More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF BASCOM BAGBY

  “That fish, Prince Casimir (Casey Szymansky) has always been hard both to like and to dislike. He is here now. He is not in Hell. That is a false report that he has gone to Hell and is making arrangements for his second coming. The arrogance and kinkiness has mostly gone out of him. He is very sick though, and he has a long road to recovery.

  “He has great concern for the goat caravans that arrive here every day. There has long been the cultus of praying for us Poor Souls in Purgatory; but the effect has not been so much the taking up of the burdens of the Souls here as the sending to us of further burdens to bear. People phrase their prayers for us very strangely. They pray mostly for themselves, that they be rid of their burdens. And they mention our names. And those burdens arrive here every day on caravans of laden scapegoats. Casey works with the beat-up and burden-weary goats pretty well. He is a good animal man, and he patches them up as well as can be done.

  “Casey is here. So he is not elsewhere, so the predicted prodigies of him will not take place.  — unless this is a pseudo or effigy Casey who is here. That is possible, though barely.”

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF DEMETRIO GLAUCH

  “Casey's body is stolen. This casts a new darkness on the matter. Believe it, it was not stolen by strangers. It was stolen by his own supporters or associates. I am reminded of an advertisement that appeared in the last but one issue of the ‘Crock’, when the insane followers were driving Casey out of his wits and to his death.

  “ ‘Genuine emptied temples (still covered by consecration guarantee), dead bodies sent postpaid by certified grave robbers. Use them for fun or experiment, or for special rites. Prodigies sometimes occur during their use’. A box number was given to order bodies from, and requests for specific bodies were solicited. The price was not given in the ad, but somewhere else in the ‘Crock’ was a note that the bodies ran from fifty dollars each to two thousand dollars each.

  “But Casey's body, if it is held by the same grave robbers, would probably cost a Prince's ransom, or a Devil's ransom.

  “As to the Promontory Prodigies, some of them are happening, but likely they do not mean what Casey thought they might mean.”

  Hanged folks swinging from a tree.

  Hanging people, pray for me!

  How Many Miles to Babylon

  Finnegan seeks death and does not find it. That is the main point of his puzzling quest. His own fleece is named thanato and not mallion. Finnegan did not die in the ward in the hospital in the Philippines. But somebody died there in his name; and an army doctor friend of mine wrote me that Finnegan did die there in his presence, which letter I received the same day that Finnegan arrived in St. Louis. This amazed me, but it didn't seem to amaze Finnegan when I showed him the letter. ‘Finnegan did not, apparently, die on the landing at Naxos, though X swears that there were not seven but eight bodies in that lantern-lit square on the cobbles, and that one of the bodies was Finnegan's. But X himself spent the latter part of that same week in Finnegan's company. A thing like that would not bother X, but it bothers me.

  ‘Finnegan did not die in that very early encounter in the cabin of Brunhilde, but someone died there at the hands of Papadiabolous. Finnegan did not die at Tangiers with Don Lewis, though Marie Courtois believed that she had killed them both and left them together in the bottom of the tell.

  (“All I can say, Stein, is that I seem to remember these things differently,” he told me in explanation the last time I saw him. “I don't remember getting killed any of those times, except for a very hazy impression of Papadiabolous bending down to kill me in the cabin of the Brunhilde. But that was before I came on to the Brunhilde that first time.”)

  ‘Finnegan did not die at the hand of Saxon X Seaworthy on Galveston Island, though Doll Delancy found (on West Beach) a body which she swears was Finnegan's; and Miss Delancy knew Finnegan. And possibly Finnegan did not die on the Marianao Coast near Havana. I believe, in spite of all reports, that he is still alive. I also believe I have run athwart several tall-story artists, not the least of whom are that army doctor friend of mine, Doll Delancy, and Finnegan himself. But the death quest has always been there.

