More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  I have been to the future and have come back. I have been to the other side of death and have come back. And I have seen the fierce creature that eats the tongues out of the mouths of those persons who tell what they are forbidden to tell.

  Oh Lord, let me keep my tongue this while.

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF ABSALOM STEIN

  There is a legend long current in our several circles of acquaintances that Casey Szymansky and myself have traded souls, and that by this I have become the fine and upstanding person that he had been, and he has become the sleazy individual that I had been. I had known Casey pretty well before the so called soul-trading had taken place, and we had about an equal amount of sleaze. We also had about the same amount of upstandingness. These qualities may have been arranged a bit in each of us, but I do not believe that the proportions have been greatly changed.

  What we did trade was one each of our kabouters. A kabouter an interior goblin, or a crankiness, or a complex, or a fixation, or a psychological stumbling-stool. Everyone has several of these manifest goblins or kabouters in his personality. Well, they are crankinesses, or perhaps they are discrete people of a trivial species. Either case can be proved easily enough. The proof to me that these kabouters-goblins are objective, though immaterial persons is that we did trade them with rather explosive effect, and that they impressed me as persons at the transaction moment and since.

  A kabouter will know a great amount of secret stuff that goes on inside a man, having lived there. So now I am forever privy to certain unkempt secrets of Casey Szymansky, and he is privy to certain of mine. This seems to bother him more than it bothers me. But to the question “What's going on in there?” I can answer pretty well, as respects Casey. The answer is “Not quite as much as you would think.”

  Casey believes, or affects to believe, that he must go to Hell in my place, although I hadn't intended to go there and hadn't any place reserved there. But it is one piece of a problem that has plagued him from his boyhood. Casey wants (or at least he had an attraction-repulsion for the idea) to go to Hell for someone. Several of his old friends have set it down as a piece of extravagant comedy on his part, but the kabouter I have from him tells me that the largest element in this urge is real compassion for any damned person and the desire to free that person.

  He began, I believe, to play this as a very dangerous game, and he made up very dangerous rules for it. Then he discovered that someone else was making rules for the game that he thought he had invented, and he became very scared. Casey's announced aim is to trade souls with the Devil and release him from Hell, a Lord-Byronish type of phoniness that speaks for itself.

  Casey now considers his trading souls with me to have been a sort of practice for trading souls with the Devil. Hey, what does that make me then? What does it make Casey?

  I like Casey, in spite of his tiresome ‘nobody likes me’ attitude. I should be able to do something for him. About the only exceptional talent I have is the talent of getting in to see the really big people, using nothing but brashness. Well, I will see some very big people in the various worlds if I have to do so to help him. We really are blood-brothers now, whether he likes it or not. In a showdown, I would come closer to going to Hell for him than he would to going to Hell for me, or the Devil, or anyone.

  I am a patsy set up by spirits I don't even know the name of. They prowl me and they take advantage of me. They read my mind — (no, of course they don't read my mind; that cannot be done; but they read the verbalizing of my brain) — , and they turn me into an instrument for unclean purpose.

  As to this mind-reading, there is scientific stuff to it, and there is “thus far and no farther” stuff. I have questioned my scientific friends about it, Mark McClatchy, Catherine Quick, Morris Poor, Silas Whiterice, and I have read up in the journals about it, and I've bounced it around in my head. I ask “To what extent can minds be read, by anyone, but particularly by invading and intelligent spirits?” I find that brains can be read but minds cannot, and hardly anyone is willing to draw a wide line between the two. Insofar as we think in words, those words can be lifted out of the brain. They can be taken from our verbalizing and its accompaniment in the movement of the vocal muscles. This can give very extensive readings. And there are subliminal readings once removed and twice removed. There are electrical patterns, both kymatic and akymatic, in the brain; there are instrumented inferences; there are chemical fix patterns and molecular congruencies. It might be said that any thought word can be interpreted.

  Max Müller the German philologist said that all thought was verbal thought. It isn't, but most intentions and schemes and plans are thought in words and can be read in words. Could a remembered or evoked color, not accompanied by the name of a color, be read out of the brain? Certainly, there are brain wave patterns to correspond to any color or shape or smell or sound being received. Sophisticated investigators would be able to read them out, and sophisticated spirits.

  Are no secret thoughts sacred then? Yes, a few are. From my investigations, I come to one conclusion. Ransacking spirits loose in a body or a brain are allowed to loot information by any physical means or indication. But these raiding spirits are not allowed to use any spirit or nonphysical or immaterial means.

  Fair enough. We will play by those rules.

  But I tell you this, ransacking spirits, I have not meant all the things I have said nor all the things that I have thought, and I fight being made a patsy in certain matters.

  SONNET TO OBSOLETED GOD

  For colored memory of early joys

  You still do hold most brightly painted place,

  Nor will I let you go without a trace,

  You final one of all my childhood toys.

  In aeoned Heaven in the Sign of Fish,

  Bemused by your own memories, you nod.

