The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  Dionigi Manovello laid and built the fire. Dionigi, though one of the youngest, could lay the neatest fire of any boy in the Panther Patrol. And he was an expert on all manner of woodcraft. This was because, he told them, he was an Indian, a member of the old Anadarko tribe. He was the darkest of them, and he seemed to look like an Indian, unless you happened to think what an Indian really looked like. For he had told them so often that he was an Indian that they had come to believe it, even the older boys; even if they remembered when he had first come there, and that his father had been an Italian railroad worker. But let him be an Indian if he wanted to be. Dionigi made a good Indian.

  The old iron skillet was brought down from the rafters, and the boys made spits. The skillet had not been brought up from the valley; the skillet had been on the mountain for years. It had been found in the hut of Charley Coldstream. It may have been there when the sheep herders were there. It may have been there when the mine was there.

  “But it was a zinc mine,” said Conrad Crain.

  “There may have been iron there, too,” said Stanely Ridgepole. “Just look at the old rocks in the morning. You'll see that some of them are iron rocks.”

  They spitted sausages and wieners, and toasted burnt buns and bread. They made coffee and cocoa. Then they spread their sleeping bags; and Stanely Ridgepole strummed his guitar with a sort of background music while Hayden Flood talked sleepily.

  “This is a pretty safe place, as safe as you can get on the mountain. There's only two bears been seen all spring, and Mr. Mobley says they're both down in the bottoms now. Besides, they're only half grown and not bothersome, and a fire will almost always keep a bear away. The rattlesnakes never come above the ridge. The weasels will come in when you're asleep sometimes and make a little hole in your throat and drink your blood, and they do it so quiet that you never know it's happened except that you feel tired in the morning. But at this time of the year they're so fat on prairie chicken that they won't be up here bothering for blood.

  “And the Black Panther hasn't been here for seven years. It's as safe here as it can ever be on the mountain. Of course it's never safe on the Mountain.”

  “My father says there's no such thing as the Black Panther,” said Tommy Tipton. “He says it's just a legend.”

  “Your family hasn't been in this part of the country as long as some of the others,” said Hayden. “But wasn't it just seven years ago tonight that the Black Panther killed and partly ate Charley Coldstream? And didn't the doctor open his eyes and shine one of those little lights in? And wasn't the Black Panther printed on his eyes, the last thing he saw before it killed him? But it went away before the men could hunt it down. And a black panther only comes back every seven years. We'd better cut us some good stout clubs, and I'll stay awake all night to guard. There's always the chance that he'll come back.”

  “It's just a story they made up,” whispered Terry McGuire to Tommy Tipton. “It's part of the initiation.”

  “He didn't make up the part about the Black Panther being printed on Charley Coldstream's eyeballs,” said Tommy. “I heard Mr. Mauser tell that in the barber shop.”

  “I don't believe it, though,” said Terry. “I don't believe that the last thing you see before you die is printed on your eyes.”

  “If you're an Indian, then it is,” said Tommy. “The last thing an Indian sees before he dies is printed on his eyeballs.”

  “That's right. I forgot that Charley Coldstream was an Indian.”

  And a little after nine-thirty that night Carl Cornhouse started up Rain Mountain, only he started up the west face. He was the oldest of the boys and he knew the mountain best.

  “They say that the ghost of Charley Coldstream comes back,” said Stanely Ridgepole, “but I never believed in ghosts. They say he will come to warn of the Black Panther if it ever returns. He will come and light a fire in his old rock hut as a signal to all the people that the Black Panther is back. His rock hut is the highest thing on Rain Mountain and people everywhere will be able to see the fire.” “When did you say the panther killed the Indian?” asked Dionigi.

  “Just seven years ago tonight,” said Hayden Flood.

  “And how often is he supposed to come back?”

  “They say every seven years, isn't that right, Stanley?”

  “That's right, every seven years.”

  “Then he could come tonight?” asked Dionigi.

  “That's right. I never thought of it. But we all have clubs and Hayden Flood is going to stay awake to watch.”

