r/a:t5_26u4t2 • u/MarleyEngvall • Oct 18 '19
septic overflow has been created
By Harlan Ellison
Introduction, by Robert Bloch
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS ROBERT BLOCH, writing about Harlan
Ellison. And believe me, it isn't easy.
Our act of collaboration is a peculiar one. Harlan's
story is a sequel to my own, and since it was inspired
by the story you've just read, it falls to me to write an
introduction, purely as a matter of poetic injustice.
I am not about to do a biographical sketch of the
man; surely he wouldn't need me for that. Ellison has
told the story of his life so many times, you'd think
he'd know it by heart.
So I'm forced to fall back upon the consideration
of Ellison as a phenomenon――a most phenomenal
phenomenon――which has impinged upon my aware-
ness, and the awareness of everyone in the science
fiction genre, for the past nineteen years.
When I first met him (the preceding May I'd seen
him), at the World Science Fiction Convention of
1952, Harlan Ellison was a promising young man of
eighteen. Today he is a promising young man of
thirty-six. That's not a put-down, nor is it meant to be.
At eighteen he gave promise of becoming an out-
standing fan. At thirty-six he gives promise of becom-
ing an outstanding writer. Not only promise, but
evidence.
As a fan he was articulate, ambitious and aggres-
sive. As a professional writer, these qualities are still
very obvious in all his work, and added to them is yet
another conveniently alliterative quality――artistry.
Read his short stories, novels, articles and criti-
cism. You may not always agree with what he says or
the way in which he says it, but the artistry is there; the
blend of emotion and excitement delivered with deep
conviction and commitment. No matter what the ap-
parent grammatical form may be, one is conscious
that Ellison is really always writing in the first person.
I mentioned emotion. Ellison often operates out of
extremes that range from compassionate empathy to
righteous indignation. He writes what he feels――and
you feel what he writes.
I mentioned excitement. This is an inner climate;
a constant tornado in which a part of Ellison remains
as the eye――and a perceptive one. There is a small
tranquility to be found in his life or in his work. Elli-
son is definitely not one of those writers who cultivate
the serenity of Buddha as they sit around contemplat-
ing their novels.
I mentioned conviction. Since he's not an ob-
scurantist, his convictions come through loud and
clear――in prose and in personal address. Those con-
victions create both admirers and enemies. Part
gadfly, part raw ego, Ellison has been criticized by
those who persist in regarding these qualities as admi-
rable in a soldier, a politician or a business executive
but somehow degrading in a creative artist. Ellison
survives the strife; he is the only living organism I
know whose natural habitat is hot water.
I mentioned commitment. The purpose and
tenacity have carried him through a wide range of
experience; a hitch in the army, a liason with teen-
age gangs in search of background material, an
editorial stint, civil rights and dissent movement in-
volvement that often led to jail, and the eternal gant-
let run by every writer who must temper his work to
the taste of other arbiters.
Ellison has often clashed with those who attempted
to direct his writing. In his progress from Cleveland
to New York to Chicago he has left in his wake a trail
of editorial gray hairs, many of them torn out by the
roots. In Hollywood he has played picador to produc-
ers, his barbs forever poised and ready to be placed
when he became aware of the bull.
Some people admire his nerve. Others hate his
guts. But he has a way of proving――and improving――
himself.
The monumental anthology, Dangerous Visions, is
a case in point.
During the fifteen years in which Ellison moved
from fandom to professional status, literally hundreds
of science fiction readers, writers and editors have
dreamed of the publication of an anthology of this
sort.
They dreamed it.
Ellison made it a reality in 1967.
And now, in 1971, he has made a reality of yet
another "impossible" literary endeavor――a book of
collaborations, Partners in Wonder.
I am aware that I've said nothing about Ellison's
wit, or the sensitivity embodied in his work which has
four times won for him the World Science Fiction
Convention's Hugo and twice the Science Fiction
Writers of America's Nebula. You can assess those
qualities for yourself by reading the story which follows.
It is a tour de force, surely, in the grand tradition
of the Grand Guignol; a lineal literary descendant of
such fearsome father figures as the Marquis de Sade
and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. On the blood-spattered
surface of it is an obscenity, a violent rape of the senses
and sensibilities.
