Ellison, Harlan Love ain, t nothing

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bumped his weight heavily against the door twice, three times. It bowed, but did not give.
There was only one way. If there were more ways, they weren't registering, and he had been in the
doorway for almost two minutes now. He had to take the chance.
He hop-jumped half a dozen paces out into the street, a timorous creature, and then hurled himself
like a battering ram back into the doorway and against the slabbed door. The machine-gunner was a
moment too slow. By the time he had tracked the big .30 caliber J-34 to the new target, Arnie was
on his return trip. The bigbeast rattle of spraying shots overrode the thwack! of Arnie's shoulder
hitting the door, and puffs of dirt, chips of cobblestone exploded harmlessly as he slammed full
against the bolted door. The door gave and splintered inward off its bolt as a fresh shower of
shots ripped into the edge of the building, chasing him, seeking him, but not locating him.
Then, as the big air-cooled machine gun went berserk, firing hysterically at the empty doorway, he
fell inside; with a fluid, almost instinctive movement, he slammed the door closed again, and
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fumbled for the bolt. It was half-torn from its screws, but it held, rattling into place as he
palmed it home. Then he turned--
Into darkness.
That suddenly, that abruptly. The electricity of what had filled the past few moments had held
light within his eyes, but now that he was momentarily safe, tension and fear and preoccupation
were used up and the mind--magician master of misdirection--came fully to bear on what was inside
that house. What was inside that house:
Darkness.
Nothingness.
Black chilled pressing-in heavy midnight blindness, a coalsack filled with dust; nothingness
weighing down on his eyes, filming them with ink-shadows, flitting dimnesses ...
Slowly his legs collapsed under him. Standing in quicksand, he began to sink with exaggerated
slowness to the dirty floorboards of the anonymous hovel. A puppet whose usefulness has passed,
his unseen manipulator snipped his strings and he fluttered into a heap, bundled in dark shrouds
of fear, and a vagrant vision he had had for many years (and never remembered upon awakening)
crawled back to him:
Thick winds, like ropes of sand, tore at him, the sound like tortured metal shrieking as it was
rent. Arms flung up to the nightmare sky, whipped into cloud-and-dark froth, he stood on a barren
plain. He was a scarecrow, or something very much like a scarecrow; an imbecile relation to a
scarecrow. In the middleground of an empty plain, beaten by sound and hurricane winds, he was
crucified on a shaft of night, under a gibbering sky. And as he stood unmoving, from out of that
sky--riding a trough of shouting black wind--the blind bird plummeted toward him. It was an ink
bird, a domino bird, a soot bird; blind and small and very frightened out in its storm; but he
could not help it, could not bring it peace or security or comfort, and he had nothing to say to
that blind bird, save to tell it to go away, to fly back up into the darkness. Blind bird, blind
bird, go away from me! But it was a shivering, frightened little bird, and over his head it
circled, all through that night, until at last he admitted he was afraid, too.
The vision came with extraordinary clarity, for the first time in his life while he was awake, and
he suddenly realized how many nights he had trembled in his bed, shivering with that pathetic,
circling blind bird. And the question came to him unbidden, there in the pitch-darkness of that
house, Why do I remember it now?
Why, indeed? Again, an answer leapt unbidden.
Less than a month before, the offensive had struck south from Normandy, leaving the flesh and the
metal piled high in the fields, on the beaches, in the sea. He had been trotting along behind a
deuce-and-a-half stacked high with cartridge cases, using the truck for cover across a two-mile
open stretch currently in favor with the German mortar batteries. He had slung his M-1 over his
shoulder and was folded down in upon himself, lighting the roach of his last cigarette, when the
truck rolled its right front wheel across the exact center of an antitank mine. He had been a few
paces farther behind (having ceased to dogtrot, trying to get the butt lit) and only that had
saved him. All he knew was that the truck rose up in majestic fury, like a featherweight prop,
sprouted blossoms of metal and flame, and exploded like a thousand fire-lilies. The concussion
rather rudely hoisted him by the ass and shot-put him three hundred feet across the field and into
a drainage ditch, without his once complaining. He was unconscious before he hit turf. He came to
rest upside-down, legs twisted under his body (but, miraculously, unbroken), his back lofted in an
aesthetic arch by his pack and the rifle which had whirled along with him. When the medics found
him, he was sleeping as peacefully as any classic example of shock and shrapnel and whiplash and
concussion and blast-burn could sleep. He was trundled back to the evacuation hospital and when
the slight burns and flesh wounds had been treated, they had waited patiently for him to come out
of the coma, hoping APCs would do the job and he could be trundled back into the line, because
there was still much trouble out front. Every man was needed.
Arnie came out of it nicely, and sat up one morning as though refreshed from an extended snooze.
Stretching his arms over his head and grunting with pleasure, he had heard the doctor ask, "Well,
how do you feel?" and had gotten off the classic line, "What time is it?" The doctor had said,
"About ten thirty," and Arnie had said, "Blackout?" and the doctor had looked heavenward, because
it was ten thirty in the morning, not the evening, and Arnie's eyes were wide open.
They had bandaged his eyes, and he had lain there for close to a week, trapped in stifling
darkness, and the soreness had passed, but the pools of thought had bubbled.
Memory within a memory:
Stealing dimes from his mother's purse. His father had gone to work, and she lay in bed, catching [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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