Ellison Wonderland (8 page)

He returned Richard Becker, as well as Ted Rogat, to the security and tiny world of room 16.

Two months later he brought him back, and spent a highly interesting three hours discussing group therapy with Herr Doktor Ernst Loebisch, credentials from the Munich Academy of Medicine and the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic. Four months after that, Dr. Tedrow got to know the surly and insipid Jackie Bishoff, juvenile delinquent and hero of “Streets of Night.”

And almost a year later — to the day — Dr. Tedrow sat in his office with a bum, a derelict, a rheumy–eyed and dissipated vagabond who could only be the skid from
Sweet Miracles
, Richard Becker's first triumph, twenty–four years before.

What Richard Becker might look like, without camouflage, in his own shell, Tedrow had no idea. He was, now, to all intents and purposes, the seedy old tramp with the dirt caked into the sagged folds of his face.

“Mr. Becker, I want to talk to you.”

Hopelessness shined out of the old bum's eyes. There was no answer.

“Listen to me, Becker. Please listen to me, if you're in there somewhere, if you can hear me. I want you to understand what I'm about to say; it's very important.”

A croak, cracked and forced, came from the bum's lips, and he mumbled, “I need'a drink, yuh go' uh drink fuh me, huh . . . ”

Tedrow leaned across, his hand shaking as he took the old bum's chin in his palm, and held it fixed, staring into this stranger's eyes. “Now listen to me, Becker. You've got to hear me. I've gone through the files, and as far as I can tell, this was the first part you ever played. I don't know what will happen! I don't know what form this syndrome will take after you've used up all your other lives. But if you can hear me, you've got to understand that you may be approaching a crisis point in your — in your life.”

The old bum licked cracked lips.

“
Listen!
I'm here, I want to help you, I want to
do
something for you, Becker. If you'll come out for an instant, just a second, we can establish contact. It's got to be now or — ”

He left it hanging. He had no way of knowing
if–what
. And as he lapsed into silence, as he released the bum's chin, a strange alteration of facial muscles began, and the derelict's countenance shifted, subtly ran like mercury, and for a second he saw a face he recognized. From the eyes that were no longer red–rimmed and bloodshot, Dr. Charles Tedrow saw intelligence peering out.

“It sounds like fear, Doctor,” he said.

And, “Goodbye, once more.”

Then the light died, the features shifted once again, and the physician was staring once more at the empty face of a gutter–bred derelict.

He sent the old man back to room 16. Later that day, he had one of the male nurses take in an 89-cent bottle of muscatel.

“Speak up, man! What in the name of God is going on out there?”

“I — I can't explain it, Dr. Tedrow, but you'd better — you'd better get out here right away. It's — it's oh Jee–zus!”

“What
is
it? Stop crying, Wilson, and tell me what the hell is
wrong
!”

“It's, it's number 16 . . . it's . . . ”

“I'll be there in twenty minutes. Keep everyone away from that room. Do you understand? Wilson! Do you understand me?”

“Yessir, yessir. I'll — oh Christ — hurry up Doc . . . ”

He could feel his pajama pants bunched around his knees, under his slacks, as he floored the pedal of the ranch wagon. The midnight roads were jerky in the windshield, and the murk that he raced through was almost too grotesque to be a fact of nature.

When he slewed the car into the drive, the gatekeeper threw the iron barrier back almost spastically. The ranch wagon chewed gravel, sending debris back in a wide fan, as Tedrow plunged ahead. When he screeched to a halt before the sanitarium, the doors burst open and the senior attendant, Wilson, raced down the steps.

“This way, th–this way, Doctor Te — ”

“Get out of my way, you idiot, I know which direction!” he shoved Wilson aside, and strode up the steps and into the building.

“It started about an hour ago . . . we didn't know what was happ — ”

“And you didn't call me immediately? Ass!”

“We just thought, we just thought it was another one of his stages,
you
know how he is . . . ”

Tedrow snorted in disgust and threw off his topcoat as he made his way rapidly down the corridor to the section of the sanitarium that housed the restraining rooms.

As they came into the annex, through the heavy glass–portaled door, he heard the scream for the first time.

In that scream, in that tormented, pleading, demanding and hopelessly lost tremor there were all the sounds of fear he had ever heard. In that voice he heard even his own voice, his own soul, crying out for something.

For an unnameable something, as the scream came again.

“Give me some light!”

Another world, another voice, another life. Some evil and empty beseeching from a corner of a dust–strewn universe. Hanging there timelessly, vibrant in colorless agony. A million tired and blind stolen voices all wrapped into that one howl, all the eternal sadnesses and losses and pains ever known to man. It was all there, as the good in the world was sliced open and left to bleed its golden fluid away in the dirt. It was a lone animal being eaten by a bird of prey. It was a hundred children crushed beneath iron treads. It was one good man with his entrails in his blood–soaked hands. It was the soul and the pain and the very vital fiber of life, draining away, without light, without hope, without succor.

