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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Sure, he'll watch it for you. Even a Waxman-Kelmis will be faithful in that. Oh no, they never take very long to make anything for anybody any more.” (Time had slipped by, though not much of it; Selim had a sporty car that he drove like a flaming rocket; and it wasn't very far to the northwest side of town. They were out at the Funnyfingers' place now, and into the back, back rooms that turned into tunnels.) “They never take very long to make things anymore,” Oread was continuing, “not since that time, you know, when God got a little bit testy with them on Sinai when there was a little delay. They first made the tablets out of iron entirely, and they wouldn't do. They had to make them out of slate-stone with the iron letters inset in it, and the iron had to be that alloy known as command iron. Since then they are all pretty prompt with everyone, and they follow instructions exactly. You never know who it really is who places an order.

  “Kelmis has the original all-iron set. I'll get him to show them to you some time.”

  “Where do you get your stories, Oread?”

  “I tell my mother that I make them out of iron.”

  “And where do you really get them?”

  “I make them out of iron.”

  Selim talked easily with the three uncles while they wrought and hammered the white-hot parts that Oread was to assemble into a symbol concept. “How is it that you work inside a little hill in Oklahoma?” he asked them. “Shouldn't you be in the forests or hills of Phrygian Ida? How did you come to leave the Old Country?”

  “This is the Old Country, and we haven't left it,” powerful Acmon said. “Everything underground anywhere is part of the Old Country. All hills and mountains of the world connect down in their roots, in their toes, and they make a single place. We are in Mount Ida, we are in Crete, we are in Oklahoma. It is all one.”

  They made the pieces. And Oread, dipping the parts out of the white-hot iron as if it were water, put them together to make the thing. It was a new concept-symbol system, and it looked as if it would work.

  And it looked much more as if it would work the next afternoon. Mr. Zhelezovitch the instructor was almost out of his mind with it. The graduate students and the regular students (for this was one of those advanced, mixed classes) crowded about it and went wild. The implications of the new thing would tumble in their minds for weeks; the class would be a marathon affair going on and on as the wonderful new things were put to work to uncover still more wonderful things. The stars were out when Oread and Selim left the class, and no one else would leave it at all that night. But these two had something between them, and it might take another new concept to solve it. “Oread, give me your answer,” Selim was saying again. “I want to marry you.”

  “Make a wish on a star then. On that one where I'm pointing.”

  “Triple jointed funnyfingers, who can tell where you're pointing?”

  “On that male star there between the several eunuch stars.”

  “Yes, I see the one you mean, Oread. I make a wish. Now, when will you answer me?”

  “Within a half hour. I go to question two people first.”

  Oread left there at a run. She went home. She talked to her mother.

  “Mama, why is my father so boyish? Is he really just a boy?”

  “Yes he is, Oread. Just a boy.”

  “After some years would he be a man, really, and not just a pleasant young kid?”

  “I think so, Oread, yes.”

  “Then after some years you two could have children of your own? Being a funnyfingers isn't an obstacle?”

  “I'll never know that, Oread. When he is grown up I will be long dead.”

  Oread ran out of there and ran to the convent that was behind the school she used to attend. She entered and went upstairs and down a hallway. She knew where she was going. One funnyfingers can always find another one. Besides, the eight years was up. She opened the door and found Sister Mary Dactyl playing solitaire with iron cards. “How old?” Oread asked.

  “Three hundred and fifty-eight years,” said Sister M D without looking up. “Were I not vowed, I would be coming to the family age now.”

  Oread ran all the way back to where Selim was still waiting in the street under the stars. She was crying, she was bawling.

  “The answer is no,” she blubbered. Selim, under the stars, was as white-faced as it is possible for a Syrian to be. But he must not give up.

  “Oread, I love you more than you can know,” he said. “Maybe we can make a different answer out of iron,” he proposed in desperate jest.

  “This is the iron answer,” she bawled, “and the answer is no.” She ran away too fast to follow.

  Deep under the hills Oread was crying. She was weeping big hot tears. They weren't, however, iron tears that she wept. That part is untrue.

