Fourth Mansions

by R. A. Lafferty

  Musical thunder of the fountain. Climbing churning water that was golden or white or green or blue or thunder-color. Height above height of it, fountains bursting out of fountains, castles of water piled on top of castles. Whole nations of spirits living in the towering columns of foam. The living airy shocking sudden smell of fountain water, salt and sulphur and iron, and fresh. And the vast bottomless lake of which the incredible fountain was center.

  “O'Claire, how deep is that thing?”

  “Don't know, Foley, I've always been afraid to sound it. There's things here I'm not supposed to understand. I'm a patrick and my job is to guard this door of the world. But there are caves below the lake, dry caves. This whole height is like a sponge, full of caves and passages. I know that if I sounded the lake it would sound far deeper than the caves below it and it'd scare me. It's full of fish, though; full of shellies, full of grand-pappy frogs and big turtles. I could live on its produce forever.”

  “It's full of big blacksnakes too,” Freddy growled, “big ones, five or six there.”

  “Sometimes they are seven, sometimes eight, sometimes nine,” O'Claire said, “but they aren't snakes. They are all the tentacles of one amorphous creature. I believe that every primary fountain has one. This one tries to escape, and if he ever escaped into the world there would be disaster beyond telling. He leaves the center sometimes and tries to climb out onto the shores. Then I beat him back. That's the main reason I am here.”

  “Oh snake hokey, O'Claire! Who beats him back when you're off in town?”

  “There is an oyster that whistles. I hear, and I come back at preternatural speed from wherever I happen to be. Foley, do not look blank at me! You should light up to the magic of the oyster that whistles! And the tentacled fountain-devil has never slipped me once. I believe that a few of them (from other fountains, not from mine) do slip into the world from time to time, though. They are what does the damage to the world. You would not know of any such new seven- or eight-or nine-armed creature wreaking havoc recently, do you?”

  “Maybe I do. O'Claire, you're a liar as high as your mountain.”

  “That I am, little Fred Foley, that I am.”

  “Miss Villareal warned me of you, I think. She gave me a sort of blessing: ‘That you be safe from cascabels and their brothers, and toads, and unborn things, and the mountaintop liar.’ You are the mountaintop liar, O'Claire.”

  “Certainly. How about pancakes for supper? Feed a few sticks into the horno there and get it hotted up.”

  Then O'Claire whistled sharply, a whistle cutting through the roaring of the fountain.

  “Hey, Peggy, bring the milk!” he called loudly.

  “I didn't see that little clay furnace when I came up here first,” Foley said. “It looks like it'd heat up quick, though. O'Claire, what are cascabels?”

  “Rattlesnakes, Foley, but don't pay any attention to Miss Villareal's blessing other than to be protected by it. She is an intuitive person but weak on her zoology. The black creature is not the cascabel, but the pólipo maldito, the misnamed serpent from the beginning. The toads are toads indeed, but they have servitors who will kill to protect their reputations. And by unborn things she really means unfinished or unfledged things. She hasn't quite the words for the four creatures. And neither she nor you need fear the mountaintop liars nor any patricks. We patricks stand ready to serve and to save. I believe that God must be out of his wits that he does not call on us yet. We await that call forever. Yeah, just mix the buckwheat flour and the honey and crush in a little of the rocksalt; it's from the fountain too. A little butter then, and afterward the milk.”

  “I knew a liar on a mountain,” Freddy sang softly to the tune of High Noon.

  “He had a pancake for a house. Where's the milk, O'Claire? Everything else is here.

  “He keeps a polyp in a fountain. What will I use instead of milk, fountain water?

  “He gets'um milk without no cowse. Hey, is that Peggy?”

  That was Peggy, a little she-goat who came up to the lake. O'Claire milked her into a wooden bucket, enough for the pancakes, and gave it to Foley. Freddy mixed and poured into a pan and set that into the horno. He mixed some more in another pan and O'Claire gave him a very cold sausage to cook with it.

