The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “How, Chavo? What does the murder of Allyn have to do with this? How did the Oganta Ocras become the Rogha Treorai? What was his special stimulus?”

  “To eat the back-brains of a Rogha will transform an Oganta into a Rogha, if both are strong and capable. We calculate that there is enough there to transform four Oganta. We have also discovered (Ocras discovered it in becoming Treorai) that eating the back-brains of certain fully-charged World-men will bring on this transformation in us — those of such World-men who might be able to stay with a mountain-hunt till the fourth prey.”

  “Lie still, oaf. I'll spear you through. What now will happen to Treorai who was Ocras the murderer of Allyn?”

  “What will happen to Chavo, the sun-fall murderer of Papa Garamask? Treorai's time is up, as mine will be after a like period. Treorai has had two equivalent years to grow in wisdom as a Rogha. This very week (he will not know the time) he will be set on and killed, and his back-brains eaten.”

  “ ‘And to keep your gaze fixed on the back of your head,’ the dead-man Allyn told me,” Garamask mused. But the Ocras-Treorai will not die so. I will finish the business up here, and then I will go down and arrest the fellow regularly for the murder.”

  “And in place of one Rogha there will be four,” Chavo continued as though he had not heard Garamask. “In this way we will reestablish the Rogha and shorten our time of waiting. When there are again enough Rogha, they in their wisdom will be able to find what went wrong with the transformations; and they will find a less grotesque way to bring them about.

  “And you yourself, Papa Garamask, do a good deed in your death this sun-fall. From your death there will spring four new Rogha.”

  “You violate a code yourself, Chavo. Dying, or freshly dead, I would be good for you. And for four of you? I hear your three companions coming up the line now, so you think you have me fresh? Will the line hold, do you think, Chavo?”

  “It will hold. Papa Garamask, you have not violated the code of the line also?”

  “Lie still, oaf. Call it what you will. Oh, it will be close, and I will not slash it again. I stand by my bet. It frays, Chavo, it gives a little, and the highest one of them is so near the top! It gives more! It parts! It breaks! They have fallen, Chavo!”

  The Oganta was sobbing and crying noisily on the ground for the death of his friends, and the deathly ineptitude of the recording seemed to give a fitting dirge. Garamask laughed with black amusement, withdrew the spear, unlashed the elbow saber from it and put it on himself again. He looked at the Oganta.

  “Get up, Chavo. What is the name of the fourth prey again?”

  “It is you, the crag-ape, Papa Garamask, for World-men do look funny to us, and we call you so. Or it is myself, the frog-man, if I can kill you here and now and eat and make the frog-leap. We fight, Papa Garamask, and I eat your back-brains! Hear my battle-cry on the recorder that you cannot turn off! Does it not twang beautifully?”

  “Damnable eternal teenagers!” Garamask howled as they closed in bloody battle. “There is enmity between us from the beginning of the worlds! I'll break you down! I'll choke you to death with the strings of your own hittur.”

  “Papa Garamask, you lie about frogs' size. I be a very big frog here very soon.”

  They fought in the late day on the top of the needle in the sky, gnashing and knifing in their eschatological fury. And one of them would be dead by sun-fall.

  The Man With The Aura

  “Nor is that the worst of my troubles, James,” said Thomas Castlereagh. “Not only has my conscience begun to gnaw me, but my doctor tells me that I will be dead within a month.” “Good God, Thomas! I thought you were in perfect health,” his friend James Madigan cried out in real alarm.

  “Not perfect, but, James, I'm of sound body for a man of my age.”

  “But your doctor said—”

  “That he intends to kill me. I've given him reason.”

  That was the evening that Thomas Castlereagh told his full story to James Madigan. Halfheartedly he had tried to tell it several times before. He hadn't been believed. He had gained the reputation of being a delightful man with a certain outré humor. He wasn't. He had no humor at all.

