More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “An anachronism, that's what you are, Duffey,” Dotty said.

  The brown box contained index cards scribbled full of information. Most of the cards had been filled up by Duffey himself. Others of them had been filled in by other persons, including X.

  “It is information on the plotters, on the infiltrates,” X said.

  “I know what it is,” Duffey told him, “but I'm not as interested in it as I once was.”

  “Then get interested in it once more,” X lectured him. “It was a sort of game before. Now it becomes serious. It is in only a sketchy manner that you know what it is, even though you made many of the notes. This is the hard information on the diabolists who infiltrate the People and the State and the Church You will notice one new card of fluorescent or phosphorescent or diabolical orange-red that was not in the file while you had it. And you will notice that this card, while apparently three times the other cards in all dimensions, yet fits in neatly with the others in this small box. It is an illusion that was more than optical.”

  “I understand the illusion. I could probably do it myself,” Duffey said. “But why add such a card at this time?”

  “Because he is loose and working at this time. If the Lady Letitia will pour coffee for me and brandy for the rest of you, I will tell you about the recent release of this person or entity. I was an eyewitness.”

  “I have heard of several hundred eyewitnesses to it, and they do not agree,” Absalom Stein said.

  “That's possible,” X agreed. “There were quite several hundred persons present at the release, and not one of them was the sort of person who would keep quiet about things. As to the accounts not agreeing, well it was mostly a disagreeable business. Did you field that one, Miss Dotty? It was in the nature of a joke.”

  “It was a lovely joke, X, and you are a lovely person,” Dotty said. “Tell us about the great moment when history was unmade and the Devil was released from his prison.”

  So X quickly went into his account of the incident.

  “The peninsula with its oblast was known to the Greeks as the Tauric Chersonese and to the Romans as the Euxine Chersonese. The Goths called it simply Cherson. At the time of the imprisonment, the peninsula was owned partly by the Kingdom of Kiev and partly by the Principality of Tmutarakan, an advance host of the Khanate of the Golden Horde. So the Prisoner, though brought from Aachen by Christians, was delivered first to Mohammedans on the peninsula, and was then given over to Devil worshipper allies for the actual prisoning. This was in the year 946 or 947. The Devil always had a small group of Devil worshippers as his guards. The peninsula is called Krym by the Russians and Crimea by ourselves. But it was also known as The Prison (Phylake, Carcer) for more than a thousand years before the actual imprisonment.

  “The Crimean Mountains rise to an altitude of over a thousand feet near the south coast of the peninsula, and the prison itself was dug down a thousand feet below sea level and below the roots of the mountains.

  “Notables had been coming to the vicinity for several years, to check on the time of the release and to consult with the imprisoned Devil. The Yalta Conference was based on such daily, in fact hourly, consultations with the Devil by all the principals of the conference. Very much was promised at that conference. It might seem to a disinterested observer, of whom there can be none, that all the promises were very one-sided. They were pledged to further the Devil's work if only the Devil would come out of his prison after his release was obtained.

  “In the imprisonment bit, the Devil, an evil king, was playing a part mostly played by good kings or leaders, the part of the imprisoned or enchanted or trance-sleeping leader. Barbarossa, Alaric, Brian Boru, The Cid, Arthur, all sleep in enchantment or imprisonment somewhere, with their loyal subjects waiting and hoping for their awakening or release. But the Devil, they say, did not sleep very much during his imprisonment.

  “This past spring was not a pleasant one on the Crimea, as it attempted to return to being a pleasure resort after the war years. It was chilly right up to that fateful last Saturday of May, and yet there was a flocking of notables there such as has not been seen for many lifetimes. They all just wanted to go to the Crimea to enjoy the beaches, now that peace had returned, they said. People with futures were there. They obtained and confirmed their futures by being there. Here were the architects of all the new realms. They came to adore, and to receive their patents in the nobility. There were disproportionate numbers of Catholic Cardinals and lesser Clergy among them. There were disproportionate large numbers of leaders of Jewry. And the Liberal Consensus was especially well represented, and most overly represented of all was the floating world of the intelligentsia, or the cognoscenti, or the gnostics. There were many of the venerable and long-lasting advisors to premiers and presidents and prime ministers and kings. They had waited so long to see their real King! Now the older of them would be able to look on him and expire.

