Not To Mention Camels

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I will,” Mary said. She looked back, and there was not any persimmon tree there, either withered or hale. “I don’t believe there was ever any persimmon tree there, was there?” she asked.

  “No,” said Spurgeon. “I had to take an inventory of the trees in the region of the parkway. I took this once a month. There was never a persimmon tree there.”

  Pilgrim stood and talked with his hands spread out and his fair hair flowing. This was on a brown green knoll above the parkway.

  “It will bloom again when I am gone,” he said, “but not now. I’ve greened a dozen worlds with my leaving them. They green themselves in recollection of me. Listen now, and I’ll give you the meat without the shell and the fruit without the rind.

  “I preach you the declared thing with no opposite to restrict it. The high without the low, the light without the dark, the inside without the outside, the up without the down, the feast without the famine, the young and never the old, the beginning without the end, the circle without a center, the top without a bottom, the winning without the losing, the prize without the payment, the bait without the hook, the rain and never a drought, the exaltation and never a depression, the sin without the remorse, the right without the wrong, the shot without the recoil, the crime without the punishment, the inebriation without the aftermath.”

  “It doesn’t mean a thing, does it?” Mary Morey asked.

  “Why should it?” Zontik asked. “Do you look for meaning in a hymn?”

  “It’s a good trick,” Doctor Augustine said to Doctor Raffels, “but can he deliver on it?”

  “The trick is the nondelivery,” Raffels said. “To deliver would be straight. John, I thought you were cowering with the others back in the cult room.”

  “A little cowering goes a long way with me. It’s tedious. Raffels, I’ve been thinking that we might pick up some several stipends this evening. We are two very good medical doctors. Why should we let lesser doctors receive stipends for pronouncing persons dead, especially when they are rent apart and dead without any doubt? Both of us are Lords Spiritual, and we have rank to displace any lesser doctors looking for death-scraps.”

  “All right, John. We will do it. There’s something familiar about this, however. I have the oddest feeling that I have attended Dusmano at his death at some earlier time.”

  “Possibly, possibly. Was I there?”

  “Yes. I believe so.”

  “I proclaim the counterpart without the prime-part,” Pilgrim was telling in his golden voice. “I speak of counterworlds with no first world. I speak of counterculture, but there is no such thing as culture itself. I speak of derivatives, but there are no originals ever anywhere. I know antithesis, but not thesis. I love antilogy, but I blind my eyes to logy or logic itself. I recognize antimatter, but I have not seen matter. Look about you. Which of them do you see? Is it the thing, or is it the antithing?”

  Then the voice of Pilgrim Dusmano became more drossy than golden.

  “I myself am anticlimax. But who is climax? I am antihero. But there is no hero anywhere.”

  Pilgrim spread out his hands in a gesture that lacked a small something. Nowhere was there any gesture complete and unlacking. Antihero that he was, he stood like a Christus and spoke. Mary Morey understood that he was an Anti-Christus, but who else understood it? Then Pilgrim began to wilt as he saw horses being brought toward the knoll.

  “I speak of attraction without distraction.” Pilgrim was talking, but he was barely heard. His tongue was clay. He gulped as though he would try to swallow his last words. Now he hardly looked like an antihero even.

  “It’s just come into his mind that ‘distract’ originally meant to draw asunder or to tear to pieces,” Raffels said to Augustine. “Now he sees the horse-beasts and he is in a clammy fear that his death will be a distracting by wild horses. The militia offers an interesting assortment of deaths, though. I wonder what mine will be?”

  “Are you going with him, Raffels?”

  “I suppose so. It seems as if I always do.”

  “You don’t make sense, man.”

  But Pilgrim would die dirty and with all the fancy stuff blown away. He caved in. He begged for a more instant death. A slow bad death made for a slow bad jump. He began to squall when they tied the horses to him to pull him apart.

