Shadows lived in that house. A heavy, somnolent madness that pressed against the inner walls and made the very glass of the dark windows bulge outward as though bloated. Carrie had warned me there was a slithering horror in the place, even before either of us had known for certain I would be coming to town, but I had snickered at her, and rummaging on the bookshelves of my own jolly pad in Los Angeles, had tossed the copy of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at her.
“Jackson already wrote it up, Punkin’,” I laughed. “If you were living in Transylvania or some dark corner of Brittany, I might buy it…but Brooklyn? Come on, kiddo!”
She’d smiled wanly, looking up at me from the sofa, and there had been a wispy, thin, almost timorous smile on her elf face. Brave, and quite frightened. “You’ll see,” was what she left me with.
And now, here I was in New York, and walking up the steps of the Romaine house in Flatbush (how ridiculous, what a sillyass place for weirdness, in the heart of comfortable mediocrity and middle-class lack of imagination); and I had to admit that what she had promised was true. The house was a typical no-style 1920’s monstrosity, with front porch, attic windows and dormers at attention, glass-paneled front doors, mail slot silently pursed as though capable of secrets, if only it would speak.
But there was more: there was the filtered stink of dust long-since gone; of old clothes bundled together; of parchment-skinned hags dead in their apartments with old Life and Newsweek stacks ceiling-high, and forty million dollars in small change under the floorboards; of velour drapes drawn against the sun; of heavy jungle or empty desert. Of non-place, of nontime, of aloneness.
Poe and Hawthorne and Lovecraft tried to speak of the terrifying desolateness of moors or graveyards or empty stretches of the sea, but for sheer wanton loneliness, there is nothing like a Brooklyn street in late Fall, October, November, when the leaves mat like dark, coagulated blood in the gutters, and the chill wind spins down through the cross-streets, chasing the subway trains like hungry dogs after meat wagons. Empty, chill, helpless, it is the end of the universe, and anyone stupid enough to be caught away from a bubbling TV set or a good nineteen-broad orgy, deserves to stand out there and shiver. Not entirely from the cold.
So I walked up the steps, and turned the old-fashioned door chine in its metal frame, and heard the rasping ringaling of it far inside. The door burst open inward almost immediately, and Carrie, little gnome, was standing there in her Greenwich Village outfit, long hair brushed back in a single braid, her eyes alive, as though I’d come to save her: “Welcome to Dante’s Inferno!” she murmured.
Rudy was a prelim fighter. One, two, a right cross just under the heart. The Mob kept him around for laughs, he was a gentle kid. Rudy did twenty-one years with the Mob. Since he’d been seventeen.
But when Rudy was thirty-eight, he was a little too old to be called the kid any more, and he wanted out of the Mob. Not for any specific reasons, there wasn’t any heat going, but just because he felt restless, had the feeling there were other things to do.
Rudy had always heard it said: nobody leaves the Mob. Yet, surprisingly, there was no trouble when he told them he wanted out. Why not? He didn’t have anything they wanted, or were afraid to turn loose of. Especially knowledge. Rudy had been a hitter, and what he knew was old and unimportant. So they gave a nice buncha twenties, smacked his back, and said so long, Rudy.
In this book everything has been invented except the truth. If there is no truth, there is no book. If there is no invention there is no book. Who can be offended by the truth? Who can be offended by invention?
“My fingertips are covered with the scars of people I’ve touched. The flesh remembers those touches. Sometimes I feel as though I am wearing heavy woolen gloves, so thick are the memories of all those touches. It seems to insulate me, to separate me from mankind. I very often refrain from washing my hands for days and days, just to preserve whatever layers of touches might be washed away by the soap.
“Faces and voices and smells of people I’ve known have passed away, but still my hands carry the records with them. Layer after layer of the laying-on of hands. Is that altogether sane? I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it for a very long time, when I have the time.
