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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “But, Austro, even you must realize that something has gone wrong with it,” Hardtack said. “It's howling for at least fifty separate targets now. There can't be that many people in on this murder. Even in Broken Bench Lane that isn't possible. Something's wrong!”

  “Well, there was one slight thing he hadn't corrected yet. He decided, because of the immediacy of the murder, to go ahead and put the machine into action anyhow, is that not true, Roy? It seemed so unlikely that the case would arrive.”

  “Uh, it's like the man who sold the horse to the other man,” said Roy Mega who had just returned to the wax museum after setting his machine into action. “ ‘I will acknowledge that the horse has one fault,’ the seller said. ‘He sits down on grapefruit. He cannot pass a grapefruit on the ground without sitting down on it, but otherwise he is an exemplary horse, and he is patient with children.’ ”

  “So the man bought the horse and started to ride him home,” Austro said. “He went fine until the man rode him through a little creek, and the horse sat down in the middle of it and would not budge. Cudgels and calumnies would not move the beast, so the man walked back to the seller with his complaint.”

  ‘Oh hell, I forgot to tell you,’ the seller said, ‘he sits down on fish too,’ ” Roy Mega finished it off.

  “So???” police detective Otis Hardtack intoned, and everyone listened silently. Even the howling murder detector was quiet now, having been incapacitated by men with hammers and wrecking bars.

  “It's the same with my new machine,” Roy Mega said. “It howls when it comes on to a recent murder. It also howls (this is one of the quirks in it that I hadn't had time to take out yet) when it comes on anyone who had apple wine for breakfast. I didn't realize that there would be so many or even any of them.”

  “It was likely those advertisements on the air last night,” detective Otis said. “ ‘Apple Wine, Apple Wine, Start Your Day with Apple Wine.’ A catchy tune and your loss. You have no idea what a sense of security you two boys give me. Police detectives sometimes are worried by their competition from outside the lines. That situation sure doesn't obtain here.”

  There was a little slight-of-body business here. Laboratory men were working over that dead body in bunches, but the confusion could be channeled. The attention of all was called away several times. Hypnosis was used, and misdirection. Austro and Roy somehow got the dead body over to their Big Star Detective Agency, and the police finally loaded an unscathed wax figure with a similar funny face on to their morgue wagon and took it downtown with them.

  Madame Gussaud was one of the few people who noticed that the switch had been made.

  “But, in spite of it, I'm not short a wax figure,” she said. “I'm two wax figures over! It's those damned false faces that have been popping out on them. How is anyone to keep them straight?”

  Several of the folks gathered in the Gift Shop, the Wax Museum in the wake of the murder having attracted a number of persons of the grosser sort. “Do you have the Gift of Second Sight for sale?” False Face Flaherty asked the Gift Shop proprietor.

  “Oh certainly,” the man said. “We have every sort of psychic and mental and personal gift for sale. We have the latest and most scientific things along the Lane. My own second sight tells me that you should have sought the gift of second sight yesterday and not today. My own uncanny-intuition gift tells me that you are in a jam. Sir, you are now in a room with only two doors leading out of it. The name of one of them is ‘Too Late’ and the name of the other one of them is ‘Never,’ but either of them is better than staying where you are. For five thousand dollars I can give you the gift of second sight. Just put your head into this helmet, bite down on the bullet of your selection, and remember that pain has no memory.”

  “It's cheap enough, I suppose,” False Face said. He paid the five thousand dollars and put his head in the helmet. For the next few minutes he went through numerous contortions as though he were in extreme pain. Austro and Roy Mega and a few others went next door to the Air-Skate Rinkarama so as to miss the sufferings of False Face Flaherty.

  “Item,” said Austro, as he watched the air-skaters skim along two inches above the top of the grass of the rink, “we have a dead man not yet identified by ourselves, though the police may have identified him by his prints. They don't tell us everything.”

  “Item,” said Roy Mega, “over in the Wax Museum there are two dead wax figures that are similar in face to the dead man and are similarly stabbed with rubber daggers turned to steel. Those two are in addition to the unscathed wax figure that we substituted for the body. This business of three of the rubber daggers being transformed into steel is what puzzles me.”