  It isn’t as easy as it sounds to distract a man with horses, without distracting him to death. One arm came off, and then there seemed to be nothing to pull against. The militiamen looped the horse ropes around his ankles to rend and split him completely, but they only tore off one foot. They pulled his head off with the horses. It came quite easily. Raffels and Augustine declared Dusmano to be dead, and a militiaman signed chits for them so that they might be paid their stipends.

  Dusmano was an untidy scattering of meat, of mud and blood, of dirt and detritus. The militiamen looped ropes around parts of him again, to drag him more, to abrade and separate him further.

  “Hold your horses!” Mary Morey called firmly, coming onto the knoll of the distraction, with her brother following. “We’re going with him. Don’t let him get too far ahead of us or he’ll go into panic. He isn’t at his best today, militiamen. When you put in your reports, could you make it seem better than it was? This wasn’t one of his better deaths. Now please send us after him as quickly as you can.”

  “Have you a permit to be killed?” one of the militiamen asked.

  “No,” Mary said. She hadn’t thought to get a permit. Neither had James.

  “You can’t be killed today, then,” the militiaman said. “The office is already closed.”

  “But he won’t know what to do when he wakes up and finds that none of us are there,” Mary protested. “He’ll panic. He’ll go to pieces.” Then Mary went into happy laughter about it, realizing that Dusmano was already in pieces.

  “We’ll waive the permits,” a sergeant of militia said. “We’ll make this clean and fast.” He scored Mary deeply at all the joinings and branchings with a ritual short sword. Then the foamy horses were roped to her extremities and driven with whips and shouts. They lunged and they broke her, and Mary came apart quite easily. Then there was another pulling apart, and still another. The Doctors Raffels and Augustine pronounced her dead and received chits whereby they could collect their stipends.

  And her brother James was separated and killed in much the same way. He was not at all a sinewy man, and the horses weren’t lathered much more in pulling him apart.

  “Anyone else?” the militia sergeant called.

  “Yes. I’ll have to go with him,” Zontik said. “He’ll need my umbrella over him wherever he goes. No man ever needed shielding more.”

  “Do you people have any idea what you’re up to?” the sergeant asked, puzzled.

  “Not an idea, no,” Zontik admitted. “An idea is mental. We have a visceral prompting, perhaps.”

  They killed Noah Zontik with the horses. Then they killed Doctor Raffels. But Wut in his rage terrified the horses, so he was killed by simple garrote.

  Doctor Augustine made his way out of life by private conveyance, after he had collected his stipends, including Raffels’s death stipend.

  The whole thing was anticlimax without climax.

  9

  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

  Matthew

  You know how that camel does it? He just closes one of his own eyes and flops back his ears and plunges right through. A camel is mighty narrow when he closes one eye and flops back his ears. Besides, they use a big-eyed needle in the act.

  Narrow Valley

  This was in one of the narrow provinces of the country of those who have just died. It was at a place sometimes called the Iron Meadows and sometimes called the Camel’s Eye; the most straitened portion of this place was known as the Narrow Corner.

  There were three figures coming up the steep, dangerous, and molten path where it climbed toward
the Narrow Corner at an angle that sighted into the lowering iron sky above. One of these three had been a powerful cult figure in another place, and now appeared in most peculiar outline. It was not in fuzzy outline; it seemed to be expressed in a number of sharp and clear outlines superimposed. It was like a clear figure seen by double vision, by triple vision, by dozen vision. But no detail of it was smudged.

  Thus the creature, according to its various outlines, might sometimes be taken for an ape, at other times a teras, or a Groll’s Troll, or a tityrus, or one of the sorts of man, an Enacian, a frog. This pan-morphous creature seemed brittle and unplastic, and yet he could have been manipulated.

  The two other creatures coming up the garish, steep, scorching path were an ariel and a dog. These had once been a human brother and sister who had served the first figure in his cult. Indeed, they were still in human form, but the impression they gave was of a dog and an ariel. These two moved with a sort of leashed fury, and all three of the climbing creatures were dangerous and fanged.

