Not To Mention Camels

by R. A. Lafferty

  The Narrow Corner wasn’t built by hands, not by flesh hands. It was a projected image that was made solid by its own fire. It was the anthology of thousands of such personal projections. It was influenced, it was even manufactured by the intuitions and projections of countless bruised and dislocated persons in death throes or in death prescience.

  There was Alighieri who projected and shaped much of the Narrow Corner. There was Christ in Matthew. There was Maugham. There was mad Blake. There was Anastasia Demetriades who recounted the prophetic frightfulness of the Corner to Count Finnegan who projected it back to the thing itself with his amazing visualization. And clerk Ovyde constructed sheer heights of the Corner by the strong impetus of his Lost Cantos. (They were not lost: they were burned in punishment for their own dangerous clarity.)

  These people had shaped the iron rocks of the Narrow Corner; they had instituted the stenches and the heats. And it isn’t finished. You’ll add to it yourself in your death straits, if there is any deformed originality at all in you.

  (Dazzling lightning and rolling thunder again.)

  The wrathy man from above had come down onto the terrible, slippery, crumbling Narrow Corner of fire and height. He came to join the assault on the pan-morph, who had begun to clarify out of his ocean of forms. But the wrathy man was intercepted by the servitor dog. And the dog, newly powerful and of a still steeper savagery than before, closed with the wrathy man, intercepting him, fastening into him with sharp iron teeth, shearing off the defending fingers of the maniac, gobbling through gore, eating throat cartilage with clanging teeth. And the maniac man was breaking the neck of the dog, but he would never break that head loose. It was a lightning dog in its dazzling assaults; and the maniac was a thunder-man in his roaring and clattering defiance.

  But can lightning and thunder under a low, finite, iron sky be of the same power as lightning and thunder in open infinity? Ah, is the lion less to be feared in a small, closed, entrapping room than on the open savanna?

  The battle was on three fronts now. The demented child was no longer the fire-drake. He was the python destroying the ariel. The maniac was fang for fang and torn throat for torn throat with the iron dog, annihilating its flight forever and burning down its mind. The hairy-ape flesh-smith had tangled with the now sea-clarified man, both of them rasping with fright on the slippery lava of the high knife-blade-narrow pass.

  Even in death such prodigies as these do not happen. But they happen in that half hour that comes right after death.

  It was the dog that went first to falling destruction. The enraged man had broken all four of the dog’s legs. He had broken its back and its neck. He had torn out its eyes, and he had smashed its skull, which scrambled its wits forever. But the enraged man could not tear the beast loose from his own throat. When finally the infuriated man flung the broken animal off the knife-sharp ridge, his own torn-out red throat went with it.

  And the dog fell through unrecording space that hadn’t an end.

  The maniac man sank down in voiceless and blood-gushing helplessness. Only his eyes seemed alive now, and they were insane with a new fury. The clarified man from the sea realized that the maniac was the man with the code name of Wut. But who could reap the Wut fortune now?

  The dog fell. It was heard to hit the last ledge that marks the underside of the earth. It was heard to scratch and scramble on the hot iron stones of that ledge, and it was heard and felt to fall again. It must have lost the gore-mass from Wut’s throat, but it found voice at the same time. Howling in the depths! Deeper and deeper into those depths that are outside of limited space! The voice ever lower in tone but still with sustained strength for a long while! Gone, dog, gone!

  The demented child had now left off being a python. It had destroyed the flight of the ariel. It had destroyed her voice and balance and spirit. The ariel fell into the black-wing pit of her enemies, down and down, with the wings torn clear off her. She fell, and her brother, the howling dog, still fell.

  But the mad child had now pervaded the higher area and was winking out from the Narrow Corner. He was again no more than one hate-shot child-sized eye riding the effluvium of the burned-out lightning that betrashed the melted iron floor of the Narrow Corner.

  The clarified man who had been tricked out of his changing and protecting ocean now knew that the demented child was the younger son of Aubrey Pym, who had gone, throat-cut and trusting, to take a message for a man named Pilgrim Dusmano. But that younger child hadn’t gone trusting.

  “It must have been a garbled message,” the now exundined and single-shaped man said, “with one quarter of it not getting there at all.”

  “Your two companions and friends have been destroyed into the chasm,” the flesh-smith said. “Now you, nailed up tight in a single skin, will follow them. This is the end for you, Mr. Jump-No-More.”

  “I’ll not go into the pit that has no way out.” Jump-No-More swore his decision, burying his teeth in the nape of the flesh-smith.

  “Ah, but there is a way out,” the flesh-smith gibed as he tore open the belly of Jump-No-More. (Why did this seem peculiarly vengeful and fitting?) “There is one way out, and only one way. And you’ll not like that one way, not after you understand what it is. Ah, how is it now, bright man, to be clarified as to form, and to find out you’re still made out of mud?”

