.C. Turned out the guy was an assistant D.A., fifteen years on the Force, and he threw the muscle halfway across that time-zone. The entire carny wound up in the K.C. slammer.

  Pretty quick, everyone was sprung. The “management” couldn’t afford to have its crew locked up for very long: first, because there were dates that had to be played in towns down the line, and second, because there were enough complaints and warrants out on that show to send everyone away till the next Ice Age. So everyone was sprung.

  With two important exceptions.

  The first was the geek. The second was me.

  Anyone unfamiliar with the term “geek” should seek out and read William Lindsay Gresham’s now-classic 1946 novel, NIGHTMARE ALLEY, for the most chillingly accurate description ever set in type. A geek is usually a wetbrain; that is, a young or old man so far gone into alcoholism that his brain has turned to prune-whip yogurt. When he sweats, he sweats sour mash. A gilly locates a skid hi whatever town it’s in, and carries him to the next stop, and as many stops as it can get out of him before he either dies or wanders off. For the splendid honorarium of a bottle of gin or two a day, the skid will dress in an animal skin, go without shaving, sleep in a cage, and on cue wallow in his own shit, eat dead snakes, bite the head off live chickens. No reputable camy will carry a geek. It is a terrible thing. It plays to the basest hungers and most primal fears in the human repertory. Anyone who could derive enjoyment from watching a debased creature, seemingly only half-human, scuttling across the floor of a foul, stinking pit or pen, smearing itself with feces, rubbing its privates on the gnawed skin of a dead rattlesnake, moaning and rolling its eyes as it devolved before one’s eyes, reverting to a stage of subhuman existence not even Cro-Magnons knew … such a person is beneath contempt, lower even than the poor bastard in that cage.