  Confronting them above were three other figures. One was an ape-shaped human who had once been called the Holy Knacker. One was a wrathy person who in life had born the cognomen of Wut. One was a demented and furious child who, in another place, had been born to parents named Pym.

  “Easy, easy,” said the climbing ariel in her controlled fury. “Those waiting above are as wary of us as we are of them. We will fill their eyes with murk and be invisible to them. But our eyes will see.”

  It was a battle for centrality, then. From which boxlike head would which eyes look out to establish themselves as the center?

  It was the pan-morphous cult figure climbing up the smoky path from below who won the first slight advantage for his party. The eyes of this pan-morphic (he had jeweled eyes or cracked-glass eyes) established the field of battle and made it conform to their own vision. So those above were purblind and made to move in a private darkness. And yet they were all the sort of beings who work well in the dark.

  But this focusing by the cult figure was a distortion and almost unendurable calamity, even to himself. It itself was a wild darkening. Things appeared much more frightening through the eyes and mind of this marred cultist than through the myriad eyes of that personified and spooky place itself. And this more frightening version became the imposed reality both for those below and for those above.

  This pan-morphic cultist was himself injured in mind and memory. He was horribly vulnerable through several holes in him. And he could not recall just what these holes meant or where they had been received. He was demented and savage even beyond the sullen savagery of his two servitors, the ariel and the dog. He knew that these two creatures were absolutely faithful to him. But he also knew that they were random and excited and unreasoned, and that their savage faithfulness could as well result in their rending him to pieces (to save his essence by carrying it in their own gullets through the dangerous places) as it could result in anything else. And he was overpowered by the things he saw above him. He knew that when prodigies meet beyond life and time, they are like small boys bluffing each other. He knew that, and he was still overpowered. Small boys bluff murderously when they are removed beyond life and time.

  Foremost of the threats was a hulking apelike creature that the polymorph saw high ahead. (This was all by firelight, there being no sun in the iron sky, so the seeing and the seeming ran together.) The ape-thing was moving down the terrible and steep path toward the three climbers. It was coming fast enough to intercept them at the Narrow Corner. The path was fearfully narrow even where the three climbed it. The ariel had her crest drooping and smoking; the dog had his singed tail between his legs; the polymorph himself had teeth in his heart that crunched it and gnawed it away.

  And above them, as they climbed, the path fell away much more. It narrowed and vanished off to gnashing horror on each side. How more wonderful it would be if it could be said that it fell away to nothing! But the Narrow Corner, still above them and seeming to loom higher as they approached closer, was snagged, tentacled, pulsating, steep. It was more frightening by much than the torturous path which they were still climbing.

  This Narrow Corner was sometimes called “the Camel’s Eye,” but there was either a mystery or an error in that name. The fable was of the camel and the eye of a needle. Well, but the fact was a giant camel-eye by whose favor this whole cavern existed.

  Besides the apelike creature above and ahead, there was a smaller and younger and incomparably more savage being who perched there on a ledge like a bird and who gibbered like the young of the buzzard-bird. This young fury was in open lust for the life and soul of the climbing polymorph. The fury-creature was partly in the form of a rebelling child, partly in the form of a fire-drake, partly in the form of the crackling-voiced buzzard.

  But the fury-child, unlike the apelike creature, was not moving down the crumbly, slippery, lava-flow passage. It moved in a different way. It pervaded all that narrow, steep upper wasteland; it pervaded the Narrow Corner itself; and it began to pervade the impossible lower path that looked up past the Corner at the iron sky. This fire-drake, this demented child came to bear on places not by moving from one place to another, but by occupying one place more and another less until it was fully and threateningly in a new place. And this new place might not be exterior to its prey.

  Demons, demons, spew and spree!

  Gouge your eyes out. Count them three.

