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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Not you, Harry,” Drakos objected. “You would be the last of us to have rapport with them. You would be the last of us to have rapport with anything.”

  The books had been removed from the ‘body’ of Loretta Sheen now. I had not moved them, nor had any of the other four men. It had been done either by the free spirit of Mary Mondo or of Loretta Sheen herself: the two young girl remnants looked very alike in their dim outline. They were also stowing up other things about the room as if they did not want to be criticized for its lack of neatness.

  “Yes, I understand something of their complex now,” O'Donovan insisted, “unlikely as I seem for it. Their syndrome represents such reality as there is in those much abused terms ‘The Third World’ or ‘The Third Realm’. They are apart from our own torn world; they are apart from the heaven and hell that tear our world between them. They are, although in a very minor way, the third thing. Besides them, there isn't any other third thing anywhere. It is all completely amoral, of course, just as fairyland was, is. It may be the same dingy place. I've always believed that that turgid place and state was unnecessarily romanticized. There was always something queer and queasy about fairies, even before the latter meaning.

  “But it's all a blind alley, we know that, and that is all the understanding that is possible of it. Worse than that, it is the blind gut of a nameless and inferior worm that they are in. I don't know the reason for the thing at all, and I suspect that even God has forgotten it.”

  “Yes, you understand it somewhat, Harry,” Cris Benedetti sighed, “but you surely do not have rapport with it. Barney, what did you mean when you said that you could not understand the words of your daughter but that she could sometimes answer your questions in another way?”

  “I'd better show you,” Barnaby said with a sort of heavy listlessness. “I'd be afraid to tell it in words. Likely you won't believe it even when I show you. It isn't important, really, but it's a piece of what I'm trying to investigate.”

  Barnaby Sheen took one of those little paper-slitting knives that was no more than a razor-blade set into a folding clasp. He cut the 'body' of his daughter Loretta down the side of her jaw and into her bosom. It was much like cutting cloth or paper or parchment. It became apparent, as Barnaby made the cut, that the skin of the girl and the dress of the girl were a continuation of the same material, slightly different in coloring.

  There was nothing liquid inside the cut at all, nothing that had ever been liquid. There was nothing there that remembered being either blood or serum or flesh or bone.

  “It's sawdust,” Barnaby Sheen remarked. “She is now full of nothing but sawdust and mottos.”

  “There was never wood sawdust so fine as that,” Drakos said, “but it is dust.”

  “It is the primordial dust from which the first of us came,” Harry O'Donovan declared (I'll not guarantee this conversation of Harry O'Donovan. I can see correctly in the fringe areas; but I'm not always so certain that I hear correctly in them), “and unto which the first of us returned. Later, we came from and returned to a more modified dust. Most of the dust we now see in the world is not primordial dust at all. It is a recycled or secondary dirt: it has been used before, and several animations have run through it. That secondary dust is now the dust into which most persons fall when they die. Not so in the case of Loretta and her dust which we see. She did not die, she did not traverse her life; and so she did not come to the latter dust.

  “She withdrew or was withdrawn from life, she backed out of it, she left it by the same door she had entered it; she did not cross that room at all. So it became the case that she hadn't been, that she had never lived at all, that she is not and was not. She is not recycled into dust. This, here, is dust that has never been animate; dust from which the animation has been withdrawn.”

  Had Harry O'Donovan really been saying fringe things like that? I do not apperceive accurately in the fringe audio area.

  “Secondary bull dirt upon you, Harry!” Barnaby Sheen said in a voice more friendly than his words. “Ask her a question someone. I mean it. Ask her a question.”

  “Loretta,” Cris Benedetti said either to the dim body or to the dim glob of the girl, “you once used to read a fair amount, and several of your friends did also. How is it with you now? Do you still read? And what? And how?”

