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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Somehow you three don't seem like the Three Lordly Ones,” Peter said uneasily.

  “Oh, we're the alternate team,” one of them told him. “We're up here only one week in the month when we let the first team take a rest from it all. They're more lordly and noble than we are, but we can do what needs to be done. The only thing that ever needs to be done is to hang persons who've become too inquisitive about the thunder and the bullhorn.”

  But the talking post was protesting something:

  “No, no,” the talking post said. “Hang him and break his neck. But what pieces the buzzards get of him they'll have to get on the fly. When he is properly hanged and broken, then put him back into his funny boat and push it off the island. His will be a flaming fall.”

  “Yes, all right,” the third of the false Sky Lords said to the post. He was the roughest-looking of the three. But Peter Flaming-Arrow was fascinated by the talking post.

  “I can figure it out!” he cried. “I can discern how it's done. It has those copper coils in tune with copper coils on the earth below. And the voice of the post comes from down below. Give me an hour and I can figure it out in every detail.”

  “Not an hour, not even a minute,” one of the false noble and very earthly Sky Lords said. They put the noose around Peter's neck right where the red mark on his neck indicated it. They hanged him on the gallows, and they made sure that his neck was broken.

  “Six sets of bones on the rocks behind me there,” Peter Flaming-Arrow said. “Six persons have been here before me on this Floating Island in the low sky and all have failed, even as I am failing, to balk the mystery and rectify the deception. Six sets of bones I see behind me there, but if they are behind me, then I am not seeing them with my proper eyes. I am dead and I'm seeing them with my death eyes.”

  Then the three false Sky Lords put Peter Flaming-Arrow back into his funny fletched boat and pushed it off the sky island. It started down toward earth at an easy glide.

  “Seven long years,” said the covenanted mouse familiar as he again studied the entrails of the dead coppertone eagle. “Well, I can't let myself get mouse-hearted over this,” he said. “I'll shorten the time if I can, and I'll spend every free moment in careful planning. I'll not fail us! Most of all I must practice my thunder voice. That will be the hardest of all. But will I ever have a voice again? When they hanged the other me, they hanged myself, also. When they broke his neck, they sympathetically broke my neck, too. Oh, woe. Oh, rue!” The crowds below the Floating Island, on the sunshiny second morning of the great fair, had already been alerted by the bronze-throated thunder from above. Now as they looked up they saw that funny, floppy boat leave the sky island at an easy glide. This was between the stormy petrel sky and the firebird sky.

  Then the crowds gasped as they saw the little gliding boat burst into flame to the accompaniment of a series of barking roars from a plush house on the hill.

  The handmade rifle of the armorer Jasper Shortlegs was a powerful one, for it took three men to hold it. And it had a device more futuristic than the futuristic skull in that plush house on the hill. By this device, the rifle would hit anything espied through its sights. The shots had no trajectory. They were as straight as light itself. And the incendiary shots that the rifle fired were the hottest things this side of the east meadows of hell. They hit the funny boat in the low sky and they hit the funny arrow man in it. And the flaming arrow man hit another coppertone eagle as it flew by. And then there was a conflagration overhead as bright as ten suns. And bullhorn voices amplified from the Floating Island belabored the point for persons who might not understand.

  “I saw a demon fall like lightning!” came the amplified bullhorn voice from the low sky in what was supposed to be an imitation of the voice of the Lord of the universe Himself. The people shuddered to hear this, and they said to each other:

  “That pleasant and gifted funny man Peter Flaming-Arrow was a demon, and now he is falling to the doom that was prepared for him. So it is seen that all who question the Three Lordly Ones are evil and will come to an equally fiery end.”

  Again the amplified bullhorn voice spoke in bronze thunder from the low sky, prophetically in futuristic verse:

  From morn to noon he fell,

  From noon to dewy eve,

  A summer's day, and with the setting sun,

  Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.

  And all the people at the fair groaned at this, partly in compassion for the man burning in the low sky, and partly from the great heat that blistered them all.

  Oh, the strong odor of heroic flesh roasting in the middle of the low sky!

