The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “If you go, Willy Jones, you will be gone for many years,” said the dark Dutch Margaret.

  “Only one at the most,” said Willy.

  “And I will be in my grave when you return.”

  “There is no grave could hold you, Margaret.”

  “Aye, it may not hold me. I’ll out of it and confront you when you come back. But it gives one a weirdness to be in the grave for only a few years. I will not own you for my husband when you do come back. You will not even know whether I am the same woman that you left, and you will never know. I am a volcano, but I banked my hatred and accepted you. But if you leave me now, I will erupt against you forever.”

  But Willy Jones went away in the Flying Serpent and left her there. He took two of the golems with him, and he left one of them to serve Margaret.

  What with one thing and another, he was gone for twenty years.

  “We were off that morning to satisfy our curiosity about the Big House,” the fellow said, “since we would soon be leaving the island forever. You know about the Big House. You were on Willy Jones Island too. The Jilolos call it the House of Skulls, and the Malaya and Indonesia people will not speak about it at all.

  “We approached the Big House that was not more than a mile beyond our perimeter. It was a large decayed building, but we had the sudden feeling that it was still inhabited. And it wasn’t supposed to be. Then we saw the two of them, the mother and the daughter. We shook like we were unhinged, and we ran to them.

  “They were so alike that we couldn’t tell them apart. Their eyes twinkled like the compounded eyes of a creature that eats her mate. Noonday lightning! How it struck! Arms that swept you off your feet and set your bones to singing! We knew that they were not twins, or even sisters. We knew that they were mother and daughter.

  “I have never encountered anything like them in my life. Whatever happened to the other two soldiers, I know it was worth it to them. Whatever happened to them? I don’t care if they kill me! They were perfect, those two women, even though we weren’t with them for five minutes.”

  “Then it was the Badger.”

  * * *

  No, no, no! That’s the wrong story again. That’s not the story Galli told me. That’s part of the story the fellow told me in the bar. His confused account keeps interposing itself, possibly because I knew him slightly when we were both soldiers on Willy Jones Island. But he had turned queer, that fellow. “It is the earthquake belt around the world that is the same as the legend belt,” he said, “and the Middleworld underlies it all. That’s why I was able to walk it.” It was as though he had been keel-hauled around the world. I hadn’t known him well. I didn’t know which of the three soldiers he was. I had heard that they were all dead.

  * * *

  “Imagine about conspiracy stuff now,” said Galli. “Imagine about a whispering in a pinang grove before the sun is up.”

  “How can I spook that man?” Margaret asked her golem shortly after she had been abandoned by Willy Jones. “But I am afraid that a mechanical man would not be able to tell me how.”

  “I will tell you a secret,” said the golem. “We are not mechanical men. Certain wise and secret men believe that they made us, but they are wrong. They have made houses for us to live in, no more. There are many of us unhoused spirits, and we take shelter in such bodies as we find. That being so, I know something of the houseless spirits in the depth of every man. I will select one of them, and we will spook Willy Jones with that one. Willy is a Welshman who has become by adoption a Dutchman and a Malayan and a Jilolo man. There is one old spook running through them all. I will call it up when it is time.”

  “I forgot to tell you that the name of Margaret’s golem was Meshuarat,” Galli said.

  * * *

  After twenty years of high piracy, Willy Jones returned to his island. And there was the dark Dutch Margaret standing as young and as smoldering as when he had left. He leaped to embrace her, and found himself stretched flat on the sand by a thunderous blow. He was not surprised, and was not (as he had at first believed) decapitated. Almost he was not displeased. Margaret had often been violent in her love-making.

  “But I will have you,” Willy swore as he tasted his own blood delightfully in his mouth and pulled himself up onto hands and knees. “I have ridden the Margaret-tiger before.”

  “You will never ride my loins, you lecherous old goat,” she rang at him like a bell. “I am not your wife. I am the daughter that you left here in the womb. My mother is in the grave on the hill.”

  Willy Jones sorrowed terribly, and he went to the grave.

  But Margaret came up behind him and drove in the cruel lance. “I told you that when you came back you would not know whether I was the same woman you had left,” she chortled, “and you will never know!”

  “Margaret, you are my wife!” Willy Jones gasped.

  “Am I of an age to be your wife?” she jibed. “Regard me! Of what age do I seem to be?”

  “Of the same age as when I left,” said Willy. “But perhaps you have eaten of the besok nut and so do not change your appearance.”

  * * *

  “I forgot to tell you about the besok nut,” said Galli. “If one eats the nut of the besok tree, the tomorrow tree, the time tree, that one will not age. But this is always accompanied by a chilling unhappiness.”

  * * *

  “Perhaps I did eat it,” said Margaret. “But that is my grave there, and I have lain in it many years, as has she. You are prohibited from touching either of us.”

  “Are you the mother or the daughter, Witch?”

  “You will never know. You will see us both, for we take turns, and you will not be able to tell us apart. See, the grave is always disturbed, and the entrance is easy.”

  “I’ll have the truth from the golem who served you while I was gone,” Willy swore.

