Fourth Mansions

by R. A. Lafferty

  The lights of the town went out then. It gave a chilly effect to Foley's words.

  “No, no, I don't believe you'd do it,” Loras protested. “A person can quit any time he wants to quit. I'll stay right here by the bonfire till you're gone. You wouldn't dare do it here in the light.”

  Boneface was back already. Say, that man was fast! He was fast in understanding a situation also. He did Loras in. He did it in an offhand way, with a rapid and deadly wrist-flick that he used. “I was wrong,” Foley said to himself. “I'm not near as good with the short knife as Boneface is.”

  After that, luck turned against them. They couldn't find Rowell; they realized that Rowell would see to it that they didn't find him. And Goodfoot, Munsey, Napier, Nash, Cabot, Bottoms were not only said to be dead but they were aggressively dead; they were unalterably dead, watchfully dead, and with their minions about them. They were making a great thing about being dead. There was no getting to them; they were guarded, they were inviolable. They had not made the mistake of Twitchell and Cramms, or it may be that the word travels very fast in their set. They were safely dead so that they could live again, or they had already entered other persons and were living there.

  Perhaps one of them could be crashed to. Boneface was eager to try it. It mattered not at all to him if his own destruction was part of the bargain. Boneface disappeared rather suddenly from the group, and he may have gotten one of the Suspendeds. But none of the rest of Foley's band could get at any of the enemies at all.

  “Forget it, Fred, forget it,” Miguel Fuentes was saying from distant underground. “They are only toys now. But tomorrow you yourself may turn into something more than a toy.”

  It had become very difficult to move about now. Everyone was out of his lightless house and into the streets to watch the crowds and the fires. There is no one who doesn't like to watch fires. There was a great amount of breaking glass, and much fighting, but now it was more and more confused.

  The New Prophets began to preach by torchlight as though the latter days had come. It was the younger Pliny, those many centuries ago, who mentioned that in times of turmoil men with beards will appear instantly, when in all Rome there had not been bearded men before the moment of strife. The younger Pliny had lived in a shaved age; he believed that the bearded men who appear suddenly are wraiths or portents, and not men at all.

  It was a bearded portent who appeared now at one of the circles, further clogging traffic; and there were others of them about town. This one talked with a rumble touched with both irony and hysteria, and he seemed to have found his proper setting there in the torchlight:

  “The pact is broken. The compromise has revealed itself as no deeper than spiderwebs on the grass. Did you really believe that the peace would be longer than a long breath? Did you imagine that the thin earth on which you trod did not have another earth under it? Did you really believe that these brittle buildings were the houses of the mighty? Did you actually suppose that this white town on the river would endure longer than three long lifetimes? Did you imagine that the sickly hum you heard was truly the speech of men? Or that the mechanical wound-up toys would never run down?”

  You have heard of fiery-eyed prophets, and this man was one indeed. There were many bonfires and torches going now and their fire seemed to dance in his huge eyes. And yet the fire images there were not reflections; they were originals.

  “Whoever promised you peace? Who promised you ease? Did you really believe that you could live your whole life without spilling blood? Could you have dreamed that it is in the natural order for a man to die in bed? You fancied that the day would be so long that the dark would never come? That the earth would lie still and no more riffle its hide? But the weak interval is over with, and we come now to life itself, or to death.”

  “He's a prophet like one of the prophets,” Croll told Foley. “As patrick, I will extend my aegis over him.”

  “Who told you that your house was meant to keep out the elements?” the prophet still prophesied. “Who gave the promise that one should live clean and dry? What mad seer said that a man should live long enough to see the faces of his grandchildren? Who told you that you had the right to go in shoes, or fed? Did you not know that the steep earth would break through this smooth clutter you have placed upon it? Who told you to quit growing fangs and claws? What actuary promised you life till morning?”

  Not direful, no, no. This was the most joyous prophet anyone ever heard. It was all high expectation about to be fulfilled for him now. Like snow on deserts, like crowning fire in dead wood, like violence and eruption giving the answer to satiety, this was an addled prophet of new life, not of death.

