“Yes, that is the story as far as Gorgonius Pantera knows it,” said Leonardo the Great. “I am a true Prince, yes, and I am entitled to use The Great with my name. What my cousins here are too modest to tell you is that they also are Prince and Princess, and they are entitled to use The Great with their own given names. Gorgonius believes that people would find the name Gorgonius The Great somewhat overblown and musical-comedyish. Monika does indeed sign her letters Monika The Great, but only to very close personal friends, less than two of them in the world.”
Among the strange cargoes which the Strange Cargoes ships had brought to their rendezvous were seven steam calliopes. The manifest was for shipment to Laughter-Lynn Casement at Oosterend. And they were stenciled: FROM A SECRET ADMIRER.
“I am nine parts enchanted with the anonymous gifts, but one part in wonder what I should do with them,” Laughter-Lynn said. “If only they were player steam calliopes I would know what to do with them.”
“Maybe we could find some skilled craftsman able to convert the machines,” Hieronymous Talking-Crow said. “But if you’re thinking of setting them to play Wednesday at Oosterend before Wednesday is gone, that skilled craftsman had better come along pretty soon.”
After the Group had finished their tea-and-rum with the sea captains of the Strange Cargoes ships, they ascended the wonderful circular stairway again, past the sea-level landing where only prosaic boats and ships came, up through the living levels of the big house, and to the studio level, the highest level except one.
Here in the studios, several of the persons began to paint. And the model for their paintings was the panoramic Earth and Ocean series of their hostess Laughter-Lynn Casement. Wonderful forgeries were done in quick time by Denis Lollardy. And Jane Chantal Ardri began to do incredible burlesques of them, which she may not even have intended to be burlesques. After all, Jane Chantal in what might be called her primary life had been an Artist of All the Arts. And now, when she acted very young and believed herself to be so also (though now she said that she was ten years old going on eleven, whereas she had earlier said that she was nine years old) her artistic power was still with her, but it took strange flights. And the speed, the speed with which she finished or half-finished those pictures! She painted Earth and Ocean and Jane Galatea After She Has Been Born Again; she did Earth and Ocean and the Murder-House Where We Must All Stay Very Close Together; she did Earth and Ocean and the Sea-Goblins; she did Earth and Ocean and Those Strange Cargoes That Even Caesar Oceano Doesn’t Know About.
“Oh, it is Saint Joseph, the carpenter from Galilee arriving,” Laughter-Lynn cried out. “We are so glad to see you, Joseph Jacobson. You have not been here since you built our wonderful wooden staircase. I was just showing it off to my friends.”
“I will work for my evening meal,” Saint Joseph said. He was a tall, straight man. “I can repair anything or modify anything.”
“Can you adapt ordinary steam calliopes to be player steam calliopes? There are seven of them. Could you do it as soon as you have supper? We want to set them to play Wednesday at Oosterend before Wednesday is gone.”
“Oh, surely, surely.”
“Gorgonius, get with it and write Wednesday at Oosterend, and then go down with Saint Joseph and show him where the steam calliopes are. And orchestrate Wednesday at Oosterend for seven calliopes and play it as soon as Saint Joseph gets them modified.”
They set out a good supper of French bread and camel-milk cheese and sword-fish and roast goose and crab-apple wine. Then Saint Joseph went with Gorgonius down where the calliopes were, Gorgonius still writing Wednesday at Oosterend as he walked.
“Let us go up and see the incredible Sky Studio at the top of the magic staircase,” Laughter-Lynn said to the rest of them. “There is nothing like it anywhere.”
“Oh, Oh, Oh, let’s all stay close together,” Jane What’s-her-name howled. “Let’s all stay close together in this murder house so we don’t get separated and killed one by one. If the rest of you go up to the Sky Studio, I’ll have to go too.”
“Of course, Jane,” Laughter-Lynn said. “Come with us. You can always return to your paintings.”
