Harlan Ellison - Troublemakers

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HARLAN ELLISON

TROUBLEMAKERS

HARLAN ELLISON has been called “one of the great living American short story writers” by the

Washington Post . TheLos Angeles Times has said, “It’s long past time for Harlan Ellison to be

awarded the title: 20th century Lewis Carroll.” In a career spanning fifty years, he has won more awards

for the 74 books he has written or edited, the more than 1700 columns, the two dozen teleplays and a

dozen motion pictures he has created, than any other living fantasist. He has won the Hugo award 8½

times, the Nebula three times, the Bram Stoker Award, presented by the Horror Writers Association,

five times (including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the

Mystery Writers of America twice, the Georges Méliès fantasy film award twice, and the Silver Pen for

Journalism by P.E.N., the international writers’ union. He is also the only author in Hollywood ever to

win the Writers Guild of America award for Most Outstanding Teleplay (solo work) four times, most

recently for “Paladin of the Lost Hour,” 1987,The Twilight Zone . In March, 1998, the National

Women’s Committee of Brandeis University honored him with their Words, Wit Wisdom award. He

recently completed the screenplay for Dimension Films,Demon with a Glass Hand , to be directed by

David Twohy.

An ibooks, Inc. ebook

ibooks, Inc.

24 West 25th St.

New York, NY 10010

The ibooks World Wide Web Site Address is: http://www.ibooksinc.com

e-ISBN: 1-59019-522-1

This text converted to ebook format for the Microsoft Reader

This one is for my

long-time partner in crime,

the great cinematic auteur,

JIM WYNORSKI

TROUBLEMAKERS:

Stories by

HARLAN ELLISON

INTRODUCTION:

“THAT KID’S GONNA WIND

UP IN JAIL!”

No use pretending: too many of the “young people” (whateverthat means, 4–6 year olds, 10–13,

15–20ish?) I’m thrown into contact with these days are, in the words of Daffy Duck, maroons . . .ultra

maroons. Dumb, apathetic, surly, dumb, arrogant, semiliterate, dumb, disrespectful, oblivious to what’s

going on around them, ethically barren, dishonorable, crushed by peer pressure and tv advertising into

consumer conformity, crude, dumb, slaves to the lowest manifestations of cheap crap popular culture (as,

for instance, WWF wrestling; boy bands; idiot Image comics featuring prepubescent fanboy

representations of women with the vacuous stares of cheerleaders, all legs and bare butts, with breasts

like casaba melons grafted to their chests at neck level; horse-trank home-made mosh-pit Xtasy

kitty-flippin’ dope; and Old Navy rags that make everyone look like a bag lady or wetbrain bindlestiff

with a sagging pants-load), inclined to respond to even minor inconveniences with anger or violence

because they’ve been brainwashed into believing everything they want, they ought to have, and

everything ought to be given to them free, and oh yeah . . . did I mention they’re dumb? Did I mention,

also, that they’re ignorant as a sack of doorknobs? Which ain’texactly the same as dumb.

And isn’t thatexactly what you needed today, on a day that has already been as friendly as a paper cut?

Smartmouth from some total stranger ’way older than you, some guy you never heard of before, comes

on fronting you with his “young people suck” riff, tripping on you before you even know what you did

wrong to get this geezer so on a mission. Very nice, very cool. Yeah, you say: I gotcher cool right here.

So okay, I’m not talking aboutall teenaged kids. Just the onesyou have to deal with every day. The

pinheads, the bullies, the mean little rats who laugh at you behind your back or right to your face because

you’re too fat or too scrawny or too tall or too short or you can’t control the farts or you bump into

things all the time or you got a helluva acne plague this week or your mommy dressed you weird or you

speak with an accent, or you’re good at sports but the other creeps think you’re just a big dumb ox, or

you really like to read and you get decent grades but the jocks and sosch skanks think you’re the Prince

of the Kingdom of Geek.

Notall “young people,” just the lames who bustyour chops. Yeah, all of ’em . . . they should itch forever

with no scratch available. They should break a leg or two.

When I was your age, they were on me, too.

That’swho this guy snarling at you claims to be. The kid who was there, same place as you, before you

got here. And I’ve got this book of stories that definitely won’t save your life, or get you off crystal-meth,

or turn your academic slide into a climb back up, or even clear up your acne.

