There really should not be footsteps out here in the water, surely not the footsteps of a left-footed stalking man, a club-footed man who strode more heavily on that left club. There shouldn't be that inexplicable splashing sound to the footsteps as though they were going through water no more than ankle deep.
“He will follow me for the rest of my short life,” Finnegan groaned. “He is monomaniac. He will believe that Saxon Seaworthy is still alive and sending him instructions: and he will receive those instructions. After a while, I will believe it also. Dotty said that Saxon would put a trail on me and kill me with it after he was dead: X said the same thing. Well then, he will kill me with his stalker, but he will not kill me tonight.”
Finnegan was over the hump now and free. Except for the footsteps, except for the footsteps. Except for the footsteps even on the water.
1. The “Apocryphal Passage” was intended by the author to have been included as the ending to The Devil Is Dead. This piece, as well as an explanatory letter in the hand of the character Absalom Stein that was to have been inserted between chapters ten and eleven of that book, arrived at the publishers (Avon books) too late for inclusion. It was first published in Episodes of the Argo. This is its second appearance. — ed.
Company In The Wings
1.
Ahoy! and Oho, and it's who's for the ferry?
(The briar's in bud and the sun going down):
And I'll row ye so quick and I'll row ye so steady,
And ‘tis but a penny to Twickenham Town.
—Theophile Marzials, Twickenham Ferry
Waking from full pleasure, coming out of vast worlds into the narrow reality, feeling them all slip away, and grasp into hold the pieces of them while their continents dissolved and their mountains toppled, holding to just one phrase that might be the key to their reconstruction, to one word even (obolus was the word) — coming full awake then with all of it lost —
Fairbridge O'Boyle had been the ‘morning fool’ before, waking empty from exciting dreams that he could not hold onto. But there was a difference this time. He did not awake in bed, but standing and clothed. He did not know how he had spent the night, save that it had been elsewhere and that it had been pleasurable.
He was in his own room, but he knew that he had just come into it. And where had he come from? There was no key to it, unless that odd word ‘obolus’ might be the key. It seemed more like a dream-distortion of his own name O'Boyle though. Or unless his friend Simon Frakes was the key, the skeleton key to fit the lock. Simon was very like a key in the metallic thinness of him.
And he was very like a skeleton. It always seemed as though Simon had put his flesh on carelessly and could slough it off at any time. It was hard to believe in him when he wasn't present: and the aroma of the pleasurable and lost night did have a certain tang of Simon to it.
“It seems to me Simon,” Fairbridge had said to him once, “as if I had discovered you, as if you would disappear if I cast you out of my mind.”
“Don't do it, Fairbridge. You're playing with smoke,” Simon had protested with near excitement. “I'd rather you didn't try that experiment. It might be painful for both of us. Keep me in the back of your mind somewhere. Even keep me forgotten there. But don't cast me out.”
This was a funny conversation for a morning fool to be remembering now, but all conversations with his friend Simon had been a little bit odd. Simple Simon Frakes, so Fairbridge used to call him sometimes; but has anyone really understood the profundity of the mythos of Simple Simon? Simplicity is a much more complex thing than its opposite, duplicity. Simplicity is the gathering of everything together into entity. Duplicity is only the wanton scattering of the pieces again.
Morning fools really do think in such terms. Then the morning fool Fairbridge undressed and went to bed, but set the clock for only two hours hence. He was a late morning fool this day, and it would soon be afternoon. And there was another of the fabulous lectures to enjoy that afternoon.
The man who was giving the lectures was Simon Frakes, with his grin that was a two-line caricature, and with his puzzling, ironic way of talking. He was giving the inaugural series of the Trefoil Lectures, and he was making a shambles of them.
