“I’m not real hot on it, Audrey,” Jane said. “I’ve felt awful funny and queasy ever since I’ve come back. I don’t much want to fool with things like that.”
“I bet every person who comes back from the dead feels awful funny and queasy about it for a while. But Aunt Drusilla says that you were the best projector in the whole bunch, which was why you were able to project Atrox and make everybody see him, in outline anyhow, even if it was all the wrong outline. But you know what he looks like now so you’ll be able to get him in the right outline. I’ll get a paper and pencil for me and describe him in some of those animating words. And I’ll get a canvas and brush and paints for you and let you paint him in those animating appearances. And we’ll have him here in pretty good shape in just a little while. I know you are on my side because you slipped away from the breakfast and came out to me when I made monkey faces at you through the window. What will be the name of the picture, Janie?”
“It will be Earth and Ocean and the Return of Atrox the Giant From the Dead.”
“You can hardly see the ocean from here.”
“I’ll make it closer in the picture. And I’ll make Atrox pulling some of those big distal wing-feathers out of a big bird to make quill pens out of them. And at the same time I’ll project for all I’m worth. And I’ll mock him a little bit to make him mad. Getting mad brings more people back to life than anything.”
“I’m describing him as perfectly as words can describe him,” Audrey said. “And I’m projecting fit to bust myself. Oh, there’s the outline of him hovering in the air. Talk to us, Atrox, talk to us.”
“Giant back from die and dee / Tell us, tell how old you be?” Jane Chantal rimed the question.
“Back from outer cloud and cold / Day today I’m nine years old,” the Atrox outline rimed.
“He fits the pattern,” Jane said. “When I first came back from the dead I thought I was only nine years old. Now I’ve improved till I think I’m eleven going on twelve. When giants are in trouble like that, Audrey, you have to talk to them in rime.”
“Oh I know it. I always do it. Giant, giant, we are friend / Make you well and make you mend. I’m six, Atrox, and Jane is a little bit older. We’re happy to have you back even if you’re only an outline yet.”
“We at the Futuristic Institute have been monitoring your group, of course,” said Anthony, an especially casual English Intellectual. “We’ve been monitoring you especially for the last three or four days, and to a lesser extent for several years. Your general flamboyance (the talking belly-button there, the talking panther on the floor, I don’t know which is the more garish or goofier) convinced us that you were a group of incurable amateurs. And yet you seemed to have entree to the Atrox mythos. Our own idea was that extraterrestrial aliens were writing detailed scenarios for a few million earth persons to follow, and were compelling the people to follow them.”
“We at the London Poly have devised one-hundred-and-one tests by which we might know the true Atrox from all imitators, just as Atrox devised one-hundred-and-one tests by which one might know whether one was in a dream or in reality. The number one-hundred-and-one is important in the Atrox myth,” said a casual English lady Intellectual named Sandra Ott. “The mythos itself can be traced back to the beginning of the sixth century. At that time, when fallen Rome had become squalid and ruined and overgrown, many of the people believed that the memory of a Grand Rome was not based on any reality, that it was based entirely on a fable that the Giant Atrox wrote in a huge book named The History of Rome the Great. This is one of the great Lost Books of Atrox, but it now seems that very much of the legend of Rome’s greatness stems from that book. Several centuries later, during the palmy days and life of Charlemagne, many of the people of Europe believed that the whole Charlemagne Cycle was only a tall tale written by the Giant Atrox (who was now in some sort of timeless neither-alive-nor-dead state). And now we come onto eerie corroboration that the old people of Europe were right. The Charlemagne Episode fits illy into European history. Its texture is just not the same at all. The supposed contemporaries of Charlemagne never heard of him. Tear the whole Charlemagne Episode out of European history and it leaves no hole at all.”
Leo Parisi stared at one of the doorways of the room. He had that do-I-see-it-or-do-I-not look on his face.
“Sandra Ott, Dame of the Realm and possessor of other honors and titles,” he said, “would you recognize Atrox the Giant if he walked through that door right now?”
