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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Who do the Easter Island head-statues look like? What men or ghosts or darksome creatures do these huge, deformed dished faces properly belong to? Seldom in those years did I go to Rapa Nui on Easter Island without wondering about those things, without in fact climbing those slopes again to gaze at the giant stone heads there. I got to Gran Rapa no more than once a year — the coconut business was not really major there — but this question was with me all the time. Were they cat faces? No, no, cats cringed in fear before those big images. Cats do not do well on Easter Island at all. The really big cats there, they say, are still underground. Were the large images dog faces? Slightly, ever so slightly. Were they monkey faces? Not quite, no, not quite. What monkeys had such long noses as those? And where else might be found such longish, good-naturedly serious faces as here?

  Well, there are a few such faces on Egyptian friezes, though not perhaps on any of the better known ones — not on any of those north of Qena anyway. A few such faces were on early Mexican terra-cotta figurines — but the Mexicans did not have either the monkey or the cat, and they tied the yin only and not the yang. There were quite a few of the faces in the old comic Chinese drawings that can only be called “Monkey Shines.” Some of them found in Gothic carvings ought to be named “Katzenjammern,” things that are too late to be honest Gothic, fourteenth-century things. The longish faces are on Irish bronze-work and on Attic pottery, but not on the best of either. Deer sometimes have that long-faced look; colts and dogs have it more often. But these are all glancing coincidences, not the solid things.

  Very rarely will a person have that look. And one person in particular had it, he on whose account I began to notice the big faces closely. This person was Mr. Hamadrynd, that lank-faced, long-nosed gentle man with the muted howl in his voice. He looked like that. But what was the main thing that the Easter Island heads, and Mr. Hamadryad, and all the other cited oddities looked like? What was it that pulled them all together? For the big Easter Island faces had only half their look; they implied their own intertangled opposites somewhere. One person had told me that those opposites were still sleeping in stone under the ground.

  When next I saw Mr. Hamadryad, it was not in bright Africa, but in the dim and little-known interior of the North American continent. This was south of the domain of the Garfield-county wheat-growing tribe; somewhat north of those wide savannas of the bush-wool or cotton plants; west of the pecan forests and bosky bottoms of the Canadian River wilderness; east of the sunburned grazing range of those short-legged black cattle named Angus. It was some five days' portage — or two hours by motor — from the Alabaster Hills. It was at that dusty, trail-crossing town named Oklahoma City. Traveling in coconuts, I hadn't much business in that place. I had called on the Cross-Timbers Coconut Candy Manufacturing Company. And then I was in the Sun-Deck Club of that town.

  I heard the now-familiar footfalls in the corridor outside: the steps of a splayfooted person in soft buckskin boots; and the powerfully heavy, silky quiet and blurred double steps of a barefoot being. Then Mr. Hamadryad came into the club alone. The other, the slave — if it were he — remained outside.

  “A Ring-tailed Rouser, and the regular for lunch,” Mr. Hamadryad ordered in that pleasant, muted howl that I would always remember.

  “Certainly, Mr. Hamadryad,” said Jane the beautiful bartender, and she set about building the Rouser. The Ring-tailed Rouser is composed mostly of clear, uncharred whiskey served in a quart fruit jar. There is added a sprinkle of gypsum dust from the Alabaster Hills and also the egg of the scissor-tail flycatcher, smashed in the shell and afloat in the liquid. And Hamadryad added a sprinkling of the small grains of the broomcorn plant — these grains are very like Aladdin's Sesame — as soon as the drink was set in front of him. The Ring-tailed Rouser is a specialty of the Sun-Dock Club and is found almost nowhere else in the world.

  Mr. Hamadryad paid for the drink with a Jackson, one of those oblong green-paper — or green-skin — coins that were used in the middle barrens of the North American continent. He would have change coming but he let it hang. He was setting up tab at the Sun-Deck Club. He came and sat at my table.

  “How did the panthers do it?” I asked him. He looked at me now. The five-year interval seemed to bother him only slightly.

