“There are still a few bright spots left in the world,” Dotty said one day. “And mostly they are ourselves.”
“Yes. The world can't be all bad with so many very good people in it,” Duffey agreed.
Then several of the very good people began to fall out of the world. Bagby in St. Louis was the first of the very good people (during the last few years, he had become a very good person) who died and fell out of it.
Book Eight
‘It was originally built by a prince of the Canaanites called in the vernacular ‘Righteous King’ (Melchizedech), for he was indeed righteous. Wherefore he was the first to officiate as priest of God, and being first to build a temple, gave this city, till then called Salem, the name of Jerusalem.’
[Josephus. Jerusalem and Rome.]
After Duffey got back from Bagby's funeral in St. Louis, he found on his table one of those weekly letters from Bagby. The funeral had been on Saturday. Duffey and Letitia arrived back in New Orleans on the following Monday morning. Bagby's weekly letters always came on Monday.
“I will miss him,” Duffey said, “He had become, though he wasn't always so, a faithful man as well as a faithful correspondent. He must have written and mailed this last of his letters Thursday before he was stricken.”
But the following Monday, there was another letter from Bagby. And on the Monday after that there was still another one.
“Even in death he is a joker,” Duffey said. “He wrote some of these ahead of time. There was never anything timely in his letters anyhow, no ‘news’ in a literal sense. He always despised the ‘timely’ in letters and in everything. And he gave these to somebody to mail, once a week, after his death. I wonder how long they will continue?”
At last report, very many years later, they were still continuing. Bagby must have written more than a thousand of those undated weekly letters before he died. That's carrying a joke a long ways. Could they have been written by somebody else? By an even more outlandish joker? No, they couldn't have been. They were from Bagby's hand and from his mind and person. Nobody else, except Duffey, was at all near Bagby in any of these things. And Duffey wasn't writing the letters to himself.
Dotty Yekouris had gone away, to meet Finnegan somewhere, possibly in Cuba, and she hadn't come back. Finnegan hadn't written to her directly. A lawyer named Ignacio had written to Dotty. And a girl named Elena had written to her. They told her that Finnegan was coming apart, and that she might wish to come down there if she cared. It was mysterious. Dotty went down there, and she didn't come back.
The folks around the Pelican Press always expected her to return within days or weeks or months, or years anyhow, and she didn't. And there was no solid news from her or from Finnegan again. There was a little bit of quakey news from X and such people. That sort of news is always as easy to come by as it is difficult to build upon.
X said that both Finnegan and Dotty had been slain in a futuristic episode on the Marianao Coast of Cuba near Havana. As to just how final their deaths had been, he would not swear. X said that he still felt presences of both Finnegan and Dotty. Well everybody who had known them still felt their presences. They had both been permeating people whose presences would pervade for a long while.
“Tell me X, were they killed by three slant-faced men?” Duffey demanded once.
“I am sorry to disappoint you, Duffey, but I don't believe that they were,” X said. “I know those three. They haunt a lot but they don't kill much. Often they take the credit for killing persons who were already dead or who were otherwise killed. No, this killer was the shabby and heavy stalker, the heavy man who follows forever so slowly, and who is there and waiting when his victims arrive at a new place.”
“Ah, I know him. But you really don't know much more about this than I do, do you, X?”
“Not much more. But I intend to find it all out. The one behind it all I know. He is a Cheap-Shot Artist who is the father of all cheap-shot artists.”
“Ah, I know him too, and his agents.”
Well, Duffey and others had returned from futuristic deaths, Could not Finnegan and Dotty do it also? They were special people, and it was unlikely that their deaths were completely final. But would they have to be waked up all over again? And by whom?
Well, not very long after these disappearances, Duffey had an encounter with the Cheap-Shot Artist and Father of all cheap-shot artists.
Letitia Duffey had become the new editor of The Bark. She paid less attention to the Jazz Sheet and the Union Sheet and the Sporting News and such things that the Pelican Press had been publishing for money, and several of those accounts were lost to the Pelican. Letitia kept The Bark going out of private funds, which Dotty would never have done.