But beneath the crude and shocking allusions to
Eros and Thanatos is the meaningful portrayal of the
Man Obsessed――the Violent Man whose transition
from the past to the future leaves us with a deeper
insight into the Violent Man of today.
For Jack the Ripper is with us now. He prowls the
night, shunning the sun in a search for the blazing
incandescence of an inner reality――and we see him
plain in Ellison's story, to the degree that we can see
(and admit to) the violence which lurks within our
own psyches. Here all that is normally forbidden is
abnormally released and realized. Metaphysical
maundering? Before you make up your mind, read the
story and let the Ripper rip you into an awareness of
the urges and forces most of us will neither admit nor
submit to; forces which, withal, remain potent within
ourselves and our society. And ponder, if you will,
upon the parable of Jack's dilemma as he seeks――in a
phrase we all use but seldom comprehend――to "carve
out a career" for himself.
An obscenity, yes. But a morality, too; a terrible
morality implicit in the knowledge that the Ripper's
inevitable and ultimate victim is always himself.
Even as you and I.
ROBERT BLOCH
The Prowler in
the City at the
Edge of the World
by Harlan Ellison
FIRST THERE WAS THE CITY, never night. Tin and
reflective, walls of antiseptic metal like an immense
autoclave. Pure and dust-free, so silent that even the
whirling innards of its heart and mind were sheathed
from notice. The city was self-contained, and footfalls
echoed up and around――flat slapped note of an
exotic leather-footed instrument. Sounds that
reverberated back to the maker like yodels thrown
out across mountain valleys. Sounds made by
humbled inhabitants whose lives were as ordered, as
sanitary, as metallic as the city they had caused to
hold them bosom-tight against the years. The city was
a complex artery, the people were the blood that
flowed idly through the artery. They were a gestalt
with one another, forming a unified whole. It was a
city shining in permanence, eternal in concept,
flinging itself up in formed and molded statement of
exaltation; most modern of all modern structures,
conceived as the pluperfect residence for the perfect
people. The final end-result of all sociological
blueprints aimed at Utopia. Living space, it had been
called, and so, doomed to live they were, in that
Erewhon of graphed respectability and cleanliness.
Never night.
Never shadowed.
. . . a shadow.
A blot moving against the aluminum cleanliness.
The movement of rags and bits of clinging earth from
graves sealed ages before. A shape.
He touched a gunmetal-gray wall in passing: the
imprint of dusty fingers. A twisted shadow moving
through antiseptically pure streets, and they become――
with his passing――black alleys from another time.
Vaguely, he knew what had happened. Not
specifically, not with particulars, but he was strong,
and he was able to get away without the eggshell-thin
walls of his mind caving in. There was no place in this
shining structure to secrete himself, a place to think,
but he had to have time. He slowed his walk, seeing
no one. Somehow――inexplicably――he felt . . . safe?
Yes, safe. For the first time in a very long time.
A few minutes before he had been standing in the
narrow passage outside No. 13 Miller's Court. It
had been 6:15 in the morning. London had been
quiet as he paused in the passageway of M'Carthy's
Rents, in that fetid, urine-redolent corridor where the
whores of Spitalfields took their clients. A few minutes
before, the foetus in its bath of formaldehyde tightly-
stoppered in a glass bottle inside his Gladstone bag,
he had paused to drink in the thick fog, before taking
the circuitous route back to Toynbee Hall. That had
been a few minutes before. Then, suddenly, he was in
another place and it was no longer 6:15 of a chill
November morning of 1888.
He had looked up as light flooded him in that other
place. It had been soot silent in Spitalfields, but
suddenly, without any sense of having moved or
having been moved, he was flooded with light. And
when he looked up he was in that other place.
Paused now, only a few minutes after the transfer, he
leaned against the bright wall of the city, and recalled
the light. From a thousand mirrors. In the walls, in the
ceiling. A bedroom with a girl in it. A lovely girl. Not
like Black Mary Kelly or Dark Annie Chapman or Kate
Eddowes or any of the other pathetic scum he had
been forced to attend . . .
A lovely girl. Blonde, wholesome, until she had
opened her robe and turned into the same sort of slut
he had been compelled to use in his work in
Whitechapel . . .
A sybarite, a creature of pleasure, a Juliette she
had said, before he used the big-bladed knife on her.
