“I believe that this is it, Laughter-Lynn,” came the cheerful and boyish voice of Leo Parisi. Like all the others, he was somewhat bloodied and battered from being dropped into the street from no more than a camel’s-eye height from the shuttle coming into a modern world terminal that was more than twelve hundred years old. Yes, there was an Archangel on the street corner.
“Oh, Isradel, it is so good to see you again,” Laughter-Lynn said to the Archangel. “Now I’m oriented and at home. Yes, he’s an Archangel. The museum catalog that perpetually offers him for sale says he is a Bronze Statuette of an Angel with a Flaming Sword, Property of the City of Dublin. But he is not bronze. He is of Archangel flesh. And he is alive. Angels commonly move so slowly that people don’t realize that they’re alive. A photographic reporter once took pictures of him, in timed sequences, and his eyes blink every seventeen minutes. And that is his Flaming Sword That Turned Every Way. But it turns so many ways that it seems to be a loop. And people used to tie their horses to him for a hitching post, back when horses were more ridden in the city than they are now. And if this is the Archangel, then there is the pub named Gaire, or perhaps misnamed so. Let us go in. Quickly, quickly. ’Twill soon be closing time.”
The Group of Twelve which now always either numbered more or less than twelve, entered the pub named Gaire or Laughter, and instantly a voice that sounded like a saw going through tinne or holly-wood assailed them.
“Laughter-Lynn Grogley, you are too young to come into this place,” the saw-sounding voice sang. “I’ve thrown you out by the nape of the neck a thousand times and still you come back in. You are but sixteen years old and you may not come into a drinking place.”
“No, no, I was sixteen years old when I left this street to seek my future in the world, but that was twenty years ago,” Laughter-Lynn tried to explain to the buzz-saw.
“Should I be updating persons every twenty years?” the man demanded. “Sixteen years old you were, and sixteen years old you are yet. Begone, Grogley girl. You are too young to be in a place like this.”
“A prophetess is not without honor save in her own home town and in her own home neighborhood,” Laughter-Lynn quoted with two fingers of bitterness in her voice.
“What?” the saw-voiced groggery-owner cried. “You are a prophetess, Laughter-Lynn? I should have known it. Your family was always loaded with talent, filled up with prophets and prophetesses for the last twelve hundred years. You are welcome forever, now that I know you are a prophetess. You are welcome with your friends. That big yellow cat, though, it may not be safe for him to come in here. My dog is rough on cats of all sizes. He doesn’t care how big they are. My dog doesn’t have good sense.”
“I am a pretty big cat,” said Leonardo the Great the Golden Panther. “And if necessary I can be rough on dogs of all sizes.”
“A talking cat, is it?” asked the saw-voiced grogshop-man (his name was Donohoe). “And now I begin to put seven and nine together. I remember John Barkley Towntower there and his talking belly-button. They did their act at the Caladium Music Hall up the street. Let me make a guess, Laughter-Lynn. With the ventriloquist and with the big talking cat and with yourself as a prophetess doing a mental act, you have a traveling carnival and you are going to put it on the boards at one of the music halls or orpheums around here on Show-House Lane. But tonight you are going to give an advance performance in your mother’s castle.”
“Thou art very near to the truth, thou art very near to the kingdom,” Laughter-Lynn said. “How long is it till Tuesday?”
“Twenty-two minutes,” Donohoe said, “and worth every penny of it.”
“Then give us a round of the biggest twenty-two minute drinks in the house,” Gorgonius Pantera ordered. “Where is Gaire Castle, Laughter-Lynn? I see neither horns nor hooves of the Castle around here.”
