More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  One Saturday morning, Sebastian Hilton bought a small piece of statuary from Lily Koch for one hundred dollars. He paid her in cash after finding that he had left his checkbook back it school. Rich kids can pay other rich kids such sums without turning the least shade green. And Melchisedech knew with furious exasperation that the statuette was really worth the hundred dollars, and that the taste of these two young persons was worth all the hammered gold in the world. There were other art things there: pictures, lockets, statues, weavings to hang on the wall, porcelain figures, iron figures, bronzes. There were also insufferably cute pieces to be sold to insufferably cute grown-up customers, and Duffey felt the laughing disdain of Lily when she sold such.

  Melchisedech invaded, ransacked, and pirated the minds of Sebastian Hilton and Lily Koch for this new thing. He also ransacked the minds of several grown-up persons who came to some of Lily's sales. And Melchisedech, with what he pirated and ransacked, and with what he already possessed unknowingly, became an instant art expert. Art expert was one of the vocations to which he would be faithful all his life. The part that he lifted from Sebastian did not have the high-speed condition of other things that he lifted from that mind. The judgments he got there on this were in absolute balance at any speed or at no speed it all.

  He encountered other things in the mind of Lily Koch. She knew when he was there. She came and talked with him there in an old way that is closer than words. She told him to come any time he wished, that she would put up a pavilion for him there, and that he should put up a dromedary-hide tent for her there. But would she remember in the world what she told him in her mind? Yes, she would and she did. She was very friendly and very easy with Melchisedech.

  At her sales, Lily did not use a green eye shade as John Rattigan did. For her trademark as merchant, she used to snap on celluloid cuffs or gauntlets. They were more common than they are now. And when high noon struck on Saturday, she would cry, “Time, ladies and gentlemen! Quickly, quickly!” And after the customers were all gone, she would put away her things and unsnap her celluloid cuffs until next sale time.

  One Saturday morning, Melchisedech Duffey brought one of his talismans and gave it to Lily Koch. “It is for you,” he said simply, and then he attempted to bolt out of the room. Lily hooked him by the collar and jerked him back.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” she cried. “This can't be for sale. It isn't allowed to sell them. This is real. Anyone can see that this is something special and cannot be sold.”

  “No, it's not to sell, Lily. I want to give it to you so you can give it to somebody else someday. Take it. I have to leave now.”

  “Wait, wait!” she jerked him back. “But this is genuine. Who is it from?”

  “It's from myself, Lily. You will give it to someone. I don't know how to say it, and you don't know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean. Sebastian told me that you were one of the magi, and I had already about guessed it. They are the only ones who could give something shaped like this. One could form an extraordinary person with one of these. One could pour almost everything into such a person. But there's nothing that I can do with it, Melky. I'm already born and, beyond that, I'm already finished. And I will never have any children of my own.”

  “I thought that you might give it, well, to — ”

  “Oh, to her? I didn't know you even knew about her. Why couldn't it have been me instead? I don't think that it'll work, but we'll try it if you wish. She is already born, but she sure is empty-headed. So this is what she's been waiting for! I love her, and you will also. Trust me. I'll do what I can. It may work. Sure it'll work.”

  “You do what you can with it, Lily,” Melchisedech said. “I guess they might not work every time.”

  “Why couldn't it have been you and I, Melky?” Lily asked. Two twelve year old persons, and they were asking, ‘Why couldn't it have been you you and I’ as if something were irrevocable. And it was irrevocable.

  Lily looked at Melchisedech with level eyes and then kissed him on the mouth.

  “You get out of here now,” she said. “You hand out magic like that, and you don't even know what it is.”

  No, Duffey didn't yet understand very much about his own talismans. He was glad that Lily Koch seemed to understand part of it at least.

  6

  In one thing and by latter standards, the four boys were not very precocious. Forty or fifty years later, it would be a case that baseball and sex and kindred subjects were organized and regimented and made compulsory from the third grade of school on. The things have backfired, but the failures have not been recognized. “I tell you,” a man said just the other day, “they organize it all too early. I tell you that early regimentation turned me against both baseball and sex forever.” That was a double ruin. In the childhood of Duffey, it was not quite so organized as it later became, and yet it was organized. Even in those old decades the compulsion had begun. A series of dances was arranged every year and attendance was compulsory. Duffey and Rattigan and Murray knew girls, but they didn't know ‘girls’. Sebastian, who had been in France and Italy, knew a little bit more about ‘girls’. He had, in fact, had an affair with a countess, he said. And affairs with countesses are closely regimented. This claim was something for the other boys to hoot at him for, and they hooted. But Sebastian wasn't at all abashed. It was true, he insisted. And yes, he admitted it had been funny. He wished that he was at liberty to tell just how funny it really was.

  And Duffey, dipping into the Sebastian mind, found that there really was a countess and that she was now twelve years old. Duffey even extracted the information (not from Sebastian  —  he couldn't have known it  —  but from the fates somewhere) that he Duffey would someday make the acquaintance of this Countess and that she would be his close friend.

