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

by R. A. Lafferty

  But there were always marks breaking through on the walls between the time of the wall washing and the hit of the first prophet. It was the case of the stronger of yesterday's drawings and writings fighting their way out through those paint-washes and splaying themselves black and beetling on the new clean surface. There was a never-say-die spirit to the more meaningful of the old drawings, writhing and fighting their was through. And they changed in their struggles. Comparative pictures showed that the graphia were somewhat different in their emerging state from what they had been when they were submerged by the wall washing.

  And then the new day's pictures and scribbles began to appear even before human hands could reach the wall. And this day, as revealed by the vision-set from Atlanta, the Rooky Duke scored first.

  “Good!” Mudge Gilligan cried out as he watched. “I'm always afraid of the Rook, but if he's first he can't hurt me. I've got the third tonight, and if that had been the Rook I'd probably have died. There's only one worse than the Rooky Duke for me this session, the way the fates are falling.”

  Quite often lately, the Rooky Duke had been scoring first, with electric or ectoplasmic hands. The cameras caught a little bit of the fogginess of such ghost hands that splashed their signatures and messages on prime walls before the surge of great-name but purely human artists could reach them.

  The Rooky Duke had left his flaming message there, and it meant the deaths of very many people. But Mudge Gilligan was not riding on the Rook for a first.

  The Putty Dwarf scored immediately after.

  “Two down!” Mudge cried in half relief and half fear. “That's two of the three who might have killed me. And I have the next coming up, but the odds are strong against all three of my worst death-threats coming up the first three.” Mudge shook though, as if the odds were a little bit closer on the thing.

  “Why do you take such risks, dear?” Evangeline asked her husband. “I'd think it would worry you sick.”

  “It does. But there's a pretty good sum of money in the pot by this time. Only one in the pot can win and it's got to be me soon. There's only five of us left.”

  “And only one in the pot can lose—can lose his life, that is,” Evangeline said, “and it's got to be you soon. Why did you join up this time?”

  “You remember the fortune I got —

  Live dangerously,

  reap the stuff,

  and die if you lack luck enough.

  And, Evangeline, nobody can escape his fortune, and four men have already died in it, and the pot has built up to twelve dollars. It's worth the risk. What other chance have I to avoid being a poor man all my life?” The Rooky Duke and the Putty Dwarf had already hit. And now the third prophet, hit—”

  “Oh, no, no!” Mudge howled in terror as he recognized the third ghostly hand that was writing on the camera'd wall.

  “Is he really so bad for you, dear?” Evangeline asked.

  “He is the death of me,” Mudge moaned, for the third of the prophets to score was the Gloaty Throat.

  “At least read the message,” Evangeline urged. “It might not be death after all.”

  But the handwriting on the wall read:

  Anoint your head and leave your brood,

  and use what came in the breakfast food.

  This message didn't mean a lot to the millions of viewers, but it came through strong to Mudge Gilligan.

  “All I can do is make an end to it,” Mudge whimpered. He knew that his little boy Hiero had got a vein opener in the last box of breakfast food and that the Gloaty Throat was referring to it.

  “This is good-by, Evangeline,” he said.

  “Don't touch me, please,” she protested. “Your hands are always so sweaty when you are scared, and you are so acid. You know I don't like you to touch me when your hands are sweaty.”

  Mudge Gilligan went quickly and anointed his head. Then he got Hiero's vein opener and he opened his veins and died.

  “Oh, I can see that this is going to be one of those days,” Evangeline said.

  With the real mind explosion, most of the more intelligent people had gone beyond high astrology and had begun to tie their fortunes to the handwriting on the walls, to the pictures, to the messages. And the Handwriting on the Wall had already become a great and established institution. As the only prehuman graphic communication, it had always remained somewhat monkey-handed, and its prophetic element had not become soaringly interspecies. It was real understanding, the stuff that was splashed on the walls and became psycho-dyked there. This was gut-art. This was what the great Charles Puncheon had called transcendent drivel. This was seraphic scribbling. And it was creative prediction.

  The emphasis on wall writing was not to abrogate high astrology but to fulfill it. All the great prophet-artists of the whited walls are planetary personages, and all the scientific backing of high astrology applies to transcendent wall writing also.

  No good name had ever been found to describe the excellence and many-leveled meaning of this testimony on the walls. It had been called kakographia and syngramma and scribble-schnibble. It had been called zographia and ektyposis and ochsenscheiber. It had been called chromatisma and schediasma and oscenite. It had been called scherzi and motfi and asynartesia. The Italians have called it graffita, and the name may have stuck. But it became more than just a complex of things that dirty little boys wrote on walls. Now it was things that dirty big boys wrote, and these boys were the prophetic artist-heroes who came to the top by power and genius and scheming and creative duplicity and murder.

  The twelve zodiacal signs had once been “set” things that were not subject to change. But the twelve prophets of the whited walls were twelve kings of the mountains who came to the top and flung others down to their destruction. They were the reincarnations of the prophets of the twelve tribes of Israel; they were the embodiments of the twelve planets; they were the twelve apostles; and they were the twelve signs from the sky. These mighty ones accepted every challenge, and many of them lived at the apex for several years. There were no living, former members of this highest circle of the prophetic artists: to fall from the twelve was to fall to death.

