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

by R. A. Lafferty

  ‘I have not determined the exact and complete relationship of the Argo legend to the Finnegan Cycle.’

  Notes on the Finnegan Cycle — Absalom Stein

  Three unusual things happened on the same day. The first unusual thing was the awakening (in his grave by the sounding sea) of a man who had either been dead, or in a time-stasis-undead, unalive- for several decades.

  But first, many years before, there had been the picture.

  In a walk-in art bijou in New Orleans, there is a large and sea-sounding picture named ‘The Resurrection of Count Finnegan’. The painting was received by the bijou's owner, Melchisedech Duffey, about the middle of the sixth decade of the twentieth century. It was at first considered to be a joke: but what a magnificent joke it was!

  It was plain that it was painted by John Solli, believed by those able to judge these things well (about a dozen persons in the country) to be one of the greatest painters of the contemporary world.

  This John Solli, who was widely known by his nickname of Finnegan, was reported to have been killed several years before the arrival of this painting. And nothing other than rumors had been heard of him in the interval.

  But Solli-Finnegan was not a man who would accept death easily, and most of his old acquaintances had at least a tenth-part feeling that he was not dead and that he would return. Or they had the feeling that his body would yet be found. With the arrival of the magnificent painting, there bloomed the consensus feeling that Finnegan was indeed alive, and that this was his announcement that he would return to his old haunts.

  “It has to be very recent,” Margret Stone said about the painting. “He was good before, but he hadn't come this far. He couldn't have painted it before his death. It had to be since.” Irish was about the only thing that Margret Stone was not, but she was full of blarney and malarky and bulls.

  The painting was twelve feet by eight feet, and Count Finnegan and one other person were shown as life-sized. The painting was really two paintings separated by a schizo-gash. In the larger portion, the burial crypt seemed to be an ocean cave under a rock shelf; but now there was a fissure in the rock roof of the cave, and air and sunshine were pouring in. The half-risen Count Finnegan was partly in the dark-green water and partly in the bright-green air. There was a stark and horrible riseness about him. There were places on him where the flesh had fallen away from his bones as will sometimes happen when a person in either death or time-stasis is subject to an abrasion; and the under-the-rock-shelf water had apparently been abrasive. Count Finnegan was setting back into place one long strip of flesh that had fallen away from its bone, and he showed sure intent of repairing other flesh damage and decay. He was identified by a Latin scroll there, as the Papal Count Finnegan. Finnegan-Solli had always been good at reproducing Latin scrolls.

  The Count Finnegan in the picture seemed about thirty years older than the John Solli Finnegan would have been at the time of his reported death, which had been between two and three years before the time of the arrival of the painting at Melchisedech Duffey's New Orleans place. So it was a self-painting of Finnegan as it would appear twenty-five to thirty-five years in the future. “And that's mighty rough,” said Absalom Stein who viewed the painting. “It could be Finn thirty years in the future, or three hundred.” But the projection was clearly authentic. Nobody else but Finnegan could, with many years added to him, look so like this Count Finnegan in the picture.

  Solli-Finnegan's big banana nose had acquired nobility and distinction on the Count in the picture. The flesh-mending hands of the pictured Count were even more intricate and talented than Finnegan's recent artist's hands which would be remembered by all who had ever known him. There was still the outrageous humor mixed with the warping pain and torture in the eyes. There was still the loose strength and speed of a yearling bullock, or perhaps a three-hundred-years-young bullock, on the Count in the picture. There was still the mouth in motion, and one had the feeling of soon being able to hear the multi-dialected words and spatting phrases from the painted Count. But there was an added texturing of the whole person that appears mostly in those who have risen from the dead. The flesh had suffered simultaneous transfiguration and corruption and was now in a state of violent incompleteness. There was a locality about the flesh change; partly it was the sea change of the un-coffined dead of the poor people of the West Indies. Count Finnegan was in the rags and tatters of what may have been a winding sheet. But there were solid but old clothes there for him to put on, travelers clothes.

