Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  “No, my boy, no no no. You’re not in hell at all. You’re in the future. For you the future, for me the world of now. You came from 1888 and you’re now in—” he stopped, silently speaking for an instant, as though computing apples in terms of dollars, then resumed “—3077. It’s a fine world, filled with happy times, and we’re glad to have you with us. Come along now, and you’ll wash.”

  In the ablutatorium, the late Juliette’s grandfather changed his head.

  “I really despise it,” he informed the man from 1888, grabbing fingerfuls of his cheeks and stretching the flabby skin like elastic. “But Juliette insisted. I was willing to humor her, if indeed that was what it took to get her to lie down. But what with toys from the past, and changing my head every time I wanted her to fuck me, it was trying; very trying.”

  He stepped into one of the many identically shaped booths set flush into the walls. The tambour door rolled down and there was a soft chukk sound, almost chitinous. The tambour door rolled up and the late Juliette’s grandfather, now six years younger than the man from 1888, stepped out, stark naked and wearing a new head. “The body is fine, replaced last year,” he said, examining the genitals and a mole on his right shoulder. The man from 1888 looked away. This was hell and God hated him.

  “Well, don’t just stand there, Jack.” Juliette’s grandfather smiled. “Hit one of those booths and get your ablutions.”

  “That isn’t my name,” said the man from 1888 very softly, as though he had been whipped.

  “It’ll do, it’ll do…now go get washed.”

  Jack approached one of the booths. It was a light green in color, but changed to mauve as he stopped in front of it. “Will it—”

  “It will only clean you, what are you afraid of?”

  “I don’t want to be changed.”

  Juliette’s grandfather did not laugh. “That’s a mistake,” he said cryptically. He made a peremptory motion with his hand and the man from 1888 entered the booth, which promptly revolved in its niche, sank into the floor and made a hearty zeeeezzzz sound. When it rose and revolved and opened, Jack stumbled out, looking terribly confused. His long sideburns had been neatly trimmed, his beard stubble had been removed, his hair was three shades lighter and was now parted on the left side, rather than in the middle. He still wore the same long dark coat trimmed with astrakhan, dark suit with white collar and black necktie (in which was fastened a horseshoe stickpin) but now the garments seemed new, unsoiled of course, possibly synthetics built to look like his former garments.

  “Now!” Juliette’s grandfather said. “Isn’t that much better? A good cleansing always sets one’s mind to rights.” And he stepped into another booth from which he issued in a moment wearing a soft paper jumper that fitted from neck to feet without a break. He moved toward the door.

  “Where are we going?” the man from 1888 asked the younger grandfather beside him. “I want you to meet someone,” said Juliette’s grandfather, and Jack realized that he was moving his lips now. He decided not to comment on it. There had to be a reason.

  “I’ll walk you there, if you promise not to make gurgling sounds at the city. It’s a nice city, but I live here, and frankly, tourism is boring.” Jack did not reply. Grandfather took it for acceptance of the terms.

  They walked. Jack became overpowered by the sheer weight of the city. It was obviously extensive, massive, and terribly clean. It was his dream for Whitechapel come true. He asked about slums, about doss houses. The grandfather shook his head. “Long gone.”

  So it had come to pass. The reforms for which he pledged his immortal soul, they had come to pass. He swung the Gladstone and walked jauntily. But after a few minutes his pace sagged once more: there was no one to be seen in the streets.

  Just shining clean buildings and streets that ran off in aimless directions and came to unexpected stops as though the builders had decided people might vanish at one point and reappear someplace else, so why bother making a road from one point to the other.

  The ground was metal, the sky seemed metallic, the buildings loomed on all sides, featureless explorations of planed space by insensitive metal. The man from 1888 felt terribly alone, as though every act he had performed had led inevitably to his alienation from the very people he had sought to aid.

  When he had come to Toynbee Hall, and the Reverend Mr. Barnett had opened his eyes to the slum horrors of Spitalfields, he had vowed to help in any way he could. It had seemed as simple as faith in the Lord what to do, after a few months in the sinkholes of Whitechapel. The sluts, of what use were they? No more use than the disease germs that had infected these very same whores. So he had set forth as Jack, to perform the will of God and raise the poor dregs who inhabited the East End of London. That Lord Warren, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and his Queen, and all the rest thought him a mad doctor, or an amok butcher, or a beast in human form did not distress him. He knew he would remain anonymous through all time, but that the good works he had set in motion would proceed to their wonderful conclusion.