  “Oh, I've solved that part,” Austro said. “One in six of the latest bunch of Dirky Dave Rubber Daggers (apparently manufactured during the night just past) was made of steel and honed to an edge. This is something that even Madame Gussaud doesn't know. But the junior underground along the Lane has been putting out the word all morning that Dirky Dave Roulette is the new In game in the neighbourhood. So it would be easy for three different persons to select the heavier steel daggers out of the souvenir dagger baskets and then plunge them into the intended victim, and mistakenly into the two adjacent wax figures that were funny-faced exactly like the victim.”

  “Dirky Dave Roulette sounds like a childish game,” Roy Mega said, “but I can see where it would be fun. ‘Stab your Bosom Buddy in the Bosom! One chance in six that you will kill him or wound him.’ Do you want to go by there and try it, Austro? We just reach in the basket blindly and take out the Dirky Dave Dagger that comes to our hand. And then we will have at it.”

  “We will go by the Museum and maybe we will do it and maybe we won't,” said Austro.

  And they didn't do it. They were diverted by crowds of scoff-laws, hitsters, and hooded-crows. They were buffeted by these hurrying persons in the Lane, and they forgot all about playing dagger roulette.

  The newcomers were visitors, from Kansas City and Memphis and Dallas, of the wooly sort. They had apparently come to town on the mid-morning planes, and they had headed for the Lane at once. News that a new wrinkle might be found on the Lane had traveled fast. The scoff-laws wanted the funny faces that could be worn for either long or short times as ruddy and living flesh disguises. (“We get so damned tired of wearing those ski-masks when we make a hit,” one of them said.) They wanted whatever variety of funny-face pills might be had. They spotted False Face Flaherty instinctively as the Factor, in Faces. They dragged him out of the helmet in the gift shop and began to shove money at him. So False Face went back to his base at Funny Faces Incorporated to attend to business.

  “We really don't know who False Face Flaherty is,” Austro remarked, “even though he seems to have a leading role on the Lane. It seems to everyone that he has been here for ever, but he had never been on the Lane as late as yesterday. There's almost too much of him for one person, and there's a lot of things missing from him that even the poorest person should have.”

  “Who is Cornelia Falselove?” a wax raven in Gussaud's Wax Museum was heard to croak.

  “The mistake we are making is in dealing with surface or apparent persons rather than with psychological persons,” Roy Mega said. “We might, for instance, inquire about the apparent person of False Face Flaherty: we would find, I suspect, that there is no such person at all. Ah, but let us examine the psychological persons that hover about this Flaherty, though not about him exclusively: the corporate Substrate Lord, the Shadow, the Anima, the Animus, the Ego, the No, the Hemeis; aye, and the Id. I believe that there is a corporate, but not a personal, personality behind those false faces of Flaherty.”

  “I know a little bit about that corporate personality myself,” Austro said. “I have just obtained a copy of the Articles of Corporation of Funny Faces Incorporated. The articles state that False Face Flaherty is a corporate personality that may be inhabited by Harry Kingfixit or Edgar Thornbush or by Hamlet Izobret; it states that
all three of these have equal rights to this personality, especially the rights of entering it and leaving it.”

  “Well, I wonder which one of them is inside Flaherty at the moment?”

  “Oh, I'm sure that it is Harry Kingfixit,” Austro said. “It could hardly be one of the others since Judy Kingfixit seems to have such a lively affection for it. It must be her husband Harry Kingfixit.”

  “Hey boys,” said Cornelia Falselove as she came to them. “Those two dead wax figures that were on each side of the dead man back at the wax works, well, it turns out that they aren't dead wax figures at all. They are dead live human people is what they are.” “Who knows about this?” Roy Mega asked in his conspiratorial voice.

  “I do,” Cornelia said. “I have a sensitive nose and it says that they are people and that they are getting a little bit ripe already on this warm day.”

