More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Are they alive now?” I asked.

  “They're green clay now,” the children said. “We get them out of green clay eggs. And they can be breathed into. Whoever heard of breathing anything into a baked clay animal? What's the matter with you anyhow?”

  After that, things happened rapidly, almost as rapidly as they do in the Pristine World.

  “Fly with me to a better place, Widow Waldo!” Zabotski called as he often did.

  “What do you think I'm fixing to do?” she asked. “I suppose we will be ready whenever you are.”

  “Dammit, Zabotski, are you finished with your part yet?” Widow Waldo called.

  “All except bolting the boat whistle onto the boat and getting myself a pair of water goggles.”

  “I'll bolt the whistle on. And I'll get the goggles for you,” the Widow Waldo said.

  There had been a rhapsody of animals the night before Zabotski and the Widow Waldo (she was now Wife Waldo Zabotski, but Zab still called her Widow Waldo), and quite a few of the children, and an amazement (that is the only collective word that will do for it) of animals, left in the giant contraption.

  Green clay animals you say they were? Do green clay animals hoot and bellow like that? But I suppose that all of them were green clay animals up to the time of their hatching: Oh, the rhapsodic noises of many animals, roaring, runting, nikkering, neighing, whinneying, snorting, whickering, trumpeting, blaring, bawling, yowling, barking, growling, yapping, rumbling, bleating, lowing, gibbering, hissing, giggling, yammering, mewing, caterwauling, crunching, gnawing, wheening, oinking, hammering, squealing, tumping, hooting, stomping, baying, bugling, shouting, yodeling, gruffing, snorting, and making a noise ‘chok-chok-chok-kachoom’. There had been a great orchestration of animal noises, and of animal aromas also. But now, in the new daylight, the animals had settled down, except for a few still loading on. The contraption had the air of being animal-full and just about kid-full.

  “We have a list of incredible charges against you, Zabotski,” one of the Orthodoxers was saying as a bunch of them came up to Zab with dangerous faces and dangerous-looking weapons. “It is said that you refuse to accept the Orthodoxer time scale. It is said that you have been in the company of Fundamentalers, and that you have listened to fun being poked at the four greatest names in paleontology.” The man making these serious charges wore a badge that said ‘Darwin or Death’.

  “I'd hardly do that,” Zabotski said. “I'm pretty touchy, and my own name would surely head the list of the four greatest. I don't like fun being poked at me.”

  “It is said that you have substituted false history for the established thing,” another of them attacked. He wore a badge that read ‘Herbert Spencer Forever’. “It is also said that you ‘leave’ this place every now and then by mysterious conveyance, that you take off down the road, and that you just disappear. We would like to see you do that. Take off down the street now if you wish. I bet I can put a rifle bullet into your head before you can do your disappearing trick. If not, nothing much lost. If you come back again, we'll grab you again. “

  “Mr. Zabotski,” said a reasoning member of the Vigilante Orthodoxers, “you don't really believe that the Orthodoxer account of origins is rot, do you? You are reported as saying that it is.”

  “Sure it is,” Zabotski still maintained. “Almost everything about the Orthodoxers is rot. They average out lower than the Fundamentalers.”

  “You fink, you Fortean, you Fundamentaler,” barked one of those guardians of pure science. He wore a badge that said “Huxley the Bulldog forever!” “Start walking! Yah, walk about three steps and we'll start shooting.”

  Zabotski started walking, but he threw darkness or clouds upon the Orthodoxers so that they couldn't see him or anything else for a little while. He went to his giant contraption and climbed to the top of it.

  “Zabotski, you fool, there won't be a flood like the original flood,” I, Melchisedech called up to him. I was in a mixture of frustration and laughter at him.

  “Melchisedech, you fool, this will be the original flood,” Zabotski called down. “The others were only for practice. And those big structures on Ararat are all discarded models. Mine is the thing itself. This is the original. Don't you know that legends always precede the real happenings?”

