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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Nevertheless they were making a pact, a brainless and spiritless pact. Then they all tramped out, or at least disappeared, with a noisiness, even a sort of metallic brightness.

  “They have made a pact to kill themselves,” Barnaby Sheen said by correct guess. He rose with an almost deliberation. “I really ought to stop them,” he hazarded.

  “Ah, no matter though,” he voiced a little later, after Loretta had rattled something to him in her unlocated way. “It will make little difference. They were as good as dead anyhow.

  “How have they been so completely robbed of mental sunshine? I will bring some here if I have to import it. It will be several years too late for most of them; maybe not for all.”

  Harvey Clatterbach took Willow Gaylord behind him on his cycle and they went off a viaduct to their deaths. They flamed down on the concrete and rails below. They may have set themselves afire before their wheeled vault through that space. Elroy Rain simply ran out into a stream of traffic to be killed. It may have been an accident, a Freudian accident.

  Violet Lonsdale cut her throat with a saw. She tried first to do it with a carpenter's saw and found that very awkward.

  “This will not do at all,” she said, or seemed to say. “Now that I have become completely metallic I should use a hacksaw.” She did. It went much better.

  Barry Limus who was with her went a little beyond her with the same tool. He performed on himself mortal mutilations that seemed quite imaginative to himself, but were really gross and dull.

  Priscilla Rommel drowned. This also may have been a Freudian accident. She went skating alone on a pond. She went onto mushy ice over deep water and went through. But she knew the pond well, and knew ice.

  All seven of the students had entered fully into their weekend assignment. The instructor Edmund Weakfish was quite pleased by the response.

  To one outside it, the hylicon-colored world seems pretty dull. To one living within it (we have only the word of several undependable persons who lay claim to the experience) the dullness is the redeeming part of it. Dull pain is less searing than sharp pain; dull loss is not so wrenching as vivid loss. Those who are in that state want it dull, ‘tis said, or they wouldn't have chosen it. This seems an unfair judgment. There had been a certain liveliness in some who had chosen it, and we cannot believe they are all happy in their doubtful state. (Dull unhappiness, though, may be better than cutting unhappiness.)

  Here we plead ineptitude and lack of foundation. We can only use secondary evidence for most of what follows.

  There were some unpleasant things at several of the funerals. There were rappings from inside some of the caskets. This isn't so unusual a thing as you might believe. Those whose business is with funerals may encounter it a dozen times during life. It is usually tactfully ignored, but it does give one a clammy feeling to hear it.

  It was worst in the case of Barry Limus. It began in McGee's Funeral home late at night, the night before the funeral. It was no ordinary knocking. It was a multiplex thing that seemed to have a pattern, almost a disagreeable tune, to it. It became so bad that an exorciser was called, and performed his exorcisms.

  This did seem to have a dampening effect on the knockings; it muted the noise a little bit, it gave a certain frustration to it. But then came the garble, the mumble, the words. They were slightly in the voice of Barry Limus, but they were not from his mouth or his throat. “Leave it off, Father John,” the words segregated themselves out of the garble (it was really as if Barry were speaking in several voices at the same time and this one came to the fore), “it isn't devils, it is only myself.”

  “Where are you, Barry?” the exorcist priest asked the sound.

  “Mostly right here,” came one of the Barry voices. “Not, not in the body here. Just around here. Was curious about it a little. Not very though.”

  “Are you in Purgatory, Barry?” the exorcist asked him.

  “For about three years now, I think.”

  “But you are dead only one day. Time must seem different to you.”

  “Goes slower, not faster. No big thing that. I'd already left off regular living. No big change.”

  “Why do you knock and clatter?”

  “Not knock and clatter. It's a beat, Father, a send-it beat. It's all we want.”

  The exorcist priest became quite stern.

  “Go out from him!” he ordered angrily.

  “No one to go out,” one of the weary young voices with a touch of Barry said. “No one in me but me. Not much of me.”

