All the Sounds of Fear

by Harlan Ellison

“Give me some light!”

Cry: tormented, half-moan half-chant, cast out against a

whispering darkness; a man wound in white, arms upflung

to roistering shadows, sooty sockets where eyes had

been, pleading, demanding, anger and hopelessness,

anguish from the soul into the world. He stumbled, a

step, two, faltering, weak, the man returned to the

child, trying to find some exit from the washing sea of

darkness in which he trembled.

“Give me some light!”

Around him a Greek chorus of sussurating voices;

plucking at his garments, he staggered toward an

intimation of sound, a resting place, a goal. The man in

pain, the figure of all pain, all desperation,

and nowhere in that circle of painful light was there

release from this torment. Sandaled feet stepping, each

one above an abyss, no hope and no safety; what can it

mean to be so eternally blind?

Again, “Give me some light!”

The last tortured ripping of the words from a throat raw

with the hopelessness of salvation. Then the man sank to

the shadows that moved in on him. The face half-hidden

in chiaroscuro, sharp black, blanched white, down and

down into the grayness about his feet, the circle of

blazing white light pinpointing him, a creature impaled

on a pin of brilliance, till closing, closing, closing

it swallowed him, all gone to black, darkness within and

without, black even deeper, nothing, finis, end,

silence.

Richard Becker, Oedipus, had played his first role.

Twenty-four years later, he would play it again, as his

last. But before that final performance’s curtain could

be rung, twenty-four years of greatness would have to

strut across stages of life and theatre and emotion.

Time, passing.

· · · · ·

When they had decided to cast the paranoid beggar in Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker had gone to the

Salvation Army retail store, and bought a set of rags

that even the sanctimonious saleswomen staffing the shop

had tried to throw out as unsalable and foul. He bought

a pair of cracked and soleless shoes that were a size

too large. He bought a hat that had seen so many autumns

of rain its brim had bowed and withered under the

onslaught. He bought a no-color vest from a suit long

since destroyed, and a pair of pants whose seat sagged

baggily, and a shirt with three buttons gone, and a

jacket that seemed to symbolize every derelict who had

ever cadged an hour’s sleep in an alley.

He bought these things over the protests of the kindly,

white-haired women who were doing their bit for

charity, and he asked if he might step into the

toilet for a few moments to try them on; and when he

emerged, his good tweed jacket and dark slacks over his

arm, he was another man entirely. As though magically,

the coarse stubble (that may have been there when he

came into the store, but he seemed too nice-looking a

young man to go around unshaved) had sprouted on his

sagging jowls. The hair had grown limp and off-gray

under the squashed hat. The face was lined and planed

with the depravities and deprivations of a lifetime

lived in gutters and saloons. The hands were caked with

filth, the eyes lusterless and devoid of personality,

the body grotesquely slumped with the burden of mere

existence. This old man, this skid from the Bowery, how

had he gotten into the toilet, and where was the nice

young man who had gone in wearing that jacket and those

slacks? Had this creature somehow overpowered him

(what foul weapon had this feeble old man used to subdue

a vital, strong youth like that)? The white-haired Good

Women of Charity were frozen with distress as they

imagined the strong-faced, attractive youth, lying in

the bathroom, his skull crushed by a length of pipe.

The old bum extended the jacket, the pants, and the rest

of the clothing the young man had been wearing, and in a

voice that was thirty years younger than the body from

which it spoke, he explained, “I won’t be needing these,

ladies. Sell them to someone who can make good use of

them.” The voice of the young man, from this husk.

And he paid for the rags he wore. They watched him as he

limped and rolled through the front door, into the

filthy streets; another tramp gone to join the tide of

lost souls that would inevitably become a stream and a

river and an ocean of wastrels, washing finally into a

drunk tank, or a doorway, or onto a park bench.

Richard Becker spent six weeks living on the Bowery; in

fleabags, abandoned warehouses, cellars, gutters and on

tenement rooftops, he shared and wallowed in the nature

and filth and degradation of the empty men of his times.

