Deathbird Stories

by Harlan Ellison

  She laughed lightly. Almost gaily.

  Quentin Dean, lost in his work to the exclusion of all sound, spun, brush held like a sword. He smiled as he saw her. “Helene…honey, why didn’t you call the drugstore? They’d have told me you were coming…”

  She laughed again, a faint elfin tinkle in the empty studio. “What do you call that, Quentin dear?” She pointed one slim white-gloved hand at the painting.

  He tried to match her smile with a boyish, uncertain smile of his own, but it would not come. He turned to look at the painting, fearing he might have done something he had not seen, standing so close. But no, it was just the way he had wanted to say it, in just the proper tone and with just the right amount of strength. It was his city, the city that had welcomed him, had let him work, that had sent him Helene Bournouw to lift and succor him.

  “It’s Third Avenue. I’ve tried to incorporate a dream image–magic realism, actually–of the el, before they tore it down, as it might be seen by someone who had lived under the el’s shadow all those years and suddenly began to get the sunlight. You see, it’s…”

  She interrupted, very friendly, very concerned. “It’s ludicrous, Quentin, dear. I mean, surely you must be doing it for a lark. You aren’t considering it for part of your sequence on Manhattan, are you?”

  He could not speak.

  Weak as he had found he was, his strength, his sustenance came from his work, and there he was a whole man. No longer the emotional cripple who fled Chillicothe, Ohio to find a place for himself, he had grown strong and sure in front of his canvases. But, she was saying…

  “Quentin, if this is the sort of drivel you’re contemplating, I’m afraid I’ll have to put my foot down. You can’t expect me to take this over to Alexei for exhibit. He would laugh me out of the gallery, darling. Now, I have faith in you…even if you’ve fallen back again…”

  Helene Bournouw stayed a long while, talking to Quentin Dean. She reassured him, she directed him, she slept with him and gave him the strength he needed to:

  Slash most of the paintings with a bread knife.

  Ruin the remainder of them with turpentine.

  Break his brushes and turn over his easel.

  Pack his three shirts in the reinforced cardboard container he had used to mail home dirty laundry from college, and return to Chillicothe, Ohio, where a year later he had submerged himself sufficiently in his family’s tile-and-linoleum business to forget any foolishness about art.

  Helene Bournouw moved to her third appointment of the day…

  When his social secretary told him Miss Bournouw was waiting in the refectory, the Right Reverend Monsignor Della’Buono casually replied he would go in immediately he had signed the papers before him. As the social secretary moved to the door, the Monsignor added, almost as an afterthought, that Miss Bournouw had something of the utmost seriousness to discuss–a personal problem, as he understood it–and they were not to be disturbed in the refectory. The woman nodded her understanding, passing a vagrant thought that the good Monsignor could not much longer support the tremors and terrors of his confidants, that he was certainly due for a rest before his hegira to the Vatican in November.

  But when the door had closed behind her, the priest signed the papers without reading them and shoved back his ornate chair so quickly it banged against the wall. He gathered his cassock and went out of his office through the connecting door that led onto a short hallway ending at the refectory. He opened the dining room door and stepped inside.

  Helene Bournouw was leaning against the long oak refectory table, her arms rigid behind her, supporting her angled weight. The trench coat was open at the knee, exposing one slim leg, bent slightly and exposed. The priest closed the door tightly, softly, and locked it.

  “I told you never to come here again,” he said.

  His voice belonged to another man than the one who had spoken to the social secretary. This man had the voice of helplessness through hopelessness.

  “Joseph…” she whispered. The barest fluting of moisture gathering in the bell of a flower anxiously awaiting the bagman bee, rasping down out of the sun. “I know what you need…”

  He went back against the door, the door he had locked without realizing he was locking it, not to keep others out, but to keep himself in. She unbuckled the belt of the trench coat, threw it wide, and let it slide down off her naked arms.

  Helene Bournouw was silk and fulfillment, waiting in her nakedness for his body.

