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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Are there many more of these?” asked Robert Stokes who was one of the listeners and who seemed to be developing a nervous condition.

  “Billions of them,” said Simon.

  “Is it necessary to name them all?”

  “Apparently it is. I tell you that there is a multitude in the wings, and you do not believe me. Long John Silver, Major Hoople, Madame Lazonga, Auguste Dupin, Jenny Blanchard, Jeff Peters, Barnacle Bill—these are real.”

  “You are saying that every human type is already in theoretical existence and waiting to be recognized?” ventured Robert Stokes.

  “No, Robert. My words seem to convey nothing to you,” Simon lamented. “I am saying that every possible being is in actual existence always. I am saying that, though only a fraction of them are born physically into the world (that part is accidental and unimportant and can often be had for the asking), many others are made manifest by the thing known loosely as folklore. I am saying that these, and the myriad others not made known to you at all, are no less real.”

  But Simon Frakes was not able to convince his listeners. He named another hundred, and then another thousand, instances. The audience became restive: and that was strange, because the subject was an interesting one.

  Benny B-Flat visited Simon Frakes and Fairbridge O'Boyle later one evening. Benny was a song writer. “Now, gentlemen and professors,” Benny said to them, “I have a small hatchet of my own to grind. I have heard about this new frolic and I will not beat around the boscage. I believe that there is something in it for me. You talk about this psychic sea where all possible persons and gadgets already exist. And you say that the new things in the world are only old things taken out of that sea, and that we create nothing, Gentlemen, I am looking for the dipper to dip into that sea. Where can I find it?”

  “Here, if you are to find it anywhere,” Simon said. “What do you want to dip out?’

  “Tunes, tunes. I am a tune-smith. We grind them up and we distort them, but first we have to have them. If all possible tunes are already in existence, then who has custody of them?”

  “Oh Fiddle-Foot Jones and ten thousand others,” Simon said.

  “Can you arrange for me to meet them?” Benny asked. “And what is the tariff?”

  “I can arrange it, Benny B-F,” said Simon, “and the only tariff is the little passage coin that we make ourselves. For the smart ones it's easy.”

  “I'm smart. And these out-of-the-world tunes, how will they be?”

  “Familiar, Benny, as though you had known them forever: yet new and successful. They will serve your purpose. You believe, and others doubt. Here! I draw five lines on a sheet of paper. Not any five lines. These five lines. Then I pluck the drawing off the paper and make it real. It doesn't look like a coin, but you use it as a passage coin. Can you do that?”

  “I got it, Cy,” Benny B-Flat said. “You just have to show Benny a thing once. There are folks who wouldn't even know that this thing is a key or a coin. They wouldn't know where to look for the river or the door that it fits. I'm glad I'm not one of the slow folks. I've got it now, and thanks.”

  “Ah but, Benny, there's a catch,” Simon warned. “You'll remember it only if you're one person in a million.”

  “I'm one in a million,” said Benny B-Flat.

  But Fairbridge O'Boyle wasn't one in a million. Fairbridge was an ordinary man who now worried because he woke up every morning standing and clothed and with his hat on his head. He woke with residue of unremembered pleasure and with frustration of loss. He worried because he didn't know where he spent his nights. “I ought to have a wife,” he moaned. “I bet she'd find out where I spend my nights.” But he felt more and more that Simon Frakes was involved in the mystery.

  “Simon,” he said to his wispy friend. “I go somewhere at night. I see something. And then I forget. But it gnaws me. What do I do at night?”

  “Fairbridge, you cross a river you don't believe is there. You visit the multitudes which you swear do not exist. Amnesia of the visits is often the price of the visit. Once more I show you a device, and perhaps it will stick with you. There is a Greek name for it, and a childs' name for it, and these are the lines of it. See how simply they're drawn! Five lines, that's all. You should be able to retain them, but they have a slippery quality. Do you remember who used them when you were a child?”

