He was getting a sort of contact with someone who had also been assaulted by the brain-weave. He called him Miguel and not Michael, but he knew there had been a link between the two.
He wasn't through for the night. He needed to ask more questions of someone. He wouldn't go back to Michael Fountain tonight. That man would surely be short with him on a second visit. Fred Foley needed to talk with someone who knew more things than did Michael Fountain.
But there was no such person, not in his acquaintance.
Well then, he needed to talk to someone who knew sorts of things that even Michael Fountain didn't know. And there was only one such person, a blockish ungainly fraud, but he did know things outside the lines.
And here was his very broken and unkempt street here on the edges of shanty-town. Fred Foley turned down it toward the diggings of Bertigrew Bagley.
The authors of the brain-weave believe that they have transmitted somehow through polarized one-way glass; but it is two-way. The return way is open even when the senders are unaware, and all those who have been touched by the weave are themselves somehow in touch, even when the weavers or Harvesters are asleep.
Thus Freddy Foley now sometimes impinged on the entity for whom he had found the name of Miguel. (He still believed it to be a separated fragment of Michael Fountain. But Miguel, raising an army to take over the world, had already enlisted eight men, three of whom knew where they could get rifles, and this all in one night. Fred Foley knew of this part but he didn't know how to appraise it.) Freddy also impinged on the devious mind of Carmody Overlark, but this always lost him in a laughing swamp.
However, one portion of the brain-weave itself was not now completely asleep. She was wandering in a fitful delirium, not frightful (for it was one of the Shes out of Haggard and nothing could frighten them), but puzzling (even to her of the initiation and the strong psychic powers), frustrating, a rambling-in-waste-places delirium. “I have borne a child out of my body,” she said, “I expected him to be beautiful and full of light. Instead of that, he is a deformed monkey.” (She had not actually borne any child out of her body except Iracema, a girl who was now eleven years old; but this was another sort of image.) “I wonder if anyone else will notice that he is a deformed monkey,” she said. “Many babies look like deformed monkeys, and people are polite about it. I could be loud and confident and carry it off, I know; but perhaps it would be better to destroy the child and bear another one tomorrow. A great thing will happen to me before that, and the child I bear tomorrow night may really be beautiful and full of light.”
(This She was the ashen-haired, pale or moon-colored slim woman who had been painted by Burne-Jones several times. She was Letitia Bauer, the danger-loving one of the Harvesters; but even she was not sure in her surety.)
Then the slob came into Freddy's mind. This may have been because he now neared the slob's diggings; or the slob himself may have been a target of the brain-weave. The slob was the sort of man that the Harvesters might try to have fun with, just as they had had fun with Freddy himself.
Two crammed and ponderous minds in two such different containers. Michael Fountain was the very image of distinction, urbane, mannered, of regal appearance and voice, respected in the several communities: an elegant decanter. Bertigrew Bagley was fat and ungainly, grown old ungracefully, balded and shaggy at the same time, rheumy of eyes and with his mouth full of rotten teeth, discredited, violent and vulgar: an earthen pot, and a cracked one at that. But he knew some things that even Michael Fountain didn't know.
Fred Foley had been there once before, as a reporter, trying to pin some ugly rumors on the flush-faced old mountebank. He hadn't been able to pin them on him, and he had been treated better than he deserved.
Freddy went down the three steps to the heavy door and pounded on it. He knew (he shivered at the memory of it) that there was another flight of steps leading down inside. He pounded harder and had the feeling that his pounding could not be heard. He remembered that all doors into Bagley's den were iron-sheeted and muffled, and could be barred with series of long steel bars. He remembered something else. He struck a match to see, and it was so. There was still the plaque there: DAMNED DOOR NOT LOCKED. COME IN.
Freddy went in fearfully. Fearless Freddy was afraid of certain small things that had bitten him before. He stepped carefully, knowing it would be no good. He avoided one rolling thing and slipped on another. Fred Foley fell down the flight of stairs.