  He swallowed nothing and plunged into her, smothering his face between her breasts. She took him to her with an air of Christian charity, and he took her, there, openly, on the refectory table. And when his first time was over, and she was readying him for a second, he begged her to put on the little girl clothes he knew she had brought in the wide-mouthed model’s hand-bag. The short pinafore, the white hose, the patent-leather buckled shoes, the soft ribbon for the hair, the childish charm bracelet. She promised she would. Helene Bournouw knew what he needed, what was beyond the realities but not the wildest fever-dreams of the Monsignor, who was not allowed to molest small children in the basement of the cathedral. Not even in the Cathedral of his Soul, and certainly not in the Cathedral of his God.

  Later that day, he would write his paper, his long-awaited theological treatise. It would serve to sever the jugular of the Judeo-Christian ethic. His God would smirk at him, but not at Helene Bournouw.

  Even God does not take lightly a creature of a kind called Helene Bournouw.

  But that day was a busy day for Helene Bournouw, for possibly the most beautiful woman in New York, and she moved from appointment to appointment, being the delicious, scented unbelievable Helene Bournouw that she was. A busy day. Rut hardly over.

  She stood before the mirror, admiring herself. It was trite, and she knew it, but the admiration of such a beautiful animal as herself could, by the nature of the narcissistic object, transcend the cliché. She studied her body. It was a beautifully constructed body, tapered that infinitely unnamable bit dividing mere perfection from beauty that burns out the eyes.

  It had not quite burned out the eyes of that U.N. delegate from a great Eastern power (who had flashed like a silver fish in still waters when he had seen whom he had been fixed up with by his attaché), but it had unsettled and angered him sufficiently when her favors were not forthcoming so that there would be no mercy or reason in him during the conferences beginning the next day.

  Yes, a fine and maddening body.

  The apartment on Sutton Place was four-in-the-morning quiet, barely carrying the sound of Helen Bournouw hanging up her evening gown (its work on U.N. delegates done) and showering. The apartment took no notice as Helene Bournouw donned slacks and sweater, flats and trench coat. It made only a small sound as she closed the door.

  In the lobby, the doorman created his own mental gossip concerning Helene Bournouw and her need for a cab this late in the day…or early in the morning, depending on whether you were a famous model or a night-working doorman.

  The cabbie raised an eyebrow when Helene Bournouw gave him their destination. What sort of woman was it who wanted to be let out on a street corner of the Bowery at five in the morning? What sort of woman, indeed, with a face that held him stunned, even in a rearview mirror.

  And when the cab had disappeared into the darkness, its angry red taillight smaller, then gone, Helene Bournouw turned with purpose and direction, and strode off down the Bowery. What sort of woman, indeed.

  Her flats made soft, shuffling noises in the still, moist, Manhattan night. She walked four blocks into a section of deserted warehouses, condemned loft buildings and wetbrain saucehounds sleeping halfway to death in their doorways. She turned down a sudden alley, a mouth open where there had been darkness a moment before.

  Down the alley and she stopped before the fourth door; door perhaps, more boards and filth and bricked up th
an door, but door nevertheless.

  Her knock was a strangely cadenced thing.

  Her wait was a self-contained, restful thing.

  When the door opened, she stood silently for a moment, staring at the man. He was perhaps four feet tall, his legs thick and truncated-looking. His body was a shapeless protoplasmic thing, erupting in two corded arms deeply tanned and powerful. His head rested without neck on his shoulders, matched as though with another head by the grotesque and obscene hump on his back. His face was a nightmare fancy. Two eyes, small and beaded and crimson, like those of a white rat, cornered and ferocious. The mouth was a gnome’s gash without teeth, without lips. The skin a dark-bock-beer tan, even more wooden across the tight cheek-bones and in the pitted hollows under the fanatic eyes.

  A mass of black hair, unkempt, filthy, spreading down across the cheekbones like devouring fire ants. A rag of clothing, no shoes, long and black-rimmed fingernails. The magnificent, lovely face of Helene Bournouw stared at this man and found nothing peculiar, found nothing wanting.

