Fourth Mansions

by R. A. Lafferty

  “No, Freddy. I'm standing ten feet from you. Tell me what this is, Freddy. Mystery doesn't become you.”

  “It's the same face three times, it's the same name three times. Selim, how would you say Overlark in old Egyptian?”

  “Ka-Ra, which means both the food of Ra and the soul of Ra, is also the word for a lark. I don't know what Overlark means, though, other than a name.”

  “Neither do I. This piece of paper, Selim, which you didn't slip into my pocket, gives a certain address, and it tells me to go there right now.”

  “You are a reporter. Go there. It may have been in your pocket for hours, though, and you just noticed it now. You may have put it there yourself and forgotten it. You know how you are. But go there, tonight or in the morning. Remember, you're the boy who never passes up a tip on anything. You told me so yourself.”

  “I'll go right now. It says right now. It says to come alone. I'm scared of it but I'll go. Say, those guys are talking Mexican-Spanish and they're cooking up something big. They might really jolt the world, that guy and those he's gathered.”

  “What guys, Freddy? Those of the address where you're going?”

  “Oh no, other guys entirely. Selim, I bet I know something that they don't know about their own brain-weave, and they invented it.”

  “Who, the Mexican-Spanish plotters?”

  “No, the Shes and the Borgias, Biddy's group. You get plugged into their brain-weave and you stay plugged in. They plug into someone else, and you're connected too. And sometimes now I'm connected with him and they're not. Well, one snake-pit at a time; I'll go to the address. It's a spooky part of town, especially this late at night, but I knew it when I was a kid and I still know it. Good night, Selim.”

  “Good night, Freddy. And, Freddy, you aren't the only one who's noticed the resemblance of the life-mask to Carmody Overlark. It's been a joke around the museum for these two days.”

  III: IF THEY CAN KILL YOU, I CAN KILL YOU WORSE

  We have gone higher and deeper than anyone has gone before. We have solved problems that were always regarded as impossible of solution. We have reached a certain firm height in material and physical and spiritual being. We have come up in powerful, loose, integrated movement, and with profound freshness and creativity in our group soul; and we have seen the high pastures beyond. We come to the verge, to the mansions of the fourth height, in a moving moment of dizzy expectation and extreme danger, up under a new Heaven with a new Earth in our hands. Don't drop it!

  Second Trefoil Lectures: Michael Fountain

  FRED FOLEY swung along with a jauntiness of expectation. This was a section of town that he had always been a little frightened of, but the frightening elements were from his childhood.

  There had been a brick factory here once. The offices of the company were still here, but the hive-shaped baking kilns were now at another location. It had been from the intense fires of those kilns that Freddy Foley, walking in the evenings with his father and not yet four years old, had got his idea of Hell. Should he be probed even today it would be found that he had a concrete idea of Hell, that it is hive-shaped like a brick baking kiln and of an eye-burning fire inside.

  And with this idea was an early story told him by Sylvester Larker, that they had put a little boy into one of the kilns and burned him up. No reason was given for this. In small boys’ stories no reason is ever given for any act, nor is it asked. They burned the little boy all up except his eyes, which turned into agates. These were the same two agates that Sylvester Larker used for taws. They would seek out the marbles for themselves, they never missed; Sylvester Larker had been marble champion. And he had given these two agates to Freddy.

  All his life, people would be giving valuable things to Fred Foley unasked: gifts, powers, lives, worlds, secrets.

  Also, in this part of town, there had been the brick pit itself, likely the deepest hole on earth. It had a narrow-gauge railway track down in it, and the little cars that shuttled back and forth were wound up from it by cables. There had always been water in the bottom of the pit, however much they pumped it out. And once a little boy had drowned there. He was of Freddy's age, four then, and he was the first dead person that Freddy was ever permitted to see.

  There were other elements in that old section which had abiding effect on Freddy Foley. The people of that neighborhood had kept both cows and hogs long after it was forbidden by ordinance to keep them in town. And pigeons — all the families had kept pigeons. There is no accounting for the manner in which pigeons had become sinister to Freddy; it was surely in connection with some story which he no longer remembered. In the early days of that neighborhood, many of the houses still had barns; the barns had lofts, and lofts always have pigeons.

  Hound dogs too. The Stamfords had hounds, the Dugans had hounds, the Collyers had both bird-dogs and hang-dog hounds; and kids who have strings of hounds are just naturally tough. This is fact, whatever the explanation of it.

  There were the railroads, very strong in the complex of memories. The district was in the V of two lines which joined forces there before they went downtown, and it was there that they always hit their whistles. There had been sidings to the cottonseed-oil plant, to the brickyard, to a fire-belching foundry, to a boiler-maker's. There was the waste land that is always about rail junctions, bogs, weed patches, small pastures, large vacant lots, genuine woods with streams, clay cliffs honeycombed with boys’ and hobos’ caves, and the Old Show Grounds. The Show Grounds held the carnivals, all the circuses except Ringling's, which was too big for it; and in times between it was always occupied by families of Indians, Gypsies or Mexicans.