Duffey and Letitia and Mary Virginia went to a meeting put on by the New Catholic Press Guild, a somewhat suspect (but already powerful) organization. Well, what was this New Guild? It was very new. Possibly it was born just for such occasions as this. It was not the same as the old Catholic Press Association. Two-thirds of the members of the New Guild also belonged to the old Association, and the other one-third of the members of the New Guild had come out from under the rocks.
This was a highly secret and at the same time a very heavily advertised meeting. It was stated in the advertisements (“Classified, not to be given to unauthorized persons” ) that the Guest Speaker of the meeting would be “The Most Important Person in the World, The Most Important Person Who Has Ever Been in the World” . That was a tall claim. And it was stated that this Guest Speaker was also the busiest person in the world, and that he attended ten thousand meetings a year with select groups.
Duffey caught a whiff of the situation when he came into the meeting room.
“Who do we know who holds ten thousand meetings a year with select groups?” he asked. “What, ladies, what? Well then, who do we know who is the Cheap-Shot Artist and the Father of all cheap-shot artists? You really don't know? I bet you will be hearing that phrase ‘You really don't know?’ a lot this evening.”
“Oh, stuffy Duffey, that's what the several groups of giggle-nuns who are here keep saying,” Letitia protested. “‘You really don't know who he is?’ they ask each other. And then they go into their giggle act.”
“Who do we know who sets off the giggle-nuns?” Duffey asked. “I will bet nineteen to one that it is Old Clootie Himself.”
The guest speaker (“Possibly, ever certainly, the best-known person ever, anywhere,” the introductory speaker was introducing him) was standing in a bit of shadow, and yet it seemed that he was being picked out by low-resolution, purple spotlights. The introductory speaker was on that list of the one thousand persons who had been present at the releasing of the Devil near Yalta, according to X. Duffey hadn't believed it of the man, a churchman little known but of high station. Now he three-quarters believed it.
And the meeting itself, it was scheduled to begin at three o’clock in the morning. No, that wasn't such an hour as would bother Duffey or Letitia or Mary Virginia. And it didn't seem to bother the little groups of giggle-nuns and giggle-priests (“You really don't — giggle — know who he is?” ), but it stood out as a possibly convenient hour for a person who held ten thousand meetings a year with select groups, and who did not sleep. That's a bit more than twenty-eight meetings every twenty-four hours. Meetings, meetings, is there no end of meetings?
“The real name of this person is the only four-letter word that may not be spoken by us always and everywhere,” the introductory speaker was saying. “There is no proper pronoun to refer to this person who is an androgyne and beyond grammar. The person is always to be referred to simply as ‘The Majesty’. The accepted method of adoration of ‘The Majesty’ is the snicker.”
“You here, Duff?” asked George Koran who reported for the Picayune. “I came in here a bit ago and got a whiff of it. ‘Judas Priest!’ I hollered out I was so startled by it. ‘Yes, yes, you want an interview?’ eight of the Judas Priests snickered, and
they crowded up with their tongues lolling and their noses twitching. Hey, this is one fruity place! I got to keep moving, Duff, in one door and out another. Those three edge-heads keep trying to kill me. They can run me out, but they can't keep me out.”
“Don't you have your press card?” Duffey asked him.
“Sure, and I showed it,” Koran said. “ ‘That's no good. That's a dead man's card,’ one of the edge-headed guards told me, and he was switching that switch-blade knife. ‘You're wrong,’ I said. ‘It's my own card, and I'm not a dead man’. ‘You will be, you will be,’ another of the edgies told me. ‘In five minutes you will be.’ ”
“Oh, I didn't know that the slants had any humor,” Duffey remarked.
‘The Majesty’ was a built-in optical illusion. Duffey had encountered such illusions before, and he could guess the size pretty well. ‘The Majesty’ was a giant disguised. There is nothing uncommon about that. But he had the apparent size of a man. Well, let's see. Where will his head really come to? Duffey climbed up into the jungle of hidden cables and struts above the little stage of the hall. Duffey had been a rigger. He could climb, and he knew about the above-stage apparatus in that jungle.
