Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories

When the dancer was finished, when his half hour show was concluded, he came to our table. His suit was skin tight 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 his esses, 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 porcelain sèvres soup plate filled with flan. 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 to Senor 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 chitinous clak 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 can do 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 for him; 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 unicorn but 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 fleshmounds 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, the lightening 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 nothing but chairs, are so totally and completely chair 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 of chairness. 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.)