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

by R. A. Lafferty

  They also sang barbershop harmony in the room, sometimes the same four men, sometimes Austro singing bass in place of George Drakos. But the fine, high voice of Harry O'Donovan, the deep, dark voice of Austro, and the indifferent voices of Benedetti and Sheen didn't need an artistic secretary for their functions.

  Nevertheless we had an artistic secretary now, and she didn't intend to withdraw. Daisy wasn't shy.

  “We will have to use this room and no other,” she said once. “It is the only room I ever saw that is large enough to portray the world. And I believe that, for the optimization of the product, two changes must be made in this group, Mr. Sheen. Get rid of the gaff and get rid of the Laff—” (she meant Austro and myself) “—and bring in any gentlemen from the list I have here as replacements. The improvement will be axiomatic and immediate. You'll see.”

  “Impossible,” said Barnaby. “We will not allow ourselves to be changed or improved. We are a polyander, unchangeable and unsunderable.”

  “I don't even know what a polyander is,” Daisy admitted with distaste.

  “It is a group of men who have become one and will remain so,” Barnaby said. “And what will you do with this polyander, young woman?”

  “Commit polyandry with it, I guess,” Daisy hazarded. “Oh, is that the same word, or are there two words just alike?”

  Daisy wasn't the only one playing it odd here. Roy Mega, a young electronic genius who worked for Barnaby, had also begun to haunt the study instead of applying himself to his job down at the laboratory. And there was a hint of conspiracy: both Roy and Daisy belonged to the amateur, though excellent, Rushlight Players. But don't look at playwright Harry O'Donovan if you're talking about conspiracy: he had not conspired with Daisy nor with Roy. “Is it that I'm paying you good money to be fluffing off out here rather than laboring at the lab, Roy?” Barnaby Sheen asked that young man.

  “No you're paying me shoddy money to invent, originate, stumble over, or put together new and usable techniques. We both know that these are most often uncovered by the process of fallout. I see very fruitful electronic fallout in our employing this stuffy room and its denizens as a hotbed for seedling art, a basis for art amplification. A laboratory is where one labors; this old monastery room is a laboratory for me for the moment.” That's what Roy Mega told Barnaby Sheen. Roy was sketching electrical diagrams of fruitful fallout and seedling art as he talked. Austro was studying them avidly. Austro couldn't read words very well yet, but he could read mathematical equations and electric schematics with excited understanding.

  “Ah, well, what is art, seedling or otherwise?” Barnaby asked.

  “Art is the Garden of What Ought to Be selected out of the Jungle of What Is,” Roy quoted from somewhere.

  “Not quite,” Barnaby argued. “Good art is the privileged outpouring of the Holy Spirit, sometimes from one unworthy vessel into another unworthy vessel. Bad art is the outpouring of an unholy spirit. The good is preferable.”

  “No. Real art is the struggle between good and bad,” Cris Benedetti argued. “There cannot be drama without this struggle; there cannot be real art without this dynamism. Static or undramatic art is no art at all. There is only one form of struggle in the world and that is between the Holy Spirit and the unholy or unclean spirits.”

  “I'm an unwashed spirit but I'm not an unclean spirit,” Mary Mondo said out of the air. “There's a difference.”

  “Who is talking out of the air?” Daisy Flavus demanded. “You're a neutral spirit, Mary,” Barnaby told her gruffly. “Or at least you have a high percent of neutral spirits in you.”

  “The Putty Dwarf used to say that art was smoke without fire,” the ghost girl Mary Mondo went on. “And he said that all flesh should be of cardboard or it might be dangerous and alive. I haven't any flesh, so I'm a cardboard spirit. I haven't any art either.”

  Mary Mondo and Loretta Sheen, the broken ghost and the broken doll, were artless denizens of that room.

  “Who is that talking out of the air?” Daisy asked again. “Who are you, smoke-without-fire girl? You're a split-off personality who has lost her prime person; that's who you are.” Daisy was correct in this.

  Mary Mondo was the schizoid or split-off personality of a girl named Violet Lonsdale, and Violet was long since dead.

