Deathbird Stories Part 13

"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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 redb.a.l.l.s, 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....

And then there was silence.

That lasted for a moment.

And then there was soft music that demanded nothing but inattention. So they lay there, fitted together, in the heat of the tiny room, and they slept for some hours.

After that, Rudy seldom went out into the light. He did the shopping at night, wearing shades. He emptied the garbage at night, and he swept down the front walk, and did the front lawn with scissors because the lawnmower would have annoyed the residents of the lanai apartments (who no longer complained, because there was seldom a sound from The Hill).

He began to realize he had not seen some of the eleven young people who lived in The Hill for a long time. But the sounds from above and below and around him in the house grew more frequent.

Rudy's clothes were too large for him now. He wore only underpants. His hands and feet hurt. The knuckles of his fingers were larger, from cracking them, and they were always an angry crimson.

His head always buzzed. The thin perpetual odor of pot had saturated into the wood walls and the rafters. He had an itch on the outside of his ears he could not quell.

He read newspapers all the time, old newspapers whose items were imbedded in his memory. He remembered a job he had once held as a garage mechanic, but that seemed a very long time ago. When they cut off the electricity in The Hill, it didn't bother Rudy, because he preferred the dark. But he went to tell the eleven. He could not find them.

They were all gone. Even Kris, who should have been there somewhere.

He heard the moist sounds from the bas.e.m.e.nt and went down with fur and silence into the darkness. The bas.e.m.e.nt had been flooded. One of the eleven was there. His name was Teddy. He was attached to the slime-coated upper wall of the bas.e.m.e.nt, hanging close to the stone, pulsing softly and giving off a thin purple light, purple as a bruise. He dropped a rubbery arm into the water, and let it hang there, moving idly with the tireless tide. Then something came near it, and he made a sharp movement, and brought the thing up still writhing in his rubbery grip, and inched it along the wall to a dark, moist spot on his upper surface, near the veins that covered its length, and pushed the thing at the dark- blood spot, where it shrieked with a terrible sound, and went in and there was a sucking noise, then a swallowing sound.

Rudy went back upstairs. On the first floor he found the one who was the blonde girl, whose name was Adrianne. She layout thin and white as a tablecloth on the dining room table as three of the others he had not seen in a very long while put their teeth into her, and through their hollow sharp teeth they drank up the yellow fluid from the bloated pus-pockets that had been her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her b.u.t.tocks. Their faces were very white and their eyes were like sootsmudges.

Climbing to the second floor, Rudy was almost knocked down by the pa.s.sage of something that had been Victor, flying on heavily ribbed leather wings. It carried a cat in its jaws.

He saw the thing on the stairs that sounded as though it was counting heavy gold pieces. It was not counting heavy gold pieces. Rudy could not look at it; it made him feel sick.

He found Kris in the attic, in a corner breaking the skull and sucking out the moist brains of a thing that giggled like a harpsichord.

"Kris, we have to go away," he told her. She reached out and touched him, snapping her long, pointed, dirty fingernails against him. He rang like crystal.

In the rafters of the attic Jonah crouched, gargoyled and sleeping. There was a green stain on his jaws, and something stringy in his claws.

"Kris, please," he said urgently.

His head buzzed.

His ears itched.

Kris sucked out the last of the mellow good things in the skull of the silent little creature, and sc.r.a.ped idly at the flaccid body with hairy hands. She settled back on her haunches, and her long, hairy muzzle came up.

Rudy scuttled away.

He ran loping, his knuckles brushing the attic floor as he scampered for safety.

Behind him, Kris was growling. He got down to the second floor and then to the first, and tried to climb up on the Morris chair to the mantel, so he could see himself in the mirror, by the light of the moon, through the fly-blown window. But Naomi was on the window, lapping up the flies with her tongue.

He climbed with desperation, wanting to see himself. And when he stood before the mirror, he saw that he was transparent, that there was nothing inside him, that his ears had grown pointed and had hair on their tips; his eyes were as huge as a tarsier's and the reflected light hurt him. Then he heard the growling behind and below him.