  When small I always wanted to be God;

  I make my move now, reaching for that wish.

  How feels it in the land named ‘obsolete’?

  How tastes it on the further end of time,

  To be so big a thing, and be forgot?

  Your empty mansion should be cool and sweet.

  Perhaps it needs renewing somewhat. I'm

  A spirit of the time. And you are not.

  But how does one get out of a really devouring situation? I am being eaten up. I am being swallowed alive. Is this myself going down those dark red gullets so smoothly? I am Casey, but I want out of the Casey Szymansky Movement. I want to be clear out of it. How did I get in it anyhow?

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF MARGARET STONE

  “There is a valid and pious practice among certain Catholic children that is documented as going back more than one thousand years, yet its signatures and characteristics seem to be much older than that. The cultus seems to have its first setting in Rome of the Empire days, to be centered in the frame of Diocletian legalism. This cultus and practice consists of a child taking the place, for one hour usually, of the most forgotten soul in Purgatory. It is very painful, but it is not desolating. It is quite rewarding.

  “To serve such an hour is to be washed with hopefulness and grace. One could offer to serve there longer, but not forever; for there is no ‘forever’ in Purgatory. Release is already guaranteed. I served such hours several times, but I am no longer able to serve them. The mechanism and the contacts for serving them are blotted out. It is a service that is not open to adults.

  “I questioned Casey about this once, when I had heard that he was talking nonsense about trafficking with the Devil. He remembered the cultus from his childhood, but he had never entered into it. He had been afraid. He was afraid of one hour in Purgatory, but he big-mouths about an eternity in Hell.

  “I think that Casey's mind has blown.”

  Starved folks buried underfeet,

  Give us dead-man's bread to eat.

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF JOHN SCHULTZ

  “It is a philosophical as well as a mathematical necessity that the offer be made, unc
onditionally. The offer has been called “the very bottom cellar of silliness”; nevertheless, it must be made for the shape of the house above the cellar. I believe that the offer has been made, conditionally, many times by many different persons. I believe that it will be made by Prince Casimir several times conditionally, and that the conditions will have to be broken out of it one by one till finally it is made unconditionally. And then the final requirement of the offer is that it must fail.

  But how is Holy Prince Casimir involved in such a thing as Ransom of the Devil? He always had a fine mind, but he almost always enlisted that mind in the service against reason. He always had a deep compassion  —  for anything except people. Dogs or cats or birds or bugs, or spirits clean or unclean, or half-way species real or imaginary, he had deep compassion for all these things, but not for people. “Let the people have compassion on one another,” he said, “but who will have compassion on suffering plants of the field if I do not?”

  Such compassion as he had was a bullet and a bomb. It was a fuse to ignite the world and burn it down also. Such compassion is born insane, which some may find to be an objection against it.

  I recently had, and am still having, an odd but valid mystical-mathematical vision of a cosmic change detected and noted in a classroom. This may be yesterday or today or tomorrow, but it is immediate, before the ending of the seven days times seven.

  The great mathematician is scratching in chalk before a group of graduate students, and he figures the implications of new values and functions. The great mathematician is a true portrayal, cubistically, for he is a simultaneous montage of the three most famous mathematicians in the world.

  “It is a different universe now,” the mathematician says, and he demonstrates that it is. And the graduate students gasp as they catch the implications. One had but to look at the spooky equations set out there to see that the world was changed, the buildings were changed, the bodies of all the students were changed. The change was not in size nor in general appearance. Only persons trained in post-secular mathematics would be able to follow the implications. The average half-educated person would not notice anything different in the world, even though every electron and neutrino in every atom of the world had been changed. The seventh line that the mathematician put on the board there  —  Oh my God, that seventh line! A cosmos could be swallowed up in the implications of that line and never seen again.

  “Aye, it's a whole, new, and different universe that we have now,” the mathematician was saying. “Such a complete alteration we have had no more than a score of times before; no more than five or six times since the appearance of man. It is the nature of the universe to change completely at intervals, but it is inherently conservative and will not fulfill this nature without grave reason. But the appearance of a chicken-hearted devil will not only rotate every vector value in the universe one hundred and twenty degrees in the counter-clockwise direction, but will also (as you can see by the ninth line) introduce a — ”

  It isn't the vision that always fades out at that point; it is myself that fades out. The disturbing vision will not go away. It happens more validly and more clearly all the time. I suspect that all the people will have to go away and the vision will remain.

  Casey Szymansky is a spellbinder. That is one of the least known facts about him, and some persons have been acquainted with him for years and have not known this about him. He does not spellbind persons; he spellbinds crowds. But he addresses crowds very seldom because of this. He doesn't love his spellbinding talent; mostly he tries to hide it away; but he has it.

