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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Hi, Austro, hi, Laff,” Drakos said, but he had a bristling sort of worry about him.

  “Carrock,” Austro said warily. A mouse stuck its head out of Drakos' coat pocket.

  “Carrock,” the mouse said in exact mimicry of Austro, who fell to trembling.

  “Ah, there is no sense in being afraid of a mouse, Austro,” Drakos jibed, and he sat the small rodent down on the paving there. “You aren't a young girl to be afraid of a mouse. You are a boy, almost a man.”

  Austro would have nothing to do with the mouse that mocked him there and looked at both of us with the eyes of someone we already knew. Well, the mouse looked at us with eyes ever so much like those of Austro, and that was the truth of it.

  But Austro, with his sunshine brains, had an idea. There was an old carpet there that kids had been using for a tent before they had abandoned it. Austro shuffled his feet on the deep-piled fabric of it. He shuffled his great, splayed shoes on it (Austro had slightly opposable big toes so his shoes were very wide and specially made); his hair stood on end and he sparked.

  “Carrock. Bad wind. Spark wind,” Austro said. He bent down and touched the mouse with a trembling, crackling finger. There was a sizzling and then—

  Ka-boom!!

  There was an explosion, a violent one for all that it was small.

  There was a clap of thunder at the same time, but none except the credulous would connect them.

  “Oh, God, don't!” George Drakos cried out, and he staggered back, whey-faced and with hands over his heart.

  “Are you all right, George?” I asked. “You look almost like a dead man.”

  “Carrock, good Drakos?” Austro asked, with deep worry.

  “Yes, I'm all right again,” the doctor said, and he attempted a smile. “I looked like a dead man, did I? Oh, I died a little then, but we all do that every day. Yes, something did go out of me, but the only harm is that one of the mice is destroyed. I can easily make another, but I won't. I have several left.”

  Well, the mouse had exploded, or it had disappeared anyhow.

  “Barnaby wanted us to drop over after supper,” Drakos said then, “and it is that time now. Say, dark does come early, what with those weird clouds! Have a couple of the best, fellows — they're because I'm a father. The mice, you know.”

  Drakos gave each of us a cigar, and Austro and I lit up.

  “I am still welcome at Barnaby's, am I not, Austro?” Drakos asked.

  “You, always, carrock, always,” Austro said. “Not sure about the mice, though.”

  “I know what they are now,” Harry O'Donovan said. “They're little globs of gas plasma, that's what they are.” We were in Barnaby Sheen's cluttered study, Harry O'Donovan, Doctor George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, Barnaby Sheen, those four men who knew everything; and myself who didn't. And Austro who didn't, Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo who didn't, and seven peculiar mice who perhaps didn't either.

  “They're plasma,” O'Donovan repeated, “but how is it possible to grow hair on gas globs?”

  “I do some pretty tricky things in my laboratory,” George Drakos said.

  “But I'm right, am I not?” O'Donovan still demanded.

  “A little bit right, Harry,” Drakos said. “Yes, they're part plasma.”

  “One meaning, the mineral meaning of plasma,” said Barnaby Sheen, “is a variety of quartz, green and faintly translucent.”

  “That is one definition of life,” said Cris Benedetti, “the mineral definition: green and faintly translucent. Ah, your own complexion is a bit green these days, Drakos, like a boy who's swallowed his first cut of chewing tobacco. What's the matter, George? Have you swallowed more than you bit off? And where did the extra come from?”

  “You do look bad tonight, George,” Cris Benedetti said. “Are you?”

  “No. I feel fine now, though I did have a twinge an hour or so ago.”

  “I said you looked bad; I didn't say that you looked as if you felt bad,” Benedetti said rudely. “I wasn't referring to your state of health.” There was an embarrassed silence.

  The mice ran about the floor. They stopped and sat up. They mimicked, and they mimicked cruelly. There was something unnatural here.