They went up higher by the incredible Circular Staircase that was one of the Three Wonders of the big Casement House at Oosterend and one of the Seven Wonders of the World. They went up to the Sky Studio that was unsupported save by the stairway itself, that was like a large head atop a long corkscrew neck. The Sky Studio was clear glass in its sides and clouded glass in the skylights that formed its roof. All this glass work had been done from the two little panes of glass, one of them clear, one of them clouded, that Saint Joseph the Carpenter carried in his small package. And all the glasswork had not diminished those two small panes of glass a whit. It was a prodigy.
And there was another prodigy inside the Sky Studio. It was Atrox Fabulinus the Giant, the Roman Rabelais, sitting at a huge table and writing on a huge parchment roll with a nine-foot-long quill pen.
“We are surprised to see you here, Atrox,” Laughter-Lynn said.
“Why are you surprised to see me here? Did I not tell you that I would go before you? Go before you into Galilee, is the phrase, and already I hear the Galilean carpenter Joseph altering the ambulatory music boxes down below. Why didn’t you tell me, and I’d have fixed them any way you wanted them with a few strokes of my pen.”
“Who are you, Atrox, and what do you do?” Leo Parisi asked.
“I am the voice of one writing in the wilderness, Make ready the future world of the Lord, make straight its paths.”
Almost more prodigious than Atrox was the music that then filled the whole Casement house, the intricate, the superb, the very loud, the beautiful Wednesday at Oosterend for Seven Calliopes, composed and orchestrated by Gorgonius Pantera and several sustaining Angels of the Arts. “Will it play forever less two days, Laughter-Lynn?” Mary Brandy asked. “Oh, I hope so, I hope so,” Laughter-Lynn said.
“What year are you living in, Atrox?” Hilary Ardri suddenly asked.
“I live yet in the year of restored salvation four hundred and fifty-three, the last year I may live in, since I die on the evening of the last day of that same year. The world exterior to me, however, is now about twelve years beyond me, possibly in the year four hundred and sixty-five. Things have rolled for a dozen years into the world I wrote, and the going is easier for the world because I wrote the way. I, the writer of the future, have now written the world to about the year two thousand, though the world itself has not yet moved into my scenario of it all the way. Well, I love doing it, and somebody has to do it.”
“Who are we then, Atrox?” asked the great composer Gorgonius Pantera as he came into the Sky Studio after his labor of writing and orchestrating Wednesday at Oosterend. “Who are we then who live just short of the year two thousand? Who are we who live fifteen-hundred years and more after your death? What traffic is there between us and thee?”
Oh, what a room full of living masterpieces was there! Masterworks of art, yes. And were they also masterworks of life? They were dazzling people, Gorgonius and Monika, Leo and Perpetua, Drusilla and Laughter-Lynn and Mary Brandy, Hilary and Jane of-the-strange-situation, Caesar Oceano and Prince Leonardo the Great, John Barkley Towntower and Solomon Izzersted, Denis Lollardy, Hieronymous Talking-Crow! Whoever made them, they were well made!
“You are a dozen or more from among the six thousand characters I have written to represent the six-billion persons who will have lived in the world after my death. You are sketches that I did not quite fill out, you are people in my still quite sketchy world of the future. And yet I did all of you as well as I was able to.”
“If you can create characters who live and move in the world, then you should create a few writing characters to lighten your load,” Caesar Oceano said archly. “Who would know whether such characters were primary or secondary?”
“Oh, I have done what you mention a few times, Caesar. The results, well, the results were pretty m
ixed. But my primary results have also been rather mixed.”
“Tell us about a few of your scribbling characters, Atrox Fabulinus.”