  “It has been said that a man must lose his soul at least once if only for the pleasure of finding it again. I say that a man who has died without seeing the end of the world has lived in vain! But many of us here will not have lived in vain. The corral is open and the beasts are loose. Do not look back. The world isn't there any more. Ah, but look back then, if only to raise a little salt. There has never been enough salt in the earth. Unless your salt exceeds that of the saltimbanques it were no matter if you ever lived or not. Why do you fear to die who have never lived? But I am sure of my new life, I am sure of my new desire, though it is born out of ashes. What, is it not a wonder that I was dead and that now I live?”

  “Let's be about our business, Croll,” Foley said. “I have his words anyhow, as coming from the weave.”

  “And I have them anyhow, as patrick,” Croll said.

  It was hard to tell which of the night screams were genuine, as the teenagers were on the jag of screaming in dark places for the fun of it. A genuine scream will always sound false, just as real terror always appears comical and contemptible to those without compassion. But there was more noise than blood that night. An effete generation does not return to massive rapine and murder all at once, even though it has long lost all moral objection to them. It will take a while for new energy to grow toward real action.

  The amateur town-criers were having a field night of it with stories of rockets only ninety seconds away, and Baltimore and Philadelphia already obliterated; and corpses piled deep in the streets of New York with no one to bury them.

  It was only those who believed in an incredible plot who understood that it might already have succeeded. For, if the Suspendeds had already decided to die, it meant that they had the situation under control, or that they had entered other hosts. It was not their idea to waste time in watching these death agonies of a civilization, a dreary interval that would surely take the greater part of a generation.

  And their job had not been too difficult: to bump the world at one critical point, to ensure that it dropped once more into its old repeating cycle, that it did not break out of the cycle into ascending spiral. Three cities, each more advanced in artifact and building and spirit: these had been. Then the fourth city, the city of destruction. And then let it repeat. This was the essence of real order, to maintain the sequence of birth, growth, destruction and death, and rebirth: the closed cycle. Let it never be broken or opened!

  And (like the old Oriental wrestlers) you could let the world throw itself by its own strength. The stodgy old watchers, they would overwatch now. The reactors would overreact. The Lawful-Lawless Hydra-Weave would absorb psychic energy and turn it back on itself. The monsters defeat each other and the world and bring about the destruction plateau.

  “We'll see if their plot works, Fred,” young Miguel Fuentes was communicating from far underground. “Yes, the watchers will overwatch. The old patrick here is shaking their invisible net. The reactors will overreact. I myself will overreact most strenuously in the morning. And that hydra that brushed myself and yourself, it is sending out electric poison that I can see like the borealis lights even here in my underground. But there is something else, little Freddy. You are the something else. You are the simple man, the innocent, you are the virgin who charms the unicorn. Hey, is that not jazzy talk, little F
reddy? I don't know what you will do, how you will alter it. But there is something. Do you know what you will do, Freddy?”

  “No,” said Fred Foley shortly to the voice that was coming from underground seventeen hundred miles away.

  “This patrick does not overwatch, but he watches,” said Croll.

  “We need no more than the desire to break to a higher life,” the prophet was still sounding in the distance. “If we are sure of this, then we cannot be leveled.”

  Yet it would seem as if the stimulus of the Suspendeds was working. Throughout the boondocks and waste places of the world, a hundred or so groups had gotten the whiff of the change, of the vacuum needing to be filled, and had begun to move. There was a strong group in Anatolia, one in Bas Pyrenees, one in Circassia, one in Sierra Leone, one on the Rio Grande River which was led by Miguel Fuentes. Some of these sudden armies, after they had eaten their surroundings and their near rivals, would be of real effect. And tinder had been torched everywhere.

  Double assassinations of men of opposite parties had happened in a dozen parts of the world. Soon there would be risings by the minorities and the abused, and the abusing. The acute could already hear those stirrings like a giant hornets’ nest.

