More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  Table of Contents

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Book Four

  Book Five

  Book Six

  Book Seven

  Book Eight

  Book Nine

  Book Ten

  Book Eleven

  Book Twelve

  Book Thirteen

  Postscript

  Additional Material

  Great Day In The Morning

  The Casey Machine

  Promontory Goats

  How Many Miles to Babylon

  Book One

  Early Boyhood of a Magus

  We know the sign athwart the wreck

  The sign that hangs about your neck,

  Where One more than Melchisedech

  Is Dead and never dies.

  G. K. Chesterton

  Ballad of the White Horse

  Well, what do you think is maintaining the world on even its wobbly ways if it is not the extraordinary work of a few prodigious and special people in it? These people are known as magicians or sorcerers or magi: and this is the daily life of one of them. He was Melchisedech Duffey. Like every magus, he arrived with many mantles of magic. Like every magus, he would lose most of them during his life. And such payments as he would receive for his losses would seem trivial or incomprehensible.

  “I do not understand the value of these trifles I receive for the splendid things that I give up,” another magus had complained once.

  “If you are a true magus, you will understand it,” one in higher authority said.

  “And I go all my life in fear of assassination or even more mortal things,” the magus complained.

  “If you a true magus, you will not let these small things bother you,” the Higher Authority said.

  The True Magus Melchisedech Duffey had the golden touch. He could bang his hands together and produce graven gold or bar gold or coin gold. He was an invader of minds, moving in and out of the people with whom he was in accord as well as some with whom he was in clashing discord. To a limited extent, he was a Lord of Time, moving back and forth in the streams of it almost at will. And he commanded invisible giants.

  By talismanic device, he was able to manufacture persons, or at least to put his own fabricator's mark on unfinished human clay. This was his most powerful gift.

  “Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life — ”  — these specifications seemed improbable for a mortal person like Duffey; and there was confusion about each of the items as applied to himself.

  Duffey remembered three different childhoods in the present or twentieth century. It was hard to reconcile them because they occupied the same years. Duffey also remembered a much older and continuing life that was always with his like a backdrop. This older backdrop contained camel's hair tents flapping in the wind in a rocky country that was green with grass and golden with sunlight.

  And there was a background sound that fit in imperfectly with the semi-desert atmosphere. It was the hooting of a particular ship's horn, a strong, golden and pleasant sound that could be produced by one ship only. Other people could not hear this ship's horn however loud it sounded.

  In all other ways, Duffey was a pretty normal person. He had sorrel hair and fire-blue eyes. He would be a solid but not overly large man. He had a mouth that might start to grin before his eyes did. And he was constantly banging his hands together and shouting, “Yes, yes, my creature, we will do this thing right away.” He might be shouting this to a clay chicken he had made with his hands, and to no one else at all.

  For a very brief moment here, we dip into the latter-middle life of Duffey just before that life breaks up and moves in several directions, but mostly back in time from that latter day. For this one brief moment that we watch now, he is in his own ‘Duffey's Walk-in Art Bijou’ in New Orleans. He is eating and drinking with a friend there, and he is contemplating an urn full of ashes that is on his cluttered table. The urn is old and ornate and it had once belonged to a King of Spain. There is nothing odd about keeping an urnful of ashes on one's table, perhaps, but this case was a little different. The ashes were Duffey's own.

  “The people whom you make, Duffey,” said Mr. X who was the friend Duffey was eating and drinking with, “you haven't any real control over them, have you?”

  “Over them? It's over you, X. You're one of the people I made. No, I haven't much control over the bunch of you. You're a ‘how sharper than a serpent's tooth’ crew.”

  “And someday you'll have to settle on one of your three childhoods to be the real one, Duffey,” X said.

  “Yes, but I won't settle on it yet. I'll keep my options open. What kind of man I can be today or tomorrow will always depend on what kind of boy I was yesterday. I really wish that I had more than three childhoods to choose from. But beyond these three I come on only fragments.”

  2

  Melchisedech Duffey, for one of his most likely childhoods, appeared in either Harrison or Shelby or Pottawattamie County in lowa. The seven cities that disputed the honor of being his birthplace were Minden, Underwood, Beebee Town, Neola, Crescent, Avoca, and Union Township which was not properly a city at all. Melchisedech used to say that he arrived on the night of the turn of the century, a night that also was claimed by the Papadiaboloi and Mr. X and other portentous persons. Duffey may have lied about this: he may have been several years younger than the century. And X may have lied about his own case. Likely he was several years younger than Duffey even.

  A fact given by an older relative or pretended relative is that Melchisedech's mother had died when he was five years old and that thereafter he had lived with cousins until finally he came to live alone. When Duffey was twelve years old, he began to go to boarding schools, and that was the beginning of his living alone.