He cursed, but not unhappily. It was always adventure to visit Bagley. The place was dark and empty. Then it leaped to half light, and the big man came in and filled it, laughing with a hooting like hippopotami, slipping into a big chair made of a barrel cut down, ensconcing himself behind a big table built out of freight skids.
“You do it best of anyone who comes to visit me, Foley!” Bagley boomed. “Anyone who falls down stairs like that can't be all bad.”
“That was a trap!” Freddy snapped, somewhat elated however and knowing that nothing was broken. “Stairs should be kept clear.”
“No, they should not,” Bagley told him. “Steps are made to put things on. A man is entitled to store what he wants to on his own steps; there's no better place for sorting things out. A man has to use his eyes, Foley, even in the dark. What's the idea of coming here without an appointment?” Bagley was a crackpot, but it was not an ordinary pot that had cracked. It was a giant grotesque Gothic garboon.
And always at Bagley's just around the corner of eyesight, was the dog-ape, the plappergeist that served Bagley. Freddy could not see the thing directly, but he could see its friendly wink. The thing liked Fred Foley. This spook-animal-person went through walls easily and could be inside or outside.
“You ought to have a light so a man could see where he's going, Bagley,” Fred said.
“I have one light in the place; that's enough. I said what's the idea of coming here without an appointment?”
“Would you have given me an appointment if I'd asked?”
“Of course not. Damnation, man! I didn't know you had a bottle! You should have hollered that you had it before you started down. You could have broke it when you fell.”
This Bagley had a fantastic erudition (though much of what he knew happened not to be so), a fertile mind, a gift for invective that had left scar tissue on the great and near great for a generation and a half, a wanton contempt for all mankind except a few always temporary favorites, and a deep love for a red-necked brawl. You will remember him writing under the byline of B.B.B. (he was known as Beetle-Browed Bagley) before he was totally discredited.
“Well, what are you after, Foley?” Bagley asked him after Foley had opened the bottle, pulled up a sort of cobbler's bench, and joined Bagley at the big table built of freight skids. “You came as a slippery reporter before and tried to hang me with a raffish rope. And now I believe that you are involved with a group that has tried to burglarize my mind. They cannot do it. I've a series of long steel bars that I can set into the doors of my mind also. What are you after? I ask you. You don't love me enough to visit without a motive.”
“I have a motive, Bagley,” Freddy said. “You rode an old horse that got you laughed off the public scene: the old Hidden-Hand running through History and Affairs. It's quite a nag. Now I find myself riding the same horse.”
“You're sure you know which end of the horse to get on, Foley?”
“No.”
“Because I didn't either. It's a double-rumped cayuse. I never did find the head.”
“Did you ever really have anything, Bagley?”
“I thought I did. Now I'm not sure. I believe I was close to something, but I may have been mistaken as to its shape, size, color, and motive.”
“Did you ever have anything on Carmody Overlark?”
“Him? No. He rose after I had set. He has all the earmarks of one of them, though. I do not use the phrase as cliché. You have heard of the archaic smile and such. Let me assure you that there is such a thing as the archaic ear. He has it,
and most of them have it. The ear is the only appendage of man that has evolved at all during the recorded or pictorial history period. This would be clearer, of course, if the ear left skeletal or bone remains. But the archaic ear has a touch of Pan, and all these repeaters have it.
“When I say this, Foley, I see a look in your eye that is familiar to me; it has been turned on me often enough. When I threw it all over and retired, Foley, I went to a doctor, the least quackish I could find. I asked him to go over me from stem to stern (I told him I didn't know which end my brains were in) and tell me frankly whether I was crazy. He did a thorough job on me, probing both mind and body. When he was finished I asked him for his decision. ‘Am I crazy?’ I asked him. ‘One of us is, Bagley, one of us is,’ he told me. That's about as fair a verdict as any man has ever given me.”
“I was wondering if there's also an archaic look in the eye.”
“Yes. There is, and you have just used it. The ancient skepticism. Which part of the horse are you working to, Foley?”