  But that didn't solve the problem of the dances. The first of the series was to be held in the fine home of Lily Koch's kindred as this was a very large house and very handy to the girls' school, and as the family was very pushy about such things. Twenty-five of the boarding boys of Duffey's school were to escort twenty-five girls from St. Mary Major's.

  “Oh, there has to be a way out of it,” Charley Murray would mutter, and he would chew off all his fingernails and half of his fingers.

  “They can't make me do it. They can't make me go,” Duffey would growl.

  “If we're going to our doom, then let us go elegantly,” Sebastian Hilton offered. “And sharpen up a little bit, boys. Wear gloves if you have any. And scarves. I've hired a carriage for this evening. We'll do it in style.”

  It was early October and still warm, and they really didn't need either gloves or scarves.

  “It's only three blocks to the girls' school,” said Rattigan who was parsimonious. But the others jeered him down. If they had any chance at all, it would be to go in style. One other rich kid in school had hired an automobile and driver to take himself and his party, but what possible style was there in an automobile?

  So Sebastian's hired carriage with liveried driver pulled up for them that night. The carriage had style and the coachman had style. It even had a post-boy's horn on which Charley Murray blew rousing notes. The horses were Cleveland Bays, and there were no more stylish horses in the world. The carriage and the jouncing ride in it were enough to lift the spirits of any condemned persons.

  Even at St. Mary Majors where they arrived with their style drooping only a little bit, the situation was eased by their friend Lily Koch being one of the four girls the boys were to pick up.

  “Who will squire whom?” Sebastian asked out of his orderly mind.

  “Nobody will squire anybody,” Lily stated. “They think they can make us do it that way, but they can't. We will all be together, and nobody will be with anyone else.”

  That was like new life being given to dying people. They went out, and the four girls got into the carriage. What, got into the carriage just to go across the street? Sure, to ride around a dozen blocks and t
hen to end up across the street. The carriage was made to hold four, and there were eight of them. The four guys piled in too, and they went for a happy and whopping ride. Charley Murray was very good on that post-horn, and he gave them some hectic tunes. They were fox-hunting tunes. The boys were only with girls on that carriage ride. They were not yet with ‘girls’.

  The fun remained till they made their circuit of quite a few blocks and arrived at their destination across the road from the girls' school and dismounted and entered the big house. And then, in the face of the arrangements and formality and scrutiny, it all shriveled.

  Oh flushing horror, they were going to make them pair off! And they were going to make the boys shake hands with the girls. The boys had sat on the girls' laps in the carriage, but they were too flustered to shake hands with them in public. And some of the girls were even more shook.

  “I'm going to write my mother to take me out of this school,” Mary Anne Michaels said. “I'm going to tell her that I'll kill myself if I can't get out of this school and go home. And I will kill myself if she says no. But how will that help tonight?”

  “I know how I can get out of it,” said the girl named Sedalia Schoefeld. “I know a trick so I can vomit whenever I want to. I'll play real sick. Then they'll have to let me go back across the road and go to bed.”

  “Wait! Turn this way. Get some on me!” Lily Koch cried. “Then they'll have to let me go across the road to change my dress, and I won't come back.” But Lily was laughing.

  “Wait kids,” she said. “There's better ways. Follow me. I know places to go.”

  Lily knew that house. They went through big rooms and down long hallways. They went up back stairways. Somehow they were up in the sound-proofed billiard room in the attic. (The sound of ivory balls striking against each other affected the lady of that house perishingly, so this was the most sound-proof room in town.)

  They had a good time up there, the eight of them. They played Kelly pool and rotation. They had two victrolas there, one with the old cylinder records, one with the new disc records. They played rag music and they danced rag dances. But they sure wouldn't have endured the formalized horror of dancing at the dance downstairs. There was food and drink there, from Lily's stock from across the street and from a couple of stores and pickle houses and confectioners in Germantown. And just from the big kitchen downstairs. It was good eating. All the boys and girls had been too nervous and upset in the stomachs to eat before coming to the dance.

  There was some of that Germantown wine. There was rag music and jazz music and even honey-bunny music on the victrolas, and they had a fine time of it.

  But why, persons of a cruder era might ask, could they not have had a fine time at the formalized dance downstairs? Oh, such people don't know anything, not anything.

  Mary Anne Michaels became very friendly with Charley Murray. Sedalia Schoefeld became very friendly with Rattigan. Edith O'Dwyer made conversation with Duffey but Lily Koch teased about Duffey really being her boy. Sebastian shot the best pool, but perhaps it wouldn't always be so. It was just that he had shot more of it. Duffey felt the talent for that table rising in him, and Charley Murray said that they would have a pool table put in their house at home for Christmas of that year.

  Oh, the hours went by pleasantly enough. And when their sense of time started to come around (Sebastian had a gold watch, but the cover on it was stuck and wouldn't open, so they didn't know for sure what time it was), they cracked the door of the sound-proof room so they could hear the break-ups and departures.

  When that turmoil had crested but was not quite completed, the eight young persons went down the back stairs and out the back door and then around to their carriage, and piled in it, and were away again. Duffey had the post-horn this time, and he blew it with vigor.