  ‘Finnegan is a double phougaro or funnel, the link between several different worlds. Yet there are characters (X, Biloxi Brannigan, Doll Delancy, and others) who have verifiable existence in at least two of those worlds. Finnegan himself believed that he was subject to topographical inversion; he believed that one of the worlds was always interior to him and another one exterior, and that they sometimes changed their places. But where does that leave us who live in either of the worlds? Are we not sometimes reduced to being no more than items in the mind of Finnegan?

  ‘Is the Brunhilde the first ship? Or the third? Is it the original Argo? Or is it a latter and unsanctified appearance of that ship, following the Barque in time? We have also the question of superimposed levels of experience in the Cruise of the Brunhilde. X says that not all the events of this voyage happened to Finnegan in the first decade of the interbellum period: he says that a strong substratum of them happened to Giulio Solli (the monster forgotten, the father of Finnegan) in the decade before World War One, and that Finnegan has filial memory of them. The atmosphere of that period does sometimes break in strongly on the voyage. But so much of our information depends on X who is not to be depended on.

  ‘Carr states that the characters of the Brunhilde are not true archetypes. Why, then they are false archetypes, and these also have their being. Kidd believes that X himself is in the process of becoming the Third Evil to fill the void left by the insufficiency of Papadiabolous and Seaworthy in the roles of devils. But Kidd is Joycean. To complicate matters, Lafferty swears that Finnegan is in no way Joycean, that he is nine hundred years earlier, out of the Yellow Book of Lecan (the Táin bó Cúailnge), a character out of the Tá. This presupposes that Finnegan is identical with Finn McCool as well as with the more derivative Fingal, and also with Cú Chulainn. Well, Finnegan is capable of being all. To those interested in this line I recommend Thurneysen's Die Irische Helden- und Königsage.

  ‘I myself was present at several episodes (whether in the flesh or out of the flesh I do not know, God knows): I was present at one meeting of Don Lewis and Manuel of which Finnegan knew nothing, so this could not have come from his mind. I was present and watched them dine in death-like glitter on the Grand Canary, but I was unable to cross the room to them. John Schultz also experienced a rapport with one of the Brunhilde incidents.

  ‘We are all of us in legend, of course. It is absolutely impossible that anyone should be in life who has not first been in legend. But no one of us understands his own legend. Mary Schaeffer says that I am the Wandering Jew, particularly in my writing style.

  ‘I have not determined the exact and complete relationship of the Argo legend to the Finnegan Cycle.’

  Notes on the Finnegan Cycle  —  Absalom Stein

  Three unusual things happened on the same day. The first unusual thing was the awakening (in his grave by the sounding sea) of a man who had either been dead, or in a time-stasis-undead, unalive- for several decades.

  But first, many years before, there had been the picture.

  In a walk-in art bijou in New Orleans, there is a large and sea-sounding picture named ‘The Resurrection of Count Finnegan’. The painting was received by the bijou's owner, Melchisedech Duffey, about the middle of the sixth decade of the twentieth century. It was at first considered to be a joke: but what a magnificent joke it was!

  It was plain that it was painted by John Solli, believed by those able to judge these things well (about a dozen persons in the country) to be one of the greatest painters of the contemporary world.

  This John Solli, who was widely known by his nickname of Finnegan, was reported to have been killed several years before the arrival of this painting. And nothing other than rumors had been heard of him in the interval.

  But Solli-Finnegan was not a man
who would accept death easily, and most of his old acquaintances had at least a tenth-part feeling that he was not dead and that he would return. Or they had the feeling that his body would yet be found. With the arrival of the magnificent painting, there bloomed the consensus feeling that Finnegan was indeed alive, and that this was his announcement that he would return to his old haunts.

  “It has to be very recent,” Margret Stone said about the painting. “He was good before, but he hadn't come this far. He couldn't have painted it before his death. It had to be since.” Irish was about the only thing that Margret Stone was not, but she was full of blarney and malarky and bulls.

