“No of course he can’t. Not on foot.” The man drank. He said, “A surprising sort of adventure for our delicate little pet.” His air of contemptuous approval did nothing to help.
Evelyn began to sob. “It’s that woman,” she sniveled. “That—that—” No epithet was both vile and polite enough to be utilized. “She took him off somewhere. I know it. You know what they are. Extraordinary things happen here in this awful country. Anything might have been done to him.”
“But I take it it wasn’t?” Chaver finished the whisky. “Where is he now?”
“I sent him straight to bed.”
“I see. Well, he’ll keep, then. I’ll go and have a word with Agnini.”
“Oh, no—Chaver—no—”
“Why not? You seem to think she’s at the bottom of the mystery.”
“No, you mustn’t—”
“Don’t tell me,” said Chaver, casting after all the stone, and unerringly, “what I may and must not do.”
As he crossed the night garden with quick eager strides, between bushes that flickered tonight with fireflies, he saw his quarry almost by instinct, shadow in shade, under an orange tree near the wall. The spot was secluded, an invitation. He walked up to her, quite hidden from the bungalow and the servants’ area, and said, “What’s been going on, then? Thinking of abducting my son, maybe, and your accomplices never turned up? Too scared. As you should have been.” She said nothing, and even in the dark her eyes glowed, as if they too held fireflies, or stars. He chuckled, roughly, to demonstrate it might all be a joke. “That’s what the memsahib thinks, anyway. Taking my son and heir away to sell for immoral practices. But I don’t think you’d do that, Aggi. Murdering an old woman now, that’s more your line.” Again he waited, and she said nothing. He put out one hand and let it fall on her shoulder, which was bare. He palmed her shoulder, liking the texture of her, as he had known he would. What she had on was a little puzzling. It was nothing of Asha’s lending anymore, rather some piece of cloth taken up from somewhere and casually wound on her, and as casually, perhaps, unwound. “You did kill her, did you? The men said there was something wrong with the body. They said, it was hollow, like an empty sack, but full of mud that had been washed in and then hardened. It looked like an ordinary corpse to me.” He moved his hand downward. “But you’re all alive, aren’t you? No, don’t move away. After all, I could give you some trouble, Aggi, if I wanted to. If I reported that corpse to the authorities, and mentioned we’d had a stray wandering around here. Come on, Aggi. I’ll talk Hindi-cindy to you, if you like.” He had both hands on her now, and pressed close to her, to let her learn his readiness. “You know you want to, Aggi. You pray doing it, don’t you, everywhere, on every bloody temple. You’re full of it, you darkies—” The sound came from her mouth, close by his ear, and turned his pounding heart to stone and the heat in his groin to ice. Before he could think, Finlay had jumped away from her, and gone on stumbling backwards until he collided with another of the orange trees. His reaction was out of all proportion to what she had done. Yet it had not seemed to be: She had hissed at him. There was nothing catlike in it, nor anything human. It was the exhalation of the hunting cobra. And the sinuous shape of her against him, the weave of her head scarcely seen in the night gloom, these things had seemed snakelike too. In that split second, there between his hands and grappled to his torso—something cool and evil and untender rustled and swayed, and the great jaws gaped, the long teeth glinted, readying to deliver the paralyzing and deadly bite … .
“For God’s sake,” he said hoarsely. But out of the black of his invisible foreign garden, her woman’s voice came back at him, speaking rapidly in English, and then in Hindi, so he did not quite follow it all.
“Do what you wish,” she said. “Tell whom you wish. My wandering is done. I go elsewhere. Thou canst not harm me, thou man. And that which thy slaves found on the road, that was only mine, no other’s. The shed skin of my mortal youth and age, gone from me now I am young again, and free. But thou. Go woo thy pink-eyed wife. And for thy son—go thou and lie in the dirt at his feet, for that is thy place. Thou shalt see the sun rise in him, soul and body, while thy tiny strengths wither like old leaves. Thy way is darkness. Remember me, once, in the long and lampless night of thy life.”