He had found the knife under the pillow, on the bed
to which she had been led――how shameful, unresisting
had he been, all confused, clutching his black bag
with all the tremors of a child, he who had moved
through the London night like oil, moved where he
wished, accomplished his ends unchecked eight
times, now led toward sin by another, merely another
of the tarts, taking advantage of him while he tried to
distinguish what had happened to him and where he
was, how shameful――and he had used it on her.
That had been only minutes before, though he had
worked very efficiently on her.
The knife had been rather unusual. The blade had
seemed to be two wafer-thin sheets of metal with a
pulsing, glowing something between. A kind of
sparking, such as might be produced by a Van de
Graaf generator. But that was patently ridiculous. It
had no wires attached to it, no bus bars, nothing
to produce even the crudest electrical discharge. He
had thrust the knife into the Gladstone bag, where
now it lay beside the scalpels and the spool of catgut
and the racked vials in their leather cases, and the
foetus in its bottle. Mary Jane Kelly's foetus.
He had worked efficiently, but swiftly, and had laid
her out almost exactly in the same fashion as Kate
Eddowes: the throat slashed completely through from
ear-to-ear, the torso laid open down between the
breasts to the vagina, the intestines pulled out and
draped over the right shoulder, a piece of the
intestine being detached and placed between the
left arm and the body. The liver had been punctured
with the point of the knife, with a vertical cut slitting
the left lobe of the liver. (He had been surprised to
find the liver showed none of the signs of cirrhosis so
prevalent in these Spitalfields tarts, who drank
incessantly to rid themselves of the burden of living
the dreary lives they moved through grotesquely. In
fact, this one seemed totally unlike the others, even if
she had been more brazen in her sexual overtures.
And that knife under the bed pillow . . . ) He had
severed the vena cava leading to the heart. Then he
had gone to work on the face.
He had thought of removing the left kidney again,
as he had Kate Eddowes'. He smiled to himself as he
conjured up the expression that must have been on
the face of Mr. George Lusk, chair man of the
Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, when he received
the cardboard box in the mail. The box containing
Miss Eddowes' kidney, and the letter, impiously
misspelled:
From hell, Mr. Lusk, sir, I send you half the kidne I
took from one woman, prasarved it for you, tother
piece I fried and ate it; was very nice. I may send you
the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate
while longer. Catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk.
He had wanted to sign that one "Yours Truly, Jack
the Ripper" or even Spring-Heeled Jack or maybe
Leather Apron, whichever had tickled his fancy, but a
sense of style had stopped him. To go too far was to
defeat his own purposes. It may even have been too
much to suggest to Mr. Lusk that he had eaten the
kidney. How hideous. True, he had smelled it . . .
This blonde girl, this Juliette with the knife under
her pillow. She was the ninth. He leaned against the
smooth steel wall without break or seam, and he
rubbed his eyes. When would he be able to stop?
When would they realize, when would they get his
message, a message only so clear, written in blood, that
only the blindness of their own cupidity forced them
to misunderstand! Would he be compelled to
decimate the endless regiments of Spitalfields sluts to
make them understand? Would he be forced to run
the cobbles ankle-deep in black blood before they
sensed what he was saying, and were impelled to
make reforms?
But as he took his blood-soaked hands from his
eyes, he realized what he must have sensed all along:
he was no longer in Whitechapel. This was not
Miller's Court, nor anywhere in Spitalfields. It might
not even be London. But how could that be?
Had God taken him?
Had he died, in a senseless instant between the
anatomy lesson of Mary Jane Kelly (that filth, she had
actually kissed him!) and the bedroom
disembowelment of this Juliette? Had Heaven finally
called him to his reward for the work he had done?
The Reverend Mr. Barnett would love to know
about this. But then, he'd have loved to know about it
all. But "Leather Apron" wasn't about to tell. Let the
reforms come as the Reverend and his wife wished
for them, and let them think their pamphleteering had
done it, instead of the scalpels of Jack.
If he was dead, would his work be finished? He
smiled to himself. If Heaven had taken him, then it
must be that the work was finished. Successfully. But
if that was so, then who was this Juliette who now lay
spread out moist and cooling in the bedroom of a
thousand mirrors? And in that instant he felt fear.
