Stalking the Nightmare Part 26

There was the shriek of an animal in the distance, and he came back from total involvement with the still figure in the ice to realize that Scotti and Kirth were yelling up through the rising wind at him.

Quickly, he wound the nylon line tighter about himself, looped it over an outcropping of rock that was deeply coated with ice, for a slippage-lever, and began pulling the towline heavily.

In a few minutes Scotti's florid face came up over the far edge of the ledge, and then the puffy body, and then he was standing across the creva.s.se, hauling up Kirth. When the two of them were on the ledge, Rennels motioned them to leap the creva.s.se.

And when they were all together, staring at the woman, finally, Scotti said something of awe and wonder. But the howling gale caught the words and threw them away into the deepening gloom.

Kirth drew their faces close to his, and shouted, "We can't stay on this ledge! The storm! It'll blow us off!

Find some shelter!"

They split up and followed the ledge around the face of the ma.s.sif, and Rennels found a deep cave that ran back for perhaps seventy feet. They met again in front of the woman and he told them. But strangely, none of them moved for the shelter. Instead, they each unshipped an icepick and began hacking at the ice that enclosed the woman.

Finally, they chipped out a block of ice six feet high and, pushing and shoving, worked it around the ledge and into the cave.

Kirth lit the survival lamps from his pack and Scot ti hung a tarp across the mouth of the cave. Rennels set up the portable heater, and in the shadowy interior of the glacier they settled down, all of them.

Scotti. Kirth. Rennels... and the woman.

All but one of the lamps had been extinguished. Shadows lay like broken bodies across the rough walls.

Scotti was slugged down deeply in his thermal sleeping-bag, apparently asleep. Kirth sat with his back to the wall, pulling on a cup of black coffee.

Rennels was hidden in the darkness.

He was watching the woman.

The ice had thawed slightly, and now she could be seen clearly.

Rennels was hypnotized by her beauty.

The single garment she wore resembled a light yellow chiton; it draped across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, exposing one shoulder and an exquisitely-formed arm. It fell in pleats to her feet. It was almost Roman in design, but Rennels had had his degree in archaeology, and he recognized it as Phoenician. There was no way of unraveling the mystery of how a Phoenician woman had come to be frozen in a glacier somewhere near the top of the world.

But it was not that mystery that held him.

It was her face.

The features were indescribably beautiful. The body would have made Helen of Troy jealous.

Rennels stared without blinking.

And in the corner, Scotti watched, from his sleeping-bag, feigning sleep. And Kirth watched, breathing deeply.

But it was to Rennels that the vision came first.

As he studied her in the ice, everything seemed to grow gray and distant, and he was somehow separating from his body, standing and looking down at himself there in the shadows. Then he turned, and went toward the ice-block, into and through it.

And the woman was waiting for him.

She opened her eyes, which were green and deep and seemed to swirl with a languid smoke of sensuality. She raised her arms to him, and the chiton pulled tightly across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Rennels came to her, and she touched him lightly on the side of the face.

It was a touch of the wind.

"Who are you?" he asked, with wonder.

"Ilira," she said. Her voice was not sound, but something deeper, more omnipresent, entering his mind and expanding, filling him with a sense of her being.

"How--"

"How did I come here?"

He nodded. She smiled a soft, sad smile. And he saw that she had a charming overbite that just faintlypressed the full roundness of her lower lip.

"The Priests of the temple. I was found to be blasphemous in my worships. I was a G.o.ddess of the temple. So they condemned me to eternal sleep in the ice lands. But now you've come to me."

It seemed all so right, so simple, so direct.

He had freed her, and now she was his.

He moved closer to her, and she slipped her cool arms about his neck, drawing his face to hers. Around them the mist grew up and flooded the world, covering them in a soft gray blanket.

He could feel the length of her, down his body, and he realized with an electric shock that he was about to make love to a woman whose race had died thousands of years before... a woman who must be part witch... a woman whose lovemaking would be informed by the strange practices and pa.s.sions of a pagan world.

But she did not give him time to wonder.

Her sleep in the ice might have been a second, or an eternity, so starved for his body did she seem.