  “There's a cloudburst on the way,” Bandicoot Blackstone hollered at us as he stuck his head out of his door. “Wow! What am I saying. It's not on the way. It's here! Look at that rain! Did you ever see it start so fast and so hard. All person in designated lower areas are supposed to go to higher ground. This is a designated lower area. Where's Zabotski going, Melchisedech?”

  “Oh, he's going away for a couple of thousand years this time.”

  “That means that he might not be back for a couple of months.”

  “What happens if the water does rise and carry you away in your contraption?” I, Melchisedech called up to Zabotski.

  “I'll float, that's what will happen,” Zab called down through the downpour. “It sure is good to know that you'll float.”

  Zabotski pulled the water goggles down over his eyes, and he jerked on the boat whistle chain to sound the hooter. The Widow Waldo and the boatful of children and animals cheered. The contraption was afloat and into the swift stream.

  “Zabotski, you fool, it'll never go under the Shoal Street Viaduct,” I cried to him suddenly. “It's too big to go under it.”

  “Under or over it, or through it we'll go,” Zabotski yowled, and he hooted the boat whistle again. “We can travel on water or air or space.”

  Zabotski came to his lot on Lake Borgne, and he is still afloat there, drifting on a little kedge anchor. He says he'll be ready when the real flood is ready, and that he and his are unsinkable. I wish that I, Melchisedech were unsinkable. These sure are rainy days for all this week now, since he floated out of here.

  (Editor's Note: That is the end of the ‘myth of origin’ part of the account of the fantastic Zabotski house. And that is the end of Melchisedech Duffey as far as H and H H Magazine is concerned. That is the end of the ‘shaggy people tale’. In an upcoming issue we will have a clear description of this interesting and charming and unsinkable and gigantic house on the coast of Lake Borgne where it opens into the Gulf of Mexico. We will have an account of the very many odd children and the many horribly strange animals that are there, and of the great size and flabbergasting design of the grotesque structure. We will have an account of the architecture that is at the same time primordial and futuristic. We will have an account of that incredible but gracious couple, Zabotski and Wife Waldo. We will have this if the rains let up a little bit and the barges can bring in paper again.)

  “How many of the children are coming along?” Zabotski asked.

  “As many as want to come, I suppose,” the Widow said. There was still a lot of beauty in her even though it was several decades since she had been Miss America.

  There was news that nineteen unarmed Fundamentalers had been killed in a shootout with Orthodoxer police. Such things were happening all the time.

  “How is your father, Bandicoot?” Zabotski asked the president of the Bandicoot Enterprises Limited.

  “Oh, he's dying,” Bandicoot said. “He won't last the day. But he's had a long and full life. I always liked that fellow.”

  “Who has taken over his businesses?” Zabotski asked.

  “I will remain as chairman of the various boards,” Bandicoot said, “but my son John, as ‘First Executive’ will be pretty much running the shows.”

  “Five days, that's really all he lasted,” Zabotski mumbled in wonder.

  “Some of the green clay animals that the children are carrying into your contraption are pretty misshapen, Zabotski,” I, Melchisedech said to him.

  “Some of the animals presently in Molasses World are pretty misshapen too, Duffey,” he said, “as if they were made by kids. They are at least as bad as these that are going into my contraption. These will do well enough.”<
br />
  “Is it true that you have bought a lake frontage on Pristine Cove on Lake Borgne?” a newspaper reporter asked Zabotski.

  “True enough,” Zabotski said. “I got in on a ‘First Introductory’ offer that was only tendered to outstanding citizens. It cost a little more than I was led to believe though.”

  “And is it true that the mysterious giant contraption that you are building in your back yard is intended to be your palatial home on the lake?” the reporter asked further.

  “How would I ever get it there?” Zabotski wondered.

