* * * *
Introduction to
A TOY FOR JULIETTE
What follows is, in the purest sense, the end-result of literary feedback. Recently the story editor of a prime-time television series, pressed for a script to shoot, sat down and wrote one himself rather than wait for the vagaries of a freelance scenarist’s schedule and dalliance. When he had completed the script, which was to go before the cameras in a matter of days, he sent it as a matter of form to the legal department of the studio. For the clearance of names, etc. Later that day the legal department called him back in a frenzy. Almost scene-for-scene and word-for-word (including the title), the non-s-f story editor had copied a well-known science fiction short story. When it was pointed out to him, the story editor blanched and recalled he had indeed read that story, some fifteen years before. Hurriedly, the story rights were purchased from the well-known fantasy writers who had originally conceived the idea. I hasten to add that I accept the veracity of the story editor when he swears he had no conscious knowledge of imitating the story. I believe him because this sort of unconscious plagiarism is commonplace in the world of the writer. It is inevitable that much of the mass of reading a writer does will stick with him somehow, in vague concepts, snatches of scenes, snippets of characterization, and it will turn up later, in the writer’s own work; altered, transmogrified, but still a direct result of another writer’s work. It is by no means “plagiarism”. It is part of the answer to the question asked by idiots of authors at cocktail parties: “Where do you get your ideas?”
Poul Anderson dropped me a note several months ago explaining that he had just written a story he was about to send out to market when he realized it paralleled the theme of a story he had read at a writers’ conference we had both attended, just a month or so before. He added that his story was only vaguely similar to mine, but he wanted to apprise me to the resemblance so there would be no question later. It was a rhetorical letter: I’m arrogant, but not arrogant enough to think Poul Anderson needs to crib from me. Similarly, at the World Science Fiction Convention held last year in Cleveland, the well-known German fan Tom Schlück and I were introduced. (Tom had been brought over by the fans as Fan Guest of Honor, an exchange tradition in fandom perpetuated by the TransAtlantic Fan Fund.) The first thing he did after we shook hands was to hand me a German science fiction paperback. I had some difficulty understanding why he had given me the gift. Tom opened the book—a collection of stories pseudonymously written by top German s-f fan-pro Walter Ernsting. The flyleaf said: “To Harlan Ellison with thanks and compliments.” I still didn’t understand. Then Tom turned to the first story, which was titled “Die Sonnenbombe”. Under the title it said: (Nach einer Idee von Harlan Ellison). I wrinkled my brow. I still didn’t understand. I recognized my own name, which looks the same in all languages save Russian, Chinese, Hebrew or Sanskrit, but I don’t read German, and I’m afraid I stood there like a clot. Tom explained that the basic idea of a story I had written in 1957—”Run for the Stars”—had inspired Ernsting to write “Die Sonnenbombe”. It was the literary feedback, halfway across the world. I was deeply touched, and even more, it was a feeling of justification. Every writer save the meanest hack hopes his words will live after he goes down the hole, that his thoughts will influence people. It isn’t the primary purpose of the writing, of course, but it’s the sort of secret wish that parallels the Average Man having babies, so his name doesn’t die with him. And here, in my hands, was the visible proof that something my mind had conjured up had reached out and ensnared another man’s imagination. It was obviously the sincerest form of flattery. And by no means “plagiarism”. It was the literary feedback. The instances of this action-reaction among writers are numberless, and some of them are legend. It is the reason for writers’ seminars, workshops, conferences and the endless exchange of letters among writers. What has all of this—or any of it—to do with Robert Bloch, the author of the story that follows? Everything.