  “Ah, we'll prod around in her a little and the answer should be found,” Barnaby was saying. He had spread a handkerchief and scooped a little of the Loretta dust upon it. He didn't seem to want any of it to be wasted; he wanted it all returned to her. There were other things mingled in that fine dust. It was almost as if the girl had become a scrap heap. “She's full of mottos and such chopped-up things,” Barnaby Sheen mumbled as he worked with careful fingers. “Ah, I believe this is the pertinent piece.”

  Barnaby tried to spread it out, but there was no way. It twisted on him, and twisted again. It was crinkled as a piece of scrapling. And yet, there did seem to be an insane lettering on it, wherever the lettering did not fall clear off of it.

  “We read the Putty Dwarf,” the writhing crinkle showed the demented letters. “Oh, surely you know the Putty Dwarf! Even some adults read him. He is the Pied Piper of the pied type. Whether we are children or whether we are rats (we ourselves argue about this) we will follow him yet. No, of course we do not find him interesting. Interest is the thing we abhor most.”

  “It is printed, if such deformity be called print, upon a series of little parings of something,” Harry O'Donovan was toying with an idea, or toying with sanity. (Once more, I do not guarantee this conversation of Harry O'Donovan; he is, though he does not seem to be, a fringe person.) “There is an inferior devil named Topashi who prints his little insanities on the dried foreskins of boys who have sinned mortally in the womb before birth. Such, at least, is the old legend, and probably the present case. But how did Loretta come by such a quantity of compromised foreskins?”

  “Shut up, Harry,” Barnaby Sheen said pleasantly. “It is the latest opinion that a child is unable to commit mortal sin before the age of eighteen months. You're insane.”

  “And would I be watching such stuff as this if I weren't?” Harry arched his voice.

  “Is that Loretta's handwriting, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked.

  “No, of course it isn't. It is nobody's handwriting. The devils never did use flowing script, never true handwriting. They are denied such personal signature. Harry was right that it is only devils who print such stuff. I'm not sure he is right as to the name of this particular devil.”

  Well, it was in that deformed poster-style, in that block-printing with every letter of a different size and shape from every other, with all the lines running all out of line. It was that crookedness for the sake of crookedness, that deformity in love with deformity. (Either Cris Benedetti or Harry O'Donovan was saying all these words, or else they were going through my mind from the thoughts of one of those persons; it isn't firm ground here: the deformities are always printed out over a void and not over firm ground.) “Whether it was used by devils only is not certain, but there seems always to be this ‘Devil Between’ in such communication. No good person ever employed such a deformity of print or drawing, unless going through a devil-medium out of necessity; and a good person has no business going through a devil-medium.

  “And the Putty Dwarf was for sure the Pied Piper of such pied type and thought. He did have a mixed following of rats and children and unspirits, and it is hard to tell them apart. It is likely that Edmund Weakfish had introduced some of the children, and some of the rats, to the writings of the Putty Dwarf.”

  And Barnaby Sheen was sewing up his daughter's body with needle and thread, though George Drakos (who was a surgeon) insisted that he would be able to do it better. Neither one of them seemed to notice the blood dripping from Barnaby's jaw and neck (from the great cut that he didn't remember getting) into Loretta's dust. It is quite certain that neither of them noticed the pattern and shape of that blood dripping, o
r they'd have boggled at it. The shape of it was in an even more tenuous tint of mud-violet than is the rest of this scene. Both of them, likely, were too intelligent to be able to see it. But it was a broken communication going in the other direction now, going through a medium at least as dirty as the other, going in a form possibly even more grotesque. Deformity has more shapes and hovels than one. Barnaby sewed Loretta up without appreciating what they were doing to each other; and who is to criticize? Barnaby Sheen and his daughter did communicate, a little bit, very dimly, very late. This is the closest that they ever came. The pattern of Barnaby's own blood-drip was not overly sane. How should the dribblings of the girl's never-lived-in dust be more so?