  Atorrante, the black-muzzled puma, now settled down in White Mule Draw. But he would rest only a few hours. He never rested long since he had become a wanderer. He was restless and feverish in sleep. Now everything on Rain Mountain was asleep except Carl Cornhouse who slowly made his way up the west face and had almost reached the crest.

  The crickets were four hundred feet below them on the slope. The owls hooted as though under water, and flew far below their feet. And a calf could be heard bawling so far down that it sounded as though it were in the bottom of a well.

  Terry McGuire gripped Tommy tightly by the wrist and Tommy started up in terror. “Oh! It's only you. I thought it was a big snake that had me.”

  “Tommy, I said it was only stories to scare us. I said it would only be an initiation. But they are all lying there asleep. Count them. You can see them all here. And out there is the fire.”

  “Our fire? It's still glowing. Why shouldn't it be?”

  “No. I mean on the very top of the mountain. Look, it's a fire at Charley Coldstream's hut.”

  “How could there be? There isn't anybody to light it.”

  “But you can see it burning. It didn't light itself. Tommy, I'm scared.”

  “Do you think he came back?”

  “Yes, the dead Indian came back to light the bonfire. He came back to warn people that the Black Panther is back on Rain Mountain.”

  “We got—got to wake up the rest. Tell them it's the Black—Black Panther. I can't holler. You holler.”

  “I can't talk more than a whisper. It's like a dream where you try to holler and wake yourself up. And you open your mouth and you can't make a sound. Tommy, we have to wake them up. I'm too scared to move. I can't even get up to run. If we're too scared to holler, then the panther will come and eat us all.”

  They both tried to cry out, but they were so paralyzed with fright that they could only croak. They opened their mouths and strained in terror to break the spell with a cry.

  Then the terrifying scream of the Panther sounded from the west wall of the Mountain; and its sound echoed among them like cascades of horrible lightning.

  Carl Cornhouse had spent many hours practicing his panther scream. He lived on the other side of the mountain from the other boys and had often practiced it around home. It was chilling, made out of broken sobs and stranglings and a curdling series of ascending screams. It scared his dogs, it scared the crows, that scream would scare almost anyone. But even he had no idea what a wild thing it would seem heard on top of Rain Mountain at night. After he had climbed the west face of the mountain he had lit the fire at Charley Coldstream's hut. Then he had shied rocks at the cabin of the Panther Patrol until he saw that two of the younger boys had stirred and had seen the fire. Hayden and Stanley would have been awake anyhow but pretending sleep, for they were in on it. This is the way that boys were initiated into the Panther Patrol, with this scare at night on the mountain. But there had never been anyone who could give the panther scream as well as Carl Cornhouse.

  And once more he gave it, and it was as though ice crystals formed in the blood of those who heard it and the hair raised clear off the head. And now was the time to cinch it.

  “Panther,” howled Hayden Flood. “Run, run.”

  “Panther,” cried Stanley Ridgepole. “Run for your lives.”

  And the four young boys, and the two who were a little older, tore out of the Panther Patrol cabin into the mountaintop darkness.r />
  Atorrante stretched and rose, grumbling and cranky, in White Mule Draw. As the scream came again he bounded like a ghost to the mountaintop. He came almost on top of one boy who stumbled, fell, crawled, clawed, and ran stumbling. “Panther, panther!” cried Carl Cornhouse.

  Then Hayden and Stanley were laughing. “Here is your panther,” Hayden said. “Now you all belong to the Panther Patrol. Carl didn't come with us. But he came up the other side of the mountain later and lit the fire at Charley Coldstream's hut so you would think the dead Indian had come back to warn you. So Carl is your panther.”

  “Panther,” sobbed Carl. “Panther!”

  “It's over with now,” said Hayden. “Don't act it so much. I've already told them. But you really can give that panther scream.”

  Then it came again. It wasn't as loud or fancy as the panther scream of Carl Cornhouse. It hadn't that sobbing effect and that strangle in it. But it had something else. It was solider. There was hair on this panther and you could smell him.