  The tears were actually of that aromatic flux of salt and rosin that wrought-iron workers employ in their process.

  Endangered Species

  “What do you know about the Spokelspuk?” Benoni Lambert asked. Lambert was director of the Species Conservation Bureau. “Is the Spokelspuk an endangered species now, Benny?” Agata Scampo asked him.

  “What is the present head count on them?” her husband, Conrad, wanted to know. “Do we have a head count?”

  Conrad and Agata were not in as perfect accord as they once had been. Certain misbehaviors had ruffled and rippled the clear surface of their relationship. But they were still in wordless and almost telepathic understanding with one another.

  Conrad now called soundlessly to Agata, What in peristaltic perdition is a Spokelspuk?”

  And Agata was forced to answer him just as soundlessly, I don't know either.

  That was bad. When you are the ace team in the species-preserving business you cannot afford to admit ignorance of anything.

  “No, we do not have an accurate head count,” Director Lambert admitted. “The reason is that it is difficult for a layman (and we cannot have experts everywhere) to make a sure identification.”

  “Like the Ruffled Yellow-Head Duck,” said Conrad.

  “That was so often mistaken for the Morgan's Merganser by the ignorant,” said Agata.

  “Yes, this is the same sort of thing.” Lambert spoke sadly. “Both the Spassenspuk and the Spottelspuk have been falsely identified as the Spokelspuk.”

  “I can see why, Ben.”

  “I can't,” Lambert confessed. “They're really not at all alike except in appearance, and this is one case where appearance is meaningless. But our so far uneducated guess is that there are now fewer than thirty of the Spokelspuks left in the world.”

  “How about the Trondheim district of Norway?” Conrad asked. This question had stood him in good stead many times before. No one seemed to know anything much about Norway.

  “No, there couldn't be any in the Trondheim district,” Lambert told him with thin patience. “The Trondheim is a sod-house region.”

  “Of course. I wasn't thinking,” Conrad confessed lamely.

  “I don't presume to tell you two how to go about your survey and implementation,” Lambert said. “You are clearly the best team we have. Draw ordinary funds from the bursar. For extraordinary funds, as always, make application to the committee. That is it, folks. We'd like to have a report with recommendations within a month. We would really like you to effect a population increase in the Spokelspuk within that month.”

  “We may just do that, Benny,” Agata told him. “We have some forceful ideas along that line.”

  “One thing, before you leave. I have a very rare tape of the Spokelspuk. Be warned—the sound it makes jangles the nerves of even the most steady.” Lambert set the tape to play.

  At first came a cranky murmur. Then a snuffling as of some creature drawing in windy breath for a great endeavor. Then came the inimitable, unhinging sound itself.

  It began as a scream. It was followed by a heart-freezing clatter and a laugh that curdled all the juices of the body. It was a mockery that sucked all the marrow out of the soul, it
was a shriveling derision, a cruel gloating gobble that brought one to absolute desolation, to the ragged despondency that is just short of death. A laugh like that should not have been allowed in hell.

  “That is the sound of the male Spokelspuk,” Lambert whispered with a shudder. “The tape, thankfully, doesn't quite do it justice.”

  “Yes, I've always found it an unnerving sound,” Conrad lied easily. He looked quite shaken.

  “The sound of the female is worse,” Lambert said.

  “Good for the female,” Agata exclaimed with a sick smile. “Of course it's a little hard to worry about the Spokelspuk's being endangered. It really should be extirpated, a thing that laughs like that? We have this special rescue and revival job to do, though, and we will do it. We are professionals.”

  “Of course,” said Lambert, knowing that they were stalwart and dependable. “Of course.”

  Conrad and Agata left. They stopped at the bursar's and drew ordinary funds just short of the extraordinary limit. Tomorrow, after they had thoughtfully studied the situation, after they had (to be truthful about it) found out exactly what a Spokelspuk was, they would decide how extraordinary should be the funds they would ask for. The stickiest deals paid most. To save from extinction something that laughed like the Spokelspuk ought to pay well. “It has to be either a bird or a human,” Conrad said as they entered the working phase of their program. “Nothing else could laugh like that.”

