THE FUNNEL OF GOD 

 

Robert Bloch 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Harvey Wolf was seven, he met the Black Skelm. 

Now “skelm” means rascal, and at his age, Harvey knew nothing of duplicity and the ways of men, so he was not afraid. Nor did the man’s skin repel him, for Harvey was ignorant of apartheid. 

The Basutos on his father’s place called him baas, but he did not feel that he was their master. Even Jong Kurt, his father’s foreman, treated the men of color without contempt. Harvey came to know the Bechuanas, the Kaffirs, the Fingos and the Swazis far better than the Roinecks, which was their name for Englishmen. 

Harvey knew his own father was a Roineck, who owned this place, but that was virtually the extent of his knowledge. His father never visited him; he spent all his time at the Cape, and had ever since Harvey’s mother died when he was born. Harvey had been left in care of Jong Kurt and of his wife, whom Harvey learned to call Mama. 

“Poor little one,” Mama said. “But you are free and happy with us, so gued geroeg.” 

And Harvey was happy. Mama made him veldschoen of rawhide, and he roamed at will over the karroo beyond the drift where the fontein gushed. As he grew older, he sought the krantz above the valley where he made his home, and soon he was climbing the great berg which towered over all. 

Here he found the wild orchids of the upland plateaus, plucked as he wriggled his way through the mimosa, the thornbush and the hartekoal trees where the aasvogel perched and preened and peered for prey. 

Harvey came to know the beasts of the mountain and the plain—the aard-wolf and the inyala, the oribi and the duiker, the springbok and the kudu. He watched the tall secretary-bird and the waddling kori bustard, and traced the flight of bats from out of the hidden caves on the berg above. From time to time he encountered snakes; the cobra di capello, the puff adder, and the dreaded mamba. 

But nothing that loped or trotted or flew or crawled ever harmed him. He grew bolder and started to explore the caves high upon the faraway berg. 

That was when Mama warned him about the Black Skelm. 

“He is an evil man who eats children,” Mama said. “The caves are full of their bones, for on such a diet one lives forever. You are to stay away from the berg.” 

“But Kassie goes to the berg at night,” Harvey protested. “And Jorl, and Swarte.” 

“They are black and ignorant,” Mama told him. “They seek the Black Skelm for charms and potions. The wicked old man should be in prison. I have told Jong Kurt time and again to take the dogs to the berg and hunt him out. But he is too slim, that one, to be easily captured. They say he sleeps in the caves with the bats, who warn him when strangers approach.” 

“I would like to see such a man,” Harvey decided. 

“You are to stay away from the berg, mind?” 

And Mama shook him, and he promised, but Harvey did not mind. 

 

One hot morning he toiled across the karroo, slipping out unobserved from the deserted, heat-baked house, and made his way painfully up the krantz. The aasvogels drooped limply in the trees, their eyes lidded, for nothing moved in the plain below. Even the orchids were wilting. 

It was no cooler on the krantz, and when Harvey found the winding pad which circled the berg, he paused, parched and faint, and considered turning back. But the trip would be long, and perhaps he could find a fontein up here. There were pads he had not yet explored— 

He started off at random, and thus it was that he came to the cave of the Black Skelm. 

The Black Skelm was a gnarled little monkey-man with a white scraggle of beard wisping from his sunken cheeks. He sat at the mouth of the cave, naked and cross-legged, staring out at the veldt below with immobile eyes. 

Harvey recognized him at once and put his knuckles to his mouth. He started to edge back, hoping that the old man hadn’t observed him, but suddenly the scrawny neck corded and swivelled. 

“Greetings, baas.” 

The voice was thin and piping, yet oddly penetrating. It gained resonance from an echo in the cave behind. 

“G-greetings,” Harvey murmured. He continued to edge away. 

“You fear me, boy?” 

“You are the Black Skelm. You—” 

“Eat children?” The old man cackled abruptly. “Yes, I know the tale. It is nonsense, meant only to deceive fools. But you are not a fool, Harvey Wolf.” 

“You know my name?” 

“Of course. An old man learns many things.” 

“Then you’ve come down to the plains?” 

“Not for long years. But the bats bear tidings. They are my brothers of the nights, just as the aasvogels are my brothers by day.” The Black Skelm smiled and gestured. “Sit down. I would invite you inside the cave, but my brothers are sleeping now.” 

Harvey hesitated, eyeing the little old man. But the man was little, and so very old; Harvey couldn’t imagine him to be dangerous. He sat down at a discreet distance. 

“The bats told you my name?” he ventured. 

The wrinkled black man shrugged. “I have learned much of you. I know you seek the berg because it is your wish to see what is on the other side.” 

“But I’ve never told anyone that.” 

“It is not necessary. I look into your heart, Harvey Wolf, and it is the heart of a seeker. You think to gaze upon the lands beyond this mountain; to see the olifant, the kameel, the great black brothers of the rhenoster birds. But to no purpose, my son. The elephant, the giraffe, the rhinoceros are long gone. They have vanished, with my own people.” 

“Your people?” 

“Those you call the Zulus.” The old man sighed. “Once, when I was a jong, the plains beyond the berg were black with game. And beyond the plains the leegtes were black with the kraals of my people. This was our world.” 

 

And the Black Skelm told Harvey about his world; the Zulu empire that existed long before the coming of the Roinecks and the Boers. He spoke of Chaka and the other great indunas who commanded armies in royal splendor, wearing the leopardskin kaross and lifting the knobkerrie of kingly authority to command the impis—the regiments of grotesquely painted warriors in kilts of wildcat tails. They would parade by torchlight, the ostrich plumes bobbing like the wild sea, and their voices rose more loudly than the wind in the cry of “Bayete!” which was the regal salute. And in return the induna chanted but a single response: “Kill!” Casting his spear to the north, the south, the east, or the west, he sent the regiments forth. And the impis killed. They conquered, or never returned. That was the way of it, in the old days. 