  “Is it true that you complained to the City Commission that it floods so badly here that a good rain would wash an ocean-going ship right down the channel in front of your house, the channel that is humorously called Dumaine Street?”

  “That sounds about like something I might have said,” Zabotski admitted. “The river is getting higher all the time, or the land lower. And it does rain more, in these last years, and months, and weeks, and days particularly.”

  “Well, will it do it?” the reporter persisted. “Will a good rain (there's a gusher supposed to be on the way) float your giant contraption and carry it all the way to Lake Borgne?”

  “With a good rain, that's possible,” Zabotski said. “And Lake Borgne is an open-mouthed lake. It goes right into the Gulf. But just where is the line of questioning leading?”

  Book Ten

  You, Melchisedech, replevin.

  Be you either lump or leaven.

  Choose a road from one to seven.

  Melchisedech, Ukalegon.

  [Cleo Mahoney. Seven Roads.]

  Duffey had visited Zabotski and his wife Waldo several times in their great, floating boat palace (The Big Red Barn on Pristine Cove, as their watery neighbors called it.) After all, it was less than a dozen miles away from Duffey. But Duffey knew that he would not have time to build such a castled boat himself, nor should he share that great contraption on Pristine Cove with Zabotski and wife Waldo. They were already sharing it with very many children and animals. One patriarch to a castle was enough.

  But it was consoling to know that a boatful of children would live into the imminent future, whether the rest of the world lived into it or not. Besides, Duffey already knew how he would die, and it wasn't by drowning.

  Was the world really coming to its end? Probably it wasn't yet, but for Melchisedech Duffey it was. Duffey had already seen the end of time for himself. The symbol of it had been the seven-arrowed sign put there to dry by the girls from Ursuline Academy. But he wouldn't have needed the symbol to know that his ending was at hand. His ending, but he would not have any end. Scripture states so.

  Well, he had seen the barrier blocking him off from a valid future in this world, and he had backed off from it. He could go into the future only on another trick, in the context of the Seven Lost Years. He could not go into the future on the normal track. And the seven alternate futures that were offered him. Dammit, there was something suspect about every one of them.

  “Is there anything at all I can do about this?” Duffey asked himself. “Of course there is. I can worry about it. That's what one is supposed to do with problems.”

  And it happened that others were worrying about Melchisedech Duffey's problem also.

  “Melchisedech has come to the end of his stick. This probably will not be his death. He has already seen his own ashes as memento of it. This may be that much worse thing, his disintegration. And if he loses his integrity, what boots him other things? He seems to be coming apart, to be unraveling into several strands. But Melchisedech is the man who does not have an ending. That must be meant of him in a special case, since none of us really ends, which is to say that we are all immortal in soul. But Melchisedech is splitting and flaking off. He can not go down seven simultaneous roads without that. The riddle of the seven futures may be too much for him. If he were younger, he could take them all in succession, one by one. But now I think he's stuck. I'd help him and advise him if I knew how. Otherwise, all I can do is pray for him.

  “What is this about Melchisedech being of a very great age, about all of us in our group being of a very great age. Some days, I believe that. Today I don't.

  “Melchisedech Duffey is not the Melchisedech, though sometimes he believes that he is, and sometimes he lives and remembers episodes out of the life of the real Melchisedech. I believe that the case of it is that Melchisedech Duffey is merely in unusual accord with his patron saint Melchisedech the King of Salem, and so he shares some of the memories and experiences of that old king.

  “Such is the case as I believe it today. But on many other days I believe that Melchisedech Duffey is indeed Melchisedech the King of Salem. “The Devil-Released-From-Prison, who has made something of a stir in esoteric circles for these last several decades, is not the Devil himself. He is only one of the minor devils, a goof devil. I believe that he is a sort of decoy. It will seem, by those who mistake this decoy for the Royal Black Duck, that this vile lout is a parrot-brained inanity and is no real danger. And then the Devil Himself, put out of notice and out of mind, pursues his murderous and quiet work in all its clandestine horror.