  “I can always use another personality,” Daisy continued. “I see you now, girl. You're a smoky black smudge. I'll absorb you, spook-kook.”

  “You'll not absorb me, Daisy, nor make an under-person of me,” Mary Mondo said.

  “But I will absorb you,” Daisy insisted. “And that big busted doll on the sofa, she's unsanitary. Out she goes! She gets sawdust all over everything.”

  “No, you will not get rid of Loretta,” Barnaby said shortly. “She seems to be a big doll, but she is really the undead body of my own daughter Loretta — and her sawdust is self-renewing, she'll never run out of it.”

  “All right, Loretta, you stay in,” Daisy said. “But who will we get to play your role? You may have to play yourself.”

  “What is the name of the production tonight?” Barnaby asked.

  “The name of the production is the same as the secret name of this room,” Daisy said. “It's The Monastery on the Third Floor.”

  “Harry,” Barnaby asked O'Donovan, “why did you name your little project the Rushlight Theatre?”

  “The very first art, caveman art, was done by rushlight,” Harry answered.

  “Is it true, Austro?” Barnaby asked his houseboy who was sometimes called an ape-boy by those with unseeing eyes.

  “Carrock, yes,” said Austro. “Fat, oily rushes. They burn, they smell. I drool.”

  “It's fifteen minutes till curtain time at the Rushlight tonight,” Barnaby said. “The wives of you wived ones are all playing in it, I believe. Shouldn't you be going?”

  “No, they shouldn't,” Roy Mega said. “You all are going to see the play, but you are not going to see it. You're going to stay right here and be in it. But you will have to get into the mood; into the detached reality mood.” Roy had in his hands a needle so big that it looked like a burlesque prop. He jabbed Barnaby Sheen in the arm with it.

  “That stings devilishly,” Barnaby complained. “What is it?”

  “Oh, a simple sympathetic transmitter device,” Roy answered, and he jabbed George Drakos in the arm with it.

  “Damn it, kid, do you know what you're doing?” Doctor Drakos demanded. “I never saw a needle like that. And you've broken it. You've left a piece of it in my arm.”

  “How can I implant it without leaving it?” Roy asked. “Let it alone! It's carefully tuned to your personality, to your personality as edited and upgraded by myself.”

  Roy shot an implantation into the arm of Cris Benedetti.

  “Is this real or is it a nutty dream?” Cris asked. “Why are you going around shooting people with that needle, Roy? My wife said that the dumb kid who works for Barnaby came by and gave her a shot in the arm this afternoon. I told her that she was crazy, that she'd been into the wine again.”

  “She had been into it, Mr. Benedetti,” Roy said. He shot implantations into the arms of Harry O'Donovan and Austro. Daisy, meanwhile, was roving about the room with her own needle and with an evil look in her yellow eyes. Mary Mondo screamed!

  “Oh, oh!” she cried. “How can it hurt me when I'm beyond pain. You can't put a physical implant in me, yellow-hair. I'm a ghost.”

  “I did it, witch!” Daisy chortled. “I'm one up on you. I believe that will heighten the drama.”

  “Oh, oh, oh!” Mary Mondo moaned with the pain of it. Daisy needled the arm of the big broken doll that may have been Loretta Sheen. Loretta moaned and spilled a bit of sawdust on the carpet. It wouldn't matter. The sawdust was self-renewing.

  Well, the room was as big as the world now, and yet it was a discrete fortress set off against the world. There were perspective pictures on the walls (they were in the style of George Drakos, though they were drawn and painted ele
ctronically by Roy Mega), and they made the room appear quite as big as the world. There was overture music somewhere (it was in the style of Barnaby Sheen, but it also was produced electronically by Roy—or rather it was edited and amplified by Roy from some Barnaby Sheen original).

  “Come along, Roy,” Daisy said. “We'll be late. They're beginning at the theatre.”

  Roy Mega and Daisy Flavus left the rest of us there; yet they took pieces of each of us along when they went.

  II

  “Oh I come from Castlepatrick, and me heart

  is on my sleeve,

  But a lady stole it from me on St. Poleander's

  Eve”

  — G. K. Chesterton

  Why should there suddenly be a playbill in every hand with the title The Monastery on the Third Floor? The date, of course, was April 30, but does that explain the strange double happenings? It was St. Poleander's Eve, yes, but St. Poleander had been declared a nonperson by the good Roman Church some years before this — a myth, a mere legend.