Until, finally, none were left to return. 

None but the Black Skelm, who sought the caves of the bats and the vultures, to live like a scavenger in a world of death. 

“But my people are down there,” Harvey protested. “They are not dead. They tell me Cape Town is a great city, and beyond that—” 

“Cape Town is a cesspool of civilization,” said the Black Skelm. “And beyond that are greater sewers in which men struggle and claw at one another, even as they drown. It is a sickening spectacle, this. The world will soon end, and I would that I could die with it. But, of course, I shall never die.” 

Harvey’s head hurt: the sun was very hot. He wondered if he had heard aright. 

“You can’t die?” 

“It is true, baas. Soon, of course, I must decide upon my next move, for this body of mine is no longer suitable. But—” 

Harvey rose, reeling a bit, and backed away. 

“Don’t eat me!” he cried. 

The old man crackled again. “Nonsense!” he said. “Sheer, superstitious nonsense. I do not eat children. My brothers feed me.” He stretched forth his hand. “Look!” 

And the air was filled with the odor of carrion, as the aasvogels gathered, fluttering frantically up the face of the sheer cliff and clustering about the bony body of the wizened black. In their beaks they carried bits of rancid flesh, dropping their tribute into the Black Skelm’s fingers. 

Then Harvey knew that he was very sick indeed; the sun had played tricks. He ran into the cave, and it was dark and musty, and from the twisted caverns beyond welled a terrible odor of decay. The bats hung head downwards, hung in mute millions, and the floor of the cave was not covered with bones, but with whitish droppings. On the walls great eyes winked—eyes that had been painted by hands long dead. The eyes whirled and Harvey felt his kneecaps turn to water. He would have fallen, but the Black Skelm came up behind him and caught him. 

The old man’s grip was surprisingly strong. 

“Do not fear,” he whispered. “Drink this.” And he held out the hollowed skull. The liquid was warm and red. 

“Blood,” Harvey quavered. 

“Of cattle. It is pure and fresh.” 

“But you are a wizard—” 

“What is a wizard? Merely a seeker, like yourself. A seeker who has perhaps peered further than the land beyond the mountain.” 

The Black Skelm led him back to the mouth of the cave, and bade him sit in the shadows there. Harvey was suddenly very tired. He closed his eyes, scarcely listening, as the Black Skelm droned on. 

“All men are seekers, but each chooses a different path in his search for understanding. There is the path of Columbus who sought to encompass the earth and the path of Galileo who sought to search the heavens; the sevenfold path of Buddha which led, he hoped, to Nirvana, and the path of Apollonius which is an inward spiral with oblivion at its core. There is Einstein and—” 

Harvey opened his eyes. He was, he knew, quite delirious. The black man sitting beside him, chanting strange names, eating out of the beaks of vultures, talking of Zulu kraals which had vanished a hundred years ago—this was a fever-dream. He could hear only bits and snatches. 

“You will be a seeker, too, Harvey Wolf. You will go out into the world to look for knowledge. Eventually you will sicken of knowledge and try to find truth. Perhaps we can discover it together—” 

Harvey’s head throbbed. The sun was blazing off in the west, sinking benath the purple lower lid of a gigantic cloud. And a voice was echoing along the berg, calling, “Harvey—Harvey, where are you?” 

“Jong Kurt!” Harvey rose. 

The Black Skelm was already on his feet, scuttling into the shadows of the cave. 

“No, wait—come back!” Harvey called, groping after the old man and nearly falling as his fevered body convulsed in a sudden chill. 

But the old man retreated into the cave. 

And then Jong Kurt was looming on the pathway, his face grave and his forehead seamed with apprehension. He caught the reeling boy in his arms. 

Suddenly the blackness blossomed and burst forth from the cave, a blinding billowing of squeaking, stenchful shadows—shadows that flapped and fluttered and stared with millions of little red eyes. 

Jong Kurt fled down the mountain, carrying Harvey Wolf. But the eyes followed, haunting Harvey’s delirium in dreams… 

They sent him away, then. Harvey wasn’t conscious when the decision was made, though he did see his father once, afterwards, at the dock in Cape Town. His father introduced him to his Uncle Frank, from America, and gave him strict orders about minding his manners and following instructions. There was talk about a New Life and a Good School and the Unhealthy Outlook that comes from being alone. 

Harvey tried to tell his father about the Black Skelm, but his father wouldn’t listen; not even Mama or Jong Kurt had listened. They all said Harvey had suffered from sunstroke, and in the end he came to believe it himself. It had all been heat and hallucination and nothing was real now but the great ocean and the great city. 

In New York his Uncle Frank and his Aunt Lorraine were very kind. They took vicarious pleasure in his amazement at the sight of the city, and conducted him to his first motion picture. 

That seemed to be a mistake, and after they dragged the frightened, hysterical child out of the theater he suffered what the doctor called a “relapse.” Afterwards, he forgot the whole incident, and it wasn’t until years later— 

But meanwhile, Harvey grew up. He went to school and he managed to endure the tight, idiotic abominations called “Health Shoes.” Gradually he accumulated the fund of knowledge necessary for a child to flourish in our society—that is to say, he could identify the various makes and models of automobiles in the streets, he learned the names of “baseball stars,” and the meanings behind the four-letter words and the slang-phrases of the day. 

