More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  To this case also we will return with much more massive information.

  “Six.” This is the confrontation of Melchisedech with the Loosed Devil in a closed place. There are instructions given before the confrontation. ‘You stand for Mankind in this meeting,’ someone tells Melchisedech as he goes to the doom place. ‘I will just be damned if I stand for Mankind, here or anywhere,’ Melchisedech swore. He never knew whether these unbodied voices were those of friend or enemy.

  This was a duel that shook the whole spider web in which the suns are caught, the web that is called the cosmos. Or else it was not that at all. It was a fancy that Melchisedech might or might not accept in its possibilities.

  A covenant is offered there, but there are holes in that covenant. But what if Melchisedech accepts the covenant, and then lies and tells Mankind that he did not do it?

  “Seven.” This is a wordless repartee between Melchisedech Duffey and the invisible God in a garden in the afternoon. Everything is promised, and a solution to all problems. The only thing that could go wrong is so minor a thing that it would have to be sought out in stubbornness and confusion. And even if found and effected, the thing that could go wrong would not mean final disaster; not to everyone, maybe only to the one at whose hand it should go wrong would it mean disaster. But that person was Melchisedech Duffey. At the very least it would mean a reversion to a beginning for that misbehaving person. This seventh contingency would nullify some, but maybe not all of the others.

  It wasn't clear whether Melchisedech had any power to choose between these cases. Anyhow, there wasn't any hurry about making the choices. Outside of Time, there can be anxiousness, and anxiety, and even hysteria, but there cannot be hurry for that is tied to time. Melchisedech, hardly noticing it, had moved out of time and into moment. He had done this when he had come onto the sign that the girls had printed to advertise their play. And who else of the Duffey circle was it who was living in moment?

  Yes, Duffey still got a weekly letter from his brother Bascom Bagby. He didn't, in his fractured state, receive clear communications from anyone else. But the Bagby correspondence was long-standing; it was outside of time; it was allowed.

  “My dear brother,” Bagby wrote. “Do not be alarmed over your present situation. You were in a somewhat similar situation during your ‘Seven Lost Years’. You aren't dead. The people around you do not even notice your acting much different from your usual. You are skitting. You are in an adolescence. For some reason, you skipped adolescence in all your previous courses, going from long childhood to early manhood. Yes, there are often awkward and spooky accompaniments to an adolescence. There is psychic dislocation, and there is the familiarity of neutral creatures (‘neutral spirits’ we call them here; that's a sort of purgatorial joke). As a prodigious and special person, you attract them massively.

  “Seven maids willing to marry you? The most I ever had at one time was five, but I was a slob. It shows that you are in a greening cycle, old patriarch.

  “You are a fetish mark, like a crack in the sidewalk or a post by the road. This is a fetish that the fates and principalities step on or do not step on, touch or do not touch; since they set great store in this, and perhaps they determine a course by whether they have touched you or not. There is nothing lowly about being such a fetish. Even the grand ones cannot ignore you.”

  There was more. There was always more to Bagby's letters. And Duffey would have been lost without them.

  Melchisedech met the Loosed Devil in a closed place. This, then, was at least the ante-room of the Sixth Contingency of the World that Melchisedech had entered. Would it prevent him from entering some of the other contingencies. No it wouldn't, not unless Melchisedech Duffey entered into covenant with this person.

  “There are certain things that my client is always in need of,” the Devil said. “He must always have a Magus or so on hand. At the moment he is very low on them. The last several of them were vaporized, soul and body. There was overreaction somewhere. I have heard that you are not the nervous type, and that you are a top Magus.”

  “I didn't know that we were rated, Clootie,” Melchisedech said. “Yes, I am a Magus. I do magic. Having known several who worked for you, I can say that I am better at the trade than they are. But no two of us plow the same field, and no one can say who is top.”

  “Come work for my client, and you can wear diamonds,” the Devil said in the corniest of the very old lines.