  The destruction of the most hideous slum area the country had ever known, and the opening of Victorian eyes. But all the time had passed, and now he was here, in a world where slums apparently did not exist, a sterile Utopia that was the personification of the Reverend Mr. Barnett’s dreams—but it didn’t seem…right.

  This grandfather, with his young head.

  Silence in the empty streets.

  The girl, Juliette, and her strange hobby.

  The lack of concern at her death.

  The grandfather’s expectation that he, Jack, would kill her. And now his friendliness.

  Where were they going?

  [Around them, the City. As they walked, the grandfather paid no attention, and Jack watched but did not understand. But this was what they saw as they walked:

  [Thirteen hundred beams of light, one foot wide and seven molecules thick, erupted from almost-invisible slits in the metal streets, fanned out and washed the surfaces of the buildings; they altered hue to a vague blue and washed down the surfaces of the buildings; they bent and covered all open surfaces, bent at right angles, then bent again, and again, like origami paper figures; they altered hue a second time, soft gold, and penetrated the surfaces of the buildings, expanding and contracting in solid waves, washing the inner surfaces; they withdrew rapidly into the sidewalks; the entire process had taken twelve seconds.

  [Night fell over a sixteen block area of the City. It descended in a solid pillar and was quite sharp-edged, ending at the street corners. From within the area of darkness came the distinct sounds of crickets, marsh frogs belching, night birds, soft breezes in trees, and faint music of unidentifiable instruments.

  [Panes of frosted light appeared suspended freely in the air, overhead. A wavery insubstantial quality began to assault the topmost levels of a great structure directly in front of the light-panes. As the panes moved slowly down through the air, the building became indistinct, turned into motes of light, and floated upward. As the panes reached the pavement, the building had been completely dematerialized. The panes shifted color to a deep orange, and began moving upward again. As they moved, a new structure began to form where the previous building had stood, drawing—it seemed—motes of light from the air and forming them into a cohesive whole that became, as the panes ceased their upward movement, a new building. The light-panes winked out of existence.

  [The sound of a bumblebee was heard for several seconds. Then it ceased.

  [A crowd of people in rubber garments hurried out of a gray pulsing hole in the air, patted the pavement at their feet, then rushed off around a corner, from where emanated the sound of prolonged coughing. Then silence returned.

  [A drop of water, thick as quicksilver, plummeted to the pavement, struck, bounded, rose several inches, then evaporated into a crimson smear in the shape of a whale’s tooth, which settled to the pavement and lay still.

  [Two blocks of buildings sank into the pavement and the metal coveri
ng was smooth and unbroken, save for a metal tree whose trunk was silver and slim, topped by a ball of foliage constructed of golden fibers that radiated brightly in a perfect circle. There was no sound.

  [The late Juliette’s grandfather and the man from 1888 continued walking.]

  “Where are we going?”

  “To van Cleef’s. We don’t usually walk; oh, sometimes; but it isn’t as much pleasure as it used to be. I’m doing this primarily for you. Are you enjoying yourself?”

  “It’s…unusual.”

  “Not much like Spitalfields, is it? But I rather like it back there, at that time. I have the only Traveler, did you know? The only one ever made. Juliette’s father constructed it, my son. I had to kill him to get it. He was thoroughly unreasonable about it, really. It was a casual thing for him. He was the last of the tinkerers, and he might just as easily have given it to me. But I suppose he was being cranky. That was why I had you carve up my granddaughter. She would have gotten around to me almost any time now. Bored, just silly bored is what she was—”

  The gardenia took shape in the air in front of them, and turned into the face of a woman with long white hair. “Hernon, we can’t wait much longer!” She was annoyed.

  Juliette’s grandfather grew livid. “You scum bitch! I told you pace. But no, you just couldn’t, could you? Jump jump jump, that’s all you ever do. Well, now it’ll only be feddels less, that’s all. Feddels, damn you! I set it for pace. I was working pace, and you…!”