Also, he learned to insulate his interior existence from other eyes; he found that seekers are not popular with their fellows, so he concealed his interests from his playmates. His teachers, however, were not unaware of his intelligence; at their advice he went on to private schools and from there to an Ivy League college. 

He was still there when Uncle Frank and Aunt Lorraine went over to Cape Town to bring his father back for a reunion; he was there when the news came to him that the private plane had crashed on the return flight. 

After the funeral he visited the attorneys. 

They told him he had inherited the entire estate. Once liquidated, with all taxes paid, he could count on an accumulation of better than three million dollars. It would be ready for him by the time he reached his twenty-first birthday. 

Right then and there he made a sensible decision; he decided it was time to retire. 

It was not just the caprice of a spoiled brat or a rich man’s heir. At twenty-one, Harvey Wolf was a fairly presentable young man—many girls even found him handsome, for three million reasons—and he possessed an alert intellect. 

He turned his back on the world only because he was fed up with hypocrisy and liars. 

Harvey’s first move was to leave the college. He said farewell forever to its small Humanities Department and its huge football stadium. 

Next he departed from a church whose spiritual representatives appeared at launching ceremonies to bless aircraft carriers and destroyers. 

At the same time he walked out on most of the phenomena and beliefs held dear by his peers; on chauvinism, on racial prejudice, on the feudal caste-system glorified by the armed forces of our democracy. 

He briefly considered going into business, until he found he couldn’t subscribe to the widespread doctrine that there is some mystically ennobling value attached to “competition” and that somehow everybody benefits under a system where one man is dedicated to outsmarting another. 

Harvey turned his back on the life of a wealthy idler because he could not tolerate the common amusements. He did not believe that animal-killers were “sportsmen,” whether they dressed in red coats and drank champagne before chasing a fox or wore dirty dungarees and guzzled beer out of the bottle before shooting at an unsuspecting duck. He did not think that baseball players or boxers or even bullfighters were as much heroic as they were overpaid. He squinted but saw nothing in abstract art; he listened, but heard nothing in its credos and critiques. 

Harvey Wolf turned his back on Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and all the other holidays heralded by the joyous tinkle of cash-registers on high. He deplored the phony virility of the men’s magazines, the fake coyness of the women’s magazines, and the artificial social values which emotionally warped young people into “manliness” or “femininity.” 

Taking stock of himself, Harvey found he did not worship sports cars or subscribe to the “theory of obsolescence” dearly beloved by manufacturers and dearly paid for by consumers. He abhorred drum-majorettes, bathing beauty contests, and the publicity given “Miss Canned Goods” or the “Oklahoma Cucumber Queen.” He took a dim, pained view of billboards, and disliked the transformation of natural parks and beauty spots into commercialized locales for hot-dog stands and souvenir concessions which sold little wooden outhouses. 

He held opinions which would automatically antagonize all fraternity-members, morticians, professional evangelists, Texans, and the marchers in St. Patrick’s Day parades. He did not believe in caveat emptor; card players who slam each trick down on the table and bellow at the top of their lungs; fake “frontier days” held by rough, tough pioneer towns in the wilds of New Jersey; sound engineers who “ride the gain” on TV commercials; professional fund-raisers who take 40% off the top in charity drives, or people who take pride in announcing that they are “quick-tempered,” as though this statement entitled them to special privileges. 

Harvey held a bias against practical jokers, and people who obscure driving visibility by decorating their car-windows with dangling dolls, oversize dice, baby shoes, and imitation shrunken heads. He saw no sense to endurance-contests, had no patience with litter-bugs, failed to believe in Beggar’s Night or politicians who “compromise” after election at the expense of repudiating their campaign pledges. He had a contempt for Muscle Beach exhibitionists and he objected to the rewriting of history under the guise of “patriotism.” He—but the list is endless, and of interest only to psychiatrists; they get $50 an hour for listening. 

Harvey Wolf didn’t go to the psychiatrists—not yet, at any rate, including the $50 an hour one. 

He thought he was searching for something to believe in and that perhaps he could find it in good, hard, scientific logic. 

So he sailed for Europe, to study at the source. 

In Edinburgh, Harvey encountered a Brilliant Doctor who prided himself on complete objectivity. 

“Nothing,” said the Brilliant Doctor, in one of his famed private seminars, “is ever finally ‘proved’ and everything remains possible in theory. 

“For example, granted the loose molecular structure of both a human body and a brick wall, it is only logical to concede that, with the exact proper alignment of every single molecule in the given body with every single molecule in the given wall, at a given instant it would be possible for said body to walk through said wall and emerge unscathed on the other side. 

“The chances are almost inconceivably infinitesimal, but the possibility must be granted.” 

Harvey Wolf thereupon asked the Brilliant Doctor, in the light of this opinion, what he thought of allied phenomena. What of his late countryman, the Scottish medium, D.D. Home, who practiced levitation? He rose, resting on his back in mid-air, then floated out of one second-story window and back into the room through another, in full view and broad daylight. 

“Nonsense!” said the Brilliant Doctor. 

Harvey Wolf blinked. “But no less an observer than the distinguished scientist Sir William Crookes testified he had witnessed this feat with his own eyes,” Harvey replied. 

“Impossible!” said the Brilliant Doctor… 

 

At Oxford, Harvey Wolf was enthralled by a Learned Scholar who spoke of the biological basis of Life and the almost metaphysical borderland between Being and Nothingness. 

“The electromagnetic principles governing sentience and consciousness are still indefinable,” he announced. “No man has yet isolated the Life Force or truly defined death or nonexistence except in terms of its absence.” 