  Austro was in a state of almost electric excitement and protest. He drew furiously in his drawing tablet. He drew thunderbolts and blasts and ball-lightning, and charged plasma globs like glowing and clinging swamp ghosts. He drew projections, and the aura of evil; he drew the electrical phenomenon known as hysteresis. He was partly unlettered, and not even accounted as human by all; but he did have those sunshine brains.

  “Austro is predicting a terrible thunderstorm almost immediately,” Barnaby interpreted.

  “So is the weather bureau,” said Drakos. “Austro probably heard the six o'clock report. So are our own ears predicting it. Austro is not so special, not one to be taken for an oracle. Tell me, when a man accomplishes something extraordinary (and I have accomplished something extraordinary in creating these living mice), why is everyone immediately jealous?”

  “I'm surely not jealous of you,” Cris said. “Harry isn't, Barney isn't, Laff isn't, Austro isn't (though he's afraid of your things): the two girls aren't jealous of you; they move in and out of realms that you can't touch.”

  “Well, someone is jealous,” Drakos insisted, and now he was looking as if he felt bad. Austro was drawing furiously in garish and frightening lines. Drakos came to look. We all came to look.

  “What does it say, Austro?” Drakos asked, but Austro only shivered.

  “It says that God is jealous,” Mary Mondo interpreted.

  One of the mice mimicked Loretta Sheen. It made sawdust dribble out of the corner of its mouth in her manner. It gave with spirit knocks, as she sometimes gave them. Loretta groaned in great agony. There was simultaneous blinding lightning and deafening thunder to the point of shaking and scorching the whole house. “Oh, God, don't!” George Drakos cried, exactly as he had cried earlier when one of his mice had exploded and he had suffered a slight heart twinge. I realized now, and I think that Austro realized it too, that Drakos was using “God” as a direct address and not as an exclamation.

  “There's an old folklore connection between rodents and thunderstorms,” Barnaby Sheen said informatively. “There are echoes of it in the Rat King: more in the orchestration than in the storyline, really. I believe the closer connection, though, is between mice and thunder. Were you aware of the connection, George, when you made the mice?”

  “Certainly, certainly. Oh, why is there this attempt to intimidate me and divert me from my work! I have put so much of myself into them! Why am I thwarted?”

  “One account, a Balkan or Thracian one, was that the mice in their millions nibbled on the toes of the mountains,” Barnaby continued. “The mountains, in certain seasons, were driven wild by this irritation, and they answered it by violent thunder.”

  “I am investigating and creating things by my legitimate lights,” Drakos was insisting. “I have created life: I am learning how it was done in the past and how it might be done better.”

  Oh, that thunder, that thunder!

  “You've not created life, man,” Barnaby said sharply but compassionately. “You have deceived yourself. You have indeed put yourself into it; you have projected life, your own, a little.”

  “My mice are alive, my mice are alive,” Drakos insisted. “There's no man else in the world who could have made such mice.”

  “I agree,” Barnaby said. “Ah, that one mimicks me devilishly. Someone else used to mimick me just like that; it was you, George. You were always a scatterbrain, will you have any wits left when this is finished with?”

  “Yes, I hope so, I think so. And the weather can't affect the plasma part of my constructions. Brookhaven has assured me of that.”

  “What does Brookhaven know about weather?” Barnaby asked. “They've never had any of it; not weather!”

  Barnaby was the only one not bothered by the mouse that mimicked hi
m. Myself, I went into a great tremble when it happened to me. I shook, and I felt a mockery that was shot through with contempt. George, it can never be the same between us again.

  Cris Benedetti crossed himself and mumbled a smiling prayer: “Lady of Salette, Light on the Mountain, protect us from unholy mice and pray for the mind of the mouse-maker!”

  Harry O'Donovan swore and rose to his feet. He stamped into burning embers the live mouse that mocked him, and he stamped the embers into nothingness. And Doctor Drakos groaned with apparent sharp pectoral pain.

  “No man else could have made such mice,” Barnaby said easily. “But, George, you put too much of yourself into them. It was dangerous. Ah well, they'll soon be gone. Then we'll see.”