  “Such is the case of it as I believe it today. But on many other days I believe that the Devil-Released-From-Prison is the Devil Himself, that the great danger from him lies in his sinister silliness and his incomparable oafishness, in the strongest of all finite powers running amok in resolute madness and dedicated destruction.

  [Absalom Stein. Notes in a Motley Notebook.]

  “Duffey has gone to the very edge of time, for him, and then he his somehow drawn back. But we are in the same time-context with him. Though this is not necessarily the edge of time for the rest of us, yet we continue in the same time-fabric with Melchisedech Duffey. Has he unwittingly drawn us back from the edge with himself? This last year or so does seem very familiar to me, as though I had been through it several times before. Salvation Sally says that she has the same feeling about it.”

  [Margaret Stone. Lines Written in Margin of Perrone's Praelectiones Theologicae.]

  “I have this fancy that Melchisedech Duffey is of an older recension than the ‘current human’. There is not any authority Scripture or Revelations for the idea that God made many false starts in his creation. But there are legends about it. There are legends of the nine discarded worlds that God made before he made this world, the tenth. He discarded the nine because of their unacceptable defects. How they must have been when this world is the one finally accepted!

  “But who says that it is? It may likewise be discarded, and an eleventh or twelfth or thirteenth world may still follow it.

  “The nine discarded worlds are still animate and populated. What anthologies of errors and busts, or outright errors and of less-than-perfections they must be! What paradoxes they must contain that will not quite jibe, what giant ideas and titanic jokes, what brilliant conceptions that failed their promises!

  “Sometimes people from one of the nine worlds blunder into this world. There is always a monsterness about these people. They may be overflowing with flawed genius. I believe that one of these persons who has blundered into this world is Melchisedech Duffey. Sure he was a Boy King and a Boy Magician, but in another world, not in this one. Sure he is without father or mother. They didn't use them on his world. Sure he is without end. The continuity there was a circle, returning, returning, and never ending at all.

  “Melchisedech, Melchisedech, what discarded zoo-world have you come from? You do know that the Melchisedech paradox is now on collision course with this world, don't you? Who will pick up your pieces? You will be shattered into pieces, you know. Who will log all your voyages? You will voyage on the seven different winds, you know. If you weren't so damned indomitable about it all, one could almost feel sorry for you.”

  [Mary Virginia Schaeffer. Lines in Her Duffey Book.]

  2

  There are so many ghosts in that part of New Orleans that they have their own coffee shop, a plac
e that is open for just an hour before dawn and an hour after. The ghosts come there to swap ghost anecdotes and also to try to purge themselves from the absolute horror of their trade. They do this by talking out those horrors with their fellow spirits.

  You can see them slipping along in the very early morning, down Ste. Ann Street and Dumaine Street and St. Philip Street and Ursulines Avenue, up along Decatur Street where the French Market will not serve ghosts, up Chartres and Bourbon, out of Frenchman Street and Elysian Field Avenue, ghosts who have just finished their night's haunting.

  In the Ghost Bar there is a large painting, done by Count Finnegan (did he paint it before or after he became a ghost?) showing, well the plain ghostliness of these customers. This is done in ghost violets and ghost grays, and it is really a convincing and moving picture.

  That is a lie. All of it is a lie except the part about the Count Finnegan picture of the gathering ghosts. It really does hang in the ghost bar. Let the truth about that place now be told:

  In New Orleans there was a little coffee shop that was run by a man named Anthony Ghost whose father had come over from the Netherlands. This establishment was called ‘The Ghost Coffee Shop’. Dock workers and seamen used to come in here in the morning, people out of the Quarter, people just wandering around, night people who were very like ghosts. School kids also used to come in there on their way to school. Some of the day students at Ursuline Academy used to go to early mass at the Cathedral instead of at their own chapel, and then come into the Ghost Coffee Shop for breakfast.