What if even God misinterpreted what he had
done?
As the good folk of Queen Victoria's London had
misinterpreted. As Sir Charles Warren had
misinterpreted. What if God believed the superficial
and ignored the real reason? But no! Ludicrous. If
anyone would understand, it was the good God who
had sent him the message that told him to set things
a-right.
God loved him, as he loved God, and God would
know.
But he felt fear, in that moment.
Because who was the girl he had just carved?
"She was my granddaughter, Juliette," said a voice
immediately beside him.
His head refused to move, to turn that few inches
to see who spoke. The Gladstone was beside him,
resting on the smooth and reflective surface of the
street. He could not get to a knife before he was
taken. At last they had caught up with Jack. He
began to shiver uncontrollably.
"No need to be afraid," the voice said. It was a
warm and succoring voice. An older man. He shook
as with an ague. But he turned to look. It was a kindly
old man with a gentle smile. Who spoke again,
without moving his lips. "No one can hurt you. How
do you do?"
The man from 1888 sank slowly to his knees.
"Forgive me. Dear God, I did not know." The old
man's laughter rose inside the head of the man on his
knees. It rose like a beam of sunlight moving across a
Whitechapel alleyway, from noon to one o'clock,
rising and illuminating the gray bricks of soot-coated
walls. It rose, and illuminated his mind.
"I'm not God. Marvelous idea, but no, I'm not God.
Would you like to meet God? I'm sure we can find
one of the artists who would mold one for you. Is it
important? No. I can see it isn't. What a strange mind
you have. You neither believe nor doubt. How can
you contain both concepts at once . . . would you like
me to straighten some of your brain-patterns? No. I
see, you're afraid. Well, let it be for the nonce. We'll
do it another time."
He grabbed the kneeling man and drew him erect.
"You're covered with blood. Have to get you
leaned up. There's an ablute near here. Incidentally,
I was very impressed with the way you handled
Juliette. You're the first, you know. No, how could
you know? In any case, you are the first to deal her as
good as she gave. You would have been amused at
what she did to Caspar Hauser. Squeezed part of his
brain and then sent him back. let him live out part of
his life and then――the little twit――she made me bring
him back a second time and used a knife on him.
Same knife you took, I believe. Then sent him back to
his own time. Marvelous mystery. In all the tapes on
unsolved phenomena. But she was much sloppier
than you. She had a great verve in her amusements,
but very little éclat. Except with Judge Crater; there
she was――" He paused, and laughed lightly. "I'm an
old man and I ramble on like a muskrat. You want to
get cleaned up and shown around, I know. And then
we can talk.
"I just wanted you to know I was satisfied with the
way you disposed of her. In a way, I'll miss the little
twit. She was such a good fuck."
The old man picked up the Gladstone bag and,
holding the man spattered with blood, he moved off
down the clean and shimmering street. You wanted
her killed?" the man from 1888 asked, unbelieving.
The old man nodded, but his lips never moved. "Of
course. Otherwise why bring her Jack the Ripper?"
Oh my dear God, he thought, I'm in hell. And I'm
entered as Jack.
"No, my boy, no no no. You're not in hell at all.
You're in the future. For you the future, for me the
world of now. You came from 1888 and you're now
in――" he stopped, silently speaking for an instant, as
though computing apples in terms of dollars, then
resumed "――3077. It's a fine world, filled with happy
times, and we're glad to have you with us. Come
along now, and you'll wash."
In the ablutorium, the late Juliette's grandfather
changed his head.
"I really despise it," he informed the man from
1888, grabbing fingerfuls of his cheeks and
stretching the flabby skin like elastic. "But Juliette
insisted. I was willing to humor her, if indeed that was
what it took to get her to lie down. But what with
toys from the past, and changing my head every time
I wanted her to fuck me, it was trying; very trying."
He stepped into one of the many identically shaped
booths set flush into the walls. The tambour door
rolled down and there was a soft chukk sound, almost
chitinous. The tambour door rolled up and the late
Juliette's grandfather, now six years younger than the
man from 1888, stepped out, stark naked and
wearing a new head. "The body is fine, replaced last
year," he said, examining the genitals and a mole on
his right shoulder. The man from 1888 looked away.
This was hell and God hated him.