The little gla.s.s goblin turned, and the werewolf rose up on its hind legs and touched him till he rang like fine crystal.

And the werewolf said with very little concern, "Have you ever grooved heavy behind anything except love?"

"Please!" the little gla.s.s goblin begged, just as the great hairy paw slapped him into a million coruscating rainbow fragments all expanding consciously into the tight little enclosed universe that was The Hill, all buzzing highly contacted and tingling off into a darkness that began to seep out through the silent wooden walls....

The new G.o.ds move in mysterious ways, their will to make known: business as usual, with miracles as loss-leaders.

Brings to mind the ancient Chinese admonition, "Be careful what you wish for...you might get it. "

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer

This is true: Chano Pozo, the incredibly talented conga drummer of the bop '408, was inexplicably shot and killed by a beautiful Negress in the Rio Cafe, a Harlem bar, on December 2nd, 1948.

d.i.c.k Bong, pilot of a P-38 "Lightning" in World War Two, America's "Ace of Aces" with forty j.a.panese kills to his credit, who came through the h.e.l.lfire of war unscratched, perished by accident when the jet engine of a Lockheed P-80 he was test- flying "flamed-out" and quit immediately after takeoff, August 7th, 1945. There was no reason for the mechanical failure, no reason for Bong to have died.

Marilyn Monroe, an extremely attractive young woman who had only recently begun to realize she possessed an acting ability far beyond that of "s.e.x symbol" tagged on her early in her career, during the timeless early hours of August 6th, 1962, left this life as a result of accidentally swallowing too many barbiturates. Despite lurid conjecture to the contrary, the evidence that she had been trying to phone someone for help as the tragedy coursed through her system remains inescapable. It was an accident.

William Bolitho, one of the most incisive and miraculously talented commentators on society and its psychological motivations, whose "Murder for Profit"

revolutionized psychiatric and penological att.i.tudes toward the mentalities of ma.s.s murderers, died suddenly--and again, tragically--in June of 1930, in a hospital in Avignon, victim of the mistaken judgment of an obscure French physician who let a simple case of appendicitis drop into peritonitis.

True.

All of these random deaths plucked from a staggering and nearly endless compendium of "accidental tragedies" have one thing in common. With each other, and with the death of Warren Glazer Griffin. None of them should have happened. Each of them could have been avoided, yet none of them could have been avoided. For each of them was preordained. Not in the ethereal, mystic, supernatural flummery of the Kismet- believers, but in the complex rhythmic predestination of those who have been whisked out of their own world, into the mist-centuries of their dreams.

For Chano Pozo, it was a dark and smiling woman of mystery.

For d.i.c.k Bong, a winged Fury sent to find only him.

For Marilyn Monroe, a handful of white chalk pills.

For Bolitho, an inept quack forever doomed to apologies.

And for Warren Glazer Griffin, a forty-one-year-old accountant who, despite his advanced age, was still troubled by acne, and who had never ventured farther from his own world than Tenafly, New Jersey, on a visit to relatives one June in 1959, it was a singular death: ground to pulp between the triple-fanged rows of teeth in the mouth of a seventy-eight-foot dragon in a Land That Never Existed.

Wherein lies a biography, an historical footnote, a cautionary tale, and a keynote to the meaning of life.

Or, as Goethe summed it: "Know thyself! If I knew myself, I'd run away."

The giant black "headache ball" of the wreckers struck the sh.e.l.l of a wall, and amid geysers of dust and powder and lath and plaster and brick and decayed wood, the third story of the condemned office building crumbled, shivered along its width and imploded, plunging in upon itself, dumping jigsaw pieces into the hollow structure. The sound was a cannonade in the early-morning eight-o-clock street.