  At this time, the high twelve were: The Rooky Duke, the Putty Dwarf, the Tutti Fruit, the Demogorgon, the Braggin Dragon, the Gloaty Throat, the Creature Preacher, Joe Snow, the Spanish Fly, Hu Flung, the Moving Finger, and the Turning Worm.

  “Mother, father has opened his veins and bled to death all over everything,” small son Hiero Gilligan was hollering. Hiero's early stridence always gave an unpleasant cast to a morning. “Yes, dear,” his mother Evangeline told him, “but be tolerant, it is his personal privilege.”

  “Personal privilege, nothing!” Hiero exploded. “I never said that papa could use my vein opener. He should have asked me first. I wish people would leave my things alone.”

  “I'll get you another one if you really want to use it, dear,” Evangeline offered.

  “No, I wouldn't want to use it now,” Hiero pouted. “The shine's all gone off the idea.”

  The Gilligans had given their little boy Hiero everything, but he had always been hard to please.

  There were those (unguided persons all) who said that the walls and all their fruits were nonsense and that the science behind the prophetic messages was pseudo-science. These unguided folks said that the guided persons were probably insane and that they were wrecking the very apparatus of society with their aggressive ignorance. They said that production had already broken down because of the great numbers of unproductive wall watchers and that already there were not enough of the necessities to go around to everybody. Well, no, there wasn't enough for everybody, but there was enough for the guided people. They had their power and their numbers. Who was going to dispute them, the fortune-cookie people?

  The Spanish Fly had just hit the prime wall, and it was carried to all the other big-name walls. The Fly could not hit in a number of places at one time, as could the Rooky Duke or the Putty Dwarf or the Gloaty Thr
oat. These were camera reproductions of the Fly message on the secondary walls. He wasn't a multi-presence entity. He hadn't either electric or ectoplasmic hands. He had to be at the wall he actually hit. So he was at the Great North Wall of the men's room of Monorail Central in Atlanta. But the Spanish Fly did have successive bodies. He had to have. He used up a body every time he hit.

  He had hit now on the prime wall with a sudden and spectacular splotch of blood and viscera. And the great blotch was himself entire: the blotch was the Spanish Fly. The gory stuff slid down the wall and it spelled out its message as it did so:

  I am an insect spilled;

  this is my all.

  I in my red, fulfilled

  on whited wall.

  There was always a wistful tone to the Spanish Fly's death messages, and there was a wonder how he was able to spell out the message when he came to his last extremity. His enduring classic communication, of course, had been those slow-beat words:

  Blood, bone, gore, pith,

  reek and rot.

  Here I go with

  all I've got.

  But death splatterings lose a little of their excellence when they are repeated every night or morning.

  The Spanish Fly always said that he was really the planet Mercury, but in his present manifestation he had been born in Spain, Idaho. Jealous and edged-tooth persons said that his use of the throwaway bodies was a conjure and a trick.

  “Who's going to bury papa?” Hiero Gilligan asked his mother. “I don't know,” she said. “Maybe I will have an intuition on how to get it done.”

  “Who are you on this morning?”

  “I'm playing a double. The Demogorgon and Joe Snow.”

  “But you aren't smart enough to play a double, mama.”

  Hu Flung had hit. Hu Flung's messages were always in the medium of thrown ordure. It globbed on the wall, and the words it spelled out were always gross. The Demogorgon hit. The Demogorgon was probably the least of the reigning twelve. Only a sustained rumor as to who he really was gave him any stature at all. And his messages didn't mean much to the multitude, but this one meant a little bit to Evangeline:

  Oh bury your dead

  and run and run!

  But where will you head

  for luck and Fun?

  “Well where will you head to find them, mama?” Hiero asked.

  “I don't know. I'll intuit something in a little while. Who are you on today?”

  “The Braggin Dragon.”

  A dozen challengers from the stratum below the High Twelve had hit on the Great North Wall in Atlanta, the prime wall of the day. And ten thousand other challengers had hit on a thousand other walls. Oh, the world would never run out of talent with so many powerful ones rising like giant waves every morning. Most of these were one-timers, but some of them had sustained power.

  Joe Snow hit!

  But Joe was always a time bomb. His hits were delayed messages. He hit with snow-shot, white on white, and his messages could not be read immediately. But his communications always caused flurries of intuitions in all who were on him for that day. And later in the day, when the whited walls had become dirty and speckled, his messages could be read as they stood out in stark white from dingy gray.

  “I have an intuition from Joe Snow,” Evangeline said, and she rose to follow it.

  “But your intuitions on Snow are always wrong,” the little boy Hiero argued, “and when the messages finally come clear, they are never anything like you guessed.”

  “Never mind,” said Evangeline. “I have to start somewhere, and I will start with this intuition.” Evangeline went by the place of Violet Anemone Rhodina, a widow-woman of the town. “Your roses look bad, Vi,” Evangeline told her. “I believe that there is something a little bit lacking in them. I've been worrying about them.”

