Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

*Ellison Anecdote #2: My wife and I attended a lecture that Harlan gave at the University of Colorado in the fall of 1974. He had at that time just finished "Croatoan," the skin-freezer which leads off Strange Wine , and he'd had a vasectomy two days before. "I'm still bleeding," he told the audience, "and my lady can attest that I'm telling the truth." The lady did so attest, and an elderly couple began to make their way out of the auditorium, looking a bit shocked. Harlan waved a cheery goodbye to them from the podium. "Night, folks," he called. "Sorry it wasn't what you wanted.”

"Croatoan" uses that myth of alligators under the streets of New York as its starting point- see also Thomas Pynchon's U. and a funnyhorrible novel called Death Tour by David J.

Michael; this is an oddly pervasive urban nightmare. But Ellison's story is really about abortion.

He may not be antiabortion (nowhere in his intro to this story does he say he's pro -abortion, however), but the story is certainly more sharply honed and unsettling than that tattered piece of yellow journalism which all right-to-lifers apparently keep in their wallets or purses so they can wave it under your nose at the drop of an opinion-this is the one which purports to have been written by a baby while in utero . "I can't wait to see the sun and the flowers," the fetus gushes. "I can't wait to see my mother's face, smiling down at me . . ." It ends, of course, with the fetus saying, "Last night my mother killed me.” "Croatoan" begins with the protagonist flushing the aborted fetus down the toilet. The ladies who have done the deed to the protagonist's girl friend have packed their d & c tools and left.

Carol, the woman who has had the abortion, flips out and demands that the protagonist go and find the fetus. Trying to placate her, he goes out into the street with a crowbar, levers up a manhole cover . . . and descends into a different world.

The alligator story began, of course, as a result of the give-a-kid-ababy-alligator-aren't-they-just-the- cutest -little-things craze of the midfifties. The kid who got the Bator would keep it for a few weeks, then the tiny alligator would all of a sudden not be so tiny anymore. It would nip, perhaps draw blood, and down the toilet it went. It was not so farfetched to believe that they might all be down there on the black underside of our society, feeding, growing bigger, waiting to gobble up the first unwary sewer repairman to come sloshing along in his hipwaders. As David Michael points out in Death Tour , the problem is that most sewers are much too cold to sustain life in fully grown alligators, let alone in those still small enough to flush away.