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

by R. A. Lafferty

  —Motto taken from the rubble and dust

  of Loretta Sheen

  It was that old room over the garages that now rumbled fearfully as though to illustrate Barnaby's words. This was no ordinary rumble. We were all white-faced with fear, it was coming on so rapidly.

  Then it exploded. Kabloom!!

  It stunned ears, it paralyzed throats, it singed eyes. It buckled the floor of the study where we were and it knocked one wall completely out, even though the exploding room was in a building apart. It shook sawdust out of Loretta Sheen. It gave Harry O'Donovan a nosebleed, and it knocked Barnaby Sheen out cold. It is believed that it moved a small mountain over behind us, a small mountain known as Harrow Street Hill.

  But the outdoors, seen and heard and smelled and felt where the wall had been knocked out, was like no outdoors we had ever seen before. There were many thousands of conflagrations and eruptions and avalanches and floods and quakes; and all of it had to be within a very small area, between the old garages and the house.

  All the air was filled with reek and smoke and howling animate clouds. These clouds at first seemed like flying masses of biblical grasshoppers and locusts, plague creatures, but they had faces on them, and remembered parts. And they were upbeat and strong and not at all overwhelmed by the destruction.

  There were the blown-apart pieces of boys flying through the air, and some of them looked a lot like ourselves. There were flying effigies by the thousands. Why, there was one whole parade or convention with banners flying. “Re-elect President Parkinson” was the message on the banners. He had been the leader of the Cow-Moose Party when he was elected president. How had he been forgotten, when weak echoes of him had been remembered?

  There were our own grandfathers flying through the air. They weren't the two regular grandfathers that most of us remembered, but the other grandfathers that we had forgotten. And the air was full of tumbling and howling dogs such as hadn't been around here lately; what breeds they were! Baffinland Giants and Denver Block-Dogs, Hartstone Hunters and Blackfoot Swackers, Dansburry Dandies and Cowcatchers were there, with Brindled Birmingham Dogs and Grenadiers and Short-Haired Scratchers. How come we hadn't seen any of those sorts of dogs around for a long time?

  There were the other kind of automobiles, that looked like McCormick Reapers with their cylinder-like vanes spinning in the wind and powering them. Oh hokey, there were even chalky comics from the old Magic Lantern theatre circuits. There were the Sullivan Seven-Passenger Family Balloons flying well enough and only a little bit tattered from the explosion. There were the other kind of people and the other kind of animals and the other kind of motor dredges.

  Yeah, yeah, but most of it was people, and most of the people were in remembered masquerade costume. Only one whole parade? Why, there were perhaps a thousand parades, writhing and marching in that reek from the explosion; and yet, apparently, it was just one little room that had blown up. There were illustrated rocks floating through the air, thousands of trees worth of paper. But the whole thing had been no more than one clattering jolt, half-comic and half-frightening, and it was over with in an instant.

  It left after-images, though, as a fire in a fireplace will shuffle them and show them. We would be seeing them, with our eyes open or with them closed, for a long time. And the thing, though destructive, wasn't depressing; there was a lot of fun associated with it.

  A little while later, the dazed Austro came in, singed and smoking, but laughing. He had been in the room when it blew up, but he was a tough one. “Carrock, carrock, we bust the crock,” he said. It was the first complete sentence that he had ever spoken in English. He winked; he winked crookedly, he would never wink straight again. One of his eyes had been blasted askew. But he had salvaged an armload of patio blocks and he began to draw on them with happy abandon. And what he was drawing was the million-year-long saga of Rocky McCrocky.

  We remembered now. John Penandrew used to draw Rocky McCrocky when we were boys. But Austro was Rocky McCrocky. No wonder he had always looked familiar.

  “Cousin, rock-cousin,” said Harry O'Donovan, “you have given me back the lost two-thirds of my boyhood. Ah, that was one of me sailing through the air with my head half severed off. What a guy I was when I was him! You have intruded a lost million years into a small room over there. We will never remember it all, but we have remembered parts of it now, parts of it that we thought were lost forever.”

