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

by R. A. Lafferty

  But Chalky came to them instead. Oh, that can hardly be believed! My God! He came striding toward the crowd of them, rapidly and openly and purposively. He was clothed and he was wearing shoes. He was not bare-hair ape as he had been in the pictures taken by the talented infrared cameras. He came striding with apparent anger and determination up from the lower level of the bogs and quicksands.

  Silas Stone shot Chalky face-on with a shotgun. But it was loaded with light-shot, with bird-shot. Chalky was driven back two steps by the blast. His face and light shirt were quickly patterned and crosshatched with lines and gouts of blood.

  “No, Jake, you have it wrong!” he called to Silas, shook his head and came on again, striding upward in a slippery place. “Monster!” Chalky called out and pointed into the middle of the group. “Murdering monster!” Who was Chalky accusing? This was all backwards.

  Silas Stone shot Chalky, at closer range now, with a second shotgun blast. And Chalky staggered and put his hands over his face. Then Malcom Schermerhorn shot him in the head with a carbine. Chalky slipped and fell grotesquely to the ground that was not solid ground. He slipped down a short slope and then down a steeper slope. He slid into the bog. He sank. No one reached a hand or branch to his bleeding and unconscious form. Within fifteen seconds he had disappeared completely into the quicksand bog, one of the infamous bottomless bogs.

  “Oh, God have mercy on his soul!” cried Clara Cottonhead the bereaved mother.

  There was total silence for another fifteen seconds. Then one of the hounds pointed his nose to the sky and mourned for Chalky with a slow and dismal howl.

  “That is the end of the Chalky Bottoms Monster,” one man said.

  “That is not the end of him,” another man contradicted. “We will have him out of there, and we will tear him apart with tractors. There is a River and Road Department Caterpillar-Track Grapple not half a mile from here.”

  “We know where it is,” several of the men said. And they went to get the machine with which they would possibly be able to reach down into the quicksand bog and grapple the body of Chalky out of it.

  Ten minutes went by, or maybe twenty. It seemed three hours, but the sun didn't indicate anything like that. Then there was a sort of signal from the depths of the bog. The dogs began to bristle and whimper. And so, oddly, did Malcom Schermerhorn.

  “He's rising out of there!” Malcom rattled in a jittery voice. “He's going to rise right out of the bog. I tell you, he's coming out of it.”

  “You are nervous, boy,” said a man. “So are we all.”

  Well, there was a stirring in the bog. The bullfrogs whimpered like puppies and flopped out of there. They were ashen white instead of black-green, or so it seemed. The blacksnakes squeaked like mice and came out of the bog in terror. The crows were making an intolerable disturbance.

  “They carry on like that every time somebody rises from the dead here,” Aunt Ronda Harvestman said. “They think it's wrong.”

  The surface of the bog began to move itself and to tumble like rapids or shoal water. “It's the great beaver,” someone said. “If he comes up, it means that one of us here will die this morning.”

  “The great beaver is silly superstition,” another of them muttered. “It's the ghost named ko-el, that's who it is. He is a dead man who comes back.”

  “It's the Chosky Bottoms Monster himself,” several said.

  “It's Chalky coming up to kill me,” Malcom gibbered.

  But a man laughed. “It's only an in-shore current from the river,” that man said. “It flutters and bubbles and heaves the bog every morning. I've seen it happen before. The bog is always a bit windy and noisy. But nobody, alive or dead, is going to rise out of it.”

  Then there was a big surging and rising out of the sand-choked water. Yes, it was a dead man rising out of his slimy grave. Or it was something even more fearful. The dead-man-ghost-monster surged once, twice, three times with spuming splashing, found a firm underfoot, and staggered out of the bog onto firmer ground, shedding cataracts of mud and sand and water.

  This is the place where the entrails melt. It is the place where the heart faints and stutters. It is where the human resolve is eroded completely by fear.

  It

  is

  a

  nightmare

  eating

  you

  up.