“If I ever have the time.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: the concept embodied in T—’s speech, page—, is not original. Nor has it been plagiarized; rather, it is that peculiar melding of originality and plagiarism that occurs, I am told, in all those of an artistic bent. It was spurred to life by something someone else had written. In this case, Salinger. I was reading Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and when I read across the line: “I have scars on my hands from touching certain people,” I stopped dead, without going further, dashed into the next room and the typewriter, and wrote T—’s speech, even before that section of the novel had been drafted. It laid out for me a particularly important facet of his character; a facet in fact, which planned a direction I had only vaguely, till then, considered for the book. What that speech did, in effect, was build the very cornerstone of my book, and set my thoughts to considering depths I would not otherwise have attempted in what was originally intended as a straight adventure novel. When I went back, and found that Salinger had gone on to say almost precisely what I had said, I felt awkward, small boy kicking turf, embarrassed. I have no doubt no one would consider that I had “borrowed” in writing that paragraph, for in the main, readers are barely aware of what a writer tries to do with his mechanics…but I would know there was a debt there, and so, this note. It would be safe to say, then, that this novel was strongly influenced by J.D. Salinger. Though I’m certain he would find such an idea presumptuous, it remains true, in a much murkier sense than merely his works triggering my thoughts. Those words opened doors my mind knew were there, but had never considered looking beyond. At least in this book. And in that degree, I feel Mr. Salinger has helped to make this a worthier effort. My thanks to him.
Pieces of things that will never be written. Where they came from I choose to remember, for the stimulus is often more memorable and important than the shabby fiction it produces. Where they reside, is here, for whatever pleasure or momentary empathy they may cause. Where they are going? Probably no further, for having been set down, they accomplish what they were intended for. A spark gap effect, a bridging of the mind through concepts. By imposing the necessary artificiality of plot and character on them, they become greater than themselves. They become stories.
Which ought to more than satisfactorily answer, for all time (at least as far as I am concerned) the question raised by drunkards and dilettantes at cocktail partties: “Where do you get your ideas?”
About the stories in this book. Each story has its own little prefatory note by the undersigned, but a few words before you attack them (and as a reviewer has noted, they attack you). For the most part these are old stories. I would not write them this way were I writing them today. Several of them I find painfully amateurish. Most of the stories were written in the late Fifties. When I was learning my craft. This is by way of explanation, not excuse. I still stand behind the stories, even though they were written by quite another Harlan Ellison—or series of Harlan Ellisons.
That they are once again in print is due not only to the Author’s continuing need for money and ego-boosting, but to the requests of a large number of readers who have encountered the later works, and have made querulous noises about the ones that came before. Due also to the interest of Belmont’s lovely editoress Gail Wendroff, who insisted on including four of the stories from my first collection, A Touch of Infinity, among these other, never-before-anthologized pieces. And to the urgings of my literary agent, Mr. Robert P. Mills, a man whose interest in my career has kept me, on numerous occasions, from throwing in the bloodied towel.
It has been a long way from courage and Andy Porter and Silverbob and raw strips of flesh that might (and may yet) some day be stories. A long way, and yet truly a hyperspace jump, for the journey is made through the mind of the creator, by way of lands without signposts; and if those lands could be named, if they were not the Terra Incognita in which this Author dwells much of the time, it might be seen by the light of revelation that they were Right Here, all the time.
You have been very kind, and I thank you.
Several months ago I bought a pair of very handsome low-modern filing cabinets, in which to store my moldering manuscripts. Until that time, they had been dumped in piles in whatever handy drawer or closet I was not using for clothes or record albums or books. In filing the six hundred-odd manuscripts (with their attendant chipping and falling triangles of yellow-brown page edges—the man who invents a cheap yellow second sheet that doesn’t turn doggie-poo brown within five minutes of exposure to the sun will win the undying thanks of professional writers the world over) I found stories I had not reread since I’d written them years before. A heart blow of nostalgia hit me (not to mention a stomach-punch of nausea) as I reread them, sitting there in my Alexander Shields bathrobe on the floor. Many of them were about how itsy-teeny we poor Humans are in the Universe. There was one in which all the saucers were coming here to use us for a parking lot in an overcrowded universe (titled “A Lot Of Saucers,” naturally); and there was one where we went to extend the hand of Dominant Homo Sapiens to our poor benighted alien brothers, and were ordered to take our spaceship around back by the service entrance; and one in which we became smorgasbord for a troupe of alien actors; and—well, you get what I mean. Pretty awful. Only once did I really get to it in nitty-gritty terms. That once, a story I still like immensely is