  On a bet, he once walked uninvited onto a stage where that turgid drama Goat Boy, with Adrian Abdo in the title role, was playing at the Castle Theatre. Casey carried a Greater Chicago phone directory with him. He opened it at random and began to read names in a passionate and ecstatic voice. And suddenly it was pandemonium in the old Castle. Girls shrieked and squealed, matrons moaned like Carolina doves, boys howled, and men stood and shouted.

  Casey read only seven names, and then he stopped. There were absolutely unceilinged ovations! But, later, no one could remember the reason for such carrying on.

  Anyhow, Casey won the bet, whatever it was. He always represented a danger ready to go out of control. It only takes one spark, if it be a special sort of spark, to ignite and burn down a universe. And Casey could conceivably be a spark of almost any sort.

  For his last month, and right up to the strange ending of him, he was surrounded by sudden crowds of insane people. Nobody had ever seen anything like them.

  Casey died then, after a month of extreme pressure from his followers. He really died, I believe, to get away from his mad followers who were a little too much for him. Casey had always been fastidious.

  Now they have stolen his body away. Beside his open grave they set a plaque  —  ‘Non est hic; surrexit enim’, which is to say ‘He is not here; he is risen’. How corny can you get?”

  From all evil of this day,

  Libera nos, Domine!

  FROM THE COMMENTARY OF COUNT FINNEGAN

  It's an odd process to try to reconstruct a man out of little pieces of paper, when possibly that man isn't dead yet.

  People, for a few decades, thought that I was dead; and maybe I was dead and maybe I wasn't. And whatever I am reconstructed out of now, it may be less substantial than little pieces of paper.

  I'd give more than paper to reconstruct Casey though; I'd give an arm or a leg or an eye; but not a head, and not a soul. A piece of paper is almost too easy an offering.

  One thing about Casey that no one else seems to have noticed; he's lost his mind. He's as nutty as a Lever Brothers Coconut plantation. He's fishy as the Grand Banks themselves. He always did attract weak-fish and weak-fish opinions; but his compassion has been genuine. He is sometimes taken by transports of it. He cries easily but privately over the case of helpless things. The shape of a conch can mist him over, or the dulling of a Lesser Cat's eye that he picked up on yesterday's beach. Between Morotai and Soemsoem Islands where we were long ago, the Molucca wind used to set up a sort of double ripple on the near glassy green water, and the pattern of it shook him every time he saw it. He had a Buddhist regard for small bugs and beasts, and he would take great care not to harm any small thing. Now he has lost his framework and is committed to helping a large thing that is far from helpless. He is insane, gently but dangerously insane.

  Ah, now comes the silly question from someone on the fringe: “With Casey who would know the difference?”

  I would know the difference.

  Simple insanity is like heresy in one way. It loses, or it throws out, only one thing of many, and it keeps the rest. It allows the original structure (whether of mind or of institution) to stand, with only one big gaping hole in it. Sometimes the structure will collapse quickly then (if the gaping hole is at the heart of it); but sometimes it will stand for a very long time with the wind whistling through that hole. If the wind does not happen to blow from the wrong direction, one might not even notice the insanity, or the heresy.

  He had last compassion for every last least thing, and all the rest of it is noise. His excessive commitment to the Monsterousness is all noise, done as he goes over the edge.

  God, have mercy on that man! I do not ask it lightly.

  Make me not such leader be

  Let this cup depart from me.

  Of former lives, of former aspects, of former roles, I believe that Melchisedech Duffy implanted all of them in us as educational devices. I believe that it was the doing of his damned talismans. Oh certainly, I remember all the old episodes; but did they happen? Or were pieces of old Greek mythology and of other sorts of myth implanted in us?

  Who gave Duffy such power as he once had in such things?

  He does not know.

  Who gave me such real but crooked powers as I now begin to evince?

  I do not know.

  What am I anyhow? I'm an old wineskin full of new wine.
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  Then I will burst it, and both wine and wineskin will be lost.

  No, no! I protest against it! I do not want to be filled with such new wine. I asked for it, yes, but I didn't want it.

  I remember the Spanish hero Cid Campeador, dead and tied upright in his saddle on his horse, and leading his army to a great victory with his wild riding, such wild riding as nobody had ever seen before. But what had a dead man to lose in taking the hurdles that way?

  I remember the skull of the great law-giver Justinian, set on a rough hewn council table in those dim centuries when the Empire had all but disappeared into the Gothic fog. There was a snake coiled within the great law-giver's skull. Questions were asked of the skull and of its snake. If the answer was ‘yes’, the snake slithered its head and half length out of the right eye-socket of the skull. If the answer was ‘no’, the snake slithered its head and half length out of the left eye-socket. So the judgment was given to chieftains on great matters, and it was accepted.

  I see myself as leading an insane army of overturners intent on destroying this world, and the next one, and the one after that. But am I responsible for what my body does after I'm dead? (I suppose that I'm dead; that seems to be the most reasonable explanation for certain phenomena.)

  I will disassociate myself from what comes after me. I say ‘It is not myself who gives these judgements. It is the snake in my skull.’