With his shoulders to the slender orange tree, his ears ringing and his intestines crawling, Chaver Finlay heard then something that made it seem as if a bundle of light material had been thrown down into the grass. It would take him months to erase the impression he had that the shadow of the woman vanished, while, about the height of his boot top, something whispered away like a river through the bushes, and all the fireflies winked out.
However, it took only half an hour to push the matter temporarily from his forebrain, with the admitted help of the whisky decanter and cigarette box. And only three minutes more to reach his son’s bedroom.
“Get up, David,” the man said in a cold, penetrating and level voice, as his hand shook like a terrier at the scruff of the boy’s neck. “Get up. We have some business.”
In the semi-dark, a drift of light coming in from beyond, where Evelyn stood whimpering, the boy seemed luminous in his pale pajamas.
“You’ve been damned disobedient,” said the man. “You know that, don’t you? Going off and scaring your mother. Telling lies. All right. You’ll take your punishment. Drop your trousers and lean over the chair.”
And then, after a moment, over the noise the woman was making, came the noise of a leather belt being applied to naked eight-year-old flesh. And the man panting at the work. But no other sound.
Outside, the woman wrung her hands, suffering every pain that the boy received, as if she herself bore it for him. Such chastisements drew them closer, a mother and son, both victims of the man. And it was a dreadful beating for a little boy. She was concerned he did not scream or weep. The former, lighter beatings had always caused him to cry out—would Chaver be able to stop, without this signal of acknowledgment?
In the end, the man did stop, tiring, and abruptly aware he had gone too far. Defensively he said, “All right. You’ve been brave, I’ll give you that. Lie down now. Go on, lie down.” And then, loudly, violently, as if to a savage dog, “Lie down!”
Not properly grasping what was amiss, the woman heard fear in her husband’s voice. Startled, on a reflex, she ran forward and pushed the bedroom door fully open, so the light sluiced in and filled the room.
Her son, David, stood at the center of the room, in the light, clad merely in the unbuttoned pajama top and the blood that trickled down his legs. His fair hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, but from the unfathomed day’s exposure to the sun, she saw his body had acquired at last a deepening tan. He was less than half the height of the man, his father, yet the child seemed to dominate the entire scene. His mouth was firmly closed, his eyes tearless and wide.
“Davy,” the woman said, under her breath. “Oh, do as Daddy tells you, Davy.”
But it did not matter anymore that she called him “Davy.” The dream had ebbed away, he had forgotten it. Nonetheless, brain and heart and spirit, it had bathed him through; nameless and unremembered, yet it had recolored everything, and the dye was permanent. Now he knew himself, and what he might become, nor would he ever doubt, nor doubt the daylight path stretched before him and could not be missed. Whatever shadows scattered that path, he would pay them no heed. They were nothing now, compared to what would be his, in the golden future only years, days, moments away. And though the blood ran and the man panted and though “Davy, Davy,” the woman muttered, there was even another name, a secret name, nothing would ever touch.
Less than half the man’s height, the boy looked up. Chaver Finlay, who had not recalled the aspect of his child’s eyes, now met it, blue as a jewel and falling like the blow of a seven-foot sword across his recoiling adult mind.
Pushing past his wife, the man went away, laughing coarsely. There was nothing to do save laugh, sinc
e his consciousness could not admit what all the rest of him already saw and shouted at. Though he did sense he had beaten his son for the very last time in his life.