Forty years before, an obscure billionaire named Rouse, who had maintained a penthouse love-nest in the office building, in an unfashionable section of the city even then, had caused to be installed a private gas line to the kitchen of the flat; he was a lover of money, a lover of women, and a lover of flaming desserts. A private gas line. Gas company records of this installation had been either lost, destroyed, or--as seems more likely--carefully edited to exclude mention of the line. Graft, as well as bootlegging, had aided Rouse in his climb to that penthouse. The wreckers knew nothing of the gas line, which had long since gone to disuse, and the turnoff of a small valve on the third floor, which had originally jetted the vapor to the upper floor. Having no knowledge of the line, and having cleared all safety precautions with the city gas company as to existing installations, the wreckers hurled their destructive attentions at the third story with a.s.surance....

Warren Glazer Griffin left his home at precisely seven forty-five every weekday except Thursday (on which day he left at eight o'clock, to collect billing ledgers from his firm's other office, farther downtown; an office that did not open till 8:15 weekdays).

This was Thursday. He had run out of razor blades. That simple. He had had to pry a used blade out of the disposal niche in the blade container, and it had taken him ten extra minutes. He hurried and managed to leave the apartment house at 8:06 A.M. His routine was altered for the first time in seventeen years. That simple. Hurrying down the block to the Avenue, turning right and hesitating, realizing he could not make up the lost minutes by merely trotting (and without even recognizing the subliminal panic that gripped him at being off schedule), he dashed across the Avenue, and cut through the little service alley running between the shopping mart, still closed, and the condemned office building with its high board fence constructed of thick doors from now-demolished offices....

U.S. WEATHER BUREAU FORECAST: partly cloudy today with a few scattered showers. Sunny and slightly warmer tomorrow (Friday). Gusty winds.

High today 62. High Friday 60, low 43. Relative humidity...

Forty years past, a billionaire named Rouse.

A desire for flaming desserts.

A forgotten gas main.

A struggle for a used razor blade.

A short cut through an alley.

Gusty winds...

The "headache ball" plunged once more into the third story, struck the bottled-up pressure valve; the entire side of the building erupted skyward on a spark struck by two bricks scratching together, ripping the ma.s.sive iron sphere from its cable. The ball rose, arced and, borne on an unusually heavy wind, plummeted over the restraining board fence. It landed with a deafening crash in the alley.

Directly on the unsuspecting person of Warren Glazer Griffin, crushing him to little more than pulp, burying him five feet deep beneath cement and dirt and loam. Every building in the neighborhood shuddered at the impact.

And in several moments, cemetery silence fell once more in the chilly, eight-o- clock morning streets.

A soft, theremin humming, in little circles of sound, from all around him: the air was alive with multicolored whispers of delight.

He opened his eyes and realized he was lying on the yellow-wood, highly polished deck of a sailing vessel; to his left he could see beneath the rail a sea of purest vermilion, washing in thin lines of black and color, away behind the ship. Above him the golden silken sails billowed in the breeze, and tiny spheres of many-colored lights kept pace with the vessel, as though they were lightning bugs, sent to run convoy. He tried to stand up, and found it was not difficult: except he was now six feet three inches in height, not five feet seven.

Griffin looked down the length of his body, and for a suspended instant of eye- widening timelessness, he felt vertiginous. It was total displacement of ego. He was himself, and another himself entirely. He looked down, expecting to see the curved, pot- bellied and pimpled body he had worn for a very long time, but instead saw someone else, standing down below him, where he should have been. Oh my G.o.d, thought Warren Glazer Griffin, I'm not me.

The body that extended down to the polished deck was a handsome instrument.

Composed of the finest bronzed skin tone, the most sculptured anthracite-hard musculature, proportions just the tiniest bit exaggerated; he was lovely and G.o.dlike, extremely G.o.dlike. Turning slowly, he caught his reflection in the burnished smoothness of a warrior's bronze shield, hung on a peg at the side of the forecastle. He was Nordic blond, aquiline-nosed, steely-blue-eyed. No one can be that Aryan, was his only thought, flushed with amazement, as he saw the new face molded to the front of his head.

He felt the hilt of the sword warm against his side.

He pulled it free of its scabbard, and stared in fascination at the face of the old, gnarled marmoset-eyed wizard whose countenance was an intaglio of pitted metal and jewels and sandblast block briar; engraved there in hard relief on the handle. The face smiled gently at him.

