Fourth Mansions

by R. A. Lafferty

  Then Fred Foley knew that Croll was the patrick, a more-than-a-patrick, a Croll: that he had been committed by his title, not his name. He knew, as a matter of fact, that Croll was Patrick of Baltimore and Washington, that he was Over-Patrick or Croll of the entire continent. He also understood that Croll was a little bit simple and inept, for sign that the office was more important than the man.

  But a new force, a new man, entered the projected play now, one who could enter anywhere that Fred Foley could enter. The other inmates who had gathered around the communication felt this new person strongly.

  (“Here's another of the monsters,” Croll bear-growled. “Don't tell me he's not real.” The new-appearing monster was Miguel Fuentes and he was real.)

  Michael Fountain, dictating privately in his own rooms thirteen hundred miles away, had become highly nervous but he still composed brave words for his lecture:

  “We come to apex, and it is no way elevated or outstanding; we come to perfection, and to perfect simple means to finish; we come to climax, and it is beautifully flat and undistinguished. We have completed the world. Behold it!”

  And in some manner Michael Fountain was holding a large, fine, precious, crystal bowl, The Golden Glass Bowl, in his two hands. It was pretty. It was almost substantial.

  “This is the world,” Michael intoned in a self-induced trance. “This is our lives, this is our final achievement. Worry not that it is small: it is the largest world ever, if we will not allow a larger one. Worry not that it is flawed: we ourselves are the flaws: and if we say that we are not flaws, then who is there to contradict us? Worry not that it is fragile, so long as we are very careful not to drop it.”

  “Drop it!!” the thunder-clap voice of Miguel Fuentes exploded. Everybody in the entire communication jumped at the cannon-barking violence of that command. And Michael Fountain dropped his world.

  It tinkled into a thousand tinny pieces. It shattered and all the light flickered out of it. The face of Michael Fountain also broke and shattered and the light went out of it also. He cast himself down and was racked by dry sobs.

  “How did we go wrong? What did we forget?” Michael moaned.

  “You forgot that there is One who will not be mocked,” Miguel Fuentes said in a voice like curling smoke. The falcons, like the patricks, believe strongly in things like that.

  “That spik sure queered him,” said Leo Joe Larker. “Do you know that spik, Foley?”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “I know him way on back,” said Leo Joe. “I was a Mexican one time myself.”

  “That one was real,” said Croll. “He's as real as I am. The old gaffer isn't quite real, though. He had a good spiel going but he couldn't hold onto it. He came right up to the still, past the grinders, and then dropped his molasses jug.”

  “The funny thing about the old fellow,” said Loras who claimed to be an alien. “He had known where the fountains were once. But the last time he went to them he busted his pitcher.”

  But there are also formalities in the life in the Bug, in the tomb. There was interrogation after a while. There was separation. There were more of those shots, tranquilizers. But Foley had been tranquil ever since he was buried here. There was even a little cleanliness lecture. And there was supper.

  There was supervised recreation. This is the original contradiction of terms. It was for making suggestions about supervised recreation that the devil was cast into hell; any other account you have heard is false. The inmates were crazy, but they weren't crazy enough to like that stuff.

  Then to the beds. Even the sleeping was supervised, and honest darkness was not allowed in this tomb. Stubborn sleep then, and appearances that were not supervised.

  The brain-weave was in tension and exhilarating unnatural agony. James Bauer and Arouet Manion were locked in lawless death passion, very much like snakes trying to swallow each other. It was not absolutely certain that Bauer was the master, for all that Arouet groveled before him. Bauer was in the grip of his own terror, that of horrifying height (and he was sitting on the ground-level patio of his own home), mind-blinding height, and Arouet knew of the terror and knew how to heighten it.

