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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “No. But she was apparently in her own room and in bed when accosted. She seems to have been strangled there and thrown out her own window. It was quite late, after the dew, and no feet left the building after the dew and before her discovery — except those of Gadberry, who reported her. At the moment we have no leads to anyone except those who lived in this building. Tell us, what about Mrs. Raffel?”

  “A religious fanatic but a good woman. It is believed by the others that I pay the regular rates here, but that is not so. I live here partly on the charity of Mrs. Raffel.”

  “And Gadberry, the artist?”

  “In one word, selfish.”

  “George Handle? He has been called a fool.”

  “Only a half-fool. But easily led.”

  “Izzard?”

  “A merchant. He never spent a penny without a return.”

  “Nazworthy? Is he as crazy as he sounds?”

  “No, he isn't. He's a sardonic kidder, with a dislike for all authority. I can imagine a little the line he would take with the police. The cat, the only other animal that indulges in straight-faced sardonic humor, betrays itself by a flick of the tail. Nazworthy has the same motion, but without the tail.”

  “Could he kill?”

  “I doubt he could kill Minnie Jo Merry. He hates only pretentious people, and she wasn't. He could kill a policeman — or her killer. If another is killed, then you will know.”

  “We'll watch for that. Lamprey?”

  “Nothing there. A nothing man. Did you notice the girl well? A beautiful thing and finely made, but there was plenty of strength to her. That nothing man couldn't have strangled her. She'd have strangled him and thrown him out the window. You'll have to look to one of the others, not to him.”

  Dillahunty was right. Lamprey was a nothing man, and he was terrified of the police. “I didn't kill her. I didn't know her. I didn't know anybody. I wash dishes at Webbers. I don't know nobody. I'm in my room all night.”

  “Well did you hear noises in the night?”

  “Noises I always hear, and some of them never happen. I'm a nervous man, but I kill nobody, I hurt nobody. It is more I am always afraid someone would kill me.”

  Lamprey was a small man with small hands, a frightened man on the edge of incompetency. They questioned him a little more and left him.

  “What do we have?” Captain Keil asked. “A heavy old woman who is a religious fanatic and also a good woman, and is glad that the girl was killed before something had happened to her. An artist who is selfish. A sardonic kidder who is not as stupid as he acts. A half-fool who is easily led. A nothing man. A merchant who does not spend without a return. An old Irishman who is thrice her age, but can we be sure that all the sap is dead in him? Seven, and one of them is crazy, but which? Let's go talk to the half-fool.”

  “Handle,” Captain Gold said, “did you sleep well last night?”

  “No. I have never slept well any night of my life. I dream a lot and worry a lot. I'm totally alive when I sleep.”

  “Was it because of your restlessness at night that you decided to try the learn-while-you-sleep systems?”

  “Yes. I want to know things, so I decided to tap my nocturnal energy, as the advertisement said.”

  “What is your relationship with Gilford Gadberry?”

  “Oh, he takes me for quite a bit, but he knows all the things I want to know. He can talk about music and funny paintings and the new dirty novels and psychology and things like that. Sometimes I turn him on when he talks, and play him back at night. Sometimes when I lend him money he'll make recordings for me — Gaelic furniture design, and things like that. He arranges the things I'll hear at night so I'll get a well-rounded liberal education.”

  “I see. Did you hear any noises last night?”

  “I hear noises every night, though I sleep with the earphones on, and all outside noise is supposed to be cut out. It must be that I dream the noises.

  “Did you dream last night? Did you dream anything about a murder or a dead person?” Gold asked.

  “Yes. About seven dreams like that.”

  “Tell us one of them.”

  “Which one?”

  “Hell, I don't know. We're shooting blind. Tell us one.”

  “Well, this one, it's kind of silly. This was a long time ago, or anyhow it took place in a cabin and by candlelight. We sat wake over a corpse. We cracked and ate walnuts, but someone objected when we threw the shells in with the corpse, though that was a good place to throw them. Then someone else—”

  “Oh Judas!” said Captain Keil.