Harvey Wolf was interested. What, he asked, did the Learned Scholar think of Pierre and Eve Curie’s signed testimony that they had seen genuine evidence of psychic phenomena demonstrated by a medium? What about Thomas Edison’s similar convictions, and his final experiments in communication with the spirit world? 

“There is no objective validity offered in evidence here,” said the Learned Scholar. 

“But we ignored electricity for thousands of years,” Harvey protested. “Its omnipresent existence was unknown to us except in lightning until we found a means of harnessing this force. Surely, if the borderline between existence and nonexistence, consciousness and unconsciousness, cannot be exactly defined, and yet is apparently subject to certain definite principles—” 

“Utter rot!” said the Learned Scholar… 

 

In Heidelberg, Harvey Wolf studied under a famous Herr Doktor-Professor whose technical mastery of neuropathology was exceeded only by his interest in psychosomatic medicine. The Herr Doktor-Professor was extremely liberal in his outlook, and even admitted prodromosis as a basis for diagnosis. 

“I knew a surgeon who was in charge of an army hospital during the war,” Harvey said. “One of his patients was completely paralyzed from the waist down—the spinal cord had been entirely severed and there was no nervous response. He lay in bed, wasting away, and was informed he’d never move his legs again. He refused to accept the verdict. Each day he pulled himself up in bed, lifted his legs over the side, tried to stand. The surgeon gave strict orders to restrain him, but he persisted. After two gruelling months, he stood. A month later he took his first step. All tests showed it was physically impossible for him to exercise any control over his legs, but he walked—” 

“Impossible!” muttered the Herr Doktor-Professor. 

“Yet what about Edgar Cayce and his clinically-verified healings of organic disorders with no possible basis in hysteria? What about—” 

“Dummkopf!” opined the Herr Doktor-Professor… 

 

In the Sorbonne faculty, Harvey met a Celebrated Savant with unorthodox views; a man who dared to side with Charles Fort in his questioning of organized science. He once stated that if we accepted the theory of evolution from a non-anthropomorphic viewpoint, it was quite possible to believe that man’s function on earth was merely to act as host for cancer cells which would eventually learn to survive the death of the human body and emerge as the next, higher life-form. He was even fond of quoting Mark Twain and others to the effect that the stars and planets of our universe might be merely the equivalent of tiny corpuscles moving through the bloodstream of some incalculably huge monster. And that this monster, in turn, might walk the surface of another world in another universe which in turn might be composed of similar corpuscles—ad infinitum to the nth2 power. 

“It is a humbling thought,” the Celebrated Savant observed, and Harvey Wolf agreed. 

“A far remove from petty human concepts,” Harvey mused. “There is no need to concern oneself with trivia in the face of it now, is there?” 

But the Celebrated Savant wasn’t listening; he was reading the newspaper and scowling. 

“Those pigs of Algerians!” he muttered to himself. “Yes, and those lousy colons, bidding for power and setting up education for all. It is a disaster!” 

Harvey shrugged. “The world is only a corpuscle,” he said. “Or perhaps it’s just a virus-cell in the bloodstream of the Infinite. What does it matter?” 

“Cochon! The purity of the State depends upon maintaining our autonomy. And furthermore, young man—” 

 

Harvey Wolf found himself walking out once more. But this time he was walking out into Paris. 

Paris, of course, is what you make it. To cutpurse Villon, living from hand to mouth and from the Small to the Grand Testament, it was a city of cold cobblestones were every twisted alley led only to the inevitable gibbet. To Bonaparte it was the site of a triumphal arch through which he marched to celebrate victory—or furtively avoided, in a solitary coach, as he whipped his horses from the field of Moscow or Waterloo. Toulouse-Lautrec clattered across Paris leaning upon two sticks, and his city was a gaslight inferno. There is the Sec and Brut Paris of pout-lipped Chevalier, the cerebral city of Proust and Gide and Sartre, the Paris of the GI on leave for couchez-vous carnival. There is the Paris of the tourist—the Louvre’s leg-weary legacy, the giddy gaping from the Eiffel Tower, the hasty concealment of the paperbound Tropic of Cancer at the bottom of the suitcase. There is a Paris as gay as Colette, as tough as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as weird as Huysmans. You pay your money and you take your choice. 

And when you have three million dollars— 

Harvey Wolf brooded about it in a Montmartre bistro. A bearded man stared at him with yellow cat-eyes and said, “Welcome, Pontius Pilate.” 

“Pilate?” echoed Harvey Wolf. 

“I recognize the mood,” said the bearded man. “You are asking yourself Pilate’s age-old question—What is Truth?” 

“And the answer?” 

“Truth is sensation,” the bearded man told him. “Sensation alone is reality. All else is illusion.” 

“Hedonism, eh? I don’t know—” 

“You can learn. Experience is the great teacher.” 

Harvey was sated with civilization, sick of science. He spent six months with the bearded man and the bearded man’s friends. He rented a villa near Antibes, and many guests came. 

There was the dwarf girl and the giantess and the woman with the filed and pointed teeth; the lady who slept only in a coffin and never alone; the girl whose luggage consisted solely of a custom-made traveling case filled entirely with whips. There was a rather unusual troupe of artists whose specialty consisted of a pantomime dramatization of the Kama Sutra. 

Long before the six months were up, Harvey realized that his meeting with the bearded man had not been accidental. Behind the beard was neither Jesus, D.H. Lawrence, or even a genuine Gilles de Rais—merely a weak-chinned, loose-lipped voluptuary adventurer who had visions of sugarplum splendor in the form of a billion-franc blackmail scheme. 

