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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Your several guards are coming back from the cantina on the corner now, Mogul, after that fine late drink; and your guard just outside that door has gone to sleep. But a usually reasoned and collected man has moved up to this level of the building, but he's in a state of dull confusion. He moves with cranky steps, and he's near collapse. His feet are even now at the door. Do you hear him?”

  “I hear him. But he is not my two-fifteen slammer. Who can he be?”

  “I told you who he would be,” X said. “I win the wager. And now you will pay a princely fee on this first dead prince. And then we will agree to certain verbal contracts, and we will share certain other information.”

  “It cannot be that,” the Mogul said. “I would know his face if it were he. I will not be taken in by any of your skittish tricks. Why doesn't my guard outside the door stop him? It's like a dead man stalking.”

  “Certain peoples do sometimes stalk several steps after they're dead. I told you that your guard outside the door had fallen asleep.”

  X and the Mogul had been speaking in Frioul. Really, there are hardly a dozen such neutral languages left which two men of their experienced sort will know and feel easy to discuss in. All others have certain trammels and connotations.

  The door was fumbled open. A man, frozen-faced and dully horrifying, quite large for a Japanese, staggered in. He tottered there for a moment. Then he fell forward at full length. There was a knife hilt between his shoulders. There were other weirdly misplaced things about him.

  “He's quite dead,” said X. “Shall I turn him over? Did you get a good enough look at his face?”

  “I got a good enough look at his face,” the Mogul said. ”He is Cardinal Runosake.”

  Much later that morning, John Mogul, a man of some vestigial religion, had a stone cut for Runosake with the words “—but others, save them, snatching them from the fire.”

  Then the Mogul raised his hands over his head with their twelve digits extended. The Mogul had, on each hand, five fingers and one thumb. This extradigitalism was common in the Mogul family. John Mogul was indicating that he still had twelve men on contract to be killed.

  5

  The business of the bells on the North Coast of San Simeon continued. The main hope, or the main fear, was that it would be widely known that the bells were ringing there, or that they had rung there. A growing legend of the bells would play havoc, and havoc is a two-handed game. It is very hard to keep a noise about bells quiet. Even if all this North Coast's bells were silenced at one time (and, so far, they had not been) there would still be the spreading rumor that bells had rung at this place, and that they were summoning bells. There hadn't ever been bells on that North Coast before, but there had been bells further out, among the ghost shoals. There had been subliminal bells and submarine bells there, for near five hundred years now, just beneath the level of human hearing and just beneath the level of human breathing: sunken-ship bells, sunken-city bells, sunk promontory bells. The bells of the thirteen hundred Spanish and French ships that had sunk in those waters during the maritime centuries were not necessarily silenced. Bells do ring underwater. All sea creatures, from plankton to porpoises, enjoy these water-buried bells. Porpoises and dolphins love bells; they can be talked to by coded bells.

  Hundreds of the sunken ship bells have been raised, by fishermen, by private persons, by beachcombers, and set up on stanchions on small reefs and on small islands, so that has always been a musical ocean, up in the Antilles and Indies. Now the booming bells off north of San Simeon gave real authority to what had been a vague chorus, and gave a world-wide call to assemble at a certain place.

  It was Count Finnegan who brought the second bell, the Martyr-Bell to the shoal region to join the Sea-Bell. This was two days after the Sea-Bell had first begun to boom. He brought the bell, on a log raft towed by a motor skiff, to a particular mooring-rock. They set it up there on stone stanchions so that the whole mooring rock and stony-bottomed sea thereabouts boomed and pealed with the rocking bronze giant.

  The mooring-rock was six hundred yards by three hundred yards. There was a rock-hewn fresh water well there. It was a shaft, ten feet square, that had been cut into the solid and unfissured rock for a cistern to catch rain water; but fresh water had welled up into it from the bottom when it was dug to one hundred feet. And the fresh water had not failed. The shaft had been dug about one hundred years before this.

  The mooring-rock was built like a long bowl, with a high ring around it, twice the height of a man. This ring was like a palisade, and the low tide and surf there never broke over it. Inside the palisade, the rock was just about sea level. Parts of it were under two or three feet of water (of fresh water from the rain, not sea water) and parts of it were bare to the sun. For about a hundred and fifty years, people had been bringing soil to this mooring rock, soil taken from islands or parts of the main, or soil dredged from the muddier and more organic parts of the sea. People had built garden plots there which no one could see from the ocean. The ocean-view appearance was of barren rock. These were not large garden plots, for the whole mooring-rock was only about forty acres in extent; but probably fifty people now had permanent homes on that piece of rock, and several hundred people (sharing the secret of this secluded place) moored there at some time during the year. The mooring-rock could only be come to by certain passages through the shoals, and a stranger would leave his wreckage and his bones there before he found a passage by himself.

  At least three millionaires were secret sharers in this place and came in season for the deep-sea fishing and the ocean seclusion. Every sort of fisher people came there. Two different tramp-steamers visited the place, one of them four times a year, one of them times a year. But they didn't advertise the place to unworthy ears.

