Ellison Wonderland by Harlan Ellison Page A

were jerky in the windshield, and the murk that he raced through was almost too grotesque to be a fact of nature.
    When he slewed the car into the drive, the gatekeeper threw the iron barrier back almost spastically. The ranch wagon chewed gravel, sending debris back in a wide fan, as Tedrow plunged ahead. When he screeched to a halt before the sanitarium, the doors burst open and the senior attendant, Wilson, raced down the steps.
    â€œThis way, th–this way, Doctor Te — ”
    â€œGet out of my way, you idiot, I know which direction!” he shoved Wilson aside, and strode up the steps and into the building.
    â€œIt started about an hour ago . . . we didn’t know what was happ — ”
    â€œAnd you didn’t call me immediately? Ass!”
    â€œWe just thought, we just thought it was another one of his stages,
you
know how he is . . . ”
    Tedrow snorted in disgust and threw off his topcoat as he made his way rapidly down the corridor to the section of the sanitarium that housed the restraining rooms.
    As they came into the annex, through the heavy glass–portaled door, he heard the scream for the first time.
    In that scream, in that tormented, pleading, demanding and hopelessly lost tremor there were all the sounds of fear he had ever heard. In that voice he heard even his own voice, his own soul, crying out for something.
    For an unnameable something, as the scream came again.
    â€œGive me some light!”
    Another world, another voice, another life. Some evil and empty beseeching from a corner of a dust–strewn universe. Hanging there timelessly, vibrant in colorless agony. A million tired and blind stolen voices all wrapped into that one howl, all the eternal sadnesses and losses and pains ever known to man. It was all there, as the good in the world was sliced open and left to bleed its golden fluid away in the dirt. It was a lone animal being eaten by a bird of prey. It was a hundred children crushed beneath iron treads. It was one good man with his entrails in his blood–soaked hands. It was the soul and the pain and the very vital fiber of life, draining away, without light, without hope, without succor.
    â€œGive me some light!”
    Tedrow flung himself at the door, and threw back the bolt on the observation window. He stared for a long and silent moment as the scream trembled once more on the air, weightlessly, transparently, tingling off into emptiness. He stared, and felt the impact of a massive horror stifle his own cry of disbelief and terror.
    Then he spun away from the window and hung there, sweat–
drenched back flat to the wall, with the last sight of Richard Becker he would ever hope to see, burned forever behind his eyes.
    The sound of his sobs in the corridor held the others back. They stared silently, still hearing that never–spoken echo reverberating down and down and down the corridors of their minds:
    Give me some light!
    Fumbling beside him, Tedrow slammed the observation window shut, and then his arm sank back to his side.
    Inside room 16, lying up against the far wall, his back against the soft passive padding, Richard Becker looked out at the door, at the corridor, at the world, forever.
    Looked out as he had in his first moment of life: purely and simply.
    Without a face. From his hairline to his chin, a blank, empty, featureless expanse. Empty. Silent. Devoid of sight or smell or sound. Blank and faceless, a creature God had never deigned to bless with a mirror to the world. His Method now was gone.
    Richard Becker, actor, had played his last part, and had gone away, taking with him Richard Becker, a man who had known all the sights, all the sounds, all the life of fear.

    What can I tell you? When I was a kid in Painesville, Ohio, and involved in the intricacies of Jack Armstrong, The Green Hornet, I Love A Mystery, Hop Harrigan and Dick Tracy,
anything
was possible. Under the side porch of our house, magic