  “Representatives of all the decadent and goatish arts were there. Decadence would be in now, and centrality (except for the dark centrality) would be out. And there would be deformed counterparts of every one of the bright arts.

  “Only one thousand persons had permits to be present, and my own permit was number nine hundred and eighty-two. I have masqueraded as many different men, and my permit was made out to one of my old masquerade persons. It was only because of the large complement of fraud that has always been in me that I could be there undetected.

  “The Devil came out, and I knew him. I had seen him before and talked to him. But I hadn't talked to him, apparently, in his real flesh that was imprisoned there, but in a sort of effigy flesh. This brings us to the question: What will the Devil be able to do in his real flesh that he was not able to do in his effigy flesh? The next few decades may devote themselves to answering this question.

  “He came out. He was of a puzzling size. One moment he seemed giant-sized and the next moment he was merely man-sized. Several of the Cardinals prostrated themselves and adored him. They sang ‘Te Satanum’.

  “The Devil was misshapen. By that he may always be known. It is hard to describe, but everything about him was out of proportion. He is the enemy of proportion and shape. He is slant-faced and everywhere slanted.

  “The Devil signed out in the release book. The Devil cannot write in script. He prints in deformed and scatter-set characters: one letter large, one small, one up, one down, one in one color, one in another. Whenever you see proclamations or posters or models for the young to draw by in such deformed letters and words, you will know that they are really in the hand of the Devil.

  “People began to speak in squalid tongues, in a reverse pentecostalism. The Devil stretched and scratched. His servitors began to rub balm on his shackle-sores.

  “He spoke about his plans. He said that he would hold about ten thousand meetings a year with select groups, and that every one of the meetings would be a key meeting of utmost importance. He would preach and teach defamation. He would preach the scenic and crooked way. Of all things that stand, he would say, ‘Pull them down!’. Of all things alive, he would say, ‘Kill them!’.

  “I have the names of all one thousand persons who were present at the release of the Devil. There are a few more of their names than that in the cross-index, as many of the devious persons travel under a variety of names. I will have this most secret list and index brought here if you will publish it in The Bark.”

  “I don't know,” said Melchisedech Duffey.

  “No. I'm sorry, X, but we will not publish it,” said Dotty Yekouris.

  Ah, but during the next several days, they did have a good time playing “Who was There?” Some of X's attested names and answers would dumbfound you. X stayed with them for four days that first time. Then, like morning dew, he was gone.

  4

  But X had been correct in one of his sayings. There did appear the deformed counterparts of every one of the bright arts. Almost at once, they came flying on bat wings out of the old pit tha
t had been closed all during the prisoning of the Devil. Duffey, in his New Orleans time stasis, felt some things as immediate happenings that were, to others, spread out over a decade or more. And yet, even to an objective observer, many of the appearances came overnight, or out of the night. It was no good saying that there had always been such deforming counterparts, such a trashing of the arts. Yes, there had been, but there hadn't been such a massiveness about it before. This wasn't bad art done by accident. It was putrid art done on purpose.

