Harlan Ellison: No Doors, No Windows

No, he hadn’t. Of course.

We were the last to go. I wouldn’t leave. I watched each person pass out through the front door, standing right in front of the door so no one could get past me. Bob checked out the toilet. He wasn’t in there. There was only one exit from the apartment, and I was in front of it. “Listen, goddammit,” I said heatedly, to Hans and Bob and our host, who wanted desperately to vomit and go to bed, “I do not believe in ghosts; he wasn’t a ghost, he wasn’t a figment of my imagination, he wasn’t a fraud; for God’s sake I’m not that gullible I can’t tell when I’m being put on; those stories he told me were too damned good; and if he was here, how the hell did he get out past me? I was right in front of the door even when I came to the kitchen to get the water. He was an old man, at least seventy-five, maybe older; he wasn’t a goddam sprinter! Nobody could have gotten through that crowd fast enough to slip out into the hall behind me without banging into everyone, and someone would have remembered being pushed like that … so …”

Hans tried to calm me. “Billy, we asked everyone who was here. No one else saw him. No one even saw you sitting on the sofa there, where you say you were sitting. No one else spoke to anyone like that, and many of the writers here tonight knew him. Why would a man tell you he was Marki Strasser if he was not Marki Strasser? He would have known that a room filled with writers who knew Marki Strasser would tell you if it was a joke.”

I wouldn’t let go of it. I was not hallucinating!

Our host went digging around in the back closet and came up with a bound file of old Mystery Writers of America programs from Edgar Award dinners; he flipped through them, back fifteen years, and found a photograph of Marki Strasser. I looked at it. The photo was clear and sharp. It wasn’t the same man. There was no way of confusing the two, even adding fifteen years to the face in the picture, even allowing for a severe debilitation from sickness. The Marki in the photograph was a round-faced man, almost totally bald, with thick eyebrows and dark eyes. The Marki I had talked to for almost an hour had had soft, blue eyes. Even if he had been wearing a hairpiece, those eyes couldn’t be mistaken.

“It’s not him, dammit!”

They asked me to describe him again. When that didn’t connect, Hans asked me to tell him the stories and the titles. The three of them listened and I could see from their faces that they were as impressed with the books Marki had written as I was. But when I ran down and sat there, breathing hard, Hans and my host shook their heads. “Billy,” Hans said, “I was the editor of the Unicorn Mystery Book Club for seven years; I edited The Saint Detective Magazine for more than ten. I have read as widely in the field of mystery fiction as anyone alive. No such books exist.”

Our host, an authority on the subject, agreed.

I looked at Bob Catlett. He devoured them a book a day. Slowly, reluctantly, he nodded his head in agreement.

I sat there and closed my eyes.

After a little while. Bob suggested we go. His wife had vanished an hour earlier with a group intent on getting cheesecake. He wanted to get to bed. I didn’t know what to do. So I went back to the Warwick.

That night I pulled an extra blanket onto the bed, but still it was cold, very cold, and I shivered. I left the television set on, nothing but snow and a steady humming. I couldn’t sleep.

Finally, I got up and got dressed and went out into the night. Fifty-fourth Street was empty and silent at three in the morning. Not even delivery trucks and, though I looked and looked for him, I couldn’t find him.

I thought about it endlessly, walking, and for a while I imagined he had been my father, come back from the grave to talk to me. But it wasn’t my father. I would have recognized him. I’m no fool, I would have recognized him. My father had been a much shorter man, with a mustache; and he had never spoken like that, in that way, with those words and those cadences.

It wasn’t the almost-forgotten mystery novelist known as Marki Strasser. Why he had used that name, I don’t know; perhaps to get my attention, to lead me down a black path of fear that would tell me without question that he was someone else, because it had not been Marki Strasser. I didn’t know who he was.

I came back to the Warwick and rang for the elevator. I stood in front of the mirrored panel between the two elevator doors, and I stared through my own reflection, into the glass, looking for an answer.

Then I went up to my room and sat down at the writing desk and rolled a clean sandwich of white bond, carbon, and yellow second sheet into the portable.

I began writing LOVER, KILLER.

It came easily. No one else could write that book.

But, like my father, he hadn’t even said goodbye when I went to get him that glass of water. That tired old man.

I’m not anti-women. this not expresses only my own opinion and not police officers in general. Further, I’m male.