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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I forget. Did I have such a paper prepared? I will look in my own pockets.”

  Meanwhile, back on the mountain, back on the thundering mountain there were certain daring and comic persons rushing in and out and counting coup on the Wrath of God. It is a dangerous game. These were the big prophets who prayed so violently and sweat so bloodily and wrestled so strongly. It was they who fought for the salving or the salvation of the days, in fear and in chuckling, in scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking. The thundering mountain was a funny one this morning. It didn't reach clear to the ground. There was a great space between, and there were eagles flying under it. And the day, the day, was it really the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn? Was it really a Monday at all? Or was it a Thursday or an aleikaday?

  It was like another morning of not long before. The eagles remember it; the clouds remember it; the mountain wrestlers remember it dimly, though some of the memory has been taken away from them.

  Remember how it is written on the holy skins: “If you have faith you shall say to the mountain ‘Remove from here and cast thyself into the sea’ and it will do it.” Well, on that morning they had tried it. Several of the big prophets and wrestlers tried it, for they did have faith. They groaned with travail and joy, they strove mightily, and they did move the mountain and make it cast itself into the sea.

  But the thunders made the waters back off. The waters refused to accept or to submerge the mountain. The prayer-men and wrestlers had sufficient faith, but the ocean did not. Whoever had the last laugh on that holy morning?

  The strivers were timeless, of the prime age, but they were often called the “grandfathers' brothers” by the people. They were up there now, the great prophets and prayer-men and wrestlers. One of these intrepid men was an Indian and he was attempting to put the Indian Sign on God himself. God, however, was like a mist and would not be signed.

  “We will wrestle,” the Indian said to God in the mist, “we will wrestle to see which of us shall be Lord for this day. I tell you it is not thick enough if only the regular days flow. I hesitate to instruct you in your own business, and yet someone must instruct you. There must be overflowing and special days apart from the regular days. You have such days, I am sure of that, but you keep them prisoned in a bag. It is necessary now that I wrest one of them from you.”

  They wrestled, inasmuch as a man slick with his own sweat and blood may wrestle with a mist: and it seemed that the Indian won the lordship of a day from God. “It will be a day of grass,” the Indian said. “It will be none of your dry and juiceless days.” The Indian lay exhausted with his fingers entwined in the won day: and the strength came back to him. “You make a great thing about marking every sparrow's fall,” the Indian said then. “See that you forget not to mark this day.”

  The thing that happened then was this: God marked the day for which they had wrestled, but he marked it on a different holy skin in a different place, not on the regular skin that lists the regular days. This act caused the wrested Day to be one of the Days out of Count.

  Prophets, wrestlers, praying-men of other sorts were on the mountain also. There were black men who sometimes strove for kaffir-corn days or ivory-tree days. There were brown island men who wrestled for shellfish days or wild-pig days. There were pinkish north-wood men who walked on pine needles and balsam; there were gnarled men out of the swampy lands; there were town men from the great towns. All of these strove with the Lord in fear and in chuckling.

  Some of these were beheaded and quartered, and the pieces of them were flung down violently to earth: it is believed that there were certain qualities lacking in these, or that their strength had finally come to an end. But the others, the most of them, won great days from the Lord, Heydays, Halcyon or Kingfisher Days, Maedchensommer Days, St. Garvais Days, Indian Summer Days. These were all rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood. And yet all were marked on different of the holy skins and so they became the Days out of Count.

  “Days out of the Count,” Buford Strange was saying. “It's an entrancing idea, and we have almost proved it. Seasons out of the count! It's striking that the word for putting a condiment on should be the same word as a division of the year. Well, the seasons out of the count are all well seasoned and spiced. There are whole multiplex layered eras out of the count. The ice ages are such. I do not say ‘were such’; I say ‘are such.’ ” “But the ice ages are real, real, real,” Helen Hightower insisted. (Quite a few long hours had passed in the discussions, and now Helen Hightower, the wife of Christopher Foxx, was off her work at the telephone exchange and had put on her glad rags and joined the scholars.)

  “Certainly they are real, Helen,” Buford Strange said. “If only I were so real! I believe that you remember them, or know them, more than most of us do. You have a dangerously incomplete amnesia on so many things that I wonder the thunder doesn't come and take you. But in the days and years and centuries and eras of the straight count there are no ice ages.”

  “Well then, how, for instance, would local dwellers account for terminal moraines and glacial till generally?” asked Conquering Sharp-Leaf—ah, Vincent Rue.

  (They were at the university, in that cozy room in the psychology department where Buford Strange usually held forth, the room that was just below the special effects room of Prof. Timacheff.)

  “How did they account for such before the time of modern geology?” Buford asked. “They didn't. There would be a new boulder one morning that had not been there the day before. The sheep-herder of the place would say that the moon had drawn it out of the ground, or that it had fallen from the sky.”

  “You're crazy, Buford,” Adrian Montaigne said with a certain affection. “Why the ice ages then? Why should they have happened, even in times out of count? Why should they have left their footprints in the times within the count?” Adrian had very huge and powerful hands. Why had they not noticed this before?