  Atorrante came with a sort of grumbling rush, and the seven boys fell flat with terror. And the big puma cleared them all with one leap and went over the side and down the mountain in the dark. Atorrante would find a more peaceful mountain elsewhere.

  And one thing is pretty sure: on the eyes of seven boys there would be imprinted forever that Black Panther as he began his leap against the bonfire by the dead Indians hut.

  The Panther Patrol still exists. And a great many boys have been initiated into it and grown out of it since that time. And there have been other experts of the panther scream, and they tell the story better than they used to. There is more of it to tell. And if all the boys who have been scared on that mountain were put in one line they would reach all the way to Elk City. But since that time it has been nothing but initiations. But this year could be different. For it has been seven years again since Carl Cornhouse gave the panther scream, and was answered by Atorrante on top of Rain Mountain.

  And the Black Panther commonly returns every seven years.

  Long Teeth

  “A person can grow a very long set of teeth while waiting to dine on a dead man's leavings,” Carla murmured. “That sounds like a proverb, but not a very happy one,” Clinton told her.

  “It is. It's a froggish proverb. You should be educated like me. Then you would understand logic. You would understand that there is no logic in waiting.”

  “A man is entitled to live out his life, Carla. And you won't hasten a death by wishing.”

  Clinton was a little timorous about launching such talk. He was glad that it was his wife Carla who had brought it up. He had often wished his Uncle Nicholas dead but he had always been afraid to voice the wish.

  “A man is not necessarily entitled to live out his life,” said Carla. “Sometimes he must move along to make room for others. This old world is a little crowded. One man cannot hold one table all day and dawdle over a glass of water. It's like in a cafeteria. You have to keep them moving. It's our turn to sit at the table now.”

  “He isn't old. A little over fifty.”

  “He is fifty-three years, seven months, and nine days old. His calculated worth is three hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars (my own calculation but a close one); you are his heir, Clinton. He is, moreover, highly insured with such a multiplicity of policies that it is almost impossible to tabulate them, or even to be sure that I know about them all. He is unsound of heart, liver, lung, kidney, and stomach; has high blood pressure, ulcers, and Evan's Disease; in short, he is the kind of man who might live forever. I have no faith in the early death of a man with a number of deadly diseases. Death often seems not to know which to select, and retires again shaking her head.”

  “You refer to death as feminine.”

  “So she is in all languages that are gendered. If we had to depend on the men to get things done I doubt if anyone would ever die at all.”

  “It worries me that I have a clever wife. Why did you marry me, Carla?”

  “I married you because you are the heir of a rich uncle. But I did not invest in you to wait forever on my investment.”

  So Clinton knew that his Uncle Nicholas had already been sentenced to death, and he was not really sorry for it. The old man had lived long enough, he told himself. Or had Carla told him so? He was no longer sure in his own mind what was his own and what Carla had sown there.

  Uncle Nicholas had no kindred except the two nephews, Clinton and Walter; and Walter had been disinherited. Walter was the prodigal nephew who would rather eat the husks of freedom as offered by the unaffiliated swineherds; and he was no great respecter of Uncle Nicholas. Velma his wife was an empty doll. And Walter Jr., well who could say what he was really like? He may have been a little bit like Uncle Nicholas. He may even have been a little like Clinton.

  And as for Clinton, well he was serving time. He was the right-hand man for Uncle Nicholas. He waited; and now that Carla had given him the idea, he waited with a certain impatience. Yet actually he was rather fond of Uncle Nicholas. Of himself he would never seriously have thought of doing in the old duffer.

  Clinton wasn't greedy — well, no more than you or the next man. He was not callous, he was not even irresponsible. But he was married to a designing woman. Once, long ago, Uncle Nicholas had warned him of designing women. And, for that, Carla may have been leery of old Nick; yet Nicholas thought her a pleasant enough niece.