  The arena became crumbling sand then, on the edge of cliffs of immeasurable height, and James Bauer and Arouet Manion were the two bulls who fought to death. Bauer was the heavier and stronger, he was the old king bull who had never been defeated: longer and more massive of horn, more humped and knotted of neck, bulkier of body, more iron of hoof, and altogether fearsome. But Arouet became the challenger, even though it was Bauer who had commanded him to the battle. Arouet held the high ground and could charge downward. He could regroup and charge again. But Bauer was trapped on the very edge before it started. He could not lunge without the sand further crumbling and sending him over the edge. He was hunched together, and all support began to slice out from under him. He dug one great horn into the steep turf for anchor, and dug more emptiness beneath himself as his sand base cascaded down the cliff-sides. He bellowed, and it caved beneath him still more. Arouet punished him from above, brought him to his knees, raked him and slashed him, but he could not turn that heavy armored head or come to the flank.

  Bauer tangled horns with Arouet, hunched mightily, and broke Arouet's neck. But now the lighter bull was down on Bauer, twisted on his horns, quivering and screaming, and Bauer had no firm stance to pitch the thing away and back from his horns. Back legs pawing air, catching sand again, crumbling it with the effort, and pawing fearful empty air again. What great bull can stand to all charge with a crumbling foothold?

  Arouet dying … let him die then, but how to get rid of him? And Arouet, though frantic with the fear of death, would go if he could take Bauer with him. The king bull feared no death except the falling death, and bull Bauer with the burden on his horns began to run like the sand itself over the edge of the cliff that had no bottom.

  The arena became a pit then, green rocks and green shadows. Two great snakes, each trying to swallow the other. Bauer was the stronger and more massive, but Arouet Manion was perhaps the longer of jaw. Gaping mouths spread, unhinged, and spread again, wider, more mucous, now clinging and gaining like bird-lime, now sliding and slavering like very snake oil. Arouet had his longer jaws over the snout of Bauer, obliterating nostrils and eyes, closing over the great gape with extension that was drawn as thin as blue bubble, suffocating Bauer in the wide-spread translucent jaws.

  Bauer grappled and won in the writhing snake-wrestle, breaking Arouet's back again. But in death spasms Arouet gained and gulped, swallowing Bauer's head, inching down the length of him, blistering and murdering him with blazing gastric and psychic juices, spreading his own Arouet-death over Bauer like a clinging plastic sheath. And, suffocatingly, Bauer knotted himself again and again to try to burst the killing sheath.

  Bauer, on his own patio, was breathing with a rasping groan that would not leave him for the rest of his life; and Arouet Manion writhed on the stone floor, frantically afraid of death, frantically avid for killing.

  The arena changed to — obscene interval — that is too degrading to contemplate even in a brain-weave. The arena changed again and again while the double death battle tallied off all its aspects one by one. The other members of the weave were brought to continuing psychic orgasm by the strong and musky play of agony and death. And it would be played out for many hours yet.

  Hondo Silverio was shaken with waves of disgust and loathing. That noble snake found himself revolted to his depth. It was then that he decided either to master or to break the weave; but that isn't done in a minute or an hour, nor even in a day.

  Another arena, and another. The dead wife of Bauer waited in agony in an uncontinented place for Bauer to fall past her into hell: ashen anguish, ghostly torture. The living-aspect wife, caught in deep catalepsy, waited for the hypnosis over her to be broken by death, if indeed even death would break it. A saintly sexpot and a cinnamon cookie (the cookie for Cerberus) were caught in the passion,
the passion that would break the weave.

  Bedelia Bencher would come for Foley, either late that night or early in the morning, either on bat-wings or by commercial flight; but she would have a very deep draft of this passion first.

  So would they all. They were the psychic athletes and this was their game, the sounding evil of it, before they broke it in final disgust. But the horror-gulping gusto would reign a long reign before the disgust overwhelmed it.

