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

by R. A. Lafferty

  But the phenomenon was not local. Wagoner's article was the first comprehensive (or at least wordy) treatment of it, but only by hours. Similar things were in other papers that very afternoon, and the next day.

  It was more than a fad. Those who called it a fad fell silent after they themselves experienced the dream. The suicide index rose around the country and the world. The thing was now international. The cacophonous ditty Green Rain was on all the jukes, as was The Wart Hog Song. People began to loath themselves and each other. Women feared that they would give birth to monsters. There were new perversions committed in the name of the thing, and several orgiastic societies were formed with the stomach rat as a symbol. All entertainment was forgotten, and this was the only topic.

  Nervous disorders took a fearful rise as people tried to stay awake to avoid the abomination, and as they slept in spite of themselves and suffered the degradation.

  It is no joke to experience the same loathsome dream all night every night. It had actually come to that. All the people were dreaming it all night every night. It had passed from being a joke to being a universal menace. Even the sudden new millionaires who rushed their cures to the market were not happy. They also suffered whenever they slept, and they knew that their cures were not cures. There were large amounts posted for anyone who could cure the populace of the wart-hog-people dreams. There was presidential edict and dictator decree, and military teams attacked the thing as a military problem, but they were not able to subdue it.

  Then one night a nervous lady heard a voice in her noisome dream. It was one of the repulsive cracked wart-hog voices. “You are not dreaming,” said the voice. “This is the real world. But when you wake you will be dreaming. That barefaced world is not a world at all. It is only a dream. This is the real world.” The lady awoke howling. And she had not howled before, for she was a demure lady.

  Nor was she the only one who awoke howling. There were hundreds, then thousands, then millions. The voice spoke to all and engendered a doubt. Which was the real world? Almost equal time was now spent in each, for the people had come to need more sleep and most of them had arrived at spending a full twelve hours or more in the nightmarish world.

  “It Could Be” was the title of a headlined article on the subject by the same Professor Greathouse mentioned above. It could be, he said, that the world on which the green rain fell incessantly was the real world. It could be that the wart-hogs were real and the people a dream. It could be that rats in the stomach were normal, and other methods of digestion were chimerical.

  And then a very great man went on the air in worldwide broadcast with a speech that was a ringing call for collective sanity. It was the hour of decision, he said. The decision would be made. Things were at an exact balance, and the balance would be tipped.

  “But we can decide. One way or the other, we will decide. I implore you all in the name of sanity that you decide right. One world or the other will be the world of tomorrow. One of them is real and one of them is a dream. Both are with us now, and the favor can go to either. But listen to me here: whichever one wins, the other will have always been a dream, a momentary madness soon forgotten. I urge you to the sanity which in a measure I have lost myself. Yet in our darkened dilemma I feel that we yet have a choice. Choose!”

  And perhaps that was the turning point.

  The mad dream disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The world came back to normal with an embarrassed laugh. It was all over. It had lasted from its inception six weeks.

  Bascomb Swicegood, a morning type, felt excellent this morning. He breakfasted at Cahill's, and he ordered heavily as always. And he listened with half an ear to the conversation of two girls at the table next to his. “But I should know you,” he said.

  “Of course. I'm Teresa.”

  “I'm Agnes,” said Agnes.

  “Mr. Swicegood, how could you forget? It was when the dreams first came, and you overheard me telling mine to Agnes. Then you ran after us in the street because you had had the same dream, and I wanted to have you arrested. Weren't they horrible dreams? And have they ever found out what caused them?”

  “They were horrible, and they have not found out. They ascribe it to group mania, which is meaningless. And now there are those who say that the dreams never came at all, and soon they will be nearly forgotten. But the horror of them! The loneliness!”

  “Yes, we hadn't even pediculi to curry our body hair. We almost hadn't any body hair.”

  Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. “Like a sackful of skunk cabbage,” Bascomb murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase.

  Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn't warts and bumps. “Like a latrine mop!” sighed Bascomb with true admiration. The cracked clang of Teresa's voice was music in the early morning.

  All was right with the earth again. Gone the hideous nightmare world when people had stood barefaced and lonely, without bodily friends or dependents. Gone that ghastly world of the sick blue sky and the near absence of entrancing odor.

  Bascomb attacked manfully his plate of prime carrion. And outside the pungent green rain fell incessantly.

  Phoenic

  He was an ancient Phoenician, perhaps the oldest man in the world. It was not that he had shriveled. He was a tall, gaunt old man with a beak on him like a bird of prey, and his complexion was of royal Phoenician purple. He was of the race that had traveled to the ends of the Earth. Indeed, this oldest of them had come all the way from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; which is farther than Punt, farther than Ophir, clear on the other side of the treacherous globe; on the Greater Antilla, and inland.

  He was a coat-and-suit maker there in Pittsburgh. Now he had come home.

  A Phoenician, however, does not come home to a town. He comes home to a continent. The narrow shore, which no longer belonged identifiably to his ancestry, held him for only short weeks. Then he fared inland, crossed a small desert, and came out on the south sea.