Harvey got rid of him, at last, for considerably less, and he did not begrudge the price he finally paid. For he had learned that the senses are shallow and the orgasmic is not the ultimate peak of perceptivity. 

 

Harvey went to Italy and immersed himself in Renaissance art. He journeyed to Spain and somehow he found he’d started to drink. A girl he met introduced him to some little capsules her friends smuggled in from Portugal. At the end of another six months he was picked up in the streets of Seville and shipped back home through the kindly offices of the American consulate. 

They put him in Bellevue and then in a private san upstate. Harvey kicked the habit and emerged after a loss of four months and forty pounds. 

He ended up, as do most seekers after Truth, on the confessional couch of a private psychiatrist. 

The psychiatrist decided that perhaps Walt Disney was to blame for it all. 

Harvey admitted the man had an interesting argument. He was able, after many sessions, to recall his first visit to the movies when he’d come to America. Uncle Frank and Aunt Lorraine had taken him to see what was perhaps the most famous short cartoon of the Depression era—The Three Little Pigs. 

He could recreate quite vividly, without the aid of narco-hypnosis, the strong fear-reaction engendered by the sight of the Big Bad Wolf stalking the helpless pigs. He remembered how the Wolf huffed and puffed and blew the straw house in. What happened immediately thereafter he did not know, because it was then that he had been carried, screaming, from the theater. 

It was, the psychiatrist averred, a “traumatic incident.” And now, as an adult, Harvey had read a great deal about animated cartoons and their possible effect on children. Following the success of The Three Little Pigs it seemed as if the entire concept of cartoon-making underwent a drastic change. In place of playful Pluto and droll Donald Duck came a horde of ferocious bulldogs, gigantic cats with slavering fangs; huge animal menaces who tormented smaller creatures and sought to devour them in their great red maws. 

But, if anything, their little intended victims were worse; they always outwitted the hulking pursuers and seemed to take fiendish delight in sadistic revenge. One animal was always crushing another under a truck or a steamroller; pushing his enemy off a steep cliff, blasting his head open with a shotgun, blowing him up with dynamite, dragging his body across the teeth of a great circular saw. During the years, the so-called “kiddy matinee” became a horror-show, a Grand Guignol of the animal kingdom in which atrocious crimes and still more atrocious punishments flashed in fantastic fashion across the screen in lurid color, to the accompaniment of startlingly realistic shrieks, groans, screams of agony, and cruel laughter. 

Parents who carefully and conscientiously shielded their supposedly innocent youngsters from the psychological pitfalls of the dreaded comic-books were quite content to listen to the same moppets shriek uncontrollably at the sight of a twenty-foot-high animated hyena being burned to death while the happy little rabbit squealed in ecstatic glee. 

Harvey had read about this and he listened when the psychiatrist told him there was probably no harm in such fantasies—to the average child it was merely a vicarious outlet for aggression. Such a child unconsciously identified with the small animal who destroyed the larger tormenter: the bigger creature symbolized Daddy or Mama or some authority-figure, and it was satisfying to witness their defeat. The weapons employed were direct concepts and representations of adult civilization and its artifacts. Most children were exposed to such films from infancy on and grew up without psychic damage. As normal adult human beings they were able to go out into the world and fight its battles. Indeed, it was the avowed purpose of many psychiatrists to keep them “mentally fit” during real battles, so that they could continue to spray liquid fire from flame-throwers upon enemy soldiers cowering in tanks, or drop bombs on unseen thousands of women and children. 

It was merely unfortunate, said the psychiatrist (at $50 an hour) that Harvey had been brought up away from the influences of normal society and abruptly exposed to the symbolism of the cartoon. And there were, of course, other factors. 

The fact that Harvey’s last name happened to be Wolf—so that his little American playmates insisted on calling him “The Big Bad Wolf” when they innocently ganged up on him at recess and tried to emulate the punishments inflicted by the heroic little pigs in the film. 

The fact that Harvey, instead of acting like any normal, red-blooded American boy and fighting back against the six or eight older bullies who came after him with planks and stones, chose to cry and bleed instead. 

The fact that Harvey soon underwent another traumatic cinematic experience when he saw a picture called The Wolf Man and its sequels, and gradually came to accept and identify with the role symbolized by his last name. 

The fact that Harvey seemed to have totally misinterpreted the message; to him it wasn’t important that the Wolf was destroyed, but that he was revived again in the sequels. 

Regrettably, said the psychiatrist (at great and expensive length) he seemed to have equated acceptance of his Wolf role with survival. As an adult, he had become a Lone Wolf, moving away from the pack. And his self-styled search for Truth was merely a search for the Father-Image, denied him in childhood. 

Harvey attempted, at one point in his analysis, to talk about the Black Skelm and that fantastic fever-dream atop the berg. The psychiatrist listened, made notes, nodded gravely, inquired into the duration of his subsequent illness, and went back to his theory about the traumatic effect of the films. What had Harvey thought when the Wolf Man was beaten to death with a cane by his father in the movie? Did Claude Rains, as the father, remind Harvey of his own parent? Did he perceive the phallic symbolism of the silver cane used as an instrument of punishment? And so on, blah, blah, blah—until Harvey Wolf got up from the couch and walked out again. 

Psychotherapy had its own truths, but its methodology was still magic. One had to believe in certain formulae, in spells and incantations designed to cast out demons. At the same time there was this pitiful insistence upon a “realistic” interpretation; an attempt to reconcile frankly magical methodology with the so-called “normal” world. 

