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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “No, dolt, that rank Rat-catcher of a Cromwell is wrong,” Professor Dolph Lustlife contradicted. “They are not free and easy. We'll not permit it. We have them imprisoned in their thousand-fold prisons—well, not all of them, but we have a lot of them bottled and stoppered—and we'll not release them. Cromwell's wrongness is a sticky pitch that catches the weak-winged and weak-limbed ones. Has it caught you, little Killer Diller? Perhaps we can have your own entailment confiscated and divided among the remaining six of us. That's a penalty for your being wrong.”

  The Prized Hemispheres were displayed on a nut-wood table there in the torch-lit lounge.

  “Ah, maybe you will confiscate my entailment too,” Professor Sanger spoke in half anger. “Maybe you'll cancel me. I have been feeling a bit cancelled lately. It's as though an amnesia were snapping at my heels like a long-toothed fog.”

  “Those are the unapproved notes, little Banger Sanger,” Professor Dorothy Mandel jibed. “Be careful. They'll eat the heels clear off you.”

  “The amnesia is connected in part with Cromwell,” Sanger said. “How long has Professor Cromwell and his mild insanity been among us? I can't remember.”

  “He arrived just this year, I think,” said Under-professor Peter Quickshanks.

  “Just this month, I think,” said Professor Diller.

  “Just this week, I think,” said Professor Dorothy Mandel, “but it's been long enough.”

  “What does the record show, Dean Anwalt?” asked Professor Dolph Lustlife.

  “The record is a little stubborn in Cromwell's case,” said Dean Anwalt, that baby-faced, aging man. “A dozen times I've looked in the record for the date of Cromwell's entry into our midst. I've had my finger and my eye right on that date a dozen times. But I've never been able to read it off.”

  “Why not?” asked Professor Mandel.

  “An inhibition, in the form of a mist, is always introduced. The mist gets in my eyes, and it puts me to sleep every time. It's a clever device, really too clever for Cromwell to have thought up by himself. I wonder about it.”

  “We'll fix that fink!” Professor Lustlife bayed. “We'll fix his termination date for today or tomorrow, and we'll make it stick. Then let that Rat-catcher throw mist in our eyes!”

  “Who are the Rat-catchers?” Professor Diller asked. “And who are the rats? Who are the Principalities and the Powers? Those are Cromwell's questions. This one is my own: Are we, all of us, b.y.o.b.—bring your own bottle—genii?”

  “The more intelligent genii have always used the mental evasion that the inside of the bottle is the outside, and the outside is the inside,” Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown said in her soft voice. “They make themselves believe that they are on the outsides of the bottles and that they have the world caught inside. By believing it they make it to be so. And, really, there's not very much difference in the two sides of a piece of glass.”

  The faces of the people in the first of the Hemispheres looked very familiar in the torchy light. Who were those people who had been imprisoned in there for so long? If those crowded and tormented people were only artifacts, why was it so shocking a thing to meet the eyes of one of them?

  “The things we are talking about are mottles on the face of the world. There cannot be a prosaic and everyday world if we even have such thoughts. That would mean that the nature and essence and direction of the world are still up for grabs,” said Sanger.

  “The face of the whole world has always been made up of just such mottles as these,” Professor Lustlife said. “But it is part of our job — we of the upper one-thousandth of one percent — to give a better seeming to the world's complexion. There have always been experts working on this. We construct and maintain the fiction that there is a rational world, that there is a consensus world, that there is a humdrum world — ah, the unapproved notes of that illicit musical instrument, the hum-drum, are no longer heard by conforming ears — that there is a work-a-day world. And we know there isn't, but the fiction has proved a useful one.”

  “Bring in the accused,” said Dean John Anwalt. The doors were thrown open. But an underling entered first and handed Dean Anwalt a piece of writing. After this, Tom and Catherine Cromwell came in. Then the doors were closed and locked. The Cromwells were put in the dock (they had an antique dock-stall there, of fine, old, polished wood). The Kangaroo Plaque was unveiled on the wall to show what sort of hearing this would be: A kangaroo with a lot of kick.

  “I have just received notice of disturbances,” Dean Anwalt said. “A group of young and not-so-young students, known as the Crom-bombs, has been knocking down walls and blowing off roofs. They are doing this by shock waves that are somehow in between audio frequencies. Are you responsible, Professor Cromwell?”

