HARLAN ELLISON

MIDNIGHT IN THE SUNKEN CATHEDRAL

 *
Harlan Ellison is the second columnist who has provided us with a story this
issue. Harlan, our film editor, has been composing a lot of short fiction
lately, much of it for his comic book series. The series, produced by Dark Horse
Comics, is called Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor. The issues are spectacular,
the art stunning, and the stories . . . well see for yourself.

 *
"Midnight at the Sunken Cathedral" inspired our cover, done by artist Barclay
Shaw.

He walked the bottom of the world and tried not to think about how his father
had died. Half a mile from the ivory sand beach, off the east coast of Andros
Island, two hundred feet below the surface of the Grand Bahama Banks. Trudging
through the warm, cool, warm translucency of the North Atlantic at latitude
24'26" N, longitude 77'57"W. A quarter of a mile from the island -- about
twenty-five miles southwest of Nassau --well within the 1,500,000 square miles
known as the Bermuda Triangle --the ledge suddenly tips out and goes from 80
feet, drops out of all earthly sight, all human conception, to 2000 feet, maybe
3000, maybe more. Miles, incomprehensible miles down, where the pressure of
pounds per square inch is tens, perhaps hundreds of tons. Nothing we know can
survive at such depths. It is called the Wall of Andros, and those depths are
known as the Tongue of the Ocean. In specially constructed bathyspheres, and
once in the International Hard Suit unit called a Newtsuit, the abyssal deep had
been penetrated to the depth most commonly found in the international maritime
atlas, 1382 meters; 4533 feet; almost a mile straight down. They had seen only
darkness below them; and the cataclysmic stress-creaking of tungsten steel and
case-molded maxi-plastic had warned them to pry no deeper, to go back up, go
back home where soft flesh things would not be reduced to a crimson smear.

Walking through gorgeous plant life and coral outcrops and the racing, darting
animated movie of piscatorial chromatics, he pulled himself along in the ancient
hardhat diving suit, grabbing a medusa handful of writhing tubers, clawing the
long-handled sand-fork against a chunk of upthrust coral, stirring the silt
bottom as little as possible, plodding ahead step by step toward the anomaly he
had read on his sonar screen.

In the basement of the Bermuda Triangle, blue as the eye of the most perfect
sapphire ever uncovered, 350 carats, the Star of Asia, he teetered ahead of his
bubble-trail, angled forward at forty-five degrees, hauling his airhose and
lifeline behind him like the great tail of a saurian.

And he tried not to think about the way his father had died.

His father -- whom he had loved and admired more than he had ever been able to
say, ever been able to tell the man -- had been slammed to pulp between the
upper and lower dies of a gigantic body-part hydraulic punch press in the old
Poletown plant, the Dodge main plant, in Hamtramck, the East Side of Detroit, in
1952 when Dennis was less than a year old. George DeVore Lanfear had reached
into the four foot high opening with his left hand when the cold-stamped steel
front door stuck in the press. He reached in with a long piece of pry metal, as
he had done a hundred times before, knowing that the press operator had set the
safety buttons that would protect him. The press was on hold, the clutch was
locked; he extended himself into that empty space between iron jaws, sixteen
feet deep, twelve feet wide, until the upper half of his body right to the
belt-line was under a metal roof, resting on a metal deck; and the master button
die setter was an alcoholic who was half-wasted from the night before, and the
clutch didn't hold, and the safety failed, and the press automatically repeated
the operation, and the press smashed down with a roof pressure of one hundred
tons, and infant Dennis Lanfear was without a father. Dead as table scraps, in
the old Dodge Main on Joseph Campeau Avenue, on the East Side of Detroit, in
1952, before Dennis could tell him how much he loved and admired him. Which he
came to understand, when he grew older, because of the stories his mother told
him about his father, was a manifestation of his infinite, terrible loss.

