Freddy Foley rented a rent-a-car in the morning and drove out to the morning-Maryland hideout. He found it more by instinct than by the Oriel description, which had been brainless and hurried. He caught a whiff of it as he came near, the something distorted in the morning light, the unreality and impermanence of the surroundings, a too-shrill music to hear with proper ears, the sick poetry, the paleness of grass and bush as if a great stone had just been rolled away exposing it all. But Foley had been through that choppy and building-pocked countryside before and it hadn't been like that. Lately, however, he had been learning to see with other sorts of eyes, with Harvester eyes, with patrick eyes, with falcon eyes, with toad eyes. A man misses so much if he uses only one set of eyes.
The house was nearly hidden by the pale boscage. It was elegant and low — “squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve” — it was the place, it could not be the hideout of any other creature. Freddy had not known she was like that the evening before. Now he caught it all before he saw her.
Oriel Overlark met him at the door, throat and gills aquiver. She jibbered in silver, she shined like green bronze, she was the most striking and puzzling thing that Freddy Foley had ever seen.
“Did you bring them? Didn't you bring any part of them? Did you bring part of them in yourself? Be open, boy, or I'll crack your brains like walnuts and eat them right now. I want them, I want the two of them right now. How did you attach to it? I want to merge with it! Help me to merge with it right now!”
“The people of the brain-weave, Mrs. Overlark? How did you know about them? Do I have their smell on me? They barely brushed me. We'll forget about them. I want to ask you several questions, that's all.”
“Oh questions! I want the spiral passion and the mottled snake humor. I want his body now. More, I want hers! Has anything from them entered into you? I want you then, right now.”
Oriel had clasped Freddy and he was shocked by the heat of her. A body heat of a hundred and twelve at least is unusual in an old-recension human. Freddy would have sworn also that she had two hearts beating furiously. And her eyes, they were made to look at, not to see out of. “Throw hither all your quaint enameled eyes” ran through his head. A nameless emotion burst up through Freddy Foley and almost exploded in him.
“Tell me about him,” the jewel-eyed creator pleaded. “Has he really two of them? How is she? The writhing, the convolutions — tell me, show me.”
“I barely know the couple on sight, Mrs. Overlark. They are weave people and I have been brushed by the weave, but that's all. Hey, cut that out!”
An overpowering emotion still more upwelling in Freddy Foley! It would burst him! And into his quaking breast came certain spoof lines of Chesterton:
Or didst thou love the God of Flies
Who plagued the Hebrews and was splashed
With wine unto the waist, or Pasht
Who had green beryls for her eyes?
The emotion overpowered Freddy completely. It burst him asunder.
“You're laughing at me!” Oriel Overlark gasped in white amazement. “Oh, I am wounded! I am dead! How could anyone be so ungrateful? Don't you know that's the only way we can be wounded?”
Well, it had been that or rupture himself. Freddy'd had to do it. By the time he had gotten rid of the bigger globs of laughter, the torrid Oriel Overlark had turned to ice.
“I'm sorry, really I am,” Freddy explained. “Your eyes are like nothing else. Your form is like nothing else. Your passion, perhaps, belongs in the weave itself, and I'm sure you've been in weaves like it. It's only that I'm a boor, one without the true lower feeling, and I don't understand these intense things. Now pout for a moment (you do it wonderfully), and then answer some questions.”
But Freddy nearly burst again. “The gold and flowing serpent” ran through his mind, and Oh those lines!:
Scorpion and asp, and amphisbaene dire,
Cerastes horned, hydrus, and ellops drear.
Oriel Overlark was all those things, and pretty besides, and who was the oaf who would not appreciate this, wrapped as it was in kata-chthonic passion and overly sweet poetry?
“I don't believe at all in asking questions,” said Oriel in a sulky and lifeless manner. “Still less in answering them. Both use up time, and time is the one thing we have so little of.”
Oriel had been badly wounded by the laughter and was still gasping. She had been mortally affronted and her jeweled eyes had gone dull.
“Mrs. Overlark, kid, green-eyed doll, I've lately been searching for a group of people who seem to have plenty of time,” Fred Foley said. “Centuries of it.”
“No, nobody has plenty of time,” the wan Oriel said. “Almost all have about the same amount of it. Every day we live we get a day older. It's frightening. We look for a way out of it but we don't find one.”
“How long have you been in a hurry, Oriel?”
“I've always been in a hurry. I must make every minute count. Every second must be of the highest interest You somehow gave me to believe that you would be of highest interest. The line of your throat! The mercurial movement of your body! Please don't disappoint me.”
“I'll have to; I'm not geared to that at all. Nobody can stay at high point all the time.”
“Yes, at high point all the time, every living minute,” Oriel insisted. “There has to be variety, excitement, even a new kind of calm, a sharper agony as is mine at the moment, an additional facet. It must be really new, and it must not last long. After a while, real variety is hard to find. Then we must lie fallow to whet the appetite and to save the precious days.”
“Well, this won't take too long. What I want to find out, Oriel, is this: was there any significant change in your husband Carmody Overlark about two years ago?”
