“Yes, there it is.” Aubrey pointed.
“So it is,” Pilgrim admired. He took it in his hand. “It fits me as though I had used it before. Stone is so ritual! Now, please, all of you set your thoughts on a bright and high and invisible bridge. This is a bridge that exerts a powerful charm. You are all going to cross that bridge to another world. But at the same time it will be the world that you are already in, seen in another aspect. It will be an aspect deplaced much less than a millionth of an inch from the aspect you are in now. Are all of you ready, in valor and joy, to cross this high bridge?”
“Yes,” said Aubrey Pym.
“Yes,” said his wife.
“Yes,” said the elder child.
“No,” said the younger child. “You have jeweled eyes. You didn’t have them before. Maybe somebody will kill you and steal the jewels out of your eyes.” There was really rampant mockery in the behavior of that child now, and there was much more than a bit of hate.
Pilgrim Dusmano quickly cut the throat of Aubrey Pym with the ritual stone knife. Aubrey rattled a bit in his cut throat and in his decapitated lungs. Then he died.
“That seems extreme,” said the wife. “How is that going to get us moved to another town? Are you sure that’s the way it’s done?”
“I’m sure,” Pilgrim said. “If I used a less grotesque method of sending messengers from this world, my competitors would be onto them in no time at all. Be well disposed, good wife. Be happy, but apprehensive. Be valiant.”
“Oh, all right,” the wife said. Pilgrim cut her throat with the ritual stone knife. She made sharp, windy sounds as if she wished to say something else. Then she died.
“Is it my turn now?” the elder child asked.
“Yes,” Pilgrim mumbled, and he cut the child’s throat with the stone knife.
“Can you use a new knife on me?” the younger child asked. “That one’s dirty. You have jeweled eyes like a fly that’s as big as a man.”
“There’s only the one knife,” Pilgrim said. “Come now.”
“Oh, no!”
And then there was absolute confrontation. The four-year-old child glared at Pilgrim with snake’s eyes, with basilisk’s eyes. There was agate fire in the eyes of that small and suddenly unnatural creature.
“I’m not going,” the child sputtered. “You can cut my head clear off, but you can’t kill me. You might be able to send me away from here, but I’m not going to go all the way to there. I’ll hide in the passages and in the glaciers, and I’ll trap you there the next time you have to travel. I’ll be there where there’s only room for me, and I’ll knock you clear into hell when you try to pass. You’ll be scared.”
Somehow this way of speaking didn’t match that of a normal four-year-old child.
“Your papa and your mama have already gone,” Pilgrim said in false-ringing words. He never knew how to talk to children. Especially he never knew how to talk to precocious children. “Don’t you want to go with them?”
“No. I want to stand on that narrow ledge and knock you off into hell the next time you come by. I know right where it is. I’ve been there before.”
And Pilgrim Dusmano had one hell of a time cutting that kid’s throat. The child was slippery. It was sputtering and biting. It was cursing and foaming. And there were some inopportune workmen going by, and it made Pilgrim feel a little foolish to be killing a child while they gawked. Pilgrim always tried to dispatch messengers when nobody was watching. He finally cut the child’s throat with very bad grace.
But the messenger-dispatching affair itself did not seem to be seriously flawed by this little unpleasantness. Pilgrim watched the words of the message fade from the paper that was still held in the dead hand of Aubrey Pym. And the fading of the words meant that the message had been received by Supply in the other world or in the other aspect.
And it also meant that the messengers, or three of them anyhow, had made a successful transition to another world or to another situation, that they were alive and well, that they were in parallel bodies in a parallel place.
This transition was all very routine. It was done every week with some messenger family. That is one of the ways messages are sent to other aspects by persons whose commerce is widely scattered. If it weren’t for such setups, there would be no commerce at all between Present World and such places as Dongolo. And this established commerce, even though some of it might be invisible to persons of certain attitudes or situations, was always advantageous to both parties. It wouldn’t have taken place otherwise.
