Stalking the Nightmare by Harlan Ellison Read Free Book Online Page A

that had grown cold since 1946.
    Without dipping into capital he was able to underwrite his expenses handsomely. Even though the gnomes of Zurich had done away with unnumbered, secret accounts, he had made his money in a way that caused no concern among the assessors, customhouse officials, tithe-seekers and running-dogs of the IRS desiring duty, levy, tribute, tallage, liver and lights. He moved freely under a variety of passports and a number of names. He came to think of himself as a nameless, stateless person, someone out of a Graham Greene suspense novel.
    There were clues, beginning with one of the appraisers who had worked on the Ford bequests. He was quite old by the time Chris located him in a retirement trailer camp in Sun City, but he remembered the item clearly. No, he had never seen it; it was crated with specific instructions that it should not, under even the most extreme circumstances, be opened. If he was lying, he did it well. Chris was paying a high enough premium for the information that it didn’t matter either way. But the trail picked up with the old appraiser’s recollection that whatever the crate had contained, it had been bequeathed to a contemporary of Henry Ford’s, a man with whom he had been friends and then fallen out, fifty years before.
    Chris managed to locate the bills of lading and traced the crate to Madison, Indiana. The recipient of the crate had been deceased for fifteen years. The contents of the crate had been sold at auction …
    And so it went. From place to place. From clue to clue. And each clue indicated that having been in touch with the artifact, the owner had known great joy or great sorrow; but all were dead. The Holy Grail always lay just ahead, always just out of Chris’s reach. Yet he could never bring himself to take the easy way out: to summon up the horror Siri had called Adrammelech. He knew if he finally gave in, that even if he found True Love he would never be able to savor it.
    In January of 1975 Christopher Caperton followed a clue from Trinidad to New Orleans. His source had assured him that the artifact had passed into the hands of a houngan, a priest of the con-jur, a disciple of the voodoo of Doctor Cat, a pioneer of mail order Voodoo in 1914.
    On Perdido Street, in a back room lit only by votive candles in rubyglass jars, Chris met “Prince Basile Thibodeux,” whose title at birth had been merely Willie Link Dunbar. Prince Basile swore he had known and loved the real and true Marie Laveau. As the old black man looked no more than sixty—though he claimed to be ninety-two—such a claim was, either way, highly dubious. Absolute proof exists that Marie Laveau, the first of the many Marie Laveau’s, died on June 24th, 1881, at the approximate age of eighty-five. Two years before Willie Link “Thibodeux” had been born, if he was ninety-two; and thirty-four, if he was lying.
    Christopher Caperton did not care what lies Prince Basile told to sell his worthless hoodoo goods in the drugstore of Love Oils, Goofer Dust, Devil’s Shoe Strings and War Water, as long as he told him a straight story about the artifact.
    When he walked into the little back room, washed in bloody shadows from the candles, he was prepared to pay a premium price for the information he sought, or to assure Prince Basile that there were two men living on Prytania Street who would, for only a fraction of that premium price, inflict great bodily sorrow on a sixty or ninety-two-year-old black man, and he would worry about the black goat dancing on his grave at a later time. But Prince Basile took one look at him and fear filled the withered face.
    “Doan put dat gris-gris on me, mistuh,” he pleaded. “Jus’ whatever you want, that’s be what you gone get. Ah’m at y’service.”
    And Chris walked out of the little back room on Perdido Street with the information—that he knew to be absolutely reliable because no one that terrified could he without dying in the act—that Willie