Authors: Harlan Ellison
YOU’RE PLAYING FOR TIME.
She’s on to me,
Roger thought desperately. He flung the Italian marble egg at the neon wall sculptures, it struck, geysers of sparks erupted, a curtain caught fire, a woman’s dress went up in a puff of Gucci, people began shrieking, the ultraviolet dissipated in an instant, everything returned to normal, Roger was scared out of his mind...and he ran out of there as fast as he could.
His finger had grown hoarse, and finally shut up.
Roger called in sick and begged off work for a few days. They were understanding, but the big Labor Day weekend was coming up, they’d laid in a large stock of Sicilian switchblades and copies of the steamier works of Akbar del Piombo and Anonymous in the
Travelers’ Companion
series, and they expected him—neon coil, weird eye and metal finger included—on the ready line when the marks, kadodies and reubens fresh from Michigan’s Ionia State Fair descended on sinful Times Square. Roger mumbled various okays and went for extended walks along the night-hot Hudson River Drive.
The big Spry sign blinking across the Hudson from Jersey caught his eye.
YOU ARE THE DAMNEDEST, MOST OBSTINATE HUMAN BEING I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED, said the Spry sign, forming words it was clearly incapable of forming.
Roger began running...blindly along the breakwater. The sign gave him no peace. It continued jabbering at him. ROGER! FOR CRINE OUT LOUD, ROGER, WILL YOU STOP JUST A MOMENT AND LISTEN TO ME!
He ran up West 114th Street, stumbling over a gentleman of the evening who was lying half in, half out of the doorway of an apartment building. Roger excused himself and would have waited for a response to make sure he had not damaged the fellow, but the man had somehow gotten his tongue stuck deep inside the neck of an empty Boone’s Farm Apple Wine bottle, and speech was beyond him.
Roger grabbed an IRT express downtown, and sitting in the clattering hell of the subway car he tried to ignore the overhead fluorescents that babbled I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOUR SOUL, YOU CLOWN. I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU. ARE YOU BEING ASSAULTED BY LOVE EVERY DA Y SO MUCH YOU CAN TURN DOWN A TERRIFIC OFFER LIKE THIS?
Roger closed his eyes. It didn’t help. His chest coil was obviously activated and it was pulsing in time with the overheads. He opened his eyes and with a sudden weariness that had swept over him like a sea of sand he opened his mouth and gave a primal scream. No one in the subway car noticed.
He got out on Times Square and, of course, she was everywhere. In the signs of the sea food restaurant on the other side of 42nd Street, in the marquees of the skin flick theaters, in the neon of the pornobook shops, in every flashing, bubbling, flickering, hallucinating light that made up the visual pollution by which Times Square proclaimed its wares and snagged its victims.
“Okay!” he howled, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as the mobs split around him. “Okay! I quit! I’ve had enough! I give up! Name it, just name it, I’ll do it! I’ve had the course! I’m only human and I’ve had it!”
TERRIFIC! AT LONG LAST! said the neon come-ons. THERE’S A LADDER OVER THERE BY THAT MOVIE, SEE IT?
Roger looked and, yes, there was a twenty-foot ladder up under the marquee of a movie house playing a double bill comprising
Leather Lovers
and
Rebecca of Sinnybrook Farm.
“Now what?” Roger said, softly.
I CAN’T HEAR YOU, the neon replied.
“I said: What the hell now, you goddam pain in the ass!” he screamed, at the highest decibel count he had ever achieved, his throat going raw. People shied away.
CLIMB UP THE LADDER, YOU SWEET THING.
“Oh, God,” Roger mumbled, “this is just terrible; just terrible. I hate this a lot. “
But he climbed the ladder, just as the assistant manager of the theater—a zit-laden young man in a soiled tuxedo and argyle socks—emerged from the lobby carrying the heavy boxes of marquee letters to change the bill. “Hey! Hey, you! Weirdo, what the gahdam flop hell you think you’re doin’? Get offa there you freako-pervo-devo!”
Roger went up and up, and when he was standing at the top he was on a level with the neon theater name. It said, very suddenly, TAKE ME! TAKE ME NOW!
And for no particular reason Roger could name, he reached out with both hands, swung himself onto the marquee, and—ripping open his shirt so his coil was exposed—he slammed himself against the love-message.
There was a blinding flash of light that pulsed and continued flashing like endless novae, over and over and over resembling—said a narcotics squad cop who had worked on the ski patrol at Stowe, Vermont—who happened to be emerging from the theater handcuffed to two Queens junkies he’d caught scoring in the highest row of the balcony—resembling nothing so much as the sunlight glass flashing off the thin crust of ice-over-powder at the summit of a snow-covered mountain.
Someone else said it was the exact color of tuna fish salad.
But when the light faded, Roger Chama was gone, all save the little finger of his left hand, lying on the sidewalk humming a medley of tunes from
The Student Prince, Blossom Time
and
The Desert Song,
a very peculiar eyeball that seemed to have developed a terrible case of glaucoma, and a dollar and thirty-five cents in change.
Someone else said it was the exact color of the cardboard they used to reinforce his shirts when they came from the Chinese hand laundry.
And one thing more.