  “What is Limus?” the exorcist suddenly asked.

  “I am Limus. My last name.”

  “What else?”

  “I don't know what else,” one of the residue voices of Barry Limus said.

  “Leave us alone,” said several of his other voices.

  “Limus means mud or slime,” the priest remarked to Barnaby Sheen and to several other observers who were there. “And, as an adjective, it means ‘askance’ or ‘squinting’. His father doesn't know the origin of the surname. I get something of an unclean and continuing family spirit or tutor here, but I don't get much of him. Probably of no importance.”

  Several of the other remnants had given a few words or sounds even more garbled than those of Barry Limus. The whole business was in bad taste.

  All the rappings left the caskets before burial. They were heard in the air, above and away from their boxes for a while. They were heard going off aimlessly into the distance, mostly back towards their own part of town. But Loretta Sheen still remained unburied.

  “It isn't near as bad as I feared,” Dr. George Drakos said to Barnaby Sheen several days later, “but she does begin to smell a little.” “She always did,” Barnaby said. “No, not always, but for the last year or so. It is the way that the young people live and keep themselves in these latter times.”

  “Barney, are you really going to keep her here like that?”

  “Oh yes. George, I am going to make a sincere effort to understand my daughter and her friends. We have found them empty and dull, and it is true that they had become so. But I must find out who cut them off and let them fall into such a state; I must find out why and by what authority it was done. I must discover why they chose it with such open and unseeing eyes. I will uncover the real essence of this thing, if it has any. It is all something monstrous, and I go monster-hunting. I am setting up equipment to study this out thoroughly.”

  “Equipment, Barney?”

  “Aye, man, aye! Am I a pseudo-scientist for nothing?”

  Barnaby Sheen assembled an impressive battery of equipment in his daughter's room. It was already plain that the room had become a sort of headquarters or hangout for Loretta and her dimly-colored friends. Sheen used ultra-violet cameras. He often got the globs that represented the muddy young people. He had some success with ultra-violet scanners and scramblers. The globs could be recognized: they were outrageous burlesques of the seven young people who had been known to him in the world. The globs changed shape constantly, but they kept slight signatures of their originals.

  There were some twists even to this. Mary Mondo had taken over Violet Lonsdale. Mary Mondo had been the secondary person of that split girl: now she was the primary. Violet sometimes hovered near her for a moment, thin and tenuous, but was usually present for only a few seconds.

  There were a few there who were strangers to Barnaby Sheen. These were globs or persons other than the seven young persons who had recently died.

  “There are two of the extras that I know,” Harry O'Donovan said in his high voice, “and they are still alive and listless in the temporal world. I don't know what to make of this at all.”

  Harry O'Donovan and Dr. George Drakos were with Barnaby Sheen this day as he tried to unravel the phenomena.

  “You don't really need the ultra-violet equipment, Barney,” Harry O'Donovan said. “One can see the forms about as easily without it. They just take a little getting used to. I suspect we could always have se
en them. And now I'll be seeing them everywhere, and I don't particularly want to.”

  “I know,” Barnaby told them, “and I don't particularly want to see them everywhere either, but I have to. I will understand these things. I will bring some sort of understanding to them since they haven't any of it in themselves.”

  “I recognize the sound pattern now,” Doctor George Drakos said, “now that the analyzer has waded through hours of it and made abstractions of it. I should have recognized it before, and I suspect that I will be hearing it everywhere in the future. All of us have been hearing it everywhere, of course, and for a long time. We have tuned it out resolutely. But will we be able to tune it out from now on? It is the brain-wave pattern sometimes found with a type of insanity called hebeta dementia. It isn't complex. It isn't rhythmic. It differs from random noise only in its narrowness. It resembles something else in its queer narrowness. I wonder why they like it?”

  “It's the sound that the hinges of hell make,” Harry O'Donovan put in, “and that is the dullest of all sounds, as coming from the dullest of places.”