  On this day he was in the port town of Ezion-Geber, built by his people for Jedidiah long ago, and now named Aqaba.

  And tonight he was on passage to Yenbo with the old Jew who not only owned the boat but also lived upon it. The fact is that this Jew had no other home, though he could well have afforded one; for he was rich, though not quite so rich as Wiedervogel, the Phoenician. He was also quite old, though again not so old as the Phoenician.

  The Jew's name was John Counts and he was a florid man, not by nature, but by pose. There is always room for a certain number of sharp men; there is room for a number of personables. There is some room for smooth raconteurs and also for competent solid men. There is hardly room for the intellectuals, and not nearly enough room for the honest men. The opportunities for many of these have been exaggerated. But Counts, when he chose his vocation, believed that there were empty niches for several more florid men. He became one of them.

  “You are taking a useless voyage, old bird,” he told Wiedervogel. “It cannot be for gain. It must be for curiosity.”

  “I have none.”

  “Nobody goes beyond Yenbo. That is the end of the World. There is nothing beyond.”

  “I have an appointment beyond. It was made long ago.”

  “How long ago? There has been no water traffic between these two ports for a generation.”

  “It was quite a few generations ago that I made the appointment.”

  “You, Wiedervogel, are what I call a phoney in depth. Do you know that you are grotesque in that old ready-made suit? But grace isn't given to everyone.”

  “It is one of my own models, now (it is true) obsolete. It was dead stock, but it is heavy and warm.”

  “So is the night. I beg you, do not grasp that glass as with a claw! Hold it lightly. There will be more when it is gone. Surely
you are old enough to have acquired a few of the airs. It must be that you have kept your nose too close to the needle. Live a little. You never know how much time you have left.”

  “Yes, I know how much time I have left.”

  “Do you, now? How long, old turkey?”

  “Five days.”

  “And your old appointment is with the dark lady at the end of the passage?”

  “In our old language her name was masculine. Yourselves use a later borrowed name. I have an appointment in what is called the ‘House of Ashes’.”

  “Is it not the elk who knows his time to die and who goes North to end it all in the ancestral boneyard?”

  “No. It is the elephant, and he goes South. But in my case there will be no bones left.”

  “Interesting, but not very. Otto, we are in immediate danger of going thirsty! Is not Otto a fine steward, Wiedervogel?”

  “He is a fine steward, but he is not otherwise fine. I suspect that he is an unholy creature, a Golem.”

  “You are too old to believe in legends, Wiedervogel. You couldn't believe it of Otto on any other coast. However, legends are the only crop that will grow here. They can't grow cane, they can't grow maize, they can't even grow grass here. But how they can grow legends! And the irony of the locale is that all the legends are true.

  “Not two years ago. I drove right through a grand old sail-ship on just such a night as this. It had no body to it. It must have been made out of fog. The lanterns on it, and the seamen on the deck, and the smells up out of the open hold must have been made out of fog too. But they seemed real enough. It was a great lateen with a high poop from the old Caliphate days of sail. You see cuts of them in old hooks. They haven't sailed for near five hundred years.”

  “I remember them a little bit,” Wiedervogel said.

  “I picked up a passenger near here once,” said Counts. “Once! Before it was over with I picked him up four times. The crewmen were afraid of him. They came to me and said that the man was already dead. They said that it was bad luck to have a deadman on a boat, but I have never found it so. I asked the man about his status, but he gave me an equivocal answer that first time.

  “Then a storm came up out of a dead calm. The boat tumbled all over itself and it tumbled that passenger overboard, and he drowned. ‘It is no great loss,’ one of the crewmen told me. ‘He has been drowned before’.

  “I didn't think much of it, not till it had happened the second and third and fourth time. Always that man would come to me briskly and pay his fare in very old coin. And always there would come up a sudden storm, and he alone would fall overboard and be drowned. I finally asked him about it. ‘I keep thinking it might turn out differently this time,’ he said, ‘and that I need not be drowned at all.’ He is still along this coast trying to undo fate. He has been around here for a long while.”

  “I believe that I know the fellow,” Wiedervogel said.

  “I took a live mermaid not far from here one morning,” said John Counts. And then he paused. “That pause, old Wiedervogel,” he said after a bit, “that pause was for you to say ‘Incredible!’ or something similarly apropos.”

  “Consider it said. Was she real?”

  “She said that she was. She seemed to be. She was ugly as sin, to use an old phrase. Her skin was green and rough, and perhaps it was scaled. She had a deformity of her feet and legs that turned them into serviceable flippers. She smelled like a mermaid, or at least like a fish. She was a diver, and it was as such that her husband made his living from her. Her hair would have been human hair, if the infestations that lived in it had been cleaned out.”

  “What did you do with her?”

  “I tried to sell her in England. There is a man there who goes in for such things. ‘But I already have a mermaid,’ this man said. ‘A real one?’ I asked him. ‘No, not a real one, but this is not the first real one that has been offered to me. What I have is better than a real one.’