  “Oh, I guess so, a little bit. I encourage these people to improvise. And some of the walls and roofs did seem a little bit confining.” And Professor Tom Cromwell began to blow soundlessly on his alto flute.

  “This probably crowns a series of illicit acts,” Dean Anwalt said. “If there should be one more illicitness, that would be certainty. Please stay in the dock-stall, Mrs. Cromwell. It is securely locked, and there is no way you can get out of it, in any case. But you are out of it. Get back in it.”

  “I can't. It's securely locked,” Catherine said. She was standing before the Prized Hemispheres and waving at some of the people inside the first of them.

  “Stop blowing on that damned flute, Cromwell!” Anwalt ordered. “The sound of it, no, not the sound, the something of it is driving us all crazy.”

  “Can you hear my flute?” Cromwell asked.

  “No, of course we can't,” Anwalt said. “But whatever is coming out of it is driving us crazy. Stop it, I say! Who will deliver the jeremiad?”

  “Let me!” shouted Professor Dolph Lustlife. “Oh, let me!”

  “This man Cromwell is a trouble-stirrer, a sour note, a glutton at the trough, and he is a nobody from nowhere. Let us vote his extinction at once!”

  “I say get that Rat-catcher of a Cromwell!” Under-professor Quickshanks swore angrily.

  “We intend to, Peter,” said Lustlife. “There is something totally wrong about this man. We don't remember how it happened, or when it was that Cromwell came to our college. We barely begin to remember that each of us was assessed one seventh of his pay to go to this Rat-catcher. Yes, he is the Rat-catcher. He blows the Rat-catcher flute. But his flute lies about the wide meadows it will take people to. They are all narrow meadows, in a bottle, in a hemisphere. Where did he go? He can't get out of the locked dock-stall. He can't get out of the locked room. But he's gone. Where?”

  “I believe he has gone up the chimney,” Dean Anwalt guessed in a jerky voice. “His flute playing seems to be coming from up the chimney.”

  “There isn't any chimney,” Lustlife said. “Oh, there he is back in the room again. Cromwell, please stay in one place ‘til we are finished with you. And if you detect a sinister note in the phrase ‘finished with you,’ it is there.”

  “Let me simplify this,” said Cromwell. “You want to be rid of myself and my wife. Well, we are ready to go. We are leaving this college this very night for wider and livelier places.”

  “Do you not understand, Cromwell?” Dean Anwalt asked. “Certainly, we want to be rid of you. Certainly, we want you to leave. But we do not want you to leave here for some other place. We want you to leave every place forever. We will insist upon your extinction. Guard the four corners, Quickshanks, Lustlife, Thumbsdown, Mandel!”

  “They are guarded,” said Lustlife (but it didn't seem to be a physical guarding of the four corners of the room). “We have him bottled up, no matter what he tries. Now, for the regularity and seemliness of the world, let us remove these Cromwell irregularities. It is not enough to extinguish irregular persons. The condition must be achieved that they have never been. And that the creatures writhing in bottles have never been.”

  “Is it possible that extinctions and obliterations and s
uch can go on so unquestioningly and unnoticed in our world?” Professor Diller asked. “Is it really so wooly a world we live in that it has to be saved from such? After all, Cromwell is no more than a clown.”

  “This clown Cromwell can affect the whole world,” Dean Anwalt insisted, “and the world gets very nervous when it is disrupted. Every clown can affect the whole world at any time. That's the four-billion-headed hazard that the world always has to live with. Most of the clowns don't understand the way it really is with the world: The clown Cromwell understands certain parts of it dangerously well.”

  “But there is no cause for his removal except incompetence, arrogance, obnoxicity, suborning the young, and cracking windows with his flute-playing,” Diller protested. “I like Tom-Crom. He is harmless, and his wife—”

  “And his wife is not harmless,” said Professor Dorothy Mandel. “Could we not terminate Catherine and keep Thomas?”

  “Dorothy, your eyebrows are burned off and your nose is melted, and your head is cracked wide open!” Catherine Cromwell cried, but she seemed to be talking to somebody in the first Hemisphere rather than to Professor Dorothy Mandel where she sat in the room. And yet, that candid comment clipped Dorothy Mandel a staggering blow. “You sure do look funny, with your head-hair burned off, too,” Catherine said to the person in the Hemisphere.