  “No, I don't believe there's anything particularly hellish about it,” Barnaby Sheen muttered. “It isn't consequential enough to be hellish. Nothing of that complex is. Yes, I will have to find out why they like it.”

  Barnaby Sheen got more material, several days later, for his investigation. A group of young people, living young people as well as he could tell, came to him in Loretta's room.

  “We want to hear it,” one of their spokesmen said. “They're good, and we want to listen to them. We want to gather in this room and listen to them almost all the time.”

  “How many of you are there?” Barnaby asked from the depths of the depression that these young people always gave him.

  “About five hundred of us. Some days there would be more.”

  “No. It's physically and personally impossible for me to put up with any such number of you.”

  “There's an alternative,” one of those leaders suggested. “We will all kill ourselves, just as they have done. Then we will be able to crowd into this one room and enjoy, and you won't even have to feed us.”

  “I wasn't figuring on feeding you,” Barnaby said. “And I don't think you'd all better kill yourselves at once. It's a more serious thing, even for such as you, than you would imagine. I unwelcome the whole idea.”

  “There is a second alternative,” said another of the youth leaders. “I'll have to tinker with it a little, and then I'll have it. Trust me, all of you, and you too, Mr. Sheen: I'll have it ready by tomorrow and we'll try it. I'm an electronic genius.”

  “So am I,” said Barnaby. “I don't believe we have anything else in common.”

  The young people left him then, all except the seven in the special state and a few others who were on the fringe of that state.

  But the young leader, who said he was an electronics genius and that his name was Roy Mega, was back the next day with his own pieces of equipment.

  “We have a sort of barn, a shed, Mr. Sheen,” he said. “It will hold the five hundred persons if they are crowded in tightly, and that is always the best way. It will also hold any number of free spirits, and I believe that they will come from almost everywhere. We will present in our barn The Continuing Event, the Experience of the Seven Spooks. This will be our fulfillment.”

  “I don't really care what five hundred of you, abetted by a number of free spirits, will be doing in a barn or shed, provided that it is a sufficient distance from here,” Barnaby Sheen said.

  “It's about a mile from here,” the young genius told him. “I intend to pick up the Experience in the room here and carry it to our larger meeting place. I have invented certain equipment to do this. Marvel at it if you wish, and then permit me to install it.”

  “It looks like a couple of amplifiers and telephones,” Barnaby said.

  “Is that what they are?” Roy Mega cried with sudden flaming interest. “Why, I have independently invented the telephone and the electronic amplifier then. My own genius will never be sufficiently appreciated. I almost hate to merge myself in the experience and lose my special self.”

  “I'll give you a job, Roy,” Barnaby said. “You'll not even have to get a haircut for it. I'll waive that requirement. I have quite a number of electronics geniuses working for me; and I pay well.”

  “Mr. Sheen, I did not believe you capable of such an obscenity,” the young genius said with real shock. “You'd have me debase my genius for money?”

  The young Roy Mega installed his equipment and left.

  Thereafter, for some weeks, there took place what was either an ecstasy or a public nuisance in a barn or shed about a mile from the Sheen home. It was called, by some, The Symphony of the Seven Spooks and Other Free Spirits. By others, it was called a damnable noise, which was inaccurate. It wasn't a noise, and the young people couldn't be prosecuted for making an objectionable noise. It wasn't quite in the audible range; and we believe that noise, by some definition, must be within that range. Normal people couldn't hear it, but they sure knew it was there. It was near enough to the audio to give all the neighbors an attack of subliminal insanity. And it was near enough to give the initiates a species of ecstasy.

  Five hundred young persons, and numberless free spirits, crowded into the old barn or shed and enjoyed a flesh-crawling silence in glazed-eyed rapport. It was a silence that often shattered glass panes in the neighborhood and brought all the malaise of a sonic boom. It was just below the audio range, as the free spirits themselves were just below the visual range. Yet there were certain persons, other than the adolescent pupa forms who gathered for it, who could actually hear this thing, just as there were persons who could actually see the free spirits.