  The thing that came out of the bog was frighteningly unreal, and probably carried a freight of a hundred pounds of mud and sand and slime. But it began to shed them. There was the suspicion that it was invisible under its coating of sand and slime and blood. And it sparkled and glittered in the way that is the mark of a ghost or a risen man. But it was Chalky for certain, as it had not been certain that it was Chalky in the photographs, as it had not even been quite certain that it was Chalky who had strode toward them and been shot by them.

  The dogs lay flat on their bellies like snakes, and their bones rattled noisily as they shook in fright.

  “He's come out of the grave to kill me and to tear my soul to pieces,” Malcom Schermerhorn cried in a clattering voice. “He knows that I killed them.” Then Malcom groaned and railed and fell down as if dead. And he was dead, either immediately or in a very few seconds.

  And most of the others there were half dead with fright. This was surely a dead monster or a dead man arisen, the more terrible because he was familiar to them. He was wrapped in mud and in shining glory at the same time.

  10

  “It's the mica,” Crescent Harvestman said matter-of-factly. “There's always been specks and little sheets of mica in the quicksand slime, and it gathers in pockets. Chalky plowed through a pocket of it when he roused up, and now it sparkles and dazzles on him in the morning light.” “He only creased my head with the carbine shot,” Chalky said in a choked and muddy voice as he cleared the sand and mud from around his eyes, “but it knocked me out, and I'd have drowned and died in the slough if he hadn't been taunting me in my head. ‘Die, monster, die!’ was what he was chanting in his mind and in mine, and after a while I woke up. ‘I will not die,’ I said, and I stirred myself. We do not drown in such half-hours as I was down there. Malcom was unstable. He was weird, like a butterfly with fangs. But he could communicate outside the lines. Yes, I killed him or made him kill himself. I felt it in my head when he killed the children and I came to kill him then. He died of fright when I rose out of the slough again, but his taunting had roused me and saved my life.”

  “Who?” someone asked.

  “Malcom,” Chalky said. “He's dead. I felt him go in my head. That mouth-to-mouth business is useless on him.”

  “Ape-boy, you are the Monster of the Chosky Bottoms and the killer of the children,” said a deputy sheriff named Al Moss. “You will die torn to pieces for that.”

  “No, I don't think so,” said Chalky, who was still bleeding from quite a few streams and rivulets. “Malcom was the Monster of the Chosky Bottoms and the killer of the children. He was a strange animal. And to tear anyone to pieces, deputy, with tractors or otherwise, strikes me as very bad taste.”

  Almost all of them there felt that the situation had changed completely. Somehow there had been a reversal of roles. They found themselves empty of their recent deep hatred for Chalky.

  “This person has experienced both death and resurrection in a very short time,” said a webby-brained man named Reverend Joseph Handsome who had a little crossroads church. “Do not touch him. He has in him the fire of God or the fire of the Devil. Either one will burn us if we touch him. The judgment of him is taken away from us and reserved in another place. He is resurrected.”

  Why, Chalky was two parts off the hook already!

  “His nest is in the alder-willows two hundred yards back from here,” Crescent said.

  “Whose nest?”

  “Malcom's nest,” she said. “He's been coming down to the Bottoms often. He could never spy Aunt Ronda's cabin, but I spied his nest from the time he began to bring things into
it. Some of the things, I see only now what they were for.”

  “Malcom had been frustrated ever since Chalky came to school,” Principal Franklyn said. “And he had a slanted view of himself since that clinical anthropologist found so many anomalies in him: inhumanly fast heartbeat, more like a shrew's than a man's (he was born to die of hypertension and shock, but he could think mighty sharp while he lived); pattern tests showing ‘total amorality,’ but not apparently freedom from worry about that amorality; unorthodox chromosome count that might mean nothing at all or might mean criminal insanity. It meant criminal insanity in his case. ‘I am a monster, I am a monster,’ he said over and over at the Halloween Ball and Bonfire. He really did want to change places with Chalky, to trade the monster inside for the monster outside. Then he wanted Chalky to be found guilty of all the evil things that were breaking out of him. Why do I see it all too late?”

  “How did he get the two little Cottonhead children to come down here with him?” Chalky asked. “I kept saying in my head, ‘Don't go, don't go!’ but they went.”