  * * *

  “A golem is an artificial man,” said Galli. “They were made by the Jews and Arabs in earlier ages, but now they say that they have forgotten how to make them. I wonder that you do not make them yourselves, for you have advanced techniques. You tell them and you picture them in your own heroic literature,” (he patted the comic books under his arm), “but you do not have them in actuality.”

  * * *

  The golem told Willy Jones that the affair was thus:

  A daughter had indeed been born to Margaret. She had slain the child, and had then put it into the middle state. Thereafter, the child stayed sometimes in the grave, and sometimes she walked about the island. And she grew as any other child would. And Margaret herself had eaten the besok nut so that she would not age.

  When mother and daughter had come to the same age and appearance (and it had only been the very day before that, the day before Willy Jones had returned), then the daughter had also eaten the besok nut. Now the mother and daughter would be of the same appearance forever, and not even a golem could tell them apart.

  Willy Jones came furiously onto the woman again.

  “I was sure before, and now I am even more sure that you are Margaret,” he said, “and now I will have you in my fury.”

  “We both be Margaret,” she said. “But I am not the same one you apprehended earlier. We changed places while you talked to the golem. And we are both in the middle state, and we have both been dead in the grave, and you dare not touch either of us ever. A Welshman turned Dutchman turned Malayan turned Jilolo has this spook in him four times over. The Devil himself will not touch his own daughters.”

  The last part was a lie, but Willy Jones did not know it.

  “We be in confrontation forever then,” said Willy Jones. “I will make my Big House a house of hate and a house of skulls. You cannot escape from its environs, neither can any visitor. I’ll kill them all and pile their skulls up high for a monument to you.”

  Then Willy Jones ate a piece of bitter bark from the pokok ru.

  * * *

  “I forgot to tell you that when a person eats bark from
the pokok ru in anger, his anger will sustain itself forever,” Galli said.

  * * *

  “If it’s visitors you want for the killing, I and my mother-daughter will provide them in numbers,” said Margaret. “Men will be attracted here forever with no heed for danger. I will eat a telor tuntong of the special sort, and all men will be attracted here even to their death.”

  * * *

  “I forgot to tell you that if a female eats the telor tuntong of the special sort, all males will be attracted irresistibly,” Galli said. “Ah, you smile as though you doubted that the besok nut or the bark of the pokok ru or the telor tuntong of the special sort could have such effects. But yourselves come now to wonder drugs like little boys. In these islands they are all around you and you too blind to see. It is no ignorant man who tells you this. I have read the booklets from your orderly tents: Physics without Mathematics, Cosmology without Chaos, Psychology without Brains. It is myself, the master of all sciences and disciplines, who tells you that these things do work. Besides hard science, there is soft science, the science of shadow areas and story areas, and you do wrong to deny it the name.

  “I believe that you yourself can see what had to follow, from the dispositions of the Margarets and Willy Jones,” Galli said. “For hundreds of years, men from everywhere came to the Margarets who could not be resisted. And Willy Jones killed them all and piled up their skulls. It became, in a very savage form, what you call the Badger Game.”

  Galli was a good-natured and unhandsome brown man. He worked around the army base as translator, knowing (besides his native Jilolo), the Malayan, Dutch, Japanese, and English languages, and (as every storyteller must) the Arabian. His English was whatever he wanted it to be, and he burlesqued the speech of the American soldiers to the Australians, and the Australians to the Americans.

  * * *

  “Man, it was a Badger!” the man said. “It was a grizzle-haired, glare-eyed, flat-headed, underslung, pigeon-toed, hook-clawed, clam-jawed Badger from Badger Game Corner! They moved in on us, but I’d take my chances and go back and do it again. We hadn’t frolicked with the girls for five minutes when the things moved in on us. I say things; I don’t know whether they were men or not. If they were, they were the coldest three men I ever saw. But they were directed by a man who made up for it. He was livid, hopping with hatred. They moved in on us and began to kill us.”

  * * *

  No, No, that isn’t part of Galli’s story. That’s some more of the ramble that the fellow told me in the bar the other evening.

  * * *

  It has been three hundred years, and the confrontation continues. There are skulls of Malayan men and Jilolo men piled up there; and of Dutchmen and Englishmen and of Portuguese men; of Chinamen and Filipinos and Goanese; of Japanese, and of the men from the United States and Australia.

  “Only this morning there were added the skulls of two United States men, and there should have been three of them,” Galli said. “They came, as have all others, because the Margarets ate the telor tuntong of the special sort. It is a fact that with a species (whether insect or shelled thing or other) where the male gives his life in the mating, the female has always eaten of this telor tuntong. You’d never talk the males into such a thing with words alone.”

  “How is it that there were only two United States skulls this morning, and there should have been three?” I asked him.

  “One of them escaped,” Galli explained, “and that was unusual. He fell through a hole to the middle land, that third one of them. But the way back from the middle land to one’s own country is long, and it must be walked. It takes at least twenty years, wherever one’s own country is; and the joker thing about it is that the man is always wanting to go the other way.