  Among these was the Larker family. The Larkers could have been any of the three, or could have been something else. Toney, who was Freddy's age, said that they were Indians, that they really owned the whole town-site, that they were going to take it back and make the people pull down all the buildings, and then they would kill them all by putting green rawhide around their necks and setting them out in the sun. This shrank the rawhide and strangled the people to death.

  Sylvester, who was two years older than Freddy, said that they were Mexicans, and for proof of this he had a Mexican knife that had killed sixteen men. But Leo Joe Larker, who was the oldest of the Larkers and four years older than Freddy, said that they were Gypsies. He said that they could tell who was going to be murdered and who was going to die that year. He said, moreover, that they could work magic, and that he himself had raised a man from the dead.

  But Freddy's father had said that the Larkers were a black-necked bunch of Irish tinkers, the last of them, and that the world would be better when they were gone. The Larkers had a shack that was clapboards on the bottom and canvas on top.

  This was the first time in a dozen years that Freddy had been back to that district where he had been raised. He knew about where the address would be. He was going to a meeting with a person whose name he did not know, answering a summons which he had received in an unknown way. “Walk there, and talk to no one, and do it at once,” the note said. “You will barely have time.”

  The face of this district had changed somewhat, but the feeling of it had not. Freddy knew that it was still occupied by the toughest boys in town and that they were no longer small boys. As reporter he knew that the bars here were dingier and rougher than bars elsewhere, that most of the burglars in town lived here, that crimes of violence in the district had a shamefully high index, that there were stories going around more macabre than those Freddy had heard in childhood.

  The quarter had always been built up in tight knots of buildings separated by empty spreads. There was something oriental about the crowdedness of the buildings, something medieval about the high-gabled look of them. There were still the vacant lots, still the woods that threatened to take over the whole place with a sudden rush, still the street lights broken out as often as they were replaced.

  The house of the address (it had to be the address, though it could not be rea
d in the dark) was a tipsy four-storied frame building with no light at all except a cigarette in the open door. It was a squat earth-giant winking with a small red eye. But what gave Fred Foley the creeps was that he knew what man was standing there, and he couldn't have. Ah well, a fellow who raised a man from the dead when he was no more than nine years old will always have a certain presence about him.

  “Hello, Leo Joe,” Freddy said boldly. “Is it yourself I am to meet?” It was Leo Joe Larker standing there still unseen, either as blood-curdling boy or as man.

  “You know my name? I underestimated you. I'll have to find out how you know my name, since it wasn't told to you,” said the black gap behind the cigarette.

  “You haven't changed, Leo Joe, except in your voice. I used to know you when we were boys. I can't see you in that dark doorway, though.” Nothing was changed in Leo Joe except his voice. But the voice was all that could be encountered of him. If the boy's voice could not be recognized in the man, and if the man himself was invisible in the dark, then what was it that identified him?

  “You haven't changed from before?” Freddy added.

  “Not changed from what before? But yes, you were the fearful little boy. You had a dog named Popcorn,” the voice said.

  “And now I am Fearless Freddy,” Fred Foley said. “I ask you again. Is it with you that I have this informal appointment?”

  “No, Foley, I'm an interloper.”

  “I'd rather deal direct, Leo Joe.”

  “I'm putting in first claim on you.”

  “What for?”

  “If you're threatened in any way tonight, and you will be, just consider that I have an override on all threats to you.”

  “But if my meeting isn't with you, how do you have any part of it?”

  “Never mind my part. Upstairs you're going to be threatened by a couple of rough-talking gentlemen. They overdo their threats. But then they also overdo their execution of them. They can kill you, and there's a fair likelihood that they will. It's one thing to be threatened in a very heavy and outmoded style; it's another thing to be killed in that same outmoded style.”

  “What will they want me to do?”

  “They'll want you to lay off the line of inquiry you're on.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to stay on it, Foley. Be dumb, blind, blundering, and silly, but stay on it. You may be dumb enough to get to the core of it.”

  “Well, will you help me with it, Leo Joe? I'm totally in the dark.”

  “No, I won't help you. And you seem able to see in the dark tonight. No, you have to go on your own all the way with it. I'm just telling you not to lay off. If they can kill you, Foley, I can kill you worse. If they can scare you, I can outdo them at that too. Now go up to your appointment. You better not be late.”

  “What will I do?”

  “Whatever they tell you to do, don't. Whatever they tell you not to do, do it. But say what you have to, to get out of there alive. And don't keep any more appointments in dark rooms with people you don't know.”

  “If the appointments are in the line of my inquiries, I will keep them. Ah, do you ever see any of the old kids, Leo Joe?”

  “I don't know anything about old kids. I'm probably not who you think I am.” The man came out of the doorway still wrapped in dark, passed by Freddy Foley silently and disappeared. He didn't look much like Leo Joe Larker should have grown up to look like; he hadn't sounded like him at all. The dark glimpse had shown a man who might be a Negro. The voice, remembered now, had something of that tone. Nevertheless, Fred Foley believed that this interloper man had been Leo Joe Larker when he was a boy.