  But he had everything else: robust pink-faced health; gold-edged security and impregnable wealth; familial abundance in his later years as recompense for his earlier sorrows; and the glowing regard of every person in America.

  Castlereagh served on many committees and national forums. His heading-up of any body guaranteed its integrity and success. No president felt properly inaugurated unless Castlereagh stood by his side. His was the most sought-after endorsement in the country. He was Respectability.

  Any description of the man would be trite beside the man himself. His face had become the Face of America at its best.

  Rumley had done him. Cassell had done him in the magnificent portrait now in the Great Portraits Room of the Tate Gallery. Arestino had done him. But the finest portraits could give no real indication of the man himself. Anyone in his presence was always pleasantly shaken by the experience. Words cannot give an account of it, though the Castlereagh voice and words were a large part of the effect.

  Castlereagh's three sons were respected and notable. Charles had much of the father's business ability and of his pervading charisma. John Thomas was a doctorate professor, and the author of an exciting text, Theoretical Extrapolated Mechanics. Robert Adrian was a gifted artist. All inherited in part from the father's amazing gifts, but all would stand in his shadow forever.

  And Castlereagh's wife was Letitia, an international beauty known equally for her wit and sparkle and for her nearly too perfect beauty.

  And the graciousness and grace of the man failed in nothing. He had brought a new dimension to goodness. He was perfected in fame and fortune; and perfection is not perfect if it fail in anything.

  Castlereagh's visitor of this night was James Madigan, a Cabinet Member, Secretary of Crime Prevention. But Madigan was in a bleak mood, even in the golden presence of Castlereagh. “Thomas, the country, the society, is in the worst shape ever,” he deplored. “The very idea of honesty has become comical. We have been afraid to publish the revised crime index for the last six months; I doubt if we will ever publish it again; it's horrible. The very appearance of character has all but vanished from the human face. Perhaps that is why you yourself are so remarkable, Thomas.”

  “Coals of fire, James! But they don't burn me much. I'm well insulated.”

  “What, Thomas? I believe that I catch a glint of your fine humor there, and I certainly need it tonight. How the crimes do weigh on me!”

  “Ah, the crimes!” said Castlereagh. “Murder and arson aren't important in themselves. The effect on a man becomes serious only when followed by a certain hardening. But a man who has done these things to the point of ennui and who has built upon them may eventually become a little coarse. I've seen it happen to others. Who can say that I am immune? Drink, James.”

  They were drinking brandy together. The words of Castlereagh seemed delightfully humorous. It was the puckish twist of the mouth, it was the laughing eyebrows, it was the dancing gray of the eyes, the complexity of the voice.

  “I enjoy your piquant humor, Thomas,” said Madigan as he savored and sipped the drink that had an aura beyond all others. “There is something beyond hilarity in the idea that you could ever be criminal, or coarse. But even your drollery can hardly distract me tonight. When I was younger I believed that there was nothing darker than a crime of sheer passion. Now I know that there is something much worse. Do you know what it is?”

  “I know it as well as I know the face behind my face, James. But it is you who are in full eloquence. Go on.”

  “It is the crime without passion, Thomas, the crime almost without interest. The most vile things are done daily in the most offhand manner. It is a thing colder and more horrifying than sadism. If only I could discover the roots of it! If I could find one clear stripped-down example to study, T
homas, I might develop a specific against this venom.”

  “I can give you one, Madigan. I will give you a chance to study at close range a man who has had more opportunities for evil and has made more use for them than anyone in the world. Listen, and believe. It is important to me that someone finally believe.

  “Madigan, I am about to tell you the story of my life. I realize that those are the most fearsome words that one man can ever say to another, but do not be alarmed; I have the virtue of brevity.

  “I was named Tom Shanty, James, and not Thomas Castlereagh. I've come a ways from the shanty to the roal castle which is the meaning of Castlereagh. The name, you see, James, is one element of the aura. I was a sickly boy and the most luckless ever; and perhaps the most dishonest. The police suspected me of every misdemeanor in our neighborhood, and they were right to suspect me. My appearance was against me. I was a fox-faced sneak.”