  “No. Nobody used them. I have never seen lines like those before.”

  “But you have seen them. You have seen them and used them every evening for the last ten days. And you saw them when you were a child. In every group of children there is one who knows them. It is appointed that there should be one such child in every group. One day you played the game of ‘Disappear’, and he used the device and disappeared. And later he took you all with him on the passage over that river, on the bright crossing to the ‘billion worlds’. But later you forgot about it. And in most cases, the child who was the adept also forgot about it.”

  “What's the name of the River, Simon?”

  “Cocytus, of course.”

  “But that's a mythological river.”

  “Mythology is one trick to avoid complete forgetting.”

  “What is the name of the device, or the lines?”

  “Obolus, of course.”

  “But that's the name of an ancient and almost mythological coin. It's the word I wake up in the morning remembering when everything else has slid away. And it's myself, O'Boyle. But what is it all, Simon? What is the connection?”

  “It is only the making of an image solid, Fairbridge, ‘imagining’ in the true sense. Draw the lines on the paper. Then pluck them off in your hand. But with this thing you can cross the river to the worlds beyond the horizon.”

  “This time I'll remember, Simon. We'll visit a hundred universes, and I'll remember, remember, remember.”

  Fairbridge O'Boyle did visit many more than a hundred universes with Simon Frakes that night. He swore that he'd remember them all. And he didn't. He woke at dawn, standing and clothed and oblivious, a morning fool.

  Simon Frakes was giving the last of his lectures. His pleasant grin had taken on a look of futility. He hadn't been able to communicate with his listeners well, and whose was the fault of that? “If I haven't convinced you by now, then it may be hopeless,” Simon told his hearers. “ ‘If you will not believe me, neither will you believe one risen from the dead’ is one of your own scripture sayings. For my own case I can only say ‘If you will not believe me, neither will you believe one who is not yet born’. Every possible thought has already been thought out, every riddle has been unriddled, every epigram spoken. You have only to tap them. They have been in existence for millennia.”

  “Have you been born, Mr. Frakes?” Professor Dodgson asked quickly.

  “No, of course not. Do I look as if I'd been born?”

  “And where in space is this limbus of yours?” demanded Robert Stokes. “Just where is this teeming limbo of the unborn where everything already exists?”

  “It is fragmented. It is protean. It is everywhere,” said Simon. “Through a door and across a river. And there it is.”

  “Then why can't we visit it? That would be the only proof.”

  “A dozen of you here present have visited it, Robert. And you yourself have done so several times. But you are not fully convinced. And you forget.”

  “You are saying that this psychic sea is a sort of common human memory?” Robert fumbled. “But you cannot mean that it is real in the same sense that—”

  Simon Frakes swore a resounding oath from the limbus. It had never been heard in the world before. But it had a familiar ring to it, and it would catch on.

  “I thought a series of lectures by a man unborn would be interesting to you,” Simon said finally, his near-anger having passed. “I intended no more than a friendly visit from my country to yours, and I am sorry if it has gone amiss.”

  “You speak as if you were one of them,” said David Dean. “Your lectures have bee
n interesting, though perhaps not very informative. We are of that adulterous generation. We need a sign.”

  “Oh very well,” Simon sighed, “but the sign will not convince you.”

  Simon Frakes stood there with his grin that was a caricature as a cartoonist might have drawn it. He was there. Then only his grin was there, mocking them in the empty air.

  “I'm sure that I know that grin from somewhere,” Professor Dodgson mumbled. Ah, but memory is a cat-like thing. It creeps away soft-footed, and is gone.”

  “If you do not believe this, then you will not believe anything,” said the grin of Simon Frakes. Then the grin itself vanished, and that was the last that anyone ever saw of Simon Frakes in that neighborhood.