  “And we've never had a call to preserve a human species from extinction.” Agata set in that piece of the puzzle. “There are a few I wouldn't want to save, the Sandy Sue species for instance. But I believe the Sandy Sue is in no danger of becoming extinct. She's too common for that.”

  “Now you are casting reflections upon my taste,” Conrad said stiffly.

  Sandy Sue was a young lady in whom Conrad had shown much interest. Actually Conrad showed interest in many young ladies, but Sandy Sue had become a type of this activity in the mind of Agata.

  “Are you two looking for me?” a buxom and pink-haired lady asked Conrad and Agata. She followed them out to the street. There was something unreal about her, pleasantly unreal. She looked like a younger member of some endangered older species. “Madam Hexe, we have absolutely no use for a discredited medium,” Agata said.

  “But I divine things,” Madam Hexe said. “I divine things especially by physical contact.”

  “And what do you divine now?” Conrad asked.

  “That you need me. That you have just received a well-paying assignment and that you have no idea how to go about doing what you must. I want to cut myself in. I can do the job for you that nobody else can.” And, in the process of divining by physical contact, Madam Hexe placed strong arms around Conrad.

  “Enough of that,” Agata said.

  “I'll follow you around until you realize that you really do need me,” Madam Hexe said. “My pay — portal to portal, you know — has already started, but we can settle after you come to appreciate my true worth.”

  The Scampos ignored the medium then — at least Agata did. But she still followed them in the street and Conrad sometimes did drop back into her friendly arms.

  “I'm still shaking from that Spokelspuk laugh,” Conrad said. “From the male Spokelspuk. And they say that the laugh of the female is even worse.”

  “I have to hear that,” Agata said. “I have a feeling that there is a female Spokelspuk in my future. And I just believe—ah—I bet that the female Spokelspuk's laugh is the last laugh.”

  They went to see their favorite ornithologist. Madam Hexe still followed them and seemed determined to wait for them outside the bird man's gracious home studio.

  “You really do need me,” she said. “A bird the Spokelspuk is not.”

  The bird man was friendly. He had worked with the Scampos before. He liked to help people and they liked to be helped.

  “The world and myself can never honor the two of you enough,” he said, “for saving the Lesser Speckled Grackle from extinction. Is there now another endangered species for which steps should be taken?”

  “There is,” Conrad Scampo told him. “The Spokelspuk.”

  “We have been informing ourselves, of course, as to the habits and habitats of the Spokelspuk,” Agata said, “and now we have come to an expert for advice. Could you give us a good rundown on this imperiled bird? Are there any readily available printouts? Are Spokelspuk preservation societies already in existence? Sometimes it is well to work with existing groups even if they are composed mostly of amateurs and lay persons.”

  “Where did you dig up such a name as Spokelspuk?” the bird man asked. “Did old Lambert discover it?”

  “Why, yes. Director Lambert,” Conrad said, “has declared the Spokelspuk an endangered species and we are asked to implement its preservation.”

  “Did Lambert say that the Spokelspuk was a bird? Or is this another of those cases where you were too proud to confess your ignorance?”

  “Well, what is the Spokelspuk if it isn't a bird?” Conrad asked. “What other life form is endangered?”

  “It isn't a bird. Not any kind of a bird,” the bird man said. “I don't know what it is. I never heard of it.”

  The Scampos left him. Out in the street Madam Hexe embraced Conrad competently.

  “So he never heard of the Spokelspuk,” Madam Hexe said. “I didn't think he would have. A specialist, you know. You had better hire me now. We need each other.”

  “You're so right,” Conrad said, enchanted. “She needs the job and we need her.”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Agata said. “Where did you ever hear of the Spokelspuk, Madam Hexe? I don't remember mentioning the species in your presence.” “Are you sure you did not? But you've thought of it—and I lift things out of the mind. There is only one way to increase the Spokelspuk population, and that is to make more Spokelspuks. And all that is required to make them consists of sound wits and a good heavy wooden mallet.”