  “Is that from the pig we just killed?” Freddy asked. “How so quick?”

  “No, no, it takes four days to get the high taste out of one of those animals even if you know what you're doing. This is last week's pig. Use a lot of it, Foley, I love sausage. Now then, I have white wine and red wine, beer, sagebrush tea, corn whisky, peach brandy, tequila, mead (which is honey-whisky), milk and buttermilk, but no coffee. Can't grow it here and I grow everything that I use. What will it be, Foley?”

  “Honey-mead,” Foley said. “I've read about it, but I've never seen it or tasted it. Were those stone benches there when we first came up? Was the stone-slab table? We're all ready, then. O'Claire, I am the best mountaintop pancake and sausage cooker in the world. What's that fruit and where did you get it when I wasn't looking?”

  “It is brother to the chokecherry and half-brother to the sandplum. I grow them, Foley; I grow everything I need. I am the self-sufficient man.”

  “The whole supper is a mountaintop lie, O'Claire, but it's good. My own touch, you know.”

  It was really too early to be a supper. It was, as a matter of fact, the first meal that Freddy had had that day: It was very bright sunlight yet, none of the twilight stuff. Whatever Freddy saw on the mountaintop was there. “But where did you get, the cheese, O'Claire?” he demanded. “You didn't go down.”

  “Oh, I get the cheese from goats’ milk and cows’ milk. I keep three of each. I have a thousand pounds of cheese ripe, and more ripening. I have much more honey than that, whole caves full of it. I run about a hundred hives. I have granaries full of buckwheat and barley and corn and Mexican beans. I have amphoras full of blackberries; they go so good with turtle. I have a mushroom cellar that is directly under the fountain. I have peanuts — you wouldn't believe the quantity of peanuts I have. I have whole vats of cactus syrup. See this shirt? I spun and wove it myself out of yucca fiber. I grow my own flax, I shear my own sheep, I make my own shoes and jackets from my own leather. I grow my own tobacco and make my own pipes. The basin below the fountain lake is my power pool. I close the dam for an hour when I want power, then I let my donkey generator churn and run my power tools. I cut my own timber, I make my own charcoal, I fire my own clay pots, I stave my own barrels. I have a house of twenty rooms, but they are scattered, no two together, the furthest a mile apart This is my fountain room. I have a fortress, I have an arsenal, I have a library and observatory. I know the caves under me better than does any other living person, but there are many others who know parts of them, and there were almost always a few people living in them. These caves are very deep, and they go lower than the bottom of the great river itself. I can duck into a cave entrance five feet from me (you do not see it) and go through eighteen miles of passage dry-shod and come up in Mexico. I could hide armies in my caves.”

  “I think about a little army now, of one Miguel. Could it hide in your caves?”

  “Miguel knows me. Mine is one of the several great minds that had influenced him before he was recently struck by that gaggle-brained lightning. He has visited me before. I expect him to come again. He may be able to line up a dozen such havens. How are you in accord with him, Foley? I don't catch that part.”

  “I don't know how I am but I read him somehow. I don't even know his last name.”

  “Fuentes. That is ‘Fountains.’ You are about to ask whether there is some connection between him and the savant Michael Fountain in your own town? I believe the boy wrote to the man several times, relying on the name coincidence for introduction. I believe the man answered, giving some good advice which is now being ignored. And I believe the boy is presently right in ignoring this good advice.”

  “He can't get anywhere with his games, of course
. Like taking over Vinegaroon.”

  “No, he can't get anywhere, Foley, not for more than the long hour. He will take over the world, of course, but that will be for hardly more than a decade. Even so, he may decide to throw his power to another. For a little while the world has become a vacuum crying to be filled. Miguel is a compassionate boy and cannot stand to hear it cry. That's the way they all start, but they all become a little coarsened as they move along that way. It's possible that he will simply back the world into a corner and then give it over to … to I don't know whom … before either he or the world is too much damaged by it.”

