Fourth Mansions

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I'll have to take all this with a kilo of salt, Carmody,” Fred Foley said, “being under death threat not to laugh and all. But I simply don't accept it.”

  “Why not? You had already convinced yourself that I was a returnee.”

  “I had, Carmody, and you've just now unconvinced me. You're a wraith that settles on a man and alters him. You're an insane spirit with no real substance, an influence flowing through. But you aren't a man, and you never were.”

  “I am a returned man as you first believed. I and my group are powerful enough to rule the world. Being so powerful, would we not be in legend?”

  “Possibly, Carmody, but not so neatly; not with all the known names.”

  “The neatness is a modern accretion, Foley. Often the legend-cloak is draped over an unworthy dummy.”

  “Not as national heroes, not as peoples’ heroes. You're against the people.”

  “No. It's they, in their ingratitude, who sometimes turn against us. We began as people of a sort, as men. After we were men we were tribal gods. We each have our tribe that we sometimes inspire and that we follow with interest. My own is a diaspora tribe that's older than the Jews and has forgotten its name; sometimes it's called the Intelligentsia. This is a people and a race, though it's forgotten that it is.”

  “It's no wonder that the Intelligentsia is inhibited from becoming intelligent.”

  “And when our tribes follow false gods, then we visit our wrath on them — as did a certain neologist among the tribal deities.”

  “This is like something out of Freud or Jung, Carmody. It isn't real.”

  “What is, Foley? We ourselves have always been puzzled as to what constitutes reality. We even have a sort of bet among ourselves as to who'll find the valid answer.”

  “But if you aren't real, what sort of visiting wraiths are you? Are you like winds blowing on a man and making him look a little bit like another man? Are you thin spooks influencing by fear and yourselves fearful?”

  “We do influence by fear, but we deny that we are fearful. But how could you be if you had no —  Oh, there are some things that can't be explained! It's so much easier to obliterate than to explain.”

  “And you really have no morality at all, Carmody, and you regard all our ethic as man-made?”

  “Certainly. And you have no morality, Foley. You have only the memory of a morality. There are so many of these memories and nothing that is origin to them. Where were these original things? I was there. Where were they? It's always been in the past tense. Man has never been moral, but he's always remembered that he had been moral. It's a sort of backward aspiration. But you wouldn't understand it, Foley.”

  “I begin to understand some things too well. But when all is said and done, you're men only, or less than men, not more.”

  “But all isn't said and done yet, Foley. We are still men, in a way, but we are not only men. It wasn't a mere empty gesture, the rite of our assuming the godhead. It meant something.”

  Carmody Overlark was no more than poltergeist or plappergeist like the dog-ape of Bertigrew Bagley. He was even inferior to that sometimes invisible creature. He worked the fear trick; it was the only trick he knew. He came out of nowhere, a wraith frozen with fear, and he communicated that fear. By means of it, he seemed to have his way, a little bit, over the fearful. And there are always plenty of fearful.

  “But you're not eternal or all-powerful or all-knowing or all-kind,” said Freddy. “You're certainly not all-kind. What does your godhead consist of?”

  “But we are the nearest things to the eternal. We are, at least, very powerful and very knowing. Oh, there have been marches stolen on us, we don't deny that. Here and there we weren't as astute as several others. But we'll see how it finally comes out. And to ourselves we are all-kind, Foley. We give ourselves all precedence, as is right.”

  “Who stole the marches on you, Carmody? You have me curious there.”

  “Oh, once there was a traveling man from Ur, and one made a promise to him at an oasis. The promise wasn't strictly kept but the memory of the promise abides. There was the Galilean thing. There was, what partly combined with it, the Grecian thing. We'd seen many come and go, and we were too complacent. But we're not content to run behind for long. We've bled it near to death in half a dozen drawn battles; it can't get even a draw any longer. Our old enemies are all dead, and it's only the parasites growing out of their bodies that we must subdue now.”

  “And you really regard us as no more than bees, or perhaps ants, Carmody?”