It’s a book about some of the kinds of trouble we all get into. The stuff that seems to be a good idea at

the time, but turns out to be six months in rehab or a beef in the juvie hall of your choice. Trouble has

been my middle name since I was two — three years old. Yeah, that far back, I was the one they always

swore was gonna wind up in jail or lying in a gutter with UPS trucks splashing garbage and mud on my

wretched carcass. Well, it didn’t happen. I’ve got fame and money, and skill, and a great wife, and a

boss home now they ask me to put together a book for youse guys.

Well, imagine my surprise. Not to mention my nervousness. I do a lot of high school and college

lecturing, and it’s not at all like what it was, hell, eventen years ago. Today, when I confront an audience

of “young people” I get more mood ’n’ tude than a serial killer trying to cop a plea. So, like a jerk, I get

really honked at them and start insulting the audience.

And here’s whatreally fries my frijoles . . .

Theytake it!

They don’t learn from it, they don’t get openly upset by it, they just sit there and pout like babies. And

so, I’ve packed it in, pretty much. Not like it was when I did colleges in the ’60s and ’70s, when

everyone was questioning and smart about what was happening in this country, when “young people”

really had things to rebel against, instead of being upset that they’re not allowed to play their Gameboy in

class.

So here’s this book of weird little stories, something like a modern-day version of Aesop’s Fables,

except not really. A book of warnings, what we call “gardyloos.” With lessons to be learned that come

out of my own corrupt and devilish adolescence.

Careful, though. Gardyloo! I am nobody’s here, and I am as fu-- well, you know what I mean, I’m as

messed up as you. So read the stories for pleasure, and if they make you grin or scare you a little, and

you turn out okay as an adult, and you get rich . . . send me some money.

Because I’m just a poor old guy trying to make a sparse living in a world full of “young people” who are

smarter than I, cleverer than I, faster than I; and I’m just about on the verge of becoming like y’know a

“bag lady” kind of guy, gnawing the heads off rats, peeing in doorways, begging from door to door. So,

when these stories make you rich and famous, and they’ve just completely like y’knowaltered your life,

send me a couple of bucks.

Because I love you folks, you know that, doncha?

I just love ya.

(And while we’re at it, I’d like to sell you some shares in the Panda Farm I’ve got growing in my butt.

Very reasonable.)

Yr. pal, Harlan.

HARLAN ELLISON

Sherman Oaks, California

ON THE DOWNHILL SIDE

Here’s one of the few Secret Truths I’ve learned for certain, having been “on the road” since I was

thirteen and ran away. (Had nothing to do with my folks; they didn’t beat me; I was a restless kid,

wanted to see the world.) The Truth is this: most of the reasons we give for having done something or

other, usually something that got us yelled at or grounded or busted, most of the reasons we dream up

are horse-puckey. (I’d use the B-word, but libraries are going to be stocking this book.) All those

reasons and excuses are just lame rationalizations, and they only tick off the people yelling at you. So

shine ’em on. Forget them. The only reason that makes any sense is “Itseemed like a good idea at the

time.” Lame though it may be, it’s the Truth. “Why did you bust that window?” Itseemed like a good

idea at the time. “Why did you get hung up on that guy/girl when you knew it was a destructive hookup?”

Itseemed like a good idea at the time. “Why did you do that lump of crack?” Itseemed . . . well, you get

it. Too bad the guy in this first story didn’t get it, because the True Answer to why you fell in love with

someone who ranked & hurt you is . . . itseemed like . . .

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.

— French proverb

Iknew she was a virgin because she was able to ruffle the silken mane of my unicorn. Named Lizette, she

was a Grecian temple in which no sacrifice had ever been made. Vestal virgin of New Orleans, found

walking without shadow in the thankgod coolness of cockroach-crawling Louisiana night. My unicorn

whinnied, inclined his head, and she stroked the ivory spiral of his horn.

Much of this took place in what is called the Irish Channel, a strip of street in old New Orleans where the

lace curtain micks had settled decades before; now the Irish were gone and the Cubans had taken over

the Channel. Now the Cubans were sleeping, recovering from the muggy today that held within its hours

thedéjà vu of muggy yesterday, thedéjà rêvé of intolerable tomorrow. Now the crippled bricks of side

streets off Magazine had given up their nightly ghosts, and one such phantom had come to me, calling my

unicorn to her — thus, clearly, a virgin — and I stood waiting.