  The painting was twelve feet by eight feet, and Count Finnegan and one other person were shown as life-sized. The painting was really two paintings separated by a schizo-gash. In the larger portion, the burial crypt seemed to be an ocean cave under a rock shelf; but now there was a fissure in the rock roof of the cave, and air and sunshine were pouring in. The half-risen Count Finnegan was partly in the dark-green water and partly in the bright-green air. There was a stark and horrible riseness about him. There were places on him where the flesh had fallen away from his bones as will sometimes happen when a person in either death or time-stasis is subject to an abrasion; and the under-the-rock-shelf water had apparently been abrasive. Count Finnegan was setting back into place one long strip of flesh that had fallen away from its bone, and he showed sure intent of repairing other flesh damage and decay. He was identified by a Latin scroll there, as the Papal Count Finnegan. Finnegan-Solli had always been good at reproducing Latin scrolls.

  The Count Finnegan in the picture seemed about thirty years older than the John Solli Finnegan would have been at the time of his reported death, which had been between two and three years before the time of the arrival of the painting at Melchisedech Duffey's New Orleans place. So it was a self-painting of Finnegan as it would appear twenty-five to thirty-five years in the future. “And that's mighty rough,” said Absalom Stein who viewed the painting. “It could be Finn thirty years in the future, or three hundred.” But the projection was clearly authentic. Nobody else but Finnegan could, with many years added to him, look so like this Count Finnegan in the picture.

  Solli-Finnegan's big banana nose had acquired nobility and distinction on the Count in the picture. The flesh-mending hands of the pictured Count were even more intricate and talented than Finnegan's recent artist's hands which would be remembered by all who had ever known him. There was still the outrageous humor mixed with the warping pain and torture in the eyes. There was still the loose strength and speed of a yearling bullock, or perhaps a three-hundred-years-young bullock, on the Count in the picture. There was still the mouth in motion, and one had the feeling of soon being able to hear the multi-dialected words and spatting phrases from the painted Count. But there was an added texturing of the whole person that appears mostly in those who have risen from the dead. The flesh had suffered simultaneous transfiguration and corruption and was now in a state of violent incompleteness. There was a locality about the flesh change; partly it was the sea change of the un-coffined dead of the poor people of the West Indies. Count Finnegan was in the rags and tatters of what may have been a winding sheet. But there were solid but old clothes there for him to put on, travelers clothes.

  There was another person in the picture who was as remarkable and powerful in appearance as was Count Finnegan. This person was standing just to the left of the fissure in the rock-roof of the burial cave, but this fissure also served as the schizo-gash that separated the Resurrection of the Count Finnegan from the Annunciation of Joseph Cardinal Hedayat. Joseph stood in the middle of a scene half a world away from the resurrection setting. The counterpart setting was a Syrian or Lebanese country scene. Joseph who had just received news or instruction or nomination, was identified in a scroll in Syrian Arabic as Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch.

  “He is my kindred,” said Margret Stone when she saw the Joseph in the painting the day it had arrived.

  “Who isn't!” said Mary Virginia Schaeffer. “He was on TV just this past week. He may be the next chief of state of Syria in spite of his youth. But, ah, Finnegan has done something about Joseph's youth in this picture.”

  “Yes, it's the way Joseph will look in thirty years,” Margret Stone said. “Or in three hundred.”

  “It is authentic,” said Mr. X. who was present also. “I know him well, and the whole world has seen him pictured enough to know him on sight. Nobody in the world except this multi-geniused Joseph Hedayat could, with many years added to him, be the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of this picture.”

  “That's true,” said Duffey. “And yet it's clear fact that the Count Finnegan of the picture and the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of the picture are of absolutely identical appearance.”

  “We will have to agree with that,” Margret Stone said. “Yet, in their present (or recent) forms, Joseph and Finnegan do not look very much alike. Oh, they're both amply nosed, and they're about the same size and color. And they do move alike. But, really, they don't look anything alike.”

  “No,they don't,” said X. “But Joseph, with many years added, has to look like the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat there. However did that world-wide playboy and extraordinarily pleasant person become a cardinal?”

  “And Finnegan, with many years added, has to be the Count Finnegan here. There is no other thing he could turn into,” Mary Virginia said. “Oh, and they are absolutely identical. It's spooky. It's flesh crawling. It's flesh-falling-away-from-the-bones, that's the sort of feeling it gives one.”