In 1943 Robert Bloch had published a story titled “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”. The number of times it has been reprinted, anthologized, translated into radio and TV scripts, and most of all plagiarized, are staggering. I read it in 1953, and the story stuck with me always. When I heard its dramatization on the Molle Mystery Theater, it became a recurring favorite memory. The story idea was simply that Jack the Ripper, by killing at specific times, made his peace with the dark gods and was thus allowed to live forever. Jack was immortal, and Bloch traced with cold methodical logic a trail of similar Ripper-style murders in almost every major city of the world, over a period of fifty or sixty years. The concept of Jack—who was never apprehended—living on, from era to era, caught my imagination. When it came time to put this anthology together, I called Robert Bloch and suggested that if Jack were, in fact, immortal, why then he would have to go on into the future. The image of a creature of Whitechapel fog and filth, the dark figure of Leather Apron, skulking through a sterile and automated city of the future, was an anachronism that fascinated me. Bob agreed, and said he would set to work at once. When his story came in, it was (pardon the word) a delight, and I bought it at once. But the concept of Jack in the future would not release my thoughts. I dwelled on it with almost morbid fascination. Finally I asked Bob if he minded my doing a story for this book that took up where his left off. He said he thought it would be all right. It was, as I’ve said, in the purest sense, the act of literary feedback. And again, the sincerest form of flattery. Bloch had literally triggered the creative process in another writer.
The story that follows Robert Bloch’s story is the product of that feedback. Mr. Bloch has kindly and graciously agreed to write the introduction to my story, in an effort to gain revenge for the introduction to his story. Tied in a knot, the two introductions, the two stories and the two afterword: seem to have melded into a unified whole that demonstrate; more admirably than any million words of literary critique; what it is that one writer obtains from another.
What this particular editor has obtained from that particular writer named Robert Bloch is far more than a story idea. I first saw Bloch—tall, debonair, sharp-featured, bespectacled, smoking through a long cigarette holder reminiscent of Eric von Stroheim—at the Midwest Science Fiction Convention at Beatley’s-on-the-Lake Hotel in Belle-fontaine, Ohio, in 1951. I was almost eighteen. I was obnoxious, wide-eyed and hungry to know all there was about science fiction. Bloch was at that time, and had been for many years, a living legend. Even though a recognized professional with many books and stories to his credit, he had always made himself available to even the grubbiest fan anxious to cadge a story or article for some half-legible fan magazines. Gratis, of course. He was the perennial toast-master, his wit a combination of cornball and cutlass-incisive. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. Up to this pillar of fantasy walked the snot Ellison.
I do not recall what happened on that occasion, the mists of time and the ravages of senility having already reached me at age thirty-three, but it must have been memorable, because someone took our photograph, and I still have a copy: myself looking smug as a potato bug and Bloch staring down on me with a peculiar expression that says benevolence, toleration, amused confusion and stark terror. I have been privileged to call myself a friend of Robert Bloch’s since that time.
One more small anecdote, then I’ll let Bloch speak for himself on the subjects of his career, his childhood and the nature of violence. When I arrived in Hollywood in 1962, literally without a dollar in my pocket (I had ten cents, a wife, a son, and we had been so broke driving cross-country we had only eaten the contents of a box of pecan pralines for the last three hundred miles), in a battered 1951 Ford, Robert Bloch—who was not all that well off himself—loaned me enough money to get a place to stay and food to eat. He waited three years to be repaid, and never once asked for the considerable sum. He is one of God’s Good People, as anyone who has ever come anywhere near him can attest. It is one of the giant dichotomies of our times that a man as gentle, amusing, empathic and peaceful as Bloch can write the gruesome and warped stories he produces with alarming regularity. One can only offer by way of amelioration Sturgeon’s lament that after he had written one—and one only—story about homosexuality, everyone accused him of being a fag. Bloch is an entity quite apart and diametrically opposite from the horrors he sets on paper. (I might suggest the reader remember this writer’s lament when he comes to the story after Bloch’s.)