  And Count Finnegan had been here before, in his youth, quite some several decades before this. Now Count Finnegan had brought the Martyr-Bell from Ste. Genevieve. The rock people took it and rigged it up and set it to booming on their rock. This was about seven miles from where the Sea-Bell had begun to boom two days before.

  And the Ship-Bell, which was onboard a small ship and not land stanchioned, began to move about; and the Martyr-Bell stood fast, but seemed to move (from the tricky sound-carrying winds in the neighborhood). This confused the soldiers who were set to the task of extinguishing the bells. The soldiers swore that both of them were ghost bells.

  It had been in the year 1594 that English raiders in the service of the Queen had come to the Island of Ste. Genevieve and had murdered thirty-nine Christian people of color who had refused to abjure their faith. Thereupon the English ship, the Lord Cramner, had been shipwrecked on a shoal only nine sea miles from Ste. Genevieve, and all aboard had drowned. Several bronze cannon of the Lord Cramner had then been raised by people of Ste. Genevieve and brought to their island. The bronze had been cast into the Martyr-Bell. The bell was set up to seaward. For four hundred years it rang of itself whenever Englishmen or other enemies of the Faith approached the island.

  Then one day, some people of the Island (in the spirit of prophecy) went out and intercepted Count Finnegan who was going down ocean in a speed launch. Some of the old men of them remembered Count Finnegan from their childhoods, but now he was younger than they were. Count Finnegan said that he would do whatever they asked him to do; he said that he had been searching and listening for Prophetic Instruction, and that he felt that the very air and sea around him were crackling with such instruction now. The people told him the history of the bell and they told him he was to take it South to a place he would know. It was to be set up there and set to pealing an invitation to good people to come, not a warning to evil people to stand off. So Count Finnegan towed the bell to the mooring rock in the shoal water north of San Simeon. And once it was set up there, it rang for three years at least.

  At mooring rock Count Finnegan asked old men about a room or cave, down in the rock and below sea level, that he remembered. It could be reached, he recalled,
by a sort of passage from the hewn well-shaft. Count Finnegan said that, as well as he remembered, it was a room large enough to hold fifty people. Now the whole interior of the well-shaft was grown with wonderful green vines till it was an absolute joy to look at. But was the passage to that subterranean room still known, or was it forgotten behind the vines?

  Oh, it was still there, the old men said, but it hadn't been used for a very long time. The passage and the room would be used again when there was a special reason for their use, and not before.

  Count Finnegan sold the speed launch to a rich man who was on the rock. Then he took passage on the tramp steamer that came there twice a year and had come there now. He went away on the tramp, listening intently for more Prophetic Instruction.

  It was two weeks later that the Peter-Bell was brought to the mooring rock. It was brought there in a ship that was actually named the Argo; the name was painted boldly in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee letters. This was a sail-ship, but it approached the mooring rock at swift speed and exactly against the wind, and its sails billowed out full and evenly against the wind, corning in contrary direction. It was square-sailed and had no lateen or coastwise sail at all.

  The man on the Argo (only one man was to be seen there) had his face covered with a golden scarf or veil or mask with eye-slits in it. He said that his veil mask was made from combings of the Fleece itself, that the original fleece of Colchis can have gold tufts combed out of it and not be diminished by their loss.

  The man said that he had brought one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine Peter-Bells from St. Peter's in Rome. And he unloaded it with his ship's boom. Then the man gave the people on the rock some flat unleavened bread or ship-biscuit from the Black Sea, and red wine which he said was from the Persian Sea.

  The man went away again in the same direction from which he had come. The wind had shifted around by then, and he once more went with full sails and at great speed directly against the wind.

  In the month that followed, the people obtained and put up about a hundred more bells along the limestone north coast of San Simeon, and in its salt swamps and outcroppings and islets in all the shoal waters as far as Campche Bank and Perez Island.

  6

  John Mogul, the chief of ‘Track and Total’, held up his hands with six digits extended on one of them and five on the other, to indicate that eleven of his primary targets were left alive and two of them were dead. He recited a little verse that was both a crowing and a prediction, and rope-jumping children in West Chicago and in Surabaja Java had it instantly, each group in its own tongue:

  Eleven little fuzzy cubs

  Hiding in a den.

  The head of one goes bouncing off,

  And then there are ten.

  This was dedicated to Ignatius Cardinal Ti, the next in line for destruction, to indicate what death he should die. The second Prince in Hiding who had been killed was Kirol Cardinal Gabrailovitch of Zagreb. John Mogul, as a man of vestigial religion, had put up a monument stone to this Prince with the carven words: “One of these must be made a witness with us of His resurrection.” John Mogul was, very slightly, worried about the ‘doubles’ of the Princes. He had them all identified now, but he did not have them dead. These were the doubles:

  Of Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch, Count Finnegan (full name and birthplace not known).

  Of Paul Cardinal Brokenbolt of Freemantle, Australia, Cecil Octavian of England.

  Of Ignatius Cardinal Ti of Manila, Bolo Manolo (place of residence not known).

  Of Terrence Cardinal Merry of Cork, Emmet Collins of Boston, Massachusetts.

  Of Edward Cardinal Leviathan of Edinburgh, Douglas McAfee of London.