Simon's presentation, ‘THE VALIDITY OF IMAGINED CREATURES’, had caused many second thoughts among his listeners. To imagine, he said, is to make images, and images may be remarkably solid. If they come out of a lively imagination they will be live images. And Simon demonstrated with a bit of stage trickery. He made a live image, that of a suddenly loquacious young girl. There was a certain nervousness that ran through all of them who watched him do this. It was only dispelled when he unmade the image again. But an uneasy feeling had begun to grow. What if there really was a grain of truth in his thesis? His lecture, ‘THE TERTIARY LIMBUS’, had caused further unease. To the Limbus Patrum and the Limbus Infantum he added the Limbus Nundum Natus. None of his listeners believed in Limbo. They didn't believe in the limbo of the Fathers, nor in the limbo of the Infants who died before reaching reason; but it was spooky to think that there might be a third limbo, the limbo of those not yet born.
His talk, ‘THE MULTITUDE IN THE WINGS’, had caused some to question his sanity, and others to question their own. It was a creepy rhapsody that set up resonances in even the dullest of minds. It wasn't a possible thing, but all the hearers seemed vaguely to remember encounters with that multitude. It struck a chord, and the chord sang and rattled in their heads. Something would have to be done about this disquieting man.
(This day, Fairbridge O'Boyle had had his second awakening, to the clock, had risen and dressed, and had gone to Simon's latest sortie.)
This sortie, ‘THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION’, questioned a fundamental thought process. Simon began to cause a real alarm, and the falsetto chorus was raised against him. He was either kidding, or the world itself had for a long while been kidding all the people in it. And all the good and uneasy people seemed to hold Fairbridge O'Boyle responsible for the unorthodoxies of his friend Simon.
“But the difficulty with all such arguments is that they cannot be proved,” Fairbridge argued over coffee with his friend Simon after the lecture, and after the little tempest that followed it had scattered for a while. “Oh, but I proved it to you last night, Fairbridge,” Simon said easily. “Have you forgotten the proof?”
“Worse than that, Simon: I've forgotten last night. I've meant to ask you whether we were together last night.”
“Together, yes, except for a few times you deserted me for greener folk. Let us ride the same horse to another country then. Say what you consider proof and I will furnish it.”
“The things would have to be experienced literally for proof.”
“Then we will literally experience them. Get your hat.”
“Where are we going?”
“Oh, to one of the purlieus of the limbi. Man, don't hang back! The crossing-over is always one of the shining things, and it never grows old. The crossing itself is worth almost everything. And then it's to arrive at the second greatest adventure of them all, and you don't even have to die to achieve it. There are one billion oysters that are yours for the opening, and every one of them is a world. Pick one!”
“How? How?”
“Oh, here's maybe the easiest of a billion ways.”
Simon Frakes drew a five-line diagram on a piece of paper. Then he plucked it off the paper and it was solid in his hand.
“What is it?” Fairbridge shrilled.
“It's just a gadget. The name of it is the ‘obolus’.”
“But that's the word I hung on to. It's the name of an old coin.”
“Who says a coin can't be a pentagram? Yes, it is a coin. It's the passage-penny.”
“Could I do that?” Fairbridge demanded.
“You could if you remembered it, Fairbridge, but you probably won't. You've seen it done before, and you've forgotten it completely.”
Simon's grin was a two-line caricature. Th
en Simon faded out and only the grin remained. “Come along,” the grin said, and it moved off. Remembering it as something that had happened before, Fairbridge O'Boyle, stumbling and hurrying, followed the grin out of the door and down the now darkening Oswald Lane on the second greatest adventure of them all.
Oswald Lane is two hundred years old and only two hundred and twenty yards long. Its locations are all numbered and listed and taxed. There are only a certain number of doors there, and only a certain number of persons living behind them. There is not room for an entire unknown world to exist there, surely not room for millions of such worlds.
Fairbridge followed Simon Frakes (or Simon's grin, and a bit more of him again by then) through a door where there had never been a door before. One shining moment that could not be measured in time! It was the crossing-over itself that was worth almost everything! It was unforgettable, of course, and incomparable. Whoever has crossed-over can never be the same again. Ah, but everybody in the world has crossed-over at least once, one way or the other.
Everybody in these new worlds had not necessarily crossed-over though. Fairbridge and Simon were into new worlds then, without the moment itself being at all dismal. They were into a large room that was itself an elusive world; and there was no room for so large a room in all of Oswald Lane.
