The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  Buford Strange was already at the North Paragon, and with him were Adrian Montaigne and Vincent Rue.

  “I have already ordered for ourselves and for yourself, Christopher,” Buford said. “It is sheldrake, and I hope that you like it. They will not prepare it for fewer than four persons. ‘We can’t go around killing quarter ducks,’ they say.”

  “That is all right,” Christopher said meekly. He glanced at the other three nervously. There was surely something familiar about them all.

  Great blue mountain thunder! Why shouldn’t there be! He had worked with these men daily for several years. But, no, no, his edgy mind told him that they were familiar in some other and more subtle way. He glanced at the paper which he had taken from the corner slot outside. Something like quick flame ran across the top of it and was gone too quickly to verify. But was it possible that the flame had said “You want a date, honey? You phone—” Of course it was not possible. Clearly, at the top of the paper it was printed A DAY IN MAY. Clearly? Was that clear enough for a date?

  “What date is this?” Christopher asked the three of them.

  “May the eighth, of course,” Adrian answered him. “You’ve got today’s Journal in your hand and still you ask?”

  Well now it was printed clearly there, May 8, and there was no nonsense about “a day in May”; still less was there anything like “You want a date, honey?”

  Some wild-looking children burst into the North Paragon Breakfast Club.

  “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” they cried at the four gentlemen there. “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” The children buffeted the four men a bit, did other extravagant things that are since forgotten, and then they went out of the Breakfast Club again: or at least they disappeared; they were no longer there.

  “Why should they have done that?” Adrian asked, puzzled. “Why should they have called us that, and done the other things?”

  “Why should who have called us what?” Vincent asked, even more puzzled.

  “I don’t know,” Adrian said dryly. “It seemed that someone was here and said or did something.”

  “You’re witless, Adrian,” Vincent chided. “Nobody was here.”

  “Straw-Man,” Christopher Foxx said softly. “I remember the word now and I couldn’t remember it before. I woke up this morning trying to remember it. It seemed to be the key to a dream that was slipping away in spite of my trying to hang on to it. I have the key word now, but it fits nothing. The dream is gone forever.”

  “We will come back to this subject later in our discussions,” Buford Strange said. “I believe that your word ‘Straw-Man,’ Christopher, is a part of the underlay, or perhaps of the overlay, that pertains to our world and our study. There is a good chance that certain children, or perhaps dwarfs or gnomes, entered here several moments ago. Did any of you notice them?”

  “No,” said Vincent Rue.

  “No one entered,” said Adrian Montaigne.

  “No. I didn’t see anyone,” said Christopher Foxx.

  “Yet I believe that a group did come in,” Buford Strange continued suavely. “It was a group unusual enough to be noticed. Then why didn’t we notice it? Or why did we forget, within a short moment, that we had seen it at all? I believe it was because the group was in a different sort of day. I am nearly sure that it is a group that lives in either St. Martin’s Summer or in the Kingfisher Days. Ah, here is the sheldrake ready with all the trimmings! Drool and be happy. We shall never know such moment again.”

  It was a momentous fowl, no question of that. It was good, it was rich, it was overflowing with juice. It was peer of the fowl that are found in the land named St. Succulentus’s Springtime. (What? What? There is a land named that?)

  The four noble men (they were ennobled by the circumstance) fell to eating with what, in days of another sort, might almost be called gusto. It was a royal bird and was basted with that concoction of burst fruits and crushed nuts and peppers and ciders and holy oils and reindeer butter that is called—(wait a bit)—

  “Do you know that the sheldrake is really a mysterious creature?” Buford Strange asked as he ate noisily (nobody eats such royal fare in quiet). Buford acted as if he knew a secret.

  “It is not a mysterious creature at all,” Adrian countered (he knew it was, though). “It is only the common European duck.”

  “It is not only the common European duck,” Buford said strongly. “In other days it may be quite uncommon.”

  “What are you saying, Buford?” Vincent Rue asked him. “In what other days?”