  “I already wear diamonds,” Melchisedech said, “Finnegan diamonds. Finnegan, wherever he is, is still in the diamond distributing business with the Haussa boy named Joseph. All Finnegan's friends wear diamonds. Do all of yours?”

  “This Finnegan has reaped where he has not sown,” the Devil said. “He is in deep debt to my client, and he will not come out of that house till all is paid. My client needs a Magus for certain creative work. It isn't that my client cannot himself create, but  — ”

  “It is that you yourself cannot create, Clootie,” Melchisedech said. “You can poison the springs and roil the land, but you cannot create.”

  “The creative fecundity is always at hand,” this Devil said. “It didn't originate with my client, and it didn't originate with any magus. But sometimes, to awaken a thing to a desired shape or inclination, we must bring to bear an influence or a secondary intervention.”

  “Nah, Clootie, nah, that's not the way I do it,” Melchisedech said. “A cheap-shot magus may work by secondary intervention, but I do not. I actually create.”

  The Devil's eyes brightened when he heard this, and he rubbed his hands together. “That is what we want,” he said. “We've always been hampered in the field of primary creation. Now you will work for me with your full magus powers. I said that you will work for me. I tell you: I do not ask you. You have no idea what mortgage I hold on you. I'm a canny fellow in all this, and I hold iron-studded mortgages on you, soul and body. And I'll not remit anything to you for coming over to me. I have it on your own word that you are a primary creator, so you will create for me. I compel you to — ”

  “Nah, Clootie, nah,” said Melchisedech. “You'll not compel me.” Melchisedech had scored a few shots. As to the question whether this was a minor devil of the Devil himself His Majesty, the fellow was using a tactic of speaking of his ‘client’ as if he himself were a mere agent or underling working for another. But then he would (Duffey could see it coming, what ham!) reveal that he himself was the client, the high Majesty. He would do this by a great pyrotechnic display that would be overpowering even if not convincing. But Duffey, by calling the fellow ‘Clootie’ (one might call a minor devil that, but not Himself His Majesty) had kept him a little off balance.

  It wasn't settled. It's still going on. These out-of-time confrontations still continue while other things are going on also.

  “But the devil or Devil is way ahead on points,” Melchisedech deplored it in his own place while he was being outhandled by the devil on the devil's home field. “Why am I responsible? Oh, I suppose that I'm ‘charge of quarters’ for the world this day, and the highest ranking non-com about. It might be that we could reverse the trend oil the devils, if only —

  “ — if only I could shape up another dozen of — and, with both the world and myself in a fractured state, it might be possible — well, since I have over-run the cutting edge and stand out of context, maybe I could — the old bunch does all it can — but there should be more for me to do than to wait for plaudits.

  “If I could locate a fecund working area, and not be distracted by either threats or pleasures, I might be able to make — ”

  “To what extent are a potters’ dozen of us the Marvelous Animations of Melchisedech Duffey?

  “To no extent at all. It is more likely that Duffey is an animation of ours. His undistinguished clay hulk was first known to Casey Szymanski and Hugo Stone (who was possibly myself) in Chicago, and to Mary Catherine Carruthers and to Margaret Stone in Chicago also.
And before that, the clay hulk was known to those magicians Sebastian Hilton and Lily Koch. We all worked on Duffey, to see whether we could not shape him into something worthwhile. It was a sort of a game. So also did Giulio Solli, the Monster Forgotten, the Father of Finnegan, work on the Duffey. So did Finnegan himself, and Henri and Vincent, when they joined our acquaintance during the war. So did Mary Virginia Schaeffer and Dotty Yekouris and Showboat Piccone, though some of them had not yet seen Melchisedech Duffey. We made him what he is today, a moth-eaten magus who believes that he made us, and whom we love, for all his unlovely qualities.

  “Such is my belief today, that he proceeds from us and not we from him. But there are other days when I believe irrationally that this Melchisedech was our maker, that he evoked our clay and awoke us to live, or to new life.”