  But the clarified man, Mr. Jump-No-More, was very strong. He could have handled this animal-kin creature, this flesh-smith, if he had had a solid place to stand, if his stomach had not been ripped out, if he were as clarified in mind as he was in form. But his mind still had those superimposed outlines, as though it were a clear mind afflicted by double vision, by triple vision, by dozen vision. He was nearly certain that he had now settled into a human form and that he would retain that form as long as he retained any. But he was fuzzy and witless and confused. He did not fully understand about the Narrow Corner, or he was afraid to understand it. He did not know his own name, nor where he wanted to go or, more important, where he did not want to go. It was very important that he arrive at a new place, that he arrive quickly at any new place except one.

  He bit and gnawed deeply into the nape of his enemy there, and the feet of both of them slithered on the ice-smooth, fire-lava, hog-back, knife-sharp Narrow Corner.

  “All results here are final, you know,” grunted his pungent, rank-fleshed opponent, this ape-shape, this flesh-smith, this rank and rampant man. “You will go into that pit, man, and there is only one way out of it. Extinction would be better, but you don’t deserve so good a thing as extinction.” And the lout was pulling the intestines out of the clarified man, out of Mr. Jump-No-More.

  “Nothing here is final except your own destruction!” the clarified man sputtered, still grubbing with his teeth in the nape of his enemy. “I avoid all final things forever!” He made a great effort then, and he gained two advantages: he broke his enemy’s neck, and he remembered his own name. His name was Polder. He was Polder, that which has been reclaimed from the amorphous ocean, that which has taken solid form and will change no more. Unchanging form is a prison, he knew. But one must give up something to get a name. Oh, the danger of the scuffle there!

  There was an old, odd, familiar, remembered-in-exuberance, and yet rather unpleasant odor to this flesh-smith man that Polder was destroying. It was the smell of molten gold, always a foul smell even when one fluxes its melting with lime. Why, this creature was the Holy Knacker himself, and this Narrow Corner was the place where one settles disputes left uncompleted by death! The knacker was a rough-finished man, but not a true ape-form. Where had Polder known him? And how did the fellow happen to smell of a gold that had been melted and reduced with lime flux?

  Polder crushed the knacker then with a crunching of bones and a tearing of sinews; and he flung that man into the pit, the abyss where he would fall forever, as the dog had fallen. And then Polder tried to patch up his own belly with the melted rock and melted iron. It wasn’t a good job that he did on himsel
f, but it would serve.

  Polder reeled on the narrow, knife-blade path. He staggered with the heat, with the stenches, and with the buffets of the black-wings flying above the chasm. He knew that he’d fall. There was no good standing place at all in Narrow Corner.

  “All results here are final,” the Holy Knacker had said. And Polder slipped and fell finally into the chasm.

  But did he fall to his destruction? No, not at all. There was hiatus here. There was a Legacy to account for. There was a bright roll of nine rich lives and worlds which were pleasant little pieces of eternity and which would use up no time at all. There was that string of jeweled worlds of the restrictive covenants.

  There was the jump, yes. But then there were the wonderful unclocked times in between. And then—

  10

  —the guarantee

  From Lambeth that the Rich can never burn,

  And even promising a safe return:—

  “We let such vain imaginaries pass!”

  Then tell me, Dives, which will look the ass—

  You or myself? Or Charon? Who can tell?

  They order things so damnably in hell.

  Belloc

  The rich are different from us.

  Fitzgerald

  There is a compensation and counterpart to the “Eye of the Needle” edict. The rich would not have accepted it without this. The rich have a special Legacy: The Nine Lives to La Spezia. After they die they are permitted to live nine more lives of pleasure almost hysterical in its immediacy and extent before they go to hell.

  Clement Goldbeater, The Enniscorthy Chronicle

  It was a Medici who first raised his rich eyes and saw it in the sky, though special persons had been living bright and timeless lives there almost from the beginning. It is right in the middle of the Milky Way and is the most wonderful rivière or litany of jeweled worlds to be found there. Why have vulgar eyes not been able to see it? We don’t know this. It is picked out in brilliant midnight-blue light, or three-in-the-morning-blue light for anyone with jeweled eyes to see. There are nine blue-bright stars, each of them illuminated by the light of one of its own transcendent planets. The rivière of the nine stars or lives is in the shape of a promontory or cape, and the nine are named Cannes, Oraioi Polloi, Hy-Brasail, Smart Set, Savona, Delectable, Theleme, Luogo Perfetto, La Spezia. It is difficult to maintain historical calm in recounting them.

  Arpad Arutinov, The Backdoor of History

  The melodious shrillness of Janie’s voice, loaded with musical complaint, drifted into the area. All voices on Cannes World were melodious and all expression was musical. And there was no objection to complaint. Complaining was one of the things they did best on Cannes World.

  “You are not using live persons!” Janie shrilled, melodiously of course. “That was a sham Jezebel they used! Get the Marshal of the Animations!”

  The charge, if true, was a serious one. It was required that live persons be used in all roles at the Cannes Perpetual Animation Festival.

  “Have you evidence? Have you proof?” Pelion called as he came into the area. “Was anyone watching except yourself, Janie? Can this thing be verified?”

  “Verified, Pelion? There are the pieces of her yet.” She pointed. “There is her head still on the sand. Look at the blinking blank eyes and the lazy grin still on the face of the severed head. It’s clearly an automation.”