  Oh, the inexorable logic of the arithmetic of flame and air!

  Oh, the strange earth-and-sky road from Kara Cove to Bleak Mountain!

  Actually the wobbling, flaming fall of Peter Flaming-Arrow lasted no more than eleven minutes and covered no more than twenty miles. Then he crashed in the swamp east of Ithkar. Quick rumor said that the final ashes of him and his boat came to rest on a low mountain named Bleak Mountain in the middle of the swamp. And so Peter Flaming-Arrow was dead—

  —except for a flickering ember of him in the brain and body of the covenanted mouse familiar, for the mouse and the man were one. A thing is not dead when any last ember of it is still alive. The mouse had suffered the pains of the damned while the man burned, but its resolve was strengthened in that fire.

  It was six weeks before the mouse recovered its reason. And then it set itself to do what had to be done.

  “I know from studying the entrails of the second coppertone eagle (the one that was split apart by the lightning man) that it will be seven years before there is a summer dry enough to allow me to come to Bleak Mountain in the middle of the swamp,” the mouse recited to itself. “But in seven years I will be there. And I will wake up the other half of me, the man half of me, if I am able to do it. I will prepare myself for it. The world has not seen the end of this arrow man, nor of this arrow mouse.”

  The mouse pored over dusty tomes in obscure bookrooms when there were no persons there, to acquire the necessary knowledge. The mouse exercised his voice morning and evening in the open places, the meadows, the rocky wastes, the swamps. He has caught the tone of the thunder already. He does it well. All that is needed now is that he strengthen his voice a hundredfold or a thousandfold. He is working on it, he is working on it.

  “When the mouse shall trumpet with the voice of thunder on the mountain, then you will know that the lightning man has wakened from his death,” —so it is written in The Book of Jasher.

  The mouse is working on it, he is working on it.

  Junkyard Thoughts

  The wealth in keep of junkyard mutt

  More rich than tomb of young King Tut!

  “When did you last see your cousin, Jack?” that relentless police person Drumhead Joe Kress asked Jack Cass the pawn broker and junkyard operator in Polder Street. “And do not tell me again that you have no cousin. Surely I am not the only one who has noticed the resemblance in you two. I almost have the feeling that he's here right now, hidden somehow, and looking at me with those hard blue eyes of his, those snake eyes.”

  “Nah, I ain't got any cousin, Joe,” Jack Cass said in his always rough voice. “No cousin have I. Only a few hundred nephews, for a pawn broker is ‘uncle’ to a good number of hard-time folks. And there's one of them at my junkyard gate right now. I'll see what he wants. No, Drumhead Joe, that man you talk about is too elegant to ever be a customer of mine.” Jack Cass went out into his junkyard, and the police person Drumhead Joe Cress availed himself of the chance to do a pretty good shakedown of the pawn shop. And he talked to himself while he did it.

  “This cram-full place always seems much larger on the inside than on the outside,” he explained to himself. “And so, for that matter, does its proprietor Jack Cass. There's thousands of unlikely items in both of them. But there's no nook here big enough to hide an elegant man with hard blue eyes. Why do I
sense him here then? Ah, the ledger, what does it tell me? Jack hasn't had a particularly busy two hours since that elegant swindler disappeared from his town house on High Street. In fact, he hasn't made a ledger entry all day. Ah, the cheque book. Jack hasn't written a cheque for three days. He does most of his business in cash. Ah, Junkyard, you're monitoring me, are you?” Junkyard was a large brown dog who always came into the pawn shop to keep an eye on things when Jack Cass the proprietor had to be out. But Junkyard knew that Drumhead Joe had the run of the place.

  “And the crate full of unpaid bills. Why doesn't he pay them?” Drumhead went on. “He always has a healthy bank balance: and I've verified several times that the bank really has the balance that Jack carries in his book. He could pay all these bills without making much of a dent in his account. Maybe he just has fun making people wait for their money. But the cheques themselves are pure folk art, as is the man himself.”