  His hand came up and moss grew instantly toward the face. The face vanished, and a moment later the gardenia reappeared a few feet away. The moss shriveled and Hernon, Juliette’s grandfather, dropped his hand, as though weary at the woman’s stupidity. A rose, a water lily, a hyacinth, a pair of phlox, a wild celandine, and a bull thistle appeared near the gardenia. As each turned into the face of a different person, Jack stepped back, frightened.

  All the faces turned to the one that had been the bull thistle. “Cheat! Rotten bastard!” they screamed at the thin white face that had been the bull thistle. The gardenia-woman’s eyes bulged from her face, the deep purple eyeshadow that completely surrounded the eyeball making her look like a deranged animal peering out of a cave. “Turd!” she shrieked at the bull thistle-man. “We all agreed, we all said and agreed; you had to formz a thistle, didn’t you, scut! Well, now you’ll see…”

  She addressed herself instantly to the others. “Formz now! To hell with waiting, pace fuck! Now!”

  “No, dammit!” Hernon shouted. “We were going to paaaaaace!” But it was too late. Centering in on the bull thistle-man, the air roiled thickly like silt at a river-bottom, and the air blackened as a spiral began with the now terrified face of the bull thistle-man and exploded whirling outward, enveloping Jack and Hernon and all the flower-people and the City and suddenly it was night in Spitalfields and the man from 1888 was in 1888, with his Gladstone bag in his hand, and a woman approaching down the street toward him, shrouded in the London fog.

  (There were eight additional nodules in Jack’s brain.)

  The woman was about forty, weary and not too clean. She wore a dark dress of rough material that reached down to her boots. Over the skirt was fastened a white apron that was stained and wrinkled. The bulbed sleeves ended midway up her wrists and the bodice of the dress was buttoned close around her throat. She wore a kerchief tied at the neck, and a hat that looked like a wide-brimmed skimmer with a raised crown. There was a pathetic little flower of unidentifiable origin in the band of the hat. She carried a beaded handbag of capacious size, hanging from a wrist-loop.

  Her step slowed as she saw him standing there, deep in the shadows. Saw him was hardly accurate: sensed him.

  He stepped out and bowed slightly from the waist. “Fair evenin’ to ye, Miss. Care for a pint?”

  Her features—sunk in misery of a kind known only to women who have taken in numberless shafts of male blood-gorged flesh—rearranged themselves. “Coo, sir, I thought was ’im for true. Old Leather Apron hisself. Gawdamighty, you give me a scare.” She tried to smile. It was a rictus. There were bright spots in her cheeks from sickness and too much gin. Her voice was ragged, a broken-edged instrument barely workable.

  “Just a solicitor caught out without comp’ny,” Jack assured her. “And pleased to buy a handsome lady a pint of stout for a few hours’ companionship.”

  She stepped toward him and linked arms. “Emily Matthewes, sir, an’ pleased to go with you. It’s a fearsome chill night, and with Slippery Jack abroad not safe for a respectin’ woman such’s m’self.”

  They moved off down Thrawl Street, past the doss houses where this drab might flop later, if she could obtain a few coppers from this neat-dressed stranger with the dark eyes.

  He turned right onto Commercial Street, and just abreast of a stinking alley almost to Flower & Dean Street, he nudged her sharply sidewise. She went into the alley, and thinking he meant to steal a smooth hand up under her petticoats, she settled back against the wall and opened her legs, starting to lift the skirt around her waist. But Jack had hold of the kerchief and, locking his fingers tightly, he twisted, cutting off her breath. Her cheeks ballooned, and by a vagary of light from a gas standard in the street he could see her eyes go from hazel to a deadleaf brown in an instant. Her expression was one of terror, naturally, but commingled with it was a deep sadness, at having lost the pint, at having not been able to make her doss for the night, at having had the usual Emily Matthewes bad luck to run afoul this night of the one man who would ill-use her favors. It was a consummate sadness at the inevitability of her fate.

  I come to you out of the night.

