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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Can patinas be peeled from anything except stones?” a non-Pop asked.

  “Yes, certainly,” the speaker said. “Wood, as a short-term storehouse of historical treasures (for no more than four or five centuries), is often superior to stone. Finished and furnitured woods in particular will store memories and scenes and will become haunted with them. They will project these recalls at unexpected moments. These are the ghosts of the last seven centuries, the ghosts of old houses. And the term ‘table talk’ sometimes has the special meaning of talking tables. Planchette and ouija are dull forgeries of such talking tables, but they are made of the genuine remembering wood. And old tables become accepted members of old families. What child, playing under an old wooden table, has not heard old family secrets whispered by the familiar (which is to say, ‘long in the family’) wood?

  “But still better and more recording than either stone or wood, for very short periods (a couple of decades), is undisturbed leaf mold.”

  “Hey, Duff, let's slip off for a while,” a small group of young and shimmering and sidling folks propositioned Melchisedech Duffey. “They'll not miss you for the host for the while, and they'll not miss us.”

  The most dedicated rationalist, if he is honest, must admit that there are intervals that go against the grain, that go against reason. There are happenings, usually of quite short duration, that simply are not acceptable in the rationalist framework. I myself have experienced several such unaccountable or unbelievable intervals. Two were of such very short duration that they did not take up any discernible time. And one was of three minutes; another was of five minutes;

  And one was of twenty-four hours.

  —Absalom Stein, Notes on the Argo Legend

  Quick thunder wounds the fatted town

  That copiously bleeds:

  And fruitless growths come tumbling down

  And even human weeds.

  —Finnegan, Road Songs

  “Done,” said Duffey. “I always said that if I could find a better place than mine or better company than my own, I would join it for as long as I was accepted. You look just like the young people who could show me wonders in my own town.”

  They were out of the buildings and into the street. And right next to Duffey's was Bayougoula Park, and it hadn't been there yesterday. Hell, it hadn't been there an hour ago. There had previously been some buildings there, but they couldn't now be called to mind. Zabotski half-believed that the missing buildings had belonged to him, but he couldn't say for sure. Well, there was a new park there now. It was like a blessing.

  “But it isn't a new park, Duffey,” said Absalom Stein, who had been pacing there in edgy thought. “I've just been checking the records, and it's been here for over a hundred years. That's what the people at the park department tell me. There's something nervous about those people. They act like zombies, and they say things as though someone were making them say them. And there's something contrived about the park itself.”

  “Don't look a gift colt in the mouth, Absalom,” the hoyden told him.

  “Or, it'll crop you like a weed,” the child-hero said. “The Thunder Colts can crop the weeds that are too tough for the weed-hackers to cut. Are you a tough one, Duffey?”

  There couldn't ever have been more than two or three narrow buildings in that place, but the park was not narrow in any sense. It remembered all the things that a park should have, and it made room for them.

  There were graceful benches made of fruitwood. There were tables and standing sideboards. There were the big trees, live oaks, gum tupelos, royal walnuts, red cedar. There were several dead and dying animals there, their flesh turning into rubber or plastic or styrofoam as they expired. There were several dead and dying people there also, but they lacked conviction and reality.

  “Are the broken-up animals and the broken-up people the same?” Duffey asked the hoyden who had come out with them.

  “Oh, yes, the broken-up human people often collapse into their own interiors when they die. But often they collapse into their animal totem forms. You will notice that neither of them has real flesh, except for a hunk here and there. Most such people were never real. They are the first ones the weed-choppers chop down. We wonder that our city has kept so many of them for so long. Every place else in the world has gotten rid of all of them several weeks ago.”

  There was a tumbling and noisy fountain in the middle of the park. It was full of green turtles and bullfrogs, whistling bluefish, and carp. There were conches and oysters. There were alligators that would snap up alive any child or dog that came too near and had reactions too slow. The park policed its own. There were horned cattle there. And there were the crazy and splendid thunder colts.

  But natural beauties are not enough for a park. It must have the amenities also. Three persons who were themselves amenities came. Mary Virginia Schaeffer and Margaret Stone and Salvation Sally came to see what park had grown up around the corner from them. These were the girls from the Pelican Press. And also there were the inanimate or only partly animate amenities.

  There were arcades there—gazebos and kiboshes and kiosks, taverns and tabernacles, and all sorts of other tents and pavilions. There were shops there—newsstands and confectioner's stands, open-air cafés, bars, and a little bandstand where some fellows drummed and tootled and tinkled.

  “This is a sort of show staged here,” Mary Virginia said. “It is all contrived and set up. It has a bright and flimsy face. I don't understand it, but it isn't real.”

  “Yes, it's real,” the child-hero said. Really, it was time for the child-hero to leave off being a child. He was old enough to be a man. “But many things that you thought were real, Mary Virginia, they aren't. You're wide open yourself; it is so easy to change your apperceptions. But your town itself, here in its old and historic part, it isn't quite real. Haven't you ever seen the gaps in its reality?”