  “Oh, I believe, possibly, in what the Dutch call Kraanzomer, Crane-Summer. Are we agreed that the other days, the days out of count, are topic rather than temporal?”

  “We are not even agreed that there are days out of count,” Christopher objected.

  “Drakes’ teeth, by the way, while rare, are not unknown,” Adrian Montaigne popped the statement out of his mouth as if in someone else’s voice. He seemed startled at his own words.

  “Drake is really the same word as Drakos, a dragon,” Christopher Foxx mumbled. “Ah, I was going to say something else but it is gone now.”

  “Waiter, what is the name of the excellent stuff with which the drake is basted and to which it is wedded?” Vincent Rue asked in happy wonder.

  “Dragons’ sauce,” said the waiter.

  * * *

  “Well, just what is the mystery, the uncommonness of the sheldrake, Buford?” Christopher asked him.

  “I don’t seem to remember,” that man said. “Ah, let us start our discussion with my, our, failure to remember such things. Vincent, did you not have a short paper prepared on ‘Amnesia, the Holes in the Pockets of the Seamless Garment’?”

  “I forget. Did I have such a paper prepared? I will look in my own pockets.”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, back on the mountain, back on the thundering mountain there were certain daring and comic persons rushing in and out and counting coup on the Wrath of God. It is a dangerous game. These were the big prophets who prayed so violently and sweated so bloodily and wrestled so strongly. It was they who fought for the salving or the salvation of the days, in fear and in chuckling, in scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking. The thundering mountain was a funny one this morning. It didn’t reach clear to the ground. There was a great space between, and there were eagles flying under it. And the day, the day, was it really the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn? Was it really a Monday at all? Or was it a Thursday or an aleikaday?

  It was like another morning of not long before. The eagles remember it; the clouds remember it; the mountain wrestlers remember it dimly, though some of the memory has been taken away from them.

  Remember how it is written on the holy skins: “If you have faith you shall say to the mountain ‘Remove from here and cast thyself into the sea’ and it will do it.” Well, on that morning they had tried it. Several of the big prophets and wrestlers tried it, for they did have faith. They groaned with travail and joy, they strove mightily, and they did move the mountain and make it cast itself into the sea.

  But the thunders made the waters back off. The waters refused to accept or to submerge the mountain. The prayer-men and wrestlers had sufficient faith, but the ocean did not. Whoever had the last laugh on that holy morning?

  The strivers were timeless, of the prime age, but they were often called the “grandfathers” brothers’ by the people. They were up there now, the great prophets and prayer-men and wrestlers. One of these intrepid men was an Indian and he was attempting to put the Indian Sign on God himself. God, however, was like a mist and would not be signed.

  “We will wrestle,” the Indian said to God in the mist, “we will wrestle to see which of us shall be Lord for this day. I tell you it is not thick enough if only the regular days flow. I hesitate to instruct you in your own business, and yet someone must instruct you. There must be overflowing and special days apart from the regular days. You have such days, I am sure of that, but you keep them prisoned in a bag.
It is necessary now that I wrest one of them from you.”

  They wrestled, inasmuch as a man slick with his own sweat and blood may wrestle with a mist: and it seemed that the Indian won the lordship of a day from God. “It will be a day of grass,” the Indian said. “It will be none of your dry and juiceless days.” The Indian lay exhausted with his fingers entwined in the won day: and the strength came back to him. “You make a great thing about marking every sparrow’s fall,” the Indian said then. “See that you forget not to mark this day.”

  The thing that happened then was this: God marked the day for which they had wrestled, but he marked it on a different holy skin in a different place, not on the regular skin that lists the regular days. This act caused the wrested day to be one of the Days out of Count.

  Prophets, wrestlers, praying-men of other sorts were on the mountain also. There were black men who sometimes strove for kaffir-corn days or ivory-tree days. There were brown island men who wrestled for sailfish days or wild-pig days. There were pinkish north-wood men who walked on pine needles and balsam; there were gnarled men out of the swampy lands; there were town men from the great towns. All of these strove with the Lord in fear and in chuckling.