“Give me some light!”

Tedrow flung himself at the door, and threw back the bolt on the observation window. He stared for a long and silent moment as the scream trembled once more on the air, weightlessly, transparently, tingling off into emptiness. He stared, and felt the impact of a massive horror stifle his own cry of disbelief and terror.

Then he spun away from the window and hung there, sweat–
drenched back flat to the wall, with the last sight of Richard Becker he would ever hope to see, burned forever behind his eyes.

The sound of his sobs in the corridor held the others back. They stared silently, still hearing that never–spoken echo reverberating down and down and down the corridors of their minds:

Give me some light!

Fumbling beside him, Tedrow slammed the observation window shut, and then his arm sank back to his side.

Inside room 16, lying up against the far wall, his back against the soft passive padding, Richard Becker looked out at the door, at the corridor, at the world, forever.

Looked out as he had in his first moment of life: purely and simply.

Without a face. From his hairline to his chin, a blank, empty, featureless expanse. Empty. Silent. Devoid of sight or smell or sound. Blank and faceless, a creature God had never deigned to bless with a mirror to the world. His Method now was gone.

Richard Becker, actor, had played his last part, and had gone away, taking with him Richard Becker, a man who had known all the sights, all the sounds, all the life of fear.

What can I tell you? When I was a kid in Painesville, Ohio, and involved in the intricacies of Jack Armstrong, The Green Hornet, I Love A Mystery, Hop Harrigan and Dick Tracy,
anything
was possible. Under the side porch of our house, magic lands of adventure and intrigue made themselves known to me in the pages of comic books that chronicled the adventures of the Sandman, Captain America and Bucky, the Human Torch, the Boy Commandos, Captain Marvel, Starman, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash and (my favorite) Hawkman. My Saturday afternoons of quivering joy were secretively spent in the Utopia Theater, that stood next to the Cleveland Trust, where Kresge's 5 and 10 now looms. And in that tiny movie house I saw my first Dick Tracy serial, starring Ralph Byrd. I saw the Shadow with Victor Jory. I shivered at The Clutching Hand and cheered Don Winslow Of The Navy and hissed as The Crimson Skull doomed the hero to a room whose walls came inexorably together. It was a golden time, before TV, in which the imagination and the need to be young were coupled with a world of wonders. In my world, at the corner of Harmon Drive and Mentor Avenue, was a wonderful dark woods, just like the one in

Did you ever feel your nose running and you wanted to wipe it, but you couldn't? Most people do, sometime or other, but I'm different. I let it run.

They call me square. They say, “Smitty, you are a square. You are so square, you got corners!” This, they mean, indicates I am an oddball and had better shape up or ship out. So all right, so I'm a goof–off as far as they think. Maybe I do get a little sore at things that don't matter, but if Underfeld hadn't'a layed into me that day in the gym at school, nothing would have happened. The trouble is, I get aggravated so easy about little things, like not making the track team, that I'm no good at studies. This makes the teachers not care for me even a little. Besides, I won't take their guff. But that thing with track. It broke me up really good.

There I was standing in the gym, wearing these dirty white gym shorts with a black stripe down the side. And old Underfeld, that's the track coach, he comes up and says, “Whaddaya doin', Smitty?”

Well, anyone with 20/40 eyesight coulda seen what I was doing. I was doing push–ups. “I'm doing push–ups,” I said. “Whaddaya think I'm doing? Raising artichokes?”

That was most certainly
not
the time to wise off to old Underfeld. I could see the steam pressure rising in the jerk's manner, and next thing he blows up all over the joint: “Listen, you little punk! Don't get so mouthy with me. In fact, I'm gonna tell you now, 'cause I don't want ya hangin' around the gym or track no more: You just ain't good enough. In a short sprint you got maybe a little guts, but when it comes to a long drag, fifty guys in this school give their right arms to be on the team beat you to the tape. I'm sorry. Get out!”

He is sorry. Like hell!

He is no more sorry than I am as I say, “Ta hell with you, you chowderhead, you got no more brains than these ignorant sprinters that will fall dead before they get to the tape.”

Underfeld looks at me like I had stuck him in the seat of his sweat pants with a fistful of pins and kind of gives a gasp, “What did you say?” he inquires, breathless like.

“I don't mumble, do I?” I snapped.

“Get out of here! Get outta here!
Geddouddaere!”

He was making quite a fuss as I kicked out the door to the dressing rooms.