  In another place, a young man was having evil fun in his grave in the caves underground. Miguel Fuentes was the hunted there, but he also ran with the hunters. Indeed, he was the bright young Mexican boy, guileless and glib, who told certain army patrols that he knew the caves better than anyone in the world, that he could find anyone in them. And he led the patrols in to their loss and murder, and them hunting for him all the while. This young man would be a falcon full-feathered when he finally came out from underground.

  And in still another place (and it could be any one of many, as they of that species are so much alike), a patrick was experiencing a waking night-dream out of Samuel, the saddest verses in scripture:

  And the patrick answered: “Here I am, Lord.” And again he said, “Here I am; for you called me.” But the Lord answered him: “I did not call you. Go back and sleep.”

  Well, why did the Lord never call the patricks? They had been waiting, oh how they had been waiting for the call! It was given to others. It was never given to the patricks, and they waiting so ready for their thousands of years.

  “Smith, Foley, whatever your name is, turn that thing off, whatever that thing is,” protested Loras who claimed to be an alien. “We want to sleep. How can we sleep with you dreaming that bright-colored stuff?”

  XII: FOURTH MANSIONS

  That I be one to catch the hard truth hurled

  And fight soft lies that have the world for span!

  I know the Ox, the Eagle, and the Man,

  The Lion — and the schism of the world.

  I feed on elementals like a cloud

  Though buried in constraining earthy room

  Where now I harvest lightning in my tomb

  And integrate the monsters for a shroud.

  Here in Fourth Mansions which is Death or Life

  Is rooted world that it is worth to live:

  The Giant Troubling and the Giant Brawn.

  Though I be dead a while I bite the knife!

  In monumented earth I grow and give

  While I predict and manufacture dawn.

  Broken Cisterns and Living Waters:

  Endymion Ellenbogen

  “THERE IS A holiness in a whole person or a whole world,” the patrick Croll said. “The veriest monsters inside us may be sanctified. They were put there by Him who is ‘Father of Monsters’ also. What right have we to cut them out of us? Who are we to edit God? We cut strong things out of ourselves and suppress them, and the rocks and clouds will give birth to them again. We dry up our interior fountains and they gush out again, exteriorly and menacingly. We cannot live without monsters’ blood coursing through us. Only to the whole person is life worth living and death worth dying. Here in Fourth Mansions we must be whole or we must be nothing.”

  “Where do you get those curious phrases, Croll?” Freddy Foley asked him.

  “From the manual. As patrick, I must recite certain passages every morning.”

  “But aren't the patricks themselves monsters?”

  “Yes, I believe so. But we're the monsters under the man-symbol.”

  This was the morning of the second day of the burial or incarceration of Foley.

  “A man and his daughter were here looking for you earlier this morning,” an attendant told Foley now, “but they found no trace of you. They're nearly convinced that you're not here. You aren't here, you know.”

  “Well, but who is this here then?” asked Freddy.

  “You're in the records as Julius Smith.”

  “That explains why so many call me Smith. Did you tell the man and his daughter that I was carried as Smith on the rolls?”

  “No. I just hinted enough that they might not be gone for good. They were very generous with me this morning. A little later they may be even more generous. They're wealthy, aren't they?”

  “They may be, but don't run it into the ground.”

  “I'll have to be the judge of that, Foley-Smith. Oh, I miss out entirely some times when I shoot for too high a figure. But I make it up, I make it up, I often do quite well. I have a good judgment of what the traffic will bear. That girl — those eyes — are they real?”

  “Not entirely. But you saw her and I didn't.”

  “I swear she has eyes like nobody has eyes. She has pictures painted on her eyeballs, weird pictures, snakes and monsters and fountains and upheavals. I never saw anything like them. But she gets around all right. How can she see with those pictures painted on her eyeballs?”

  “She's a clown, but she's more than that. She's mutated and she can see with every part of her. So can I. I just now realized it. Who needs eyeballs? Is there a tattoo artist here in the Bug? I'll have him tattoo my eyeballs. I'll be the first one here with tattooed eyeballs.”