  Austro howled in that way of his that made some persons doubt that he was really human. Mary Mondo rollicked like a rampant and embattled witch. The mice and their maker should have had more sense than to tackle Austro and Mary Mondo at the same time.

  For then it all broke loose.

  Ball lightning came down the chimney (Barnaby kept a real fireplace in that room, though it was not the season to have a fire laid in it.) Ball lightning came in the window cracks and in by the furnace registers. All the lights in the house went out, but they certainly weren't needed. Ball lightning appeared from nowhere, right in the middle of the room, and there was an incredible minute-long peal of thunder.

  “Ball lightning often plays in this room,” Barnaby remarked dryly. “It's a friend of the two girls.”

  Those lightning balls sought out the glowing, gas-plasma mice and devoured them every one. And, as each one was extinguished, George Drakos gave a hideous death scream.

  Then the lights of the house came on again. The thunder and lightning were finished with and were succeeded by a torrential downpour outside. Barnaby Sheen was checking the breathing and pulse of Drakos.

  “Should we get a doctor?” I asked inanely.

  “He is a doctor,” Barnaby said. “Why double the trouble? Besides, he'll be all right, though a little shaken.”

  “I was right, wasn't I?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “The mice were mere globs of gas-plasma, weren't they?”

  “Of course,” Barnaby said. “But he thought they were something more.”

  “The mice had life in them,” Drakos insisted in his delirious sleep.

  (“What is life?” Mary Mondo asked like Pilate.)

  “They had true life in them,” Drakos mumbled.

  “Yes, they did, George,” Barnaby said. “They had your life in them. Nobody else could have made them,” Barnaby was explaining to us then. “Nobody but this learned and superstitious man would have been able to project himself so strongly as to fool even himself. He'll be better now for having gotten the mice out of his brains.”

  “The thunder has nothing to do with it then?” Cris asked.

  “Oh, the thunder has everything to do with it,” Barnaby instructed. “The mice would have disintegrated in almost any storm; but we hadn't had a thunder storm for a week, and George made the mice less than a week ago. It was a really good show. Thank you, girls, and thank your lightning familiars. It was almost better than George deserved. And God wasn't jealous, Austro. You were mistaken there. He was amused.”

  Austro nodded that he understood that now. But once more he was drawing furiously in his drawing tablet. And the ball lightning had all disappeared from the room. No, not quite all. A pleasant little snake of that lightning was licking the ghost hands of Mary Mondo. They were in accord, and perhaps the lightning was her servitor. And, after all, she had asked the real Pilate question, and now she must wash her hands—with lightning.

  And then it was all over with?

  “What are you drawing, Austro?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “Are you having a go at the high adventure we have just witnessed?”

  Austro shook his head dubiously and continued to draw.

  “He's doing next week's ‘Adventures of Rocky McCrocky,’ ” Mary Mondo conveyed. “But he got an idea for it from this.”

  The last bit of ball lightning left Mary Mondo and went up the fireplace chimney. Now all the spooky part was finished. There was only the torrential downpour outside, and it would go on and on all night. You have to expect such violent storms when you live in Oklahoma.

  The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti

  Save me from the lion's mouth,

  And my lowness from the horns of the unicorns.

  —Psalms

  A battle grown disguised and dim,

  In heraldry foretold:

  The Lion had two heads on him;

  The Unicorn was polled.

  —Cantos Llantos, Clement Goldbeater

  Professor Cristoforo Benedetti made a lion. He made it a little better than he had intended. He hadn't meant to make a literal lion; only a literary lion. And he surely hadn't meant to make a two-headed lion.

  The lion was named Clement Goldbeater. He was born in the year 1890 which would make him a very old man now, and an impossibly old lion. He was born in Ireland, midway between the Dublin suburbs of Clontarf and Howth, on the north shore of the Liffey estuary. But this was all more than a quarter of a century before Cris Benedetti was born. How then had Cris made him?

  In tangled situations like this it is sometimes best to start, not at the beginning, but just before the end.