  These, again, were persons of either admirably noble or of disgustingly coarse sensibilities. If you were of the land between, it left you angrily blank.

  A thing like that couldn't go on. “Of course it can go on,” Harry O'Donovan said surprisingly. “It is outside of time, so who is to say that it cannot go on? With them, and with the thing itself, it is instantaneous. An instant (am I not correct, Cris?) cannot have duration, and neither can it have an end.”

  We were met together, Barnaby Sheen, Dr. George Drakos, Harry O'Donovan, and Cris Benedetti, the four men who knew everything, and myself who did not. This was in Barnaby Sheen's home, in Loretta Sheen's old room which Barnaby now used for a study. (Barnaby's last study was crammed full of things now, and there was no room for more: he had three of these rooms in his house that were so full of things that they could no longer be used.)

  “An instant meant, originally, a standing upon or a pressing upon, an urgency,” Cris Benedetti said. “Then it meant a close pressing in respect to time, an immediacy. But you are wrong about the young people and their things. It isn't an urgency that they have; it's an unsubstantial flimsy, and it will have a flimsy ending.”

  The room was still the shrine or crypt of Loretta Sheen, but now her body was less regarded. The room didn't seem to center on it anymore; the room centered on nothing. The body still lay on the sofa-bed there. It had become little more than a life-sized doll. It was even more doll-like in that it had a sewn or stitched appearance, and now the clothing seemed a part of the body.

  “Well, you should have more regard for it, for her, than that, Barney,” George Drakos was saying. “Look, there are even several books piled upon the body. That is thoughtless of you.”

  “Thoughtless of me, yes,” said Barnaby. “I did it without thinking, if I did do it; and I hadn't noticed it at all. I see, though, that they are her books and not mine. Perhaps Loretta piled them there herself. She doesn't—eh—take very good care of her own body lately.”

  Barnaby Sheen did appear quite thoughtless this evening. He had a great cut down the side of his jaw and neck: he said that he didn't know how he had come by it, that he didn't know that he had it.

  “She is becoming more interested in things now, though,�
� Barnaby said. “She is becoming more kind. She does little things for me that she never did before, not even in her regular life. I cannot understand her speech and I am sure that I will never be able to understand it again. But she is often able to answer my questions in another way. And the thing does begin to break up. There are fewer of the globs around now than there were, and fewer of the free spirits as they call themselves. They're drifting off to somewhere else, I believe.”

  “It may be simply that we're losing our ability to see them,” Cris said.

  “No. We can still see three or four of them,” Barnaby insisted, “the same three or four of them, which is the test. Loretta is still here. Mary Mondo is here, though her secondary person, Violet Lonsdale, has gone. Barry Limus is here. Sometimes there is another one here who is not one of the first seven. And there's another diminution. I am told that the sub-audible in the barn has abated considerably. It breaks up a little.”

  “It may be so, Barnaby,” Harry O'Donovan said. “But have you come any closer to understanding the young persons and their complex?”

  Barnaby Sheen had just unwrapped a new cigar and stuck it in his mouth. A lighter near him on the table rose into the air, lighted itself, and lighted the cigar for him when he puffed matter-of-factly at its flame. “Thank you,” Barnaby said. It had been the barely-visible hylicon-colored glob of one of the girls, possibly that of Mary Mondo, more likely that of Loretta Sheen, that had performed the thoughtful service.

  “No, I can't say that I've come any nearer to understanding them,” Barnaby breathed out the words along with a wreath of blue smoke, “since understanding is an essential that is absent from their whole thing. I become a little more mellow to them, though; I like them and theirs more than I did. And I believe that they now understand (though that isn't the correct word for it) me a little better than they did, and they are more solicitous of me.”

  “I understand them pretty well myself now,” Harry O'Donovan said.