  “Oh, they were cousins of his,” Crescent said. “He often took them for walks. Time of day meant nothing to them, and small children are often awake and about earlier than anyone else in a household. Chalky, how old are you?”

  “Nine, I think, but I'm into manhood. We live faster than you do, and not so long.”

  “How long?”

  “Thirty is very old for us.”

  “Yes, I thought you were impossibly young. And in a very few years you would be an impossibly young old man, wouldn't you, Chalky?”

  “You are so much bigger now, Chalky,” Coach Goodbeaver said.

  “Oh, I've grown about eight inches since I left school at the first of the year. But I should have my full growth before this year is over.”

  They came to the “nest” of Malcom Schermerhorn. Oh, there was the expensive full-ape suit with heavy black fur and the zipper up the back that Malcom had bought from the novelty house. There was the rubberoid Chalky face that he had made with the aid of the art student Maudie Stone. There was the mallet with which he killed friendly dogs and kid goats and children. There was the heavy-duty fence-stretcher with its ropes and chains and wire grips and double- and triple-wheel pulley blocks.

  “Could it have?” Principal Franklyn asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Coach Goodbeaver said. “You can get several thousand pounds of pull with one of those. It will pull a quarter-mile length of barbed wire clear of the ground. It would easily pull a dog apart, or a kid goat, or the children. That is what chewed up the two posts it was anchored to in the corral of the barnyard where the kid goat was killed. There are probably a couple of sets of trees around here that are chewed up a little bit too. I should have known from those two posts what happened.”

  “But that would take a little time to operate,” Crescent said, “even if the victims were already dead. But it was reported that the hound gave a death howl that was cut off in the middle, and the men ran there almost immediately and found it dismembered.”

  “I was one of the men who ran there, but Malcom was there before me,” Jonathan Stone said. “But, Crescent, you remember Malcom's ‘dying dog howl.’ He used to do it at rallies and lots of things. He would even do it in football games to rouse up the team when it seemed to be dying on him. I think he had already finished tearing the dead hound apart, and had stashed his fence-stretcher again before he gave that howl. And Malcom wrote all the early stories about it for the press, you know.”

  There were cameras in the “nest” too. There was a little cylinder of methane gas that might have been used to bubble through swamp water to create long-hovering glows of swamp fire. The ape-suit soaked in such methane-water would probably glow in the dark and create a Saturday Night Specter. And it would give an illuminated sort of photo. There were other things there.

  “I guess it is tied to Malcom,” deputy sheriff Al Moss said. “But, Chalky, to tell the truth I had my heart set on tearing you apart as the monster.”

  “Why deny yourself?” Chalky asked. “The Monster Malcom still lies yonder. The two tractors stand ready. Hey, that would be fun!”

  “Chalky!” Aunt Ronda Harvestman cried. “You are as amoral as was dead Malcom!”

  But Chalky just grinned a big grin. The Slew-Foot Quick-Louts have their own humor.

  “What will you do now, Crescent?” Principal Franklyn asked her.

  “Go home again. Maybe get a summer job. I've caught up on my thinking.”

  “What will you do now, Chalky?” Coach Goodbeaver asked him.

  “Start out south. I can jog a hundred miles a day, you know. And NFL practice starts within five weeks. I'll talk to the Dallas Cowboys first. If they don't see the picture, I'll try the New Orleans Saints. If they can't see me either, though that's hard to believe, I'll try the Miami Dolphins. Surely somebody will have a place for a boy of my ability.”

  “Surely somebody will,” Charley Goodbeaver said.

  Snake in His Bosom

  Strong-housed from the gruesome

  From wolves and from boars:

  But the Snake in his Bosom

  Eats Hinges and Doors

  —Sean Liffey, The Death of MacDearmod

  “I have never seen you so jittery and jumpy, Emil,” Sarpa Fuerst said with that slurred sharpness in her voice. “Are you frightened of something?”