  “Not very many gaps, not very big ones,” Mary Virginia said. “It's all real except for these new morning parks, and you new morning people. Are you real?”

  “We are. You're still on trial,” the hoyden said.

  “What do you think of these new-old parks and people, Duffey?” Mary Virginia asked.

  “Oh, they represent the bright and shining obverse side of the Fortean coin or universe,” he said. “I've always known that the coin had two sides. The reverse, the best-known side of the Fortean medallion, has always been dingy and dim, aye, and stupid. But these new things are fine and exciting. The parks are misplaced, of course. They do not belong here at all. But let us enjoy them.”

  “Forget about the morning parks,” the child-hero said. “We've told you they're real. Think about this part of your town that is several hundred years old. Is it real, or has it always been a fraud? Will it stand the test of historical evidence? Have you never wondered where the people got all that iron for all the wrought-iron work here? They were very prodigal with it. But this was a pretty primitive Louisiana at the time ascribed for the constructions. And the workmanship of the old iron balconies is in no way primitive. It's decadent rather. But there was no iron available here. It isn't real iron.”

  “Oh, bedamned with this jabber!” Mary Virginia exploded. “It's real enough.”

  “Have you ever wondered where they got all the stones?” the Countess asked. The Countess was pert, with many generations of pertness in her. She was quite young; she was still a teenager. She had the easy cruelty of a member of a very old and very civilized family. “Really, there was no such stone on these mudflats, and there was not a quarry within sixteen hundred miles. The stones of these old buildings around us, they aren't real stones.”

  Mary Virginia and the others had to laugh at the line of nonsense these Royal Pop people were pushing on them. All of them were drinking Shining Mountain Beer now. The brewery was right across the street from the park, but it hadn't been there yesterday. Or, if it had been, it had been passing itself off as some other kind of building.

  �
��They've kept the taste,” Margaret Stone said. “I recognize the taste. But maybe they've changed the name of it. Does anybody remember what the name of it was yesterday? Not Shining Mountain, no.”

  “There are two further proofs that your town is mostly unreal,” the hoyden was saying.

  Zabotski joined them about then. He had a puzzled look, but he still felt that he was supposed to own the land that Bayougoula Park was built upon. “Have you heard about the Black Sea disasters?” he asked. Zabotski was wearing one of those new badges that said: “It's a Question of Your Survival. Are You Splendid Enough?”

  “It has no mountains, and it almost hasn't any thunder,” the hoyden was continuing despite the Zabotski interruption, “and these are two of the things by which the validity of locale or history can be checked.”

  “Certain tropic lands have no thunder at all,” Stein said in his learned manner.

  “Those same tropic lands have no history at all, either,” the hoyden said.

  “Who is that very young man who looks like Finnegan?” Salvation Sally asked them as she pointed to a bugle-nosed young man who was coming dangerously close to the alligators in the fountain. “I'm spooked, I tell you. I thought that it was Finnegan indeed. I thought it was his ghost.”

  “That's the young painter who paints very like Finnegan in his orange period,” Duffey said. “Yes, he could almost be a younger ghost or fetch of Finnegan.”

  “Finnegan always did have a lot of fetches,” Margaret Stone remembered.

  “Mountains and thunder, they are the test,” the hoyden was insisting. “Oh, the newness of mountains! Mountains are the most astonishing happenings in recent history. There weren't any mountains at all until quite recently. And we hadn't full dimensions on this world until they were raised up.”

  “What are you new young pop girls talking about?” Melchisedech Duffey demanded. “There were always mountains. How would there not be mountains?”

  “Duffey, you are so old that you have to remember when there weren't any mountains,” the hoyden challenged. “Or, maybe there was just one; but it wasn't a very high mountain, whatever you have heard to the contrary. That's why there wasn't really very much water required for the water epic. It was all a flatlander world then.”

  “You young people—the child-hero, the hoyden, the Countess—are you not all in the presentation tonight at the Decatur Street Opera House?” Mary Virginia asked.

  “Why, of course,” the young Countess said. “We are the splendor and interest of it, up till the slaughter starts.”

  “And this mountains-and-thunder nonsense that you're talking, that's part of the presentation, isn't it? This is just advertising talk, yes?”

  “Come to the show, lady, come to the show,” the child-hero said. “We give away lots of free things here, but we don't give away everything.”

  Black people of the town strode by wearing the new badges “Are You Splendid Enough?” There were other people of unspecified sorts. The dying people and dying animals were about gone. As the life left their members, their flesh turned into plastic or plywood or papier-mâché, and then they were regarded as no more than leftover carnival debris.

  “How does it happen?” Margaret Stone asked.

  “They lost faith in themselves and in their flesh,” the Countess said. “The dragon there had the most faith. It was a human, and then it collapsed into the dragon totem as it died. Most of its flesh is turned now, but not all.”

  Margaret Stone bought a box of crackers at one of the kiboshes and fed the crackers to a dying dragon. Most of the body of this biodegradable dragon had already been transmuted into papier-mâché, but some flesh remained.