  “Can you get the two figures for us without anyone catching on?” Roy said.

  “Oh, I can buy them as wax figures I guess.”

  “Do it. And bring them to the Big Star Detective Agency at its new location in its special Two-Guys-in-a-Garage Invention Kit and Utility Building.”

  “All right,” said Cornelia Falselove who was an agreeable woman also. She went to buy the two figures who were actually dead human persons according to herself.

  “Who is this Cornelia Falselove?” Roy Mega asked.

  “What is ‘is’?” asked Austro looking like an owl.

  Roy Mega and Austro went to their Two-Guys-in-a-Garage Invention Kit. All that morning they had been fooling around with that kit that was both a building and a business, and they hadn't been able to put it together yet. This was strange, because they were the ones who had invented the Invention Kit. But it did take a lot of invention and genius to put one of those things together. Now, about those Two-Guys-in-a-Garage Invention Kits: T Town Oklahoma had always been an inventive place beyond all others, and Broken Bench Lane had always been the heart of that inventiveness. The Two-Guys-in-a-Garage syndrome was the most common form of T Town inventive enterprises. It was the companies and factories started by Two-Guys-in-a-Garage that had kept T Town afloat and thriving when big oil companies and big aircraft factories and mobile home factories moved away or closed down. You get a couple thousand of those Two-Guys-in-a-Garage going and you have burgeoning diversification. And pretty soon some of those companies will have grown to a thousand guys in a garage. But the accommodations of the TGIAG syndrome had been left to find their own blind ways until just two days before this.

  Then two boys, or under-aged young men, Roy Mega and Austro, had begun to market prefabricated module kits to house and equip Two-Guys-in-a-Garage set-ups.

  They procured a quantity of odd-shaped and odd-length boards from the Elite Lumber-Rippers and Board and Price Cutters Company that was near by.

  They procured a quantity of imperfect building blocks from the Honest Goof Concrete and Select Seconds Building Stone Sales Company that was also near by and was run by Honest Goof Gomez. They procured small kegs of mixed nails, bolts, screws, turnbuckles, and odd angle iron fittings from Junky Joe's. They got mounds of old automobile accessories that one could spread around and make it look as though this had been a garage indeed.

  They fixed up, in an imposing envelope, assembly instructions that read in full: “If you are real inventors, you will find a way to make a building and a business out of this kit. If you are not real inventors, then you shouldn't have bought an Invention Kit in the first place. It's lucky you find out now that you don't have what it takes.”

  With each of their kits they included another envelope titled “Three Red Hot Inventions Just Waiting to be Invented.”

  Roy and Austro had sold two of the kits the first day and four of them the second day. All six pairs of purchasers had groused a little bit at the skimpy assembly instructions; but all of them, being real inventors, had gone ahead and built fine buildings out of the stuff, each of them different, each of them distinctive and effective.

  So, on the morning of the third day, Austro and Roy tried it themselves with one of their own kits. They intended to build a home for that most inventive and begeniused of enterprises, the Big Star Detective Agency. And they sure had been having a lot of trouble making anything at all out of it.

  Cornelia Falselove and several persons she had dragooned into helping her arrived with the two additional human bodies from the wax works and unloaded them at the Big Star. They stretched them out beside the first body that the boys had got by a sleight-of-body trick that they played on the police. “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” Roy Mega said. “We will just see what kind of flies these three bodies will draw here. And I will turn on my newly completed Confession Compulsion Machine and see who rises to the tainted bait.”

  “That isn't the same thing as a Guilt Machine, is it?” Cornelia asked. “I feel a little bit guilty buying human bodies for wax prices that way.”

  “A guilt machine? Oh no, that would complicate it too much to have a Confession Machine and a Guilt Machine in the same unit,” Roy Mega said. “I should scatter myself as someone else seems to have done. I have to activate my Confession Compulsion Machine, and at the same time I have to contemplate these three sets of remains here.”

  “And at the same time figure out what went wrong with the ailerons of the Big Star Weed Rider this morning,” Austro said. “What really crashed this morning was a part of our reputation. You turn on the machine, Roy, and I'll contemplate the remains, and we'll both think about the ailerons.”