Had it been Sutton Place, had it been a Manhattan evening, and had we met, she would have kneeled to

pet my dog. And I would have waited. Had it been Puerto Vallarta, had it been 20° 36' N, 105° 13' W,

and had we met, she would have crouched to run her fingertips over the oil-slick hide of my iguana. And

I would have waited. Meeting in streets requires ritual. One must wait and not breathe too loud, if one is

to enjoy the congress of the nightly ghosts.

She looked across the fine head of my unicorn and smiled at me. Her eyes were a shade of gray between

onyx and miscalculation. “Is it a bit chilly for you?” I asked.

“When I was thirteen,” she said, linking my arm, taking a tentative two steps that led me with her, up the

street, “or perhaps I was twelve, well no matter, when I was that approximate age, I had a marvelous

shawl of Belgian lace. I could look through it and see the mysteries of the sun and the other stars

unriddled. I’m sure someone important and very nice has purchased that shawl from an antique dealer,

and paid handsomely for it.”

It seemed not a terribly responsive reply to a simple question.

“A queen of the Mardi Gras Ball doesn’t get chilly,” she added, unasked. I walked along beside her, the

cool evasiveness of her arm binding us, my mind a welter of answer choices, none satisfactory.

Behind us, my unicorn followed silently. Well, not entirely silently. His platinum hoofs clattered on the

bricks. I’m afraid I felt a straight pin of jealousy. Perfection does that to me.

“When were you queen of the Ball?”

The date she gave me was one hundred and thirteen years before.

It must have been brutally cold down there in the stones.

There is a little book they sell, a guide to manners and dining in New Orleans: I’ve looked: nowhere in

the book do they indicate the proper responses to a ghost. But then, it says nothing about the wonderful

cemeteries of New Orleans’ West Bank, or Metairie. Or the gourmet dining at such locations. One

seeks, in vain, through the mutable, mercurial universe, for the compleat guide. To everything. And, failing

in the search, one makes do the best one can. And suffers the frustration, suffers the ennui.

Perfection does that to me.

We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best we’d allow. These are some of the high

points. They lack continuity. I don’t apologize, I merely point it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that

most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we

link our lives to others — even as Lizette had linked her arm with mine — and then, our time elapsed, we

move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally; usually through a veil of memory that clings, then

passes; sometimes as though we have never touched.

“My name is Paul Ordahl,” I told her. “And the most awful thing that ever happened to me was my first

wife, Bernice. I don’t know how else to put it — even if it sounds melodramatic, it’s simply what

happened — she went insane, and I divorced her, and her mother had her committed to a private mental

home.”

“When I was eighteen,” Lizette said, “my family gave me my coming-out party. We were living in the

Garden District, on Prytania Street. The house was a lovely white Plantation — they call them antebellum

now — with Grecian pillars. We had a persimmon-green gazebo in the rear gardens, directly beside a

weeping willow. It was six-sided. Octagonal. Or is that hexagonal? It was the loveliest party. And while it

was going on, I sneaked away with a boy . . . I don’t remember his name . . . and we went into the

gazebo, and I let him touch my breasts. I don’t remember his name.”

We were on Decatur Street, walking toward the French Quarter; the Mississippi was on our right, dark

but making its presence known.

“Her mother was the one had her committed, you see. I only heard from them twice after the divorce. It

had been four stinking years and I really didn’t want any more of it. Once, after I’d started making some

money, the mother called and said Bernice had to be put in the state asylum. There wasn’t enough money

to pay for the private home any more. I sent a little; not much. I suppose I could have sent more, but I

was remarried, there was a child from her previous marriage. I didn’t want to send any more. I told the

mother not to call me again. There was only once after that . . . it was the most terrible thing that ever

happened to me.”

We walked around Jackson Square, looking in at the very black grass, reading the plaques bolted to the

spear-topped fence, plaques telling how New Orleans had once belonged to the French. We sat on one

of the benches in the street. The street had been closed to traffic, and we sat on one of the benches.

“Our name was Charbonnet. Can you say that?”

I said it, with a good accent.

