Harlan Ellison - Deathbird Stories

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 an 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 fin 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. An 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 tan 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: we knew 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 Lizette her 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 layout 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.

But for her, empty vessel, the fate was something else entirely, The God of Love had allowed her the time of wandering, trapped by day in stones, freed at night to wander, He had allowed her the final chance, And having failed to take it, her fate was with these claiming creatures, gods themselves…of another order…higher or lower I had no idea. But terrible.

“Lagniappe!” I screamed the word. The old Creole word they used in New Orleans when they want a little extra; a bonus of croissants, a few additional carrots dumped into the shopping bag, a baker’s dozen, a larger portion of clams or crabs or shrimp. “Lagniappe! Lizette, take a little morel Try for the extra! Try… demand it… there’s time… you have it coming to you…you’ve paid…I’ve paid…it’s ours… try! ”

She sat up, her naked body lit by lambent fires of chill blue cold from the other side, She sat up and looked across the inner circle to me, and I stood there with my arms out, trying desperately to break through the outer circle to her, But it was solid and I could not pass. Only virgins could pass.

And they would not let her go. They had been promised a feed, and they were there to claim. I began to cry, as I had cried when I finally heard what the mother had said, when I finally came home to the empty apartment and knew I had spent my life loving too much, demanding too much, myself a feeder at a board that could be depleted and emptied and serve up no more. She wanted to come to me, I could see she wanted to come to me. But they would have their meal.

Then I felt the muzzle of my unicorn at my neck, and in a step he had moved through the barrier that was impenetrable to me, and he moved across the circle and stood waiting. Lizette leaped from the altar and ran to me.

It all happened at the same time. I felt Lizette’s body anchor in to mine, and we saw my unicorn standing over there on the other side, and for a moment we could not summon up the necessary reactions, the correct sounds. We knew for the first time in either our lives or our deaths what it was to be paralyzed, Then reactions began washing over me, we, us in wave after wave: cascading joy that Lizette had come to…us; utter love for this Paul ghost creature; realization that instinctively part of us was falling into the same pattern again; fear that that part would love too much at this mystic juncture; resolve to temper our love; and then anguish at the sight of our unicorn standing there, waiting to be claimed….

We called to him…using his secret name, one we had never spoken aloud. We could barely speak. Weight pulled at his throat, our throats. “Old friend…” We took a step toward him but could not pass the barrier. Lizette clung to me, Paul held me tight as I trembled with terror and the cold of that inner circle still frosting my flesh.

The great transparent claimers stood silently, watching, waiting, as if content to allow us our moments of final decision. But their impatience could be felt in the air, a soft purring, like the death rattle always in the throat of a cat. “Come back! Not for me…don’t do it for me…it’s not fair!”