  Nicholas was, in fact, a fine old bumbler, quiet and generous, and his only fault was that he was living too long. He lived in the old house on top of the hill. Clinton and Carla, by his bounty, lived in the new house halfway down the hill. And by common custom, for theirs was a very close family, each had the run of the home of the other.

  Nicholas, however, was not a bumbler as to money. He had been lucky and he had been astute. He had accumulated quietly and steadily. Yet he always had led a quiet life.

  Now, however, his life was filled with a series of odd events.

  There was first the time he was bitten on the inside of the mouth by a millipede or some such poisonous pest. The creature was inside a sandwich that he had been eating at a small family picnic. But how the monster happened to get into the sandwich is a mystery to this day. Uncle Nicholas did not die. He did not even become very sick, and the doctor said that he had a very resilient constitution, for all of his disabilities. It is true that his tongue swelled to elaborate proportions, and that for about three weeks he spoke in a comical mush-mouthed childish way. Always afterwards Clinton remembered Uncle Nicholas as talking like that.

  And there was the night when, the last thing before he went to bed, Uncle Nick got his toddy glass and then reached for the door of the small cabinet where he kept the most steadfast and gracious bottle of rye whisky in town. But for once he paused and turned on the light.

  It was not a large snake. A coral snake is not commonly very large. And nine and a half men out of ten would have taken it for one of the non-poisonous king snakes of the region. But, scarce forty years before, Uncle Nicholas had been a boy scout, and things once learned are learned forever.

  So he killed the poisonous coral, and then held a conversation with the rye whisky as the two of them became one.

  “I know I do not have an enemy; for a man such as I am does not make enemies. But it may be that one of my friends has calculated my life span on a shorter basis than is practical; that one has desired to ease and shorten my path and spare me the last long years which are commonly, though I believe erroneously, thought to be dismal ones. But there are some things in which a man should not let himself be influenced, not even by well-meaning friends.”

  For now Nicholas began to develop an ingenious and amused antipathy towards dying.

  Then there was the fine piano wire across his stairway that pinged when he broke it.

  “Luckily I am such a heavy-footed clod-hopper. I see now that I have to do with an eager amateur, than which nothing is more dangerous.”

  And then there w
as the sad death of the grandfather clock. It was very old when it died. This is the way that it was. Uncle Nicholas had inherited it, and it stood in his main hallway. He wound it every Friday night, the last thing before he took his toddy, and after he had checked and locked the doors and turned down the thermostat, and killed the main lights, and turned on the night light in the stairwell.

  There was a little snap door that one opened and inserted there the key to wind. But there was an oddity about (or behind) the small door this night.

  “Can it be,” said Uncle Nicholas, “that a kind friend has decided that the time is very late for me as well as for the clock, and would spare us both the trouble of ticking any more hours? But an old fox can smell a trap, just as a coyote can sense poisoned bait, and a canny fish a hook. I wonder what it is that they put in blasting powder nowadays? I believe that they have cheapened it. They have not, at any rate, made it odorless. Oh well, the clock has lived a long and faithful life; but, as for myself, I cannot come till I am called.”

  But he sought to do it with the least possible damage to his hallway. From the backyard he brought in two sheets of galvanized iron and made a v-shaped shield. Then, with a cord to the knob of the key compartment, from a distance of ten feet, he opened the door.

  It was loud; and at close range it might have been fatal. It did some, but not extensive, damage to the hallway. And it stilled the clock forever. It dissolved into ancient splinters, with its metallic entrails looped grotesquely about.

  “One more old friend gone,” said Uncle Nicholas, “and there are so few left.”

  There were other incidents; and some of the weirdest of them were those that never happened. The old house, high on the crest of the hill, was a target for lightning. And the high lightning rod above the main gable had drawn and grounded many a bolt. So Uncle Nicholas was not very surprised when he discovered a clever gadget attached to its ground. This was a transformer with its heavy primary coil in series with the ground, coupled with a sparking coil arranged to detonate caps for a truly amazing quantity of powder sufficient to bring down the house.