“I married a very wealthy man. He was in real estate. At one time he owned the entire block where the

Vieux Carré now stands, on Bourbon Street. He admired me greatly. He came and sought my hand,

and mymaman had to strike the bargain because my father was too weak to do it; he drank. I can admit

that now. But it didn’t matter, I’d already found out how my suitor was set financially. He wasn’t

common, but he wasn’t quality, either. But he was wealthy and I married him. He gave me presents. I did

what I had to do. But I refused to let him make love to me after he became friends with that awful Jew

who built the Metairie Cemetery over the race track because they wouldn’t let him race his Jew horses.

My husband’s name was Dunbar. Claude Dunbar, you may have heard the name? Our parties werede

rigueur .”

“Would you like some coffee andbeignets at du Monde?”

She stared at me for a moment, as though she wanted me to say something more, then she nodded and

smiled.

We walked around the Square. My unicorn was waiting at the curb. I scratched his rainbow flank and he

struck a spark off the cobblestones with his right front hoof. “I know,” I said to him, “we’ll soon start the

downhill side. But not just yet. Be patient. I won’t forget you.”

Lizette and I went inside the Café du Monde and I ordered two coffees with warm milk and two orders

ofbeignets from a waiter who was originally from New Jersey but had lived most of his life only a few

miles from College Station, Texas.

There was a coolness coming off the levee.

“I was in New York,” I said. “I was receiving an award at an architects’ convention — did I mention I

was an architect — yes, that’s what I was at the time, an architect — and I did a television interview.

The mother saw me on the program, and checked the newspapers to find out what hotel we were using

for the convention, and she got my room number and called me. I had been out quite late after the

banquet where I’d gotten my award, quite late. I was sitting on the side of the bed, taking off my shoes,

my tuxedo tie hanging from my unbuttoned collar, getting ready just to throw clothes on the floor and sink

away, when the phone rang. It was the mother. She was a terrible person, one of the worst I ever knew,

a shrike, a terrible, just a terrible person. She started telling me about Bernice in the asylum. How they

had her in this little room and how she stared out the window most of the time. She’d reverted to

childhood, and most of the time she couldn’t even recognize the mother; but when she did, she’d say

something like, ‘Don’t let them hurt me, Mommy, don’t let them hurt me.’ So I asked her what she

wanted me to do, did she want money for Bernice or what . . . did she want me to go see her since I was

in New York . . . and she said God no. And then she did an awful thing to me. She said the last time

she’d been to see Bernice, my ex-wife had turned around and put her finger to her lips and said, ‘Shhh,

we have to be very quiet. Paul is working.’ And I swear, a snake uncoiled in my stomach. It was the

most terrible thing I’d ever heard. No matter how secure you are that you honest to God hadnot sent

someone to a madhouse, there’s always that little core of doubt, and saying what she’d said just burned

out my head. I couldn’t even think about it, couldn’t even reallyhear it, or it would have collapsed me.

So down came these iron walls and I just kept on talking, and after a while she hung up.

“It wasn’t till two years later that I allowed myself to think about it, and then I cried; it had been a long

time since I’d cried. Oh, not because I believed that nonsense about a man isn’t supposed to cry, but just

because I guess there hadn’t been anything that important to cryabout . But when I let myself hear what

she’d said, I started crying, and just went on and on till I finally went in and looked into the bathroom

mirror and I asked myself, face-to-face, if I’d done that, if I’d ever made her be quiet so I could work on

blueprints or drawings . . .

“And after a while I saw myself shaking my head no, and it was easier. That was perhaps three years

before I died.”

She licked the powdered sugar from thebeignets off her fingers, and launched into a long story about a

lover she had taken. She didn’t remember his name.

It was sometime after midnight. I’d thought midnight would signal the start of the downhill side, but the

hour had passed, and we were still together, and she didn’t seem ready to vanish. We left the Café du

Monde and walked into the Quarter.

I despise Bourbon Street. The strip joints, with the pasties over nipples, the smell of need, the dwarfed

souls of men attuned only to flesh. The noise.

We walked through it like art connoisseurs at a showing of motel room paintings. She continued to talk

about her life, about the men she had known, about the way they had loved her, the ways in which she

had spurned them, and about the trivia of her past existence. I continued to talk about my loves, about all

the women I had held dear in my heart for however long each had been linked with me. We talked

across each other, our conversation at right angles, only meeting in the intersections of silence at story’s

end.