  The night that sent me down all

  the minutes of our lives to this

  instant. From this time forward,

  men will wonder what happened

  at this instant. They will silently

  hunger to go back, to come to

  my instant with you and see my

  face and know my name and

  perhaps not even try to stop me,

  for then I would not be who I

  am, but only someone who tried

  and failed. Ah. For you and me

  it becomes history that will lure

  men always, but they will never

  understand why we both suf-

  fered, Emily; they will never

  truly understand why each of us

  died so terribly.

  A film came over her eyes, and as her breath husked out in wheezing, pleading tremors, his free hand went into the pocket of the greatcoat. He had known he would need it, when they were walking, and he had already invaded the Gladstone bag. Now his hand went into the pocket and came up with the scalpel.

  “Emily…” softly.

  Then he sliced her.

  Neatly, angling the point of the scalpel into the soft flesh behind and under her left ear.

  Sternocleidomastoideus. Driving it in to the gentle crunch of cartilage giving way. Then, grasping the instrument tightly, tipping it down and drawing it across the width of the throat, following the line of the firm jaw. Glandula submandibularis. The blood poured out over his hands, ran thickly at first and then burst spattering past him, reaching the far wall of the alley. Up his sleeves, soaking his white cuffs. She made a watery rattle and sank limply in his grasp, his fingers still twisted tight in her kerchief; black abrasions where he had scored the flesh. He continued the cut up past the point of the jaw’s end, and sliced into the lobe of the ear. He lowered her to the filthy paving. She lay crumpled, and he straightened her. Then he cut away the garments laying her naked belly open to the wan and flickering light of the gas standard in the street. Her belly was bloated. He started the primary cut in the hollow of her throat. Glandula thyreoeidea. His hand was sure as he drew a thin black line of blood down and down, between the breasts. Sternum. Cutting a deep cross in the hole of her navel. Something vaguely yellow oozed up. Plica umbilicalis media. Down over the rounded hump of the belly,
biting more deeply, withdrawing for a neat incision. Mesenterium dorsale commune. Down to the matted-with-sweat roundness of her privates. Harder here. Vesica urinaria. And finally, to the end, vagina.

  Filth hole.

  Foul-smelling die red lust pit wet hole of sluts.

  And in his head, succubi. And in his head eyes watching. And in his head minds impinging. And in his head titillation

  for a gardenia

  a water lily

  a rose

  a hyacinth

  a pair of phlox

  a wild celandine

  and a dark flower with petals of obsidian, a stamen of onyx, pistils of anthracite, and the mind of Hernon, who was the late Juliette’s grandfather.

  They watched the entire horror of the mad anatomy lesson. They watched him nick the eyelids. They watched him remove the heart. They watched him slice out the fallopian tubes. They watched him squeeze, till it ruptured, the “ginny” kidney. They watched him slice off the sections of breast till they were nothing but shapeless mounds of bloody meat, and arrange them, one mound each on a still-staring, wide-open, nicked-eyelid eye. They watched.

  They watched and they drank from the deep troubled pool of his mind. They sucked deeply at the moist quivering core of his id. And they delighted.

  Oh God how Delicious look at that it looks like the uneaten rind of a Pizza or look at That it looks like lumaconi oh god IIIIIwonder what it would be like to Tasteit!

  See how smooth the steel.

  HE HATES THEM ALL, EVERY ONE OF THEM, SOMETHING ABOUT A GIRL, A VENEREAL DISEASE, FEAR OF HIS GOD, CHRIST, THE REVEREND MR. BARNETT, HE…HE WANTS TO FUCK THE REVEREND’S WIFE!

  Social reform can only be brought about by concerted effort of a devoted few. Social reform is a justifiable end, condoning any expedient short of decimation of over fifty per cent of the people who will be served by the reforms. The best social reformers are the most audacious. He believes it! How lovely!

  YOU PACK OF VAMPIRES, YOU FILTH, YOU SCUM, YOU…

  He senses us!

  DAMN HIM! DAMN YOU, HERNON, YOU DREW OFF TOO DEEPLY, HE KNOWS WE’RE HERE, THAT’S DISGUSTING, WHAT’S THE SENSE NOW? I’M WITHDRAWING!