As I got dressed I gave the whole thing a good think. I was pretty sure that a couple of those stinkin' teachers I had guffed had put wormhead Underfeld up to it. But what can a guy do? I'm just a kid, so says they. They got the cards stacked six ways from Culbertson, and that's it.

I was pretty damned sore as I kicked out the front door. I decided to head for The Woods and try to get it off my mind. That I was cutting school did not bother me. My mother, maybe. But me? No. It was The Woods for me for the rest of the afternoon.

Those Woods. Something funny about them. D'ja ever notice, sometimes right in the middle of a big populated section they got a little stand of woods, real deep and shadowy, you can't see too far into them? You try to figure out why someone hasn't bought up the plot and put a house on it, or why they haven't made it into a playground? Well, that's what my Woods were.

They faced back on a street full of those cracker–box houses constructed by the government, the factory workers shouldn't sleep on the curbs. On the other side, completely boxing them in, was a highway, running straight through to the big town. It isn't really big, but it makes the small town seem not so small.

I used to cut school and go there to read. In the center is a place where everything has that sort of filtery light that seeps down be-tween the tree branches, where there's a big old tree that is strictly one all alone.

What I mean is that tree is great.
Big
thing, stretches and's lost in the branches of the other trees, it's so big. And the roots look like they were forced up out of the ground under pressure, so all's you can see are these sweeping arcs of thick roots, all shiny and risen right out, forming a little bowl under the tree.

Reason I like it so much there, is that it's quieter than anything, and you can feel it. The kind of quiet a library would like to have, but doesn't. To cap all this, the rift in the branches is just big enough so sunlight streams right through and makes a great reading light. And when the sun moves out of that rift, I know it's time to run for home. I make it in just enough time so that Mom doesn't know I was cutting, and thinks I was in school all day.

So last week — I'd been going to The Woods off, on for about two years — I tagged over there, after that creep Underfeld told me I was his last possible choice for the track team. I had a copy of something or other, I don't remember now, I was going to read.

I settled down with my rump stuck into that bowl in the roots, and my feet propped against some smaller rootlings. With that little scrubby plant growth that springs up around the bases of trees, it was pretty comfortable, so I started reading.

Next, you are not going to believe.

I'm sitting there reading, and suddenly I feel this pressure against the seat of my jeans. Next thing I know, I am tumbled over on my head and a trapdoor is opening up out of the ground. Yeah, a trapdoor disguised as solid earth.

Next, you will
really
not believe.

Up out of this hole comes — may I be struck by green lightning if I'm a liar — a gnome! Or maybe he was a elf or a sprite, or some such thing. All I know is that this gnome character is wearing a pair of pegged charcoal slacks, a spread–collar turquoise shirt, green suede loafers, a pork–pie hat with a circumference of maybe three feet, a long, clinky keychain (what the Hell kinda keys could a gnome have?), repulsive loud tie and sunglasses.

Now maybe you would be too stoned to move, or not believe your eyes, and let a thing like that rock you permanently. But I got a good habit of believing what I see — especially when it's in Technicolor — and besides, more out of reflex than anything else, I grabs.

I'd read some Grimm–type fairy tales, and I know the fable about how if you grab a gnome or a elf, he'll give you what you want, so like I said, I grabs.

I snatch this little character, right around his turquoise collar.

“Hold, man!” says the gnome. “What kinda bit is this? I don't dig this thing
a
tall! Unhand me, Daddy–O!”

“No chance,” I answer, kind of in a daze, still not quite sure this is happening to me, “I want a bag of gold or something.”

The gnome looks outraged for a second, then he gives a kind of a half laugh and says, “Ho, Diz, you got the wrong cat for this caper. You're comin' on this gig too far and slow! Maybe a fourth–year gnome could hip this gold bit, but me, I'm a party–boy. Flunked outta my Alma Mammy first year. No matriculation — no magiculation! Readin' me, laddy–buck?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I ventured, slowly, “you mean you can't give me a bag of gold like in the fairy tale?”

“Fairy tale, schmerry tale. Maybe one ersatz Korean peso, Max, but that is definitely
it
. That is where magic and I parts company. In short, nein, man.”

“Hmmm,” I hmmmed, tightening my grip a little, he shouldn't get ideas I was letting him get away.

I thought a big think for a minute, then I said, “How come you flunked out of school?”

I thought I detected a note of belligerence in the gnome's voice when he answered, “How would you dig this class stuff, man? Go to class today, go to class tomorrow, yattata–yattata–yat from all these squared–up old codgers what think they are professors? Man, there is so much more else to be doing of note! Real nervous–type stuff like playin' with a jazz combo we got up near campus. You ain't never heard such music!” He appeared to just be starting, “We got a guy on the sackbut what is the coolest. And on dulcimer there is a little troll what can not only send you — but bring you back. And on topa' all this . . . ”

I cut him short, “How about this usual three wishes business? Anything to that?”