  Duffey, between the ages of five and twelve, lived with cousins in little towns and on big farms in Iowa, and he lived with kindred in a number of cities: Dubuque, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston. The older relative also said that Duffey, far from being without kindred, had many relatives: the Duffeys themselves, the Kellys, Byrnes, McGuires, Crooks, Bagbys, Haleys, Healeys, Haydens, Kanes, Whites, Hughes, Kennedys, Thompsons, Clancys. This older relative also said that Duffey's original name was Michael and not Melchisedech.

  “She is probably remembering my twin and not myself,” Melchisedech said when told about it. “Those supposed kindred that she mentions are good people, and I know some of them. But they are not my kindred, and I have no genealogy through them. I was born without father and without mother, and I was five years old when I was born.”

  Here is a scene when Duffey was in Council Bluffs when five years old (“The year when I was born,” said Duffey). It was in a park on Lake Manawa. People there were indulging in that weirdest of all total-body masquerades, ‘going swimming’. There was a high diving board over one part of the lake and people were diving off of that board and disappearing into the water. Duffey believed that the words ‘diving’ and ‘dying’ indicated the same thing, as he had not observed either of them before.

  “So that is the way they do it,” said Duffey, and he whacked his hands together. “I always thought that people died in the house, but how would you get rid of them if they died there? This is right, that the people disappear into Lake Manawa when they die.”

  Other people were appearing from under the water, and this was a more frightening thing. The new people were coming up out of the lake. Duffey began to count the people who disappeared and those who appeared, and he found that their numbers were almost the same.

  A strong man with black moustache
and black hair and with a blue bathing suit dived into the water. After a very little while, a different strong man with black moustache and hair came up out of the water. This second man had an evil look, and he had flowing or blurred features. But he looked something like the first man, like a caricature or deformity of the first man. It was apparent now that the people who came up out of the water were evil people. They would have to be watched.

  It went on. Those who dived in were bright and pleasant looking. Those who came out were mean, bad, twisted, with their faces half washed away or only half formed, just not shaped right. The good persons on the lake shore made uneasy way for these evil persons who came up out of the water.

  One of the most evil of them all climbed up the ladder to the high diving board. It was as if he himself intended to dive into the lake as the good people were doing. Did they not notice that he was one of the bad ones who had come up out of the lake and had then sneaked into the line with the good ones? It made the flesh crawl.

  That ‘thing’ that was going out now to dive off the board was the evil strong man who had come out of the water after the first strong man had gone in. What could such an evil creature change into a second time? Why was nobody strong enough to prevent him doing it?

  Then Duffey knew that he himself was strong enough to prevent it. Should the monster come up out of the water after he had dived in, Duffey would enforce the condition that he should come out of it dead. There was spirit-wrenching on Duffey's part to come to this decision to intervene.

  The monster dived into the water. Duffey prevented him from coming out of it again. There was a death struggle going on, inside the mind of the monster and inside the mind of Duffey, inside that water that was Lake Manawa and inside the water that is the oceanic matrix of everybody. Duffey kept the monster in his watery prison. He kept him there till he knew that he was dead. Then Duffey let go. “I just don't care any more,” he said.

  He couldn't see just what did happen afterwards. People gathered on the lake shore and in the waters of the lake itself. They were taking a great interest in a darkish form that they pulled out. People said that a man had drowned and that he looked absolutely dreadful, that he was strangled and horrifying.

  Of course he was horrifying. But imagine how much more horrifying he would have been if he was alive when he came out of that water. That was the first time that Duffey ever killed.

  In that park in Council Bluffs the squirrels are coal black. It is the only place in the world that has coal black squirrels.

  There is another early scene. It's in Boston at about the same time. It is almost the only Boston scene in the Iowa-based childhood, though in later years, Duffey often passed himself off coming from Boston. It was in a narrow park surrounded with buildings, and with a blue sky over it. White clouds were sliding into the blue of that sky. Melchisedech Duffey was with an older person, an uncle or cousin who called him Mikey.

  “You can make cloud disappear by pointing at them, Mikey,” the older person said. “Pick out one, the smallest one you can see till you learn how to do it. Now hate it with your whole mind, and you will make it disappear.”

  Melchisedech did point his finger at a little split-off fringe of cloud. He did concentrate on it in the spirit of hatred and extermination. And he did make it disappear. He was startled by his new-found power. This was the first real thing that he had ever made to disappear. Give a power like this room to operate and there was no limit to what it could do.

  Melchisedech picked out a larger cloud fragment and made it disappear. And then he picked a still larger one. He could do it every time, and he felt the power standing up in him. If he picked out too large a cloud, it would leave the scene and slide behind buildings before he could finish with it. But every cloud that escaped his power was greatly diminished when it escaped.

  “Is it working, Mikey?” the older person asked.

  “Oh sure. Every time. Can all people do it?”