Perhaps it was silly to compromise. The therapy sessions had caused Harvey to think about the Black Skelm once more, for the first time in twenty years. He remembered how the little shriveled savage had spoken of Einstein, and of Apollonius of Tyana. He had sat all alone in a bat-cave atop a mountain, drinking warm blood from a skull, but he knew. He had a surety which science and philosophy and art only adumbrated, and the source of his knowledge must be magical insight. 

 

Harvey moved down into the Village and began to fill his ramshackle apartment with books on occultism and theosophy. He avoided the local Beat types, but inevitably the word leaked out. The crackpots came to call, and eventually he met a girl named Gilda who claimed to be one of the innumerable illegitimate offspring of the late Aleister Crowley. 

Soon he found himself standing in a darkened room, facing the East, with a steel dagger in his right hand. He touched his forehead saying, in the Hebrew tongue, Ateh; touched his breast and murmured Malkuth; touched his right shoulder as he intoned Ve-Geburah and his left as he muttered Ve-Gedullah. Clasping his hands upon the breast, with dagger pointed upwards, he shouted Le-Olahm, Aum. 

Nothing happened. 

Gilda’s further experiments in sex-magic were equally (and fortunately) nonproductive. She attempted to interest him in a Black Mass, but before details could be arranged she ran off with a young man who yapped obscene ballads in public places but was granted the protection the law affords a folk-singer. 

Harvey Wolf decided that he would continue his search alone. 

During the year that followed he made many contacts and experiments. Undoubtedly he met with followers of Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley. Quite certainly he investigated the effects of lysergic acid and peyote. 

Both produced the same trance phenomena. Harvey found himself regressing, the film of his life running backwards, until he reached the point where he was enveloped in the billowing black bat-cloud from the berg. The little red eyes swirled firefly fashion all round him, then vanished into a greater darkness. He stood alone on the mountain. 

Yet not quite alone, because the Black Skelm was there, pointing to the path and whispering, “I have waited long, baas. The time has come when we must journey together.” 

The message was manifest; Harvey Wolf knew he would go back to Africa. 

Another Wolfe had said You Can’t Go Home Again, and in his more objective moments Harvey knew this was right. Twenty years had passed and nothing was left of the Africa he’d known. The world kept changing. 

There were new governments with new slogans, new reasons to hate their neighbors, and new weapons poised to punish them. A new spurt of population, subject to new mutations of disease, sought new areas of conquest. Missiles had reached the moon and Man would follow, then go on to the stars with his civilized cargo of bombs, chewing gum, carbon monoxide, and laxatives. Eventually the millennium would come; a Soviet Federated Socialist Republic of the Solar System or a United Interplanetary States. If the former prevailed, Saturn would be set up as the new Siberia; if democracy triumphed, special facilities for certain groups would be set up on Pluto—separate, but equal, of course. 

Harvey Wolf made one last effort to escape such cynical considerations and their consequences. He became an ascetic; a disciple of Raja, Brahma, and Hatha Yoga. He took a cabin in the Arizona desert and here he meditated, fasted, and grew faint. 

And the Black Skelm came into his dreams and chanted, “This is not the path. Come to me. I have found the way.” 

So, in the end, Harvey returned to the dark womb—to the Africa of his birth. 

 

He found a new spirit at the Cape; apartheid had arisen, sanctioned by the sanctimonious and condoned by the cartel of dedicated men whose mission it was to artificially inflate the price of diamonds with which the wealthy bedeck their wives and their whores. 

At first they would not even give Harvey permission to journey upcountry, but his father’s name—and a distribution of his father’s money—helped. 

This time Harvey made the trip in a chartered plane, which set him down on the flat veldt near the old place and (in accordance with orders) left him there. 

The old place had changed, of course. Kassie, Jorl, Swarte, and others were gone, and no herds of humpbacked cattle roamed over the plain. The great house was deserted, or almost so; Harvey prowled the ruins for ten minutes before the elderly man with the rifle ventured forth from an outbuilding and leveled his weapon at him in silent menace. 

“Jong Kurt!” Harvey cried. And the old man blinked, not recognizing him at first—just as Harvey didn’t recognize a Kurt whom the years had robbed of any right to retain his nickname. 

Kurt lowered his rifle and wept. He wept for the passing of the old place, for the death of Mama, for the changes which had come to both of them. Did the baas remember the way it had been? Did he remember the night Kurt had carried him, faint with delirium, down the mountainside? 

“Yes, I remember,” Harvey murmured. “I remember it very well.” 

“When you left, your father sold the cattle. The boys went into the mines, everybody left. Only Mama and I stayed on alone. Now she is gone, too.” Kurt knuckled his eyes. 

“And the Black Skelm?” Harvey said. “What happened to him?” 

“He is dead,” Kurt answered, shaking his head solemnly. 

“Dead?” Harvey stiffened in the suddenness of the thought. “Do you mean that you—” 

Kurt nodded. “Your father gave orders. The day after you went to the Cape, I took the dogs up to the berg. I meant to hunt him down, the verdamte scoundrel.” 

“You found him there?” 

The old man shrugged. “Only the bones. Picked clean, they were, on the side of the ledge near the mouth of the cave. The carrion had fed his vultures for the last time.” 

Kurt wheezed and slapped his thigh, and he did not see the pain in Harvey’s eyes. 

“But why do we stand here, baas? You will stay the night with me, eh? Your plane does not return before tomorrow?” 

Harvey murmured an acceptance of the invitation. It was true, his plane would not return until the next day. He’d thought to spend the interval in ascending the berg, but there was no need now. The Black Skelm was dead. You Can’t Go Home Again. 