Dennis Lanfear had grown to manhood without ever having been given the moment to
embrace his father, and tell him how dear his memory had become to him. Could
never tell him, not when he was fourteen and went to see the building in which
his father had died (and got bad directions and hitchhiked out to Ypsilanti,
Where he wound up at the soon-to-be-closed Willow Run plant that had helped win
World War II); not when he was twenty-two and joined the U.S. Navy to honor the
service in which George Lanfear had served during the battle of the Gulf of
Leyte; not when he was thirty-five and got his top security clearance and was
assigned as First Sonar Technician at the clandestine listening station and
torpedo test site here at Andros, the secret base most line-item military
agendas listed only as "U.S. Navy Autec Range."

Nor could he tell his father, more than forty years gone, that he had been
picking up something bewildering on his screens for quite a while now.

He had no way of telling George Lanfear that something wild and weird and
possibly wonderful -- like the secret dream of his otherwise mundane life -- was
going on in that absolute nowhere called the Tongue of the Ocean. Something that
could not be named, and certainly could not be brought to the attention of his
superiors . . . because it made no sense.

So now he walked. Having invaded one of the old shipyards on Andros, having
"liberated" some old unassisted "hardhat" diving dress from rusted lockers,
having repaired it and made it sound lit was gear dated 1922), and having
adapted the gear to accommodate a synthetic mixture called heliox, which mix of
helium and oxygen would allow him to exceed the two hundred foot depth this kind
of hardhat gear usually permitted, he was nearing the spot indicated on his
sonar readings.

He walked the bottom of the world, tried not to think that one slip and he would
topple over the edge of the Wall of Andros, sink into the Tongue of the Ocean,
and long before his airhose and lifeline pulled taut, he would be crushed by
pressures easily as great as those that had slapped his father into oblivion. He
trudged, he tried to avoid thoughts, and he did not see the smooth shadow that
undulated above him and behind him. But soon he would reach . . .

There!

There it was. But it made no sense. He stared through the thick faceplate glass
of his helmet, and at first could not comprehend what he was seeing. Time passed
as he stood there amid neon-colored swimmers, breathing heavily, trying to get
his eyes to re-rack the size and meaning of what he was seeing.

Out there, perhaps twenty-five meters beyond the lip of the ridge, out there
hanging over the abyss, was a gigantic waterfall. He ran the word through his
mind once:

QED. It is a waterfall.

Perhaps a hundred feet above him, there was a dark, odd, faintly glowing opening
in the underwater. It was enormous, a mouth of water that opened into water. As
if a vacuum hole -- the words were the best he could do -- a vacuum hole had
opened into this deep. And pouring down out of that aperture, into the
bottomless deep of the Tongue of the Ocean, was a waterfall of rushing,
plunging, foaming water, faintly crimson and solid as paving stones, cascading
out and over and down like an otherworldly Niagara, here beneath the Atlantic,
here in the Bermuda Triangle, here in front of Dennis Lanfear.

He was frozen in place, disbelieving, frightened, and unable to defend himself
as the painted, serpentine creature that had been pacing him curled herself over
and over around his airhose and his lifeline, snapping them, descending on him,
grasping him in incredibly powerful, naked arms, and dove with him . . .

Over and over, off the ledge, into the bottomless darkness below the Wall of
Andros, down and down, to five hundred feet where the pounds of pressure per
square inch was over two hundred, and Lanfear found himself embraced with death,
as he was dragged down and down, till the faint light of the ocean was
extinguished, and so was his consciousness; and the last thing he saw as
oblivion rushed in on him was the sweet, smiling, thousand-year-old face of the
watcher in the abyss, the guardian of the portal, the mermaid who bore him to
extinction.

Lanfear was dissolving in a world of red thunder.

It was dark, and cold, and he was held so tightly he could barely flex a muscle
inside the diving suit.

 *
" . . . here was darkness . . . darkness complete; i t was that sepulchral and
terrible moment which follows midnight."