“What I want you to do is not ask me any questions at all. Of course there was! There's always significant change in him — two years ago, two days ago, two minutes ago I'm sure. That's why he's so wonderful.”
“I have a curious theory, Oriel, that the Carmody Overlark of more than two years ago was not the same man as the Carmody Overlark of today.”
“But of course not. He's never the same. He's protean. He's a chameleon. All of us are.”
“Who is us?”
“Please don't ask questions. It's annoying. If you won't be passionate, go away. When you looked at me last night I thought you had more in mind than asking questions. If you want answers to questions go to the encyclopedia.”
“You may be one, Oriel. Are you quite sure that the Carmody Overlark you were married to two years ago is the same man as the Carmody Overlark you're married to now?”
“I have been married to only one man.”
“For how long?”
“Oh, who knows? It's so hard to figure. You have to subtract so much, and add a little, and who keeps track? That's the frightening part, keeping track. Even figuring it out takes time and I don't have the time.”
“I met Carmody Overlark several years back. He was not the same man I met last night, but he sure looked the same.”
“No, that was just a little goof we — I never knew him at all; I only saw him once. I don't go in for the details. They're handled. Haven't you been told that it's dangerous for you to inquire along this line? I wouldn't want anything to happen to you. The line of your throat! The mercurial movement — ”
“I know, Oriel. Oh, my life's been threatened. Three men told me they'd kill me if I didn't lay off, and one man told me he'd kill me if I did. I figured they canceled out. I believe that the Carmody Overlark of today is the same man as a Khar-ibn-Mod who lived something over five hundred years ago. Would you know anything about that?”
“A rather humorous piece has already been done on certain coincidences between my husband and that man.”
“My piece, if I do it, may not be humorous.”
“Your piece, and you will not do it, would not be believed in any case.”
“I'm puzzled about one
thing, Oriel. I had understood that the Mamelukes were abridged men. Are you sure he's so wonderful? Or does this reanimation that I'm tracking down consist of more than I supposed?”
“Oh, you don't understand it at all. Line of your throat and all, you just don't understand it. The methods weren't at all those which you call by the same name. Actually, there was a thousandfold increase in passion. Perhaps it's a good thing that the uninitiate aren't acquainted with it. It wouldn't do at all for a weak race. And yet some of the contemporaries do have something. Oh, the people in the weave! Oh, yourself if you wished!”
“The man who was Carmody Overlark until two years ago, what happened to him, Oriel?”
“I imagine they killed him. I hadn't really thought about it.”
“Don't you care? After all, he was your husband.”
“He was what? How far off can you get? How can you only guess a little bit and miss the rest so far?”
Oriel was fiddling with her hair. She was becoming bored. Even the exquisite agony of rejection had lasted too long. She fluffed her hair out as though to cool herself. Then Freddy saw it and understood a little more about her.
“You don't understand anything about me, do you, sleeping Adone?”
“Yes, now I understand almost all about you, Oriel.”
“What made you understand?”
“Your ears. Miss Evans said last night that your ears weren't at all good and that you seldom showed them.”
“She'll suffer for that remark. My ears are excellent.”
“Yes they are. But they're archaic ears.”
“Of course. Should I get new ears each time?”
“You also are one of the reappearing persons?”
“Certainly. And now that you've guessed a little of it, what can you possibly do with your knowledge? There's a group in one of our finest institutions; they're there just because they guessed just about so much. I can arrange it quite easily that you join them. Insanity is only the refusal to accept facts as they are. That we are unassailable is one of the facts that are.”
“Why are all of you so nervous and jittery and guarded? Why do you have to kill or confine to protect your secret?”
“Oh, because we're in such a hurry and passion, and because time runs out so fast.”
“What happened to the Oriel Overlark of before two years ago?”
“I really don't know and I really don't care. She may be in one of the institutions for claiming to be me, or she may be dead.”
“Don't you use the old bodies?”
“Sometimes, in a way. Again sometimes, in a lesser way. You don't have to know.”
“Do you know anything of your group substituting for an inventor named Crabtree last night?”
“The man who became Crabtree last night is an old friend of mine. I welcome him back. He's one of those of the thousandfold passion. I don't know anything about the man who was substituted for.”
“How are you able to substitute so well without being detected?”
“Oh, we're mimics. It's an ancient art. And we also force them to mimic us, back in time — you wouldn't understand it. We keep our own appearances, but we also assume the appearances of the persons we replace. You'd have to know more than you ever will know about the old mimicry to understand how it's done.”
“I know a little about it by comparing pictures and images. What's the object of all this? Why do you slow down and obstruct the world?”
“I don't make policy. Partly it's just that we intend always to run the thing and we can't let it have loose rein. We do it because we want to do it and for other reasons that are not for you to know. We do it because the world and its people are our footstool and we don't want our footstool to become too grand. Ask my husband when you have your interview with him. He'll elude you much more adroitly than I can. And I imagine that after you've talked to him you'll be put away in one way or another.”
“I may have something to say about that.”
“Not very much, mercury movement, not very much. The others will not regard you as an ornament, as I do.”