  “It was. What the man had was incomparably better than a real one. She was a beautiful human girl who happened to terminate in a fishtail. But she was no great whiz at swimming or deep diving. She wasn't a real mermaid. I gave my mermaid back to her husband on my return voyage and paid him for her service. We did not understand the same thing by the term, but she was a real mermaid.”

  “I used to see them sometimes,” said Wiedervogel.

  It was four hundred miles, and it was third dawn when John Counts hoved to in his boat off Yenbo.

  There was a boy who seemed to be moulded of clay, with a driving oar in his hands, standing on a board in the middle of the Sea. There had been no communication, but he was waiting for them.

  The Old Phoenician went over and down the side with no baggage except a small sandalwood box under his arm. The creaking could have been either from his bones or from the cordage, but he went down easily.

  “In four days?” called John Counts.

  “Yes, pick me up here in four days,” said the Old Man.

  “It's a good thing you pay well, but it will be a little unusual to pick up a passenger one day after he is dead.”

  “It is a little unusual,” the Old Man said. “It is for that I pay well.”

  John Counts went across the Sea to Ras Banas where he would load a small cargo. And the Old Phoenician, Wiedervogel, went ashore with the boy on the small float that was ankle-deep awash.

  Traveling inland from the shore, the boy often had to cut brush to clear a path. It was a very old path, and it had not been used for a long while. Though it was oven-hot, the Old Man always wished to push on. “But drink a little water then,” said the boy. “I worry for you.”

  “I believe it would be wasted on me. Keep it for yourself.”

  “But you will die of the heat.”

  “Die? Of the heat? Why yes, but how did you know?”

  They went a day and a night, or it may have been two days and two nights. Time becomes confused as it approaches its end. It was as hot at midnight as at noon. Only just before dawn did it cool a little bit. It was the morning of the vernal equinox, as required by ancient prescription.

  The boy cleaned off the old rock. It had been fouled with bird and animal droppings, but from a long time ago. They were like dust. The boy cut wood (he had been told what to do) and laid a fire. It was a great flat rock and a great hot fire.

  Then the boy did something which he later regretted very much, but it was something that he had to do. He had meant to watch. He had been told by his father to watch closely and see just what did happen. There would not again be much opportunity to watch for five hundred years, his father told him, so he must keep his eyes open.

  He did keep his eyes open, but he had to turn away for a moment to relieve himself. And when he turned back it was finished.

  After the fire had died down, the young man swept the ashes that were left into the small sandalwood box. Then the young man and the boy made their hot way back to the coast.

  John Counts waited in his boat off Tenbo at the appointed dawn. He watched the boy and the young man come to him carried on the small flat boat that was awash ankle-deep. Then the young man climbed up and over the side of Counts' boat with the sandalwood box under his arm. He was a tall young man with a beak on him like a bird of prey, and his complexion was the Royal Phoenician Purple.

  One thing about John Counts; he wasn't easily perturbed.

  “Back to Aqaba?” he asked. “Or to the other coast?”

  “To Aqaba,” the young man said. “Where else?”

  “I had thought that the ashes were meant to rest with the older ones in the temple at Heliopolis.”

  “Oh, I'll express them there from Cairo. No use making an extra trip for it.”

  John Counts had suspected, of course, that the Phoenix legend was true, and that there was a multiplicity of Old Birds. He had suspected that all the legends of that coast were true. That wasn't the real wonder.

  The real wonder took place shortly after, and half a wo
rld away. It was the amazing change in the ‘Wiedervogel Coat and Suit Fabrique’ in Pittsburgh, PA. New ideas rose swiftly there from the ashes of the old, and the sporty, modish numbers they are out with are the wonders of the day. Their fame was not merely around Pittsburgh. It reached all the way to New York.

  There is the new spray-on form-fitting clothing of daring styling. There are the ‘Dial-A-Color’ clothes; a twist of one small button at the wrist will take the whole vesture through dozens of colors and combinations instantly even as one walks about in them. There is the psychic-impregnated clothing; one wearing such will be loved and respected, or sought out, or avoided by all, according to the impregnation. There are the total ensemble effects in which one receives the semblance of new face and new body at the fittings. There are the striking ‘Fire-And-Ashes’ jackets, the ‘Resurrection’ cloaks, the ‘Hallelulay’ slacks. And there is the amazing and exclusive ‘I Was Dead And Now I Live Again’ line.

  Whence is this newness?

  Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

  Manuel shouldn't have been employed as a census taker. He wasn't qualified. He couldn't read a map. He didn't know what a map was. And he only grinned when they told him that North was at the top. He knew better. But he did write a nice round hand — like a boy's hand. He did know Spanish, and enough English. For the sector that was assigned to him, he would not need a map. He knew it better than anyone else, certainly better than any mapmaker.

  Besides, he was poor and needed the work.

  They instructed him and sent him out. Or they thought that they had instructed him. They couldn't be sure.

  “Count everyone? All right. Fill them all in? I need more papers.”

  “We will give you more papers if you need more, Manuel, but there aren't so many in your sector.”

  “Lots of them, lobos, tejones, zorros, even people.”

  “People only, Manuel. Do not take the animals. How would you write them up? They have no names.”