The doors between different situations or worlds may be opened in peculiar ways such as this, but they may not be opened very wide or very often. And the knowledge of how they are opened cannot be left lying around. Even those who may sometimes have to use such means cannot be allowed to remember the trick of them.
So Pilgrim Dusmano was forgetting even as he stuffed the bodies into the grinder-shredder machine. He honestly did not recall how those bodies happened to be there. He knew they should be disposed of, and he disposed of them. But he found it all unaccountably distasteful.
He stuffed in the big male body and sent it, sloshing in its own juice, to its reduction. Then the big female body went in. And then the little male body. And then the little—well, what was it, anyhow? Pilgrim was damned if he knew the sex of that smallest creature, and he was damned if he cared. The meat of it was still hot, and perhaps it was still making defiant sounds in its severed gullet. Was it taken by death then, or merely by a purple pout? Pilgrim stuffed it into the machine.
But a moment later, as Pilgrim glanced at the final stage of the disposal, he saw that one hate-shot, child-sized eye was riding the remaining effluvium of the people-grinder. There was no doubt that the eye was conscious and that it was glaring at Pilgrim with bottomless hatred. That child could yet make trouble!
Pilgrim Dusmano turned his back on it all and forgot it. Workmen came and removed the four large stone benches and the long ritual stone knife. As soon as it had completed its reduction process, the grinding machine was also removed by the workmen. And these things were put away for another week.
One week hence, Pilgrim Dusmano would see these objects again, and he would not remember that he had ever seen them before. Only when it came time that he must use them would he remember what it was that he must do with them.
5
An idol-thing with jewel eyes
And kindness’ milk grown thicker, curder,
With tampered shadows, Scanlon skies,
And token, microcosmic murder.
Museum-Munchers’ Daybook
Unrepeated information goes stale quickly. It festers. Pilgrim Dusmano had acquired certain information that morning from the wallet of the man with the code name of Mut, so he felt himself compelled to pass it along, unfestered yet, to places where it would do the most harm. He called, by voxo, a multimedia reporter named Randal Muckman.
“What I have is too hot for voxo,” he said simply. “Muckman, if you can be coming out of the Daylight Museum in four minutes, I will pass you as I go in. And I’ll give you something.”
Four minutes later, Pilgrim Dusmano, going into the Daylight Museum with jaunty and innocent step, passed Randal Muckman coming out.
“Evenhand is Consul,” Pilgrim said in a quick, low voice; and almost instantly there were many steps between the two men. It was as quick and easy as that. But was ever such explosive information compacted into three words! If the identity of a Consul were known, then the government of a land or a world would be in perilous straits.
Could Muckman believe what Dusmano had just told him about his known enemy? Dusmano wasn’t known at all for his honesty. What he was known for was the sheer variety of his dishonesties. But why should anyone pass along such rotten information? Why do it, if it were false? Why do it even if it were true? Just for the steep pleasure of it, perhaps, in the case of Dusmano. He was widely known as a pleasure man, and he did get pleasure from imaginative defamations.
But how should Muckman tag the source if he did pass the information along? He had to pass it along or he wouldn’t be Muckman. “From a usually unreliable source” would start the finger pointing in the direction of Pilgrim Dusmano. “From a knowledgeable man whose dishonesty few doubt” would have the scent of Pilgrim all over it.
Six minutes later Muckman did go on the tinsel with his hourly items and gave the information as “From a high, wide (of the mark sometimes), and handsome source.” At least the more intelligent and more current people knew that the source had to be the devious Pilgrim.
The three-dimensional eddies from the shocking report quickly swept over the whole land. That anyone should reveal the identity of a Consul still in office was pretty raw. So Dusmano had already done the first stage of his damage. He gloated fast, that man, and then he went on to other pleasures—to the building of a particular image, his own.