VICTOR HUGO, Les Miserables

He had never feared tight places, closed-in confinement. There were other
terrors, small ones, left over from childhood -- cinders in the eye, certain
soft insects with too many legs -- but not the dark clothes closet, not the
chilly dark basement, not the cobwebby shadowland under the back porch. But this
was the weight of the entire ocean. This was the dungeon at the bottom of the
world. Everything was up there above him, as he was borne below in the gentle,
unremitting arms of a shipper of mythology.

For the first time in his life, Dennis Lanfear felt the paralyzing fear of
claustrophobia; no rapture, in this deep.

The sound of wind rushing down through a great tunnel, the faint background
memory sound of a great assembly line, the clank of metal on metal, the
heartbeat regularity of machinery impacting on bendable steel. Dark and cold,
like eternal midnight.

The sweet and gentle mermaid's face that had appeared for an instant in the
Perspex, the fogging viewplate of his highly planished tinned copper diving
helmet . . . and then was gone . . . as unlikely crimson water and sucking
thunder took him through to the other side of unconsciousness.

A place that was always midnight.

Where the altar was closed for repairs, and the place of worship was boarded up.
Watery, deep, high-ceilinged with misty vastness stretching up, up beyond sight.
But always out of reach, and always at that terrible moment which follows
midnight.

Dennis Lanfear was dissolving in a world of red thunder.

He was out, gone, blanked and insensible; but his flesh continued to listen in
on the secret messages of the deep.

Instinctively, as his air-hose had been severed when she had wrenched him off
the ledge of the Wall of Andros, he had knocked his head against the spindle of
the regulating air outlet valve. The valve was usually made to be adjusted by
hand but -- like the Perspex faceplate that had replaced the original
plate-glass built into the gun-metal frames when the "hardhat" diving suit was
new in 1922 -- someone had re-rigged the valve so the spindle was extended
through to the inside of the helmet, fitted at its inner extremity with a small
disc. Instinctively, he had knocked the disc with his head, trapping what air
remained in the deep-sea dress. He could breathe. Oblivious, descending, bright
with delirium, his listening molecules followed the passage of the story of his
deep fall.

In this aspect of the Bermuda Triangle the water was always Nassau warm. But as
he spiraled deeper into the Tongue of the Ocean, pressed to the breasts of the
woman-fish, it grew even warmer. Lying out in an August hammock warm. And the
invitation of thunder grew louder. Perhaps hundreds of meters above them as they
fell into infinite shadow, the great crimson waterfall roared as it spilled its
raging body out of that impossible vacuum hole. But the thunder was not from the
impossible avalanche of gallons above them. It came from below in the bottomless
deep. Lanfear's listening DNA clocked every insinuation, every nuance. And then,
when the fragile sack of blood that was his human body should have come unseamed
and split, at a depth no surface creature could call home, he began to dissolve.

Dennis Lanfear, hands empty, mind clutching no more than muted memories of the
crashed, dead father he had never been privileged to know, began to dissolve in
a world of crimson water, a world of red thunder.

He had feared he would die as his father had died, in the jaws of unbearable
pounds per square inch, but it was not to be. The self-fulfilling prophecy --
will I outlive the years allotted to my father --he died at forty-four, will I
live to be fifty -- the unspoken fear that numbs all men -- was eluded.

Dennis Lanfear did not crash under the heel of the deep, he merely dissolved.
Molecule by molecule, atom by atom, submicroscopic electrical pulse by invisible
swimming flux, he was carried down in the mermaid's arms toward the twin of the
booming vacuum hole far above . . . a quiet yet susurrating void as black and
empty of identity as the matrix of a thresher shark's eye. His every instant was
culled, harvested, codified . . . and sucked into the vacuum hole as the
guardian of the portal, the watcher of the Bermuda Triangle abyss, who had
hauled such cargo uncounted times in her thousand-year existence, released his
mortal flesh in its puny diving suit fabricated in 1922 in a city of a nation
that had not existed for one-tenth her lifespan. She smiled, and swam away in
the warm.