For six weeks he was a tramp, a thoroughly

washed-out hopeless rumdum, with rheumy eyes and palsied

hands and a weak bladder.

One by one the weeks mounted to six, and on the first

day of casting for Sweet Miracles, the Monday of

the seventh week, Richard Becker arrived at the Martin

Theatre, where he auditioned for the part in the clothes

he had worn for the past six weeks.

The play ran for five hundred and eighteen performances,

and Richard Becker won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award

as the finest male performer of the year. He also won

the Circle Award as the most promising newcomer of the

year.

He was twenty-two years at the time.

The following season, after Sweet Miracles had

gone on the road, Richard Becker was apprised, through

the pages of Variety, that John Foresman & T. H.

Searle were about to begin casting for House of

Infidels, the new script by Odets, his first in many

years. Through friends in the Foresman & Searle offices,

he obtained a copy of the script, and selected a part he

considered massive in its potentialities.

The role of an introspective and tormented artist,

depressed by the level of commercialism to which his

work had sunk, resolved to regain an innocence of

childhood or nature he had lost, by working with his

hands in a foundry.

When the first night critics called Richard Becker’s

conception of Tresk, the artist, “a pinnacle of thespic

intuition” and noted, “His authority in the part led

members of the audience to ask one another how such a

sensitive actor could grasp the rough unsubtle life of a

foundry-worker,” they had no idea that Richard Becker

had worked for nearly two months in a steel stamping

plant and foundry in Pittsburgh. But the makeup man on

House of Infidels suspected Richard Becker had

once been in a terrible fire, for his hands were marked

by the ravages of great heat.

After two successes, two conquests of Broadway, two

characterizations that were immediately ranked with the

most brilliant Shubert Alley had ever witnessed, Richard

Becker’s reputation began to build a legend.

“The Man Who is The “‘Method,’” they called him, in

perceptive articles and interviews. Lee Strasberg of the

Actors Studio, when questioned, remarked that Becker had

never been a student, but had the occasion arisen, he

might well have paid him to attend. In any event,

Richard Becker’s command of the Stanislavski theory of

total immersion in a part became a working example of

the validity of the concept. No mere scratcher and

stammerer, on a stage Richard Becker was the man

he pretended to be.

Of his private life little was written; he let it be

known that if he was to be totally convincing in a

characterization, he wanted no intrusive shadow of

himself to stand between the audience and the image he

offered.

Hollywood’s offers of stardom were refused, for as Theatre Arts commented in a brief feature on Richard

Becker:

· · · · ·

“The gestalt that Becker projects across a row of

footlights would be dimmed and turned

two-dimensional on the Hollywood screen. Becker’s

art is an ultimate distillation of truth and

metamorphosis that requires the reality of stage

production to retain its purity. It might even be

noted that Richard Becker acts in four dimensions,

as opposed to the merely craftsmanlike three of his

contemporaries. Surely no one could truly argue with

the fact that watching a Becker performance is

almost a religious experience. We can only

congratulate Richard Becker on his perceptiveness in

turning down studio bids.”

· · · · ·

The years of building a backlog of definitive parts

(effectively ruining them for other actors who were

condemned to play them after Becker had said all there

was to say) passed, as Richard Becker became, in turn, a

Hamlet that cast new lights on the Freudian implications

of Shakespeare … a fiery Southern segregationist whose

wife reveals her octoroon background … a fast-talking

salesman come to grips with futility and cowardice … a

many-faceted Marco Polo … a dissolute and totally amoral

pimp, driven by a loathing for women, to sell his own

sister into evil … a ruthless politician, dying of

cancer and senility …

And the most challenging part he had ever undertaken,

the re-creation, in the play by Tennessee Williams, of

the deranged religious zealot, trapped by his own

warring emotions, into the hammer-murder of an innocent

girl.

When they found him, in the model’s apartment off

Gramercy Place, they were unable to get a coherent story

of why he had done the disgusting act, for he had lapsed

into a stentorian tone of Biblical fervor, pontificating

about the blood of the lamb and the curse of Jezebel and

the eternal fires of Perdition. The men from Homicide

East numbered among their ranks a rookie, fresh to the

squad, who became desperately ill at the sight of the

fouled walls and the crumpled form wedged into the tiny

kitchenette; he became violently ill, and was taken from

the apartment a few minutes before Richard Becker was

led away.