  “It could not have happened,” Barnaby muttered, still out, still over-powered. “That room was not library; that room was not annals.”

  It was, though.

  Somewhere there is the full story about man and his kindred, but pieces of it were right here. Loretta dribbled sawdust, and a profound written motto fell from her open throat. That was part of it, if only it could be read. Mary Mondo, that schizo ghost, laughed in that way ghosts have. She remembered a lot about what and who we are. And Austro drew the Rocky McCrocky cartoons on blocks of flat stone and passed them around the neighborhood as a weekly feature. There is a lot of good information to be found in the weekly Rocky McCrocky documents.

  And Mad Undancing Bears

  1

  Recurring group madness as a world problem could be easily solved if only there were some standard to determine which are the mad-men and which are the keepers.

  Inmate Number 444075864,

  Platt Institute for the Criminally Insane

  Though fight them yet with ding and din

  And sanity of noise,

  The mad things come like silent sin

  With dress and pace and poise.

  Peach Orchard Ballads

  They had been wandering forty years in the desert, so most of them had been born there. There were probably two hundred small groups of them, and they came now for bloodless conquest of the dark and dismal cities of the plains and valleys. They could hear the din of the cities from many miles away, they could see the smoke above them like clouds during the day, and the dancing lights at night.

  The desert that the small groups came from were the badlands, the silent salt plains, the alabaster hills and the potato hills, the gopher gulches and the bear brackens of middlewestern North America. And other continents had other deserts where perhaps similar movements were taking place. The silent things were coming to the towns.

  “The deserts are always the same,” Polycarp was saying softly. “If there are devils in the desert (and there are) they are always the same primordial devils. If there is madness in the deserts (and we know that there is) yet it is always the same madness. The deserts do not change, and we who come out of these waste places do not change except in our generations and our cycles. We have a cleansing, a sandblasting effect on the cities.

  “But the cities change; and their madness (though always of the same virus) takes different form at each appearance.”

  They were sandaled in soft leather against the hot earth. They were enfolded against the sun in dressed bearskins and deerskins and wolfskins. They were hooded with the head skins of bears, and the bears' ears were like horns on them.

  They talked happily and liltingly, but they did not sing. Song was banned to them for this while because its name had been stolen by a different and dirty thing. They walked thirty kilometers a day with a springiness and swing, but they did not dance. Dance was barred to them for the days of their dynasty because its name had been burgled by a shoddier and more dismal thing. But the birds that followed them thick as clouds sang, and the white-tailed deer and blackfoot ferrets danced about them.

  “The Third Muggers and the Fifth Choppers are coming to kill us,” Scholastica said lightly. “I know that it is a glorious thing to die, but we come for the bloodless conquest of the cities and our effect is lost if we die too easily. We are rapt, but we are told that it is not we who are mad. Yet we really have no instructions. We have no statement other than that it will be given to us in that hour what to do. Have we even any leaders?”

  These people were neat,
they were clean, they were combed and trimmed; and the men of them were unbearded. It gave a youthfulness to all of them that was seldom seen elsewhere. They had an easy grace for all the uneasiness of their situation.

  “We do have leaders,” said Vitus, “and they also will be revealed to us in that hour. As to the muggers, mind them not. In older days they ambushed and murdered; but now, and to us, they are a sick joke of themselves. They come with blaring noise boxes to their ears. In the din of the cities their tactics might still succeed, but here in the quiet desert how is a noisy ambush to take us? And they are slower afoot than ourselves.

  “The choppers, however, are something else. They have the speed of their machines, and they can search out and signal and combine murderously.”

  “ 'Tis a chopper comes now with a great roar,” Margaret said. “He has left his followers many kilometers behind and comes like a giant alone. I see his face as in a childhood dream. Dream animals, particularly those dreamed by very young children, are often accurate depictments of extinct animals; did you know that? But he is not quite an animal, and I am not quite a young child. And he isn't extinct.”