  [Absalom Stein. Notes in a Motley Notebook.]

  “Where are you going, dear?” Mary Virginia Schaeffer asked Duffey in a worried voice one day. “You are so nutty lately that I wonder if you should be wandering around without a keeper.”

  “I'm just going for one of my afternoon walks,” Melchisedech said.

  “But for you, they are doomsday walks, Duffey,” she said. “From one of them you won't come back.”

  “In that case, have a double care of things, Mary Virginia. Brood the world like the wonderful hen you are.”

  “That man really is a magus,” Mary Virginia said wonderingly when he had left, as if she had just realized it for the first time.

  “The Duff, he is a magus strange.

  Hi! Ho!

  The Duff he is a magus strange,

  A holy magus with the mange!

  Hi! Ho! The gollie wol!”

  That was Margaret Stone who sang that. They should not teach the Gadarene Swine Song to irresponsible persons.

  It was not on that afternoon walk though that Duffey walked over the edge. It was in a walk the next morning that Duffey stepped into a pothole and nearly fell, and then found himself in a somewhat changed world.

  Book Eleven

  “You, Melchisedech the brambled,

  Deeply weathered, widely rambled,

  Find the World Completely scrambled.”

  [Margaret Stone. Tablets of Stone.)

  “In our own Philosophical language we may put the question thus: How did the real become phenomenal, and how can the phenomenal become real again… Or, to put it in more familiar language, how was this world created, and how can it be uncreated again?!

  [P.D. Ouspensky. Tertium Organus.]

  So Clio scribes in manner blurred,

  To sound of crackish gong:

  She writes it down in every word,

  And every word is wrong.”

  [Finnegan. Road Songs.]

  What was different about the City all of the sudden?

  The city had been, for some time now, different from any other place in the world. It was different for its hanging onto a certain stubborn and malodorous remnant. And the most stubborn and most malodorous part of that remnant was Zabotski.

  Zabotski had once been a chemist, a smelly man in a smelly trade. He had retired from being a regular chemist now, and he had retired from a dozen trades, but he remained a smelly man. And there was something peculiar about this. He wasn't smelly to the nose. He was smelly to the eye.

  Zabotski was probably rich. He owned a lot of property around town. He wasn't an unreasonable landlord. He carried more people that did those who bad-mouthed him. But he had an abrasive tongue, and he could outshout even Melchisedech Duffey in a shouting match. And he was in no way elegant. Likely the only one who loved him, beyond the Christian requirement, was the Widow Waldo. Or was she Wife Waldo by now?

  On this particular morning he was mumbling to himself, but when Zabotski mumbled he could be heard for half a block:

  “There's a peculiar little episode hanging over our town. It's like a misshapen cloud, and it's been raining improper stuff on us for the last several hours of the night. It's hovering like a big buzzard, like a fancy-Dan buzzard with three peacock tail feathers tied on it. I think this dirty-bird episode will be a puzzler, and I may add to the puzzle. I'm going to claim that I have a main hand in it, just out of orneriness.”

  Zabotski sometimes waited around and offered his arm and his protection to Margaret Stone when she had finished her nightly giving of testimony in the Quarter. He liked to walk her back to the Pelican Press Building with a flourish.

  Protection for Margaret Stone! Aw, come down from that perch! It was rather the town and the world that needed protection from Margaret.

  “He's about the last of them,” the people would sometimes say about Zabotski, and they'd shake their heads. The last of what? Ah, to answer that we must go on a spree of destruction that changed the face of the town and the country and disturbed some of the underpinning of the world itself.

  So, this morning, Margaret Stone came in from her night in the Quarter wearing a gaudy button that read: ‘Royal Pop History. Come and Make History With Us. Are You Splendid Enough?’

  “Wherever did you get that, you splendid person, you?” Mary Virginia Schaeffer asked her.