“Oh, I was called the Roman Rabelais by my contemporaries, and I never knew the meaning of the jibe. So after the last of my joking contemporaries was dead, I did create a character named Rabelais and I did set him to writing in Future France in the sixteenth century. But this Rabelais was perverse. Instead of writing about his own day, he turned backwards to me and wrote about myself and my father and our family of giants. Mostly he got us pretty accurate, but that was no help in illuminating the future. Then I made Balzac and set him to writing in Paris of France in the nineteenth century. He was by far the best of my writing characters. I myself could never have written of that latterday Paris. I have a prejudice against Paris. I was there only once in my life, in my youth, and I was jailed and almost hanged for stealing chickens. But Balzac did what was beyond my power. And in the twentieth century I projected Charles Fort in America (I projected America from Amorica in France) to do my skies of the future. I had more trouble doing the skies of the future than any other thing. But I believe that Fort has done a good job on them for me.”
“I suppose that you feel a towering pride in creating the whole future,” Denis Lollardy said rather bitterly.
“Denis, you stole my Laughing Christ!” Atrox charged once more. “I want him back. No, Denis, what I feel is a towering humility for what I have been doing. Nor did I ever claim to be creating the whole future. I’m but one of seven scribbling giants who do the future. Denis, being a master forger, you are a judge of such things. Study the things that I have made and that the other six have made. You will be stumbling over their work now that you know it exists. You will find, I believe, that I am the best of the whole sorry lot. Did any person ever have so many things to be humble over as myself? And it’s been a weary, weary way.” And the weary Giant Atrox fell asleep.
“Let us leave him to his sleep and go down to the studios for it is now our creative hour,” Laughter-Lynn said. “It is time for us to extend our studies into the present and the future. There is a time to follow and a time to lead. We must have the brightness to lead the world in this hour.”
“We must take the Giant with us,” Jane cried. “He is one of us, and we must all be close together in this house of murder.”
“No, he isn’t exactly one of us, Jane. And my house isn’t exactly a House of Murder,” Laughter-Lynn said. “But we will stay together if you wish it that way. Up to midnight at least we’ll stay together.”
And they did stay together, in deep talk and shallow, in deep creation and shallow, right up till the midnight hour, while the delightful Wednesday at Oosterend For Seven Steam Calliopes sounded from the depths of the house.
And right at midnight there came a horrible screaming from the Sky Studio above their heads. It recalled a little bit the wonderful screaming of Jane Chantal when she was being done to death by the nine-foot-long spear. But it was that screaming giantized. Somebody was dying in a much more violent way than would have been possible for Jane Chantal. And then the screaming broke up in a resounding gurgle that shook the house.
“Atrox has killed somebody else!” Leo Parisi cried out in his hot boyish voice. “Atrox has speared somebody else to death with one of his nine-foot-long quill spears. Let us see who the hellhound has killed this time.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Thursday at East Sussex
‘It appears, therefore, that life cannot be completely identified with the physical world around it.’
— Tocquet.
‘Day and night, aloft, from the high towers
And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem
To sleep in one another’s arms, and dream
Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we
Read in their smiles and call reality.’
— Shelley.
‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’
— T.S. Eliot.
Hilary Ardri was the first of them into the Sky Studio. And yet he faced immediately a man who was strange to him, a young, handsome, fair, smiling, incredibly urbane man, bright of feature, open of soul, and covered with blood. The outstanding things about him were that he was smiling and covered with blood.
“Who are you?” Hilary demanded, with a touch of deference first, and then of anger when he saw that the Giant Atrox was dead in his own blood. “Who are you, man! Caesar Oceano, Denis Lollardy, seize this man! It is all wrong about him! Leo, block the door to this Sky Room and be sure that nobody goes out!”
“It’s blocked, Hilary. Nobody gets out!” the boyish Leo Parisi swore.