  “You, Thomas? Mr. Distinction himself? This is good. On with your tale.”

  “I was fox-smart and fox-mean. But a fox is hunted uncommonly, James, before he learns his trade. I was unsuccessful in all my jobs and all my thieveries, and was always poor. I worked for a dishonest photographic portraitist. We collected for these, but we did not deliver them. The samples I showed always made the sale. And this means experience was the beginning of my success. The touchups really were fabulous. My employer was a genius at this — when he chose to work at it. I myself am now a compendium of his best touchups. I learned what the face of respectability and distinction looked like.

  “I worked for a dishonest electronics man. We did bad work for high prices on TV, VVV, and Replica sets. Being fox-smart I picked up technical knowledge. I learned what things may be translated into waves, including things not commonly thought to be translated.

  “I worked for con men. I was bad at this, and my masters were good. I understood quickly why this was so. They had natural advantages for it, and I did not. I had decided to create these advantages for myself unnaturally. More brandy, James?”

  “Thank you. It's a droll old brandy you serve, and a droller tale you serve up. Go on, Thomas.”

  “I spent time in the pokey. My face and my aspect were always against me. They drew the finger of suspicion correctly to me every time. Then I became that lowest life-form, an unsuccessful inventor.

  “I married a quiet and rather short-witted girl who was quietly repelled by me. My luck worsened. There came the day when there was no prospect of any job, honest or dishonest; and there was nothing to eat in the house. Little Fox-face had come to the bottom of his burrow.

  “But on that lowest day I had completed a crude model of my oddest invention. I named it the aura machine.”

  “An odd name, Thomas. And you sold the invention and began your rise?” Madigan asked.

  “No, I didn't sell it. I never did sell it, for it's priceless. It's made me quite rich. I installed it and let it work for me.”

  “Just what did you do with your invention, Thomas?”

  “Oh, when my device seemed to be working all right, I went out and forged five large checks in the crudest possible manner. That was the first test of my invention, and it stood up well.”

  “Thomas,” smiled James Madigan, “I feel better already. There is something in your goblin humor that always sets me up.”

  “With the funds acquired from the forged checks I took out twenty thousand dollars' insurance on my wife,” Castlereagh said. “I waited three days for the papers to clear. Then I killed her.”

  “You are the most amazing man, Castlereagh,” Madigan said. “You are the cathartic I need. No man but you, even in the retrospect of forty years, could jest about such a matter without crudity. But coming from you, it is the all-saving humor.”

  “I have no humor, Madigan.”

  “I've studied that early case, Thomas. I'm as baffled by it as you are. There was no clue at all to the murder of your wife, and no suspect. You and she were alone in the house and nobody could have entered. It remains one of the classic puzzles to this day.”

  “It puzzled me a little too, James, until I looked in the mirror again. My device was working remarkably. My face no longer resembled that of a fox-faced sneak. It was my same face, and yet how different! My luck had changed, had been changed by a fairly simple device. The tide has been running for me ever since.”

  “But later, Thomas, you suffered great disasters that would have sank a lesser man.”

  “All the disasters suffered were tricks of my own, and all turned me a profit. With the funds from my wife's death I started a business. It was a crackpot business and it should have failed, for I was and am incompetent. But I had my new contrived luck that made competence unnecessary.”

  “Thomas, you pile drollery upon drollery. You're a bright patch in my life.”

  “My invention was working well for me. No, James, the business was in no way concerned with its manufacture of sale. By a series of clumsy frauds I prospered. It was a proud milestone in my life when I caused my first suicide, one of many I was to cause.”

  “Humor is the key, Thomas. Let our bleakest moods be bathed in its golden light and somehow we will find the strength to go on. The tale becomes richer and richer.”