  “I hadn't noticed the world being a vacuum, O'Claire.”

  “Yes, it is bankrupt, just when it believes itself doing famously.”

  “Exactly what are you, O'Claire? You talk so much and you don't say anything.”

  “You were with another one of us last night, Foley. I believe, though, that you had figured that out. His dog was restless, but nobody has ever seen his dog. You had a story there, a poltergeist or plappergeist story, and you muffed it.”

  “Bagley? Are you and he really of the same species, O'Claire? Yes, I know the jokes about Bagley's invisible dog, but it was written up years ago. Besides, it isn't exactly a dog and it isn't exactly invisible. I saw it myself. Well, no, I didn't really see it, but I saw it wink and flash happy obscenities, and I know what it looks like if I ever do see it. You are a patrick like old fat man Bagley?”

  “I am Patrick of Pecos, Foley, and you guessed it before you started down here. My realm goes from the Glass Mountains and the Santiagos on eastward as far as the Sutton Plains and Eagle Pass, and it includes all the Serranias del Burro south of the great arc of the river. Foley, there are three hunting men below, and they are masquerading as conventional hunters. They will pretend to see a buck deer and they will shoot, but they will be shooting at us. We withdraw now.”

  And they did withdraw, away from the fountain on the hilltop and into the maze of rock castles, and then into a furnished room. “But they'll find the remnants of our supper, O'Claire,” said Freddy. “They'll find everything we left scattered around.”

  “No, they won't find a thing. I also have an invisible creature, a plappergeist who serves me, and he'll clean it all up. They won't even find the fountain or the lake. They'll be led astray. They won't even discover that it's a mountaintop. They'll find that it's quite a low hill, as you saw that it was from your plane.”

  “Well, which one of us do they want to kill, O'Claire?”

  “You in particular today, Foley. And myself every day. They have fixed your interest on the reappearing men again, though, since they're warning you away from them. And the reappearing men aren't really very interesting, Foley; not nearly as interesting as I am.”

  “Do all patricks read minds, O'Claire?”

  “Naw. None of us do. We're just smart. You've got a story on Miguel, Foley, if you know what to do with it And you've got a story on me if you know how to handle it. These are both better stories than anything on Overlark. Myself, I doubt that men reappear. It is only a shape of mind that reappears. Theirs is a Fountain Inside-Out, the Vortex. It sucks you down. Forget it. You'll be a long time getting the story on Overlark. It won't be very good when you get it. Nobody will believe it And you will be either confined or killed in getting it. I resent him and his. I consider us patricks to be much more important.”

  “Well, the Overlark story is the one I will have to get, O'Claire. You talk like a friendly oracle, so be one to me. Is there a conspiracy against the world by certain men who seem to live again and again?”

  “Oh, a few of those things must have got together a long time ago, Foley. I guess they try to run the world. So do we patricks.”

  “Do they try to run it for good or for evil?”

  “If there are such things as good and evil, then their effect is evil.”

  “In that case, what can I do about it?”

  “In that case, there is nothing you can do about it I insist that they aren't that important; but they think that they are, and they kill partly from vanity. I believe that they do not like to be annoyed by the callow.”

  “How exactly do they effect their evil, O'Claire?”

  “In no one way exactly. They do it in such manner that it can hardly be traced to them. There are a few narrow passes where a group can ambush the world, and some of them are always there. They themselves believe that they are the gyroscope to prevent the world from jumping its tracks, from progressing to the next Mansion, as the Lady called it. There was one period, only a few centuries ago, when the civilized core of the world had reached a certain peak — not the highest peak that it was meant to reach, but it had reached a reasonably sound balance at a good level. There was even hope then that the world could make the transition to a still loftier level without disaster. There was present, however, a group of these men or these things which we are talking about. They decided the direction of the world was not to their liking; they believed the world was a bone misset. They broke it, to set it again in their own way. Millions died, and the new setting was in a slightly different direction.”

