Harlan Ellison - Deathbird Stories

“Oh shit!” the blonde girl said, and threw him down, giving up at last. She came toward Rudy.

“What’s wrong with him?” Rudy asked.

“He’s freaking out again. Christ, what a drag he can be.”

“Yeah, but what’s happening to him?”

She shrugged. “He sees his face melting, that’s what he says.”

“Is he on marijuana?”

The blonde girl looked at him with sudden distrust. “Mari—? Hey, who are you?”

“I’m a friend of Kris’s.”

The blonde girl assayed him for a moment more, then by the way her shoulders dropped and her posture relaxed, she accepted him. “I thought you might’ve just walked in, you know, maybe the Laws. You know?”

There was a Middle Earth poster on the wall behind her, with its brightness faded in a long straight swath where the sun caught it every morning. He looked around uneasily. He didn’t know what to do.

“I was supposed to marry Kris. Eight months ago,” he said.

“You want to fuck?” asked the blonde girl. “When Jonah trips he turns off. I been drinking Coca-Cola all morning and all day, and I’m really horny.”

Another record dropped onto the turntable and Stevie Wonder blew hard into his harmonica and started singing, “I Was Born to Love Her.”

“I was engaged to Kris,” Rudy said, feeling sad. “We was going to be married when I got out of basic. But she decided to come over here with Jonah, and I didn’t want to push her. So I waited eight months, but I’m out of the army now. “

“Well, do you or don’t you?”

Under the dining room table. She put a satin pillow under her. It said: Souvenir of Niagara Falls. New York.

When he went back into the living room, Jonah was sitting up on the sofa, reading Hesse’s Magister Ludi.

“Jonah?” Rudy said. Jonah looked up. It took him a while to recognize Rudy.

When he did, he patted the sofa beside him, and Rudy came and sat down.

“Hey, Rudy, where y’been?”

“I’ve been in the army.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it was awful.”

“You out now? I mean for good?”

Rudy nodded. “Uh-huh. Medical.”

“Hey, that’s good.”

They sat quietly for a while. Jonah started to nod, and then said to himself, “You’re not very tired.”

Rudy said, “Jonah, hey listen, what’s the story with Kris? You know, we were supposed to get married about eight months ago.”

“She’s around someplace,” Jonah answered.

Out of the kitchen, through the dining room where the blonde girl lay sleeping under the table, came the sound of something wild, tearing at meat. It went on for a long time, but Rudy was looking out the front window, the big bay window. There was a man in a dark gray suit standing talking to two policemen on the sidewalk at the edge of the front walk leading up to the front door. He was pointing at the big, old house.

“Jonah, can Kris come away now?”

Jonah looked angry. “Hey, listen, man, nobody’s keeping her here. She’s been grooving with all of us and she likes it. Go ask her. Christ, don’t bug me!”

The two cops were walking up to the front door.

Rudy got up and went to answer the doorbell.

They smiled at him when they saw his uniform.

“May I help you?” Rudy asked them.

The first cop said, “Do you live here?”

“Yes,” said Rudy. “My name is Rudolph Boekel. May I help you?”

“We’d like to come inside and talk to you.”

“Do you have a search warrant?”

“We don’t want to search, we only want to talk to you. Are you in the army?”

“Just discharged. I came home to see my family.”

“Can we come in?”

“No, sir.”

The second cop looked troubled, “Is this the place they call ‘The Hill’?”

“Who?” Rudy asked, looking perplexed.

“Well, the neighbors said this was ‘The Hill’ and there were some pretty wild parties going on here. “

“Do you hear any partying?”

The cops looked at each other. Rudy added, “It’s always very quiet here. My mother is dying of cancer of the stomach.”

They let Rudy move in, because he was able to talk to people who came to the door from the outside. Aside from Rudy, who went out to get food, and the weekly trips to the unemployment line, no one left The Hill. It was usually very quiet.

Except sometimes there was a sound of growling in the back hall leading up to what had been a maid’s room; and the splashing from the basement, the sound of wet things on bricks.

It was a self-contained little universe, bordered on the north by acid and mescaline, on the south by pot and peyote, on the east by speed and redballs, on the west by downers and amphetamines. There were eleven people living in The Hill. Eleven, and Rudy.

He walked through the halls, and sometimes found Kris, who would not talk to him, save once, when she asked him if he’d ever been heavy behind anything except love. He didn’t know what to answer her, so he only said, “Please,” and she called him a square and walked off toward the stairway leading to the dormered attic.

Rudy had heard squeaking from the attic. It had sounded to him like the shrieking of mice being tom to pieces. There were cats in the house.

He did not know why he was there, except that he didn’t understand why she wanted to stay. His head always buzzed and he sometimes felt that if he just said the right thing, the right way, Kris would come away with him. He began to dislike the light. It hurt his eyes.

No one talked to anyone else very much. There was always a struggle to keep high, to keep the group high as elevated as possible. In that way they cared for each other.

And Rudy became their one link with the outside. He had written to someone—his parents, a friend, a bank, someone—and now there was money coming in. Not much, but enough to keep the food stocked, and the rent paid. But he insisted Kris be nice to him.

They all made her be nice to him, and she slept with him in the little room on the second floor where Rudy had put his newspapers and his duffel bag. He lay there most of the day, when he was not out on errands for The Hill, and he read the smaller items about train wrecks and molestations in the suburbs. And Kris came to him and they made love of a sort.

One night she convinced him he should “make it, heavy behind acid” and he swallowed fifteen hundred mikes cut with Methedrine, in two big gel caps, and she was stretched out like taffy for six miles. He was a fine copper wire charged with electricity, and he pierced her flesh. She wriggled with the current that flowed through him, and became softer yet. He sank down through the softness, and carefully observed the intricate wood grain effect her teardrops made as they rose in the mist around him. He was down-drifting slowly, turning and turning, held by a whisper of blue that came out of his body like a spiderweb. The sound of her breathing in the moist crystal pillared cavity that went down and down was the sound of the very walls themselves, and when he touched them with his warm metal fingertips she drew in breath heavily, forcing the air up around him as he sank down, twisting slowly in a veil of musky looseness.

There was an insistent pulsing growing somewhere below him, and he was afraid of it as he descended, the high-pitched whining of something threatening to shatter. He felt panic. Panic gripped him, flailed at him, his throat constricted, he tried to grasp the veil and it tore away in his hands; then he was falling, faster now, much faster, and afraid!

Violet explosions all around him and the shrieking of something that wanted him, that was seeking him, pulsing deeply in the throat of an animal he could not name, and he heard her shouting, heard her wail and pitch beneath him and a terrible crushing feeling in him….