  “Oh, for the moment I'd forgotten what we had been talking about,” he said in that bemused, happy howl of his. “I suppose you could say that they did it in the nature of ransom. They had so much agony owing, and besides they are our slaves. But the real explanation will go back to the foundations of the world, and it concerns a partial unfolding or moving of those foundations. You didn't think you were the first, did you? You weren't. You were the last.”

  “Didn't think who was the first what?” I asked him.

  “You, you people of the new line,” he said. “You weren't the first, and you sure were not the strongest or the most intense. Your own encounter, well, it would have been a pretty small thing to those who have known real encounters. And your fall, it was hardly what we would call a fall, without laughing. Our own fall, now that was something.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “I may not,” he told me. “T'would blow your mind and your ears. But there were quite a number of races who had covenants, before Abraham, before Adam. These covenants were towering things, and their breakings were of immeasurable depth. There was violence and earthquake and earth-shattering in those abysmal falls. After such horrors, God repented himself and made each succeeding test more gentle. If not, no flesh would have remained anywhere. And yet ourselves were quite near the end of the series. We never know the real burning and shrieking horror of the early ones.

  “We were doomed to be the slaves of slaves. For this, two races — ourselves and another — were chained together. I do not know whether I can explain this relationship to you, the closeness that accompanies an utter alienation, the apposition and the opposition. Our counterparts in this are something like your own shoulder angels?”

  “Shoulder angels?” I asked. I had never heard quite that term.

  “You know them though you deny them,” Hamadryad said. “But your own angels, who are they really? I have heard that you yourselves usually do not see them, but every other race of magus, ghost, animal, creature or being sees them. Most of these folks believe that your refusal to see your shoulder angels is a most cruel disdain. I've come to the conclusion, though, that it's really blindness and inattention on your part. But are they really a race coupled to you for punishment? Are they even a separate race at all?

  “It is suggested that they are your own twins somehow deformed. It is guessed that they are your afterbirths somewhat mutated. Sometimes they are actually attached to you as small, fleshy extensions growing out of the human shoulders; and these, though you often deny it, can be seen by yourselves as well as by others. But these latter are usually covered up, by clothing and by silent conspiracy. But what are they really?

  “With us there are two clear races involved. Our enemies serve as our angels and our slaves for an era. Then it all turns over, in a strange way and out of the sight of God. Then we must serve as angels and slaves to our enemies for a long era. We will then be forced to move and lift and carry, to hew and to shape. We, the great ones, will become the slaves of the slinking panthers, and we must serve out the ransom.”

  Jane, the beautiful waitress, brought Hamadryad's lunch and set it before him. It was the stomach of suckling calf distended with its first milk.

  “I still don't see how the big, heavy lintel stones may be moved by means of panthers,” I said.

  “Things much greater than lintel stones,” Hamadryad howled softly and dreamily. “Do you know which are the lowest and highest of all folks who have received the Spirit or the pseudo-spirit? The lowest of all are the gibberish people who misunderstand the old business of ‘speaking in tongues.’ But even in your scripture the verb used for this speaking is selected carefully from several. It means to speak clea
rly. For God is not the God of gibberish. These are the lowest of all folks, those who say ‘Lord, I am holy. I can talk gibberish.’ And a short million miles above the gibberish people are the snake-handlers. We, even more than yourselves, have an abhorrence touched with fear concerning snakes. It raises my hackles every time I handle a deadly snake, and I do have hackles.”

  Yes, Hamadryad did have hackles in the peculiar crest and lay of his lank hair.

  “Snake-handlers bring courage to the affair,” said Hamadryad, “in contrast to the gibberish people who bring nothing. But greatest of all is the Faith-that-Moves-Mountains. Those who bring most are the mountain-movers, the elite of all the preternaturals, of all those who are under the punishment and the ransom. I tell you that mountain-moving is very hard to fake. Mountain-moving is the most terrible task that has ever been given to man or magus to do.”

  “What are you doing in the barrens of North America?” I asked Hamadryad. “In particular, what are you doing here in the canton of Oklahoma?”