  “I believe there was a dynasty of great and muscular prophets and ghost-wrestlers who wanted to call out the terrible days of Fimbul Winter,” Buford said in a hushed voice. “I don't know why they wanted such things, or why they sweated blood and wrestled prodigies to obtain them. They were men, but they are remembered as the frost giants.”

  “Oh my grand, grand uncles!” Day-Torch—Helen Hightower, rather, cried out. “Days of snow! Days of ice! Millions of them!”

  “You are saying that certain archetypes—” Kit-Fox began.

  “Shook the pillars of Heaven till the snow and ice fell down for a million days, for a million days out of the count,” Buford Strange finished.

  “Strange Buffalo, ah, Buford, you are crazy,” Christopher Foxx chided much as Adrian had. Christopher was talking, but the queerly smiling Adrian had now become the presence in the room. Adrian had the curious, under-rutile of the skin of one who has sweat blood in prayer and buffoonery and passion. Why had they not noticed that of him before?

  “I could almost believe that you were one of the great challengers yourself, Strange,” Christopher said to Buford, but he was looking at Adrian.

  “You strike me as with a lance, Kit,” Buford said sadly. “You uncover my mortification. For I failed. I don't know when it was. It was on a day out of the count. I failed a year ago or ten thousand years ago. I could not make it among the great ones. I was not cast out to my death: I was never in. There was room for me, and an opportunity for the ascent, but I failed in nerve. And one who has aspired to be a champion or prophet cannot fall back to be an ordinary man. So I am less than that: I am short of manhood. But, sadly, I do remember and live in other sorts of days.”

  “I believe that the aberrant days are simultaneous with the prosaic days,” Adrian Montaigne mused. Adrian was quite a large man. Why had they not noticed that before?

  “No, no, they are not simultaneous,” Buford was correcting him. “There are the days out of the count and there are the days in the count. Those out of count are outside of time so they cannot be simul
taneous with anything. You have to see it that way.”

  “You see it your way and I'll see it mine,” Adrian was stubborn. “Consider some of the aberrant times or countries: St. Garvais' Springtime, St. Martin's Summer (the Saints in these names were mountain prophets and wrestlers, but some of them were not at all saintly in their violence), Midas March (the very rich need their special season also: it is said that, in their special month, they are superiorly endowed in all ways), Dog Days, Halcyon Days, Dragon Days, Harvest May (what in the world is harvested in May?), All-Hallow Summer, Days of Ivory, Days of Horn, Indian Summer, Wicklow Week, Apricot Autumn, Goose Summer, Giant-Stone Days, Day of the Crooked Mile, the season called Alcedonia by the Latins. I tell you that all these days are happening at the same time!” This man named Adoration on the Mountain, or rather Adrian Montaigne, had a reckless sort of transcendence about him now.

  “No, they do not all happen at the same time,” Strange Buffalo was saying, “for the aberrant days of them are not in time. They are places and not times.”

  “Are there no night-time hours in the times out of time?” Vincent Rue asked.

  “No. Not in the same sense. They are in another province entirely,” Buford said.

  There was thunder in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff on the floor just above them, cheerful, almost vulgar thunder. Timacheff taught some sensational (sense response and also melodramatic) courses up there. But how did he get such special effects anyhow?

  “They do happen at the same time,” Adrian Mountain insisted, and he was laughing like boulders coming together. Quite a few things seemed to be happening to Adrian all at the same time. “They are all happening right now. I am sitting with you here this minute, but I am also on the mountain this minute. The thunder in the room above, it is real thunder, you know. And there is a deeper, more distant, more raffish thunder behind it which primitives call God's-Laughter Thunder.”

  “This gets out of hand now,” Vincent Rue protested. “It is supposed to be a serious symposium on spatial and temporal underlays. Several of you have turned it into a silly place and a silly time. You are taking too anthropomorphic a view of all these things, including God. One does not really wrestle with God in a bush or a mist, or ride in wildly on a pony and count coup on God. Even as atheist I find these ideas distasteful.”

  “But we are anthropoi, men,” Adrian proclaimed. “What other view than an anthropomorphic view could we take? That we should play the God-game, that we should wrestle with a God-form and try to wrest lordship of days from him, that we should essay to count coup on God, I as a theist do not find at all distasteful.

  “Why! One of them is failing now! It happens so seldom. I wonder if I have a chance.”

  “Adrian, what are you talking about?” Vincent demanded.

  “How could you do it, Adrian, when I could not?” Buford Strange asked.

  “Remember me when you come to your place, Adrian,” Day-Torch cried. “Send me a day. Oh, send me a day-fire day.”

  “And me also, Adrian,” Kit-Fox begged. “I would love to do it myself, but it isn't given to everyone.”

  There was a strong shouting in the room above. There was the concussion of bodies, and the roaring of mountain winds.

  “What in all the crooked days is Professor Timacheff doing up there this evening?” Vincent Sharp-Leaf asked angrily. “And what things are you doing here, Adrian? You look like a man set afire.”