  “There are also dream people and quasi-people,” Fabian said. “They are dreamed by adults, sometimes dreamed waking by adults, and perhaps they are real. What about the ‘typhonian’ features of dreamed people? Did all people once have typhonian features?”

  “This one has,” Perpetua said. “Underneath his hairiness he has them clearly. This one is a Typhonian.”

  “He is an Angel,” said Dadacus. “He is an angel unrevealed even to himself. That is what a typhonian is. One of us here must reveal him. Then he will be worth many of the others. We receive the best of them in compensation for our losses.”

  The whine of the approaching chopper-cycle had become a scream. The dust of it was a pillar in the air. It came into sight as a howling dot at the bottom of the pillar, and it grew. Riding it was the chopper whom several of them had seen while he was still far below the horizon. He was a huge, bearded, slavering man, the whites of whose eyes were as big as apples, and the black pupils of them were like insane black holes.

  His name, lettered in crazy print on his cycle, was Whole-Hog McCloud. He was hairy and naked and obese, a mad and frothing giant. But did he really look like that?

  Only at first glance. In reality he had the plastic smooth, primordial, unfinished look of a typhonian. He could still be molded into anything. But the noise of him and of his apparatus!

  He had amplifiers on his exhaust; he had amplifiers all over his machine and all over himself. He screamed to a skidding halt, throwing sand and rocks and gravel a hundred meters.

  He was bloodied in his hairy nakedness from his skidding fall, and he had intended it so. He arose and arose again, appearing more giant-like than was possible.

  “We fight to the death,” the big chopper roared through his amplifiers. “I fight and kill you all at once.” And he came at them swinging a length of chain in one of his huge hands.

  “No, we wrestle to life,” Celsus said. Celsus was the biggest man of this group of desert people. “And you strive with myself only, not with all at once. I'm a mightier wrestler than you'd believe, and my help is from otherwhere.”

  But part of Celsus' help was from those present. Domitilla spread out her hands, and there was silence. The fallen chopper-cycle coughed and its engine died.

  The electronic noise boxes that were hung on the machine all conked out with their amplifiers. There was left only quiet and little puffs of black smoke. The throat amplifier of the giant Whole-Hog McCloud likewise went silent with a bigger puff of blacker smoke. The giant tried to roar again, but his only noise was a weak, hoarse croaking.

  “My noise, my noise, I need my noise,” he croaked. “My strength is in my noise.”

  Did someone laugh at him? It may have been the desert itself, or the white-tailed deer or the ferrets; or those birds named bullbats that are unmannered birds. The people of the desert group smiled at him with quiet compassion, though Domitilla still spread out her quieting hands.

  It was tall, dusty noon, and the battle joined. Whole-Hog came at Celsus swinging his chain, and he caught him a solid bloody blow with it. But the strong wrestler, though staggered, had hold of the chain in the middle now. He held two links of it in his wrestler's hands; he broke the chain. (He really had strength or help from otherwhere.) He held one half of the chain loosely in his hand now and left Whole-Hog with the other.

  Then the wrestler Celsus smiled and threw his own length of chain away; but Whole-Hog kept his. They closed, they grappled, and the pinioned Whole-Hog was more hampered than aided by his chain weapon. Whole-Hog seemed less huge when the two of them were twined together, only a little larger than Celsus. They wrestled for a great long while: the naked hairy typhonian and the big youngish man in the bearskin cloak.

  Jacob once wrestled with a Presence for a great part of the night and until dawn. This was at a place named Phanuel near a stream called Jaboc. Whole-Hog McCloud wrestled with Celsus from tall noon till near dark at a place that was very like Phanuel and was near a stream called Coyote Creek.

  Cecilia, with her quick lilting voice, told the old and ever-new account of the erstwhile giant while he wrestled. It was all new to his ears that had been stunned for so many years and were freed only in recent hours. But he heard it and he changed. His eyes changed as he wrestled, and his whole form. Cecilia talked on and on (though it was necessarily a very compressed account that she gave) and Domitilla still held her quieting hands spread out.