“The nether ribs, I think. You hinted once that there were certain types of contrary men who occurred so persistently in history that you were double-damned if you didn't suspect that there were certain individuals recurring in history.”
“Yes, I did hint that, and for that I was crucified upside-down like St. Peter. It's a good thing I didn't say it right out loud. What is your question, Foley?”
“Did you have any theory or idea at all to go with your harebrained hint?”
“There are several theories. Reincarnation seemed to me to be the most likely. I have about a thousand pages of tables worked out, but they don't really jibe unless I cheat on them. I have even applied what I call my epicyclic adjustment to them. In Ptolemaic astronomy, when it was found that the planets did not act as if the Earth were the center, then it was necessary to plot their courses as smaller circles about points on larger circles. The theory had to be propped up.
“When I found that chronological reincarnation was not the answer to the reappearance of perverse men, then I had to add a grotesque appendage to my theory. An evil man dies; and he is followed by another evil man of startling similarity. But the death dates and the birth dates do not coincide. In my thousand pages of tables, I have only six cases that may possibly fit, and even with these I have to juggle a handful of days, or assume minor errors. So I have posed the possibility to myself that the dead man does not necessarily come to inhabit the boy at his birth, or at his conception (for I also tried to make that fit), but may appear in him in early childhood, or with the coming of the years of reason, or even later.”
“At the merging of latest youth with middle age?”
“You mean Carmody Overlark? I don't know. That seems a late entry, but there are others even later. My theory remains a very rickety one, however much I prop it up. Can't you afford better whisky than this, Foley?”
“No. But you're convinced there is something in your theory?”
“I am convinced that certain evil men reappear in history in their own personalities. I am still looking for the explanation of it. I believe you have begun to nibble at the same bait.”
“You're convinced that they're evil? All of them evil?”
“Certainly. What need has a good man to return? They are crawling evil. This Overlark whom you are tracking down, you surely see that he is of evil effect.”
“Not at all. I was hoping that the returning genii were a benign influence. I've been looking for something to hope in for a long while.”
“Foley, man, he's of the old crippling persuasion.”
“You know, Bagley, that your views were never popular, even at your peak. And now you've been reduced to a party of one.”
“Oh no, there's many of us around, and each of us is worth a thousand of the others.”
“Overlark is a brilliant man in the Humanist Tradition.”
“At the name of which even buzzards gag.”
“I can understand the reason for your unpopularity, Bagley. But now I'm only interested in the reappearances themselves. I haven't attempted to analyze the effect of them.”
“My old dog is restless outside, Foley. Someone is laying for either you or myself. I have been beaten up once already this week, and that's par; so I suppose someone is after you. Don't get yourself killed too easily. Foley, you are a slack-eared pup and a disgrace to the Irish. I'd throw you down the stairs if we weren't already at the lowest level. Now sit quietly and finish the bottle, and then you'll have to go. You may not be completely hopeless, however. Once you get your hands onto the thing you will learn a little of its nature. You'll feel the rot of it, the leprosy that will not be stamped out. And you'll see that its face is always respectability. But if you follow it up to the end you will not be respectable yourself. You'll be branded as I have been; you'll find what a tight setup they really have. And you'll see how it is almost impossible that their leaders could have become so astute in a single life. And as you look back you'll come on a man, and you'll come on him again and again, and you'll know that he is the same man just as well as you know anything at all.
“Then you'll wonder (Lord how you'll wonder!) how many of them there really are. How wide is that preternatural brotherhood? There've been a hundred points where mankind was frustrated from real clarification and grace. At each of those points you will find one of those evil men. Who directs them? And why do they obstruct while they mouth progress and enlightenment?”
“You believe in preternatural brotherhoods, do you, Bagley?”
“Belonging to one myself, certainly I do.”
“Well, I don't agree that they're evil, or that they're plural. I know one man who has lived too long or too often. But you, Bagley, see everything in black and white.”