“We are in the built-over castle-keep now,” Laughter-Lynn said. “Castle Gaire cannot be seen from any of the five streets that encircle it, nor from the air above it. It is a large pentagon-shaped building which has been mistaken for a large pentagon-shaped hill for the last several centuries. Nobody knows it is here, except everybody. There are one hundred shops facing onto the five streets that surround the Castle, and these shops back right into the Castle itself. This grog-shop is one of them, of course. And there are further shops on the five lanes that climb up the castle’s slopes and roofs, thinking that it is a hill. But the Castle still sits where it always has. Oh, I feel my mother coming. She has a presence. She is still wonderful. Why should she not be? Her mind is still as clear as a cucumber and as sharp as a hammer, and yet she’s a little bit dotty. She is so used to being with wonderful people that she may not realize how wonderful all of you are. Tell her, every chance you get.”
Countess Maude Grogley, the mother of Laughter-Lynn Casement, came into the grog-house by its back door, one of the hundred doors that came out of the Castle to the one hundred shops that surrounded it. Indeed the Castle lived by the one hundred shops, for it had a shilling rent each day from each of them, and any castle can live on a hundred shillings a day.
“Daughter of my bosom, who have never been altogether out of it, I rejoice to have you home,” Countess Maude said. “And you will come into the Castle of your Birth, along with all your friends, in just one minute.”
“Why should we wait even one minute, mother pride-of-my-eyes?”
“So that yours can be a Tuesday Visit, and Tuesday does not begin for one minute yet in this place. I intuit that Monday has had unhappy aspects for at least one of your company. So whatever unhappy Monday remnants may cling to you, you will shed them here in Donohoe’s Groggery. You will not carry them into the Castle. Donohoe has specifics against all unhappy aspects. Oh, there is the midnight bell in the bell-tower. We can go into the Castle now.”
They went out of the back door of the groggery and across a little stream. “It is the Castle Moat yet,” the Countess Maude Grogley said, “and like true castle moats everywhere it flows round and round the castle, always running swiftly down hill. But always it returns to its starting place. Like everything else in the Castle it is now much encroached upon by things of the world and the town, and it is so narrow now that a good leaper could leap across it.” Nevertheless they all crossed that flowing moat by a little foot bridge.
In the Castle, a great flight of bats swooped down one of the cross-corridors with a merry chortling giggling sound and in incredible numbers.
“Oh, how many of them do you suppose there are?” Mary Brandy asked.
“Six-thousand-and-five,” that belly-button seer Solomon Izzersted answered immediately. “How do I know? Because I am a mathematician and it is my business to know.”
“Mother Maude,” Laughter-Lynn said when they were in the Castle, “at yesterday’s caravansary, there were thirteen perpetual player pianos that played the wonderfully orchestrated melody Monday at Sora. And now, though they are buried in the earth in their pleasure palace, they will continue to play that melody until the world ends.”
“I know about it,” Maude Grogley the Countess said. “I wish I could think of clever arrangements like that. My Castle is already buried in the earth of the town and the neighborhood, of course. But I know all that has happened to you. When I have you in my bosom and my mind, then I hear and see and feel everything about you. Monday at Sora is a catchy tune, yes, but would you like to be shut up with the sound of it until the world ends? Myself, I have only three perpetual player harps in my Castle, but I will set them to playing Tuesday at Gaire Castle. I will set them to playing it as soon as one of you talented persons shall compose it. But I will not set them to playing the blessed aria until the world ends. That would be sinful pride to give such an order. Rather will I set them to playing till the world ends, less one day.”
“You always were one to hedge all bets, mother,” Laughter-Lynn said. “You know so much mother, do you know what quest we are on?”
“Yes. All of you are marooned East o
f Reality, and you are questing to find your way back to Reality. So you have come to the Castle originally named East of Laughter though now the name has generated simply to Gaire or Laughter. And yet we are still somewhat to the East of the thing itself. I myself love to play Quests. On winter nights especially, when I am able to entice a good group of people to my Castle, we often play Quests all the long night through. Often we go on quests seeking such places as Bangabout and Roughhouse and Cliobach. Myself, daughter, have always been blessed with total reality. It puzzles me that you, my so talented daughter, should have missed it so far. It’s probably due to your having a Dutch father. Oh, the Castle is yours, good people. Whatever your experiments and researches, you can carry them out here. We do have facilities for everything. Every cupboard in the Castle is full of facilities.
