Harlan Ellison: Runesmith

An old-wives’ tale once had heart-attack victims munch the leaves of the foxglove and recover. Along came science and extracted digitalis. In just this way Smith learned what it really is about bat’s blood, and the special potency of the body-fat of a baby murdered at the dark of the moon, and how these and many other things may be synthesized and their potency multiplied without recourse to bats or babies, stars or stumpwater, Eucharists, eunuchs or unicorn born.

Basics are simple. The theory of solid-state electronics is complicated but the thing itself is not; the tiny block of semiconductive germanium called transistor, nuvistor, thermistor, tunnel diode is, as any fool can see, a simple thing indeed. So it was that Smith, working his way through matters incomprehensible, indescribable, and unspeakable, came all the way through the complexities of the earnest alchemists and the many dark rituals of animists and satanists and the strangely effective religious psychology which steeps the worship of the Nameless One sometimes called the Horned God, and many others, until he reached simplicity, until he reached basics.

Simple as a transistor, as difficult to understand.

And who, using a transistor, needs to understand it?

But a transistor (however precise) without a power supply (however tiny) is useless. The runes and the bones without the runesmith…nothing. With one, with the smith called Smith, fear more terrifying than any ever known by humankind; disaster unexpected, inexplicable, seeming random, operating on unknown logic and unleashing unknown forces.

In the Hall of the Seven Faceless Ones.

Stood the incubus and the nixie.

Before their masters.

Who told them.

Things they needed to know.

The time has come. After time within time that has eaten time till it be gorged on its own substance, the time has come. You have been chosen to act as our emissaries. You will go and you will find us an instrument and you will train it and teach it and hone it and mold it to our needs. And when the instrument is ready you will use it to open a portal, and we will pour through and regain what was once and always ours, what was taken from us when we were exiled.

Here.

Where it is cold.

Where it is dark.

Where we receive no nourishment.

You will do this.

I am ready to serve. So am I. But what sort of weapon do you want us to get? I think I know what they mean. You always know what they mean; listen, masters, I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I can’t work with this incubus. He’s a complainer and a befuddler and he’s got delusions of authority. Masters, don’t listen to him. He’s jealous of the faith and trust you’ve put in me. He rails under the lash of envy. My success with the coven against the Norns infuriates him. Rails? What the Thoth are you gibbering about? Look, Masters, I serve gladly; there isn’t much else for me to do. But I can’t work under this lunatic. One of us has to be the charge-of-things on this. If it’s him, then put me on some other duty. If it’s me, then put him in his place.

Silence!

You will work together as needs be.

The incubus.

The nixie will be in charge of this matter.

And you will assist.

I serve gladly, Masters. Then why are you foaming? Shut up! Darling, you’re lovely when you’re angry.

We will hear.

No more.

You will begin now.

Find.

The weapon and teach It.

Open the portal.

We long to return.

How you do it is your concern but.

Do not fail us.

The nixie and the incubus had worked together as well as might be expected. The nixie said, We’ll give him magic and let him use it. We can’t go through, not yet at least, but we can send dreams and thoughts and desires: they’ll pass through the veil. And what good will that do?

He’ll tear a rift in the veil for us. Oh, I can’t believe the stupidity of your ideas. Stupid or not, it’s the way I’m doing it; carefully and smoothly, and you keep your trachimoniae out of it. Just don’t order me about. I’m the highest-ranking incubus—

Just shut up, will you.

Shut up? How dare you speak to me like that? You’d better succeed quickly, nixie. My principals are anxious, and if you go wrong or slow down I’ll make certain they have their way with you.

The nixie had found his weapon. Smith. He had given him first a series of dreams. Then a hunger to know the convolutions of black magic. The bulge in the floor. The hunger of curiosity. Leading him, step by step through his life: the Black Arts Book Store, the proper volumes, the revealed secrets, the dusty little room, and at last…the power. But given not quite whole. Given in a twisted manner. The runes had been cast, and the mistake made—and Smith had destroyed the world, tearing the veil in the process. But not quite enough for the return of the Faceless Ones.

And the incubus grew impatient for his revenge. The girl.

Smith was sorry. Standing in the room to which his bat had led him, he was sorry. He hadn’t meant to do it. Smith had not, in the deepest sense, known it was loaded (nor had he been meant to know); and when it went off (in this room with half a candle and dust and books bound in human flesh, and the great grimoire) it was aimed at the whole world.

Peking, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Detroit, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles: miles of cinders burying cold roast corpses. Checkerboard arrangements of bottomless pits and glass spires. Acres of boiling swamp. Whole cities that were now curling, rising green mist. Cities and countries that had been, were totally gone.

And in the few cities that remained…Water no longer flowed through their veins nor electricity through their nerves, and there they sat, scraping the sky, useless, meaningless, awaiting erosion. And at their dead feet, scurrying loners and human rat packs, survivors hunting and sometimes eating one another, a species in its glorious infancy with the umbilical cord a thousand ways pinhole-perforated before it had had a chance really to be born; and Smith knew this and had to see it all around him, had to see it and say, “My fault. My fault.”

Guilty Smith the runesmith. Back then, here, to the room where the runes had begun, to trap a girl he sensed would come. He set a noisetrap at the outer door (it opened outward so he propped a 4 x 4 against it and an old tin washtub under it; open the door and whamcrash!) and next to it a rune-trap (which cannot be described here) and he settled down to wait.

The nixie to the incubus:

What have you been doing? I’ve lured him back to the focus location. You fool! He may suspect now. He suspects nothing. I’ve implanted a delusion, a girl. When he sleeps we take him and rip the veil completely. What girl? What have you done? You can ruin it all, you egomaniac! There is no girl. A succubus. I tried earlier, but it went wrong. This time he’s weaker, he’ll sleep, we’ll take him.

What makes you think he’ll succumb this time, any more than he did the last time? Because he’s a human and he’s weak and stupid and lonely and filled with guilt and he has never known love. I will give him love. Love that will drain him, empty him. Then he’s mine.

Not yours…ours.

Not yours at all, nixie. The Masters will see to you.

He stood in a dark corner, waiting. And sleep suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world to him. He wanted to sleep.

Sleep! Should a man live threescore years, one of them must go to this inert stupidity, a biochemical habit deriving from the accident of diurnal rotation. The caveman must huddle away behind rocks and flame during the hours of darkness because of the nocturnal predators who can see better in the dark than he can. They, in turn, must hide from him. Hence the habit, long outmoded but still inescapable. A third of a life spent sprawled out paralyzed, mostly unconscious, and oh vulnerable. Twenty years wasted out of each life, when life itself is so brief a sparkle in a surrounding immensity of nothingness. Brief as it is, still we must give away a third of it to sleep, for no real reason. Twenty years. Smith had hated and despised sleep, the cruel commanding necessity for sleep, the intrusion, the interruption, the sheer waste of sleep; but never had he hated it so much as now, when everyone in the world was his enemy and all alone he must stand them off. Who would stand sentry over Smith? Only Smith, lying mostly unconscious with his own lids blinding him and his ears turned off and his soft belly upward to whatever soft-footed enemy might penetrate his simple defenses.