Rennels came back to himself lying on the stone floor. He had fainted. Had it been a dream? Some kind of snow vision that days up here had induced? No, there was a languor in his body that he knew was real. And yet a hunger, greater than any he had ever known.

And a message: The other two will want me. If you want me, you will have to win me, free me, to have me.

In his sleeping-bag, Scotti was just coming awake, his breath ragged in his throat. On the far side of the cave Kirth was wedged into the rocks, his eyes glazed.

Each had had the dream. Each had enjoyed the favors of the G.o.ddess.

Rennels paused only a second as the knowledge flooded in on him--that both Kirth and Scot ti had known her body--and he lunged for his icepick...

Suddenly, each of them had a weapon.

Kirth with the skinning knife, Scotti with a piton, and Rennels swinging the icepick with such violence that he caught Scot ti rising from the sleeping-bag and imbedded the point in his left temple. Scotti screamed with pain and died as Kirth panicked and tried to escape from the mad slashings and whirlings of Rennels's weapon. He plunged toward the mouth of the cave, smacked against the block of ice with the woman still asleep in its center, and caromed off, entangling himself in the tarpaulin that kept out the storm.

Rennels lurched forward and sank the icepick in his back, but Kirth did not die. He fumbled around the tarp and stood on the ledge, the night wind screaming curses at him.

Rennels threw aside the tarp and hurled himself at the wounded man. Kirth was rocked by the a.s.sault and with a flailing of arms and legs plunged face-forward off the ledge, his terrifying scream mingling and then disappearing into the blinding snow and the night.

Rennels stood alone on the ledge, hearing the crashing, rolling sound of thunder that was Kirth plunging to his doom.

Then he went back inside. To Ilira.

He stood silently, watching her sleep, for a very long time. Then he began chipping away the ice-block carefully.

Toward morning she was divested of her ice garment, and as the relative warmth of the cave reached her, Rennels witnessed the miracle of the woman's rebirth.

For thousands of years she had been a prisoner of the ice, put there by the Phoenician wizards who had known the dark arts of Lemuria and Mu and Atlantis, of Stygia and Egupt before it was Egypt.

And as Rennels stood waiting, she came awake, her eyes opening with almond-shaped beauty to see him as he now was.

Then she came to him, and enfolded him. In an instant, it was reality for Rennels again. The scent and sense of her overpowering him. But he had only that one last moment of sensual delight to ponder, for in the next instant Ilira was standing alone as the shower of pale silver sand that had been Rennels sifted down over her arms, and dusted the stone floor of the cave.

Then she turned, and went out into the night.

Ten thousand years before, they had stopped her, the Priests who had known what she was. But now was another time, a later time, and she would complete her destiny. It did not matter what governments or cultures ruled the world. Ilira would subjugate them to her will.

For her weapon was herself. And there was no man born of man-and-woman who could say no to the terrors and pa.s.sions of her body. , She disappeared into the storm. The storm that inexplicably blew around and over her. but did not touch her.

In the cave, the pale silver sands tossed and roiled and, finally, were dispersed, leaving behind nothing.

Gopher In The Gilly

A reminiscence of the carnival Stand behind the tent flap and look at their faces.

You will learn all you'll ever need to know about the darker side of human nature.

(The Depression leached all joy from the people. Show biz called with its cheap wares, its momentary diversions. The movies did it. Cheap, took you away, and gave you memories to savor later. Carnivals were big. They circled the country. Cheap, gaudy, thrills. Today, no self-respecting carnival will carry a freak bally--a sideshow of malforms and sports. It's ugly business. Cheap. But in those days, those cheap, ugly days of the Thirties, something was needed to pull in the rubes and the yokels and the kadodies. The freak top. Hurry, hurry, slide right in there, friend, and drag your lady with you, for the most exhilarating, most startling, most unbelievable sights that've ever graced your eyes. See Lena, the fattest woman in the world, four hundred pounds of quivering jelly... Lucifer, with a throat of asbestos and a stomach of steel, see him eat fire, chew nails, drink coal oil, wouldn't it be nice to have him in your living room on a cold Kansas night... Rippo, the fish-boy: where you and I have arms and legs, Rippo has only gills and flippers... see and marvel... see the thing without a name, neither man nor beast, a creature out of bad dreams, he eats snakes, he. bites the heads off chickens, ladies I cannot even describe in public the degradation in which this creature exists... but step up, step inside, see for yourself... see the largest gathering of freaks and marvels ever offered under one big top...) Stand behind the tent flap and look at their faces.