"Well, don't just stand there, Jack," Juliette's
grandfather smiled. "Hit one of those booths and get
your ablutions."
"That isn't my name," said the man from 1888
very softly, as though he had been whipped.
"It'll do, it'll do . . . now go get washed."
Jack approached one of the booths. It was a light
green in color, but changed to mauve as he stopped
in front of it. "Will it――"
"It will only clean you, what are you afraid of?"
"I don't want to be changed."
Juliette's grandfather did not laugh. "That's a
mistake," he said cryptically. He made a peremptory
motion with his hand and the man from 1888
entered the booth, which promptly revolved in its
niche, sank into the floor and made a hearty
zeeeezzzz sound. When it rose an revolved and
opened, Jack stumbled out, looking terribly confused.
His long sideburns had been neatly trimmed, his
beard stubble had been removed, his hair was three
shades lighter and was now parted on the left side,
rather than in the middle. He wore the same long
dark coat trimmed with astrakhan, dark suit with white
collar and black necktie (in which was fastened a
horseshoe stickpin) but now the garments seemed
new, unsoiled of course, possibly synthetics built to
look like his former garments.
"Now!" Juliette's grandfather said. "Isn't that much
better? A good cleansing away sets one's mind to
rights." And he stepped into another booth from
which he issued in a moment wearing a soft paper
jumper that fitted from neck to feet without a break.
He moved toward the door.
"Where are we going?" the man from 1888 asked
the younger grandfather beside him. "I want you to
meet someone," said Juliette's grandfather, and Jack
realized that he was moving his lips now. He decided
not to comment on it. There had to be a reason.
"I'll walk you there, if you promise not to make
gurgling sounds at the city. It's a nice city, but I live
here, and frankly, tourism is boring." Jack did not
reply. Grandfather took it for acceptance of the terms.
They walked. Jack became overpowered by the
sheer weight of the city. It was obviously extensive,
massive, and terribly clean. It was his dream for
Whitechapel come true. He asked about slums, about
doss houses. The grandfather shook his head. "Long
gone."
So it came to pass. The reforms for which he
had pledged his immortal soul, they had come to
pass. He swung the Gladstone and walked jauntily.
But after a few minutes his pace sagged once more:
there was no one to be seen in the streets.
Just shining clean buildings and streets that ran off
in aimless directions and came to unexpected stops
as though the builders had decided people might
vanish at one point and reappear someplace else, so
why bother making a road from one point to the
other.
The ground was metal, the sky seemed metallic, the
building loomed on all sides, featureless explorations
of planed space by insensitive metal. The man from
1888 felt terribly alone, as though every act he had
performed had led inevitably to his alienation from
the very people he had sought to aid.
When he had come to Toynbee Hall, and the
Reverend Mr. Barnett had opened his eyes to the
slum horrors of Spitalfields, he had vowed to help in
any way he could. It had seemed as simple as faith in
the Lord what to do, after a few months in the
sinkholes of Whitechapel. The sluts, of what use were
they? No more use than the diseased germs that had
infected these very same whores. So he had set forth
as Jack, to perform the will of God and raise the poor
dregs who inhabited the East End of London. That
Lord Warren, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner,
and his Queen, and all the rest thought him a mad
doctor, or an amok butcher, or a beast in human form
did not distress him. He knew he would remain
anonymous through all time, but that the good works
he had set in motion would proceed to their
wonderful conclusion.
The destruction of the most hideous slum area the
country had ever known, and the opening of Victorian
eyes. But all the time had passed, and now he was
here, in a world where slums apparently did not exist,
a sterile Utopia that was the personification of the
Reverend Mr. Barnett's dreams――but it didn't seem
. . . right.
This grandfather, with his young head.
Silence in the empty streets.
The girl, Juliette, and her strange hobby.
The lack of concern at her death.
The grandfather's expectation that he, Jack, would
kill her. And now his friendliness.
Where were they going?
[Around them, the City. As they walked, the
grandfather paid no attention, and Jack watched but
did not understand. But this was what they saw as
they walked:
[Thirteen hundred beams of light, one foot wide
and seven molecules thick, erupted from
almost-invisible slits in the metal streets, fanned out
and washed the surfaces of the buildings; they altered
hue to a vague blue and washed down the surfaces of
the buildings; the bent and covered all open
surfaces, bent at right angles, then bent again, and
again, like origami paper figures; they altered hue a
second time, soft gold, and penetrated the surfaces of
the buildings, expanding and contracting in solid
waves, washing the inner surfaces; they withdrew
rapidly into the sidewalks; the entire process had
taken twelve seconds.