  The personalized cheques of Jack Cass featured his homely mug with its gap-toothed grin and its bald knob, and below that was a picture of a long-eared jackass. The jackass on the cheques had the same gap-toothed grin as had the man. At the bottoms of the cheques were the words “Operator of the Imperial Pawn Palace and of the Jackass Junkyard”.

  The police person Drumhead Joe Kress had known Jack Cass for a dozen years, back when Joe was a foot cop and this was his beat, back when Joe was a detective on the bunko squad, and now when Drumhead Joe Kress was Captain Kress on the trail of some of the smoothest and most elegant swindlers and criminals to be found anywhere.

  Jack Cass was routinely arrested a dozen times a year, but only for the minor and routine fencing of stolen goods. He always accepted the warrants and searches and arrests in good humour, and in between times he paid the quite modest bribes to stay in business. He always said that all his premises were open to the gentlemen of the law, any time, day or night.

  Well, homely Jack Cass was a pleasant person, low-class with his gap-toothed grin and his bull neck and his too-rough too-loud voice. He was the genuine All-American Slob. He drank beer at the Plugged Nickle Bar and Grill and also at Duffey's Tavern. He minded his own business, and that of everybody else that might yield him a profit.

  He knew his own neighbourhood in every detail and person. And now he came back into his Imperial Pawn Palace again.

  “Find anything, Drumhead Joe?” he asked. “Find anything of your elegant swindler with his hard blue eyes?”

  “Only his smell, Jack, only his smell. But somehow it's here strong.”

  “You know better than that, Drumhead. That man is too elegant to have any smell at all.”

  “Sit down, Jack,” the police person Drumhead said. “You and I are going to have a probing talk.”

  “Not unless there's a chess board between us. I don't want it to be a complete waste of time.” So Jack Cass set up the board and the pieces on the top of an old nail keg. And the men sat in two Queen Anne chairs that Jack Cass had got for three dollars each and were worth three hundred dollars each. The dog Junkyard pushed up a three legged stool and sat on it. Drumhead Joe opened the game with the Brodsky Gambit. And there is no quick answer to that gambit.

  “J. Palmer has hit it big this time, Jack,” Drumhead Joe said. “And he has skipped without a trace. He does that every several years, of course. But this time he really made monkeys out of all of us. And he killed two men along the way, and he's usually too fastidious to do a thing like that. We were onto him in advance. We had every sort of tip-off. We even knew his seat number on the plane to Rio. We watched him duck into his elegant town house, and we listened on his phone-tap to his call for a taxi-dray to pick up himself and his sixteen pieces of luggage. Then we followed him in to his town house. The front door wasn't locked. It was even left ajar.

  “ ‘Ah, it is the bumbling police persons,’ he heard the elegant voice of J. Palmer from the next room. ‘I was expecting you, of course, and it is always a pleasure to see you. But today I fear that the pleasure must be foreshortened. I have a journey scheduled.’

  “Jack, I could feel the magnetism of that man across that big front hall. And it scared me. It always scares me. I feel that he's the giant (though always elegant) snake, and I'm the shivering ground bird, and he's about to swallow me. Does the prospect of facing him affect you that way, Jack?”

  “Drumhead, I tell you honestly that I have never faced him, either in prospect or in actuality. I tell you honestly that I have never seen his face. But go on with your story. It was getting interesting.”

  “Yes, quite interesting, Jack, especially the way it cuts off so sharp. For three men of my party went into that next room while I quaked. And J. Palmer Cass wasn't in that room. He wasn't in the town house at all. And there was no way he could have got out of it.”

  “Maybe he got out through the cellar?”

  “Jack, there are two cellars to that town house, and we had two men in each of them and were in radio contact with them. No, he didn't get out through the cellars. And someone had every part of the house in view all the time.”

  Jack Cass was about to make a chess move, but the dog Junkyard put out a paw to stop him. Jack whispered to the dog, and the dog shook his head “no”. Jack whispered to the dog again, and again the dog shook his head “no”. Jack whispered to the dog for the third time, and the dog nodded his head “yes”. Jack made the move. It was not a particularly good move.

  “Maybe J. Palmer wasn't in the town house at all,” Jack Cass said.