  “I had a report, and I came to observe the Black Mesa out in the corner of this canton,” he said. “I really came to observe a new and valid talent which had appeared in the region. It's of the enemy, of the slaves, but it's worth observing. I watched the working of it for three days, and it took a lot out of me. Did you know that the Black Mesa moved nine inches in three days ending yesterday?”

  “I heard that there were earthquake tremors in that region.”

  “There was a young and untrained puma in that region, an unslaved natural talent,” Hamadryad said. “Though I loathe all cats, yet I admired that young puma. By soul-wrenching sacrifice, by towering mentality, by garish ghastliness, by rampant animality that young puma moved that mountain named the Black Mesa nine inches in three days. I saw this. I attest it. Before God, he moved it! And he did it not even for the ransom yet. I lo was a free puma. His was Faith, pure and undefiled.”

  “What has that to do with moving lintel stones?” I asked.

  “It has to do with the moving of a mountain that is the equivalent of many millions of lintel stones,” Hamadryad said. Hamadryad was quite shaken even in the telling of this, and I began to wonder about this person. Hamadryad had changed somewhat in appearance in the five years since I had seen him last. His oddities were all sharpened. Whatever it was that he represented, he represented it much more strongly now. Hamadryad had once mentioned the Criosphinxes, those ram-headed sphinxes of Greece and Egypt. But he now reminded me of the Man-Drill Sphinx at Baidoa in upper Juba.

  Small flakes, pieces, grains of broomcorn were moving about on the tabletop, and there was no breeze. I saw that Hamadryad was moving them by an act of will. He really seemed unconscious of his act, though it was taking a lot of energy. He was practicing this thing while he ate and drank and talked. It was a talent which he wished to retain and develop. But it would have to be developed many million-fold to equal that of the young enemy puma who had moved the Black Mesa nine inches. Was it mountains to be moved that were overshadowing this likeable man?

  “Were there mountains involved in your own original encounter?” I asked.

  “Aye, Magic Mountains, Floating Mountains!” he cried with soaring memory. “But it was more than mountains, more than ships, more than islands. It was a Pavilion! Ah, what a Pavilion we did have once! It floated on the water, and it bore mountains and forests and gardens on its back. Did God ever give so magnificent an exile-float to anyone else? This was the tent that had been pitched in the pleasant place, and originally it had been larger than the world. You have heard of ‘floats’ in parades? Ours was the original of those moving flower-tiered wagons, or the beautiful juggernauts that moved over land and sea or the ‘floats’ that were floats indeed. You have, perhaps, heard the term ‘watercolors’ as applied to art? ‘The water, like a witch's oils, / Burnt green, and blue and white’ — as a poet (I sometimes think he was one of us) has written. Our moving mountain, our floating garden was the primordial watercolor in that it was a pandemonium — and it had recently been a panangelicum — of hues so vivid as to be scandal to the land. Aye, we were expelled from the land; we and our verdant, tiered and terraced mountain that was like a mile-high platter of fruits. We were marooned on our mountain-island-barge, marooned on the blue and green and scarlet mirroring ocean: for maroon is a color as well as a condition. This was our purple exile on the royal and purple sea.”

  “It sounds wonderful, but what are you talking about?” I asked him.

  “Oh, it was full of wonder, but it wasn't a pleasure-wonder,” he said sadly as though he remembered it himself. “The deprivation was starker for us, perhaps, than for any other race. It may be for that reason we were provided with a grander vehicle. All left the garden with pieces of the garden, but some went with mere clods of that holy place. I have heard that you, yourselves, had to walk out.”

  “Oh, from the garden? Yes, I guess so,” I said.

  “We floated out of the garden that was in the middle of the waters,” Hamadryad recited. “We floated away on an aromatic, many-colored mountain-island that was fruitful beyond description. Oh, by the red dew of Olivet but it was fair! And we were kings yet, though fallen. We forced our slaves for continuing ransom to hew and transport and set up great idols of ourselves.