“Yes, one-hundred times yes, I would recognize him if he walked through that door right now.”
“Well, he did walk through that door right now.”
“What, what?” it was Roderick Outreach taking notice. “Do you mean that flimsy outline who just came in with the two little girls? No, no, that is not Atrox. It fails in all of the one hundred-and-one tests, or on the half-a-dozen that I’ve run through my mind in half an instant. That’s just a little bit of grave-reek or wrack that the little girls picked up. It’s no more than some trivial dead walking thing. Little girls, you shouldn’t be playing with such rotting trash out of graves.”
“I be the Giant Fabulous.
“I be the True Atroculus,” the Atrox outline mumbled.
“No, no, little girls shouldn’t throw their voices nor make up gibberish,” Roderick Outreach stated heatedly. “Take the dirty grave-wrack outline outdoors and throw it away, little girls.”
Audrey and Jane (really they were one little girl and one big girl) took the Atrox outline outdoors again but they didn’t throw it away. And something about the lowering Atrox outline as it went indicated that it was angry as well as deeply hurt.
Then Jane stood in the doorway again.
“This house becomes a murder house now,” she said. “All of you people must stay very close together or you will be picked off and killed one by one.”
“Oh, this is intolerable!” that casual English Intellectual Roderick Outreach shouted. “Little girls should be neither seen nor heard.”
The Group of Twelve came to feel themselves somewhat inferior to the casual English Intellectuals as the day wore on. Well, none of the Group of Twelve smoked, and all of the casual English Intellectuals gave their main intention to their pipes. “Their brains are in their pipes,” Monika said of them, “and they suck their brain thoughts out puff by puff from them.” Did the pipes make the casual English superior? No, it just made them smell funnier. But the English held themselves to be so superior that some of that impression rubbed off on the Group of Twelve. And there was a clash of theories and speculations.
The speculations of the English and of the Twelve were so far at variance that one group or the other had to be abysmally wrong in every respect. And their difference in reaction became more manifest when a man came to Drusilla Evenrood.
“It is one of those giant geese, you know which ones, the very scarce ones with the long wing feathers. It is dead on the beach. What should we do with it?”
“Bury it, of course,” Drusilla said. “Very large birds become smelly when they are left unburied.”
But all of the casual English Intellectuals started for the south ocean at a furious run. “Seven Sinecures!” each of them howled. “Seven Sinecures, and I must have one of them. The genuine quills are the genuine scepters of office.” And they disappeared over the south edge of the Earth running towards the ocean shore.
“What an odd reaction,” Denis Lollardy cried.
“Odd”, “Odd”, “Odd”, all the other members of the Group of Twelve echoed him.
‘An Englishman will lounge about and stare and smoke his pipe for a thousand years with apparently no thought in his mind at all. Then he will get an idea in his mind and he will strike in an instant, and the whole world will reel from the force of his blow. And the idea that galvanized him to sudden action will always be a mistaken idea.’
THE BACK DOOR OF HISTORY, Arpad Arutinov.
It was just about sundown of that day that the ca
sual English Intellectuals returned to Evenrood Manor. All of them were rumpled up for they had been fighting with each other. They were bruised and bloody, but all still had their pipes in their mouths. Seven of them (four ladies and three gentlemen) carried nine-foot-long distal wing feathers from the dead giant goose on the beach. And the others of them who had been defeated in the battles, they had nothing.
“We are the Seven Giants who will henceforth write the world!” Roderick Outreach proclaimed, and he seemed to be making himself First Giant, the New Atrox. “Atrox is dead, and the other six giants are tired and wishing for death. Well, we write them dead now. The world turns over, and this becomes the Era of the Seven New Giants who are ourselves.”
“I don’t think it’ll work,” Hilary Ardri grumbled.
“The Feathers are no good no use / Unless they come from living Goose,” rimed the outline of the nine-year-old Atrox as he drifted in and out again.
“It’s going to be pretty unhandy for anybody to write with one of those nine-foot-long feathers unless he’s a giant,” Mary Brandy said.