The Daylight Museum, where Pilgrim now fatted his mind for an hour on the plain abundance, was based on the concept of art at its best, uncompromised and untrammeled. “It’s always nice to provide the brackets where the trammels can be hooked on later,” Pilgrim had said one day. But there were no dark corners in the Daylight Museum. And there were no dark concepts there. There were no abstractions. If a person wanted abstractions, then let him draw them out himself, from the clear material here, and from his own mentality and psyche. If a person wanted murkiness, then he could fashion it himself, but it should not be second-hand murkiness. The original representations in this museum must be clear, both in line and in thought. And the colors should be chaste. There was a rule that there should be no color which a sane mind and a clear eye cannot view without a fever rise of more than four points, or without the unease index exceeding seventy-five over sixty-two. That was one of the basic rules at the Daylight Museum, and it was a good rule. It kept out certain sorts of junk.
(Pilgrim Dusmano had been busy creating a special image by every art he could lay hold of; it was partly for that reason that he frequented museums.)
The Daylight Museum did not have something for every taste. If a person wanted to view unruly pictures or statuary or transfixes, then he could go to the Dismal Den on Third Street, or to the Implosion House downtown, or to Tom Fool’s out along the parkway. There were museums for every sort and taste. Even if a person had a taste for his own bloody tongue, he could go to the Introspection Inn on Frankfort.
(Just what was the special image that Dusmano was creating? Oh, it was just the image of his own ideated self.)
If a person wanted to experience the hot and dizzy and nauseous stuff, then let him go to hell (out in the Southgate complex). Pilgrim Dusmano tried to visit the several very different museums in the several days of the hebdomad. He didn’t actually go to hell to encounter the dingy and nauseous stuff, but in Southgate Hell or the Dismal Den or Sheol Shuckins he often observed the very expensive sets of crockery that had been made out of swamp-born, Plasticine-gray clay and had been slacked and fired in hell itself. And he saw other obscure things that had been in hell literally. None of those things were very artistic, but they were all passionate and powerful mood pieces. A person could become extremely moody just looking at them and handling them.
But today Pilgrim was enjoying his late morning hour at the daylight-infused Daylight Museum. He was joined there by Mary Morey (“Your eyes look funny today,” Mary said, “like cracked glass or jewel. Your first breakthrough to a new image, and it’s broken glass”), who was one of his early morning students. Pilgrim was now joined at very many things by Mary Morey. And, at the same time, he was not quite joined by another of his morning students, Mary’s brother James Morey. James very often hung on the edge of Pilgrim’s company, holding back in the shade, smiling, watching, listening. “Mary in the sunlight, James in the shadows” was a saying that some of the other students had about them. It was said by some, only partly in jest (experiments had actually been run on the thing, but mind-boggling happenings had always flawed the results), that Mary had no shadow at all except her brother James.
“How did you get new eyes?” Mary asked Pilgrim now. “Can anybody get new eyes?”
“Yes,” Pilgrim said. When the man Mut had struck Pilgrim down that morning, Pilgrim had seen stars and jewels and pinwheels. But these bright things, after their moment of shine, didn’t scatter and disperse at large. Rather they came together, and they came to lodge in Pilgrim’s eyes. That was the way it had seemed, at that moment, to Pilgrim’s reeling wits. Or the new eyes might have come about otherwise, but they did come about at the time that Pilgrim was struck down. The shattered eyes were connected with some shattering experience.
Mary cast a strange shadow, her brother. And also there was something unusual about the shadows that Pilgrim Dusmano cast. Those shadows would change even when Pilgrim did not change or move his position. They would change even when the light did not change. Whole parades of shadows, all of Pilgrim’s casting, would follow one another. And the man Pilgrim would be passive, his eyes slitted (scatter-lit and occluded was the case with his new eyes) with interior pleasure, projecting the quick shadows out of his breathing body. The shadows may have been prime, and the fleshed Pilgrim may have been derivative. One fleshed shadow is easier to posit than that all those snapping lively things were the shadows.
“What is the matter with Mr. Dusmano?” Mary Morey asked the museum curator. “What is the matter with his shadows?”