  “We are undone,” said David Dean. “We engaged a common trickster, a stage magician, to give the first series of the Trefoil Lectures. I doubt if we will be able to continue them under that name. To disappear from a lecture platform into thin air! How corny can you get! How could you have been taken in by that charlatan, Fairbridge?” “I taken in? I did not engage him, though he did become my friend.”

  “You certainly did engage him,” said Robert Stokes. “We three are the selection committee. I didn't engage him. And David didn't.”

  “I didn't either,” Fairbridge argued, “but somehow we agreed that Simon Frakes was our man. We accepted him before we ever saw him. We selected him, I now believe, before we even knew that there was such a man. And it appears that there wasn't.”

  One evening, Fairbridge O'Boyle walked down Oswald Lane knocking at all the doors, trying to find something that he had lost. Just what it was, he had forgotten, but he missed it mightily. But it is hard to phrase the questions about that emptiness he felt. The people in Oswald Lane all knew Fairbridge. They knew him as a young professor and timeless eccentric. But they were not able to help him. They did not have either barn nor cavern nor river nor contingent worlds behind their doors. They did not have multitude upon multitude, nor any primordial stuff at all.

  Well, had they any unborn persons there? Yes, one lady said: it should be born in September.

  “That isn't quite what I meant,” Fairbridge stumbled. “I'm sorry.”

  “Oh, I'm glad,” the lady said, “we've wanted one for so long.”

  But these were the people behind the regular doors that were numbered and listed. Where were the other doors? Fairbridge couldn't find the doors he sought: he couldn't find any of the doors that oughtn't to be there. And he couldn't remember what should be behind those doors if he found them.

  So the good-will mission of Simon Frakes had been without effect. Nobody had understood what he was trying to tell them, not even his friend Fairbridge O'Boyle. And nobody knows how to visit the myriad and interesting and valid worlds of the unborn, the company waiting in the wings.

  Except that in every group of children there is one who knows. He will do the trick, and the other children will wonder a little. And after a while they will forget to wonder. After another while, even the child who knew how to do it will forget all about it. And except for that—

  —and except for Benny B-Flat— Benny had to be shown a thing only once. He is an opportunist who is not likely to forget anything to his advantage.

  He still goes and listens to Fiddle-Foot Jones and a thousand others in a thousand worlds. He brings back the tunes that serve his purpose, so he stands high in his profession. His loot is on all the jukes, and they have what is necessary for good tunes:

  They sound familiar. And they are out of this world.

  Horns On Their Heads

  A power returned to stab and stun

  In evil'st children under sun,

  Primarily one.

  They clamber out of brimstone stew

  And claim the very Devil's due,

  Especially two.

  Most foul of demonology,

  They bring effect that should not be,

  Damned children three.

  All with a sparkling laughing roar

  They come like thunder to the door,

  In number four.

  —Hans Meneke, Mandrake's Children

  The pig-weeds lifted their heads and almost shouted. Such clumps of grass as still remained shook the dust from themselves and shined as green as they could. Junk gathered itself into neater and less junky piles. The garbage cans aligned themselves and they pretended to sparkle. The afternoon Surrogate fell silent in every building and house within three hundred meters, and the World Turned no more. There was a touch of unlawful order intruded here, powerful, frightening. The Devil's kids had a hand in this. Who else could set up such a pattern of disruption?

  But the Devil's kids were gone again like the wind. They struck and they fled. Lawful disorder returned. The weeds drooped once more and had no desire to shout. The grass pulled the dust over itself again and groaned. The junk reverted to junk. The garbage cans fell fully awry, and some of them burst in disgust. The Surrogate World Turned again. But none of it could ever be quite the same. After each visitation of the Devil's kids there remained minute changes in everything.

  Seed of the evil phlegm,

  Powers and dreads,

  Honey on tongues of them,

  Horns on their heads.

  They were a bad lot. They were manifestations that could not be. When they struck, even inanimate objects seemed to move and live. They were a dazzling and disturbing shine. Their end would be soon.