  “I believe that is enough of that one,” Captain Gold said. “Were all of the seven dreams like that?”

  “All of them about murder or corpses, yes. All of them kind of silly.”

  “Seven story dreams we have yet,” Keil said. “We're getting nowhere.”

  “Then we'll get somewhere,” Gold said. “Handle, have you any idea who killed Minnie Jo Merry?”

  “I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry.”

  “What?”

  “I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie—”

  “You are talking for the record?”

  “Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed—”

  So they took him downtown, but first they gave orders for a new lock to be put on George Handle's door and they left a guard at the apartment building.

  Naturally they didn't leave it at that. The confession of the half-fool was complete enough. There were odd elements in it, but he was an odd man. He said that he had killed the girl in a dream; that he had risen and gone to her room and strangled her and thrown her out of the open window because he was jealous. Then he had gone back to his bed, to other dreams. Yet there were points about that murder that hadn't been given out, that only the killer could have known; George Handle knew them…

  Nevertheless, the two captains continued to check during that morning. They found that Minnie Jo was an inefficient but promising worker for a stationery company. Her particular girlfriend believed that Minnie Jo ran around only with the men where she lived. They checked the places she frequented, and she had been seen with all the men.

  She had been out with Gadberry and with Handle often, and with Izzard nearly as often. She had even been seen dining with the sardonic Nazworthy at a sardonic place run by two Bulgarian brothers. She often went to Webbers, and sometimes drank coffee in the kitchen with the dishwasher Lamprey. It was believed by them at Webbers, though, that this was mere kindness on her part.

  Minnie Jo had even been seen drinking Irish coffee with Dillahunty in the after-midnight hours at Maddigan's. Nor was she the only girl a third his age that he brought in. The sap was not all dead in him yet.

  They found that Dillahunty was well liked, Handle was liked, and even poor Lamprey was liked.

  Izzard was not liked, Gadberry was not liked, Nazworthy was not liked.

  “We can tell nothing by that,” Keil said. “Handle has confessed, and it makes no difference that the people who know him like him. There is nothing to tie onto the others, even if Gadberry is selfish, Izzard is demanding, and Nazworthy is sardonic. We still have the fact that Handle has confessed.”

  “Yes. Repetitiously. But to be sure, let's go hear him again.”

  Again, George Handle told them, “I killed Minnie Jo Merry. Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed Minnie Jo—”

  “He sounds like—”

  “Yes, doesn't he?” Keil interrupted Gold. “Let's go look for it.”

  “Has anybody been trying to get into Handle's room?” they asked the guard at the apartment. “Gadberry has. Says Handle owes him money. Says he was to go in and get it. Says he wears Handle's shirts, and this locking out puts him to grave inconvenience. Handle never locked his door, according to him. Gadberry was disappointed to find the new lock on it. He seems pretty nervous now.”

  They found Gadberry.

  “Come on wit
h us. We'll go to his room and get it.”

  “What? Get what?”

  “What you were trying to get. What is making you nervous that you couldn't get? It will be here, somewhere with the bunch of them. Quite a few of them here, aren't there, Gadberry?”

  They were in Handle's room now.

  “I don't know what you mean,” Gadberry protested. “The tapes, the wires, the records. How long would it take to play them all?”

  “I don't know.”

  “You know pretty well. It would take about forty hours or more, wouldn't it? Will you find it for us, or must we play them all? And you will listen.”

  “I won't listen to forty hours of that drivel. I'll find it for you. I'd have said that nothing could break me down, but that surely could.”

  “Why did you kill the girl, Gadberry?”

  “Jealousy, frustration, curiosity…”

  “I can understand the jealousy. She was an attractive girl. What was the frustration?”

  “She was almost perfect, but not quite, and it is that which is just short of a masterpiece that infuriates. It is so near—yet it misses. I'm always in anger to destroy a near-masterpiece.”