  The two boys set themselves to these three tasks. There came the ghostly humming as Roy Mega turned on the Confession Compulsion Machine. The ghostly humming had nothing to do with the operation of the machine. It was for effect. It was a good and impressive sound and the boys used it with all their machines when they put them into operation.

  “Well, Austro?” Roy Mega said. He meant how was Austro doing with his assigned task.

  “The most noteworthy thing about the remains is that they are remains,” Austro said as he looked at the three dead fellows with affection. “That is to say, something, other than life, has been removed from them, and what remains of them is most incomplete. Something's lacking in these three. We come back to the same question: who is False Face Flaherty?”

  “That man over there,” said Cornelia Falselove, “the man with all the money and all the women.”

  “But who is he really?” Austro asked.

  “He really is the man with all the money and all the women,” Cornelia insisted.

  But Flaherty lost one of his women just then. Judy Kingfixit left him and his group and came uncertainly towards the Big Star Detective Agency.

  “The second thing about the remains is the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't syndrome,” Austro said. “I keep taking blood out of these guys, and it keeps changing. Besides being too fluid for fellows who are dead almost an hour, it keeps flip-flopping. Sometimes it seems to be good anthropino haima or human blood. And then it tests as kaoutsouk haima.”

  “And what is kaoutsouk haima, little fuzz-faced boy?” Cornelia asked.

  “Rubber blood,” Austro said.

  “Who is Cornelia Falselove?” croaked a wax raven that had somehow followed them out of the wax museum.

  Judy Kingfixit, a bit dazed, arrived at the Big Star Detective Agency.

  “I have this compulsion to confess that I killed Hamlet,” she said. “Why ever would I have a compulsion to confess such nonsense as that?”

  “Have you a feeling of guilt, Mrs. Kingfixit?” Roy Mega asked.

  “No, of course not,” she said. “What a question!”

  “The question, for you and for my machine,” Roy said, “is how there can be a compulsion to confess without a feeling of guilt. My machine says they don't go together, and you say they don't.”

  “The real question,” said Austro, “is whether there is any criminality in crime.”

  Somebody left them then like a cork plo
pping out of a bottle.

  3

  “Who was that?” Austro asked. “It was that stringer from the International Universal World Press,” Roy Mega said. “Nobody ever notices him when he's around with his pulsating ears; but he always makes that cork-out-of-the-bottle exit. I wonder what sort of story he got a lead on here that he's in such a hurry to spill it to the world?”

  “I have this compulsion to confess that I stabbed Hamlet Izobret to death,” Judy Kingfixit rattled off with unseemly passion. “Oh, I feel so much better for having confessed it!’ '

  “But did you in fact kill Hamlet?” Austro asked.

  “That is information I am unable to supply,” Judy said. “The main thing is that I have confessed it. The confession becomes the act and the happening. It is like taking off from a dull rock and soaring into flight. The flight is what matters. The rock is an accident to be forgotten.”

  “Why did you, in the context of the confession anyhow if in no other context, kill him, Mrs. Kingfixit?” Roy Mega asked.

  “Oh, he was trifling with my affections, I think. And he was after my husband to put more money into their things and not let me loot it all.”

  “Ah, he was a threat to your paper-sack-full-of-money syndrome,” Austro mumbled. “What do you call it?”

  “I call it ‘Diversified Investment Procedure According to Educated Whim,’ and it works if I can really keep it diversified, a hundred here, a thousand there.”

  “Can you say which of these three figures that are lying here is the Hamlet Izobret that you killed, Mrs. Kingfixit?” Roy asked.

  “No, they all look alike when they're spread out like that with the same false faces on them all. They were already getting to look alike anyhow since they associated together so much.”

  Several persons came in and gave Judy Kingfixit large sums of money for the investments that she had made in the various industries earlier that morning. When a person invests in enterprises along Broken Bench Lane, the harvest (before noon usually) will be thirty and seventy and even a hundredfold.