  Foley entered the dark doorway of the building. He felt his way up the stairway. It wasn't too difficult. All these old wooden apartments were built alike. This one, Freddy now suspected, was empty and condemned; and he knew that the only light he would see would be one coming from under the door of a room on the top floor. He knew his appointment would be in such a room, though the note hadn't told him of that.

  Freddy saw the slit of light as he shuffled to the top step. He opened the door and went in. He pulled up a chair and sat down at the table with the three men. “It's your move,” Fred Foley said.

  “You've been asking questions about a man who has been replaced,” the first man said heavily. It was pretty dim in there. The light that Foley had seen slitted under the door was from some sort of carbide lantern such as hunters use. The lantern was sitting on the floor and did not illuminate the faces of the men well. Apparently the utilities were off in this building. “Don't you know that you can be replaced as easily?” that first man asked.

  “No. If I thought I could be replaced, I wouldn't worry so much about myself. How can I be replaced?”

  “By another man named Fred Foley who would be identical to you in appearance. But he won't be going around asking questions,” that first man said.

  “Actually I wasn't asking questions about a man who has been replaced,” Freddy said. “I think I've been asking questions about a man who replaced another. That's where my interest lies.”

  “Then you're asking questions about the wrong man, Foley. Your own situation is like that of the man who was replaced. You should wonder what happened to him.”

  “I hadn't given him a thought. All right, I wonder what did happen to him?”

  “He ended, Foley, and without a trace. It can happen to you, tomorrow, even tonight. You would not be at all. You would be worse than dead. And not only would there be no trace of you, but there would be no one wondering where you went. Another Fred Foley would be walking around in your clothes, wearing your face and your body, living in your rooms, holding your job. But he wouldn't be you. And you wouldn't be anything, anywhere.”

  “So I should stop asking questions?”

  “You should stop even thinking questions,” the second man at the table said.

  “The replaced man may not be in complete oblivion,” Freddy hazarded. “I may follow that line of inquiry by being a replaced man and seeing where it leads.”

  “We won't be mysterious about it,” said the third man at the table. “It leads to physical death. Some of the victims die in pretty heavy agony. Some of the dispatchers get a lot of fun out of it. It's my own kind of fun. You can follow that line of inquiry if you want to, Foley, but it will be hard to get your story back from the other side.”

  Foley passed his hand before his eyes. There wasn't anything there. It had been as though a strand of gossamer or spider-silk had touched him. Those things aren't very thick. It would take a lot of them to entangle a man. It was an old spider-silk, though, and it dangled out of a web of old memories.

  This room, this old rooming house, was on the edge of the Old Show Grounds where the carnivals used to set up. Foley remembered one show where a man sawed a lady in half. What happened, someone had told him, was that the man didn't saw her in two at all; it was a trick. But what really happened, Leo Joe Larker had told him (Leo Joe the boy who seemed to have grown into an altogether different man), was that the man sawed her in two all right and she died. Then they got a different lady to show the people out in front. They used up about five ladies a day with the act. Freddy had always believed Leo Joe's explanation of how it was done, rather than the weak silly stories that others had given him. “But what do they do with all the dead ladies?” he had asked Leo Joe at the time. That had brought on another story, for there was an unusual disposition of the bodies of the sawed-in-half women. It wasn't very practical, though, and he doubted if these three men here would use the same method. What he had asked then and what he almost asked now was “Why would anybody want to kill all the ladies?”

  But what he really asked out loud now was “Why would anyone want to kill Fred Foley?”

  “Why we might want to kill you is that you have asked too many questions,” that third man said. “You asked them of quite a few people. You even asked them of one person who belongs to our group
.”

  “You should wear badges.”

  “Bravado doesn't become you very well, Foley,” said the second man at the table. He was leaner and sharper and more silent than the other two men. “You have little nervous tricks that indicate that you aren't brave at all.”

  “I know that, men. But I also have sudden impulses that make me so brave that I scare myself. Don't count on me being either way. I don't.”

  “I doubt that we'll have any more trouble with you, Foley,” said the first man. “One way or another, we will see to it that we don't.”

  “Remember, it could happen to you tomorrow,” the third man said. “It could happen to you yet tonight.”

  That was dismissal. Fred Foley left them. The slash of light was under the door for a moment after he closed it on them. Then it was extinguished. They had put out even the lantern. Fred Foley felt his way down the stairs, bumped into a wall at one of the lower landings (those old apartments were not built absolutely alike, and besides Freddy had now lost the illusion that he could see in the dark), came finally out of the shanty doorway and into the dark street.

  The effect that the men had had on him was submerged somewhat in the effect that the district had always had on him. He discounted the encounter much as he used to discount the stories of the Larker boys. But he was not quite sure that those three men might not kill him that very night, just as he had never been quite sure that Leo Joe Larker had not raised a man from the dead.

  He walked rapidly the mile toward downtown and his own rooms. He talked to himself, and then to another.

  “Take it easy, Miguel,” he said. “You can't get it all rolling in one night. Hey, you're gathering a pretty salty bunch already, though. How could I find you if I wanted to join you?”