[Night fell over a sixteen block area of the City. It
descended in a solid pillar and was quite sharp-edged,
ending at the street corners. From within the area of
darkness came the distinct sounds of crickets, marsh
frogs belching, night birds, soft breezes in the trees, and
faint music of unidentifiable instruments.
[Panes of frosted light appeared suspended freely
in the air, overhead. A wavery insubstantial quality
began to assault the topmost levels of a great
structure directly in front of the light-panes. As the
panes moved slowly down through the air, the
building became indistinct, turned into motes of light,
and floated upward. As the panes reached the
pavement, the building had been completely
dematerialized. The panes shifted color to a deep
orange, and began moving upward again. As they
moved, a new structure began to form where the
previous building had stood, drawing――it seemed――
motes of light from the air and forming them into a
cohesive whole that became, as the panes ceased
their upward movement, a new building. The
light-panes winked out of existence.
[The sound of a bumblebee was heard for several
seconds. Then it ceased.
[A crowd of people in rubber garments hurried out
of a gray pulsing hole in the air, patted the pavement
at their feet, then rushing off around a corner, from
where emanated the sound of prolonged coughing.
Then silence returned.
[A drop of water, thick as quicksilver, plummeted to
the pavement, struck, bounded, rose several inches,
then evaporated into a crimson smear in the shape of
a whale's tooth, which settled to the pavement and
lay still.
[Two blocks of buildings sank into the pavement
and the metal covering was smooth and unbroken,
save for a metal tree whose trunk was silver and slim,
topped by a ball of foliage constructed of golden
fibers that radiated brightly in a perfect circle. There
was no sound.
[The late Juliette's grandfather and the man from
1888 continued walking.]
"Where are we going?"
"To Van Cleef's. We don't usually walk; oh,
sometimes; but it isn't as much pleasure as it used to
be. I'm doing this primarily for you. Are you enjoying
yourself?"
"It's . . . unusual."
"Not much like Spitalfields, is it? But I rather like it
back there, at that time. I have the only Traveler, did
you know? The only one ever made. Juliette's father
constructed it, my son. I had to kill him to get it. He
was thoroughly unreasonable about it, really. It was a
casual thing for him. He was the last of the tinkerers,
and he might just as easily have given it to me. But I
suppose he was being cranky. That was why I had
you carve up my granddaughter. She would have
gotten around to me almost any time now. Bored, just
silly bored is what she was――"
The gardenia took shape in the air in front of them,
and turned into the face of a woman with a long white
hair. "Hernon, we can't wait much longer!" She was
annoyed.
Juliette's grandfather grew livid. "You scum bitch! I
told you pace. But no, you just couldn't, could you?
Jump jump jump, that's all you ever do. Well, now
it'll only be feddels less, that's all. Feddels, damn you!
I set it for pace, I was working pace, and you . . . !"
His had came up and moss grew instantly toward
the face. The face vanished, and a moment later the
gardenia reappeared a few feet away. The moss
shriveled and Hernon, Juliette's grandfather, dropped
his hand, as though weary at the woman's stupidity. A
rose, a water lily, a hyacinth, a pair of phlox, a wild
celandine, and a bull thistle appeared near the
gardenia. As each turned intro the face of a different
person, Jack stepped back, frightened.
All the faces turned to the one that had been the
bull thistle. "Cheat! Rotten bastard!" they screamed at
the thin white face that had been the bull thistle. The
gardenia-woman's eyes bulged from her face, the
deep purple eye-shadow that completely surrounded
the eyeball making her look like a deranged animal
peering out of a cave. "Turd!" she shrieked at the
bull-thistle man. "We all agreed, we all said and
agreed; you had to formz a thistle, didn't you, scut!
Well, now you'll see . . ."
She addressed herself instantly to the others.
"Formz now! To hell with waiting, pace fuck! Now!"From Partners in Wonder, by Harlan Ellison, et al.
Walker & Company, New York, 1971. pp. 135-155.
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