  Without a word she marched past him across the empty warehouse floor, up the winding staircase high into the deserted building. At the top of the staircase a door stood partially open.

  Helene Bournouw pushed it wider and walked into the room. Amid empty packing crates and pile of rubbish, a table with nine chairs dominated the shadowy room. In eight of the nine chairs sat eight dwarfed creatures, uglier by comparison than the one who had opened the door far below.

  The door behind Helene Bournouw closed as the grotesquerie who had followed her moved to his vacated seat. The woman stood silently, shifting from foot to foot as the little man talked. She seemed to pay them no heed and, in fact, seemed bored. From time to time she looked around, seeing nothing.

  The little men talked:

  “You’ve gone too far!” the one with warts on his eyelids rasped. “Too far! All this involvement. The old ways were good enough, I say. The expenditures, the outlay, and the results…”

  “The results,” interrupted another, with running sores on his cheeks and forehead, “have been fantastic. In a time of public relations, automation, advertising, the only way we can hope to carry on our work is to use the tools of the era.”

  “But…” the warty one tried to interrupt.

  Extending a leprous-fleshed finger, a third man cut him off. “We can’t afford to be backward. We must deal with matters on their own terms. You’ve seen how badly we did when we held to the old ways. People just will not accept ideas if they aren’t couched in terms they are familiar with. Now, we’ve gone over this a thousand times; let’s get on to planning the directions for the next quarter!”

  The warty one subsided angrily, reluctantly.

  Helene Bournouw, bored, began to hum. Too loud. The nine faces turned. One of them said snappishly, “Ba’al, turn her off.”

  The diseased and foul creature who had opened the door for Helene Bournouw rose and, dragging an empty packing crate behind him, stopped very close to her. He climbed up onto it, and his fingers left grease marks across her white flesh as they strayed toward her hairline.

  Streaks of dirt on the white, lovely face of Helen Bournouw as the little man reached up under the hairline and massaged a soft spot on the front of the cranium. A sigh escaped Helene Bournouw’s lips, and the face that could lead men astray, make them do evil, destroy their purposes, went very blank, very empty, very dead.

  The little man climbed down and began to turn. A voice from the table stopped him. “Ba’al, wipe her off; you know we’ve got to keep the rolling stock in good condition.”

  As the little man pulled the strip of chamois from his shirt the conversation began anew, with the warty one taking this opportunity to reassert himself: “I still say the old ways are best.”

  The murmuring rose around the table, and the argument waxed anew while the incarnation of evil itself wiped filth stains off the too, too beautiful face of Helene Bournouw.

  Later, when they wearied of formulating their new image, when they sighed with the responsibility of market trends and saturation levels and optimum penetration campaigns, they would suck on their long teeth and use her, all of them, at the same time.

  This is a funny story. Honest to gods. If you don’t think so, just consider how Jesus would freak if a Jesus freak handed him one of those dog-eared, fingerprinty hand-bills on Fifth Avenue.

  Bleeding Stones

  Alchemy high above the crowds.

  Over one hundred years of the Industrial Revolution had spewed chemical magic into the air. The aerosols known as smog. Coal and petroleum fractions containing sulfur, their combustion producing sulfur dioxide, oxidized by atmospheric oxygen to form sulfur trioxide, hydrated by water vapor in the air to sulfuric acid. Alchemical magic that weathers limestone. Particles of soot, particles of ash. Unburned hydrocarbons. Oxides of nitrogen. The magic of ultraviolet radiation, photochemical reactions, photochemical smog: it magically cracks rubber. Unsaturated hydrocarbons, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, for-maldehyde, acetone. Magic. Carbon monoxide, carcinogenic hydrocarbons, days and nights of thermal inversion in the atmosphere. Carbon particles, metallic dusts, silicates, fluorides, resins, tars, pollen, fungi, solid oxides, aromatics, even the smells of magic. Catalysis. Carriers of electrostatic charges. To the extent that they are radioactive, says page 184 of volume 18 of the 1972 ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, they increase the normal radiation dosage and may be cancer-or mutation-producing factors.