  “That one mountain was the Mountain of the Commandments,” the hoyden said. “Notice the number ten in all the versions. That meant that this god had ten fingers and ten toes. He was an anthropomorphic god. Had he been a god in the image of the earlier peoples, he would have given twelve commands for his twelve fingers. Had he been an abstract or transcendent god, then he would have given an abstract or transcendent number of commands.

  “It was the same mountain they used in Greece both earlier and later. They played king of the mountain on it. They played Titans and Thunderguns. They played Giants and Jovians. They had small-caliber thunder then, but none of the big stuff.

  “Very often, the people put rollers under the mountain and rolled it around to the different countries, since there was only the one mountain in the world. The name of that first mountain was Ziggurat. Now there are more and more mountains. There's supposed to be a new one somewhere this morning.”

  “What's the real story, guys?” Salvation Sally asked.

  “Oh, these morning people (we're all turning into them, you know, and I hate it) were around a long while ago,” Stein said, “and they were a nuisance. A demiurge put them all to sleep on a mountainside and told them they must sleep till he called them with a thunder of a certain tone. Then, a few millennia later, the demiurge forgot about it and used that tone of thunder for something else. The morning people woke up at the tone of the thunder (it was only the other day), and the first thing they saw was the mountain they were on. They thought the mountain was their mother, and that they were thunder dimension people. That's all there was to it.”

  “Is it possible you speak truth when you intend to joke?” the child-hero cried. “We are the thunder dimension people. The mountain is our mother. It was only the other day. We aren't fully awake yet, but we're in a fever to resolve it all. We're in a hurry to get rid of the flesh-weeds and the remnants and see who are the thunder people and who are not.”

  An alligator was eating a little boy who had come too close to the fountain. The sight of this nauseated Mary Virginia, and indeed it wasn't a pleasant thing to watch.

  “I know it isn't real,” she said, “but who is the illusion master who puts these things on? Is it possible there is some meaning to it? Or is it just a piece of unfortunate clownishness?”

  “Oh, the eating is real enough,” the child-hero said. “And the little boy was real once. But then he failed it. That's the thing that will happen to at least half of you here present. You'll be found short, and you'll be destroyed. It's best for all. Some simple persons who have lost their shine will be eaten by the alligators here. Others, a bit larger and older, are destroyed by the fire drakes when they prove to be inferior, or of some inferior species. And then there are certain strong and bright but crookedly talented weeds; and they must be destroyed by the thunder colts. Two will be working side by side at the harvest. And one will be taken and one will be left.

  “But the little boy is gone for good, and his puzzled parents will not even remember his name. Look at his mother there. She knows she brought someone or something to the park with her, but she can't remember who or what it was.”

  “Come along, Stein,” Duffey said. “We're too close to it. Let's stand off from it a little way where the dazzle won't be in our eyes. We can solve these puzzles. It comes to my mind that we are both good at puzzles, and Zabotski here also. There's a group of master illusionists in town.”

  “Or of master destroyers of illusion,” Stein said. “We will step aside from their influence and take a clear look at it all.”

  “Good-by, the men,” Margaret Stone wished them on their way. “Be splendid!”

  Duffey and Stein and Zabotski all went over to Stein's apartment. There was always a lot of high-class sanity at Stein's. The three men looked at one another. They laughed. They set themselves to solve some doubtful happenings that had made a shambles of the morning.

  “We all know that buildings cannot disappear overnight and be replaced by pleasant parks that are curiously stylized,” Stein said. “We must now bring reason to bear. There is an illusion working in all this, and we must see through it. They are all dislocated scenes that we have watched this morning, but they may be only halves of a binocular vision; they may come into clear focus if we are able to find the other halves. Th
ese things are something like the aberrations I describe in my paper—”

  Mary Virginia, Margaret Stone, and Salvation Sally had gone around the park to Duffey's bijou, which they believed to be one of the sources of confusion. The sessions were going great. One had the feeling that these people really were getting rid of much of the trash of the world, and consolidating other things. The speaker now was Hugh de Turenne of Xavier there in town. Hugh seemed to be a genuine member of the inner Royal Pop Historians. He interrupted himself as the ladies from the Pelican Enterprises came in, and he spoke directly to them: “What are the people saying about the Black Sea cataclysms, Miss Margaret?” he asked.

  “They are saying that it's a terrible thing,” Margaret Stone called in her jangled voice. “An hour ago, the people were saying that it was a terrible, terrible thing. And two and a half hours ago they were saying that it was a thrice-terrible thing.”

  “Exactly,” Hugh beamed. “The obliteration of the Black Sea isn't really important. But if we claim to have clarified geography and have things like that left over, who can credit our sincerity? We have to get rid of all the non-existents. There may still be a small note on the disaster in the afternoon papers; there may still be a short mention of it in the evening broadcasts; but it will be nowhere near so terrible a thing this evening as it was this morning. Tomorrow it may not be mentioned at all. In a week none but scholars will even recognize the name, and they will apply it correctly to an entirely different body of water. And in a month there will not be any reference anywhere in the world to the place that we used to call the Black Sea.”