And now, beaming with memorabilia and bonhomie, here is Bloch:
“As a small child I skipped several grades of grammar school, thus finding myself in the company of older and bigger youngsters who introduced me to the savage jungle of the playground, with its secret pecking order and ceaseless torment of the weak by the strong. Fortunately for myself, I never became a physical victim nor was I an over-compensating bully; in some strange fashion I found that I was able to lead my companions into various intricate imaginative games as a substitute activity. We dug trenches in the back yard and played war; the open front porch became a deck of a pirate ship and captured victims walked the plank (a leaf from the dining-room table) to jump off into the ocean of the front lawn. But I dimly recognized that the shows and circuses I devised didn’t hold the interest of my playmates nearly as well as the games which were surrogates for violence. And later on, as they were inevitably lured towards the venerated violences of boxing, wrestling, football and other adult-approved outlets for outrage on the human person, I retreated to reading, sketching, drama and the enjoyment of the theater and motion pictures.
“The silent version of The Phantom of the Opera scared the daylights out of me as an eight-year-old, but a part of me was objective enough to find a fascination in this demonstration of the power of make-believe. I began to read widely in the field of imaginary violence. When, at the age of fifteen, I began corresponding with the fantasy writer. H. P. Lovecraft, he encouraged me to try my own at writing. As a high school comic I’d discovered that I could make audiences laugh: now I began to realize that I could move them emotionally in other directions.
“At seventeen, I sold my first story to Weird Tales magazine and thus found a lifelong vocation. Since then I’ve made magazine appearances with upwards of four hundred short stories, articles and novelettes. I’ve conducted magazine columns, seen stories reprinted in close to a hundred anthologies here and abroad; twenty-five books, novels and short-story collections have been published. In addition, I’ve ghost-written for politicians and spent a term writing almost every conceivable variety of advertising copy. I adapted thirty-nine of my own stories for a radio series, and in recent years have concentrated largely on scripts for television and motion pictures.
“In the beginning my work was almost entirely in the field of fantasy, where the violent element was openly and obviously a product of imagination. The mass violence of World War II caused me to examine violence at its source—on the individual level. Still unwilling or unable to cope with its present reality, I retreated into history and re-created, as a prototype of apparently senseless violence, the infamously famous mass murderer who styled himself ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’. This short story was to see endless reprint and anthologization, plus frequent dramatizing on radio, and finally appeared on television; at latest report it popped up as a dramatic reading in Israel. For some reason the notion of Jack the Ripper’s survival in the present day touched a sensitive spot in the audience psyche.
“I myself was far from insensitive to this incarnation of violence in our midst, and I beat a hasty retreat from further consideration. As the war continued and real-life violence came dangerously near, I concentrated for a time upon humor and science fiction. It wasn’t until 1945, when my first short-story collection (The Opener of the Way) appeared, that I rounded out its contents with a new effort, ‘One Way to Mars,’ in which a pseudo-science-fictional form is employed to describe the psychotic fugue of a contemporary man of violence.
“A year later I wrote my first novel, The Scarf—the first-person account of a mass murderer. Since that time, while still employing fantasy and science fiction for satire and social criticism, I’ve devoted many of my subsequent short stories and almost all of my novels (Spiderweb, Shooting Star, The Kidnaper, The Will to Kill, Psycho, The Dead Beat, Firebug, The Couch, Terror) to a direct examination of violence in our society.
“Psycho was inspired by a somewhat guarded newspaper account of a mass murderer in a small town close to the one where I resided; I knew none of the intimate details of the crimes, but I wondered just what sort-of individual could perpetrate them while living as an apparently normal citizen a notoriously gossip-ridden and constrictedly conventional environment. I created my schizophrenic character out of what I thought was whole cloth, only to discover, some years later, that the rationale I evolved for him was frighteningly close to his aberrated reality.
“Some of my other characters have also proved to be a bit too real for comfort. When I wrote The Scarf, for example, the editors insisted on deleting a short section in which the protagonist indulges in a bit of sadistic fantasy. He imagines what it would be like to take a high-powered rifle up to the top of a tall building and start shooting people below at random. Farfetched, said the editors. Today, I have the last laugh—but it’s not necessarily a laugh of amusement.
“The Scarf, incidentally, was just republished in paperback. After twenty years, I naturally went through the book to update a few slang phrases and topical references. But my protagonist didn’t need any changing; the passage of time alone did the job for me. Twenty years ago I wrote him as a villain—today he emerges as an anti-hero.