  “Oh, as a little more. But if our planned ecology demands that you must go, then most of you will go.”

  “And you believe you can't be prevented?”

  “Of course you can't prevent us. You could no more prevent us in anything than bees could prevent the removal of one small hive where men wished to build a building. Oh, it's possible that some of us may be stung a little, but that won't prevent your removal.”

  “Why are you so scared, Carmody, if you're so powerful?”

  “Why do you keep referring to me as being scared? Anyway, haven't you known men who were scared of bees? But our planned ecology does demand that most of you be removed, so you will be removed.”

  “How you going to do it?”

  “It isn't hard. Not after you've done it a few times.”

  “Why do you keep rats, Carmody?”

  “How do you know I do, Foley? I keep rats like I keep people, to play with.”

  “Do your rats have any connection with your plans to remove most of mankind?”

  “I don't know what you mean.”

  “Do you intend, by means of rats, to reintroduce the plague for the destruction of mankind?”

  “Oh yes, we'll use the rats, among other things, for that introduction. And we'll use the plague, among other things, for the destruction, but only as a sort of secondary tool. The plague is a dull weapon and not to be depended on; it needs a very dry tinder and ideal conditions for a sweeping spread. We don't have those conditions now. You're a damnably antiseptic generation, a seven-times-washed abomination. I don't know where you get it — certainly not from us. The plague will be only one of the secondary aids. We have a primary tool that's never failed.”

  “What's that, Carmody?”

  “Hysteria. Fear.”

  “My father used to say that if I repeated ‘This is only a bad dream’ three times the dream would go away. My father was wrong there. When I said it three times it always caused it to solidify into a very bad dream indeed. I have most of your pieces now, Carmody. I only need time to put them together.”

  “You'll have plenty of time during your incarceration, Foley.”

  “I do have one more question, though, about a thing both abrupt and silly.”

  “Ask it then. But I warn you, if you laugh, you're dead.”

  “Why do you soak your head in a bucket, Carmody?”

  “Ah, Foley, I'm glad you asked that, I really am. Because, before I tell you about it, I must do it. It's past my time for it, and I'm gasping like a fish out of water, which is what I am in a way. I was afraid I'd have to have you taken away before I was finished playing with you, Foley. But now that you've mentioned it, I'll do it. If you're looking for something grotesque about me, this is surely it. There's nothing so grotesque as a fish out of water, and you may as well watch.”

  Foley followed Carmody Overlark into the next room. The “bucket” was a large crystal ewer or bowl, transparent, and the water in it was still astir as though it was freshly poured. Foley recalled the sound of gushing water in the background as he had talked to Overlark. Well, let the toads have their fountains too! Even the patricks have fountains.

  When Carmody Overlark took off his shirt, Foley was surprised at his remarkable musculature, for he had seemed a slight man. He was tanned, but there was something else. There was a very fine graining to his skin that reminded a little of fish skin — though that thought would not have come if fish
had not just been mentioned.

  Overlark breathed out deeply, emptying chest and collapsing his whole upper body in the expelling. Then he plunged his head and neck and shoulders into the large bowl and began to breathe the water deeply. If this was fakery it was good fakery, and it hadn't been rigged just to impress Freddy Foley.

  The man, if he was a man, was breathing very deeply under water — if it was water. His eyes were open and they had a new snap to them. He grinned, a not altogether man grin, a not altogether fish grin. It was the grin of a tribal deity full of rogue power and eternal youth, one at home in all the elements. Something false about both the power and the youth, though.

  Fred Foley scooped water and tasted. It was half salt — brackish, like tide-turning estuary water, or water from the sea very near the mouth of a great river. Or it was like water from an ancient ocean, one with less salt in it than have the oceans now. But why did Fred Foley think of that?

  There were minute plants in the water, and small fish. It was not tap water. It was either drawn from a particular source, or carefully mixed. Foley had a sudden belief that there might be an upwelling of that water in that room, even though it was an upper-floor room, just as there was an upwelling of water on Auclaire's mountain, though there were dry caves below.