You will learn all you'll ever need to know about the darker side of human nature.

(Ask any man of forty or fifty, who worked in a carny as a little boy. Ask him if he ever stood behind the flap of the freak top and watched--not the freaks, oh no, not those poor miserable things--ask him if he ever watched the faces of the people. The good people, the solid rural folk with their lives and their morals sunk deep in the Judeo-Christian Ethos. Ask that little boy, now grown to a man, and he will be reluctant to tell you what he saw. But press him nonetheless, and he will tell you of the expressions on the faces of the men as they watched the swaying milk udders of Lena, as they contemplated the s.e.xual wonders implicit in the plastic body of the snake girl. But he will never tell you of the licked lips and bright eyes of the women as they pa.s.sed and lingered to observe the pre-thalidomide monstrosity called the fish-boy, as they let their gaze wander over his barely concealed private parts, as they wondered--nakedly obvious in their rapturous stares--what it would be like to have those flippers touch their bodies, what it would be like to make love to something like that. The little boy will never tell the horror of fascination in the faces of a freak audience, of the women who wanted to couple with the geek, redolent in his own filth, of the men who trembled at the sight of the hermaphrodite; half-man, half-woman, how would one seduce such a thing? Once having stood behind the flap, once having seen the unmasked faces of the secret dreamers, one need never again ask how did the slaughter at My Lai come to be; one need never again wonder what it is in the American character that produces Richard Speck or Charles Manson or Charles Starkweather or Susan Atkins. One need never ask, for it is there in all of us, lying close to the surface of all of us who make up the great freak top audience. The Depression is gone, but the rural rubes are still with us, are still part of all of us. We still need our freaks. Without compa.s.sion, without sympathy, without love... with merely l.u.s.t and fascination and repugnance that attracts more than it repels...

we all come to the big show and lick our lips.) I was thirteen years old. Never mind why I ran away from home, that's another story for another time. I did it; the dream of every middle-American boy in the early 1940s; to run away and join the circus. I had read TOBY TYLER, or Ten Weeks with a Circus, and there was nothing more fascinating, nothing more swashbuckling, nothing more adventurous than to run off and join a circus.

I never found a circus. But I found the ragbag carny those in the circuit called a "gilly." The hit-and-run hundred-mile burn-the-lot operation that figure-eighted across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri, looping back through Kentucky to start its pattern all over again. Tri-States Shows it called itself, but you'd never find it listed in Amus.e.m.e.nt Business. It was a pure grifter's carny, carrying a sorry menagerie, an ugly freak top, and more hanky-panks than I've seen at even the grungiest down-at-the-heels county fairs.

What did I do? I was a gopher.

"Hey, kid, go fer some coffee. "

"Hey, kid, go fer some canvas. "

"Hey, kid, go fer that spieler, Sam."

Furless, beardless, clawless, I was a gopher.

I was a honeydipper in the hyena cage, I was a shill for the hanky-panks, I was a lookout for the laws, I was a water boy for the girls working the kootch bally, I was a swamper in the cookhouse. I was three months worth of scut, and didn't know how crooked the whole operation was, till we got busted in Kansas City, Missouri.

The show had moll dips, it had cannons, it had boosters and paper-hangers, it had everything but a square deal for the marks who frequented the flat stores on the midway and came away lucky to have their shoe soles.

One of the cannons tried to whomp a guy for his wallet in K. C. Turned out the guy was an a.s.sistant D.A., fifteen years on the Force, and he threw the muscle halfway across that time-zone. The entire carny wound up in the K.