She wanted a julep and I took her to the Royal Orleans Hotel and we sat in silence as she drank. I

watched her, studying that phantom face, seeking for even the smallest flicker of light off the ice in her

eyes, hoping for an indication that glacial melting could be forthcoming. But there was nothing, and I

burned to say correct words that might cause heat. She drank and reminisced about evenings with young

men in similar hotels, a hundred years before.

We went to a night club where a flamenco dancer and his two-woman troupe performed on a stage of

unpolished woods, their star-shining black shoes setting up resonances in me that I chose to ignore.

Then I realized there were only three couples in the club, and that the extremely pretty flamenco dancer

was playing to Lizette. He gripped the lapels of his bolero jacket and clattered his heels against the stage

like a man driving nails. She watched him, and her tongue made a wholly obvious flirtatious trip around

the rim of her liquor glass. There was a two-drink minimum, and as I have never liked the taste of

alcohol, she was more than willing to prevent waste by drinking mine as well as her own. Whether she

was getting drunk or simply indulging herself, I do not know. It didn’t matter. I became blind with

jealousy, and dragons took possession of my eyes.

When the dancer was finished, when his half hour show was concluded, he came to our table. His suit

was skintight and the color of Arctic lakes. His hair was curly and moist from his exertions, and his

prettiness infuriated me. There was a scene. He asked her name, I interposed a comment, he tried to be

polite, sensing my ugly mood, she overrode my comment, he tried again in Castilian,th -ing hisesses , she

answered, I rose and shoved him, there was a scuffle. We were asked to leave.

Once outside, she walked away from me.

My unicorn was at the curb, eating from a porcelainSèvres soup plate filled withflan . I watched her

walk unsteadily up the street toward Jackson Square. I scratched my unicorn’s neck and he stopped

eating the egg custard. He looked at me for a long moment. Ice crystals were sparkling in his mane.

We were on the downhill side.

“Soon, old friend,” I said.

He dipped his elegant head toward the plate. “I see you’ve been to the Las Americas. When you return

the plate, give my best toSeñor Pena.”

I followed her up the street. She was walking rapidly toward the Square. I called to her, but she wouldn’t

stop. She began dragging her left hand along the steel bars of the fence enclosing the Square. Her

fingertips thudded softly from bar to bar, and once I heard the chitinousclak of a manicured nail.

“Lizette!”

She walked faster, dragging her hand across the dark metal bars.

“Lizette! Damn it!”

I was reluctant to run after her; it was somehow terribly demeaning. But she was getting farther and

farther away. There were bums in the Square, sitting slouched on the benches, their arms out along the

backs. Itinerants, kids with beards and knapsacks. I was suddenly frightened for her. Impossible. She

had been dead for a hundred years. There was no reason for it . . . I was afraid for her!

I started running, the sound of my footsteps echoing up and around the Square. I caught her at the corner

and dragged her around. She tried to slap me, and I caught her hand. She kept trying to hit me, to

scratch my face with the manicured nails. I held her and swung her away from me, swung her around,

and around, dizzyingly, trying to keep her off-balance. She swung wildly, crying out and saying things

inarticulately. Finally, she stumbled and I pulled her in to me and held her tight against my body.

“Stop it! Stop, Lizette! I . . .stop it! ” She went limp against me and I felt her crying against my chest. I

took her into the shadows and my unicorn came down Decatur Street and stood under a streetlamp,

waiting.

The chimera winds rose. I heard them, and knew we were well on the downhill side, that time was

growing short. I held her close and smelled the woodsmoke scent of her hair. “Listen to me,” I said,

softly, close to her. “Listen to me, Lizette. Our time’s almost gone. This is our last chance. You’ve lived

in stone for a hundred years; I’ve heard you cry. I’ve come there, to that place, night after night, and I’ve

heard you cry. You’ve paid enough, God knows. So have I. We cando it. We’ve got one more chance,

and we can make it, if you’ll try. That’s all I ask. Try.”

She pushed away from me, tossing her head so the auburn hair swirled away from her face. Her eyes

were dry. Ghosts can do that. Cry without making tears. Tears are denied us. Other things; I won’t talk

of them here.