  “Stay with it, Melky,” said Lily who held him on her knees and who was very fond of him. “Enthusiasm beats talent every time. Blow dear, blow.” They went around another dozen blocks with singing and squealing and horn-blowing, and they stopped right across the road from where they had started, in front of the big iron front gate of St. Mary Major's.

  They all kissed in the carriage. Then, when they came through the gate and through the door, they could truthfully say that they had already done it. Their words were accepted and that was good. None of them could have done it under scrutiny.

  It wasn't too fearsome going to dances, if only you could avoid going to the dances, themselves.

  7

  That was only in the first part of the first year. But things got better afterwards till they reached a thousand-tentacled perfection. And there was a lot of educating going on at the school or schools. It was all high quality. It was a great success and a great pleasure. Yes education is, like sex, an ultimate thing, and nobody will ever speak or write the details of it. That would be an uneducated aberration. But education is one of the great and passionate things, and there can hardly he enough of it. There were lots of encounters going on and about the schools, encounters between persons and groups of persons, between persons and events, between persons and surroundings, between persons and memories and premonitions and ideas. There were encounters between different areas of the same person. Duffey even had an encounter with some soupe aux grenouilles in France.

  Melchisedech, once, just before he reached his thirteenth birthday, ate soupe aux grenouilles in France. He had ordered the soup in genuinely throaty and proper French and he had not disgraced himself in any way. This was at Colmar in Alsace. That was not properly in France at that time, and yet it was France. The chances are that he was staying it the Hotel du Champ de Mars at 2, Avenue de la Marna. He ate this soup at the Rotisserie Schillinger. He also ate Tournedos au Poivre Vert. He felt pleasant and worldly about the whole thing.

  That's really all there is to the episode. Two elder persons whom he did not know were approaching him. He didn't know them because they hadn't been in any dipperful that he had dipped out of other minds or other environments. He could have dipped them up fresh at that moment and known them, but he didn't. And, since he accepted the fact that he didn't know these older persons, the scene faded and was gone.

  Duffey, of course, had stolen this scene from the mind and memory of Sebastian Hilton. But it was a valid scene. He could savor every flick of salt in the soupe aux grenouilles. He could see and smell every grain of pepper on the peppercorns. The scene became a part of Duffey. It was an item in the Melchisedech memory forever.

  Melchisedech gave a talisman to Charley Murray, and he gave one to Sebastian.

  “But I will never have a son,” Charley said.

  “Nor I,” Sebastian said. “But there is someone for each of us to give our talisman to, or Duff would not have given them to us. Art-in-life, like art-in-art, must be planned for a long time before it is born. And the most rational way, if one is a magician and a magus, is to give a talisman. I believe that one of these will work, Duffey, and one of them will half work. Murray's will work. But the one I give my talisman for will never be completely your man, or anybody's.”

  Sebastian Hilton met Duffey at dusk one evening outside the main gate of the school. It was the last day but one of their last year in school. The next morning they were to leave. But Sebastian was white and shaking, and his dark eyes had purgatorial gleams. And this was the boy who was not scared of anything, “Melchisedech, they've found their way here,” he said. “They came within a little of killing me. And if they had killed me, there would have been no one to prevent their killing you too. They've gone for double here. The only ones they could be after are myself and yourself. We are their only possible prey, their only authentic targets. I have been absolutely careful. Have you?

  “Have I what, Sebastian?” Duffey asked. But he knew. It was the three slack-mouthed and slanted-faced young men who were here. They were the ones who had haunted Duffey from his early childhood. Had they found this place because Duffey had somehow been careless?

  Duffey saw them
on the roof then. He hadn't seen them before, but he had sensed that they were here. The three saw Duffey, and they fastened their eyes on him and on Sebastian. They were still about two years older and two years larger than Melchisedech was, but likely they didn't age or grow in an ordinary way.

  School friends were climbing up the walls after the menacing three. These friends were going fearlessly up the stippled bricks and castellated window corbels to catch the three slanty youths on the roof and deal with them. They had the schoolboy sense that the three were unmitigated enemies.

  “You know who they are, don't you?” Sebastian asked with the sharp tone that implied that Melchisedech should know, though of course the other boys wouldn't.

  “I suppose so,” Duffey said. But he didn't, not the names for them, not in words. He would never know that. Duffey could have found out from Sebastian at that moment if he had asked. But he was too proud. “It's dangerous for the two of us to be together ever,” Sebastian said. “They can use the two of us as a baseline and triangulate in on us. There are fewer than a hundred of us targets in the world, and two of us in one place will register too strongly on their receptors. We attract them too much, and they'd kill us both. I have been careful, and I know that you have been. But I knew that you were one. And you didn't know that I was. So you have not been as careful as I have. And yet we will be together very much, however dangerous it is. The greater thing should never give in to the lesser.”

  The last of those slant-faces disappeared from the edge of the high roof. The face left an after-image of absolute malevolence and a promise of blood still to be spilled. Half a dozen of the schoolmates were up there on the roof then, and they should have surrounded the slant-faced youths somewhere in the steeps and valleys of the roof. The schoolmates hunted fearlessly. They knew out of their intuitions that the knife-wielding slant-faces could kill only those they were sent to kill.