  The smoky stalactites of that passageway rimed the dog-foot verse with limestone and brimstone tone in effective salure. And above the climbers was seen a third thing or person—a half circle of shaggy darkness opening to show the new one: a madman, or at least an infuriated man. This was an intelligent, calculating, canny, relentless, unforgetting, unforgiving man who had happened to find himself in this unforgivable place and so was possessed by rage and mania.

  These were the persons of the three-tiered arena. In addition to them, there were various chimeras, both above and below and in the Narrow Corner itself. They formed a confusing aggregate of persons and players, and it was a confusing and as yet experimental theater in which they played their parts.

  (Do not be restless. There is fire everywhere, and your feet will burn off if you take even one step to withdraw.)

  There is a legend that comes back from not quite the other side, from the anteroom of beyond, as it has been called. This states that the Narrow Corner is a precipice of glare ice with garish lights rippling over and through it; that this precipice is abrupt as a rough knife-edge; and that on each side of this knife blade there is a howling and bottomless chasm where one may fall endlessly. It states that there are spirits there, unseen (but their frosty breath can be seen against the darkness)—tooth-clattering spirits who are ravening to be eating souls. And it says that all revenges that survive life will wait to be slaked at that Narrow Corner which everybody must pass.

  (The dismal child, or fire-drake, was pervading its way nearer and ever nearer.)

  And this legend is mostly false, as the climbing pan-morph now understood. Someone, perhaps, had had a visual intuition or prevision of the Narrow Corner, and had believed that it was ice. But it is molten rock and rock crystal, and the garish lights that ripple over and through it are the killing fire. It is a precipice like a knife-edge, yes, and it falls off on each side to unbottomed horror; but the spirits that soar like blood-bats there have their path made visible by flame-breath and not by frost-breath. And the revenges that lurk murderously there do not hide in ice stalagmites but in burning bushes of incandescent iron.

  The dismal child or fire-drake was now pervading the very nearness below the Narrow Corner and was attacking the pan-morph, thinly at first, and then more thickly. “I hide in the passage and I trap you there when you have to travel,” the demented child sputtered. “There is room for only one on the path, and I’ll harry you over the edge, I will shove you over clear to hell. This is the narrow edge, this is the Narrow Corner, this is where I catch you in
your fresh death and drive you into steep Tartarus.”

  The demented child who was also the fire-drake, who was attacking the pan-morph more substantially now, was not clearly visible to the pan-morph. There was one hate-shot child-sized eye riding on the fiery effluvium of the fire-grinder; that alone was clearly seen. The eye was conscious and dripped bottomless hatred. But the members of the child which inflicted horror-touch and wound could not be seen.

  But the ariel joined battle with the child fire-drake, and both of them were toothed with slasher tusks. There were hot and bloody doings on those narrow ledges. And from above there came an apish voice like high-pitched thunder.

  “I’ll chain you to one form,” the apelike creature called from above to the assaulted pan-morph. “I’ll prison you in only one body, hot ocean-man, change-man, morphic-man. I’ll nail you up within your one single flesh and I’ll have you stolen completely away from the change-form ocean. Do you not remember me? I was the flesh-smith, the body-smith. But you can’t go home again, not to the same ocean bottom, not to Sea-Change Station, which you have depended on. The change you begin now will be your final and straitened form. I narrow it, I restrict it, I nail it up tight. This is your last change, and your new name is ‘Change-No-More.’ ”

  The lightning dazzled and the thunder rolled, but neither was absolutely imposing under that low iron sky.

  “No, no. There are nine other changes you do not know about,” the pan-morph howled. “These are to be left to me after all others except the last one are used up. I have these nine special ones by unusual Legacy. I’ve tricked you.”

  “You’ll waste the nine; you’ll be nine times taken when they’re soon over with,” the body-smith growled with an animal sound in his throat.

  Then it was battle all the way. And the vaunts of the ape-man were a major part of the battle. The animal-man, the ape-man, the flesh-smith, the body-smith was howling his vaunts out of his belly which had been burst. Those vaunts clanged big iron doors shut on last hopes, and they scorched and shriveled.