Kurt had comfortable quarters in one of the smaller outbuildings. Game was scarce, but there was eland steak for dinner. The old man had learned to brew beer in the traditional Kaffir fashion, and after the meal he sat reminiscing with the young baas and drinking toasts to the past. Finally he succumbed to stuporous slumber. 

Harvey stretched out on a bunk and tried to sleep. Eventually he succeeded. Then the bat came. 

It flew in through the open window and nuzzled at his chest, brushing its leathery wings against his face and nuzzling him with tiny teeth that grazed but did not bite. It chittered faintly. 

Harvey awoke to a moment of horror; horror which subsided when the bat withdrew to a corner of the room. Kurt snored on, stentoriously, and Harvey sat up, brushing at the black, winged creature in an effort to drive it back out through the window. 

The bat wheeled about his head, squeaking furiously. Harvey rose, flailing his arms. He opened the door. The bat hung in the doorway. Harvey beat at it. It whirled just out of arm’s reach. Then it hung suspended in mid-air and waited. 

Harvey advanced. He stood gazing across the moonlit emptiness of the veldt—a lake of shimmering silver beyond which towered the black hulk of the berg. 

The bat cheeped and flapped its wings before him. Suddenly Harvey conceived the odd notion that the wings were beckoning. The bat wanted to him to follow. 

Then he knew. The Black Skelm wasn’t dead. He was waiting for Harvey, there on the mountain. He had sent a messenger, a guide. 

Harvey didn’t hesitate. He went out into the moonlit plain and it was like the first time. Now he was a grown man in boots instead of a child in rawhide veldschoen, and it was night instead of day, but nothing had changed. Even the odd delirium rose to envelop him once again; not the fever born of the hot sun but the chill of the cold moon. He trudged across the silver silence of the sand and the bat swooped in sinister silhouette before him. When Harvey reached the krantz he almost decided to turn back; this was no mysterious midnight mission, only the tipsy fugue of an overimaginative man unused to the potency of Kaffir beer. 

But they were waiting for him there in the shadows; huddled in teeming thousands, their tiny red eyes winking a greeting. And now they all rose about him, covering him in a living cloak. He glanced back and found they had closed in solidly, forming a living barrier against retreat. The acrid stench was in itself a wall through which he dared not pass, so he went forward, up to the winding pad which took him, toiling, to the top of the berg. 

He saw the mouth of the cave looming before him, and then all vision faded as the moon was blotted out by a cloud—a cloud of wavering wings. The bats flew off and he stood alone on the mountain-top. 

The Black Skelm came out of the cave. 

“You are alive,” whispered Harvey. “I knew it. But Kurt spoke of finding bones—” 

“I placed them there for that purpose.” The Black Skelm wove his wrinkles into a smile. “I did not wish to be disturbed until you returned. I have waited a long time, baas.” 

“Why didn’t you summon me sooner?” 

“There were things you had to learn for yourself. Now you are ready, having seen the world. Is it not as I described?” 

“Yes.” Harvey nodded at the gnarled little black man. “But how could you know these things? I mean—” 

He hesitated, but the Black Skelm grinned. “You mean I am an ignorant old savage, a witch-doctor who believes in animism and amulets.” He scratched his grisly chest. “Whereas you are a man of worldly wisdom. Tell me—what is Jack Paar really like?” 

Harvey blinked, and the old man chuckled. “You are so naive in your sophistication! Baas, I have seen far more than you in your brief lifetime. Although my base body sat and shriveled in this cave, my spirit ventured afar. I have been with you throughout your wanderings. I was in the theater when you screamed; I sat with you in seminars; I felt the caress of the woman with the silver-tipped whips; I was one with you when you raised the dagger to invoke the All-Being. There are ways of transcending space and time.” 

“But that’s impossible!” Harvey muttered. “I can’t think—” 

“Don’t try to think.” The Black Skelm rose, slowly and stiffly. “One does not learn through processes of organized logic, for the world is not a logical place. Indeed, it is not a place at all—merely an abstract point in infinity. True knowledge is institutional; an impressionary process which might be labelled as heuristics.” 

Harvey shook his head. “You drink cattle-blood and summon bats, and you speak of heuristics—unbelievable.” 

“Yet you believe.” 

“I believe. But I don’t understand. You have these powers. Why live like an animal in a cave when you might have gone forth to rule the world?” 

“The world?” The old man put his hand on Harvey’s shoulder; the weight was as slight as a sere and blackened leaf. “Look down there.” 

Together they stared at the silvery veldt. 

“The world is a plain,” said the Black Skelm. “And beyond, as we know, are the cities of the plain. Do you remember what happened to those cities? Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven, and he overthrew those cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. Remember?” 

“Yes. You’re trying to tell me that the world will soon come to an end.” 

“Can you doubt it, after what you’ve seen?” 

“No.” 

“The Lord remembered Abraham and brought him to the safety of the hills.” The black man smiled, but Harvey stared at him. 

“Is that why you sent for me? Because you’re—” 

“God?” The black man shook his head. “Not yet. I have not chosen. That is why I waited for you. Perhaps you can help me choose.” 

“I don’t understand—” 

“Every man is God, or contains within him the seed of godhead. Look.” The Black Skelm fumbled with a little leather pouch at his waist and drew forth a dark, shrivelled object. 

“This is a nut, encased in an outer shell. Within is the seed, the kernel. The hard shell is our human consciousness. Once broken, the kernel can be reached, the seed liberated to sprout and grow, to spread through space and thrust beyond the stars.” 