“The man is like quicksilver, Hilary,” Caesar complained as they skirried and grappled and fought. “But we have him here now like a rat in a corner. We will –”
The lights in the Sky Studio went out, and for a moment the starlight through the skylights and sides was not able to pick up the slack. One, two, three seconds. Then the lights came on again, and Mary Brandy had her hand on the switch. Caesar Oceano and Denis Lollardy were both stretched on the floor dazed, and the strange man was not in the room. But Caesar Oceano, in his hustling days when he was still Cedric Oceano, had been called the Muscle Man of the Seven Seas. And Denis had the impressive musculature of a hard-material forger who had shaped thousands of tons of marble-stone with hammer and chisel.
“Something strange has happened in here,” Mary Brandy said. “I mean even beyond the murder.”
“It’s been a switcheroo,” cried that talking belly-button Solomon Izzersted. “I missed it, I missed it. But I bet I figure it out. I wasn’t in vaudeville all those years with John Barkley Towntower without learning about switcheroos. They were a hobby of mine.”
“The strange man, the hauntingly strange man, is certainly gone,” Hilary said. “And there is only one door in and out of the Sky Studio that is atop the circular stairway.”
“He didn’t go out by the one way out, not by the door,” Leo Parisi averred. “I’d swear that on a stack of new Atrox chapters.”
“Are we all here, and nobody else?” Gorgonius Pantera asked as he checked them off with his long, strong, artistic fingers.
Yes, they were all there, they and nobody else, Leo and Perpetua Parisi, Hilary and Jane – perhaps Ardri, Gorgonius and Monika Pantera, John Barkley Towntower and his talking belly-button Solomon Izzersted, Denis Lollardy, Caesar Oceano and his associate Leonardo the Great the Golden Panther, Laughter-Lynn Casement, Drusilla Evenrood, Mary Brandy Manx, Hieronymous Talking-Crow. They were all there, and the mysterious smiling man with blood on him was not among them. And the Sky Studio, that room like a big head atop the neck that was the circular stairway, really hadn’t any way out except that door which Leo Parisi had occupied.
But the Giant Thing among them was bloody murder. It was no longer the question of whom that hell-hound Atrox had murdered now. Atrox Fabulinus was the murdered one. He was a murdered man unsurpassed in bloodiness and bulk, and in enigma. He had been murdered by one of his own nine-foot-long spear-like quill pens, one of the huge pens by which he created and wrote the future. He had been speared by it through the back of his neck as he slumped over in his sleep, and the big quill came out through his mouth. They hadn’t realized before just how big Atrox was. More than half of that nine-foot-length of spear-and-quill was in his neck and head.
“Oh, somebody will pay for this!” Mary Brandy Manx swore. “I will find the murderer and I will see him hanged on the gallows in my own town. We have a fine gibbet-gallows there. It has been inspected every year and its readiness certified, though it hasn’t been used in more than three hundred years. But it will be used this year, it will be used this week. We will try the smiling stranger in absentia, the group of us here, and we will find him guilty of murder. And we will hang him when we catch him. And I already know that it will be at Port Saint Mary on the Isle of Man.”
“We are goin
g to my place in East Sussex on the new day today, Mary Brandy,” Drusilla Evenrood said. “Thursday at East Sussex.” She was crying.
“I know it. And Friday at Port Saint Mary,” Mary Brandy said, and she also was crying.
“The Giant Atrox is dead,” Jane Galatea Chantal spoke sorrowfully. “But if he is dead, then why aren’t we all dead too, if we are only characters in his mind? I don’t understand it.”
“It’s an interesting point,” Denis Lollardy said. “For a moment there this evening, I really did entertain the possibility that we were indeed no more than characters from the mind and pen of this Giant Scrivener Atrox. Oh, I knew for a fact that I was nothing more than that! But now he is massively dead. What does it mean, other than that we are ourselves independent of Atrox, whether we are real or not. And what was he? His own reality must be examined now. We will put his own flesh to the test, and his own pouring blood. Maybe his blood is just a little bit overdone. It will require an examination in a laboratory. Can real blood possibly be that red? This is almost a milestone. But of what, I wonder?”
East of Laughter Page 11