“Say, that's a pretty good phrase, Foley. Wait a minute till I write it down. Oh, I have some men in my collection who've lived a dozen times. I do not see everything in black or white. I see most things in the four or five central colors or forces. In the middle, of course, is that malodorous worm whom we call common man. He is mud-colored. And around him are the four sorts of creatures who assail him while they claim to love him, but mine is the only sort that actually loves him. Foley, did someone tell you tonight to stop asking questions?”
“They did, and I won't. I'll ask questions till my larynx falls out.”
“Boy, you're in danger. Myself, I've always been able to counter them or evade them, but you're not that smart.”
“I'm as smart as I need to be, Bagley. What are the four sorts of creatures?”
“Oh, it is all allegory and beyond the comprehension of flatlanders. Foley, a supreme word of contempt is ‘flatlander.’ Somehow there is the belief that people in the Dark Ages believed that the world was flat. They didn't. But it is the contemptuous ones of today who have made a really flat world that is the sad answer to everything. What is wrong with the world and why is it not worth living in? It's flat, that's what. Foley, I have a little room under this rough floor. It's black and full of water but it has a cot. Go down there, they are after you tonight. I know these things. If they come here they will only work me over and I've been worked over often. But they'll kill you if they find you here. It'd mean that you were still asking questions.”
“Dammit, fat man, I will ask questions and I won't hide. Now tell me what the four sorts of creatures are. I'm not stupid. That's only the permanent impression I leave.”
“Oh, the four sorts of creatures that surround the Castle are the Pythons, the Toads, the Badgers and the Unfledged Falcons.”
“Oh what botching! Unbotch it, Bagley. Where do you get your drivel?”
“I have it anciently from my own ancient person and position. And beyond that, there are hints of it in the unguarded passages of Anacharsis Clootz, who was one of us. Some of it's from the beautiful things of a lady named Teresa Cepeda, born a little after Columbus died. He only discovered continents; she discovered the Castle itself. Hers also was a Spanish vent
ure and it will be weighed in the final balance. Did you know that nations as well as persons will be judged at the final judgment? She will be judged for Spain.”
“If I didn't know that you sometimes have a kernel inside the rotten shell I'd give up on you, Bagley. Get specific. What sort of creature am I? Which are you?”
“You are one of the malodorous worms, Foley, the commonality of mankind, the simplicity. Me, I'm a badger.”
“Damn if you're not, you snap-jawed fool. Well, what are the others?”
“Your meddling friends, the mind burglars, what do you call them? the brain-weavers, the Harvesters, they belong to the pythons, Foley. But always remember that pythons are prophetic. I don't know why this should be. It seems unfair; prophecy should be given to worthier creatures. These pythons sometimes call themselves the intelligentsia, sometimes the gnostics. They are not knowing, though, they are fools. But they are the proverbial fools who rush in; and, rushing in, they take by storm. Remember first that they are snakes; and second that they are prophetic snakes.”
“You may be both parts right about them, Bagley. But I'm still interested in a man or men who live more than once, or seem to. Do they classify among your creatures?”
“Certainly. The revenants are the toads. They sleep or they die under stones for years or centuries, and then they come out from under the stones. But there is either a legend or fairy tale of the toad with a jewel set in his head. These returners really have the jewel, and it may be the jewel of knowledge. They have this bright thing, just as the pythons have their prophecy; and I wish we had it ourselves.”
“All right. What are the badgers? Tell me about them. You are one.”
“Foley, it would take many hours to tell about us. We entrench in the earth and we retain an old empire. I don't joke. Ours is the real; but even if I should tell you all about it you would regard us as a network of lodges or curious societies or comical conventions. Can you not see that it is your apparent government and world that is these things? Foley, there are alternate worlds going on all the time, depending only on the vision. There is a double reflection. I do not accept yours, and you sure would not accept mine. But I say that mine is alive and that its more favorable time-track may still be selected. X-ray eyes, Foley, ghost eyes, fish eyes, shadow flesh, and white golden air. Halo. Aura. Corona.”
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