  Just as the sun touched down the two big men stopped their wrestling. “Your name is no longer Whole-Hog,” Celsus said. “It is Whole-Man now.”

  “Here is water,” said Whole-Man McCloud. “What is to prevent you taking me ritually into it?”

  They did so. And when they came out of the water, Domitilla wrapped Whole-Man in a bearskin robe. By this he became, like the rest of them, a berserker.

  They moved on in the early night. There had been ten persons in this group; now there were eleven.

  The people of the cities didn't understand how the desert epidemic grew. It grew by such accretions as this.

  2

  The shock so stopped the world that one

  Could hardly hear the flack.

  There reeled the psychedelic sun.

  Rabidity was back!

  Peach Orchard Ballads

  One of the nineteen persons comprising the secret society named Glomerule that ruled much of the world was a bear and not a man: His name was Boris Medved.

  Actually, only ten of the high members were men, the other eight being women; and it's an open question whether women or bears are the stranger species.

  Boris looked like a man. He was neither more nor less hairy than the men of the society, neither more nor less unhandsome. But there are certain differences between even the most manlike bear and a man (so Doctor Rockter said); and by these differences, Boris was a bear. He was determined, however, not to let this influence him either way in his judgments of the mad bear clan which was reappearing here and there out of the deserts. Boris was a most fair-minded individual. (And let us not forget the great contributions he had made to Rat-Track Rock.)

  “But there is no doubt that the madness has reappeared,” Boris shouted to his colleagues Doctor Rockter and Beryl My-Thing. “There were a dozen reports yesterday, a hundred today; tomorrow there may be thousands.”

  “We had our century of sanity,” Beryl cried out. “They can never take that away from us. I had hoped that it would last forever, though; or at least for my own time.”

  “And it will and it must last!” Doctor Rockter trumpeted. “What are even a thousand cases of this new insanity among the billions of us? We will isolate it. We will solve it. We will not let ourselves be driven mad by the reappearing madness. We'll dog it down. We'll blast it out. The madness is in the berserker form this time. Does that put you in an embarrassing position, Boris?”
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  “It does not!” Boris roared. “They say (that is, you say it as doctor) that I'm a bear, medically and phyletically, so I suppose that I am. But these mad berserkers are apparently humans of a bear clan who dress in bearskins. They should put the rest of you in an embarrassing position more than myself. It is nearly always in the human species that these madness epidemics appear. But I have nothing but hatred and contempt for these berserkers. Yes, and fear, for the infection does spread.”

  They didn't really have to shout, cry, trumpet or roar out their words like that. It was ingrained, almost innate habit. They could all read mouth; and they weren't able to hear each others' words above the din in any case.

  “Doctor Rockter, how is the madness caught? How is it infectious?” Beryl screeched. “And where does it abide in the centuries between?”

  “We don't know,” Rockter howled. “Several cycles back, in the old world, mad people of the fish clan or catfish clan lived underground in what were called catacombs. We believe that the mad people of the bear clan live underground in what are called barrows, though this guess may be based on a false etymology. And we don't know what triggers their coming up from underground, or how the madness infection is passed on. One explanation (which in itself seems mad to me) is that they pass it on by some spermotopheric spasm at the moment of their deaths, so that one dead berserker makes as many as ten live ones. I'll not believe it. I would guess that themselves made up that tale so that we'd be fearful of killing them.”

  “But we are not!” Boris thundered. “The Third Muggers and the Fifth Choppers are in the field now killing them as fast as they find them. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be fast enough.”

  Harry Stonefoot, Gaster Blaster, and Helga Navel (three other high members of Glomerule) entered the meeting room. (Everybody remembers Helen and her Umbilical Chords, the greatest, or at least the loudest, string band ever. They'd done so much for Pock Rock a decade ago.)