“I lied to you,” she said.

I touched the side of her face. The high cheekbone just at the hairline. “I know. My unicorn would never

have let you touch him if you weren’t pure. I’m not, but he has no choice with me. He was assigned to

me. He’s my familiar and he puts up with me. We’re friends.”

“No. Other lies. My life was a lie. I’ve told them all to you. We can’t make it. You have to let me go.”

I didn’t know exactly where, but I knew how it would happen. I argued with her, trying to convince her

there was a way for us. But she couldn’t believe it, hadn’t the strength or the will or the faith. Finally, I let

her go.

She put her arms around my neck, and drew my face down to hers, and she held me that way for a few

moments. Then the winds rose, and there were sounds in the night, the sounds of calling, and she left me

there, in the shadows.

I sat down on the curb and thought about the years since I’d died. Years without much music. Light

leached out. Wandering. Nothing to pace me but memories and the unicorn. How sad I was forhim ;

assigned to me till I got my chance. And now it had come and I’d taken my best go, and failed.

Lizette and I were the two sides of the same coin; devalued and impossible to spend. Legal tender of

nations long since vanished, no longer even names on the cracked papyrus of cartographers’ maps. We

had been snatched away from final rest, had been set adrift to roam for our crimes, and only once

between death and eternity would we receive a chance. This night . . . this nothing-special night . . . this

was our chance.

My unicorn came to me, then, and brushed his muzzle against my shoulder. I reached up and scratched

around the base of his spiral horn, his favorite place. He gave a long, silvery sigh, and in that sound I

heard the sentence I was serving on him, as well as myself. We had been linked, too. Assigned to one

another by the One who had ordained this night’s chance. But if I lost out, so did my unicorn; he who

had wandered with me through all the soundless, lightless years.

I stood up. I was by no means ready to do battle, but at least I could stay in for the full ride . . . all the

way on the downhill side. “Do you know where they are?”

My unicorn started off down the street.

I followed, hopelessness warring with frustration. Dusk to dawn is the full ride, the final chance. After

midnight is the downhill side. Time was short, and when time ran out there would be nothing for Lizette or

me or my unicornbut time. Forever.

When we passed the Royal Orleans Hotel I knew where we were going. The sound of the Quarter had

already faded. It was getting on toward dawn. The human lice had finally crawled into their flesh-mounds

to sleep off the night of revelry. Though I had never experienced directly the New Orleans in which

Lizette had grown up, I longed for the power to blot out the cancerous blight that Bourbon Street and the

Quarter had become, with its tourist filth and screaming neon, to restore it to the colorful yet healthy state

in which it had thrived a hundred years before. But I was only a ghost, not one of the gods with such

powers, and at that moment I was almost at the end of the line held by one of those gods.

My unicorn turned down dark streets, heading always in the same general direction, and when I saw the

first black shapes of the tombstones against the night sky, thelightening night sky, I knew I’d been

correct in my assumption of destination.

The Saint Louis Cemetery.

Oh, how I sorrow for anyone who has never seen the world-famous Saint Louis Cemetery in New

Orleans. It is the perfect graveyard, the complete graveyard, the finest graveyard in the universe. (There

is a perfection in some designs that informs the function totally. There are Danish chairs that could be

nothingbut chairs, are so totally and completelychair that if the world as we know it ended, and a billion

years from now the New Orleans horsy cockroaches became the dominant species, and they dug down

through the alluvial layers, and found one of those chairs, even if they themselves did not use chairs, were

not constructed physically for the use of chairs, had never seen a chair,still they would know it for what it

had been made to be: a chair. Because it would be the essence ofchairness . And from it, they could

reconstruct the human race in replica.That is the kind of graveyard one means when one refers to the

world-famous Saint Louis Cemetery.)

The Saint Louis Cemetery is ancient. It sighs with shadows and the comfortable bones and their

afterimages of deaths that became great merely because those who died went to be interred in the Saint

Louis Cemetery. The water table lies just eighteen inches below New Orleans — there are no graves in

the earth for that reason. Bodies are entombed aboveground in crypts, in sepulchers, vaults, mausoleums.

The gravestones are all different, no two alike, each one a testament to the stonecutter’s art. Only

secondarily testaments to those who lie beneath the markers.

