East of Laughter

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Yes, wine and miracles go together,” said Perpetua the Seventh Daughter of Gorgonius. “There are one-hundred-and-thirty different wine-miracles to be found in the Golden Legend.”

  “I love the Falernum,” said Gorgonius, “the Vina Horna, Fugacia, Surrentine, Aminean. And, Oh, the great black sweet Greek wine the Maronean, the wonderful red Pramnian, the Clazomenian, the Chian, the Lesbos which Horace called Innocent Wine but he lied when he so called it, this Thasian. I wonder what would happen if I thought of some of the modern wines of Hungary or France or California?”

  “You would become drunk, Gorgonius,” Monika said.

  “But only subjectively drunk, for it is only subjective wine.”

  “My husband, you would become subjectively drunk, and you would fall down subjectively on this subjective stone floor,” said Monica. “That is sixteen of those little cups you have had, and objectively they are not so little.”

  “It almost seems that we are no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that Atrox and perhaps some of his friends are writing,” Gorgonius hazarded. “It’s an idea that I try to chase away by throwing rocks at it, and it squawks and flies right back to me.”

  “It is more likely that we are all no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that God is writing,” Mary Brandy said, “and perhaps Atrox and some of his friends are permitted to write a phrase or two in it now and then.”

  “I believe that we should split up,” Solomon Izzersted croaked. “I would like to take soil samples here (this is one of those neighborhoods where I always expect a sky-voice to speak ‘Take off your shoes for you are standing on holy ground’) and examine those soil samples in what I am sure are Leo Parisi’s excellent laboratories. And I should like to put certain mathematical equations to test here to see how much they vary from what their forms were in the beautiful rolling hills around Broken Arrow. Other self, John Barkley Towntower, why don’t you take the soil samples while I am occupied at – oh no, that won’t work. I always forget that we two are so far inseparable.”

  “So must our group be inseparable,” Jane Chantal Ardri insisted. “We must not split up at all. We are in a haunted house, in a malevolent house, in a murder house, and we must stick together or we will be murdered one by one.”

  But they laughed her to scorn.

  “Well, for what they are worth, we may have three sources of getting answers here,” Hieronymous Talking-Crow said. “We have the books, any book that can be thought of, catalogued under the perfect system: Reach Your Hand For It And It Is There, sometimes known as the RYHFIAIIT system. We have the wine; and the question Is there really veritas in vino? can be answered Very often there is. And we have the imperfectly dead people on the catacomb-like shelves here. Leo Parisi, this is your place, though you don’t seem to know very much more about it than the rest of us do. Which one of these doubtful dead would you recommend that we address our questions to?”

  “Alexander Megas, or Alexander the Great. He is very intelligent. It’s common knowledge that he was much more intelligent than his tutor Aristotle. And he’s one of the most cheerful and accommodating dead men whom I’ve ever known,” Leo Parisi said. “You do speak and understand the demotic Greek of the Alexandrine period?”

  “Oh certainly, it’s much easier than the Classical which is the reason it became the universal language in the Hellenistic World where the Classical couldn’t make a dent. This is his stone sarcophay, is it? I’m fascinated by how handy everything is in your libraries. I always thought that Alexander was buried in deep Asia. Ah, the coffin rolls out easily. And the lid. Ah Yes, it’s counterweighted and it opens easily in spite of its great weight. Alexander, will you talk to me? Oh, my name is Hieronymous Talking-Crow. You don’t know me.”

  “Why not,” said the man in the stone box. “I wasn’t going anywhere anyhow. What is your question, Talking-Crow? How did you get a name like that? I had a real talking crow once. I used it to gather information. The chiefs of the people I was invading would hold their councils in the deep forests, believing that nobody could slip up and listen in on them there. They believed that the sound of trampled leaves and broken twigs would give any spy away. But my crow could slide in on silent wings and listen quietly. Besides, even if they saw him, the chiefs would not consider it unusual for a crow to be there. After he had heard all that there was to hear he would fly back to me and tell me everything. Such at least was the theory.”

  “And what was the practice?”