  “Was it a great war, O'Claire?”

  “No. Not a war at all. It is sometimes called the Plague or the Black Death.”

  “And they actually loosed that on the world?”

  “Indignation does not belong to the historical perspective, Foley. The plague did surprise them by its violence, but be careful that you do not slander the nature of a thing, even a disease. It had a gentle nature. It killed within three days and with no great pain. Its characteristic was a rather happy sort of delirium. There was, besides, a compassionate element to it which I have seldom mentioned. It struck down adults only, seldom children.”

  “You will not make me love it, O'Claire. What were some of the other narrow passages where the Overlark sort interfered?”

  “Oh, once there was a country and generation of unusual oppression. The people were ground down by the monarchy, the nobility, and the newly-monied. It seemed that there was no way out of it except a cleansing revolution. And indeed the revolution was begun, and with high hope. Then the members of the group interfered, evilly, as you would say.”

  “And it failed?”

  “No, it succeeded. That's the point, Foley, you will never be able to trace anything to that group. But the revolution succeeded in such a way that it might have been better if it had failed. It was not clear gain at any rate, not a clean turning. And it could have been.

  “And there was a later time when sincere men tried to build an organization as wide as the world to secure the peace of the world. It had been tried before and it had failed before. Perhaps if it failed this time it would not be tried again for a very long while. The idea of the thing was attacked by good and bad men, in good faith and bad. The final realization of it was so close that it could be touched with the fingertips. A gambler wouldn't have given odds on it either way. It teetered, and it almost seemed as though it would succeed. Then members of that group interfered.”

  “And it failed, O'Claire?”

  “No. It succeeded, Foley, as in the other case. It succeeded in so twisted a fashion that the Devil himself was puzzled as to whether he had gained or lost ground by it. And he isn't easily puzzled.

  “There have been any number of like cases. There was one in particular that is the most interesting of them all. You will be especially interested in it, Foley, for it concerns your prey Overlark in one of his earlier manifestations, one that you haven't stumbled onto yet. Thunder, Foley, thunder, it's late! I must hurry. I'll fly you to San Antonio instantly so you can catch the Tulsa plane and be home tonight. Come.”

  “No, wait, O'Claire. I don't need to be home tonight. Tell me this instance.”

  “No, Foley. I've got to get you out of here right now. Get in the plane.”

  How was there a plane there? How had O'Claire fired it up already? How were they airborne so swiftly? How was the mounta
intop no more than a low hill when they looked back at it? Why couldn't Foley see the fountain and the lake now? What had happened to the fountain? If we are out of fountains then all is lost.

  “O'Claire,” Freddy said, “I feel that all the fountains in the world are dried up.”

  “Naw, they don't dry up, Foley,” O'Claire said, “but sometimes their waters must run underground for a while. That's been the case for a few centuries. This does impoverish the surface world. Wit becomes witless and the daily bread goes stale. Both wealth and poverty lose something of their special enjoyment. And I'm told by people of the flesh that even the generative act isn't as much fun as it used to be.”

  How were they in San Antonio already?

  “Wait, O'Claire,” Foley begged. “It's thirty minutes till my plane time. You can tell me about Carmody Overlark in that earlier manifestation.”

  “Foley, the oyster just whistled,” O'Claire said, looking a little mad. “The monster is trying to get out of the fountain: I've got to get back there with unnatural speed.”

  And O'Claire was gone from there with unnatural speed, back into the air too quickly for any clearance or regulation. Gone. Gone.

  “I knew a liar on a mountain,” Freddy sang softly and grinned. But he wished that he had gotten that last lie out of O'Claire.

  V: HELICAL PASSION AND SAINTLY SEXPOT

  So they get it into their heads that it is arrobamiento, or rapture. But I call it abobamiento, foolishness.

  Interior Castle: Teresa of Avila

  THE HARVESTERS were met again that evening in Morada, the home of the Bauers.