“Are there others of your talent who are not of your group?”
“Oh, there are randoms. Have you known some?”
“Maybe. I'm not sure. How far back do you go, Oriel?”
“You shouldn't ask the age of even a reappearing woman. Quite a ways back.”
“As far back as Carmody?”
“Oh no. Not nearly so far back. I was picked up much later. We recruit, you know. We must, since we don't generate. And some of us are lost accidentally. We've tried for centuries to outlaw embalming. We've succeeded only locally and for short periods. We leave elaborate instructions and commands for our own disposal, and yet the abominations still have their way with some of us.”
“But all of you will die some day. And then what?”
“But all of you will die some day. And then what shorter what? All of you alive today will die long before we do. And no one of you has come back to bring an authentic report.”
“Haven't you any consciences at all?”
“I haven't. No, I don't believe that any of us have. There are signs that you uninitiates are also losing yours. We're both behind and ahead of you in the evolutionary scale, spanning quite a space. No, we've sloughed our consciences completely if we ever had any. And now you've overstayed your welcome. I thought you'd have the passion, would at least be a man, or an animal, or even a reptile. Really I like them best. It's a long time since I've had such a letdown. I could have given you an experience you won't otherwise get in life, and I did expect a little variety from you. We are all of us consummate sensualists.”
“I'm sure you are, Oriel. Two more questions even though I am overstayed. Why does your husband keep rats?”
“A hobby. You don't need to know any more.”
“And why does he soak his head in a bucket?”
“You ask him.”
“I will.”
Fred Foley left the morning-Maryland hideaway.
“The line of the throat, the mercurial movement,” Oriel said.
“ ‘Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in,’ ” Freddy Foley said.
IX: BUT I EAT THEM UP, FEDERICO, I EAT THEM UP
The ascension, when it comes, will be in the regular sequence, but rising a stage above the old pattern and continuing to rise. We will have had our spring, our summer, our autumn. We will have our winter then, and it is the breaking season: we will break upward into patterned rise, or we will break down.
This must not be the Fimbul-winter, the destruction winter, the wraith winter of the fulminous monstrous unwarming fire laid by the Frost Giants; not the withering sub-tropical winter, the torpidness that brings the four exterior creatures through the gates; not the inanity winter, the loss-of-nerve winter. After such spiritual and psychic frosts we can have only repetitious sick springs.
It must be, in some manner, an evergreen winter, a singing winter “a summer bird which even in the haunch of winter sings” a time of swift sanity, of right ordering and careful law, of interior handicraft and joiner-work. “Who are these spectral forms coming with pale sickles? The year's harvest is already in. Begone, pale harvesters, it is another season now.”
It is only after our winter of swift sanity and steely nerve that we will have our second spring. It will not be repetition, it will not be beginning again in the old way. It will be a tumultuous springtime higher on the helical, the ascending spiral; with birds more songful, colts more clattering, earth more burgeoning, spirits more exalted, sky more eternal. It is only after we have broken the wraith winter that we may have our helical springtime, that we may finally enter our Fifth Mansions. And then the rest is all sheer and joyous ascent.
Prose Poems: Maurice Craftmaster
FREDDY FOLEY was putting his affairs in order, inasmuch as that can be done in a short time. He had a happy head on him while he did it even though the fuliginous Harvesters
were romping and wrecking through its inner channels. He discovered, as had Richard Bencher, the iridescent limbs and rousing music of parts of their dragon.
The manila packet of Crabtree was now consigned by Freddy to a responsible man, Michael Fountain, even though Fred was now convinced that it was a hoax and the original packet had been put to other use. Michael Fountain would be able to guess much of the original thing from the false shadow of it.
And he met Salzy Silverio in the middle of his mind. “The snakes are shedding their skins early this year,” Freddy said. “It means an early and auspicious spring.”
Freddy phoned the lawyer back home and instructed that man to consider his Will Number Three as his only last will and testament, and to destroy wills one, two, four, and five. Freddy hadn't many tangible things to will anyone, and yet there were some things in that which were worthy and almost tangible.
And Bedelia Bencher was on the edge of his mind, impudent and exasperating. Pink sulphur, scented rosy fire and all, he would not give his girl over to any second class devil. This part was not over with.
Freddy had made up several packages and large envelopes. He went out to mail them, sending the big heavy envelope to Michael Fountain by registered mail Then he went to get a shave and haircut so he would be his best under scrutiny.
“I have born other children out of my body,” said an ashen ghost in Fred Foley's cerebellum while he was in the barber chair. “They are all of them deformed monkeys, or snake children, or elongated toads, or queer fish, or specter children. Fortunate that they have already perished! I am lost, I am confused. But I will still go another way. I will not go the way they have set for me. Tonight, if it is night, today, if it is day. I will bear another child who is beautiful and full of light They cannot dominate one who is indomitable.”
Fred Foley gave himself a pep talk and then went directly to the doctor's office. He did not go to just any doctor. He went to the one doctor of really solid reputation. There was one thing he wanted to be sure of and to have the proof of.
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