  “I had to have the crow executed. He was a traitor. He listened to all my councils with my own chiefs, and I thought nothing of it. And then he spilled everything to my enemies. But it was all false information that he gave to me.”

  “My first question, Alexander, is have you ever come onto any places or times where the world seemed unreal?”

  “Oh yes, places and times where the world seemed and was unreal. Unreality is more the rule than the exception. Beyond the ‘ecume’, the old civilized core of the world, it was mostly unreality. In Europe everything across the Danube North of Thrace was unreal. In Africa, everything beyond three days march south of Thebes in Egypt was unreal. (All deserts are unreal.) In nearer Asia, everything south of the Cedraei region of Arabia was unreal. And here again we run into the unreality of the deserts. And everything north of the Armenian Mountains is unreal. In middle Asia, everything north of the Chorasmii and Massagetae regions was unreal (the desert border and limit again). And everything beyond sight of land in the Arabian Ocean was unreal. An Ocean that has no further shore becomes unreal beyond sight of its primary shore. And everything to the east of the Indus River complex, and that includes most of India itself, is unreal. There are further plush regions in Asia (Cathay and Chipangu) that are impressive but unreal. I suspect that the whole Roman thing was unreal, but I never visited it before my death so I cannot make a judgement on it. But in life I could always tell, by the wind in my face coming out of a country, whether that land was real. Even in my own day, Greeks and Phoenicians sailed to the Americas. They landed there. They carried on traffic there. And they knew that the countries were unreal.

  “I was listening to some of you talking before you opened my stone box. You worried about the detailed unreality of small units. But it is in these smallest units that these unrealities begin, and then they spread to the larger units. One adage for you then: reality is not something that one has the right and title to. It is something that must be earned. And I never spent much time in unreal lands. If you conquer one such land, what have you conquered? And if you die there of the unreality disease, you are really dead.”

  “Alexander,” asked Hieronymous Talking-Crow, “can a land that was once unreal later become real?”

  “I don’t know, Hieronymous, I just don’t know. You are talking about your America, I suppose. I just don’t know.”

  “Well, are giants real, Alexander, and are they to be trusted?”

  “Are you talking about giants in general or about the local giant Atrox Fabulinus? I do know something about giants. I used always to keep a company of one hundred and twenty giants. I would send them into the forefront of battles and they would terrify the enemies. But I lost a lot of giants too. They were vulnerable in many ways, and I had to recruit them constantly wherever I went. Oh, the giants are sometimes mental prodigies, but they are rather uneven at the prodigy business. Among them are outright wanwits who nevertheless may be adept at rapid mathematical calculations or at memorizing whole encyclopedias. Atrox Fabulinus seems to belong to the latter class. I never knew him when I was alive, but I often hear him now. He talks to himself, and he putters around in the libraries very much. He has a very great bulk of things in his head, and he pours it out indiscriminately onto vellum or parchment. But he has no talent at all, though he reckons himself as one of the giants of literature. In particular, he lacks the talent for creating characters. Oh, his folks are a grubby lot! He has staying power, but that’s all. His mind is altogether second c
lass. But we can’t all be Alexanders, can we?”

  “Does he live here and work here?”

  “For one day of the week, I believe. He is a compulsive traveler, as are all giants. And sometimes he gets mixed up and out of place. But he’s a multi-locus, and travel is no problem to him. Usually he is here on Monday, and he has a different place for each of the nine days of the week.”

  “Then he’s unimportant?”

  “Totally unimportant, except in the bulk of his giant-like production. No elegance, no excellence, no real reality. And he has a petty temper.”

  Several of them were like pigs in clover all that Monday. Oh, how they did pack it in! They were gluttons for all the facts and pseudofacts that could be found in the catacombs and libraries and the storied countryside of the Parisi villa near Sora in the middle mountains of Italy. They wined and dined, and they exuberated in the wonderful air that was itself like wine, specifically like the wonderful red Pramnian wine.

  But they did receive several warnings during the day that all was not right.

  “Atrox is sulky, Atrox is furious,” said an old lady of the neighborhood, Gioia di Sotto La Montagna, “and when Atrox is both sulky and furious, somebody always dies in a bloody scandal.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, Gioia,” Perpetua Parisi said.