R. A. LAFFERTY
Company in the Wings
Ever have the uneasy feeling that someone is looking over your shoulder? Well, maybe they are, all the unborn multitude that surrounds us: Natty Bumppo, Moll Flanders, Casper Gutman, Snuffy Smith, Richard Nixon …
Richard Nixon? Well, read on … and the following sly and funny story will explain all (or nearly all), and make you master of a million unknown realms … if you are that one in a million who can remember what you see, and if you can come up with the necessary passage-penny …
R. A. Lafferty started writing in 1960, and throughout the subsequent twenty-four years he has turned out a seemingly endless string of mad and marvelous tall tales, including some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever published. In 1973 he won the Hugo Award for one of them, “Eurema’s Dam.” His books include Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, Arrive at Easterwine, The Flame Is Green, Annals of Klepsis, and the collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Four Stories, and Golden Gate and Other Stories. His most recent books are the collections Ringing Changes, Heart of Stone, Dear, Snake in His Bosom, and The Man Who Made Models, and the novel Half A Sky. His story “Golden Gate” was in our First Annual Collection.
I
Ahoy! and Oho, and it’s who’s for the ferry?
(The briar’s in bud and the sun going down):
And I’ll row ye so quick and I’ll row ye so steady,
And ’tis but a penny to Twickenham Town.
Twickenham Ferry—Theophile Marzials
Waking from full pleasure, coming out of vast worlds into the narrow reality, feeling them all slip away, and grasping to hold the pieces of them while their continents dissolved and their mountains toppled, holding to just one phrase that might be the key to their reconstruction, to one word even (obolus was the word)—coming full awake then with all of it lost—
Fairbridge O’Boyle had been the “morning fool” before, waking empty from exciting dreams that he could not hold on to. But there was a difference this time. He did not awake in bed, but standing and clothed. He did not know how he had spent the night, save that it had been elsewhere and that it had been pleasurable.
He was in his own room, but he knew that he had just come into it. And where had he come from? There was no key to it, unless that odd word “obolus” might be the key. It seemed more like a dream-distortion of his own name O’Boyle though. Or unless his friend Simon Frakes was the key, the skeleton key to fit the lock. Simon was very like a key in the metallic thinness of him.
And he was very like a skeleton. It always seemed as though Simon had put his flesh on carelessly and could sluff it off at any time. It was hard to believe in him when he wasn’t present: and the aroma of the pleasurable and lost night did have a certain tang of Simon to it.
“It seems to me, Simon,” Fairbridge had said to him once, “as if I had discovered you, as if you would disappear if I cast you out of my mind.”
“Don’t do it, Fairbridge. You’re playing with smoke,” Simon had protested with near excitement. “I’d rather you didn’t try that experiment. It might be painful for both of us. Keep me in the back of your mind somewhere. Even keep me forgotten there. But don’t cast me out.”
This was a funny conversation for a morning fool to be remembering now, but all conversations with his friend Simon had been a little bit odd. Simple Simon Frakes, so Fairbridge used to call him sometimes; but has anyone really understood the profundity of the mythos of Simple Simon? Simplicity is a much more complex thing than its opposite, duplicity. Simplicity is the gathering of everything together into entity. Duplicity is only the wanton scattering of the pieces again.
Morning fools really do think in such terms. Then the morning fool Fairbridge undressed and went to bed, but set the clock for only two hours hence. He was a late morning fool this day, and it would soon be afternoon. And there was another of the fabulous lectures to enjoy that afternoon.
The man who was giving the lectures was Simon Frakes, with his grin that was a two-line caricature, and with his puzzling, ironic way of talking. He was giving the inaugural series of the Trefoil Lectures, and he was making a shambles of them.
Simon’s presentation, “The Validity of Imagined Creatures,” had caused many second thoughts among his listeners. To imagine, he said, is to make images, and images may be remarkably solid. If they come out of a lively imagination they will be live images. And Simon demonstrated with a bit of stage trickery. He made a live image, that of a suddenly loquacious young girl. There was a certain nervousness that ran through all of them who watched him do this. It was only dispelled when he unmade the image again. But an uneasy feeling had begun to grow. What if there really was a grain of truth in his thesis?