  “This is a better picture than any of us realize,” Duffey said. “It gets better by the minute. I would almost say that it changes by the minute. There are depths in it now that I would have seen an hour ago, if they had been there then. This is better even than Finnegan in his late orange period. I bet I can get twenty thousand dollars for it.”

  “That would be like selling Finnegan in the flesh,” Mary Virginia said.

  “And that would be like selling Joseph, flesh of my flesh, in the flesh,” Margret Stone said.

  “I knew them both in the flesh and I'd sell them both in the flesh for twenty thousand dollars for the two of them,” Duffey said. “And I'd throw in my own mother too, though I never knew her in the flesh.”

  “Really, there must have been some contact,” Mary Virginia joined him.

  “No, there was not,” Melchisedech Duffey insisted. “I didn't have a mother. I have another sort of origin.”

  Duffey sold the picture to Hilary Hilton of Chicago for twenty thousand dollars. Hilary had known Finnegan. And he knew Joseph Hedayat of Antioch. Hilton had done business with the Hedayat family. But Hilton, after he had bought the picture, decided to leave it hanging in Melchisedech's Walk-In Art Bijou in New Orleans.

  “I could take it up home with me and enjoy it for thirty years I suppose,” Hilary said. “And then I could bring it back here and give it a window on the day of the happenings. (Chicago will not be such a window.) But we know not the day nor the hour, and I wouldn't want it to miss the day. The picture may have some role to play with its live counterparts.”

  But Hilary Hilton got to town at least once a year, and he used to come in and pull up a chair and gaze at the picture for an hour or more. “I wonder why I'm not in it,” he said once. “I had intended to be here and take my bloody part in the events when they arrive. But Finnegan would have known it if I should have been in it. Maybe there are other pictures to be found. He paints better with his dead hand than with his live.”

  And Joseph Hedayat who traveled everywhere in the world (nobody knew why he did, but he made a delightful presence wherever he went) once saw the picture, and himself in it, looking much older. This was about five years after the arrival of the picture.

  “I knew it existed, of course,” Joseph said, “as any knowledgeable person will know of any new prodigy appearing in the world: but I would never expect to come on it here in the United States li
ke this.” (Joseph was then, still quite young, an ex-chief of state of Syria.) Then Joseph looked at the picture in sudden sorrow and fear. “Páter, ei dynatón esti, parelthéto ap' emoú tó potírion toúto,” he said, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by.” But he didn't add “Thy will be done.” He wasn't about to accept it. Not yet. But no great disaster was shown in the picture, except the disaster in the eyes of Joseph, and in those of Count Finnegan.

  But one group, The Unbelievers' Angry League For Style In The Universe, hated the picture, and their railing against it shook Heaven and Earth. But none of the members of the Angry League had ever seen the picture.

  For thirty years at least that picture hung on the walls of the Bijou in New Orleans, and nothing was heard of Finnegan, alive or dead. But finally the day of the happenings arrived.

  The grave wasn't a formal one. The man may have been buried directly in the incrusting sand, or he may have been given directly to the sounding sea, or placed in the rock and sediment under the continental shelf to hide him. There was a fissure in the picture, and the sunlight through the fissure seemed to have awakened him. He was given a modified identity at his resurrection, but his brain had in no way been scrubbed of his old identity.

  He was given (by an unknown giver) a coded assignment. His death of several decades before had been a cover or an alibi. Now he was given the role of Count Finnegan in an eschatological spy drama. And the other man of the fractured-off part of the picture, the new Cardinal Hedayat was also given a coded assignment.

  The Papal Count Finnegan, half-risen now from either death or time-stasis, was partly in shadowy water and partly in bright air. He was in a water cave under a land shelf, but the cave had just been fissured by a land shock. He was replacing the rot and the falling-away of his flesh as best he could. There was a stench about him that had only vaguely been suggested by the picture of some decades before. He would not lose that stench.