“For the violence has come into its own now; the violence I examined, and at times projected and predicted, has become today’s commonplace and accepted reality. This, to me, is far more terrifying than anything I could possibly imagine.”
* * * *
Ellison again. In an attempt to unify the whole, and believing firmly that Bloch’s piece loses very little impact for the revelation, this section of the book has been structured to be read all of a piece. I urge you to go from Bloch to his afterword to his introduction to the Ellison to his afterword. It is a case of age before beauty
Or possibly Beauty before the Beast.
* * * *
A TOY FOR JULIETTE
by Robert Bloch
Juliette entered her bedroom, smiling, and a thousand Juliettes smiled back at her. For all the walls were paneled with mirrors, and the ceiling was set with inlaid panes that reflected her image.
Wherever she glanced she could see the blonde curls framing the sensitive features of a face that was a radiant amalgam of both child and angel; a striking contrast to the rich, ripe revelation of her body in the filmy robe.
But Juliette wasn’t smiling at herself. She smiled because she knew that Grandfather was back, and he’d brought her another toy. In just a few moments it would be decontaminated and delivered, and she wanted to be ready.
Juliette turned the ring on her finger and the mirrors dimmed. Another turn would darken the room entirely; a twist in the opposite direction would bring them blazing into brilliance. It was all a matter of choice—but then, that was the secret of life. To choose, for pleasure.
And what was her pleasure tonight?
Juliette advanced to one of the mirror panels, and passed her hand before it. The glass slid to one side, revealing the niche behind it; the coffin-shaped opening in the solid rock, with the boot and thumb-screws set at the proper heights.
For a moment she hesitated; she hadn’t played that game in years. Another time, perhaps. Juliette waved her hand and the mirror moved to cover the opening again. She wandered along the rows of panels, gesturing as she walked, pausing to inspect what was behind each mirror in turn. Here was the rack, there the stocks with the barbed whips resting against the dark-stained wood. And here was the dissecting table, hundreds of years old, with its quaint instruments; behind the next panel, the electrical prods and wires that produced such weird grimaces and contortions of agony, to say nothing of screams. Of course the screams didn’t matter in a soundproofed room.
Juliette moved to the side wall and waved her hand again; the obedient glass slid away and she stared at a plaything she’d almost forgotten. It was one of the first things Grandfather had ever given her, and it was very old, almost like a mummy case. What had he called it? The Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, that was it—with the sharpened steel spikes set inside the lid. You chained a man inside, and you turned the little crank that closed the lid, ever so slowly, and the spikes pierced the wrists and the elbows, the ankles and the knees, the groin and the eyes. You had to be careful not to get excited and turn too quickly, or you’d spoil the fun.
Grandfather had shown her how it worked, the first time he brought her a real live toy. But then, Grandfather had shown her everything. He’d taught her all she knew, for he was very wise. He’d even given her her name—Juliette—from one of the old-fashioned printed books he’d discovered by the philosopher De Sade.
Grandfather had brought the books from the Past, just as he’d brought the playthings for her. He was the only one who had access to the Past, because he owned the Traveler
The Traveler was a very ingenious mechanism, capable of attaining vibrational frequencies which freed it from the time-bind. At rest, it was just a big square boxlike shape, the size of a small room. But when Grandfather took over the controls and the oscillation started, the box would blur and disappear. It was still there, Grandfather said—at least, the matrix remained as a fixed point in space and time—but anything or anyone within the square could move freely into the Past to wherever the controls were programed. Of course they would be invisible when they arrived, but that was actually an advantage, particularly when it came to finding things and bringing them back. Grandfather had brought back some very interesting objects from almost mythical places—the great library of Alexandria, the Pyramid of Cheops, the Kremlin, the Vatican, Fort Knox—all the storehouses of treasure and knowledge which existed thousand; of years ago. He liked to go to that part of the Past, the period before the thermonuclear wars and the robotic ages, and collect things. Of course books and jewels and metal; were useless, except to an antiquarian, but Grandfather was a romanticist and loved the olden times.