  “I made it,” Margaret said. “A man was wearing the big button part of it for his convention name button. I took his name out and put the message in. A bunch called ‘The Society for Creative History’, or else the ‘Royal Pop Historians’ is going to hold a meeting in town. It starts today. They say that their job is to get rid of a lot of unhistorical remnants in this town, just as they have gotten rid of them in the rest of the world. I better go to their thing. They may try to get rid of something that I want to keep. I suspect that they'll need me.”

  “I used to create quite a bit of history myself,” Mary Virginia bragged, “but I don't do nearly as much of it nowadays.”

  “I don't think that's quite what the ‘Society for Creative History’ means,” Margaret rattled in her dubious voice, “but maybe it is. They have topics listed like ‘Get rid of that Stuff’, ‘History made while you wait’, ‘It doesn't matter  —  they're only human’, ‘Louts, Liars, and the Uses of Historical Evidence’, ‘The Holy Barnacle and the Pearl Beyond Price’, ‘Wax-Work History and the Ironic Flame’, ‘The Evidential World’, ‘Mountain-Building for Fun and Profit’, ‘History, Hypnotism, and Group Amnesia’, ‘Whoever Were Those People Who Lived Next Door to You Yesterday?’, ‘We said to Get Rid of that Stuff!’, others that I forget. They're interesting topics. Oh, by the way, the Black Sea has disappeared and millions of people have been destroyed. It's all utterly obliterated, now and forever. The Royal Pop People say that it puts an end to the old geography.”

  “How could a sea be obliterated?” Mary Virginia asked. “Where did you read the announcement of such an historical meeting, Margaret? They sound like things that you made up.”

  “Read them? Whenever did I ever read anything. I'm not even sure that I know how to read. I don't remember ever doing it. No, this is just something that I know. Or it's something that I heard.”

  “Please don't go through all that recital again, Margaret, but can't you just tell me in two words what you're talking about,” Mary Virginia requested. “Absalom says that everything in the world can be described in two words.”

  “I know his two words. But what I'm talking about is Pop History. People of the Old Kind won't understand it very well, so the Royal Pop Historians say. The meeting starts today. I don't know where it is, but somebody said that Duffey might know.”

  “I didn't know that you were interested in history, Margaret. It sure was noisy in town last night. What was happening?”

  “Sure I'm interested in history, Mary V. Papa used to have a book ‘History of Cook County in the Early Days’. I'm from Chicago, you know.”

  “I know, Margaret. Did you read the book about the history of Cook County?”

  “No. I never read it, but we had it. Papa bought things like that because he was trying to get used to being an American. Anyhow, I'm real noet
ic so I'll be a natural at something like history. What was so noisy last night was that funny wind blowing down the façades of the buildings and breaking up the old people and the old animals. It left a lot of trash in the streets. Not only that, but there's so many parks and courtyards and places this morning that weren't there yesterday that it causes one to wonder. They sure are gracious places.”

  “What old people and old animals are you talking about, Margaret? What funny wind? What fronts of buildings being blown down? How did they break up?”

  “Well, I'll tell you, Mary V., I think that some of that stuff was from old Mardi Gras floats, or they were planning to be floats next season. The new people and the new winds were breaking up everything that wasn't splendid enough. There's one dragon that's big enough to load three floats pretty heavy. It's still alive a little bit.”

  “Are you talking about live people and live animals, Margaret? And what are these new parks and courtyards and places that you're jabbering about?”

  “Oh, the broken people and animals are mostly papier-mâché or rubber or styrofoam or plastic. After they break up and die that's all that's left of them. But some of them were pretty lively before the end. There was one fire-drake (or he was half man and half fire-drake) who bit a lady in the leg and got blood all over the street. Some people took her to Doctor Doyle with it. ‘That's a terrible bite,’ he said. ‘I think it gave you infections draconitis. You have to show me what bit you.’ He went out with the people to look at it. When he found out that it was just a fire-drake made out of rubber, and that it was fabulous besides, he didn't know what to think. But a laboratory has checked what the lady has, and it's infectious draconitis all right. They think she'll die.”