  “But then we drifted. We wanted to go one way. Our slaves, the cats, wanted to go another; and theirs was the agony, but theirs was also the movement. To them had been given, beyond ourselves, the terrible mentality and spirit to move stones and mountains and islands. So we drifted in the direction selected by our slaves, and it wasn't a random direction. Then pieces began to break off our beautiful island of exile.”

  A feline chill had entered the room. Hamadryad shivered and shriveled, and he seemed unsure of himself.

  “Which pieces broke off your exile island?” I asked him.

  “Oh, hundreds of pieces until what is now left is quite small and not as green as it might be. Madagascar was the largest of those early pieces to break away, and it drifted back partly toward the direction of our origin. It is still there as a mystery and a sign; it doesn't belong in the contemporary world. You know, of course, that ‘Cats and Monkeys Island’ is the literal meaning of Madagascar?”

  “I know,” I said. But Hamadryad had risen full of passion, red and purple of face, shaking and gibbering.

  “Get back, get back, go back into it!” Hamadryad howled suddenly and furiously. And what had brought on such a tempest of passion?

  Mr. Caracal had come into the room, and the footfalls of the corridor had come with him. Mr. Caracal was the thing that had been in the corridor invisible. And yet he was a highly visible, suave, silky man with steep ears.

  “Go back into it,” Hamadryad howled. “You have no right to be out of it!”

  But Caracal grinned with fastidious contempt. He looked as though he might tear Hamadryad apart. There was a terrible battle being fought somewhere, in doubtful arena, and Caracal was defeating Hamadryad in furious conflict.

  “Is Mr. Caracal a club member?” I asked Jane the beautiful bartender. “He is making one of your clients very unhappy.”

  “I'll not interfere with that one,” Jane disclaimed. “You never know who is going to end up top cat.”

  “This is rebellion!” Hamadryad screeched. “Your time hasn't quite come.”

  Caracal was advancing on Hamadryad, and it really seemed as if he would eat him alive and complete as he trembled there. Somehow, Hamadryad left the Sun-Deck Club then in a stormy scene. It is likely that both of those odd persons left.

  Something intervened anyhow, and I didn't see Mr. Hamadryad again for several years.

  3.

  Madagascar, I had found, didn't really mean “Cats and Monkeys Island.” Hamadryad had made that up, and I had agreed with him so as not to seem ignorant. And there are no holy records of earlier expulsions of other races from the Pleasure Place. Well, perhaps somewhere there are earlier and less holy records of such. Following a
s I do the coconut trade, I happened again to be at that most unproductive base of it, Rapa Nui on Easter Island. I was in Drill's Marine Bar. I had been asking about and thinking about a certain shadow that for countless ages has been on the face of the Earth. I was worried that Easter Island, now drifting at the wild speed of more than three hundred feet a year, had begun to enter that shadow or blind spot. And it had begun to. Several pieces of beach were already under the shadow, and they seemed void of life, void of light, void of meaning. Only irrational things could happen in those umbrageous places. But if they happened, they would happen for the whole world.

  Could there really be such a blind spot on Earth? And why had it seldom been noted in the past? I asked the proprietor Drill about it, and he stroked his nose as he answered.

  “Yes, the spot is indeed there and it has always been there,” Drill told me. “And why has it seldom been noted? The reason that it is little noted is simply that there is nothing noteworthy about it. No wind blows there, and no wave moves. Yet there are frozen or motionless waves risen up there in their crests and furrows, and these unmoving waves have a deep meaning.

  “The sun and the moon do not shine on the spot, and the stars do not. No birds fly over and no fish swim under. There is no luminescence in the depths there, and no gegenschein in the high air. Compass needles wilt and sag for there is no magnetism. In the area of the spot there is no dry land except, it is said, at the changing of the aeons. No planes fly over, for it would be all blind flight. No ships or boats traverse that shadow, for it is not on the way to anywhere. It is on no way, no route, no current, no wind. Nothing drifts in or out of the region ordinarily, though there is strong rumor that our own island drifts into it now. It is the blind spot on the globe where mapmakers often put in notes or scales or explanations of Mercator's projection. So you can see that there is really nothing noteworthy about the spot. Except one thing.”