Harlan Ellison by Deathbird Stories (epub)

Author:Deathbird Stories (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

Even God needs good rolling stock to get things done.

The Face of Helene Bournouw

These are the sounds in the night: First, the sound of darkness, lapping at the edges of a sea of movement, itself called silence. Then, second, the fingertip-sensed sound of the cyclical movement of the universe as it gnaws its way through the dust-film called Time. And last, the animal sounds of two people making love. The moist sounds of two bodies in concert. Always the same sound, and only set apart from itself by the meters and stop-pauses of generators phasing down, of equipment being hauled into new positions for use.

Weltered, foundering, going down in this downdropping clogature of sound, Helene Bournouw’s mouth opened to receive a charcoal-scented passion as brief as the life of a leaf. Wind rushed silently past, deafening as it sucked the breath from both Helene Bournouw and her lover.

In the perfect minds of Gods too perfect even to have been conjured by mortals, there never existed a love as drenched in empathy as the love between Helene Bournouw and the man she accepted gratefully. Under the sun that burned bright and blue-white there was never a passion such as this: straight as steel ties to an indecipherable horizon, gleaming rhodium silver-white in perfection, filled to the top and to its own surface tension with amiability and laughter and random turnings in the dark that signified two merging into one, being taken in completely, warm and forever.

This was the way she made love, Helene Bournouw, the most beautiful woman who had ever seen man through eyes of wonder.

Richard Strike, the only one of the cilia-wafting Broadway columnists with a valid claim to literacy, once referred to her as the most memorable succubus he had ever encountered. The Times Square sharpers, of course, equated the phrase with oral pornography and let it pass; they knew what Helene Bournouw was: she was too beautiful.

Yet there was truth in what Strike had said, and the label was a fair one. There was something about Helene Bournouw that drained those who came into her life, within her reach. Of beauty there was no doubt; she was almost too beautiful. Abington was the only photographer she would allow to pose her, and together their model-photographer relationship brought forth portraits of Helene Bournouw that became testimonies to her unearthly loveliness, hers alone. (Whether those portraits sold sanitary napkins or compact cars, the viewer saw first Helene Bournouw, and when her image finally released him…then the product.)

From these two elements—beauty that could not be denied and a nature that left others spent and empty—elements met and altered subtly by the catalyst that was Helene Bournouw, the legend grew. Her private life was her own, something peculiar and rare for a mover in that circle where publicity has monetary value. Other than superficialities concerning what young executive or visiting film star she was dating, little was known of her.

As Abington once remarked to a curious article writer from one of the women’s slicks, “When she leaves the studio, I don’t know where she goes.

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