  “I believe they are already dragging the Marshal of the Animations here,” Pelion said. “Which particular presentation was it, Janie?”

  “Jehu’s Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel,” Janie told them. “This is Dore Day, you know. We pay enough. They’re obliged to supply live persons for all the roles.”

  On Cannes World, the Cannes Perpetual Animation Festival was under way. One of the conditions of there being a Cannes World was that the Perpetual Animation Festival must always be maintained with live actors. On Cannes there were ten thousand dramas a day, for the days were long. There were ten thousand days in a year. There were ten thousand years in a lifetime such as was passed by the elites there. By the end of one such appointed lifetime on Cannes all the great dramas would be fulfilled once. And after that they would repeat, for persons were constantly joining and leaving the life-flow of Cannes.

  On this day the dramas were based on the ten thousand best known illustrations of Dore, one of the few laborers who had provided enough basic material to last for an entire day. The drama for this particular period was Jehu’s Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel. It was quite a stark presentation. There was a fine and coherent story line, of course, but the main effect of the drama was visual. The body of Jezebel mutilated and broken up into dog-sized pieces, dismembered and thrown to the wild dogs to devour—that was always a good show. The presentation was always by moonlight (yes, certainly a real moon was used in the play), with the top half of the moon blocked out by clouds. The scene was beside a blind-faced stone wall in an obscure part of the city. Two wild dogs had withdrawn a ways at the arrival of Jehu’s Companions, but a third wild dog still gnashed at the pieces of Jezebel.

  There was a hand of her. There was a foot. Then there was the head lying in a natural position in the roadway and still wearing its coif. And then there was the other hand near the head. There were only four Jehu Companions in the presentation, and there were only those four pieces of the body. Someone had scrimped on the show, but the drama was ordinarily so well done that nobody had protested before. It had the virtue of simplicity.

  Each of the four pieces of Jezebel’s body asked a riddle, and each of the four Jehu Companions answered it. The first hand asked:

  “Who hurls the sin from the synagogues?

  Who is it eats me? Who are the dogs?”

  And the first Companion answered:

  “We the elites with the royal itch.

  We are the grand ones. We are the rich.”

  That appeared to be the correct answer according to the drama. Then the foot of Jezebel asked:

  “Who is it casts my flesh for fees?

  Who are the sinless s.o.b.’s?”

  And the second Jehu Companion answered:

  “We are the leaders, we are the ones.

  We are the high centurions.”

  Then it was the turn of the severed head in its coif. And the head asked:

  “Who with my common clay makes free

  And tramples the dying lumps of me?”

  And the third Jehu Companion answered:

  “The illumined flesh and the ghosts supreme:

  We are the cream of the cream of the cream!”

  There was something very powerful in these bloody pieces of Jezebel asking the riddles. After the Jezebel body had been broken up into these handy pieces for the wild dogs to devour, the pieces had been injected with vita-flow to keep them alive enough to talk; but all that was mere stagy detail. But now the bantering verses were building little stair-steps that were the first risers of the climax. And the other hand of Jezebel asked:

  “Who is it wages a witless war

  And pesters my death in my purgatoire?”

  And the fourth Jehu Companion answered relentlessly:

  “We are the unrepentant host,

  The Legatees of the Azure Coast.”

  Wait for it; it isn’t answered at all. Those were only little dramatic tricks to lull you. For at this point that other hand of Jezebel screamed, and revealed that it was the true head of the dead woman, and that what had been taken for the head was only a piece from the rounder part of the body which had been placed there on the sand and capped with a coif. Then the hand that was the true head spoke again in a saying that revealed that all the answers to previous riddles were mistaken ones. And at the same time this true head answered, the earth began to rumble and to quake, and the climax built like a thunderhead; but it was also at this point that—that Janie—the only watcher, as it happened, at the self-sustaining drama—began to screech that the scattered pieces were artificial and
not from a live body. This was scandal.

  Many other elite persons had gathered now. The Marshal of Animations was dragged before them with a rope tight around his neck and his tongue protruding.

  “Why have you not provided a live actress for this most important role?” demanded Albert Fineface, who was captain of the elites for that day (not a sequence day, a momentum-category day).

  The Marshal pretended he could not speak with the rope around his neck and his tongue so swollen and protruded.

  “We pay enough for live persons,” Fineface barked, and he stabbed the end of the Marshal’s protruded tongue with a fine sharp dagger. This pricked the Marshal into words.

  “There was no young woman available,” the Marshal slavered and sobbed. “You had gone through more than a hundred of them already on the morning of this bloody day. You know that some of the plays were requested to be presented again and again. Of course we have other young ladies coming from the country, as we know that Dore Day is always quite bloody. They will be here almost immediately now. And we have other shipments following at regular intervals. But, well, I miscalculated, and there was no young woman to be had for that brief interval.”

  “Not even one?” Fineface demanded.

  “No, not even one,” the Marshal gurgled, “except—ah—not even one.”

  “Except what?” Fineface roared. “Answer me. We’ll have you in dog pieces yourself in a minute. I’ll have an answer if I have to pull it out of your throat.”

  The Marshal would not answer, or it may be that he could not. Fineface reached into the Marshal’s throat and pulled out the answer.