  All of us were, due to the electronic genius of Roy Mega and his implanted sympathetic transmitter devices, in the old study at Barnaby Sheen's and, at the same time, in the Rushlight Theatre. It was now a conveniently sized world; for the study, the theatre, and the world had become, for a while, identical. All were themselves, at their ease in their own place, but bits of each one could be seen in the characters at the Rushlight Theatre—and the Rushlight was a superimposed presence on the old study. Yet the scene was the study, surrealistically or cubistically rendered. The scene was even signed (how could a scene be signed?) in one corner “Geo. Drakos”. This living scene had been seeded from his mind. Gold, yellow, orange, sienna, and red were the colors of this artificial world; and the studio yellow was predominant.

  Down at the Rushlight, Roy Mega, Daisy Flavus, and Austro seemed to be playing many parts. How come Austro? He was still here in the study. Daisy played the part of Mary Mondo, and Mary howled in anger to be so portrayed; then Daisy played variations of the feedback from Mary's anger and integrated them into the role. Daisy also played Loretta Sheen, vomiting sawdust, but moving with a liveliness that Loretta had not shown since the time of her death.

  There was rock-dust too, rock-dust everywhere in the air. Some of the action had been cribbed shamelessly from the Rocky McCrocky stone-chiseled comic strip.

  Electronics is wonderful. There was a serenity about the whole thing. Steadfast was the study and all the works of it. It was a true formation, a rooted thing; yes, like an old monastery. Electronic tragicomedy does the bucolic bit very well. A fabulously rich and quite medieval countryside had quietly become one of the main persons of the drama. There was, as you may know, about five acres of broken land behind Barnaby Sheen's, between his place and that of Cris Benedetti; and, no doubt, Roy Mega had implanted sympathetic electronic transmitter devices in the area. The half-dozen fruit trees that Barnaby had planted came through as grand orchards. His little patch of buckwheat (Barnaby ate buckwheat pancakes of his own grinding every morning) was presented as vast province-wide fields of wheat, barley, rye, and millet, all in their late April green touched with gold. The two rows of grapevines that Cris Benedetti had were dramatized as vast vineyards, the great-grandfather's of all the great grapes of Europe.

  Roy Mega employed the various elements for theatrical effect. But the whole thing was rooted in the rich landscape paintings of George Drakos. There were cattle, horses, sheep, and goats in profusion. There were geese, ducks, chickens, hares, and hogs. And where were the originals of these? From what had they been amplified? Chiara Benedetti did have a pet goat and a pet duck—they may have been the basis.

  Helen Drakos was in the scenes. She made fine small cabinets and chests; she was an artist in fruit wood. Judy Benedetti ran a little inn and wineshop that was adjacent to the monastery. There was superb piano accompaniment to all the settings and all the action—it was Judy's thematic music that was used. Judy, in private life, was dark, pretty, and witty. But a slightly distorted Judy (you had always suspected this) would have set you screaming—and she was on the edge of such distortion.

  Catherine O'Donovan was a potting woman and a weaving woman. She was the artisan superb. She did it all: she hetcheled the flax, she glazed the final clay; she made the whole era seem worthwhile as it came to its end.

  The Polyander, the great grouping of persons (women are included in a true polyander), was successful. It had balance, it had grace, it had art. But into the superb piano playing and Mary Mondo's ghostly song (electronic, perhaps, but near perfect) there now came a divergent note. It was not a dissonance, but it was a change of mood and a change of world. There was, at first, but a single note of that old goat music; but all the old notes bristled when they heard it. There had been a world in artistic and theological balance. Then it clashed. There was quick death-birth; and then the whole thing was other than it had been.

  “Was she really singing that? No, of course

  not. But for a moment it seemed as though

  she were singing one of those hairy goat

  songs that came up the road from langue d'oc

  eight hundred years ago.”