The trial was a manifest sadness to all who had seen him

onstage, and the jury did not even have to be sent out

to agree on a verdict of insanity.

After all, whoever the fanatic was that the defense put

on the stands, he was not sane, and he was certainly no

longer Richard Becker, the actor.

· · · · ·

For Dr. Charles Tedrow, the patient in restraining room

16 was a constant involvement. He was unable to divorce

himself from the memory of a night three years before,

when he had sat in an orchestra seat at the Henry Miller

Theatre and seen Richard Becker, light and adroit, as

the comical Tosspot in that season’s hit comedy, Never a Rascal.

He was unable to separate his thoughts from the shape

and form of the actor who had so immersed himself in The

Method that for a time, in three acts, he was a

blundering, maundering, larcenous alcoholic with a

penchant for pomegranates and (as Becker had mouthed it

onstage) “barratry on the low seas!” Separate them from

this weird and many-faceted creature that lived its many

lives in the padded cell numbered 16? Impossible.

At first, there had been reporters, who had come to

interview the Good Doctor in charge of Becker’s case;

and to the last of these (for Dr. Tedrow had instituted

restrictions on this sort of publicity) he had said, “To

a man like Richard Becker, the world was very important.

He was very much a man of his times; he had no real

personality of his own, with the exception of that one

overwhelming faculty and need to reflect the world

around him. He was an actor in the purest sense of the

word. The world gave him his personality, his attitudes,

his façade and his reason for existence. Take those away

from him, clap him up in a padded cell—as we were forced

to do—and he begins to lose touch with reality.”

“I understand,” the reporter had inquired carefully,

“that Becker is re-living his roles, one after another.

Is that true, Dr. Tedrow?”

Charles Tedrow was, above all else, a compassionate man,

and his fury at this remark, revealing as it did a leak

in the sanitarium’s security, was unlike him. “Richard

Becker is undergoing what might be called, in

psychiatric terms, ‘induced hallucinatory regression.’

In his search for some reality, there in that room, he

has fastened onto the method of assuming characters’

moods he had played onstage. From what I’ve been able to

piece together from reviews of his shows, he is going

back: from the most recent to the next and the next and

so on.”

The reporter had asked more questions, had made more

superficial and phantasmagoric assumptions, until Dr.

Charles Tedrow had concluded the interview forcibly.

But even now, as he sat across from Richard Becker in

the quiet office, he knew that almost nothing the

reporter had conceived could rival what Becker had done

to himself.

“Tell me, Doctor,” the florid, bombastic traveling

salesman who was Richard Becker asked, “what the hell’s

new down the line?”

“It’s really very quiet, these days, Ted,” the physician

replied. Becker had been this way for two months now:

submerged in the part of Ted Rogat, the loudmouth

philandering protagonist of Chayefsky’s The Wanderer.

For six months before that he had been Marco Polo, and

before that the nervous, slack-jawed and incestuous son

of The Glass of Sadness.

“Hell, I remember one little chippie in, where was it,

oh yeah, hell yes! It was K.C., good old K.C. Man, she

was a goodie! You ever been to K.C., Doc? I was a

drummer in nylons when I worked K.C. Jeezus, lemme tell

ya—”

It was difficult to believe the man who sat on the other

side of the table was an actor. He looked the part, he

spoke the part, he was Ted Rogat, and Dr. Tedrow

would catch himself from time to time contemplating the

release of this total stranger who had wandered into

Richard Becker’s cell.

He sat and listened to the story of the flame-hipped

harlot in Kansas City whom Ted Rogat had picked up in an

Armenian restaurant, and seduced with promises of

nylons. He listened to it, and knew that whatever else

was true of Richard Becker, this creature of many faces

and many lives, he was no saner than the day he had

killed that girl. After eighteen months in the

sanitarium, he was going back, back, back through his

acting career, and re-playing the roles; but never once

coming to grips with reality.