The Black Skelm twirled the spheroid in his wrinkled palm. “Shall we open the shell and partake?” he murmured. “No, it isn’t like peyote, or your lysergic acid, either. I spent years searching for the seed, which indeed comes from the Tree of Knowledge. Once eaten, it will do more than merely expand and extend consciousness. Consciousness will be discarded, like the empty husk it is, and the soul will flourish. Flourish and soar beyond all being.” 

He cracked the shell and dug within. 

“Here, will you share with me?” 

“But—why?” 

The Black Skelm sighed. “Because the human part of me is old, and afraid. It may be that I will not enjoy being God. It must, I think, be a lonely estate. When you came to me as a child I recognized a fellow-seeker, and I knew that I would wait for you to join me on the quest.” 

Harvey stared. “This isn’t just part of some crazy dream?” 

“It’s all a crazy dream, you know that,” said the Black Skelm, softly. 

“And if it works—suppose I want to turn back?” 

“There is no turning back, as you have learned. One can only go forward, through the mist called life and into the mist called death. Or one who dares can go beyond. It is your choice.” 

“But why now?” 

“Why not? Does life, as you have seen it, appeal to you?” 

“No.” 

“Do you look forward to death?” 

“No.” 

“Then let us move on.” 

The Black Skelm carefully broke the dried kernel in half and extended a portion to Harvey. 

“Place it on your tongue,” he said. “Then swallow slowly.” 

Harvey knew now that he was dreaming. He knew he was back in the bunk at Kurt’s place, and there was nothing to fear—in a moment he’d awake. Meanwhile there was no harm in putting the insignificant morsel on his tongue, no harm in gripping the black man’s shrivelled hand as the waves of sensation coursed through him. 

Because he was back at Kurt’s place now, and as he swallowed that too was a dream and he was back in America in Arizona, he was back with Gilda, he was back with the bearded man in France, he was back at the universities, back at the theater watching that preposterous cartoon, back here again on the mountain-top meeting the Black Skelm for the first time. No, he was further back than that, he was a little boy in Mama’s arms, he was crawling, he couldn’t even crawl, he was kicking inside a warm darkness, he was only a speck of liquified life, he was nothing, he was— 

Instantly he leaped forward and upward. The plain faded away beneath him, faded out of focus. He had no eyes to see it with, but he needed no eyes. He was one with immensity and perceived everything. He knew he was still standing—somewhere—and still grasping the black man’s hand with his own. But the hand was huge enough to balance a sun on its palm, yet insubstantial enough to feel no pain from its molten mass. 

Far below (yes, it was below, there was still space and dimension, immeasurably transfigured as his body had been transfigured) the wheeling planets moved in inexorable orbit. 

A voice that was not a voice, a mere beat observed in soundlessness, impinged upon his expanded awareness. 

“Behold the earth,” it said. “A speck, a mite, an errant, inconsequential atom.” 

Harvey—or that part which remembered Harvey—had a momentary awareness of the old theory of the world as a single cell in the bloodstream of a cosmic monster. But it was not a cell, he perceived, any more than he was now a monster. It was just a speck, as the voice had said. 

“Is this what God sees?” he asked. 

“I do not know, for I am not yet God. To be God is to act. And I cannot decide. Shall I become God through action?” 

“What action is possible?” 

“Only one. To destroy this earth. To rearrange the cosmic pattern by removing the atom from being.” 

“Destroy? Why not save mankind?” 

“God cannot save mankind. This I now know. God is great and Man is small. If left alone, Man will destroy himself. We alone can be saved—by becoming one with God.” 

“I dare not.” 

“Why? Do you so love the race of Man after what you’ve seen? Do you love the cesspool in which he wallows, the devices with which he brings about the destruction of others and of himself?” 

“But I am a man.” 

“No longer. You are in Limbo now. Not God, not human. There is no turning back. One must go forward.” 

“I cannot.” Harvey—or the greater being that stood between the stars—turned and faced the black, brooding face—an image of immensity, intangible yet limned and luminous in space. 

“Perhaps your life on earth was a sweeter one than mine. You did not see your people perish, and the old ways of nature vanish from the world. You did not skulk in a cave on a mountain-top for endless years, companioned by scavengers—nor feed, like them, on carrion corruption. Your skin was not black.” 

“You hate the world.” 

“I am above hate. And above love.” 

“Pity, then? Compassion?” 

“For what? This insignificant speck, crawling with midges that will soon destroy it if left to their own devices?” The soundless voice thundered. “If there is pity, if there is compassion, let it be for one’s self. I shall survive, in eternity. There will be other earths—” 

“No!” 

But the black, brooding face stared down and pursed its lips. Suddenly it blew, and spat. A cloud of ichor issued from the titanic, toothless maw. It spiralled, gathering speed and form as it fell, twisting into a tunnelling black cloud. 

The cloud encompassed the earth. The earth seemed to be sucked into the spiralling mass; its shell cracked and fire flared forth fitfully. But only for an instant. Then the spittle evaporated into nothingness and what it had encompassed was gone. 

Gone? It had never existed. 

Harvey—that which was Harvey now—turned and glanced into the great glowing face in the heavens beside him. But it too was gone. Not gone, but growing—growing to such size and at such a speed that it was impossible to perceive even a portion of its features. It was becoming space itself. The Black Skelm was God and had destroyed the earth— 

Harvey’s mouth opened, swallowing the universe in a soundless scream. 

He could not follow the Black Skelm, grow into godhead. He could not go back to an earth which no longer existed, had never existed. 

He could only scream, and merge into a swirling nothingness, a funnel that engulfed him without end…