  “So you destroyed her. And the third element was your curiosity, like when you said ‘The girl was somehow completed in death.’ You had to see how she would look dead.”

  “Yes. That knowledge was necessary to my work.”

  Gadberry had located the tape for them, and Captain Keil was threading it into the machine. “I suspect that you weren't accurate in your appraisal to us of Miss Merry, Gadberry. You said that she hadn't eyes, and other things.”

  “I lied. She had eyes, and she wasn't conventional. She was near perfect; gentlemen. So near.”

  “And in preparation for the murder it was only necessary for you to condition the easily led George Handle to a confession?”

  “Astute of me, was it not, Captains?”

  The machine played now in the compelling voice of Gilford Gadberry, as it had night after night played to George Handle, in his sleep, till he had learned to answer on cue; and the cue, of course, was the question: “Who killed Minnie Jo Merry?”

  “Pretty uninspired,” Gadberry had to admit, “but I had to assume uninspired questioners, to whom the cliché would come naturally.”

  The machine went on to recount certain abominations that only the killer knew he would commit, but the voice of that most polished adman returned again and again to the command: “Say, ‘I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry. Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed —’ ”

  Among The Hairy Earthmen

  There is one period of our World History that has aspects so different from anything that went before and after that we can only gaze back on those several hundred years and ask: “Was that ourselves who behaved so?”

  Well, no, as a matter of fact, it wasn't. It was beings of another sort who visited us briefly and who acted so gloriously and abominably.

  This is the way it was:

  The Children had a Long Afternoon free. They could go to any of a dozen wonderful places, but they were already in one. Seven of them—full to the craw of wonderful places—decided to go to Eretz.

  “Children are attracted to the oddest and most shambling things,” said the Mothers. “Why should they want to go to Eretz?”

  “Let them go,” said the Fathers. “Let them see—before they be gone—one of the few simple peoples left. We ourselves have become a contrived and compromised people. Let the Children be children for half a day.”

  Eretz was the Planet of the Offense, and therefore it was to be (perhaps it recently had been) the Planet of the Restitution also. But in no other way was it distinguished. The Children had received the tradition of Eretz as children receive all traditions—like lightning.

  Hobble, Michael Goodgrind, Ralpha, Lonnie, Laurie, Bea and Joan they called themselves as they came down on Eretz—for these were their idea of Eretzi names. But they could have as many names as they wished in their games.

  An anomalous intrusion of great heat and force! The rocks ran like water where they came down, and there was formed a scarp-pebble enclave.

  It was all shanty country and shanty towns on Eretz—clumsy hills, badly done plains and piedmonts, ragged fields, uncleansed rivers, whole weedpatches of provinces—not at all like Home. And the Towns! Firenze, Praha, Venezia, Londra, Colonia, Gant, Roma—why, they were nothing but towns made out of stone and wood! And these were the greatest of the towns of Eretz, not the meanest.

  The Children exploded into action. Like children of the less transcendent races running wild on an ocean beach for an afternoon, they ran wild over continents. They scattered. And they took whatever forms first came into their minds.

  Hobble—dark and smoldering like crippled Vulcan.

  Michael Goodgrind—a broken-nosed bull of a man. How they all howled when he invented that first form!

  Ralpha—like young Mercury.

  And Lonnie—a tall giant with a golden beard.

  Laurie was fire, Bea was light, Joan was moon-darkness.

  But in these, or in any other forms they took, you'd always know that they were cousins or brethren.

  Lonnie went pure Gothic. He had come onto it at the tail end of the thing and he fell in love with it. “I am the Emperor!” he told the people like giant thunder. He pushed the Emperor Wenceslas off the throne and became Emperor.

  “I am the true son of Charles, and you had thought me dead,” he told the people. “I am Sigismund.” Sigismund was really dead, but Lonnie became Sigismund and reigned, taking the wife and all the castles of Wenceslas. He grabbed off gangling old forts and mountain-rooks and raised howling Eretzi armies to make war. He made new castles. He loved the tall sweeping things and raised them to a new height. Have you never wondered that the last of those castles—in the late afternoon of the Gothic—were the tallest and oddest?

