Slippage (54 page)
Authors: Harlan Ellison
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Horror, #Anthologies
"But here, now, the two of us, father and son together at last, here on Mars, in Atlantis. We can talk as long as we wish. It's really fortuitous Dennis. Or do you prefer Denny?"
And there, in the sunken cathedral, far away in another sky, beneath a broiling sun, under a crimson ocean, inside a triangle that opened onto misty reaches, father and son walked and talked together. As it had been ordained. As it had never been ordained. By chance. By choice. By design. Happenstance.
At last Dennis Lanfear had all the time he would ever need to realize his dearest wish: to share, amazingly, all the aspects of the father he had never known.
Never knowing this:
that at the final moment of George DeVore Lanfear's life, as death plunged toward him from above, his last fleeting thought was that he would never see his kid grow up, never know what sort of man he was to become.
By chance. By choice.
Somewhere in the North Atlantic, a body bobbed face-down in warm waters, but that body might not have once been Dennis Lanfear.
Nor was there, for any reason, a howl in the halls of hell; not even in the halls of the gods.
___
When I got mustered out, on April Fool’s Day 1959, and was going to make tracks for Chicago to work for Hamling at
Rogue
, I literally had to pull Charlotte into the car. She was high on busting my chops, pretending she wanted to stay in that crummy trailer, in E-town. Yeah, that’d happen. But after driving me buggywhipcrazy she came along. We got a nice apartment on Dempster Street in Evanston, I steamed the wallpaper and repainted, and we moved in all the new furniture. When Hamling and I went to New York for a distributors’ convention, I asked her to open the new bank account with my salary advance of a thousand bucks. When I got back three day slater, the apartment was cleaned to the walls. I filed two days later. It took eighteen months for the divorce to be final. Now it’s thirty-seven years later. She’s a real bad, sun-faded memory. But it was, significantly, the first or second big slippage I had to deal with. And how’s everything with you?
___
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this
ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical,
now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the
publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents
either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
Introduction: “The Fault in My Lines” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1997 by
The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
The stories in this collection originally appeared in the following
anthologies or magazines: The Best American Short Stories: 1993, Best New Horror #5 &
#6, Borderlands, Dante's Disciples, Dark Destiny, Night And The Enemy, Ten Tales, The
Ultimate Dragon and The Year's Best Horror Stories: xvii;
Aboriginal Science Fiction,
Eidolon, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the
Harlan Ellison Dream Corridor series, Interzone, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
Lore, Literal Latte, Midnight Graffiti, New Rave, Omni, Omni Online, Pulphouse: The Hardback
Magazine, The Twilight Zone Magazine
and
The 17th Annual World Fantasy Program Book.
“Mefisto in Onyx” was also published in book form by Mark V. Ziesing,
Publisher. “The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams” originally appeared as an audio cassette
(narrated by the Author) accompanying Cyberdreams's “H.R. Giger Screensaver.” “Go Toward the
Light” was originally broadcast as a segment of Chanukah Lights, a National Public Radio
presentation recorded on 15 November 1994 and electronically fed to satellite uplink on 23
November 1994 for broadcast in November and December 1994. “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich” was
first telecast as an episode of
The Twilight Zone
on 2 April 1989.
The stories, essays and teleplays are variously copyright © 1986, 1988, 1989,
1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“The Dragon On the Bookshelf” written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg;
copyright © 1995 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation and Agberg, Ltd.
“Nackles” by Donald E. Westlake (as by “Curt Clark”). Copyright © 1963 by
Mercury Press, Inc. Renewed, copyright ©1991 by Donald E. Westlake. Reprinted by permission
of the Author.
Copyright © 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
ISBN 978-1-4976-0432-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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