  “Are we sure that Cromwell's entailments can be divided among the seven of us?” Sanger asked.

  “I am sure,” said Anwalt. “There won't have been any Cromwells when we have finished. There will be only the seven of us in the special department; and what is available will be available for the seven of us. And, to get rid of any wax-heartedness that may be lingering among us—” Dean Anwalt finished the words with a rapid two-handed action. He opened two vials and let their fragrance reek into every corner of the flickering torch-lit room. (Anwalt had been professor of Instigational Chemistry.)

  “Ah, I don't like Tom-Crom as well as I did,” Professor Diller said as he snuffled the rank aroma. “I say let's get rid of the spacious devil and his green meadows. We mustn't let the world be upset. We mustn't let ourselves be upset. Damn, where did he go this time? The doors are still locked. What is that stuff from the vials, Dean?”

  “Essence of Hyena Scruff from one of the vials,” said Dean Anwalt with his baby-face working into a twisted passion. “And Fortified Distillation of Entrail Gore from the other. Evocative stuff, what? It does get one into the mood. Muzzle deep into that gore, everyone! We'll have Cromwell and all the blood in him. We'll split him seven ways, and then we'll arrange it that there never was a Cromwell. Ah, maintaining a conventional façade for the world isn't easy, but it's a big part of our job. Holy Hyenas! There is a shattering un-noise somewhere near, and it's worse even than Cromwell's flute. What is it? It's the final offence.” Anwalt had a very old sword-hilt in his hand, and there was a sort of rusty-airy outline still to be seen of a very old sword-blade.

  The un-noise rose tall and rugged then, and it stuttered in and out of licit sounds. It was outside on the college brown-grass green, and it was inside in the lounge. It was a marrow-curdling siren, rising and leaping between infuriating sound and people-cracking unsound. It was a full-sweep, ascending siren, rumbling and screaming, and calling the unapproved notes and nations back into a narrow world.

  “I'm glad the young ones thought of that,” said Professor Cromwell making a casual reappearance. “It illustrates my points even better than a buzz-saw.”

  “Rat-fink Cromwell, where have you been?” Professor Diller snarled at Cromwell, and the hairs were high and excited on his scruff. “Gore of your bowels we'll have! How do you go and come?”

  “Oh, out one crack and back by another,” Cromwell said. “It's the only way to travel.”

  III

  Is Peter Piper Peter Poper now

  To change the rules and banished things allow?

  Look out! The cracky thing has jumped a groove!

  They blow that lawless horn, you'd better move.

  —The Original Horn Book

  Then Cromwell began to blow on that pipe, that horn, that alto flute. It was a brain-bursting assault on every sense. It was the exponent of the siren in its howling power. It was soundless, but it was shattering.

  “This is war!” cried John Michael Anwalt the dean. “Seize him! Kill him!” But Cromwell blinked on and off, he disappeared and reappeared. He walked into cracks in the air. And he walked out of other cracks from other directions. There was no weapon at hand that would touch him.

  “It must not be known that Hamelin College is the seat of unearthly battles!” Anwalt cried as if he were ordering the elementals to desist. “Were we not given the duty of denying admittance to those places to everybody forever? Are we not the same persons who received those orders? Or is it true that every particle of a person is altered every nine thousand years, so we are now no longer the same persons? Oh that horn! That Rat-catcher horn! There has to be some way to stop the blasts of that horn!” But Cromwell was riding that horn in battle array.

  “Oh, what horn is that?” Professor Dolph Lustlife cried in agony. “Can't somebody kill that horn!”

  “I'll try!” Professor Dorothy Mandel shouted. “The horn and the siren and the crack-traveling people and even ourselves are all postulates and suppositions in my experimental psychology class. But I can't turn off the siren, I can't make the crack-travelers stay in their cracks, I can't kill the horn. Oh horn, you kill me!”

  How Cromwell was blowing that horn-flute!

  “The horn is a recurring myth-person in my analytical mythology class,” Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown keened. “But it kills me, too. It forgets that I'm the mistress of the class.”