It was strange to think of him owning the Traveler, but of course he hadn’t actually created it. Juliette’s father was really the one who built it, and Grandfather took possession of it after her father died. Juliette suspected Grandfather had killed her father and mother when she was just a baby, but she could never be sure. Not that it mattered; Grandfather was always very good to her, and besides, soon he would die and she’d own the Traveler herself.
They used to joke about it frequently. “I’ve made you into a monster,” he’d say. “And someday you’ll end up destroying me. After which, of course, you’ll go on to destroy the entire world—or what little remains of it.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” she’d tease.
“Certainly not. That’s my dream—the destruction of everything. An end to all this sterile decadence. Do you realize that at one time there were more than three billion inhabitants on this planet? And now, less than three thousand! Less than three thousand, shut up inside these Domes, prisoners of themselves and sealed away forever, thanks to the sins of the fathers who poisoned not only the outside world but outer space by meddling with the atomic order of the universe. Humanity is virtually extinct already; you will merely hasten the finale.”
“But couldn’t we all go back to another time, in the Traveler?” she asked.
“Back to what time? The continuum is changeless; one event leads inexorably to another, all links in a chain which binds us to the present and its inevitable end in destruction. We’d have temporary individual survival, yes, but to no purpose. And none of us are fitted to survive in a more primitive environment. So let us stay here and take what pleasure we can from the moment. My pleasure is to be the sole user and possessor of the Traveler. And yours, Juliette—”
Grandfather laughed then. They both laughed, because they knew what her pleasure was.
Juliette killed her first toy when she was eleven—a little boy. It had been brought to her as a special gift from Grandfather, from somewhere in the Past, for elementary sex play, but it wouldn’t cooperate, and she lost her temper and beat it to death with a steel rod. So Grandfather brought her an older toy, with brown skin, and it cooperated very well, but in the end she tired of it and one day when it was sleeping in her bed she tied it down and found a knife.
Experimenting a little before it died, Juliette discovered new sources of pleasure, and of course Grandfather found out. That’s when he’d christened her “Juliette”; he seemed to approve most highly, and from then on he brought her the playthings she kept behind the mirrors in her bedroom. And on his restless rovings into the Past he brought her new toys.
Being invisible, he could find them for her almost anywhere on his travels—all he did was to use a stunner and transport them when he returned. Of course each toy had to be very carefully decontaminated; the Past was teeming with strange micro-organisms. But once the toys were properly antiseptic they were turned over to Juliette for her pleasure, and during the past seven years she had enjoyed herself.
It was always delicious, this moment of anticipation before a new toy arrived. What would it be like? Grandfather was most considerate; mainly, he made sure that the toys he brought her could speak and understand Anglish—or “English” as they used to call it in the Past. Verbal communication was often important, particularly if Juliette wanted to follow the precepts of the philosopher De Sade and enjoy some form of sex relation before going on to keener pleasures.
But there was still the guessing beforehand. Would this toy be young or old, wild or tame, male or female? She’d had all kinds, and every possible combination. Sometimes she kept them alive for days before tiring of them—or before the subtleties of which she was capable caused them to expire. At other times she wanted it to happen quickly; tonight, for example, she knew she could be soothed only by the most primitive and direct action.
Once Juliette realized this, she stopped playing with her mirror panels and went directly to the big bed. She pulled back the coverlet, groped under the pillow until she felt it. Yes, it was still there—the big knife with the long, cruel blade. She knew what she would do now: take the toy to bed with her and then, at precisely the proper moment, combine her pleasures. If she could time her knife thrust—
She shivered with anticipation, then with impatience.
What kind of toy would it be? She remembered the suave, cool one—Benjamin Bathurst was his name, an English diplomat from the time of what Grandfather called the Napoleonic Wars. Oh, he’d been suave and cool enough, until she beguiled him with her body, into the bed. And there’d been that American aviatrix from slightly later on in the Past, and once, as a very special treat, the entire crew of a sailing vessel called the Marie Celeste. They had lasted for weeks!