"What it is all about, is this," the wizard said softly, so that not even the sea birds careening over the deck would hear. "This is Heaven. But let me explain." Griffin had not considered an interruption. He was silent and struck dumb. "Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them."

"I--" started Griffin, but the wizard cut him off with a blink.

"No, listen, please, because after this, all the magic stops, and you have to do it alone.

"You create your own Heaven, and you have the opportunity to live in it, but you have to do it on your own terms, the highest terms of which you are capable. So sail this ship through the straits, navigate the shoals, find the island, overcome the foam-devil that guards the girl, win her love, and you've played the game on your own terms." Then the wizard's face settled back into immobility, and Warren Glazer Griffin sat down heavily on the planking of the forecastle, mouth agape, eyes wide, and the realization of it all fixed firmly--unbelievably, but firmly--in his head.

Gee whiz, thought Griffin.

The sound of rigging shrieking like terns brought him out of his middle-cla.s.s stupor, and he realized the keel of the strange and wonderful wind-vessel was coming about. The steady beatbeatbeat of pole-oars against mirror waters rose to meet the descending hum of a dying breeze, and the ship moved across reflective waters toward a mile-high breaker that abruptly rose out of the sea.

Griffin realized it had not leaped from the sea bottom, as his first impression seemed to be, but had gradually grown on the horizon, some moments after the watch in the nest had hallooed its imminent appearance. Yet he had not heard any such gardyloo; he was surfeited with thoughts of this other body, the golden G.o.d with the incredibly handsome face.

"Cap'n," said one of the hands, lumbering with sea legs toward him. "We're hard on the straits. Most of the men're shackled a'ready."

Griffin nodded silently, turned to follow the seaman. They moved back toward the lazzarette, and the seaman opened the hatch, dropped through. Griffin followed close behind him, and in the smallish compartment found the other sea-hands shackled wrist and ankle to the inner keel of the hold. He gagged for a moment with the overpowering stench of salted bully beef and fish, a sickly, bittersweet smell that made his eyes smart with its intensity.

Then he moved to the seaman, who had already fastened his own ankle-shackles and one wrist manacle. He clamped the rusting manacle still undone, and now all hands aboard the wind-vessel were locked immobile.

"Good luck, Cap'n!" The last seaman smiled. And he winked. The other men joined in, in their own ways, with a dozen different accents, some in languages Griffin could not even begin to place. But all well-wishing. Griffin once more nodded in the strong, silent manner of someone other than himself, someone to the rank born.

Then he climbed out of the lazzarette and went aft to the wheel.

Overhead, the sky had darkened to a shining blackness, a patent-leather black that would have sent back inverted reflections had there been anything soaring close enough to the sky to reflect. In the mote-dancing waters of the ocean, a ghost ship sailed along upside-down, hull-to-hull with Griffin's vessel. And above him the quaint and t.i.ttering globes of light ricocheted and multiplied, filling the sudden night with the incense of their vibrancy. Their colors began to blend, to merge, to run down the sky in washes of color that made Griffin smile, and blink and drop his mouth open with awe. It was all the fireworks of another universe, just once hurled into an onyx sky, left to burn away whatever life was possible. Yet that was merely the beginning: The colors came. As he set his feet squarely, and the deltoids bunched furiously beneath his golden skin, the two men who were Warren Glazer Griffin began the complex water slalom that would send the vessel through the straits, past the shoals, and into the cove that lay beyond. And the colors came. The vessel tacked before the wind, which seemed to gather itself and enter in an arrowed spear-pointed direction of unity, behind the ma.s.sive golden sails. The wind was with him, sending him straight for the break in the heartless stone barrier. But the colors came. Softly at first, humming, creeping, boiling up from nowhere at the horizon line; twisting and surging like snake whirlwinds with adolescent intent; building, spiraling, climbing in vague streamers and tendrils of unconsciousness, the colors came.

In a rising, keening spiral of hysteria they came, first pulsing in primaries, then secondaries, then comminglings and off shades, and finally in colors that had no names.