“He exteriorizes badly or unevenly,” the curator said. “That’s the most simple way to put it. He is a pleasure seeker in all things, but for balance he pushes it too far. There’s a lot of raw bloodiness associated with his pleasures. Where else would those red tinges in all his shadows come from except from his involvement in bloodiness? I suspect he’s insane, but I believe he can leave off being insane anytime he wishes. It’s a case, though, where he will set aside a special half hour here, an hour there during the day in which to enjoy his insanity. It’s a part of his planned pleasures. So are you a part of them, young lady.”
(A wave of excitement and emotion was going through the city, through the nation, through a good part of the world during those moments. It was a murderous, but pleasantly murderous, emotion, like killing an enemy in a dream. The waves of that excitement came through the very walls of the museum building and of every building.)
Pilgrim’s shadow at that moment was a blob of high-hearted and intensely sociable evil. It was sociable in that every person present shared the dangerous attraction of that shadow. And the shadow was highlighted by a dance of red flute notes. But Pilgrim himself was gazing at a squarish, plain, black and white drawing of a boy and girl who were standing apart and doing nothing at all. The simply drawn girl was done in black on a sheeny white area. The scantly detailed boy was drawn or painted in flat white in the black halving of the drawing.
Then why should there be such shrillness in Pilgrim’s own shadow? Possibly Pilgrim was abstracting from the sharp-line drawing. But why was there that high pitch to the red flute notes that were scattered about on the floor? The notes were too shrill to be heard by trammeled ears. They were so shrill that if there had been a glass there, it would have—but there was a glass there. And it shattered from the pitch of the shadow flute notes.
“I’m sorry,” Mary Morey told the museum curator. “I feel that I was partly responsible for that. I hadn’t seen the glass at all. That glass that was on exhibit on the table there, the curious glass that shattered, was it very valuable?”
“No. It was my drinking glass,” the curator said.
“Dusmano enjoys himself.” Young James Morey was speaking out of the shadows. “But does he have any fun out of his enjoyments and pleasures? His enjoyments might not be the same as fun. His pleasures are pleasurable by his own definition and that of his cult, but it’s all a very taut thing. I’m part of it, and I don’t know whether it’s fun or not.”
The museum curator had Dusmano into his reserved wardroom
and showroom then. The Moreys were allowed to follow. There were several striking new arrivals at the museum.
“We have a few excellent new things on loan from Melchisedech Duffy’s Walk-In Bijou in New Orleans,” the curator said.
Some of these new things were strident and some of them were serene. There were paintings, there were woodcarvings, there were German silver montages. And there was a little wooden statuette that had live eyes. It was by Groben.
The eyes of it were live and lively. They snapped. They crackled. There was a world of curiosity in them, and only the slightest edge of animosity. They were small brown monkey eyes; or they were small brown kobold eyes. Nothing else about the statuette was alive. It wasn’t even a very good-looking carving, not for Groben.
“That little statue has live eyes,” Mary said, “and they look like the eyes of somebody I know. And you, Pilgrim Dusmano, now that you have eyes that are dead and made out of jewel, don’t you have idol-eyes now?”
“Yes, of course I have. And I’m in the way of becoming an idol.”
“And has this little statuette acquired your old eyes, your live eyes? They look like yours. The statuette looks like you.”
“I intend to make myself look like a statue, but not like a statuette,” Pilgrim said. “But my old eyes shouldn’t be alive anywhere. I’ll not allow them to be.
“Let’s drown it!” Pilgrim cried against the wooden statuette with an almost leprous interest. (Unspotted in his pleasures Dusmano was not.) “Ah, there is a fine ornate crock right there, James. Go fill it with water and drown the thing.”
James Morey took the crock and went to fill it with water.
“Don’t do it,” the curator said. “We don’t know the trick of the eyes yet. And dunking or drowning it might damage the mechanism.”
“There isn’t any mechanism,” Pilgrim told them. “There is only a little wooden statuette with live eyes, and I recognize against all reason that they’re mine. Ah, here you are, James. ‘Fast as a shadow,’ they always say about you, and it’s so. Now just put the little carving into the water and hold it under.”
Not To Mention Camels Page 6