C. slammer.

Pretty quick, everyone was sprung. The "management" couldn't afford to have its crew locked up for verylong: first, because there were dates that had to be played in towns down the line, and second, because there were enough complaints and warrants out on that show to send everyone away till the next Ice Age. So everyone was sprung.

With two important exceptions.

The first was the geek. The second was me.

Anyone unfamiliar with the term "geek" should seek out and read William Lindsay Gresham's now-cla.s.sic 1946 novel, NIGHTMARE ALLEY, for the most chillingly accurate description ever set in type. A geek is usually a wetbrain; that is, a young or old man so far gone into alcoholism that his brain has turned to prune-whip yogurt. When he sweats, he sweats sour mash. A gilly locates a skid in whatever town it's in, and carries him to the next stop, and as many stops as it can get out of him before he either dies or wanders off. For the splendid honorarium of a bottle of gin or two a day, the skid will dress in an animal skin, go without shaving, sleep in a cage, and on cue wallow in his own s.h.i.t, eat dead snakes, bite the head off live chickens. No reputable carny will carry a geek. It is a terrible thing. It plays to the basest hungers and most primal fears in the human repertory. Anyone who could derive enjoyment from watching a debased creature, seemingly only half-human, scuttling across the floor of a foul, stinking pit or pen, smearing itself with feces, rubbing its privates on the gnawed skin of a dead rattlesnake, moaning and rolling its eyes as it devolved before one's eyes, reverting to a stage of subhuman existence not even Cro-Magnons knew... such a person is beneath contempt, lower even than the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d in that cage.

I have seen hordes of rural goodfolk, pillars of their communities, churchgoing Christians and advocates of the Protestant Work Ethic, who devoutly enjoyed watching a geek. Stand behind the tent flap. Watch. You'll learn more about human nature than you ever wished to know.

The geek and I were thrown in the drunk tank, a holding pen, together. He wasn't sprung because he wasn't really "carny," he was a pickup, and there were skids all along the road, so why spend hard cash on a slob so beneath notice that he couldn't even be thought of as human? 1 wasn't sprung because I wouldn't give the cops my real name; I didn't want to go home.

So the gilly took off, minus their geek, minus their gopher.

I spent three days in the K. C. slammer with that old man, that subhuman geek. I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since 1947, in that cage in Kansas City, that I haven't thought of that old drunk.

Three days we were locked together. The hacks, the guards who shepherded us, even they didn't want to get near us. The smell and look of that geek made them want to puke. They used to slide our food through the bars on the floor, at the end of a pushbroom. I was scared, and ill.

Because they wouldn't give him anything to drink, and he started having convulsions. He whimpered all through the night, and in the mornings his face was b.l.o.o.d.y and his lips bitten clean through. Along about the second day he went crazy from delerium tremens, and he climbed the bars of the free-standing cage where we were penned, and he began smashing his face against the metal ceiling. He fell and screamed, and lay on his back on the metal floor, moving his legs and arms idly like a turtle on its sh.e.l.l. His face looked like a pound of raw hamburger. And he smelled.

A special smell. Not just his pants full of s.h.i.t, and his clothes stinking from the dirt of his carny pen and garbage; he was sweating sour alcohol. A special smell. I've never forgotten it. I can't describe it to you... it smelled like such and such... there is nothing to compare. A million dead bodies turned up in a communal grave, maybe. But I've never forgotten that smell.

I don't drink. I have never drunk.

Finally, on the third day, they took me out. They had to. The Pinkerton Agency men my family had hired to find me had contacted the K. C. police. There had been missing persons flyers sent out on me, dodgers they were called; and someone in K. C. had matched a dodger with my description, even though I wouldn't tell them my real name or where I was from. And the Pinkertons sent an operative and he came and took me back on the train to Ohio.

I had spent three months with the carny.

And there was very little of romance or adventure or swashbuckling about it. All I came away with was the smell of rotten liquor sweated out through gray, dead skin... an even greater hatred of cops than I'd had to begin with... and the cynical, deadening, utterly inescapable knowledge that if one stands behind the tent flap and watches, one learns more about the darker side of human nature than any kid should ever know.