  —Dotty

  What had happened, of course, was that the thousand-year era had ended and the devil was released from his imprisonment. This event would unbalance the world and rend the seamless mantle of grace that the world had worn. It would scatter burdock and cockle in the wheat, it would kindle new perversions; it would bring back the enslaving permissiveness that is always the mark of the devil loosed. But it would also bring heightened variety and intensity and excitement to art, to all the arts, to the life whose roots are in the arts—and an art theatre was what the Rushlight was.

  A savage meanness ran through it all. Let it. There is sharp color and perspective in savage meanness. All watched themselves change in the representations at the Rushlight. They watched their own faces melt like wax, and harden into a more outré wax. They were flesh no more. Ah, but much more arty effects may be got with wax than with flesh that breaks and scorches and burns, instead of melting pungently and quickly into a new and more deforming mold. But the deformity had always been implicit in the flesh. The spirit of the Putty Dwarf was over the face of the world, and the polyander had become a rutting mob.

  Characters coalesced and then divided once more. Daisy, Loretta Sheen, Mary Mondo, Helen Drakos, Judy Benedetti, and Catherine O'Donovan were all, for a while, merged into one electronic character, a succubus. It happened in a mere instant, for souls are lost in an instant. This living-unliving apparatus committed abominations with the polyander, the men of the place and the drama, and committed them collectively and individually. Here was total abandon on all sides: animality, and the red-handed killing of children and innocents. (There was a difficulty: the persons hadn't many children of their own, so outside children had to be brought in to be killed.) Here was odd behavior limited only by the imaginations of Daisy Flavus and Roy Mega, who both had made serious studies in perversions.

  The spirit of the Putty Dwarf supplied all that the young humans missed. This spirit knew all the things hidden in sour corners. All the men performed divergent carnalities with the protean thing, while in another place they fed the young to Moloch. Chiara Benedetti gave a rattling scream when she was murdered.

  Even Loretta Sheen found a voice.

  “You can't kill me, I'm already dead; I'm part of this thing!” Loretta protested, and then her own death scream sounded.

  All of them took roles in the ruddy thing, except Austro; he refused further parts. He stood apart and fumed in his towering, high-hackled morality. Not even the electronic Austro devised by Roy Mega would be sullied by such outrageousness.

  Austro could fight on this field. He was already, according to his nature, somewhat electronic—this is common among people of the early types. Austro would not be subverted and he would not be imitated. He himself entered into every effigy of himself and nullified it.
Austro was the battleground; he was the arena; he was the stage. Austro as Rocky McCrocky was very tough; and Rocky was the basic Everyman of the drama. The trend of the drama was settled in Austro and by him. It became not quite the drama that Roy Mega had intended; yet it was even more powerful, of a more sophisticated art than had been planned.

  Now Catherine O'Donovan had withdrawn from the succubus in red fury, in redheaded and freckled fury. She challenged the whole business.

  “Drag me not down from the light and the grace! Fight you, I'll fight you all over the place,” she cried in one of her manifestations. (This was a verse drama. And it was a morality play.)

  It went on for two more acts, but Catherine continued to make scenes—scenes that weren't in the Rushlight script at all. Harry O'Donovan had written the original script, but he had written it as a comedy. Austro had rock-chipped the script that was before the original script, and he had composed it as a comic strip. Catherine herself would have to pass through fire and grave before the high comedy was achieved; but higher comedies are never without the smell of burning flesh and crumbling death. There would be no really high comic art if the fire, destruction, peril, and death were left out.

  “Bloody much tune for the ravens and cats! Blood on the sharps of it! Rot on the flats!” Catherine O'Donovan caterwauled rather than sang this. The music! There could not be music like that. There were live musicians in the Rushlight and live musicians in the study. There was electronic scrambling and contribution, horny and hairy goat songs from langue d'oc that had crept in somewhere. Barnaby was playing the Mustel celesta in the study, and that instrument was illicitly old. There was the old phenomenon that had first been heard soon after the bloody deaths of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo (Violet Lonsdale). The sound was not quite in the audio range… normal people couldn't hear it, but they sure knew it was there… either an ecstasy or a public nuisance—the Symphony of the Seven Spooks and Other Free Spirits.