  Well then, this was something that did not explain itself at all. Carmody Overlark had had his head under water for more than five minutes, and the water itself was in constant change or parade. There were schools of small fish that passed through it laterally. They did not follow around the curve of the bowl, they disappeared. And other sorts of fish appeared, all traveling a parade in the same direction, coming out of the glass itself (for all that could be discerned of them), traveling across the bowl in a straight line and disappearing into the glass wall again. There was optical illusion or there was strong current flowing through that bowl.

  Was the underwater breathing of Overlark somehow the key to suspended animation? It was a funny key; it didn't seem to fit any of the locks. It was plain that an ordinary man would be dead, as it was now ten, now fifteen minutes that Overlark had his head and breathing below the surface. It was plain that he was not an ordinary man.

  Then the water went out of the bowl. It could not be said that it drained out, for there was no drain. Air followed water in the current-parade across the inside of the bowl, and then the inside was dry. Overlark pulled his head out. He was beaming and greatly refreshed.

  “Wonderful, Foley, wonderful. You should try it. There's nothing like it to set a man up.”

  “You almost convince me that there's something to you, Carmody,” Fred Foley told him. “It makes you seem a little more than a man.”

  “Oh, not on account of that am I more than a man. It really makes me a little less, since I'm not a complete master of the air element. At one time I was somewhat ashamed of my need to return to water, but I've since talked myself out of that shame.”

  “After all, a tribal deity has no need for shame.”

  “Exactly, Foley. But you still don't understand, do you? It isn't really a mystery. It's just that I go back a very long time.”

  “Why doesn't your wife soak her head in a bucket, Carmody? If she does it, I haven't heard of it.”

  “She doesn't go back nearly as far as I do, Foley. She's a recent acquisition, a recruit of only a few hundred decades back. But we very old ones came from the sea and we're not completely free from it.”

  “I don't understand it at all, Carmody. I had some theories worked out about this suspended animation business, but this head soaking doesn't tie in with them at all.”

  “I was born in the deep sea, Foley, before there were either monkeys or men upon the earth. I have the need to return from time to time, as those born on the land do not. I was one of the first to come out onto land, into the middle of that sky-beach, one of the first to learn to live above the water. And our first Olympus was in such sky, but still the ocean tide rose over its floor. You won't find traces of it on mountaintops, Fred Foley. Its palaces were sea-level caves (the top of the sea was then our sky) and they're now below the water. Ah, it was a long time ago, hundreds of thousands of years.”

  Fred Foley had a sound grasp on time. He knew the difference between hundreds of thousands of years and hundreds of millions of years, as many laymen do not; and he knew that the time before there were either monkeys or men upon the earth was impossibly distant. What then? Carmody Overlark apparently believed all that he said about himself. But was he not an impossible poltergeist, visible only for his borrowed body? And are not poltergeister really simpleminded creatures, for all their oddments of knowledge and false knowledge? Do they entertain superstitious beliefs, about the world, about themselves? Have they their own ghostly mythology? “You think people are silly to believe in ghosts?” an old man had asked Fred Foley a long time ago. “Boy, you should hear some of the things that ghosts believe in!”

  “Oh, I led them up onto the land, or up into the sky,” said Overlark. “It's all a question of viewpoint. We're sky-fish, all of us, and I was first.”

  “You're insane, Overlark,” said Fred Foley, “but we'll let that go for a while. You said when we started that there was one condition (which I hadn't guessed) under which you might be impelled to tell me everything. And now you've told me almost everything. What is the condition?”

  “That we might want to recruit you. We do recruit, now and then, to keep up our numbers.”

  “You have no idea how quickly I'd refuse, Overlark.”

  “You have no idea how quickly you'd accept, Foley, if it were finally offered to you. It hasn't been yet, but it may be. In any case, you'd first have to serve your period of incarceration. Then we'll have a look at your state of mind. But no one ever refuses. We're sensitive and we don't risk refusals. We ask only those sure of accepting. I believe you'll be sure of accepting in several days. Now I'll have them take you away.”