  “Then I embarked on arson, that most harebrained and easily detected of frauds, on a large scale. I acquired a block-long warehouse, an ancient shanty of a building, and filled it with old crates and trash. I insured it heavily. I had twenty drums of kerosene openly battled in one night and strategically placed. And after dark I upturned them all, gave them a quarter of an hour to soak the timber, and walked out the front door. James, that was the crudest piece of arson ever pulled, and it was not even suspected. My invention was working fine for me now. I collected. I had made my first million dollars; and the story went out that I had suffered the loss of five times that amount.”

  “Castlereagh, you are better than this old brandy. You warm my cockles and give new life to my tired heart. Your 'invention' I know will be a wowser when you come to your punch line. No tongue but yours could twist out so delightful a rhapsody.”

  “It is my invention again that makes you find the story delightful. When I look at my reflection, James, I am even able to hoodwink myself. The man behind such a face as mine cannot be other than a great and respected man.”

  “Richer and richer,” chuckled Madigan.

  “I married again,” said Castlereagh. “Hers was not really a great fortune, but it was a comfortable seven-figure accumulation. I saw it comfortably settled on myself. I gave her half a year, for she was a pleasurable creature. Then I killed her.”

  “Ah, you hide that old tragedy behind your mocking humor also, Thomas. I am familiar with the case. It was one of the most baffling—”

  “Sure. No clue at all, and no suspect. I was alone in the house with her, and nobody could have entered. There were no fingerprints but mine to be found anywhere, even in the powder on her throat. She was throttled by persons unknown. Quite an impossible murder.

  “Well, James, I stayed with proved methods, but always on an expanding scale. Who would suspect a man whose face mirrored the integrity of Lincoln, the clear fire of a young Jefferson, the humor of Lamb, the honest thoughtfulness of Browne, the scope of Plutarch, the urchin-humanness of Francis, the serenity-in-power of Octavius? My next arson concerned eighty acres of surplus government buildings acquired for a sour song and a sweet face. It took me thirteen days and three thousand drums of kerosene to set that one up properly. But I collected fifty million dollars worth of insurance on it. It was bruited about, however, that I had lost half a billion; and the nation almost went into mourning.”

  “I well remember my personal desolation at your great loss,” said Madigan. “I doubt if any other man would have had the heart to surmount it, or the grace to joke about it later on.”

  “One more grand trick, and then I'd have all the money that mattered. I built me a nationwide all-embracing fraud. I cleaned out thirty million
investors, small, medium, and large on that one. Then, as an experiment, I let my mask slip a trifle, muted my peculiar device a little. A few of the fish saw behind it then. They even took me through a series of courts.”

  “I well remember those craven character assassins, Castlereagh,” Madigan said. “No man but yourself would be able to find humor in it, even now.”

  “Oh, they had me cold at every turn, James. The transparency of my fraudulent machinations was breathtaking. But I turned my device on to the full. My invention, ah, luck, working again at full efficiency. And once more I had my wonderful face. It had gone so far that it had to go all the way, and of course I won. There were tears in the eyes of the Chief Justice when he embraced me after it was all over. I had tears in my own eyes, but I would not want to have the salt in them publicly analyzed.”

  “The entire nation wept in gratitude at your vindication; and now you are able to joke absurdly about it. Ah, deep humor and tears are very close together, are they not, Thomas?”

  “Jerked by the same pair of strings, James. Then I put the cap on it. I set up the Castlereagh Fund for the Study of Bott's Disease.”

  “Kicked off by an anonymous contribution of thirty million dollars! Anonymous! But, of course, everyone knew that the contribution was yours.”

  “Sure, everyone knew it was mine, even if it wasn't. It was my own publicity that pointed the big finger at me. But it wasn't mine. The man who gave that thirty million was rather a shy fish about giving. He gave in the dark through me. By an irony, his name has come to be a byword for miserliness. By a double irony it was myself who hung that tag on him. But I treat that fund with respect; I only milk it for the earned interest every year. I call it my toothpick fund. If anything named Bott's disease really comes around, maybe I'll be able to run the trick through again.”