  “Clement Goldbeater has accepted our invitation to visit our city,” Cris Benedetti said. “He has also agreed to accept the sum we have proffered him to cover the expenses of the trip.”

  Yes, this was just before the end of it, as it concerned Cris.

  “Good,” said Barnaby Sheen. “Good. That's just what you wanted, isn't it, Cris? And it's just what the kids wanted. I think it's wonderful that you could interest so many of them in this. It keeps them comfortably in trouble and out of the way.”

  “You don't seem so pleased with it yourself, Cris,” Doctor George Drakos said (following a certain episode, Drakos himself had been a little bit sour for several months). “You haven't made away with the fund, have you?”

  “No, no, of course not,” Cris said. “The students' committee in charge of the fund has already cabled it to Goldbeater this morning, after receiving his wire of acceptance. Yes, I'm afraid they've already sent it.”

  “You're afraid they've sent it?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “And do you know when the famous Clement Goldbeater will arrive?”

  “Ah, tomorrow at noon by Braniff International, or else at one o'clock tomorrow by American.”

  “Don't you know which?” Barnaby Sheen asked. “What does his wire say?”

  “Ah, there were two wires. One was sent from Clontarf and the other one from Howth, towns four miles apart. And each gave a different airline and time of arrival.” Cris was quite upset about something.

  “Well, Goldbeater is an old man by now,” Drakos said. “Maybe a little muddled, and he probably changed his mind. You can meet both arrivals, if necessary, since they're only an hour apart.”

  “Yes,” Cris said, and he was looking at something a thousand or a million miles away. “Yes,” he said, but things weren't all right with him. He rose to his feet in a sort of daze, then he suddenly burst out in white fury:

  “All right! Who's the wise guy? It has to be one of you four. Dammit, the joke has gone too far! The committee really sent the invitation, before I knew about it, and I couldn't prevent it. As a matter of fact, I thought it was kind of funny — but then there was the answer, the two answers, really. And then that committee of kids actually sent the money.”

  “But that's what it was for,” Barnaby said blandly. “The kids worked hard at collecting it. I contributed to it myself. Wasn't that what it was for?”

  “Hanging Judas, no!” Cris shouted. “All right, for the last time, who is the joker? I know none of the kids had tumbled. Who pulled this? George? Harry? Barney? Laff?”

  We all looked at him blankly. We had never seen Cris so stirred up. He swore violently, and he did
that seldom. He stomped as though he'd go clear through the floor. He barged out of the room and slammed the door behind him hard enough to shake the whole building.

  Barnaby whistled a couple of low notes.

  “Now, what was that all about?” Harry O'Donovan asked, mighty puzzled.

  None of us knew. It was all very unlike Cris.

  Well, how had Cris Benedetti become involved with the great Clement Goldbeater? Cris taught literature and esoterica at the university, and he had a finger in a quarterly magazine there, the Unicorn. It was a student magazine, but Benedetti was a sort of faculty sponsor for it. And it was Benedetti who, more and more, turned the Unicorn toward commentary on the works and life of that wonderful Irishman Clement Goldbeater, the literary lion par excellence. Naturally you have heard of Goldbeater; and you have some idea of his work, whether you have actually read any of it or not. He is quite an in author with young people who wouldn't touch a straight with a canal pole. And yet he is not a deviant or a crookie either. There was no reason why he shouldn't have caught on in college circles in this country.

  There are maybe two dozen of the little magazines devoted, in whole or in part, to the life and the work and the legends of old Clement Goldbeater; and the little magazines are in fruitful communication with one another. It was better, anyhow, for the young people to be interested in Goldbeater than in his shorter-lived contemporary Joyce, who had turned his back on Church and Country in spite of his fine education by the Jesuits at Clongowes College and Belvedere, and University College in Dublin. And Goldbeater had a clarity that Joyce lacked. Besides, there had to be someone for the intelligent students to get interested it. “Even a nothing would be better than Joyce,” Cris Benedetti had once said.