It was a joke, of course. It was one of the happy, enduring jokes that couldn't be spoiled. Fairbridge laughed with delight. A billion choices there were, but there couldn't be a more apt choice than this one.
One couldn't take in all that room at once. It was a detailed world of too many dimensions, yet the pattern that Fairbridge O'Boyle got was one of delightful scantiness.
How to example it? What thing to take of the many for its mark?
In that realm, chair might have front legs but no back legs, you see. If it were in a certain perspective where the back legs couldn't be seen, what need to have them? The room did not have four walls all at one time. It had sometimes two walls and sometimes three. However could you see all four walls at one time?
If one thing hid another, it was not necessary for the hidden thing to be. A person seen in profile had no need of another side of his face. Time enough to have it when it would be visible. If you looked fast enough you could catch that world and its people unlined and abridged, but you had to look fast.
“What is it, Simon?” Fairbridge asked. “Not that it matters. It's amazing. Are they all so tricky and happy?”
“It's one of the pseudo-bucolic sets. Ah, there are countless ones much more tricky and much happier, but this is an easy one for beginners, and you remain persistently a beginner.”
“Papa says for you to come in,” said a girl that Fairbridge had always known and with a name that he would never remember. “Grandpa says to give the young jackanapes some pop-skull. Great-grandpa says that you look like a peddler. Are you?”
Did she really speak? Or were her words lettered in a cartoonist's balloon over her head? No matter. In her pleasant and unsubstantial way she spoke. This was glad simplicity itself, which is integrated and total simultaneous being. And the pop-skull was joltingly excellent. There was a curious lack that wasn't felt as a lack.
“Do you know that this pop-skull is only half a bottle?” Fairbridge asked, “not in the sense that it's only half full, but there's no back to the bottle. I turn it around, and then there's a back but no front.” He looked at the world in new amazement. This world was too staged a thing to be real.
“Why, this is the archetype!” he cried. “The frame we are in here, what did Simon call it? Shall we call it pseudobucolic social satire?’
“Yes, let's do,” the girl agreed. “It's fun to call things by names like that.”
Dionysus was there, but as a clown. But he had appeared a dozen times as a comic-strip clown with his real identity unknown. This was like a barn dance, but it was a world as well as barn, and there were tens of thousands of folks here—Cousin Claude the country clown and Cousin Clarence the city dude, Clarabelle and Clarissa and five thousand other cousins, scampers and gaffers and gawkers of all ages and sexes, patch-pants'd and white-bearded and coon-crazy and merry.
They drank mountain-dew and green-fog and panther-sweat and golden-moonshine. There was round-singing and ballad-singing and country-singing; and Fairbridge became drunk with it all. There were jokes and bejangles and stories, the rich originals of them all. Did you know that some of the oldest jokes in the world haven't been told in the world yet?
And anomalous intrusions! Whatever would we do without the wonderful anomalous intrusions? Old trains were running through the room, hooting and screaming; and with red-hot pieces falling off them. And many of these trains were never to appear on ordinary earth. And the father of the scanty-clad girl (there was no back to her dress, or to her, unless she turned around, and then there was no front to either), the father came with a shotgun that was like an elephant gun.
“All right, young jig-snapper,” the old father said. “You have jazzed my daughter. Now we have the marrying.”
“This is a primordial village psychic module. You know that, don't you?” Fairbridge said to the outrageous but not really outraged father. After all, Fairbridge O'Boyle was a professor.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” the father agreed. “Are you ready for the ceremony?’
“And the shotgun motif is absolutely primordial,” Fairbridge continued. “I didn't realize that before.”
“The shotgun is prime,” the father said, “but it blasts.” And he blasted the backside of Fairbridge clear off with it. Oh well, it wouldn't show unless Fairbridge turned around. He might as well join these merry people in their attributes.
“Simon, you say that there are millions of such universes and all different?” Fairbridge gasped, and he was now filled with the enormity of the idea.
“Everything that is is.” Simon said simply. “Come, we'll visit more of them.”