  “All very smart people can do it. And some dogs can. Pointer dogs can do it best. They get rid of a lot of clouds. When you're wanting rain, then you always have to shut up the pointers in a shed where they can't see the clouds. There wouldn't be a cloud left in the sky otherwise.”

  Melchisedech diminished or completely destroyed about forty clouds that day. And the next day, he came back to the park again and destroyed about half that many. He had thought it would be easier the second day, but it was more difficult. The clouds were thicker and tougher that second day, and small pieces of cloud were hard to find.

  The third day in the park was disaster for Duffey. The clouds covered almost the entire sky. It was hard to find small clouds to exterminate. All were rolling around and joining themselves to bigger clouds. Then Melchisedech found one and fastened onto it with pointing finger and pointing mind. He commanded it to melt and disappear. It refused.

  Duffey then used a word that compels obedience. He obliterated that cloud. Then he pushed all the clouds back from the center of the sky and left a sunny interval.

  “Don't do that!” came a warning from somewhere. It was the voice of a demiurge.

  “I will do it!” Melchisedech Duffey insisted. But it took more and more strength to hold the clouds apart. Then a lightning eye appeared right in the middle. Lightning came out of that eye and slashed open a tree in the park and buckled the pavement on the edge of the park, this not twenty feet from Duffey.

  “Oh, if you're going to do that,” Duffey said, “do it to these.” Duffey held up a handful of sticks that he had taken from his pocket. Then, to horrified observers, it seemed that the lightning came down and struck the little boy's hand with blinding bolts, again and again, twelve times at least.

  “Now they will have some fire and juice in them,” Melchisedech said. “I wondered how I was going to get it into them.”

  People came and got Duffey and pulled him out of that little park and to the shelter of a nearby building. He yowled in fury at being dragged away. He wasn't beaten. He could have continued to hold the clouds apart, to push them even further apart, to destroy them all. He had just eased up on it for a moment to get the lightning to animate his sticks.

  There's a sort of explanation to this. When damp and traveling air moves over dry and standing air, there will be masses and scatterings of white clouds produced. But these clouds will all melt back into the dry, standing air within minutes. You can watch the clouds fade on such a day. You can predict, when you learn the trick of it, just how rapidly they will melt. So it is no great trick, when conditions are right, to pick out a thin cloud and point a finger at it, and make it fade. Every cloud will be fading away into the air, and new clouds will be forming and moving in, to fade in their turn.

  But, on the following day, the dry standing air will have become less dry because of the clouds it has absorbed. Clouds may still fade away, but it will be a much slower process. Then (and it is usually in the night when the changeover comes) there is a dividing line after which the clouds will be growing instead of shriveling. They will grow and grow. They will swell up with lightning and noise. Then they'll break open in rain.

  That is a neat explanation of the thing. It is even true, to a limited extent. And yet there were and would always be times when Melchisedech could command the winds and clouds and rains. He could do it all. But sometimes he was afraid of it, and he held back.

  But an important thing had been done in that early encounter. The talisman sticks had been imbued with lightning.

  On Duffey's first day in school (his first day in any school) he always found that the class was very unorganized. So he would bang his hands together and say: “It just seems that we are wasting our time here unless we introduce a little bit of system. I have some good ideas on the subject. We'll use them now.” “Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, don't let there be a smart kid again this year!” Sister Mary Sabina prayed to herself out loud. This was Duffey's first day in school ever, and he was a little bit direct about things. “Why does t
here have to be a smart one every year?” Sister asked her heavenly friends.

  “We can break the class up into mixed groups of fours,” Melchisedech said, “with a responsible leader for each group. And we can — ” This was insufferable from a five year old boy who shouldn't have been allowed into school for another year.

  “Go ahead and organize it then,” Sister said. “You will anyhow. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, remember, when I come to my last agony, that I bore these things cheerfully.”

  So Duffey organized his first class. He did a pretty good job of it too.

  3

  Now here's a bit about the three slant-faced persons. Duffey saw them the first time when he was about six years old. They were three boys who were two years older and two years bigger than himself. They had slack mouths and slant faces, and they slouched along with their hands in their pockets and with knives in their hands. This was in the big town house where Duffey was living with some of his pretended kindred. It was the second largest house in town, and was on the top of the second highest hill.

  Duffey was looking out of the Prisoner John Window when he first saw those three persons. That was a little, peaked, fourth-floor or attic window that was off of the high room where Melchisedech had his domain. It was not in the main attic room as were the other three high windows that looked out in three directions. The Prisoner John Window was in a little closet or cell off the main attic room. Duffey heard the three slant-faced boys in the road down below though they thought that they moved in silence. He came to the window to watch them. He saw them come to the door, and he heard his aunt-of-that-season open the door to talk to them.

  “That little boy in this house, can he come out and play?” one of the slant-faces asked. And the other two slant-faces formed silent words, “We want to kill him” . But Duffey could read mouth.