  Some of these things were spoken in riddle-form by Sheen and Drakos and O'Donovan and Benedetti, the four men who knew everything. And some of the things were merely following a crooked trickle through my own mind; an apparent wink from the glob of Mary Mondo for one thing.

  I was only accidentally a member of the company of the four men who knew everything (they never see med to notice that I didn't). However, I enjoyed certain disadvantages that they lacked. As a person of very crude sensibilities, I could and still can see certain shapes and colors that the others miss or half-miss.

  I had seen something happening when Barnaby Sheen was cutting his daughter Loretta down her throat and into her bosom, the cutting that was like cutting cloth or paper or parchment.

  I'd seen the counterpoint of it. I'd seen it all going the other way.

  Two of the mud-violet globs (really, they aren't so unseemly if you have naturally coarse eyes) were at the same time cutting into Barnaby Sheen down the side of his jaw and neck and into his chest till they came to the primordial gore of him.

  These two globs were, I believe, the shapes and persons of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo. At the same time they were doing this, they were asking questions (not exactly in words) of Barnaby Sheen, and they were then pulling the answers out of his throat-slash.

  The answers were written on twisted cartilage (Barnaby was a very cartilaginous man). They were neither in nobly-formed letters nor in that devil-deformity with every letter of a different size and color and shape. The answers were in good but rapid writing, in cursive. Cursive letters are running letters; but why should Barnaby run on so, and he not even know it? The pattern of Barnaby's blood-drip into Loretta's primordial dust and rubble was this running thing. Maybe he was always too much given to running in his thoughts and words.

  Barnaby's answers, they were in words? Of course. They were in intelligent words? Certainly. Why should he use words of any other sort? He was an intelligent man. Was he aware of them, that they were being taken out of him? Not at all. Were they understood by Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo and by the others who coalesced less clearly? Hardly at all. Those shapes were mostly beyond words, but still there was an approach to communication.

  We still meet about once a month in the study of Barnaby Sheen. The doll that had once been Loretta Sheen is still there, a little smaller than it used to be. The globs are still there, some of them, a little muddier than before and a little less violet. In particular, the forms or globs of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo remain. At our meetings we talk of profound and important things. We agree (or rather, the four others of them agree) that certain paranatural happenings that had once infested that room are neither profound nor important.

  Barnaby Sheen (though now less and less often) still sometimes opened the throat of his daughter and drew out twisted answers or messages from her rubble and dust. Sometimes they were real (though wrongly emphasized) answers to real questions. More often they were gibberish.

  It was all vaguely in bad taste, of course. But was ever anything in worse taste than the original bodying and inspiriting of man himself? That business of the slime of the earth and of the spittle has offended many.

  As a person of very crude sensibilities, I still had my peculiar edge over those four men who knew everything. I could see Barnaby's own erratic bleeding at our nearly every meeting. I could also see the jagged cuts made in the jowls and throats of Doctor George Drakos, of Harry O'Donovan, of Cris Benedetti; these men were totally unaware of them, but the globs had expanded their field of inquiry. I could see the two girl-wraiths pulling cartilaginous and bloody mottos and answers out of all four of the men now. But a man does not see these things in himself. There was something I wanted to ask, though; something that I wanted to ask Mary Mondo.

  We went out for a midnight supper one night after one of our informal meetings. While at supper in the night place, I heard a remark. “Look at those five old bats at that table,” it was a young man making the remark. “They all five look like they cut themselves shaving, cut themselves bad.”

  Five of us. Then the glob-girls had been extracting these things from me also. Can they understand what they draw out of me better than what they draw out of the others? It seemed a balance unredressed here. They've been drawing queer stuff out of five of us, and Barnaby has been drawing only a little bit of unsubstantial matter from the doll that was once Loretta Sheen.

  An idea though! I, being of more crude sensibility than the others, might just be able to do it. There is Mary Mondo. She originated as a secondary, so she is crude and ill-defined. But she became a primary, so she is of a certain energy and moment. I myself have always felt that I was a secondary (sloughed off and long forgotten) of a primary man who has left the scene and left me isolated. So there are possibilities.