  There was another person in the picture who was as remarkable and powerful in appearance as was Count Finnegan. This person was standing just to the left of the fissure in the rock-roof of the burial cave, but this fissure also served as the schizo-gash that separated the Resurrection of the Count Finnegan from the Annunciation of Joseph Cardinal Hedayat. Joseph stood in the middle of a scene half a world away from the resurrection setting. The counterpart setting was a Syrian or Lebanese country scene. Joseph who had just received news or instruction or nomination, was identified in a scroll in Syrian Arabic as Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch.

  “He is my kindred,” said Margret Stone when she saw the Joseph in the painting the day it had arrived.

  “Who isn't!” said Mary Virginia Schaeffer. “He was on T.V. just this past week. He may be the next chief of state of Syria in spite of his youth. But, ah, Finnegan has done something about Joseph's youth in this picture.”

  “Yes, it's the way Joseph will look in thirty years,” Margret Stone said. “Or in three hundred.”

  “It is authentic,” said Mr. X. who was present also. “I know him well, and the whole world has seen him pictured enough to know him on sight. Nobody in the world except this multi-geniused Joseph Hedayat could, with many years added to him, be the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of this picture.”

  “That's true,” said Duffey. “And yet it's clear fact that the Count Finnegan of the picture and the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of the picture are of absolutely identical appearance.”

  “We will have to agree with that,” Margret Stone said. “Yet, in their present (or recent) forms, Joseph and Finnegan do not look very much alike. Oh, they're both amply nosed, and they're about the same size and color. And they do move alike. But, really, they don't look anything alike.”

  “No,they don't,” said X. “But Joseph, with many years added, has to look like the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat there. However did that world-wide playboy and extraordinarily pleasant person become a cardinal?”

  “And Finnegan, with many years added, has to be the Count Finnegan here. There is no other thing he could turn into,” Mary Virginia said. “Oh, and they are absolutely identical. It's spooky. It's flesh crawling. It's flesh-falling-away-from-the-bones, that's the sort of feeling it gives one.”

  “This is a better picture than any of us realize,” Duffey said. “It gets better by the minute. I would almost say that it changes by the minute. There are depths in it now that I would have seen an hour ago, if they had been there then. This is better even than Finnegan in his late orange period. I bet I can get twenty thousand dollars for it.”

  “That would be like selling Finnegan in the flesh,” Mary Virginia said.

  “And that would be like selling Joseph, flesh of my flesh, in the flesh,” Margret Stone said.

  “I knew them both in the flesh and I'd sell them both in the flesh for twenty thousand dollars for the two of them,” Duffey said. “And I'd throw in my own mother too, though I never knew her in the flesh.”

  “Really, there must have been some contact,” Mary Virginia joined him.

  “No, there was not,” Melchisedech Duffey insisted. “I didn't have a mother. I have another sort of origin.”

  Duffey sold the picture to Hilary Hilton of Chicago for twenty thousand dollars. Hilary had known Finnegan. And he knew Joseph Hedayat of Antioch. Hilton had done business with the Hedayat family. But Hilton, after he had bought the picture, decided to leave it hanging in Melchisedech'
s Walk-In Art Bijou in New Orleans.

  “I could take it up home with me and enjoy it for thirty years I suppose,” Hilary said. “And then I could bring it back here and give it a window on the day of the happenings. (Chicago will not be such a window.) But we know not the day nor the hour, and I wouldn't want it to miss the day. The picture may have some role to play with its live counterparts.”

  But Hilary Hilton got to town at least once a year, and he used to come in and pull up a chair and gaze at the picture for an hour or more. “I wonder why I'm not in it,” he said once. “I had intended to be here and take my bloody part in the events when they arrive. But Finnegan would have known it if I should have been in it. Maybe there are other pictures to be found. He paints better with his dead hand than with his live.”