“Drop back any time,” the girl said. “There's always some of us home.”
They visited dozens, hundreds of universes. They had, in fact, been visiting countless of them simultaneously, and Fairbridge found himself to be hundreds of involved persons, and all of them himself. This was hilarity, this was transcendence. Some of these worlds were incredibly urbane and sophisticated, even though the people of them were barefooted — till you happened to look at their feet. Then, somehow and momentarily, they acquired hasty shoes. You could catch them unshod for a bare instant. Some of the worlds were bucolic in a way that even that first module world couldn't be. Some were angelic, some were rowdy, some were mind-bursting with their wily intellectuality. Some had a wit with such bite that they snapped whole members off one. Simon Frakes and Fairbridge O'Boyle crowded whole lifetimes into that evening and night. These were the multitudes beyond count, the absolutely unforgettable things. And Fairbridge woke in the morning, standing and clothed, a morning fool with the manifold memories of the past night slipping away from him forever.
2.
What bride and what ferry, what bright ford, is this it?
What half-penny passage so open to get!
If miss you this crossing, forever you'll miss it.
To worlds in the wings all unbornable yet.
—Benny B-Flat, Cocytus Crossing
That evening, Simon Frakes lectured again to all the learned folks:
“Please understand one thing: all imagined things have reality. They are not because we imagine them. We imagine them because they are. Imagination is only the encounter with their reality. From the Olympian gods to Boob McNutt, all are persons. To imagine the non-existing is an impossibility. All are with the billions in that limbus. All are entities in the psychic pool. I speak literally.
“All are real: Kate Fennigate, Moll Flanders, Dirk Stroeve, Ester Jack, Audifax O'Hanlon, Percy Gryce, Virginia Carvel, Count Mosco, Dinah Shadd, Octavia Beaupree, Richard Nixon, Flagman Thiel, Gil Blas, Red Hanrahan, Handy Andy, Sebastian Marchman, Gippo Nolan, Mildred Rogers,
Isolde, Deirdre, Frank Couperwood, Sir Kid Rackrent, Jasper Petulengro, Cy Slocum, Lucy Dashwood, Hairbreadth Harry, Julien Sorel, Felix Kennaston, Harold Teen, Matthew Bramble, Abe Kibble, Horatio Maltravers, Constance Povey, Joe Calash, Widow Wadman, Genevieve Rod, Polly Peachum, J. Hartford Oakdale, Nat Buntline, Meg Marsh, Gavin Dishart, Casper Gutman, all are real.”
“You mean, of course,” said David Dean who was one of those responsible for the lectures, “that they are real in the sense that they bear a verisimilitude to inner reality, that their expression rings true, that they are valid imaginative creatures.”
“No, I don't believe that I mean anything like that at all,” Simon said. “You miss my point. I say that all the entities in the psychic pool are real—(is there any other way to say ‘real’?)—that they are beings as much as you are a being, that those we know are only those recognized by chance, and that the others are no less real. All are real: Barney Google, Jurgis Rudkus, Bounder J. Roundheels, Morgan Fenwolf, Madonna Zilia, Wolf Larsen, Hippolyte Schinner, Cliff Sutherland, Abu Kir and Abu Sir (they are a pair), Madame Verdurin, Arabella Allen, Andy Gump, Elmer Tuggle, Lorelei Lee—”
“Will you come to your point, Simon!” Fairbridge O'Boyle suggested. The listeners were beginning to look at each other uneasily.
“I am on my point completely,” Simon maintained. “One cannot give too many instances: Salvation Yeo, Horseshoe Robinson, David Harum, Florence Udley, Gregers Werle, Daisy Buchanan, Delphine de Nucingen, Paul Bunyan, Becky Sharp, George Bungle, Daisy Bell, Whisky Johnny, Casey Jones, Althea Pontifex, every person in song, story, picture, play, dream, or delirium is real. Wing Biddlebaum, Happy Hooligan, Snuffy Smith, Lady Sarah Macgreggor, Peter Canavan, Colley Cibber, Enoch Oates.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 132