“We are giants,” Roderick Outreach edicted. “We are the Seven New Giants of the New World Era. If somebody doesn’t like it, we will write that somebody clear out of the living world. I will take this biggest room. Let six large rooms be provided for the other six giants. And all you lesser persons around here, whether Britons or Twelvers, you had better be quiet and stay out of the way. There is nothing easier for us than to write you out of the world.”
“The world may now move again,” said the English lady Intellectual Sandra Ott, one of the new giantesses. “It has been napping for a few hours, but now we will move it ahead. Whatever we write will be fulfilled. We will, of course, write wealth and power unlimited for ourselves, and then we will loose our creative abilities upon the earth. Stay out of our way, lesser people.”
Penelope Evenrood, the sister of Drusilla, came and got Audrey and took her back to her cottage. “I do not like some of the things that are happening at your manor, Drusilla,” she said.
“Let us all stay very close together, people,” Jane Whatever was cautioning again. “This is a murder house, though I’m sure that Drusilla doesn’t intend it to be one. We must all stay together or we will be picked off and killed one by one.”
Most of the ungianted English persons did drift off one by one, ambling out into the dark, still smoking their dottle pipes. They had missed it, they had missed it. Each of them had missed it by a feather. But when there are only seven prizes, not everybody can get one.
“There really is the smell of murder about the house, the smell of murder waiting to happen,” said Hilary Ardri. “Atrox is dead in all except his giant outline, but the strange man named Murder still lives. Everybody be looking for the strange man.”
“In a world that has gone strange, even one’s closest neighbor and friend becomes a stranger,” Prince Leonardo the Great the Golden Panther said.
“We must all stay together,” Jane What-is-her-name began again.
“Oh, be quiet, Jane,” Drusilla told her. “We are all together, all of us of the Group of the Flexible Number Twelve. We are all alert and aware as the murder hour comes. I have sent all the servants home to their cottages across the moor. There is nobody at all in the house except ourselves and the six newly-emerged English giants. And three fiddlers in the music room. Or perhaps six of them, for they change shifts at midnight. Nor will we be trapped in the dark as we were for a moment last night. I have given all of us lighted candles which we will hold in our hands. There is no way either the Strange Man nor the ambushing hour may slip up on us.”
“There is one way,” said Prince Leonardo the Great the Golden Panther. “There is one moment, just before midnight, when everybody, even God, dozes for between two and four seconds.”
“I will not doze,” Hilary Ardri said.
“Nor I,” Gorgonius Pantera assured the world.
But apparently, just before midnight, they did doze for between two and four seconds. Then they heard the screaming and the midnight bell of the Manor at the same time. The screaming was plainly that of the First New Giant, Roderick Outreach, which scream was cut off in much less than two seconds.
Hilary Ardri was the first of them into the room of New Giant Roderick, and yet he was immediately face-on with the strange man of the night before, young, handsome, fair, smiling, incredibly urbane, bright of feature, open of soul, and covered with blood. He was again smiling and covered with blood.
“Caesar, Gorgonius, Denis, seize him!” Hilary called. “He’s broken loose from me.”
“He’s like quicksilver,” Gorgonius swore. “Somebody block the door.”
“The door is blocked,” Leonardo the Great called, and that Prince of Panthers was rampant on hind legs filling the doorway. “He has not gone out by this doorway, and yet he is gone.”
Yes, the strange man was gone, disappeared completely.
Roderick Outreach, the New Giant (but he had not lived long enough to become physically very giantlike) was speared to death with his nine-foot-long spear-quill driven into his mouth and emerging from the left lumbar region of his lower back. He was quite dead, and his bright red blood was everywhere.
And the other six New Giants arrived into the room.
“Call the Constabulary, call the Police, call the Yard,” Sandra Ott, New Giantess, howled.
“Oh, write in your journal that they are already called and already here,” Drusilla Evenrood said crossly.