  Besides the major arts of painting and sculpture and drama and literature-and-letters and classic jazz and long hair music and architecture, there was the massive trashing of every one of the lively arts of daily and nightly life. The style went out of them, the class was gone. Consider only such popular arts as: string bands, horn bands, flute bands, bicycle riding, soap-box spieling, country and ballad music, rag, Dixieland, barbershop quartette singing, opera, operetta, burlesque, little theatre, road show theatre, repertoire theatre, musical comedy, night club comedy, dirt track racing, horse racing, harness racing, radio listening, radio building, frogging, fly fishing, live bait fishing, shrimping, crabbing, oystering, deep sea fishing, wine making, possum hunting, beer making, automobile making and styling, baseball, boxing, sail boating, coffee making, journalistic reporting, two-reel comedy making, foreign travel, bird-dogging, bread baking, tramp steaming, civil litigation, romantic courtship, restaurant dining, home dining, train travel, carnivals, circuses, county fairs, pub-crawling, bridge building, poker playing, highway construction, rodeo riding, football, six-man football, softball, pecan raising, cattle breeding, deer hunting, coon hunting, concert singing, park strolling, hay riding, kite flying, hoe-down dancing, cotillion dancing, quarter-horse breeding, handicrafting, hell-fire retreats, political cartooning, domino playing, comic strip drawing, widow wooing, organ grinding, horseback riding, airplane piloting, auctioneering, parish bazaaring, editorial writing, sharivaries, play-going, small talk, big talk, honey tree raiding, wolf hunting, picnicking, telescope making and lens grinding, political debating, flower growing, rabbit raising, sauerkraut making, sports page writing, lecturing, newspaper columning, monocycle riding, soda fountaining, juggling, sermon preaching, tent shows, verse writing, verse reciting, park rides, raft racing, wild onion hunting, neighborhood barbecue dinners, sauntering, science fiction, masquerade partying, the everyday art of wearing clothes (and allied, minor arts, such as wearing spats), letter writing, visiting, dead waking, rink skating, rifle shooting, duck hunting, street dancing, electioneering, corn-dog making, flap-jacking. Anyone can list a hundred such minor arts. But some of them were endangered even then.

  Many of these minor arts actually disappeared, or ceased to be arts, in those days. And all of them were trashed. They lost class, they lost style. And how had this come about?

  “An enemy has done this.”

  “Forget the Siege Mentality” was the title of a leading article by a ‘Leading Theologian’ in a diocese paper, an article that was widely reprinted in other diocese papers. On seeing the name on the article, it was the second time that Duffey had come onto the name of this ‘Leading Theologian’. It seemed a curious title, and a curious attitude to take, right at the beginning of the siege itself. It had all the planned dishonesty of an ‘all clear’ call when sudden danger had just made appearance.

  Duffey reviewed all the theology writing for The Bark, and at the drop of an indult he could have named the hundred leading theologians, but this one wouldn't belong to the hundred. The first time that he had encountered that name was on a list of the one thousand persons who had been present for the release of the Devil near Yalta on the Crimea. Yes, Duffey had seen the list and the index, during the third visitation of X, and he had most of it by heart. He was even able to enter into the minds of many of those on the list, and to prowl in those minds with his old power.

  “Ah, what bat wings are coming out of that cavery!” Duffey moaned. “The Company of One Thousand came there only out of sordidness and mean-mindedness, and a greed for success, and with a passion for the sight of their own father. And they came away from it with  —  ah, it's as if they had been created a-old by the Devil there. Did he use instant talismans for his creations? I can feel a cheap-jack trickery, a cheap-shot artistry running through it all. They have trashed the things, they have trashed the world, they have trashed the people.

  “Oh how they have trashed dirt track racing and boxing, and pub crawling and soda fountaining, and train travel and comic strip drawing and juggling and duck hunting! How they have trashed Dixieland and burlesque and kite flying. How they have trashed wild onion hunting and night club comedy. Of the minor arts, they have left hardly a joy upon a joy!”

  Book Seven

  ‘And even Levi, the receiver of the tithes, was also, so to speak, through Abraham made subject to tithes, for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchisedech met him.’

  [Hebrews 7:9-10]

  In New Orleans, the season and feel of later summer prevailed for the greater part of the year. Melchisedech Duffey was in a late summer state of mind around the calendar and year after year. Things seemed to be going well. There were all sorts of prospects for large and heavy harvests. The nightmare that they might prove to be poisonous harvests was kept in a secure stockade where all nightmares are supposed to be kept, And, really, there was a sharp and exciting taste to poisonous fruit and grain when it comes in less than critical quantities.