  “That phase is unstoppable, Freddy,” Miguel Fuentes called again from the distance. “But tomorrow you will start a different thing. Freddy, you are the difference.”

  Then they spoiled the night. They turned on the lights again. A few maintenance workers had got past the tepid terrorists and turned on the lights of the city again. It made a disappointing difference. There had been a certain rightness of setting in the torchlights and bonfires. Now that was gone.

  There was a dead girl lying in the gutter. Nobody went to her. All went past with eyes averted as though she had been nothing. She remained there; she may still be there. But otherwise it was only night-time in the city, and people going home.

  Foley, Croll, O'mara and the boney-faced man went to Proviant's, which was still open, or opened again. Well, perhaps it was a different world already, but it looked about the same.

  They sat across from Larker (or a man who was just possibly Larker; he had still another appearance now), who was with some people Foley didn't know. Foley and Larker exchanged glances and maintained the fiction of not knowing each other.

  “It didn't go off so well, even for a show,” Foley told his group. “I imagine they planned it to misfire. Except for the grotesqueness and confusion of it all, it might have provoked some sort of heroic reaction; and their point is to prove that there's nothing heroic left. With that, our ruin is already assured, and they've won it in their sleep.”

  “This is the way the world ends,” said Larker at the table across. “The lights go on and it's revealed that it was all a play-act. There wasn't any world. There was only the fiction of a world.”

  “There was a Byzantine legend,” said Bencher, “to the effect that God made the world only for the grand effect of ending it. But the effect never came off quite right. He couldn't get the thing to climax properly. It was bad and he knew it. He'd set it back a few days or years from the ending and try again. It would be even worse. There were conflagrations that failed to convince, thunderbolts that sounded as if a boy were throwing them, doom-cracking that went off like a toy pistol. He'd set it back a few days and try the ending again, and again, and again. And it developed that the ending would ultimately be only that Byzantine one, to live the latter days futilely over and over again.”

  Bencher? What was Bencher doing here? And why hadn't Foley known him when he had looked right at him? Foley went over the man now, and he was Bencher in every point. But Foley hadn't known him before. And how come he was with Larker and that company? How come he knew them?

  “Mr. Bencher, what are you doing here?” Fred Foley demanded.

  “Drinking twice-heated bad coffee and observing an unsatisfactory end of a world. Oh no, I didn't think that you were crazy, Freddy. It was necessary at the time that I appeared to. Biddy had come to me with your story some time ago. I found it too wild to have been invented. I looked into it and found that it was quite true. I put my resources to it and discovered many of its ramifications. I find now that I've come too late on the scene; the damage is done. It's to be snake-bit finally, to watch the snake slither out of reach of even revenge. They're secure somewhere as though frozen in ice and they can laugh at us out of the frost. There's nothing we can do.

  “Oh, we'll live with it for a while. We may even seem for that while to regain part of our footing. But the world has already worked itself into too precarious a position. It's gone down before. I don't see how we can keep it from going down again. It's the old cycle, you know.”

  “I still hope to break that cycle, somehow,” said Fred Foley.

  “Why, Freddy? To break it means there may be an end to the temporality, I see that now. I'm not brave enough to face that end, no matter how distant, and I'm the bravest man I know. The repeating cycle is, after all, the best. It means that someone will still be going on, over and over. I'm afraid to break out of the cycle, even out of the top side of it. And it will do no good to warn the world. There'll be no belief in the nature of the disaster, not even after the disaster has happened. And we'd certainly be madmen to talk of the old dead men reappearing and frustrating at intervals.”

  “Can't we at least hunt down the remnants of them?” the boney-faced man asked. “Now, yet tonight.”

  “We will, some of them, and you'll have more adventure tonight, man. But we can't even guess where most of them have gone. We have one microscopic triumph though, Freddy. Carmody Overlark, one of their real leaders, the one who first attracted your attention, is really dead and not gone to his state.”

  “That nearly makes me happy, Mr. Bencher. How?”