  “That is all that is required?” Conrad asked.

  “Get lost,” Agata said roughly. “No, not you, Conrad. You go with me. A bird a Spokelspuk isn't. What's the next most likely living thing?”

  “An insect?” asked Conrad.

  Agata asked, “So what entomologist do we know? Oh, oh, and what entomologist does Sandy Sue work for? Ah, well, he's the only one we know. And there's a species around worse than Sandy Sue. Come along then. The buggery is right in this block. You, Conrad, not you, Hexe.”

  “Oh, you really need me,” said Madam Hexe. “A bug it is not.”

  “Oh, we really need her,” said Conrad. “A bug it is not.”

  But Agata pulled Conrad into the buggery.

  “Oh, it's that handsome Conrad!” Sandy Sue squealed. “And Agata.”

  “Conrad has been bitten by a different bug now, Sandy Sue,” Agata said. “And I want to talk to Mr. Oktopteryx right away.”

  “Go right in, Agata,” Sandy Sue said, “and I will try to unbug Conrad. We don't want any strange bugs biting him.”

  “Otto,” Agata said to the great entomologist, “how does one unbug a husband?”

  “You may be using the word in a non-entomological sense, Agata,” said the great von Oktopteryx.

  “Not entirely, Otto. But you have to help me on something else. Can you give me some hard information on the Spokelspuk? It's been declared an endangered species.”

  “I can't blame you for trying, Agata, but it isn't an insect.”

  “How many kinds of insects are there, Otto?”

  “Somewhere between a quarter-million and a half million species.”

  “And you know them all?”

  “I know enough about them all to know that none of them is named the Spokelspuk.”

  “Oh, damn. I wonder what it is then.”

  “If it isn't an insect, then it's something else. Don't you see how that narrows the field? There are more species of insect than of all other living things added together.”

  �
�I guess so. Thank you, Otto.”

  Agata went out through the reception room with its wonderful display cases. She found Conrad sitting on the silken knees of Sandy Sue, apparently getting unbugged. Agata led him gently by the ear out of the room and out of the building.

  “A bug the Spokelspuk isn't,” she said.

  “Oh, then it has to be an animal,” he reasoned. “Animal, marsupial, amphibian, reptile, snake, worm, fish, something. Let's go talk to the great naturalist Hugh Singletree.”

  “Let's go talk to the great medium, Madam Hexe,” said the waiting medium, Madam Hexe. She had obtained from somewhere a heavy wooden mallet.

  “Let's go talk to the great medium, Madam Hexe,” said the befuddled Conrad.

  “Actually, three of the Spokelspuks inhabit a house only short blocks from here,” Madam Hexe said. “It's at thirteen-thirteen East Hodges. Let's go there now. Once we are there, I believe we can discover a way to increase the Spokelspuk population by one, possibly by two.”

  “No! We're going back to Director Lambert to find out what a Spokelspuk is,” Agata said. “I must ask—what is the mallet for?”

  “You knock someone off with a wooden mallet, you make a Spokelspuk,” the Madam said. “You knock someone off with something else and you make something else, maybe a Spassenspuk or a Spottelspuk. We wouldn't want that to happen. They aren't endangered species.”

  “—maybe a Spassenspuk or a Spottelspuk. We wouldn't want that to happen,” murmured the enchanted Conrad.

  “Untangle yourself from that pink-headed witch,” Agata sputtered angrily. “We're going back to Mr. Lambert right now.”

  “Easy, Agata,” Madam Hexe jibed. “We want you to get mad, yes, but not too mad too soon.”

  “—to get mad, but not too mad too soon,” Conrad echoed.

  They went to see Director Lambert.

  “Great news, great news,” he greeted them. “We have just received important information that ties right in with your project. There is a nucleus, and it is always easiest to add to a nucleus. I have learned that three of the rare Spokelspuks inhabit a house only short blocks from here. It is located at—”