“I have about the same arrangements here that they had at the Villa Parisi at Sora in Italy. Any vessel of knowledge or information that you wish, whether of book-scroll or truth-in-wine or spirit-of-the-dead, will come immediately to your hand in this place if only you reach for it. And the only trickery in this arrangement is such trickery as you yourself may bring to it. All genuine castles in the world have this arrangement, though all do not advertise it.
“But, as to the books and scrolls, though we have as many as you may wish, yet I am no great friend of them. To disregard life and to turn to books is to walk from light into darkness. When good people may converse daily, brilliantly and freely, with Angels and with other Good People, and with Giants and with Sioga, what need have they for such inferior things as books? There will be plenty of time for you to read after you are dead. What have you there, good Gorgonius Pantera?”
“It is the new aria, Tuesday at Gaire Castle. It is good, Countess Maude, and perhaps it is immortal.”
“Do you know how to cut the rolls for the perpetual player harps to play it?”
“Oh certainly. I will cut and orchestrate the melody. And harps have not the defects of some other instruments. Three harps are sufficient for a full orchestration.”
The Countess was a sometimes-drinking lady. In the big room there, against a prominent wall, there was a life-sized, life-like, framed and unhung picture My Mother on a Bang painted by the daughter Laughter-Lynn Casement. It was a good picture. They are just starting to paint them that way now.
“There are two things that I try to foster above all others in my Castle,” the Countess Maude said. “One of them is rowdiness and the other one of them is politeness. I love rowdy fun games above all, and I love politeness above all things. There was a perfect gentleman who was gunned down, for business reasons, in one of the streets that surround my Castle just yesterday. So he lay in the gutter spouting little fountains of blood. A man came by and looked at him there. ‘How’re you doing?’ the man questioned him. ‘Dying,’ said the perfect gentleman, raising his hat from his head in salute, ‘but it was kind of you to ask.’
“That is what I call politeness.”
“And what do you call rowdiness, Countess?” Leo Parisi asked her.
“Oh, that’s a different anecdote. I’ll tell it later. One of the original names of this Castle (Oh, it has a lot of original names!) was Caislean Sciotail or Giggle Castle. But, as you know, the old anatomists always placed the giggle center just East of the laughter center in the brain. The original name of the human home in this world was Laughter Castle, and Giggle Castle was but a short distance East of it. I named my daughter here by the name of Laughter-Lynn because of her infectious laugh, and I have inherited it from her.
“In this Castle, both the mice and the bats giggle a lot. The bats fly down the corridors in units of a legion, six thousand of them in each flight, supposedly. But sometimes in this castle we are undermanned and underbatted. Well, the little beasts are funny, and they make me giggle too.
“With dawn, my visitors will begin to arrive, Angels and Men and Giants and Sioga. All of them are very friendly. The Morning Giant will come, and the Morning Angel, and the Ogre-Sioga. Perhaps others.”
“I rather fancy the idea of friendly giants myself,” Mary Brandy Manx said. “The Giants on the Isle of Man are very shy, but maybe those here are more open. I am angry at one giant though, at our Yesterday’s Giant.”
“I believe that your Yesterday’s Giant is also my regular Tuesday’s Giant in this Castle,” the Countess said. “The surly Giant Atrox. We have a variety of giants in this Castle. And we also have a visiting giant for every day of the week. The Atrox is probably here already, but he is afraid to cross running water to enter this central part of the Castle. Some lady will have to go out and bring him in later.”
“The Atrox killed my wife, Jane Chantal,” Hilary Ardri shouted in hot anger. “And I will kill him! I’ll kill him!”
“If everybody who says he will kill Atrox would really kill him, he would be, well, he would be dead. I know, I know. It was thoughtless of him. It was crude. He abuses his creatures in his anger. He lacks the spaciousness of mind and temper that a good giant should have. Well, if he killed Jane Chantal your wife, then he will just have to un-kill her. He’ll have to bring her back to life.”
“Is that possible?” Hilary cried. “Do not fill me up with hopeless hopes! What do you mean, Countess Maude?”