  “Drowned. We went for him out at his estate. He went into his lake at quite a deep point to escape us. There's a local legend that the lake is bottomless. We shot at him when he surfaced, and we watched for his reappearance long enough to be sure that he wouldn't reappear. He's drowned for good. He, at least, will not be returning.”

  It is no good to warn the world of disaster, even after it has happened. It is no good to tell your associates that they hadn't made good even in this. Whatever had happened to Carmody Overlark, he wasn't drowned, not that oldest of the survivors, he who soaked his head in a bucket. It was unlikely that he had been shot. It was very likely that he was denned up underwater till he should decide to waken again.

  Had there been the veriest flick of mockery in Bencher's telling Freddy of this? And why hadn't Freddy known Bencher at first sight here, when he was surely that man in every point of him?

  “Where's Biddy?” Fred Foley asked.

  “She should be here in a moment, Freddy,” Bencher said. “She went after Miss Cora Addamson, that pernicious female of the returnees. And she got her. I felt it.”

  “I thought that Addamson was on our list.”

  “She was on several lists, Freddy; we wanted to make sure of her. She'd try her escape by the back door of her warren, and Biddy was at the back door. Biddy wanted the job. She was as avid as Boneface here. The report of Miss Addamson's death is already out. And here comes Biddy now!” Biddy! That? Oh yeah, it was Biddy.

  “I'd go with her if I were you.” (Why was Bencher being a little oily about all this?) “Two young people can still salvage something even from a sinking world.”

  Why now, at the appearance of Biddy Bencher, did it seem to Foley that things had gone irrevocably wrong? For him, she should be the one right thing left in the world. What was this new horror?

  “There's something very wrong about all this,” Foley said, rising. “All the warnings are screaming at me but I can't tell what they say.”

  “There are a lot of things wrong,” Bencher said, “but this is one thing that can still be right. Be off, you two. We'll bury the world without your help for the rest of the night.”

  “Come along, Freddy,
little poodle-tooth,” said Biddy Bencher. “We have so many things to make up for.” And Freddy went with her. Empty! Biddy had never seemed empty before.

  “There's still something wrong with this,” Fred Foley said to himself. “All the warnings are screaming at me. Even from the weave. Why isn't she in the weave now?”

  “Wait, sir, wait!” Croll called. He rushed to Foley, caught him at the door, and held his two hands. Nobody in his life had ever called Freddy “sir” before. The patrick seemed really possessed now and he emanated another sort of weave.

  “Sir, Your Magnanimous, know you that the Congregation of Patricks, Larkers and Crolls, and Autocrats and Exarchs, and Aloysii and Metropolitans, meeting in convocation of the mind, have filled the Office that has been vacant for a thousand years,” Croll intoned. He was pathetic in his derangement.

  “I've heard of the office,” Foley said. “Good luck to all patricks this night! Who fills the office now, Croll?”

  “You, sir, Your Simplicitas, Your Innocentia, Your Laetitia, you are the Elect.” Then the Croll gave Foley a sort of accolade-embrace, and Foley returned it in a special form that he had been ignorant of till that moment. Croll also laid a narrow stole about the neck and shoulders of Foley.

  “But this isn't the purple of the ruler,” Freddy smiled. “It's the lavender of the fool.”

  “I know,” said Croll. “But it is so ordered.”

  Biddy dragged Fred Foley out of the place. “What was all that?” she asked him. “What did he do?”

  “Made me Emperor,” said Freddy.

  They walked in the parkways. It was all Biddy then, Biddy chatter, Biddy lapses of logic, Biddy high spirits as they walked about the mall. It seemed a little as if she were walking him in a direction he didn't want to go. But she'd always done that.

  Oh, but why wasn't she in the weave? The weave had now come to the point of explosion and this girl who was essential to it wasn't in it at all. Cinnamon cookie with her eyeballs painted with landscapes and dragon-scapes, what had gone out from her? She seemed unfamiliar inside herself. It was almost as if she didn't know that the pictures on her eyeballs changed, as if she couldn't see with every part of her, as if she were using little peepholes through the painted scenes.