Strangely enough, she’d even read about some of her toys afterwards. Because when Grandfather approached them with his stunner and brought them here, they disappeared forever from the Past, and if they were in any way known or important in their time, such disappearances were noted. And some of Grandfather’s books had accounts of the “mysterious vanishing” which took place and was, of course, never explained. How delicious it all was!
Juliette patted the pillow back into place and slid the knife under it. She couldn’t wait, now; what was delaying things?
She forced herself to move to a vent and depress the sprayer, shedding her robe as the perfumed mist bathed her body. It was the final allurement—but why didn’t her toy arrive?
Suddenly Grandfather’s voice came over the auditor.
“I’m sending you a little surprise, dearest.”
That’s what he always said; it was part of the game.
Juliette depressed the communicator-toggle. “Don’t tease,” she begged. “Tell me what it’s like.”
“An Englishman. Late Victorian Era. Very prim and proper, by the looks of him.”
“Young? Handsome?”
“Passable.” Grandfather chuckled. “Your appetites betray you, dearest.”
“Who is it—someone from the books?”
“I wouldn’t know the name. We found no identification during the decontamination. But from his dress and manner, and the little black bag he carried when I discovered him so early in the morning, I’d judge him to be a physician returning from an emergency call.”
Juliette knew about “physicians” from her reading, of course; just as she knew what “Victorian” meant. Somehow the combination seemed exactly right.
“Prim and proper?” She giggled. “Then I’m afraid it’s due for a shock.”
Grandfather laughed. “You have something in mind, I take it.”
“Yes.”
“Can I watch?”
“Please—not this time.”
“Very well.”
“Don’t be mad, darling. I love you.”
Juliette switched off. Just in time, too, because the door was opened and the toy came in.
She stared at it, realizing that Grandfather had told the truth. The toy was a male of thirty-odd years, attractive but by no means handsome. It couldn’t be, in that dark garb and those ridiculous side whiskers. There was something almost depressingly refined and mannered about it, an air of embarrassed repression.
And of course, when it caught sight of Juliette in her revealing robe, and the bed surrounded by mirrors, it actually began to blush.
That reaction won Juliette completely. A blushing Victorian, with the build of a bull—and unaware that this was the slaughterhouse!
It was so amusing she couldn’t restrain herself; she moved forward at once and put her arms around it.
“Who—who are you? Where am I?”
The usual questions, voiced in the usual way. Ordinarily. Juliette would have amused herself by parrying with answers designed to tantalize and titillate her victim. But tonight she felt an urgency which only increased as she embraced the toy and pressed it back toward the waiting bed.
The toy began to breathe heavily, responding. But it was still bewildered. “Tell me—I don’t understand. Am I alive? Or is this heaven?’
Juliette’s robe fell open as she lay back. “You’re alive, darling,” she murmured. “Wonderfully alive.” She laughed as she began to prove the statement. “But closer to heaven than you think.”
And to prove that statement, her free hand slid under the pillow and groped for the waiting knife.
But the knife wasn’t there any more. Somehow it had already found its way into the toy’s hand. And the toy wasn’t prim and proper any longer, its face was something glimpsed in nightmare. Just a glimpse, before the blinding blur of the knife blade, as it came down, again and again and again—
The room, of course, was soundproof, and there was plenty of time. They didn’t discover what was left of Juliette’s body for several days.
Back in London, after the final mysterious murder in the early morning hours, they never did find Jack the Ripper....
* * * *
Afterword:
A number of years have passed since I sat down at the typewriter one gloomy winter day and wrote “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” for magazine publication. The magazine in which it appeared gave up its ghost, and interest in ghosts, a long time ago. But somehow my little story seems to have survived. It has since pursued me in reprint, collection, anthologies, foreign translations, radio broadcasts and television.
So when the editor of this anthology proposed that I do a story and suggested, “What about Jack the Ripper in the future?” I was capable of only one response.
You’ve just read it.
* * * *