  And Joseph Hedayat who traveled everywhere in the world (nobody knew why he did, but he made a delightful presence wherever he went) once saw the picture, and himself in it, looking much older. This was about five years after the arrival of the picture.

  “I knew it existed, of course,” Joseph said, “as any knowledgeable person will know of any new prodigy appearing in the world: but I would never expect to come on it here in the United States like this.” (Joseph was then, still quite young, an ex-chief of state of Syria.) Then Joseph looked at the picture in sudden sorrow and fear. “Páter, ei dynatón esti, parelthéto ap' emoú tó potírion toúto,” he said, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by.” But he didn't add “Thy will be done.” He wasn't about to accept it. Not yet. But no great disaster was shown in the picture, except the disaster in the eyes of Joseph, and in those of Count Finnegan.

  But one group, The Unbelievers' Angry League For Style In The Universe, hated the picture, and their railing against it shook Heaven and Earth. But none of the members of the Angry League had ever seen the picture.

  For thirty years at least that picture hung on the walls of the Bijou in New Orleans, and nothing was heard of Finnegan, alive or dead. But finally the day of the happenings arrived.

  The grave wasn't a formal one. The man may have been buried directly in the incrusting sand, or he may have been given directly to the sounding sea, or placed in the rock and sediment under the continental shelf to hide him. There was a fissure in the picture, and the sunlight through the fissure seemed to have awakened him. He was given a modified identity at his resurrection, but his brain had in no way been scrubbed of his old identity.

  He was given (by an unknown giver) a coded assignment. His death of several decades before had been a cover or an alibi. Now he was given the role of Count Finnegan in an eschatological spy drama. And the other man of the fractured-off part of the picture, the new Cardinal Hedayat was also given a coded assignment.

  The Papal Count Finnegan, half-risen now from either death or time-stasis, was partly in shadowy water and partly in bright air. He was in a water cave under a land shelf, but the cave had just been fissured by a land shock. He was replacing the rot and the falling-away of his flesh as best he could. There was a stench about him that had only vaguely been suggested by the picture of some decades before. He would not lose that stench.

  There was an old rumor in the islands that Finnegan had not died unconditionally on the Mariano Coast of Cuba. The story was that he lived on a French island as a poor (and therefore mostly invisible) man, and that he came back once a year to lie awhile in that sea-cave on the Cuban Coast. He had married on the French Island and had had family there, this is the story. Could he not have done that at another time, before his death for instance? Men do have posthumous children, but to have children five and seven years posthumous is excessive.

  Each year, it was said, Finnegan would swim into that underwater cave and lie there for three days. At fourth dawn he would ask “Is it yet?” and someone would answer “No, not yet.” Then Finnegan would swim out of the cave and find a boat somewhere and make his way back to his own island. And so he would be there for another year. When the answer should finally come “Yes, it is time now”, that answer would be from a fissuring earthquake.

  The island wife, Angela, had hinted that Finnegan was most times in his proper flesh, but that sometimes he was in ghost flesh, and at still other times he was in a leprous flesh which is akin to both the ghost flesh and the death flesh. Yes, the stench was leprous. It is the stench, at the same time sweet and horrifying, that most of the world has forgotten.

  At the time of the awakening, there was a man standing on the flat shore above to kill the Count Finnegan when he should come up out of the fissured cave onto that rocky shore in the sunlight. This man, now grown much older and much more wicked, had known Count Finnegan long before this, had known him when he was called Count Finnegan only in fun and not officially. The man had not been wakened from a thirty year sleep to complete an unfinished murder on Finnegan. He had been doing many other evil things during that thirty years: and yet he had been doing them in a fractured sort of dream even if not in actual sleep. He did intend to complete an unfinished murder of Count Finnegan now.