And the essence of Lanfear was carried away, into the dead emotionless vacuum
eye of an abyss that lived, as the shark lives, only to feed.

The light that came to his skin from the end of the universe was white and pure
and bright; but the water around him as he came to the surface of the great lake
pool was a chromatic sibling of red and pink and amber that no eye on Earth had
ever seen. It registered in that vast and desolate cerebral Sahara within the
parietal lobe where nothing can grow. There, in the unfathomable desolation of
the primary sensory cortex, whose functions are the Bermuda Triangle of the
brain's potential, such hues and shades as composed the gently rippling waters
as his throbbing head broke the surface, had meaning and identity. In that alien
landscape of the mind, to which no human being had ever retained valid passport,
the spectrum was wider, broader, deeper, and sang with a brighter resonance.

The copper diving helmet was gone. Dispensed with. Somewhere behind him in the
passage through the thunderingly silent drain of the vacuum hole. Perhaps its
atoms had been dispersed in a cloudy shower saturating the life-heavy waters off
the Grand Bahama Banks. Perhaps they had been fired away in a narrow-focus
stream, like a lightless laser beam, as he was disassembled, broken-down,
deconstructed, unbuilt, as his molecules were being transported here -- to this
place of the lake pool and exquisite diamond-bright light and gently rippling
water that seemed heavier than he remembered water to be, seemed able to hold
him higher in its totality than he remembered water was able. It was not that he
felt lighter, more buoyant, just that the water was more reliable, more
fatherly, gentler. He trusted it more than when be had been--

-- had been where? Had been in the water beyond Andros Island? Had been in the
North Atlantic Ocean? Had been on the planet Earth? Had been in the year and the
month and the day on the calendar in his office back at the Sonar station? Had
been in his right mind, his right-brain mind? Where he had been: that much he
knew. Where he was now, what had happened to bring him to this new place, by
what impossible transport . . . he could not begin to fathom. The diving suit,
too, was gone. Its atoms dispersed at the checkout counter of
transmogrification. Stale-dated. Roundfiled. Recycled. Where the hell am I?

He looked across the crimson lake and saw ships.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of ships. Boats, craft, vessels of all sizes and
periods and origins. Arab dhows and Gallic currachs, Greek triremes and
balsa-wood PT boats, Canton delta lorcha and lateen-sailed Portuguese trawlers.
Whalers, warships, feluccas and frigates; hydrofoils, hagboats, pinnaces and
Pechili junks. Siamese lug-sails, brigantines, galeasses, Hanseatic League cogs,
sixty-oared papyrus galleys, Norse drakkars and dragon-prowed Viking longships
called the Oseberg ship. Barques, yawls, packet boats, gigarettes, freighters,
cabin cruisers, sampans, windjammers and luxury liners; Turkish tchektirme,
Greek sacoleva, Venetian trabaccolo, Levantine caique, and the German U-1065
pigboat alleged to have been sunk by R.A.F. Mosquitos in the Kattegat. Sailing
ships that were little more than rough-hewn logs lashed into the shape of a raft
with lianas, and twin-hulled catamarans of titanium and PVC pipe. The lake pool,
harbor of last resort, Sargasso of lost ships, was filled with the oceangoing
detritus of ten thousand years.

Yet it was hardly jammed. It seemed endless in its capacity to hold the
castaways of the shipping lanes, but the lake was spacious and only dotted with
a shape here, a bobbing four-masted brigantine there. Dennis Lanfear, treading
water, turned slowly, looking and looking amazed at the bizarre optical illusion
made by a storehouse overflowing . . . that remained capacious and expectant.

He turned and turned . . . and saw the city.