  “We saw him go in. And we heard his voice in the next room after we had followed him in.”

  “The voice could have been some kind of recording.”

  “Maybe. But the man entering the front door while we watched him couldn't have been a recording.”

  “Maybe he was a ghost. Maybe that's why he always gives you the shivers. Ghosts always give me the shivers myself. How long ago did he disappear on you?”

  “Two hours.”

  “Then why aren't you all dashing off in different directions looking for him?”

  “We are. And this is the last direction I dashed off to. I think that J. Palmer Cass is here.”

  “Look all you want to, Drumhead. It's been about four years since you got the asinine idea that I was somehow connected with the elegant swindler. Why? What could we possibly have in common?”

  “Your names. They follow each other in a directory. J. Palmer Cass. And Jack Cass.”

  “So you said then, Drumhead. And so I checked it out then and found that it wasn't rue. That elegant man, of course, had only unlisted numbers. And he wasn't in the directory next to me.”

  “Yes he was, Jack. In a directory of suspects that we kept at the bunko squad. J. Palmer Cass and Jack Cass. What is your full name?”

  “It is Jack Cass. You can check all my records as far back as you wish. My army record shows me as Jack NMI Cass, but they always put the NMI in where there really is no middle initial. Their computers aren't satisfied unless there is something between the first and the last name. Look at me, Drumhead! You have looked at J. Palmer Cass at close range many times through the years, and I honestly haven't. Do we look like kindred? Do we resemble each other at all in any respect?”

  Drumhead Joe looked at Jack Cass closely. At the huge innocent brown eyes that should have belonged to some friendly and giant dog. Going by the eyes alone, Jack Cass and the dog Junkyard should have been litter brothers. Drumhead looked at the crack in the corner of one of the lenses of Jack's horn-rim glasses, and at the crudely wrapped copper wire that kept the frame from falling apart at one critical point. He looked at the expansive bald head with the black and grey fringe around it, at the gap-toothed grin, at the bull-neck, at the expansive and sloppy body. Yes, and in a way he even looked at the hamburger-and-beer breath of Jack Cass.

  “Yes, strangely enough there I see at least one respect in which you do resemble J. Palmer,” Drumhead Joe said. “But I've never noticed it until this moment, and I still haven't quite found
the name for it. But there's another thing that makes me think you're more than you seem. Yes, you've done it again.”

  “Check,” Jack Cass said firmly. “And mate. Yes, what was it, Drumhead?”

  “I am seeded as the eleventh best chess player in America, and you beat me regularly. That's extraordinary in an All-American Slob, in a junkyard bum like you.”

  “Not really, Drumhead. I have a junkyard mind and I make junkyard moves. I eat up your elegant game with them. And the dog Junkyard here gives me valuable coaching.”

  “Junkyard is a showy player but he lacks substance. And his middle game is weak.”

  “Were there any surprises in the luggage of J. Palmer Cass?” Jack asked.

  “Only one. There were the sixteen pieces of elegant luggage, as he said that there were when he called for the taxi-dray. And they were packed for such a trip as that to Rio, yes. It's elegant stuff that he has. But the million in cash wasn't in any of the sixteen pieces of luggage, and it would be fairly bulky. Why do I have the feeling that it is here somewhere in this shabby Imperial Pawn Palace of Polder Street? Do you know, Jack, that this place is only a hundred yards from the elegant town house of J. Palmer Cass on High Street?”

  “Ah, in what other city could so rich a street as High Street and so poor a street as Polder Street be only a block apart? But in ways that matter they're immeasurable distances apart, Drumhead.”

  “Jack, a million dollars is enough to set up its own aura. And I sense it here. Why? Where?”

  “Look all you want to, Drumhead.”

  “No. You tell me where to look, Jack. I'll just cuff you and then I'll—” and Drumhead Joe Cress was out of his Queen Anne chair and all over the still-sitting Jack Cass, all over him with a clank rattle of manacles and a burst of muscle.

  But not for long. Drumhead Joe went flying across the crammed room and ended up in a junky corner. He had really been thrown!