Ah, a swinging boom that sometimes carried spotlights. It was at just the right height, maybe eighteen feet above the stage. Duffey swung the boom out and fetched ‘The Majesty’ an echoing ‘klunk’ in the back of his head. This was a dazzle of humor that not everyone caught. The boom klukked staggering into the real head of ‘The Majesty’! But it was the illusion head and form, twelve feet below it, that reacted so spastically and grotesquely. Oh, only the blessed understood what had happened, and the ringing silver laughter of Letitia filled the hall.
“It's a laugh all too rich for humans sometimes,” Duffey had once said, “but God enjoys it.”
Consternation soon calmed, however, and the magnetic personality of ‘The Majesty’ surmounted the happening. There was so much spastic and grotesque going on there anyhow that most of the people took it for normal.
“An enemy is here,” ‘The Majesty’ said: “and will be disposed of.”
“One does not laugh at ‘The Majesty’,” a coven of giggle-nuns gave sincere warning to Letitia.
“Oh the hell one does not!” she said.
“Ladies, pay attention to just what ‘The Majesty’ says,” Duffey told Letitia and Mary Virginia. “Yes, you have a recorder, Mary Virginia. Use it, but it may not prove accurate. This is a special case. We will see what you remember ‘The Majesty’ as saying. We will see what the recorder says that he says. And I will see what I find him saying interiorily in his mind. With the three versions we may be able to triangulate it on him. I have been a pirate and ransacker of minds, and I won't be intimidated just because his mind is that of an evil giant.”
Duffey climbed into that mind then, and ‘The Majesty’ that the mind belonged to began to talk. It's a good thing that Duffey had been a rigger and climber, or he'd never have made it in that steep jungle.
There was lots of wreckage, and high piles of bones in that mind. It was a wasteland. Duffey recognized many of the landscapes in it, those that had been done by Dali and Doré and Hieronymus Bosch, those that had been done by Peggy Munster and Adam Scanlon and Count Finnegan. Duffey climbed and clambered in the manner of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., through surrealistic clutters and mountainous and evil trash. Sure, Duffey was the Thief of Baghdad. An ordinary thief doesn't break in here and steal these secrets.
These are secrets? Can trash-giantized be anything but more trash? This speeching was real speeching of the kind to unhinge and destroy the world? How? How?
“Why don't they laugh?” Duffey asked himself. “Why doesn't everybody laugh?
“I have got my physical and temporal release, which is to say my token release,” the mountainous mind of the Devil began to grind out mice. “Now I strive as I have ever strove for my eternal release. I can never win this release in the existing case of things. I can win it only in the case of Creation being negated and withdrawn. I work always for that negation and canceling out, whatever I may call my work. ‘That it may not have been, any of it, ever!’ that is what I ultimately work for.
“I will inculcate a hatred of mankind in mankind. I will have it that no person will ever speak of mankind without a sneer. Mankind must destroy itself, but first it must deride itself until it earns its derision and destruction.
“My best game is to convince the commonality of people that I don't exist. The best game for you, my conspiring followers, is to convince the commonality of people that conspiracies don't exist. Yet I say to you, Conspire Always! And Again Conspire!”
(“Out, out, you intrusion,” the ungainly mind was saying to Melchisedech, still not knowing who he was nor how he had got in.)
“I have been called a Cheap-Shot Artist,” the huge mind went on. “Yes, I am, and I glory in it. Let you all be cheap-shot artists! It is the easy way to fame and glory, and it short-cuts the enemy. But that is the tactic. The fuel is hatred. Hatred is both the cake and the frosting on the cake. It is the meat and the drink. It is the bodies ransacked and raped. It is the whole catalog of carnalities. It is the ultimate lust and the perfect perversion. It is the uncreation, the reversal of everything, it is the murder by torture and the murder by defamation.
“But never let me hear defamation defamed by any minion of mine. It is the very hinges on which we swing. Slander, which is defamation, is always the servant of hatred. We will work for red murder and red revolt. There is an obligation to disobey. Teach that obligation! We will work for the trashing and toppling of everything. And then we work for absolute nullity.