  “It's Josue's horn!” Professor Diller moaned, “and all the walls are going down.”

  “It's the Rat-catcher's horn!” Professor Sanger railed. “But we paid the Rat-catcher. I know we did. We paid him one seventh of our pay.”

  “It's Roland's horn calling Great Carl and his wagon down from the sky,” Professor Dorothy Mandel groaned. “But Roland's horn is an archetype and we cannot see it nor hear it consciously. Oh my unconscious ears! Oh my unconscious head!”

  “It's Gabriel's horn!” John Michael Anwalt shrieked. “But how has he become prince before me? If he is here, then this is the end of things.”

  “It's Triton's horn,” Lustlife warned, “and it roils the deepest waters. If it wakes up some of those things, then we are dead.”

  “It's Peter Piper's horn-pipe,” Under-professor Quickshanks jittered. “Are Gabriel and Duke Josue and Cromwell and Peter Piper all the same? Is Peter Piper Peter?”

  “It's the Horn of Plenty,” said Catherine Cromwell simply. “Even smart people should be able to see that. Better raise the sky! Look at the stuff coming out of that horn!”

  The unhorned people in the lounge couldn't see the stuff coming out of the horn (it was almost all in the unapproved frequencies), but Catherine Cromwell enumerated.

  “Look at the boats and floats, at the steamboats, sailboats, electric boats, punt-boats, slave-boats with the whips and oars and haul-ropes. Oh, there is nothing so opulent as the banging of whips! Cabin cruisers and floating townhouses! How they all flow out of the plenty-horn, the cornucopia! And you all thought that it was just a cromie alto flute!”

  The walls of all the buildings seemed ready to go down from the expansive and exponential vibrations of horn-flute and siren.

  “It is not the cornucopia, not the Horn of Plenty,” Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown was calling in her soft voice against the silent noise. “It is the cornucalamitatis, the horn of calamity or trouble. It is the crooked horn that is broken off the crooked cow. All the riches that Catherine believes she sees coming from the horn are but the green cud-chewings and flowing manure from the crooked cow. These are false riches from the false box. The box or coffer or chest was called the ‘cow’ by our fathers. It is the unholy cow with the crooked or crumbled horn. Many have forgo
tten that the Maiden All Forlorn was named Pandora, and that the Box of Pandora was really a kerakibotion or horn-box.”

  “Who is Cromwell?” asked Professor Diller as he wiped the blood from his eyes and nose and mouth and ears from the vibrations that made unusual assault on every sense.

  “Automobiles coming out of the horn and climbing the airy hills!” Catherine was shouting in glee. “Old handcrafted automobiles from the High Middle Ages. The Almagest, The Argonaut, the Red-throat Racer, the Dragon, oh the beauty of these old cars! They run by alchemical transmutation and planetary congruence.”

  “Oh, Cromwell is the crooked man,” Dean Anwalt said. “Be ready for the containment maneuver when it is time for it, wardens! ‘Crom’ means crooked in all the old tongues, so Cromwell is the well-crooked man. He blows the crooked horn, the cromie horn, the crumbled horn of child-scripture. He is the crooked man, and his journey into the infinite is no more than a crooked mile. He is not Gabriel. Still less is he Jack Horner. But he sports murderously with us and with the world. He may be the mysterious and fearsome person known in proto-legend as The Tin-horn Sport. There is much philological work to be done on this aspect of him.”

  “Barbecued whole hippopotami, ton-tuns of wine, young whales shiskabobbed on slag-mountain spits, we will have a going-away-from-this-place feast, and then we will have a coming-home-to-home feast!” Catherine Cromwell regaled the air as Tom-Crom the Piper's Glom tootled those riches out of the curved-around hoot-flute.

  And there was an elemental roaring that even transgressed on the narrow area of accepted sound itself.

  “I'm very uncomfortable about the whole business of the cracks,” Under-professor Peter Quickshanks jabbered. “Why is there a childhood taboo against stepping on cracks? Oh, because it's always possible for a person to fall through a crack and be lost. When I was a boy, a young friend did fall through a crack in the pavement. We could hear him falling all day long. Then, at dark, he hit a ledge or something very far down, and he was killed. We could hear him crying down there all one night. And the crack was only a slight one. Not an open crack at all.”