  “And your psychology seems to be a little bit lacking, Ev,” Violet said. “What do you want from me and how much will it put me out?”

  “Like all the guided people, I am a giver and not a taker,” Evangeline said. “Do you know when it was that your roses looked the best they ever have? It was in the months after you buried your husband in your rose garden.”

  “Yes, of course. He gave my garden three flourishing years. There was never a man with so much to contribute as my husband. The earth is richer for him.”

  “My own husband died about half an hour ago, Vi. I think he made a mistake, but he went by his own free choice. Now, I was wondering whether—”

  “I'm afraid that he's too acid, Ev. He always looked like a very acidic man to me, and too much acid isn't good for roses.”

  “Oh, no, Vi. I don't believe he was ever acid at all.”

  “Didn't his hands used to sweat a lot? Wasn't he a compulsive gambler? Both may be signs of a highly acid condition.”

  “Oh, what will I do with him? What will I do?” Evangeline moaned.

  “I'd like to help you, Ev, and I'm willing to be convinced. If you can bring me a certificate that his condition wasn't overly acidic, then of course you can bury him in my rose garden.”

  “Oh, I will try to get a certificate from someone today,” Evangeline said. Then she went by Gimbal's where she worked. She hadn't been by there very often lately, but she thought that someone there might help her through a bad day.

  “Oh, I fired you a week ago, Mrs. Gilligan,” Selkirk Gimbal told her. “I'd have told you before, but you haven't been in here since I fired you. Don't look at me so blank. You don't work here any more. You never seem to comprehend what I say, but how else can I tell you that you're fired and that you don't work here any more?”

  “That's your problem, Selkirk. We guided persons never have any trouble in expressing ourselves. I'm going to have to take a few days off. I have a husband to dispose of, and I have all sorts of intuitions to sort out. And I'm going down to Atlanta today to examine the prime wall of record. I'll try to get in here a little while next week.”

  “No hurry, Evangeline. You don't work here any more.”

  “I'll forgive you for that remark, Selkirk, remembering that you are an unguided person.”

  “It may be that we unguided persons get along as well as you guided ones.”

  “Of course you don't get along as well as we do, Selkirk. Notice yourselves sometime. You simply don't have our depth. We guided ones are the pre-stressed people, and we can never be unbalanced. And we have our power.”

  The guided people of the walls had been given twelve extra sensators-at-large, one for the followers of each prophet-artist. This gave, almost always, a special tilt in affairs towards the guided people. And they had been given many other things.

  The unguided persons were those who did not order their lives according to the handwriting on the walls. They hadn't the scientific understanding to bring them to that. They hadn't the planetary disposition for it. In every society there will be the guided elites, and there will be the unguided commonality. And the whited walls, those screens for projecting things from beyond by means of the artist-prophets, were the guides for the guided.

  About midday, Evangeline received a report that might have been disquieting to her if she had not been one of the guided ones. She learned that her small son Hiero, along with three companions, had opened a new option kit that was to have been the gift to one of them for his next name day. This option kit was a very sophisticated one and should not have been given to small children without caution. But they had opened it and they had played with it. And all four of them had optioned out. Of course, self-destruction is a personal privilege for persons of all ages, but the act itself is peculiarly poignant with small children.

  All four of the boys were on the Braggin Dragon that day. That might be significant.

  They all looked nice though, as Evangeline was told, and each of them held in his little dead hand one of those motto flags such as come in those kits, with the words It's a world I never made.

  “It's too bad that children have to grow up so soon,” Ev
angeline said to herself. And then it seemed that her lament was incorrect since Hiero hadn't really grown up at all.

  “Oh, certainly, it's all right,” Violet Rhodina said. “I'm letting them bury all four of the little boys in my rose garden. Little boys are seldom hyperacidic.”

  Evangeline Gilligan took a fly-by to Atlanta. She wanted to see the wall of the day. In Atlanta at Monorail Central she came upon the Demogorgon himself sorrowfully drinking coffee and eating a roll and a bowl of squid brains at one of the tet cafés. “I always thought you were a natural,” she jibed, “and here you are eating squid brains.”

  “I am an un-natural,” the Demogorgon said, “but I have a right to these. These are devil-fish brains, and I am the devil himself.”

  The Demogorgon had always insisted, in the face of derision and disbelief, that he was the one and original devil and as such was unnatural and anti-natural. Some of the great prophet-artists were natural in their gifts; but some used artificial enhancement, either special diet or brain surgery, to build up their talents. The surgery always removed several pounds of brain matter that might prove distracting to the talents, and it introduced other matter from the organs and brains of other species and from rogue humans. The special diets consisted of daily eating of these same types of organs and brains. The highest item on the diet lists was squid brains.

  The squids, living in it entirely, had a finer understanding of the great oceanic unconscious than had people of any other species. And the squids also had a primordial understanding of writing on walls. Their inky ejections were true communication-writing, and they did have whited walls very deep in the oceans that they wrote upon with their propelled ink. The squids are not a degenerate species that writes sequentially one letter or one word after another. They eject an entire gloopy message at one time upon the walls.