  And, thirty feet off the rock shelf, was a preternatural white shark that brought its own aura of electrical green water with it wherever it went. This shark intended to kill Count Finnegan if he should attempt to escape his human hunter by an underwater way. This shark also remembered Finnegan from more than thirty years back. They were old enemies. By one account, this shark had permitted Finnegan to pass in and out, once a year for thirty years, and had ground his shark's teeth in fury at it. Now he needn't permit anything to the Finnegan, surely not life.

  Three hundred yards off the shore-shelf there was a boat with two riflemen in it. There were a lot of hunters here for a single prey. But the prey, the Count Finnegan, had a lot of drollery left in him as well as warping pain. He sang out loud now with no attempt to hide his location:

  ”The hunters have the fish on gaff!

  Hi! Ho!

  The hunters have a hollow laugh.

  They do not know their fish by half!

  Hi Ho! The gollie wol!”

  How did the Count Finnegan happen to know the Gadarene swine song? Well, according to one version, Count Finnegan was the son of Giulio the Gadarene swine himself. And the Count talked out loud, to himself and to his circling enemies:

  “It's a role to challenge my talents,” he said. “A man might wait a thousand years and not come onto so challenging a role as this. I am a masquerader, I am a spy, I am a sudden and mysterious person in a portentous flesh-and-soul drama. I will not spoil it all by letting myself be killed by such second-rate killers as these. I will break out of this and will play the double to the only transcendent man in the world for this time. Or it may be that the transcendent man will play the double to me.”

  The Count covered others of his bones with other pieces and strips of his flesh that had fallen away. He set the pieces carefully in place with his hands that were even more intricate and talented than when he was the great artist thirty years, or perhaps three hundred years, before. Then he made his move.

  The shark struck in a white blur. The man on the stone shore above flung a grenade which exploded just under the surface. And then he flung a second and a third. There was a globbing of red blood up to the surface. It could have been either shark's blood or man's blood. There were chunks of torn-loose flesh coming to the shoaly surface, white flesh that was either ghost-shark flesh or leprous-man's flesh.

  The riflemen in the boat three hundred yards off the shore shelf were firing. The grenade man dropped a heavier depth-charge, and then he slipped and followed it into the rioting water. And the water was stunned, and for a moment flattened, by the depth-charge. Then, as a secondary effect of the charge, it spouted. And a man spouted up with it. The riflemen in the boat, which had now moved in to less than fifty yards off the shore, riddled the man with shot. Another man, or the same man again, spouted up out of the spewing water, and was riddled with rifle shot again, and so he fell back.

  And still it w
as possible that a man, making his move very swiftly and with his luck running like the shore-shelf water itself, could have gone under the surging shark when it was blinded by the whiteness of the depth-charged water, and could have gone under the motor-launch a moment later when it moved in through the bucking foam, and he might have been a quarter of a mile away and left two of his enemy dead.

  It wasn't possible for very many men, but it was possible for one.

  This little action took place on the Mariano Coast not far from Havana, Cuba.

  The other man in the picture of a few decades before, had simultaneous experience half a world away. He wasn't put in immediate physical danger of his life, and he hadn't just recovered his life. But he received announcement that he was to become the only transcendent man in the world for his time, and that he could refuse this only on peril of his own damnation. This was Joseph Cardinal Hedayat, the look-alike of the reanimated Count Finnegan.

  2

  The second unusual thing to happen that day was a bell being set to ringing on the North Coast of the small country of San Simeon. There hadn't been a bell there before ever, so far as anyone could remember. Then there had come an executive order stating that, on pain of death, no bell should be rung on that north coast. The order was inexplicable. No bell had ever rung there. There had been no bell to ring. But, within an hour of the publication of the executive order, a bell did begin to ring there, loudly and clearly. San Simeon was a small country that was almost bereft of real resources. There was some maize culture and some fruit. The beans were good and the squash was fair. Goats were kept and a few pigs. No large cattle. The people dressed and were shod with woven grass. It was woven with fine style, and it was more sturdy than you might suppose.