“Ho, we’ll see what he can do when he comes. He had better have a care. One of these days God will say to him ‘Because you have been a careless giant, now you can be a giant no longer.’ Then what would Atrox do for a living? The giant trade is the only trade that he knows. But if he enlivened Jane Chantal once, he can do it again.”
“How could he have enlivened her once, Countess? What do you mean, Countess Maude?”
“Come very close to me here, Hilary, and I will whisper what I mean,” the Countess said.
From a nearby hall, enchanting harp music broke out from the vibrating throats of three harps. It was the wonderful aria Tuesday in Gaire Castle. Its composer and orchestrator Gorgonius Pantera had set it to playing on the three perpetual player harps, and now it would play until the end of the world less one day. Then the talented Gorgonius came back into the room.
“Oh what wonderful music it is!” cried his wife Monika Pantera. “Oh, what a wonderful man you are, Gorgonius.” Gorgonius and his wife Monika had always been very good friends.
The Morning Giant came in. No, not Atrox. He was a much better giant than Atrox.
“Which is the lady who fancies friendly giants?” he asked.
“I am the lady,” Mary Brandy said. So the Morning Giant joined her.
“What wonderful music,” the Morning Giant said. “Take me away to your island, Mary Brandy, and let us raise a brood of giants.”
“Tell me more, good Giant. Convince me. I want to be convinced.”
“Mary Brandy, there is the story that, after the rest of the world ends, Ireland will remain, floating alone in the World Ocean. Less well known is the story that, after Ireland herself sinks in the Ocean and perishes, the Isle of Man will be floating yet, the only thing afloat in the entire world. Take me to your island, Mary Brandy. The last days of the world are upon us, and yours will be the only safe place left.”
“I will think about it, Morning Giant.”
The Morning Angel came in and found pleasant accommodation with Laughter-Lynn.
The Morning Ogre-Sioga came in and found pleasant accompaniment with Perpetua Parisi.
Saint Brandon came in and found pleasant accommodation with Drusilla Evenrood. Saint Brandon also was a giant, a thing that is seldom mentioned of him.
“Saint Brandon,” said Hieronymous Talking-Crow, “in the United States you have become the patron saint of the Flat Earth Society. That doesn’t seem fair. You who have travelled so far, you never believed in the Flat Earth, did you?”
“Not exactly, Hieronymous. I believed in the lens-shaped earth, and I still do. The lens-shaped earth is the real earth, and the spherical earth on which it floats is the less real earth. I once sailed to the very edge
of the lens-shaped earth and was able to look down over the edge of it and into the foggy void. Part of the fog in the void is the spherical earth which is less than cloud-thin when seen correctly. The lens-shaped earth is about eighteen hundred miles in diameter, about a hundred miles thick at its center, and no more than a hundred feet thick at its edge. This includes its water, of course. It does not always occupy the same place on the less-than-real spherical world. Lands and mountains and oceans of the spherical world will sometimes drop out of reality after being real for a few centuries, and other regions will become real in their places. At present, the Circle of Reality marked by the lens-shaped world on the spherical world includes parts of Europe, a small portion of Africa, Holy Ireland of course, and part of the North Atlantic Ocean. When I sailed to the edge of the lens-shaped world, I tied my boat with a double-jib knot (I am the inventor of the double-jib knot) to the last island in the Ocean before the edge of the lens is reached. Then I let out cable to the length of one mile which brought my boat very near the edge of the world. I then attached a plank one hundred feet long to the bow of my boat, and let out rope till the plank was sixty feet of it still on the water and forty feet of it extending out over the void. Then I crawled out to the end of the plank and lay on my belly and gazed down into the void that is beyond the world. I could see the faint outline of the spherical world below me; but it was no more than wispy clouds and gouts of mist. The spherical world (I learned it for certain then) is completely unreal, except for that part of it that corresponds to the lens-shaped world. Oh, it will cast a spherical shadow on the moon and little tricks like that to give the impression that it is real. But its artifice is easy to see through, literally. It is not real.
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