“I can take a swing at it, man, but like I says, I'm nowhere when it comes to magicking. I'm not the most, if that's the least. Might be a bit sloppy, but I can take a whirl, Earl.”

I thought again for a second and then nodded: “Okay,” setting him down on the turf, but not yet letting loose his collar, “but no funny business. Just a straight commercial proposition. Three wishes, with no strings, for your freedom.”

“Three?”
he was incredulous. “Man,
one
is about all this power pack can stand at this late date. No, it would seem that one is my limit, guy. Be taking it or leaving it.”

“All right, then,
one
. But no legal loopholes. Let's do it all honest and above–board magic. Deal?”

“Reet!” says he, and races off into The Woods somewhere when I let loose.

I figured he was gone for good, and while I'm waiting, I start to think back on the events of the last few minutes. This is something woulda made Ripley go outta business. The gnome, I figure, is overdue, and so I begin rationalizing why he didn't come back and finally arrive at the conclusion that there is no honor among gnomes. Besides, he had a shifty look to him when he said there would be no tricks in the magic.

But he comes back in a minute, his keychain damn near tripping him up, he's so loaded down with stuff and paraphernalia. Real weird lookin' items, too.

“Copped 'em from the lab over at the U.,” he explains, waving a hand at the untidy pile of stuff. “Well, here goes. Remember, there may be more of a mess than is usual with an experienced practitioner, but I'm strictly a goony–bird in this biz, Jack.”

“Hey, wait a minute with this magic stuff . . . ” I began, but he waved me off impatiently, and began manipulating his implements.

So he starts drawing a star–like thing on the ground, pouring some stinkin' stuff into a cauldron, mixing it up, muttering some gibberish that I could swear had “Oo–bop–shebam” and “Oo–shooby–dooby” in there somewhere, and a lot of other.

Pretty soon he comes over, sprinkles some powder on me, and I sneeze, almost blowing him over.

“Gesundheit,” he mutters, staring at me nastily.

He sprinkles some more powder on me, mutters something that sounded like, “By the sacred ring–finger of The Great Gods Bird and Pres, man, hip this kid to what he craveth. Go, go, go, man!”

“Now,” he inquires, around a bag in which he is rattling what sounds like bones, “whaddaya want?”

I had been thinking it out, in between incantations, and I had decided what I wanted: “Make me so's I can run faster than anyone in the school, willya.” I figured then Underfeld would
have
to take me on the team.

The little gnome nods as if he understands, and starts runnin' around and around outside this star–like thing, in ever–decreasing circles, faster' n' faster, till I can hardly make him out.

Then he slows down and stops, puffing away like crazy, mumbles something about, “Gotta lay off them clover stems,” and so saying throws this pink powder on me, yelling as loud as he can, “FRACTURED!” Up goes a puff of pink smoke and what looks like a side–show magician's magnesium flare, and the next thing I know, he and the stuff is gone, and I'm all alone in The Woods.

So that's the yarn.

Hmmm? What's that? Did he make me so I could run faster than anyone else in the school? Oh, yeah, sure.

You know anybody wants to hire a sixteen–year–old centaur?

The shadow goes on before us. This story is such a thing: a message from the future to a young writer nowhichway mature enough to have understood what it meant. A foreshadowing of adult concerns, intimations of mortality. When I wrote this disturbing little fantasy, I was twenty-four years old – but hardly what one might call mature. It was written in the early days of my career when I was still using the accoutrements of “science fiction” – before I came to understand that I was
not
a “science fiction writer.” (Any more than Agatha Christie was a “railroad train writer” because
Murder in the Calais Coach 14
took place aboard the Orient Express.) But it was a concept beyond the years of the arrested adolescent who write it. I had not yet lived sufficient time to understand how our older selves are obsessed both in a personal and a literary sense by the enigma of
The End
. What lies beyond the final sentence, the typographical period, the darkness on the other side. At twenty-four, and again at age twenty-eight when I wrote the original introduction for this story in this volume, I was barely sensitive enough to understand that there is The End. And so I wrote an introductory note (which these words replace) that spoke, confusedly, of initial confusions about coming to live in Los Angeles. The confusions passed quickly, for they were not truly about where I lived . . . but about living itself. Now, on the trembling edge of age fifty, preparing this book for its new publication, I read the introduction to this story and knew, at last, that what I had sensed, coming to me from the writer who now addresses you, across more than twenty years, was a message of mortality; a gentle alert informed by the dire and disturbing experiences that had brought me to the City of the Angels. I did not then know what the shadow message meant, but it came to me as an image; an image of