  “Yeah, there is one here. If you pay me — you have money to your account here and you can release some to me — I can tell you which one he is, and we can — Nah, you're joking.”

  Oh well, what can one do in a grave except wait for that last trumpet to blow, or perhaps an intermediate trumpet in special cases? But for an inquiring mind there are interesting questions cropping up everywhere, even in the grave. Fred Foley asked one of the doctors about one of the questions that was bothering him.

  It wasn't that he was reconciled to the doctors here. He believed that they also were tilted, though perhaps not to such an angle as the boarders. Those doctors had trouble with jokes too. For answer to a joke they were likely to gaze at you with steely eyes, and then pull your record and make cabalistic marks on it. Doctor Decker was better than the others, but only a little.

  “Doctor, what I wonder is whether group delusion is common,” Fred Foley asked him.

  “Quite common, Smith, quite common,” Doctor Decker told him.

  “Then there are other groups like us who share a common delusion?”

  “At least a dozen groups in this very hospital at the moment, and there have been hundreds.”

  “What were some of the more unusual — ah — obsessions?”

  “A few years ago there was a group here that believed that very low musical notes caused their teeth to loosen. They campaigned strenuously against all low-down songs, they lobbied against them, and some of them smashed and destroyed those coin-operated machines which I believe are called goop boxes. They also tried to have the Army ‘Taps’ changed, to eliminate several low notes.”

  “And what was the outcome?”

  “Oh, the group split up. It had no real cohesion. Some of the patients were finally released. Some went on to other obsessions.”

  “No, I don't mean the outcome like that. I mean the tests. Did it show that low musical notes caused their teeth to loosen?”

  “Sizzling sandburrs, Smith! What are you talking about? There was no such test.”

  “Then who was to say that it was an obsession? It might have been a shrewd observation that wasn't acted on. There was no test at all? What were some of the other groups?”

  “There was one quite small group, three. This is the smallest possible group by our definition. All three of these men were locomotive engineers, and they all believed that their lonely night whistles were answered by giant flying creatures. They believed these creatures were not large enough to carry off an entire train, but that a locomotive running alone might be carried off; and they swore that this was the answer to several disappearing locomotives. They said the giant flying creatures believed the night whistles were mating calls.”

  “And were there actually cases of disappearing locomotives? An
d were there any attempts made to pursue this explanation?”

  “Smith, are you kidding?”

  “Not entirely. As a reporter I did hear of cases of locomotives disappearing when running alone at night. I'll follow this up when I get out and when I settle other matters. What were some of the other groups?”

  “Oh, there was a bunch who all believed there'd be a terrible earthquake in the Great Lakes region on the morning of June 19, 1979, that the southern shorelines would sink, and that thousands would be drowned.”

  “But that was the very date of it! They were right! This proves that some of the groups can be right and you can be wrong.”

  “Of course that was the date of it, Smith, and their insistence that the area be cleared would have saved thousands of lives if it had been timely. But the obsession occurred three years after the event. All the afflicted believed themselves living several years in the past, anterior to the happening. All had been eyewitnesses and near victims of it and it had deranged them. Then there was the group that believed that all redheaded women were creatures from outer space sent here to intermingle with mankind to cause trouble and destruction.”

  “I could give you instances that would seem to prove them right,” Freddy said.

  “So could I, Smith,” said the doctor. “Some of the redheads do seem to come from way out. Then we had a clutch of odd ducks here who believed that the messages and mottoes in fortune cookies form a sinister code of instructions sent by an evil mastermind in high Tibet.

  “And there was a clique with the belief that the white oak tree is a man-eater, and that persons who have unaccountably disappeared will invariably be found to have disappeared in the neighborhood of a white oak tree. They believed also that the wood of the tree had certain dangerous properties, and that a certain furniture factory that makes much use of the wood should be enjoined from doing so. We still have some of the white oaks here.