  Some of these were beheaded and quartered, and the pieces of them were flung down violently to earth: it is believed that there were certain qualities lacking in these, or that their strength had finally come to an end. But the others, the most of them, won great days from the Lord, Heydays, Halcyon or Kingfisher Days, Maedchensommer Days, St. Garvais Days, Indian Summer Days. These were all rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood. And yet all were marked on different of the holy skins and so they became the Days out of Count.

  * * *

  “Days out of the Count,” Buford Strange was saying. “It’s an entrancing idea, and we have almost proved it. Seasons out of the count! It’s striking that the word for putting a condiment on should be the same word as a division of the year. Well, the seasons out of the count are all well seasoned and spiced. There are whole multiplex layered eras out of the count. The ice ages are such. I do not say ‘were such’; I say ‘are such.’”

  “But the ice ages are real, real, real,” Helen Hightower insisted. (Quite a few long hours had passed in the discussions, and now Helen Hightower, the wife of Christopher Foxx, was off her work at the telephone exchange and had put on her glad rags and joined the scholars.)

  “Certainly they are real, Helen,” Buford Strange said. “If only I were so real! I believe that you remember them, or know them, more than most of us do. You have a dangerously incomplete amnesia on so many things that I wonder the thunder doesn’t come and take you. But in the days and years and centuries and eras of the straight count there are no ice ages.”

  “Well then, how, for instance, would local dwellers account for terminal moraines and glacial till generally?” asked Conquering Sharp-Leaf—ah, Vincent Rue.

  (They were at the University, in that cozy room in the psychology department where Buford Strange usually held forth, the room that was just below the special effects room of Professor Timacheff.)

  “How did they account for such before the time of modern geology?” Buford asked. “They didn’t. There would be a new boulder one morning that had not been there the day before. The sheep-herder of the place would say that the moon had drawn it out of the ground, or that it had fallen from the sky.”

  “You’re crazy, Buford,” Adrian Montaigne said with a certain affection. “Why the ice ages then? Why should they have happened, even in times out of count? Why should they have left their footprints in the times within the count?” Adrian had very huge and powerful hands. Why had they not noticed this before?

  “I believe there was a dynasty of great and muscular prophets and ghost-wrestlers who wanted to call out the terrible days of Fimbul Winter,” Buford said in a hushed voice. “I don’t know why they wanted such things, or why they sweated blood and wrestled prodigies to obtain them. They were men, but they are remembered as the frost giants.”

  “Oh my grand, grand uncles!” Day-Torch—Helen Hightower, rather, cried out. “Days of snow! Days of ice! Millions of them!”

  “You are saying that certain archetypes—” Kit-Fox began.

  “Shook the pillars of Heaven till the snow and ice fell down for a million days, for a million days out of the count,” Buford Strange finished.

  “Strange Buffalo, ah, Buford, you are crazy,” Christopher Foxx chided much as Adrian had. Christopher was talking, but the queerly smiling Adrian had now become the presence in the room. Adrian had the curious under-rutile of the skin of one who has sweated blood in prayer and buffoonery and passion. Why had they not noticed that of him before?

  “I could almost believe that you were one of the great challengers yourself, Strange,” Christopher said to Buford, but he was looking at Adrian.

  “You strike me as with a lance, Kit,” Buford said sadly. “You uncover my mortification. For I failed. I don’t know when it was. It was on a day out of the count. I failed a year ago or ten thousand years ago. I could not make it among the great ones. I was not cast out to my death: I was never in. There was room for me, and an opportunity for the ascent, but I failed in nerve. And one who has aspired to be a champion or prophet cannot fall back to be an ordinary man. So I am less than that: I am short of manhood. But, sadly, I do remember and live in other sorts of days.”