  For they'd been seen this time and identified. They'd been identified before, one or two of them, but not all four together. They'd soon be had. They had honey on their tongues; that was disallowed: they should have hard-hash on their tongues.

  The worst of the four was Annina of the Horns, a demon in the form of a nine-year-old girl. Her upswept black hair made the two horn-forms at her temples. She came clear-eyed always, with neither black nor blue nor green eyeglasses: an obscenity. How could she know who she was when she didn't have the identity glasses on? But none of the four wore them. She wore shoes, and shoes could only mean the cleft foot hidden. She sang, if one might call it that, but she didn't Sing the Thing.

  “Stutter and stumble, the rods and the hogs!

  Follow me, bushes, and bark like dogs!”

  Annina of the Horns sang songs like that, and it was always Devil's song, in that it had effect. For the rods and the hogs (the cars and the cycles) did stutter and stumble and fail of ignition and roar whenever she came by. They stopped and died. And the second part of her verse was even more frightful. The runt bushes and stunted trees did pull up roots and follow Annina, joyfully, and with a sort of green barking as well as greening bark. This was an impossibility. It had to be a manifestation of the outlawed power. Trees and bushes cannot uproot themselves and walk or gambol. They cannot enlarge themselves and shine with new health. They cannot multiply their numbers in as many minutes. Nor can they put down new roots in the middle of asphalt and concrete and glassified areas and concourses, and shatter them in surface and depth. It was the murderous power at work, and only the murder of the devil-girl would put an end to it.

  Daniel the devil-kid was nearly as bad as Annina. He was in about ten-year-old boy form. He was close-cropped and clothed and in no way to be trusted. But Daniel had power over the Lions, both the black-maned and the tawny-maned Lions. The Lions were the groups and the street gangs that had long since taken over all enforcement and control. Nobody, not even on the Ride, knew how they themselves were controlled: but that devil-kid Daniel could put them under total control.

  “Conk in the knockers, and hack at the knees!

  Bubble-heads, bubble-heads, freeze, Friz, freeze!”

  Daniel would chant such stuff, and every Friz of them would freeze completely, would become immobile, would become voiceless and sightless (incapable in the honkers and knockers), would stand stunned and stupid. And when they had them in such state, the devil-kids would take advantage of the Frizbees. They'd switch the identity eyeglasses from one Friz to another
. When the Frizzes came untranced, they'd not know who they were nor what sex or thing they appertained to. It didn't really matter, of course, for they were all module or interchangable persons. But the loss (or doubt) of identity (some of them had no loss or doubt, trusting completely whatever identity glasses they were wearing) upset some of them, made them uneasy, and there is nothing worse than an uneasy Frizzie.

  Ah, and then the evil kids would lob off the thatches, peel the polls, and crop the crines of the Frizzes, leave them hairless and hewn. Much worse, much more devilish, they'd sometimes cover the privates or the pseudo-privates of these Lions, these Frizzes, these Enforcers. And what did that do to the bravest and most meaningful slogan of them all: “Let it all hang out!”? The Lions were completely unlioned without their slogan.

  Michael (Quick Mick), the smallest of the demon-kids (he had the appearance of an eight-year-old boy), had his specialty.

  “Trap all the trippers, and rattle their town.

  Off of it! Off of it! Down, clown, down!”

  He'd sing that, and every tripper in the vicinity would come off it, dismally and suddenly. Great hulking horror, but they would come off of it suddenly. The untripped trippers were always in a sad state whenever Quick Mick had passed by. Mick had only little mousy hairs at his temple, but they stood up a little bit like horns.

  And the fourth of the demon-kids, Zorro or Azorro, was a mean-green-deme. He could do it all. He could levitate whole buildings for a sign and a wonder. He would lift up and reshuffle the houses and pads of the people so that when they came out of them (whenever they did bestir themselves to come out), they might find themselves in different streets or even in different towns.

  “Raise all the roofs and walls, shuffle the lot!