  “Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian of the Mountain cried out in a voice that had its own crackling thunder. He was in the very transport of passion and he glistened red with his own bloody sweat. “One is failing, one is falling, why doesn't he fall then?”

  “Help with it, Kit-Fox! And I help also,” Day-Torch yowled.

  “I help!” Kit-Fox yelped. The room shuddered, the building shuddered, the whole afternoon shuddered. There was a rending of boulders, either on the prophet's mountain or in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff above them. There was a great breaking and entering, a place turning into a time.

  There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room from a great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry.

  “I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.

  “Timacheff, you fool!” Vincent Rue bawled to the space above them. “Watch your damned special effects! You're wrecking the place!”

  Unquestionably that Timacheff was good. He used his special effects in classes on phenomenology that he taught up there.

  “The head, the head! Don't let them forget the head!” Day-Torch cried in a flaming voice.

  “I just remembered that Timacheff is out of town and is holding no classes today,” Kit-Fox muttered in vulpine wonder.

  “Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian Mountain boomed. Then he was gone from the midst of them. He would be a factor, though, “in days to come.”

  “The head, the head!” Day-Torch flamed and scorched.

  Christopher and Vincent tried to straighten up the unconscious Buford Strange. They shook him, but he came apart and one arm came off him. He was revealed as a straw-man filled with bloody straw, and no more.

  “Why, he's naught but a poorly made scarecrow,” Christopher Foxx said in wonder. “He was right that one who falls back from it cannot become an ordinary man again. He will be less than man.”

  “That's funny. He always looked like a man to me,” Vincent Rue said.

  “The head, the head! You forget the head. Let the head fall down!” Day-Torch cried.

  And the head fell down.

  It smashed itself like a bursting pumpkin on the broken floor.

  4

  Under the town is a woolier town,

  And the blood splashed up and the head fell down.

  —Ballads, Henry Drumhead

  Barnaby's Clock

  It shall be what o'clock I say it is.

  Taming of the Shrew—Shakespeare

  “How old is grass?” a little boy asked his uncle who was an industrialist and eccentric.

  “About twenty million years old, Robert Dan,” said the i and e. “It's only from the Miocene. It's just about the youngest plant that we have and we're not sure that it's here to stay. There's a lot of things wrong with grass.”

  “How old is that hill?” the boy asked.

  “Oh, that hill is a young fellow: not over a million years old. It's from a very recent uplift and an even more recent eroding. We're on the edge of a change here though. Within three miles I can show you a hill that's seventy-five times that old.”

  “How old is Corn Flakes?”

  “About a hundred years old. They were developed by Dr. John H. Kellogg. Post Toasties, invented by Charles W. Post, are about the same age. If you are wondering about Shredded Wheat, it was first made by Henry D. Perkey at about the same time also.”

  “No, I hardly ever wonder about Shredded Wheat. How old is that cloud?”

  “Likely about an hour and seventeen minutes old. You can watch it still growing. When the wind changed here about forty-six minutes ago, that cloud was already pretty far into its formation. It was about twenty-two miles southwest of here then.”

  “How old is saxophones?”

  “Born in the year 1840. The sire and inventor was Antoine Sax.”

  “How old is mice?”

  “Not old at all. About twenty-five million years old; almost the newest thing in animals. The first mouse, with no antecedents at all, popped out from behind a piece of baseboard quarter-round (in a cave, I suppose) just about that long ago.”

  “How old is Billy Dukes?”

  “I don't know, Robert Dan. About eight years old, I guess: unless he's a midget, i
n which case he might be older.”

  “He's seven, the same as me. A lot of good it does to ask you things if you don't know the answers.”

  Aw, that isn't the way this account begins. We just put that in for fun.

  II

  that bald sexton, Time

  King John—Shakespeare

  “We need a clock that will work!” the great cosmologist cried angrily.

  “Sweet man, do we ever!” his wife put in. “You with a Nobel Prize for Functions and you can't even get the clock in the kitchen to function.”

  “The Uranium/Lead-Ratio clock is only good when there is no lead to start with,” the cosmologist complained, “and there is always lead.”

  “Get the lead out, that's what I keep telling you,” the wife said.

  “The Rubidium/Strontium-Ratio clock must be set by guesswork. Everything about Strontium is guesswork,” the cosmologist continued sadly. “The Potassium/Argon clock is a joke, and a sick joke at that. We need a clock that will work.”

  “The living-room clock still works part of the time,” the wife said, “but it hisses and spits sparks every time I plug it in.”

  “The Lead/Alpha-Particle-Ratio clock can be trusted only as far as its zircon crystals,” the cosmologist went on, “and I sure wouldn't burn my back on a bunch of zircon crystals. None of the RadioCarbon clocks is any good, and the Carbon-Fourteen clock is the worst of them all. You must always multiply its results by two or five or ten or even fifty to get a scientifically acceptable answer and I feel guilty every time I do that. And with every such clock I can think of there is always something wrong with the quality of the time. We need a clock that will work right every shot.”