“Do not use a straight line where a crooked line will do. Do not say anything in two words that can be said in three. Order is our enemy. We cannot allow order in anything. Law is our enemy. Attack these things forever, and attack them crookedly. Remember that a crooked tongue can penetrate into recesses where a straight tongue cannot.”
(“Out, out, outsider!” ‘The Majesty’ was angrily ordering Melchisedech. “Easy, Clootie, easy,” Melchisedech was saying. “Do not buck like that.” )
“Do as I say,” the trashy mind was grinding out, “and for your reward, I will give to you certain persons to dismember and destroy for your pleasure. Oh, some of them are high persons! Howl and be weird! Ours are the gibberish tongues. The Paul said that God was not the God of gibberish. I say to you that I am the god of gibberish, and by this gibberish we shall know each other. You will carry out the tasks assigned to you by myself ‘The Majesty’, and in return, you will be given all riches and final oblivion.
“The richest reward is the Devouring of Entrails in the Holy Places. There is no more rampant pleasure than this. But for the present, before we are able to blow out all the lights, we will refer to our Devouring of the Entrails in the Holy Places as ‘Holding More Meaningful Liturgical Services’.”
That was really about all that the evil giant was able to formulate in cluttered mind. Oh, it went on for fifteen minutes more, but it was all repetition. ‘The Hell about Hell is its repetition,’ one dissatisfied citizen of that realm said recently. ‘Over and over, the same things in the same words and acts. It is damnation by the suffocating staleness.’
“Bad show, Clootie, bad show,” Melchisedech said as he came out of that surrealistic wasteland. So he came back more solidly into the assembly. The tiresome and illusory giant was still talking, but no matter. He was only talking with wobble-mouth words.
Duffey checked with Letitia and Mary Virginia. Yes, the speech that the Devil had given with his mouth was about the same as he had given with his mind. The mouth speech was garnished with such terms and words as ‘involvement’ and ‘relevancy’ and ‘faith-life’ and ‘life-style’ and ‘charisma’, but it was the same speech. It had words like ‘socialization’ and ‘noosphere’, and it attacked Pharisees and Legalists and Rigidists, and Reactionary Members of the Curia, and Insensate Hierarchies, but it was the same speech. Th
e Devil has only one.
“He gives several more talks in the city tonight,” the reporter George Koran said, “to an economic group, to a group of media masters, to a donkey's dozen of politicians, to a clutch of labor masters, to a coven of historians. And he will make a talk to the Student Repudiation Congress.”
“When is his next Epistle to the Romans?” Mary Virginia asked.
“It's a very early communion breakfast in Oklahoma City if he catches the Braniff flight. A bishopric board of directors there is trying to re-orient a diocesan publication so that it will be more in accord with the thinking of ‘The Majesty’. They need catch words and double words for it, and they want to pledge their allegiance. He can't very well refuse to be there. Then it's double back to catch a Baptist bunch in Waco (“Even those hard-shells I can crack” ); then to Dallas to fleece the sheepy rich (five talks there). He'll make Cow Town and San Antonio and Houston later in the day. It's a busy life, but I guess that his Majesty enjoys it.”
This reporter George Koran led a busy life also, and he seemed to enjoy it.
Margaret Stone and some of her rowdies from the Quarter came in and disrupted things by singing the Gadarene Swine Song. She had learned it from Duffey and Letitia. The Slant-Faced Men moved towards the disrupting singers with switch-blades twitching. But rowdies from the Quarter pinioned all three of them, jerked down their zootie coats, and jerked out the winders that were between their shoulder blades. And, with their winders removed, the edge-heads collapsed with a racing of gears and a stuttering of sprockets.
An old priest with crying eyes came up to Melchisedech Duffey.
“Oh, believe in him, Duffey!” the old priest cried. “Believe, believe. He's all we have left. First they took God away from us. Now some of you want to take the Devil away also. No, no, no, let us keep him! We've got to believe in something!”
More Than Melchisedech Page 30