It rose from the very edge of the lake pool. Slanting up as softly blue and gray
as psalms ascending to Heaven, it was massive, enthralling, breathtaking in the
complexity of its segmented faces. Walls so high they dizzyingly ran to a sky
that could not be seen in the misty upper reaches. Walls that abutted at right
angles -- yet formed no central square. Walls that seemed ancient, yet downy
with the breath of first birth. The cave dwellings of the Anasazi, the
prehistorical hive dwellings of slope-browed pre-men, the filing cabinets for
gothamites gone eternally condo . . . this was the City indeed, the City
supreme. It towered over the harbor, and at first Lanfear saw no hint of human
movement.

But as he stroked toward the quay, toward the low lip of polished blue-gray
stone that would allow him to climb up to the walkway fronting the Great Walls,
he saw one small figure, just one. No, there was a second person. Man or woman,
be could not be sure . . . either of them.

He breast-stroked through the lovely crimson water, softly lapping at the stones
of the quay, and paddled in to shelter. He pulled himself along till he reached
something like a hemp cargo net hanging into the water, anchored out of sight on
the walkway above. He pulled himself up, and stood, dripping heavy pink
moisture, dwarfed by the immensity of the cyclopean walls that slanted away
above him. He craned to see the sky, even to see a ceiling, but all was mist and
the reborn antiquity of structures ageless and ever new.

He marveled that, if he were indeed somewhere beneath the Bermuda Triangle, in
some impossible sub-oceanic world that could exist in defiance of the rigors of
physics and plate tectonics and magma certainties, then this subterranean
edifice was certainly the most colossal structure ever built on the planet. A
holy sunken cathedral built by gods.

He stood there dripping pink, thick water, sanctifying himself in the first
moment of true religion he had ever known.

And one of the two figures who had been walking beside the quay came toward him,
and it was a man in his very late thirties or early forties, wearing a gray
chambray shirt and casual chino slacks. He was a pleasant-looking man, and he
walked toward Dennis Lanfear and, as he drew near, he smiled and said, "Dennis?
Is that you, son?"

Dennis Lanfear came back from abstract visions of the City of God, the holy
sunken cathedral, and looked at the man. Then he stared at the man. Then he saw
the man.

Then he knew the man.

He had not seen his father since he had been ten months old. Now he was just
over forty. He was older than the man in front of him, but he knew the face from
his mother's photographs -- the picnic at Crystal Beach, the wedding the shot of
him leaning against the Packard, the snapshot on the dock when he came back from
the War. Dennis Lanfear stared into, and knew, the smile of his father dead four
decades; the loving face of George DeVote Lanfear, come to beam upon, and
pridefully acknowledge, the son he had never been allowed to see grow to
manhood.

Dennis stood silent, the pain swelling up from his stomach to his chest and into
his eyes. As his father embraced him, he began to cry. His father's arms went
around him, the tough, corded arms that had worked so diligently until death in
the auto assembly plant; and that strength bound Dennis as securely as had the
arms of the mermaid who had brought him here, beyond midnight, to the sunken
cathedral.

"Where are you? Who am I? What is this place?"

His father sat with him in one of the great rooms of the submerged city. They
had eaten, they had talked endlessly, they had swapped stories of the past
before Dennis had been born, and of the world since George DeVote Lanfear had
died. They had caught up. They were father and son. And now was the moment of
explanations, and of decisions about the future . . . because the journey was
only half the destination.

"Atlantis," his father said gently. "You're in Atlantis."

Dennis shook his head in pleasant, startled incredulity. "The legend?" he said.
"The great sunken continent, Plato, Minoan Crete, all that . . . is that what
you mean?"

"Welcome to Mars," his father said, grinning widely.

"You said Atlantis."

"Welcome to Atlantis."

"I, I don't seem to . . . "

"The Atlanteans went to Mars, son. You were brought here the way millions of
others have been brought here, for thousands of years, because you got too near
one of the drains. Our recycling system. Hadn't you noticed the red water?"