  “Frightened, no. Jittery, yes. I'm jumping with delight, Sarpa. Tonight I am playing a game with an expert. I call it ‘The Hunter-and-the-Hunted Game’. And sometimes I call it the ‘Break-in or Lock-Out Game’! I believe that he is the number two-man in the world at this particular game. And I am number-one. We play on my own board, largely by my own rules, and we play for extraordinary stakes.”

  Emil Fuerst was like a mastiff which is described as a ‘giant smooth-coated dog of a very old breed’. He was giant and powerful in body and head and jaw; he was smooth; and he was of the oldest aristocracy around.

  “Really? What are the stakes, Emil?” Sarpa asked him.

  “My life against his,” Emil Fuerst said, and he rubbed his hands together in a sort of electric delight. “And the stakes will be paid. Once he penetrates the outer ring, he will not be able to withdraw. Nor will I be able to withdraw from the game even if I should want to.”

  “You interest me, Emil. You don't do that as often as you used to, you know. There are sparks when you rub your hands together like that.”

  “Yes. With high-intensity persons such as myself that sometimes happens.”

  Emil was in fencing togs of his own design, purple and red, skin-tight, shimmering with small, light speckles or scales or point-turning armor. But everybody looks a little jittery in fencing togs, always.

  “When does the game start, Emil?” Sarpa asked.

  “Oh, I believe it started about thirty seconds ago. I feel him. He's coming. I'm delighted.”

  “Your hands are shaking with something other than delight, Emil. Is it not fear?”

  “No, no, it's delight, or whatever is even richer than delight. A touch of fear, yes, but only a touch. It would be bland with no fear at all.”

  “Who is it?” Sarpa asked. “Who plays ‘break-in’ to your ‘lock-out’?”

  “Gatto,” Emil answered. “The Cat-Burglar or Cat-Ghost.”

  “Oh. Will you be able to keep him out?”

  “I think so. But just a little of the delight is lost if I do. What if he wins every trick except the last one? What if he does get in? That's more interesting than that he should die pinned down on the grounds somewhere. Oh, I half pray that he will get in, somehow, weirdly, in spite of me. And then either he or I can die in slippery blood in the grand finale. Could that be topped for joy, Sarpa?”

  “Is that joy? I might lose my man to death in that deal.”

  “No. You're assured of a man, Sarpa. As a codicil to the wager, the winner gets you also.”

  “Oh, as a sort of afterthought?”

  “
No. As an intrinsic part of the game. Gatto wants you very much. So do I.”

  “And what do I want, Emil?”

  “You want the one who is the best man in the world at this strong game, at every strong game. He might, though, be the best man in the world at several other games, but not at this one. Oh, he's started. He's a spotch on the video screen now, and there are three shadows with him. He has come.”

  “I don't see any spotch on the video screen, Emil?”

  “Don't you really, Sarpa? How odd.”

  Emil Fuerst was the owner of a firm that did business under the name of ‘Safety Fuerst Devices and Installations Enterprises’. Under the motto ‘They Can't Get In’ he sold the most sophisticated line of burglar-proofing in the world. Emil, with a junior partner named Benedict Kingfisher, made and sold everything from free-bolt locks to total-fitness homes with all-coverage open-and-closed-circuit-burglar-alarms, video-screen monitors, amplified audio pick-up, radio-telephone blue-line systems, infra-red personnel sensors, and hot-beam controls. For a price, a client could have a house impervious to all assault. But the fortress-house of Emil Fuerst himself was beyond all price.

  ‘A goldfish couldn't get into it, and goldfish have tried’ was one of Emil's private mottos. The house was solid steel with a sheathing of cross-linked concrete-stucco that was tough rubber and steel welded together. Bolts of ten centimeter diameter traversed all doors completely, and the unlocking of them was an intricate decoding process. The house of Emil Fuerst and his wife Sarpa was the most safe strong-house in the world.

  Sh-klaup… sh-klaup… sh-klaup

  “That's the sound of heavy footsteps on old wooden passageways,” Emil said with his glance darting all around in a sort of amused apprehension. “It's the classical ‘slurred step’. Both ghosts and zombies make this slurred sound, as do also persons who have had strokes. This is the foot-dragging sound of those who are dead in at least some detail. It is caused by the destruction of the tendon—”