Every neon sign in Times Square had a new color added to its spectrum. It seemed to reside somewhere between silver and orange, bled off into the ultraviolet and the infrared at one and the same time, had tinges of vermilion at the top and jade at the bottom, and resembled no other color ever seen by human eyes. The color sounded like a Louisville Slugger connecting solidly with a hardball in that special certain way that produces a line drive high into the right center bleachers. It smelled like a forest of silver pines just after the rain, with scents of camomile, juniper, melissa and mountain gentian thrown in. It felt like the flesh of a three-week-old baby’s instep. It tasted like lithograph ink, but there are people who
like
the taste of lithograph ink.
Someone said it was the exact color of caring.
On another plane of existence, where things were vastly different from those in the world that had given Roger Charna his neon chest spiral, observations were made and the new color was seen.
“There it is,” they said.
“Yep, there it is,” they said.
“Took them long enough,” they said.
“Well, now that they’re ready we can go and show them how to do it,” they said.
“They’re going to like this,” they said.
“A lot,” they said.
And they set out immediately, and it took no time at all to get there, and when they arrived they changed everything and everyone enjoyed it a lot.
And everyone said the angels were the exact color of charna, which wasn’t a bad name for it at all.
Have you ever noticed: the most vocal
superpatriots are the old men who send
young men off to die? Well, it might just
be that the heaviest reverential act when
worshipping the god of war is to be the
biggest mutherin traitor of them all. Check
Spiro, 1 think he’s having a seizure.
What though the Moor the basilisk has slain
And pinned him lifeless to the sandy plain,
Up through the spear the subtle venom flies,
The hand imbibes it, and the victor dies.
—Lucan:
Pharsalia
(Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, A.D. 39-65)
Returning from a night patrol beyond the perimeter of the firebase, Lance Corporal Vernon Lestig fell into a trail trap set by hostiles. He was bringing up the rear, covering the patrol’s withdrawal from recently overrun sector eight, when he fell too far behind and lost the bush track. Though he had no way of knowing he was paralleling the patrol’s trail, thirty yards off their left flank, he kept moving forward hoping to intersect them. He did not see the pungi stakes set at cruel angles, frosted with poison, tilted for top-point efficiency, sharpened to infinity.
Two set close together penetrated the barricade of his boot; the first piercing the arch and his weight driving it up and out to emerge just below the anklebone, still inside the boot; the other ripping through the sole and splintering against the fibula above the heel, without breaking the skin.
Every circuit shorted out, every light bulb blew, every vacuum imploded, snakes shed their skins, wagon wheels creaked, plate-glass windows shattered, dentist drills ratcheted across nerve ends, vomit burned tracks up through throats, hymens were torn, fingernails bent double dragged down blackboards, water came to a boil; lava. Nova pain. Lestig’s heart stopped, lubbed, began again, stuttered; his brain went dead refusing to accept the load; all senses came to full stop; he staggered sidewise with his untouched left foot, pulling one of the pungi stakes out of the ground, and was unconscious even during the single movement; and fainted, simply directly fainted with the pain.
This was happening: great black gap-mawed beast padding through outer darkness toward him. On a horizonless journey through myth, coming toward the moment
before
the piercing of flesh. Lizard dragon beast with eyes of oil-slick pools, ultraviolet death colors smoking in their depths. Corded silk-flowing muscles sliding beneath the black hairless hide, trained sprinter from a lost land, smoothest movements of choreographed power. The never-sleeping guardian of the faith, now gentlestepping down through mists of potent barriers erected to separate men from their masters.
In that moment before boot touched the bamboo spike, the basilisk passed through the final veils of confounding time and space and dimension and thought, to assume palpable shape in the forest world of Vernon Lestig. And in the translation was changed, altered wonderfully. The black, thick and oily hide of the death-breath dragon beast shimmered, heat lightning across flat prairie land, golden flashes seen spattering beyond mountain peaks, and the great creature was a thousand colored. Green diamonds burned up from the skin of the basilisk, the deadly million eyes of a nameless god. Rubies gorged with the water-thin blood of insects sealed in amber from the dawn of time pulsed there. Golden jewels changing from instant to instant, shape and scent and hue...they were there in the tapestry mosaic of the skin picture. A delicate, subtle, gaudy flashmaze kaleidoscope of flesh, taut over massive muscled threats.
The basilisk was in the world.
And Lestig had yet to experience his pain.
The creature lifted a satin-padded paw and laid it against the points of the pungi stakes. Slowly, the basilisk relaxed and the stakes pierced the rough sensitive blackmoon shapes of the pads. Dark, steaming serum flowed down over the stakes, mingling with the Oriental poison. The basilisk withdrew its paw and the twin wounds healed in an instant, closed over and were gone.
Were gone. Bunching of muscles, a leap into air, a caldron roiling of dark air, and the basilisk sprang up into nothing and was gone. Was gone.
As the moment came to an exhalation of end, and Vernon Lestig walked onto the pungi stakes.
It is a well-known fact that one whose blood slakes the thirst of the
vrykolakas,
the vampire, himself becomes one of the drinkers of darkness, becomes a celebrant of the master deity, becomes himself possessed of the powers of the disciples of that deity.
The basilisk had not come from the vampires, nor were his powers those of the blood drinkers. It was not by chance that the basilisk’s master had sent him to recruit Lance Corporal Vernon Lestig. There is an order to the darkside universe.