  Of Carlos Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz, Gilberto Levine y O'Brien of Rio.

  Of David Cardinal Lloyd Spencer of Cardiff, Llyod CardiganPembroke of Tywyn.

  Of Henri Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans, Daniel Jean Boulle of Dax in France.

  Of Nicholas Cardinal Gregorio of Messina, Arnoldo Rugutini of New York City.

  Of Joseph Cardinal Doki of Douala, John Giwa of Anecho.

  Of Kirol Cardinal Gabrailovitch of Zagreb, Mihail Majic of Trieste.

  Of Martino Cardinal Erculo of Milan, Herman Hercules of uncertain domicile.

  Of Xavier Cardinal Runosake of Kobe (the first dead of the contracted men), Niku Kazuko, probably of Honolulu.

  These doubles were at least as hard to kill as were their primaries. The abdicated Cardinals, still about five hundred of them alive, weren't very hard to kill, but they just didn't give the same satisfaction as did the genuine Cardinals in Flight or Hiding.

  There were funds provided to stir up public interest, and John Mogul skimmed twenty percent off of all such funds. So he launched a contest. This contest, with all the resources of ‘Track and Total’ behind it, offered one thousand very costly premiums to contestants for the best one thousand suggestions for ‘interesting and colorful murders’. Now there would be some popular action and interest.

  Popular murder! Had there ever been anything like it! This was one of the primordial and archetypical fascinations. Who could resist it? There were more than thirty million entries in the contest. They came from the keen observers everywhere. They came from the depraved and the saintly: from the hunters and from the hunted. They even came from all eleven of the still living Princes in Flight. Ignatius Cardinal Ti sent in a murder right in line with his own approaching death. It wasn't used, in that exact form, but it wasn't too far off. All the abdicated Cardinals sent in murders, and all the doubles of the Cardinals in Flight sent in very ingenious murder-devices.

  Most of these many millions of proposed methods of murder were not practical, for one reason or a thousand, and there was heavy repetition and duplication. But there were so many really good ones that it almost made one weep not to have a few million murders under contract at certain payment.

  Instant mad dogs were good. The shot (it could be by air-gun or arrow or blow-gun, or directly by needle) might be made on the victim's own dog which would then go instantly mad and bite the nearest person, the victim, who would then die immediately. Then the dog would recover, without a trace, from his madness almost as immediately. But this depended on the dog's owner, the victim, being the closest person, so the plan could be disrupted by accident.

  Directional shots were better, and these fitted in many of the submitted murders. And contagious directional shots were absolutely the best in this category. Some substance of the victim had to be mixed with the infusion, but it had to be no more than the faint scent of his passing. Any animal would be shot with this infusion in any way. The animal would then go into a murderous fury against the victim that he had been inoculated with. It would find the victim anywhere, over dozens or hundreds or thousands of miles, and it would attack him in total fury. As to the contagious refinement, the inoculated animal, while on his murder pursuit, would bite all other animals of his sort that were anywhere near its path. And each bitten animal would immediately be similarly mad to murder that one victim. It would grow in an exponentially exploding chain reaction. It could be done with dogs, it could be done with cats, it could be done with wolves or squirrels or even rabbits.

  It could be done with rats or mice. Imagine a victim becoming in an instant a living tower totally incased in thousands of mad mice! Imagine him screaming, and hundreds of mad mice pouring down his screaming throat through the mouth that he would never close again. Slashing and slicing as they went in in wave after wave, into the inmost depths of a person! Imagine the victim, with fifty pounds of meat already sheared off him in the second before he falls to the ground. Imagine him gushing open, and the thousand-fold hairy waves gushing into him faster than his own viscera can gush out. Really, this is one of the most charming concepts in all the annals of creative murder.

  Mad birds could do it, pouring onto him from every sky and air. Or mad insects. Or mad tree toads. Or mad ants, a billion of them at least, covering a man a foot th
ick in a blanket of fiery death. Mad catfish could do it, pouring howling out of every water in relentless frenzy to take the victim wherever he might be found.

  Mad microbes might do it also, high-speed-operating colonial microbes spreading and catching like fire. But here there are difficulties in viewing the mechanics of the death struggle. Persons inventing or proposing highly imaginative murders might also manage highly imaginative observation points. The mad microbe bit could be made workable, but it isn't for everyone.

  And there is one special form. Mad three-year-old human children are excellent, and the implications open unheard of vistas. Imagine a three-year-old child, patted and needle-pierced at the same time by an ‘Oh what a handsome child you have there, madame’ murderer. The child, quickly turned into a mad phenomenal creature, will break every barrier somehow and seek out its victim with uncanny directioning; and it will seek out many other three year olds on its mad career and bite them and envenom them, and these in turn will seek out the same prey in racing fury while they also bite and infect other three-year-olds. Imagine thirty thousand such three-year-olds converging on a victim within thirty minutes, getting to him no matter where he hides himself, eating the very doors of his house off their hinges to get to him, then eating his flesh and his bones and his marrow. (Little children everywhere love bone-marrow, but they do not always know that they love it.) Oh, wonderful, wonderful concepts!