  “That is the end of the story, but let it not end abruptly,” Galli said. “Sing the song Chari Yang Besar if you remember the tune. Imagine about flute notes lingering in the air.”

  * * *

  “I was lost for more than twenty years, and that’s a fact,” the man said. He gripped the bar with the most knotted hands I ever saw, and laughed with a merriment so deep that it seemed to be his bones laughing. “Did you know that there’s another world just under this world, or just around the corner from it? I walked all day every day. I was in a torture, for I suspected that I was going the wrong way, and I could go no other. And I sometimes suspected that the middle land through which I traveled was in my head, a derangement from the terrible blow that one of the things gave me as he came in to kill me. And yet there are correlates that convince me it was a real place.

  “I wasn’t trying to get home. I was trying to get back to those girls even if it killed me. There weren’t any colors in that world, all gray tones, but otherwise it wasn’t much different from this one. There were even bars there a little like the Red Rooster.”

  (I forgot to tell you that it was in the Red Rooster bar that the soldier from the islands told me the parts of his story.)

  * * *

  “I’ve got to get back there. I think I know the way now, and how to get on the road. I have to travel it through the middle land, you know. They’ll kill me, of course, and I won’t even get to jazz those girls for five minutes; but I’ve got to get back there. Going to take me another twenty years, though. That sure is a weary walk.”

  * * *

  I never knew him well, and I don’t remember which of the names was his. But a man from Orange, Texas, or from Gobey, Tennessee, or from Boston, in one of the eastern states, is on a twenty-year walk through the middle land to find the dark Dutch Margarets, and death.

  I looked up a couple of things yesterday. There was Revel’s recent work on Moluccan narcotics. He tells of the besok nut which does seem to inhibit aging but which induces internal distraction and hypersexuality. There is the pokok ru whose bitter bark impels even the most gentle to violent anger. There is one sort of telor tuntong which sets up an inexplicable aura about a woman eater and draws all males overpoweringly to her. There is much research still to be done on these narcotics, Revel writes.

  I dipped into Mandrago’s Earthquake and Legend and the Middle World. He states that the earthquake belt around the world is also the legend belt, and that one of the underlying legends is of the underlying land, the middle world below this world where one can wander lost forever.

  And I went down to the Red Rooster again the next evening, which was last evening, to ask about the man and to see if he could give me a more cogent account. For I had re-remembered Galli’s old story in the meanwhile.

  “No, he was just passing through town,” the barman said. “Had a long trip ahead of him. He was sort of a nutty fellow. I’ve often said the same thing about you.”

  * * *

  That is the end of the other story, but let it not end suddenly. Pause for a moment to savor it. Sing the song Itu Masa Dahulu if you remember the tune.

  Imagine about flute notes falling. I don’t have a flute, but a story should end so.

  Seven-Day Terror

  Introduction by Connie Willis

  “Seven-Day Terror” was not my first introduction to R. A. Lafferty—that was “Slow Tuesday Night”—but it instantly became my favorite Lafferty story and remains so to this day, in spite of intense competition from “The Hole on the Corner,” the aforementioned “Slow Tuesday Night,” and “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne.”

  “Seven-Day Terror” is part of the proud tradition of science fiction stories like C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner’s “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and Ray Bradbury’s “Zero Hour” which are about children and how they see the world entirely differently from adults, a way of seeing that grants them incomprehensible and sometimes dangerous powers. But Lafferty’s children stand alone in their audacity, precociousness, and ruthless common sense.

  And wisdom: Clarissa’s absolutely right about the dangers of letting scientific discoveries like the disappearer fall into irresponsible hands, i.e., those of adults.

  And even t
hough this story is as lighthearted as Lafferty comes, his wry awareness of how the world works is still present. Officer Comstock, for instance, has a knack for “getting near the heart of dark matters. This is why he was walking a beat out in the boondocks instead of sitting in a chair downtown.”

  But mostly Lafferty’s just having fun here, and so are we. The Willoughby kids, from Clarence down to three-year-old Cyril, are charmingly incorrigible, the dialogue’s hilarious, and we get to meet the “esteemed” scientist Willy McGilly and his pals (who pop up in several Lafferty stories). Plus, there are oatmeal boxes, gold watches, floods, fireplugs, cats, local officials, beer cans, and an ending you should have seen coming but didn’t. In other words, Lafferty at his best. So sit back and prepare to have a really good time.

  Seven-Day Terror

  “Is there anything you want to make disappear?” Clarence Willoughby asked his mother.

  “A sink full of dishes is all I can think of. How will you do it?”

  “I just built a disappearer. All you do is cut the other end out of a beer can. Then you take two pieces of red cardboard with peepholes in the middle and fit them in the ends. You look through the peepholes and blink. Whatever you look at will disappear.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I don’t know if I can make them come back. We’d better try it on something else. Dishes cost money.”

  As always, Myra Willoughby had to admire the wisdom of her nine-year-old son. She would not have had such foresight herself. He always did. “You can try it on Blanche Manners’s cat outside there. Nobody will care if it disappears except Blanche Manners.”