  “I would and I do worry about it,” moaned Jane Chantal Ardri, she who was an artist in every art including satire. “This place is a haunted house; it is a murder house. We must all stay together or we will be killed one by one.”

  “Have all of you seen the feather that killed the last one here?” Gioia asked, “a very huge feather with the whole shaft stained with blood and gore.”

  “Those who have not seen it do not need to see it now,” said Perpetua Parisi the mistress of the house sadly. “But we have not hidden it. It hangs on the tall wall of our third largest kitchen. But it is only a prodigy, an enigma. It lacks reality. Oh, these are not bright Monday thoughts at all! They are gloomy thoughts of the eighth or ninth day.”

  “Atrox is caught up in a paroxysm of anger all this day,” said Timore, an old man of the region. “He will boil over with blood murder, and then he will cover over his black murder with terremoti and sdruccioli so that this villa will be buried under the earth and no more be seen until judgement day morning when the earth shall open up again and give up its secrets.”

  “No, no, none of this will happen, Timore,” Leo Parisi protested in his beautiful boy’s voice. “These things may happen only in the darkness, and we have an enchantment against darkness in our villa. It is because you belong to the Folletti people, to the Magi people, Timore, that you have these superstitions. But we are members of the strangest of all races, the human, and so we have a specific against superstitions.” Then Leo explained it to the members of the Group of Twelve who had been listening, “Timore here, and also the old lady Gioia whose name means Joy Under The Mountain, they both belong to the hobgoblin people, to the gnomes, the eldritch-elves, the puka people. They believe all sorts of strange things. They have no grasp on reality.”

  But the extended Group of Twelve did begin to get a grasp on reality that afternoon and night. They learned, from sources not completely suspect, that the world is indeed built on a substratum of reality, that there is a genuine and ringing reality beneath all things, that there are favored places and circumstances where everything is endowed with detailed reality, even the interiors of atoms. They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never touched it at even one point, but that sometimes they came close. They were imbrued, all through their happy suppertime and into the night hours, with an almost-happy philosophy. They hadn’t yet come to the centrality of the philosophy, but they found themselves more and more on the near fringes of it as they discussed and reveled and studied. They learned that a quest for reality is possible.

  The twenty-third hour had long since struck when Jane Chantal Ardri was heard to complain in the far reaches of their room: “Oh, why is it so dark! Why can’t we have light here! Why is there nobody with me in this horrible ghost house of death? We should all stay together in this horrible place lest we be picked off and killed one by one.”

  Then Jane Chantal began to scream in a way that would move the very stones to compassion. Several of the party rose to go to her, but Mary Brandy Manx laughed.

  “Oh, don’t you recognize it? It is the wonderful screaming scene in Ludendorf’s End of the World Agony. Listen, her screaming tumbles over four full octaves. What an artist Jane Chantal is!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tuesday at Gaire Castle

  The wonderful screaming of Jane Chantal Ardri rose like an arrow. And then it turned into something else. That strange creature, Leonardo the Great the Golden Panther, appeared from somewhere, grimacing in pain and putting his great cat-paws over his ears, those paws that had been designed by somebody who had never seen a great cat. The screaming had not been cut off yet, but it had risen beyond the ken of human ears, but not beyond the ears of Leonardo the Great. Then the scream died indeed, and the difference was felt even by those who hadn’t been able to hear the higher reaches of it. All rushed to Jane Chantal, but she was obscured for a moment by something coming down from the higher reaches of the room, from beyond candle-reach. “It’s the hazy hand of the Giant,” Perpetua Parisi said. Then the obscuring thing was cleared away, and Jane Chantal was dead on the stone floor.

  “Everybody out of the villa,” Gorgonius Pantera called loudly. “It’s an earthquake and a land-slide, and the villa will be buried!”