  And Mary has given indications, lately, of having sordid but solid answers, if only one knew how to ask the questions. I, I almost know how to ask her the question, I almost know what the question is.

  Half a dozen small knives here on my table. Are any of them crude enough to cut into globuous and unspirited matter? Are there any fingers coarse enough to draw filaments out of such a foggy throat as hers once the cut is made? One knife in particular there, it seems very coarse, very crude. Ten fingers on the edge of the table here (apparently they are my own) seem suddenly very coarse. And we are having another of our informal meetings at Barnaby Sheen's tonight.

  I almost have it clear now, the question I've been meaning to ask Mary Mondo whom I never knew in life, who never was in life except as the secondary of a duller girl.

  We will try for that question and answer. We will try it tonight.

  Boomer Flats

  “In the tracks of our spiritual father Ivan Sanderson we may now have trailed a clutch of ABSMs to their lair,” the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan was saying in his rattling voice. “And that lair may not be a mountain thicket or rain forest or swamp, but these scrimpy red clay flats. I would almost give my life for the success of this quest, but it seems that it should have a more magnificent setting.” “It looks like a wild goose chase,” the eminent scientist Willy McGilly commented. But no, Willy was not downgrading their quest. He was referring to the wild geese that rose about them from the edges of the flats with clatter and whistle and honk. This was a flight-way, a chase of theirs. There were hundreds of them if one had the fine eyes to pick them out from the background. “Mud geese,” Willy said. “We don't see as many of them as when I was a boy.”

  “I do not, and I am afraid that I will not, believe in the ABSMs,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk, stroking his — (no he didn't, he didn't have one) — stroking his jaw, “and yet this is the thing that I also have most desired, to find this missing link finally, and to refute all believers in the other thing.”

  “We can't see the chain for the links,” said Willy McGilly. “I never believed that any of them was missing. There's always been too many of them for the length of the chain: that's the trouble.”

  “I've traveled a million miles in search of them,” said Arpad. “I've pretty well probed all the meager ribs of the world in that travel. My fear has always been that I'd miss them by a trick, even that in some unaccountable way I wouldn't know them when I found them. It would be ironic if we did find t
hem in such a place as this: not a wild place, only a shady and overlooked place.”

  “My own fear has been that when I finally gazed on one I would wake with a start and find that I had been looking in a mirror,” said Velikof. “There must be some symbolism here that I don't understand. What is your own anticipation of them, Willy?”

  “Oh, coming back to people I've always liked. There used to be a bunch of them on the edge of my hometown,” Willy McGilly said. “Come to think of it, there used to be a bunch of them on the edge of every hometown. Now they're more likely to be found right in the middle of every town. They're the scrubs, you know, for the bottoming of the breed.”

  “What are you talking about, Willy?” Arpad asked sharply.

  What they were all talking about was ABSMs.

  Every town in the south part of that county has a shadow or secondary. There is Meehan, and Meehan Corners; Perkins, and Perkins Corner; Boomer, and Boomer Flats. The three eminent scientists were driving the three miles from Boomer to Boomer Flats looking for the bones, and hopefully even the living flesh, of a legend. It was that of the missing link, of the Abominable Snowman, the ABSM. It wasn't snowy country there, but the so-called Snowmen have been reported in every sort of climate and countryside. The local legend, recently uncovered by Arpad, was that there was a non-African non-Indian “people of color” living in the neighborhood of Boomer Flats, “between the sand-bush thickets and the river.” It was said that they lived on the very red mud banks of the river, and that they lived a little in the river itself.

  Then Dr. Velikof Vonk had come onto a tape in a bunch of anthropological tapes, and the tape contained sequences like this:

  “What do they do when the river floods?”

  “Ah, they close their noses and mouths and ears with mud, and they lie down with big rocks on their breasts and stay there till the flood has passed.”