"I -- I --" He stopped. He held his head comically, and waggled it back and
forth. "I'm not up to this, dad. You've given me too much to --"

"All right, more slowly, then. The Atlanteans absolutely commanded time and
space, just as the tall tales tell. They looked ahead, and they saw what was
coming, what the human race was heading toward becoming and they left. They went
to Mars."

"But there's no life on Mars, we can see that from the probes we've sent. It's
desolate, unlivable. Are you telling me that we're under Mars?"

"Exactly. But not the Mars that hangs in the night sky of Earth's telescopes.
They, the ones who will build the ships, they'll never reach Mars. Whatever red
planet in their sky that they land upon . . . whatever it's called . . . it will
not be Mars. Command of time and space, remember? Come on, tell me you remember,
don't fall behind."

Dennis laughed, a mild amusement. "I remember."

"Excellent. It's almost as if either one of us is smart enough to understand
this. What it is, son, is that even if the human race reaches 'Mars' it won't be
this place. To some Mars, perhaps; but never to this Mars, this Atlantis, to
which we fled. In fairness, they left the legend. Just to tantalize. It was a
debt they felt, a debt we still feel. An even break, if you get what I mean. If
the world changes -- it hasn't, has it? --"

Dennis sighed and shook his head.

"Ah. Well, then . . . if the world does change, and people change, and the
legend draws them to us, we'll take them in. We took you in, didn't we?" Dennis
smiled. "But not otherwise.

"Otherwise . . . they'll have to shoulder their own destiny. If we could do it,
why shouldn't they? We all come from the same egg."

He stared at his father, knowing all was not as it seemed.

The explanations were shimmering, insubstantial, missed a beat here and there.

His father looked at him with unbent affection, and said gently, "And I? Am I
your father? Well, perhaps and perhaps not exactly. But I'll do. I am -- really
and truly -- one of the many possible men your father would have become, had he
been accorded the chance. I'm a good chance at your father."

"Am I dead?"

"Ah. That question. You ask it a little less quickly than most of the cargo she
brings us: But . . . yes, that question again."

"Am I? Am I dead?"

"Not an important consideration. Probably not. But maybe you are. So what? Does
it really matter a hoot in hell? Live, dead, you're in a warm place with
wonderful things happening. We've got the opportunity denied us back where you
came from, the opportunity to get to know each other. Isn't that something
you've always wanted? Haven't you always cried in your heart that we never got
to talk about everything that mattered?"

"Yes. But --"

His father spread his hands and gave him that spiffy smile. "Buts keep coming,
Dennis. They never stop. And let me tell you a thing: even if you knew someone
you loved, like your father, for instance, knew he was dying, and you sat by his
bedside for six months before he passed on, and you said everything you'd ever
wanted to say, tied off all the loose ends, made all the little wry
observations, shared every experience you'd ever had, the both of you . . . and
you got said every last thing there was to say, about love and family and how
much you'd miss me . . . I promise you that the moment I'd closed my eyes and
gone away, you'd think of something you left out, something desperate to be
said, and you'd rue the moment for the rest of your life.

"But here, now, the two of us, father and son together at last, here on Mars, in
Atlantis. We can talk as long as we wish. It's really fortuitous, Dennis. Or do
you prefer Denny?"

And there, in the sunken cathedral, far away in another sky, beneath a broiling
sun, under a crimson ocean, inside a triangle that opened onto misty reaches,
father and son walked and talked together. As it had been ordained. As it had
never been ordained. By chance. By choice. By design. Happenstance.

At last Dennis Lanfear had all the time he would ever need to realize his
dearest wish: to share, amazingly, all the aspects of the father he had never
known. Never knowing this: that at the final moment of George DeVote Lanfear's
life, as death plunged toward him from above, his last fleeting thought was that
he would never see his kid grow up, never know what sort of man he was to
become.

By chance. By choice.

Somewhere in the North Atlantic, a body bobbed face-down in warm waters, but
that body might not have once been Dennis Lanfear.

Nor was there, for any reason, a howl in the halls of hell, not even in the
halls of the gods.