  For Melchisedech Duffey, in those noontime years of his life, there were delights by the acre. He was in the enduring middle of his golden age. He was bound before God to be joyous (all members of the Argo were so bound: that was in the ship's articles). His was a life sanguine, a life besieged, a life militant, and there were drops and gollups of joy all along the blade of it. It was a stasis-present and a kinesis-present, double-time, anomalous years at their best. There were assassins around every corner, but they killed not yet. It was all one delectable noontime of a highlighted late summer.

  A large part (about a hundred and thirty-seven percent of it by measure) of Duffey's delectable noontime was made out of spacious and carnal adventures with Letitia. If there had ever been any misunderstanding between these two, there was none now. Melchisedech and Letitia fit together like the continents of Old Pangaea, which they both now remembered more and more clearly. There was no cloud at all in their sky, but how they did generate lightning out of that blue! It was a world beleaguered by the most insane leaguerers ever, but those things couldn't get you as long as the perpetual light shined upon you.

  “It is wonderful to be alive in such a bright noontime as this!” Duffey cried out one couple-of-hours-after-midnight between choruses on his recorder flute. “By the great Sun-Drake, it would be wonderful even to be dead in such a bright noontime!”

  “Be you alive or be you dead/Come find a rime for me with bed,” said the Letitia. “Nah, man, nah, I'm not insatiable. Just greedy.” It was more than just coincidence that these two happiest people should have lived in that continuing happiest time ever.

  Oh well, suppose that the world was crumbling between their feet, and the great arts of sidewalk and pavement repair had been trashed. There was underground sunshine in New Orleans even at midnight, and it burst up through every hole that was made in the paved world, burst up like exploding flowers. These were hot, red and yellow and purple flowers named Philos and Eros and Agape. Hot purple Agape, that was the real theme flower for that one-hundred-and-twenty month long, late summertime.

  That chubby girl Letitia had long since been transfigured into a person of proto-legendary beauty.

  “You are even more beautiful than your daughters.” And how is that possible a person had admired her. “Yes, and younger too.”

  That person had thought that Letitia was the mother of Dotty and Mary Virginia and Margaret Stone. How could anybody be more beautiful than they? Come around and Letitia will show you how.

  Letitia kissed
lots of people, folks who came into the Walk-In Art Bijou and the bookstore and the pawn shop, people who came into the press room or the institute or the soup kitchen. She greeted all persons with open arms. She kissed Zabotski on his big nose and Stein on his pearly ears. But the thousand other people she kissed on their mouths and made their day for them. People lit up like candles when they heard her voice.

  “Can we come in?” people often asked at their door.

  “Of course you can come in,” Letitia would say.

  “Is this some kind of show?” they'd ask. “We didn't see any signs, but we had a feeling of anticipation when we went by here, like there was some kind of show or entertainment going on.”

  “Come in and see,” Letitia would say. “We will try to have an entertainment show, an enjoyment.”

  Beyond themselves, and the Lord who made them, and the world He had given to them for their house, everything else was bonus for Melchisedech and Letitia. The hot and happy person named Margaret Stone was one such bonus, as she was to everyone who was touched by her life. This Margaret was all ethnics in one, and she was a dago type even beyond the urchinness of Teresa Piccone of the Stranahans (they were the closest of friends, and one of these years they might even meet). You could call Margaret a Street Arab, and she was that too. Ishmael himself was her Lebanese uncle. And she was blood cousin of Absalom Stein (“Oh that damned Jew! Can't he do anything right?” she would sometimes rail at his doings), and she was a niece of that dealer in distressed merchandise in Chicago, Askandanakandrian, the ancient and comic Armenian. She was also a Galilean and a close kinswoman of Jesus Christ. She was a midnight street preacher. She was the one person in the world who made the big difference during the difficult years.