  One day the deposed Wenceslas came back, and he was possessed of a new power.

  “Now we will see who is the real Emperor!” the new Wenceslas cried like a rising storm.

  They crashed their two forces and broke down each other's bridges and towns and stole the high ladies from each other's strongholds. They wrestled like boys. But they wrestled with a continent.

  Lonnie (who was Sigismund) learned that the Wenceslas he battled was Michael Goodgrind wearing a contrived Emperor body. So they fought harder.

  There came a new man out of an old royal line.

  “I am Jobst,” the new man cried. “I will show you two princelings who is the real Emperor!”

  He fought the two of them with overwhelming verve. He raised fast-striking Eretzi armies, and used tricks that only a young Mercury would know. He was Ralpha, entering the game as the third Emperor. But the two combined against him and broke him at Constance.

  They smashed Germany and France and Italy like a clutch of eggs. Never had there been such spirited conflict. The Eretzi were amazed by it all, but they were swept into it; it was the Eretzi who made up the armies.

  Even today the Eretzi or Earthers haven't the details of it right in their histories. When the King of Aragon, for an example, mixed into it, they treated him as a separate person. They did not know that Michael Goodgrind was often the King of Aragon, just as Lonnie was often the Duke of Flanders. But, played for itself, the Emperor game would be quite a limited one. Too limited for the children.

  The girls played their own roles. Laurie claimed to be thirteen different queens. She was consort of all three Emperors in every one of their guises, and she also dabbled with the Eretzi. She was the wanton of the group.

  Bea liked the Grande Dame part and the Lady Bountiful bit. She was very good on Great Renunciations. In her different characters, she beat paths from thrones to nunneries and back again; and she is now known as five different saints. Every time you turn to the Common of the Mass of Holy Women who are Neither Virgins nor Martyrs, you are likely to meet her.

/>   And Joan was the dreamer who may have enjoyed the Afternoon more than any of them.

  Laurie made up a melodrama—Lucrezia Borgia and the Poison Ring. There is an advantage in doing these little melodramas on Eretz. You can have as many characters as you wish—they come free. You can have them as extravagantly as you desire—who is there to object to it? Lucrezia was very well done, as children's burlesques go, and the bodies were strewn from Napoli to Vienne. The Eretzi play with great eagerness any convincing part offered them, and they go to their deaths quite willingly if the part calls for it.

  Lonnie made one up called The Pawnbroker and the Pope. It was in the grand manner, all about the Medici family, and had some very funny episodes in the fourth act. Lonnie, who was vain of his acting ability, played Medici parts in five succeeding generations. The drama left more corpses than did the Lucrezia piece, but the killings weren't so sudden or showy; the girls had a better touch at the bloody stuff.

  Ralpha did a Think Piece called One, Two, Three—Infinity. In its presentation he put all the rest of the Children to roast grandly in Hell; he filled up Purgatory with Eretzi-type people—the dullards; and for the Paradise he did burlesque of Home. The Eretzi use a cropped version of Ralpha's piece and call it the Divine Comedy, leaving out a lot of fun.

  Bea did a poetic one named the Witches' Bonfire. All the Children spent many a happy evening with that one, and they burnt twenty thousand witches. There was something satisfying about those Eretzi autumnal twilights with the scarlet sky and the frosty fields and the kine lowing in the meadows and the evening smell of witches burning. Bea's was really a pastoral piece.

  All the Children ranged far except Hobble. Hobble (who was Vulcan) played with his sick toys. He played at Ateliers and Smithies, at Furnaces and Carousels. And often the other Children came and watched his work, and joined in for a while. They played with the glass from the furnaces. They made gold-toned goblets, iridescent glass poems, figured spheres, goblin pitchers, glass music boxes, gargoyle heads, dragon chargers, princess salieras, figurines of lovers. So many things to make of glass! To make, and to smash when made!