  Jane Chantal had been speared clear through –

  “There will be terremoti and sdruccioli,” whimpered the old man Timore who belonged to the folletto or hobgoblin people, “and the whole villa and everybody in it will be buried in the earth.” – had been speared by a feather nine feet long –

  “Out, out!” Perpetua Parisi was crying. “Our earthquake-warners are screaming, but they are pale sounds against the dead scream of Jane Chantal. Oh no, it isn’t the same feather that killed somebody else recently. That one is still hanging on the wall of our third largest kitchen. This killer has plenty of killer feathers. Oh, the whole villa is reeling as if it were drunk, and the rocks are already falling on the roofs of our villa and breaking them. Who is this that even the Earthquakes and the Land-Slides obey him? Out, out, or we’ll be trapped to our deaths!”

  – nine feet long, driven into her mouth that was now a mouth no longer, and speared through her entire body and coming out below, while the everywhere blood –

  They left her there in her bloody death and rushed into the starlit outdoors. They climbed slidingly from no-longer-safe places to crumbling places that were a little bit safer. They saw the entire villa covered with sliding earth and rocks, and the stars were darkened from the dust of it.

  The thirteen perpetual player pianos were still playing the wonderfully orchestrated Monday at Sora melody in the buried villa; and people-to-come would sometimes hear that buried underground music forever, for the perpetual player pianos would play it until the end of the world.

  But now it was no longer Monday at Sora. The twenty-fourth hour was likewise heard to strike in the buried villa, and it was Tuesday.

  “We will go to my mother at Gaire Castle, at Laughter Castle,” Laughter-Lynn Casement (sometimes they called her the goose-egg girl from an anecdote from her past) spoke in a frightened but reasonable voice. “Oh, but the correct name of it is East of Laughter Castle. There is nowhere else we can go without a modern world terminal, and that is buried. There is nowhere else we can go so suddenly.”

  “But Gaire Castle is only a legend,” Monika Pantera protested, “and besides it is in Ireland. And it won’t have any sort of terminal.”

  “Whether it’s a legend or not, I was born in it,” Laughter-Lynn insisted. “Trust me, Monika, trust me. Gaire Castle has the oldest world terminal in the world. It dates from the eighth century. Everybody
stand very close together.”

  “Then the terminal is twelve hundred years too old to be a terminal at all,” Hieronymous Talking-Crow protested, “and moreover –”

  “Everybody stand very close together,” Laughter-Lynn said again.

  “There is only one town like this,” Hilary Ardri moaned as he picked himself up from the paving stones. “And it has all happened so fast! My world is gone! My wife is gone! Oh, Jane Chantal and her lovely fuzziness! You are dead and I’ll never see you again. I’d rather be dead with you than here alone in this gathering of disreputable people.”

  “There’s no doubt that we’re in a disreputable and bruised and torn state,” Gorgonius Pantera laughed a painful laugh. “Never trust a modern world terminal that is twelve hundred years too old. Their mechanism is so jerky!”

  “I remember this town,” Solomon Izzersted spoke in a voice not quite so nasty as it used to be, peering out of the shirt-front of John Barkley Towntower. “John Barkley here and myself did our ventriloquism act in the music halls around this square in five different years. They loved us here in Ireland. Oh Baile Atha Cliath of the Irish! Oh Dublin of the Danes! Laughter-Lynn, the modern world terminal in your mother’s castle, if it dates from the eighth century, precedes both the Danish and the English invasions.”

  “Oh yes, it is older than either of those vulgarities,” Laughter-Lynn said. “Oh, I will have to get myself oriented. I was but sixteen years old when I left here to see the world (‘twas the year I hatched out of the giant goose egg) and that was some years ago. We’re an hour earlier here than at my home in Oosterend, so we are two hours earlier than at Sora in Italy. And it was a slow and old, preter-historical really, shuttle that brought us here, not instantaneous like the shuttles they have now. But I forget how long the trips take, that brought us here and dropped us so rudely into the street. The street must be six or seven feet lower than it was twelve hundred years ago. And the ancient shuttle didn’t move through instant space as do the modern ones. Oh, it may still be Monday here, for a few moments yet. The Gaire Tramway there is still running, and it stops at midnight. And the Archangel? Does anybody see the Archangel?”