  “But why, Carmody? Why are you afraid to let me go? And you not of flimsy flesh to be so afraid?”

  “I'm of flimsy flesh, yes, and now I need a quick snack, and I'll be rid of you first.”

  “And in this case you're still a little ashamed of being seen? Do you eat them live, Carmody? The rats, do you eat them live?”

  “I do, yes, like kids eat popcorn.” (This gave Fred Foley an uneasy turn, and the belief that Carmody was reading him a little too deeply. Whatever had happened to Popcorn, his little dog? Had the Larker kids really eaten him as they said they had?) “The second reason for having them take you away, Foley,” Carmody Overlark continued, “is that you're crazy.”

  “On what evidence?”

  “On the evidence of a man in your own profession, Foley, a man named Harry Hardcrow. He'll testify that you talked insanely last night. On the evidence of my own wife, who's stated that you were like a man with no mind at all. On the evidence of a certain doctor of solid reputation; he's a true expert in the field. Or on the evidence of myself.

  “Or, if you don't really want to be taken away as a lunatic, you can be taken away as a murderer. A man was murdered last night. He was last seen in your company. This unfortunate man was traveling under the name of Carlyle S. Crabtree, but that wasn't his true name. Carlyle S. Crabtree is an eminent man well known to us. The derelict who was cruelly murdered was a poor deluded fellow who had somehow picked up this name. The light was poor last night, in the doorway of that shop, and perhaps it can't be proved directly that you killed the man. But it can be proved that you handled him dead, and that you didn't report it. A fairly tight case of murder could be made against you. It was an especially cold-blooded murder.”

  It may not take too many of those spider-silk strands to bind a man after all. And the spider never leaves off working. Ah well, maybe Fred Foley was crazy. He was talking on the upper floor of a building on a sky-beach with a plappergeist, a mere troubling wind or wraith, who was visible only because of occupying a body not his own. The spook, with all his
other disabilities, was insane, and lived in terror. And yet by transmitting part of that terror in which he lived, the spook might just have enough leverage to affect the world.

  “Yes, that murder was a little cold-blooded, Carmody. It made me mad then and it still makes me mad when I think about it. Well, whistle up your buckoos — but I'll chop a few of them down before they drag me off.”

  “Curiously, my feelings are with you in this,” Overlark said. “I don't love my buckoos; I enjoy seeing them chopped down, so long as I have plenty of them left to carry out the task. I tell you, Foley, when I am in such a spot (and I have been), I take the first one high, the second one low, and the third one dirty. After that, it usually turns into a melee.”

  Freddy's thoughts were along the same line. He didn't hear any whistle, but Overlark had somehow given the signal, and buckoos boiled into the room. Freddy took the first one high and clean and sent him staggering. He took the second one low. But there it ended. The third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, came over him in dead heat and near killed him. The melee had been brief, and Fred Foley was trussed.

  He raged and raved a little but they took him away. They took him, and they buried him in old buildings. This was the first day of that burial.

  XI: “I DID NOT CALL YOU,” SAID THE LORD

   — and one fears heights, and he shall be afraid in the road … before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is shattered at the fountain…

  Ecclesiastes 12, 5-6

  THEY WERE a very intelligent bunch at the Bug, but Foley realized after a while that some of them had a faulty orientation. It was in the emphasis they placed on various things, in their center of interest which seemed sometimes a little off-center, in their serious treatment of the comic, in a distorted sense of proportion. Yes, there was something a little wrong with many of the inmates of the Bug.

  The Bug was sometimes called Old Central, or The School, or Little Eli, or The Chambers. It was called Happy Hollow, and the Paddock. It was called the Bat-Roost, the Bughouse, the Boobyhatch. One of the inmates called it the Nutcracker Suite, and one of them called it The Long House (“long and lazy” is “crazy” in Australian rhyming slang, and you go to any nuttery in the world and you will find one of those gentlemen from the south). But those of Fred Foley's new circle referred to Old Wanwit on the Potomac simply as the Bug.