  “I believe that the aberrant days are simultaneous with the prosaic days,” Adrian Montaigne mused. Adrian was quite a large man. Why had they not noticed that before?

  “No, no, they are not simultaneous,” Buford was correcting him. “There are the days out of the count and there are the days in the count. Those out of count are outside of time so they cannot be simultaneous with anything. You have to see it that way.”

  “You see it your way and I’ll see it mine.” Adrian was stubborn. “Consider some of the aberrant times or countries: St. Garvais’ Springtime, St. Martin’s Summer (the saints in these names were mountain prophets and wrestlers, but some of them were not at all saintly in their violence), Midas March (the very rich need their special season also: it is said that, in their special month, they are superiorly endowed in all ways), Dog Days, Halcyon Days, Dragon Days, Harvest May (what in the world is harvested in May?), All-Hallow Summer, Days of Ivory, Days of Horn, Indian Summer, Wicklow Week, Apricot Autumn, Goose Summer, Giant-Stone Days, Day of the Crooked Mile, the season called Alcedonia by the Latins. I tell you that all these days are happening at the same time!” This man named Adoration on the Mountain, or rather Adrian Montaigne, had a reckless sort of transcendence about him now.

  “No, they do not all happen at the same time,” Strange Buffalo was saying, “for the aberrant days of them are not in time. They are places and not times.”

  “Are there no nighttime hours in the times out of time?” Vincent Rue asked.

  “No. Not in the same sense. They are in another province entirely,” Buford said.

  There was thunder in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff on the floor just above them, cheerful, almost vulgar thunder. Timacheff taught some sensational (sense response and also melodramatic) courses up there. But how did he get such special effects anyhow?

  “They do happen at the same time,” Adrian Mountain insisted, and he was laughing like boulders coming together. Quite a few things seemed to be happening to Adrian all at the same time. “They are all happening right now. I am sitting with you here this minute, but I am also on the mountain this minute. The thunder in the room above, it is real thunder, you know. And there is a deeper, more distant, more raffish thunder behind it which primitives call God’s-Laughter Thunder.”

  “This gets out of hand now,” Vincent Rue protested. “It is supposed to be a serious symposium on spatial and temporal underlays. Several of you have turned it into a silly place and a silly time. You are taking too anthropomorphic a view of all these things, including God. One does not really wre
stle with God in a bush or a mist, or ride in wildly on a pony and count coup on God. Even as an atheist I find these ideas distasteful.”

  “But we are anthropoi, men,” Adrian proclaimed. “What other view than an anthropomorphic view could we take? That we should play the God-game, that we should wrestle with a God-form and try to wrest lordship of days from him, that we should essay to count coup on God, I as a theist do not find at all distasteful.

  “Why! One of them is failing now! It happens so seldom. I wonder if I have a chance.”

  “Adrian, what are you talking about?” Vincent demanded.

  “How could you do it, Adrian, when I could not?” Buford Strange asked.

  “Remember me when you come to your place, Adrian,” Day-Torch cried. “Send me a day. Oh, send me a day-fire day.”

  “And me also, Adrian,” Kit-Fox begged. “I would love to do it myself, but it isn’t given to everyone.”

  There was a strong shouting in the room above. There was the concussion of bodies, and the roaring of mountain winds.

  “What in all the crooked days is Professor Timacheff doing up there this evening?” Vincent Sharp-Leaf asked angrily. “And what things are you doing here, Adrian? You look like a man set afire.”

  “Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian of the Mountain cried out in a voice that had its own crackling thunder. He was in the very transport of passion and he glistened red with his own bloody sweat. “One is failing, one is falling, why doesn’t he fall then?”

  “Help with it, Kit-Fox! And I help also,” Day-Torch yowled.

  “I help!” Kit-Fox yelped. The room shuddered, the building shuddered, the whole afternoon shuddered. There was a rending of boulders, either on the prophet’s mountain or in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff above them. There was a great breaking and entering, a place turning into a time.