His lecture, “The Tertiary Limbus,” had caused further unease. To the Limbus Patrum and the Limbus Infantum he added the Limbus Nundum Natorum. None of his listeners believed in Limbo. They didn’t believe in the limbo of the Fathers, nor in the limbo of the Infants who died before reaching reason; but it was spooky to think that there might be a third limbo, the limbo of those not yet born.
His talk, “The Multitude in the Wings,” had caused some to question his sanity, and others to question their own. It was a creepy rhapsody that set up resonances in even the dullest of minds. It wasn’t a possible thing, but all the hearers seemed vaguely to remember encounter with that multitude. It struck a chord, and the chord sang and rattled in their heads. Something would have to be done about this disquieting man.
(This day, Fairbridge O’Boyle had had his second awakening, to the clock, had risen and dressed, and had gone to Simon’s latest sortie.)
This sortie, “The Creative Imagination”, questioned a fundamental thought process. Simon began to cause a real alarm, and the falsetto chorus was raised against him. He was either kidding, or the world itself had for a long while been kidding all the people in it. And all the good and uneasy people seemed to hold Fairbridge O’Boyle responsible for the unorthodoxies of his friend Simon.
“But the difficulty with all such arguments is that they cannot be proved,” Fairbridge argued over coffee with his friend Simon after the lecture, and after the little tempest that followed it had scattered for a while.
“Oh, but I proved it to you last night, Fairbridge,” Simon said easily. “Have you forgotten the proof?”
“Worse than that, Simon: I’ve forgotten last night. I’ve meant to ask you whether we were together last night.”
“Together, yes, except for a few times you deserted me for greener folk. Let us ride the same horse to another country then. Say what you consider proof and I will furnish it.”
“The things would have to be experienced literally for proof.”
“Then we will literally experience them. Get your hat.”
“Where are we going?”
“Oh, to one of the purlieus of the limbi. Man, don’t hang back! The crossing-over is always one of the shining things, and it never grows old. The crossing itself is worth almost everything. And then it’s to arrive at the second greatest adventure of them all, and you don’t even have to die to achieve it. There are one billion oysters that are yours for the opening, and every one of them is a world. Pick one!”
“How? How?”
“Oh, here’s maybe the easiest of a billion ways.”
Simon Frakes drew a five-line diagram on a piece of paper. Then he plucked it off the paper and it was solid in his hand.
“What is it?” Fairbridge shrilled.
“It’s just a gadget. The name of it is the ‘obolus’.”
“But that’s the word I hung on to. It’s the name of an old coin.”
“Who says a coin can’t be a pentagram? Yes, it is a coin. It’s the
passage-penny.”
“Could I do that?” Fairbridge demanded.
“You could if you remembered it, Fairbridge, but you probably won’t. You’ve seen it done before, and you’ve forgotten it completely.”
Simon’s grin was a two-line caricature. Then Simon faded out and only the grin remained. “Come along,” the grin said, and it moved off. Remembering it as something that had happened before, Fairbridge O’Boyle, stumbling and hurrying, followed the grin out of the door and down the now darkening Oswald Lane on the second greatest adventure of them all.
Oswald Lane is two hundred years old and only two hundred and twenty yards long. Its locations are all numbered and listed and taxed. There are only a certain number of doors there, and only a certain number of persons living behind them. There is not room for an entire unknown world to exist there, surely not room for millions of such worlds.
Fairbridge followed Simon Frakes (or Simon’s grin, and a bit more of him by then) through a door where there had never been a door before. One shining moment that could not be measured in time! It was the crossing-over itself that was worth almost everything! It was unforgettable, of course, and incomparable. Whoever has crossed-over can never be the same again. Ah, but everybody in the world has crossed-over at least once, one way or the other.
Everybody in these new worlds had not necessarily crossed-over though. Fairbridge and Simon were into new worlds then, without the moment itself being at all dismal. They were into a large room that was itself an elusive world; and there was no room for so large a room in all of Oswald Lane.
Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Page 66