We had reached the moment of final nightness. That ultimate moment before day began. Dawn had yet to

fill the eastern sky, yet there was a warming of tone to the night; it was the last of the downhill side of my

chance. Of Lizette’s chance.

We approached the cemetery, my unicorn and I. From deep in the center of the skyline of stones beyond

the fence I could see the ice-chill glow of a pulsing blue light. The light one finds in a refrigerator, cold and

flat and brittle.

I mounted my unicorn, leaned close along his neck, clinging to his mane with both hands, knees tight to

his silken sides, now rippling with light and color, and I gave a little hiss of approval, a little sound of go.

My unicorn sailed over the fence, into the world-famous Saint Louis Cemetery.

I dismounted and thanked him. We began threading our way between the tombstones, the sepulchers,

the crypts.

The blue glow grew more distinct. And now I could hear the chimera winds rising, whirling, coming in off

alien seas. The pulsing of the light, the wail of the winds, the night dying. My unicorn stayed close. Even

we of the spirit world know when to be afraid.

After all, I was only operating off a chance; I was under no god’s protection. Naked, even in death.

There is no fog in New Orleans.

Mist began to form around us.

Except sometimes in the winter, there is no fog in New Orleans.

I remembered the daybreak of the night I’d died. There had been mist. I had been a suicide.

My third wife had left me. She had gone away during the night, while I’d been at a business meeting with

a client; I had been engaged to design a church in Baton Rouge. All that day I’d steamed the old

wallpaper off the apartment we’d rented. It was to have been our first home together, paid for by the

commission. I’d done the steaming myself, with a tall ladder and a steam condenser and two flat pans

with steam holes. Up near the ceiling the heat had been so awful I’d almost fainted. She’d brought me

lemonade, freshly squeezed. Then I’d showered and changed and gone to my meeting. When I’d

returned, she was gone. No note.

Lizette and I were two sides of the same coin, cast off after death for the opposite extremes of the same

crime. She had never loved. I had loved too much. Overindulgence in something as delicate as love is to

be found monstrously offensive in the eyes of the God of Love. And some of us — who have never

understood the salvation in the Golden Mean — some of us are cast adrift with but one chance. It can

happen.

Mist formed around us, and my unicorn crept close to me, somehow smaller, almost timid. We were

moving into realms he did not understand, where his limited magics were useless. These were realms of

potency so utterly beyond even the limbo creatures — such as my unicorn — so completely alien to even

the intermediary zone wanderers — Lizette and myself — that we were as helpless and without

understanding as those who live. We had only one advantage over living, breathing, as yet undead

humans: weknew for certain that the realms on the other side existed.

Above, beyond, deeper: where the gods live. Where the One who had given me my chance, had given

Lizetteher chance, where He lived. Undoubtedly watching.

The mist swirled up around us, as chill and final as the dust of pharaohs’ tombs.

We moved through it, toward the pulsing heart of blue light. And as we came into the penultimate circle,

we stopped. We were in the outer ring of potency, and we saw the claiming things that had come for

Lizette. She lay out on an altar of crystal, naked and trembling. They stood around her, enormously tall

and transparent. Man shapes without faces. Within their transparent forms a strange, silvery fog swirled,

like smoke from holy censers. Where eyes should have been on a man or a ghost, there were only dull

flickering firefly glowings, inside, hanging in the smoke, moving, changing shape and position. No eyes at

all. And tall, very tall, towering over Lizette and the altar.

For me, overcommitted to love, when dawn came without salvation, there was only an eternity of

wandering, with my unicorn as sole companion. Ghost forevermore. Incense chimera viewed as

dust-devil on the horizon, chilling as I passed in city streets, forever gone, invisible, lost, empty, helpless,

wandering.

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HARLANELLISONTROUBLEMAKERSHARLANELLISONhasbeencalled“oneofthegreatlivingAmericanshortstorywriters”bytheWashingtonPost.TheLosAngelesTimeshassaid,“It’slongpasttimeforHarlanEllisontobeawardedthetitle:20thcenturyLewisCarroll.”Inacareerspanningfiftyyears,hehaswonmoreawardsforthe74bookshehaswrittenoredite...

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Harlan Ellison - Troublemakers

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