In the plight and the flight of Richard Becker, Dr.

Charles Tedrow saw a bit of himself, of all men, of his

times and the thousand illnesses to which mortal flesh

was heir.

He returned Richard Becker, as well as Ted Rogat, to the

security and tiny world of room 16.

Two months later he brought him back and spent a highly

interesting three hours discussing group therapy with

Herr Doktor Ernst Loebisch, credentials from the Munich

Academy of Medicine and the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic.

Four months after that, Dr. Tedrow got to know the surly

and insipid Jackie Bishoff, juvenile delinquent and hero

of Streets of Night.

And almost a year later—to the day—Dr. Tedrow sat in his

office with a bum, a derelict, a rheumy-eyed and

dissipated vagabond who could only be the skid from Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker’s first triumph,

twenty-four years before.

What Richard Becker might look like, without camouflage,

in his own body, Tedrow had no idea. He was, now, to the

most agonizing scrutiny, the seedy old tramp with the

dirt caked into the sagged folds of his face.

“Mr. Becker, I want to talk to you.”

Hopelessness shined out of the old bum’s eyes. There was

no answer.

“Listen to me, Becker. Please listen to me, if you’re in

there somewhere, if you can hear me. I want you to

understand what I’m about to say; it’s very important.”

A croak, cracked and forced, came from the bum’s lips,

and he mumbled, “I need’a drink, yuh go’ uh drink fuh

me, huh …”

Tedrow leaned across, his hand shaking as he took the

old bum’s chin in his palm, and held it fixed, staring

into this stranger’s eyes. “Now listen to me, Becker.

You’ve got to hear me. I’ve gone through the files, and

as far as I can tell, this was the first part you ever

played. I don’t know what will happen! I don’t know what

form this syndrome will take after you’ve used up all

your other lives. But if you can hear me, you’ve got to

understand that you may be approaching a crisis point in

your—in your life.”

The old bum licked cracked lips.

“Listen! I’m here, I want to help you, I want to

do something for you, Becker. If you’ll come out

for an instant, just a second, we can establish contact.

It’s got to be now or—”

He left it hanging. He had no way of knowing if-what.

And as he lapsed into silence, as he released the bum’s

chin, a strange alteration of facial muscles began, and

the derelict’s countenance shifted, subtly ran like

mercury, and for a second he saw a face he recognized.

From the eyes that were no longer red-rimmed and

bloodshot, Dr. Charles Tedrow saw intelligence peering

out.

“It sounds like fear, Doctor,” he said.

And, “Goodbye, once more.”

Then the light died, the face shifted once again, and

the physician was staring once more at the empty face of

a gutter-bred derelict.

He sent the old man back to room 16. Later that day, he

had one of his male nurses take in an 89-cent bottle of

muscatel.

· · · · ·

“Speak up, man! What in the name of God is going on out

there?”

“I—I can’t explain it, Dr. Tedrow, but you’d

better—you’d better get out here right away. It’s—it’s,

oh, Jee-zus!”

“What is it? Stop crying, Wilson, and tell me

what the hell is wrong!”

“It’s, it’s number 16 … it’s …”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Keep everyone away

from that room. Do you understand? Wilson? Do you

understand me?”

“Yessir, yessir. I’ll—oh Christ-hurry up, Doc …”

He could feel his pajama pants bunched around his knees,

under his slacks, as he floored the pedal of the ranch

wagon. The midnight roads 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.

“This way, th-this way, Doctor Te—”

“Get out of my way, you idiot, I know which direction!”

He shoved Wilson aside, and strode up the steps and into

the building.

“It started about an hour ago … didn’t know what was

happ—”

“And you didn’t call me immediately? Ass!”

“We 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 unnamable something, as the scream came again.

“Give me some light!”

Another world, another voice, another life. Some evil

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.

“Give 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.

The End

—>

Copyright © 1962 by Harlan Ellison.

Revised, copyright © 1977 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed,1990, 2005

by Harlan Ellison. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission

of, the Author and the Author’s Agent, Richard Curtis

Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison

is a registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.