“Oh yes, I will have to get used to my new powers,” Sandra said. In nine steps she was into her room. Then she scribbled three lines (she had to use two hands to hold that big feather-quill); and the Constabulary, Police, and Yard were all there in great numbers.
“Let us all stay very close together,” Janie said.
“Yes, all stand very close together, all of the Extended Group of Twelve. We go to my place now,” Mary Brandy said. “There may be a touch of confusion here, and we’d better miss it.”
They went instantly to Mary Brandy’s place, leaving a Manor House full of confusion behind them, and the Ancient Fiddlers playing Thursday at East Sussex, a haunting tune.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Friday at Port Saint Mary
‘To sum up, I think that all suggested accounts of the origin of the Solar System are subject to serious objections. The conclusion in the present state of the subject would be that the system cannot exist.’
— Harold Jeffres, 1970.
There were bonfires burning at Spanish Head when the Group of Twelve arrived. All three of the south shore port towns, Port Erin, Port Saint Mary, and Castletown, were awake and out doors. There was a hubbub, a forru of people, and the forru was divided roughly into three groups.
To the West was a group of citizens of Port Erin howling behind their chief howler Honorable Meara Timothy Haggerty. “It’s about time you were getting home, joy-traveling woman!” Timothy railed, “or we’d have sent and got you wherever in the world you were wasting your time.”
“Why does the gallows-gibbet have a new rope?” demanded Mary Brandy Manx herself, for she had a quick eye for everything.
“For the hangings this day!” came the wrathy voice from the East, and it was the Honorable Sean McEnglish, the Meara of Castletown. “Should we hang persons with an old rope and perhaps the whole world looking on? And, to anticipate your questions that big panther of a hell-cat who calls himself Prince Leonardo the Great. Why has he plunged into the Ocean now? Does he believe that he can wash his sins away in a tide that is already on the ebb? Or perhaps, Dame Meara, we will hang you also just to let you be an example to yourself.”
“There will be no hangings till I say so,” Mary Brandy spoke.
“You forget that this gallows was set up anciently to serve all three towns, not just your Port Saint Mary,” said Mayor Haggerty of Port Erin. “Speak for yourself, gadabout lady with your pack of fanach eccentrics. Speak for yourself.”
“A gracious good morning to all you people of all the three towns,” said Mary Brandy. “Have you been running Port Saint Mary well in my absence, Mary MacWattin?”
“No, no, not running it at all, Mary Brandy. I’m only your housemaid and no apprentice mayor at all. Still it is better that I run it than to let the power fall into the hands of the political opposition in the form of Gregory O’Growley.”
“It has been well run, Mary Brandy,” all the citizens of Port Saint Mary howled in chorus. “Mary MacWattin is the best woman in the whole show, save only yourself.”
“What is this all about?” Denis Lollardy called out in a voice so loud that it made everybody jump. “Why is there all this witless tumult? Why have three townsfull of people turned out before dawn this morning, and why are they all acting like a pack of Stage Irishmen?”
“Oh, just for the everlasting fun of it, Denis the Forger,” Mayor Haggerty of Port Erin laughed. “Coming from the stoney-faced people of Italy, you could never understand this. We have to make a noise in the morning. Have you never heard of Fun in the Morning? An abundant morning to you, Miss Drusilla and to Miss Laughter-Lynn and to all the other ladies and gentlemen.”
“How do you know our names?” Laughter-Lynn asked with a half-Irish glint.
“And beyond the everlasting fun of raising a forru before the sun is up in the morning is the fun of building bonfires whenever the spirit moves us,” spoke Mayor McEnglish of Castletown. “I say that a people is dead and uncivilized within if it doesn’t burst out of its houses in the dark at least one morning a week and light bonfires all up and down the shore. It’s a proof that the people is alive and well.”
“So it is,” Gorgonius Pantera agreed. “It is the one-hundred-and-second test for reality, and this place has passed the test.”
“But the main thing, Mr. Gorgonius, is that we are all worried about the sorry state that the world is in,” said Mary MacWattin the housemaid who had served as Mayor of Port Saint Mary in the absence of Mary Brandy.
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