  Finally, it goes on, as plain dust, they soil clothing, buildings, and bodies, and are a general nuisance.

  Alchemical magical nuisance, high above the crowds.

  Jammed, thronged, packed, overspilling, flowing and shuddering…forty thousand people drawn like iron filings to the magnet of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, filling the sidewalks and overflowing into Fifth Avenue…the mass bulging outward, human yeast, filling the intersections of 51st Street and Fifth Avenue, 50th and Fifth, 52nd and Fifth…rolling to find space along the sidewalks and doorways and garden walks of Rockefeller Center…

  Hallelujah! The Jesus People have come to the holy summit of organized religion in the land that is the very apotheosis of the Industrial Revolution. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, built between 1858 and 1879, puffed out mightily like the pigeons roosting there for over one hundred years as the magic took its time performing its alchemical wonders, the nuisances of cracking rubber, weathering stone, pitting metal, mutating and inverting thermals. Hallelujah!

  They are recognized. The Jesus People. One way, united in the worship of Jesus Christ, the Savior, the Son of God; here, at last, at this greatest repository of the faith in the land of ultraviolet radiation, they have come to spread their potency at the altar of organized power.

  While above them, on the spires of the city and the parapets of St. Patrick’s, the nuisance bears fruit and the stones begin to bleed.

  The Cardinal steps out through the massive front doors. The Archdiocese in person, recognizing them. They raise index fingers, thousands of index fingers raised in homage to the One Way.

  The Cardinal lifts his arms slowly, his gorgeous robes resplendent in the sunlight glancing off a thousand automobiles spewing out alchemical magic; his arms lift and he is a human crucifix for a moment before his arms rise up above his head and he lifts his index fingers. The crowd trills and sighs with joy. They are known!

  The Cardinal feels moisture on his left hand and looks up at his flesh emerging from his sleeve. There is a drop of blood running down through the fold of skin between his thumb and index finger. A fat, globular drop of blood that glistens in the magic air. It bulges and runs in a line down his palm. He is alarmed for a moment: has he cut himself? Then a second drop falls and he realizes the blood is dropping from above.

  He looks up.

  On the tallest spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there is movement.

  For over
one hundred years the stones of the Cathedral have been silent, still, solid and unwanting. Now the stones begin to bleed as the gargoyles come to life.

  His eyes widen and see only movement…

  But above, up here where the winds of the city carry alchemical magic, the stone gargoyles tremble, their rock bodies begin to moisten, and blood stands out in humid beads.

  The first of the many shudders and its eyes open slowly. Color comes to its stone flesh. Its taloned hands rise from its knees and flex. Corded muscles bunched for a hundred years slide and move. Its belly heaves as it draws in life. Its bat wings twitch and suddenly unfurl. It drinks of the sunlight and the air, drinks deep and sucks the carcinogens deep into its bellows lungs; the nuisance mutation is complete. Come to life after a hundred years is the race that will inherit the Earth; hardly meek, the race made to breathe this new air. The gargoyle throws back its head and its stone fangs catch the sunlight and throw it back brighter than the hides of the vehicles below.

  The clarion call blasts against the noonday tumult of the Jesus People. And they fall silent. And they look up. And all around them, on a hundred spires of a hundred skyscrapers the inheritors rise from their crouched positions, their shapes black and firm-edged against the gray and deadly sky.

  Then, like the fighting kites of Brazil, they dive into the crowd and begin the ritual slaughter.

  The first of the many swoops down in a screaming fall that sends the Jesus People scattering. At the final instant the gray death-kite flattens and sails across the crowd, its talons extended, arms dangling. The razor-nails embed themselves in a skull and rip backward as its flight carries gargoyle and victim forward. It skims skyward again and great muscled arms throw the limp meat against the walls of a building, the body ripped open from occipital ridge to buttocks, entrails bulging, spilling from the sprung carcass. The body slides down the wall leaving a red fluorescent smear.