Universe 4 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  I am drawn toward the maelstrom. Swimming is unnecessary; the water carries me purposefully toward my goal. Yet I swim, all the same, stroke after stroke, yielding nothing to the force of the sea. The first promontory is coming into view. I swim all the more energetically. I will not allow the whirlpool to capture me; I must give myself willingly to it.

  * * * *

  Now I swing round and round in the outer gyres of Charybdis. This is the place through which the spirit is drained: I can see April’s pallid face like an empty plastic mask, hovering, drawn downward, disappearing chin-first through the whirlpool’s vortex, reappearing, going down once more, an infinite cycle of drownings and disappearances and returns and resurrections. I must follow her.

  * * * *

  No use pretending to swim here. One can only keep one’s arms and legs pressed close together and yield, as one is sluiced down through level after level of the maelstrom until one reaches the heart of the eddy, and then—swoosh!—the ultimate descent. Now I plummet. The tumble takes forever. From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve. I rocket downward through the hollow heart of the whirlpool, gripped in a monstrous suction, until abruptly I am delivered to a dark region of cold quiet water, far below the surface of the sea. My lungs ache; my rib-cage, distended over a bloated lump of hot depleted air, shoots angry protests into my armpits. I glide along the smooth vertical face of a submerged mountain. My feet find lodging on a ledge; I grope my way along it and come at length to the mouth of a cave, set at a sharp angle against the steep wall of stone. I topple into it.

  Within, I find an air-filled pocket of a room, dank, slippery, lit by some inexplicable inner glow. April is there, huddled against the back of the cave. She is naked, shivering, sullen, her hair pasted in damp strands to the pale column of her neck. Seeing me, she rises but does not come forward. Her breasts are small, her hips narrow, her thighs slender: a child’s body.

  I reach a hand toward her. “Come. Let’s swim out of here together, April.”

  “No. It’s impossible. I’ll drown.”

  “I’ll be with you.”

  “Even so,” she says. “I’ll drown, I know it.”

  “What are you going to do, then? Just stay in here?”

  “For the time being.”

  “Until when?”

  “Until it’s safe to come out,” she says.

  “When will that be?”

  “I’ll know.”

  “I’ll wait with you. All right?”

  * * * *

  I don’t hurry her. At last she says, “Let’s go now.”

  This time I am the one who hesitates, to my own surprise. It is as if there has been an interchange of strength in this cave and I have been weakened. I draw back, but she takes my hand and leads me firmly to the mouth of the cave. I see the water swirling outside, held at bay because it has no way of expelling the bubble of air that fills our pocket in the mountain wall. April begins to glide down the slick passageway that takes us from the cave. She is excited, radiant, eyes bright, breasts heaving. “Come,” she says. “Now! Now!”

  We spill out of the cave together.

  The water hammers me. I gasp, choke, tumble. The pressure is appalling. My eardrums scream shrill complaints. Columns of water force themselves into my nostrils. I feel the whirlpool dancing madly far above me. In terror I turn and try to scramble back into the cave, but it will not have me, and rebounding impotently against a shield of air, I let myself be engulfed by the water. I am beginning to drown, I think. My eyes deliver no images. Dimly I am aware of April tugging at me, grasping me, pulling me upward. What will she do, swim through the whirlpool from below? All is darkness. I perceive only the touch of her hand. I struggle to focus my eyes, and finally I see her through a purple chaos. How much like Irene she looks! Which is she, April or Irene? It scarcely matters. Drowning is my occupation now. It will all be over soon. Let me go, I tell her, let me go, let me do my drowning and be done with it. Save yourself. Save yourself. Save yourself. But she pays no heed and continues to tug.

  We erupt into the sunlight

  Bobbing at the surface, we bask in glorious warmth. “Look,” she cries. “There’s an island! Swim, Richard, swim! We’ll be there in ten minutes. We can rest there.”

  Irene’s face fills the sky.

  “Swim!” April urges.

  I try. I am without strength. A few strokes and I lapse into stupor. April, apparently unaware, is far ahead of me, cutting energetically through the water, streaking toward the island. April, I call. April. April, help me. I think of the beach, the warm moist sand, the row of palms, the intricate texture of the white coral boulders. Yes. Time to go home. Irene is waiting for me. April! April!

  She scrambles ashore. Her slim bare form glistens in the hot sunlight.

  April?

  The sea has me. I drift away, foolish flotsam, borne again toward the maelstrom-

  * * * *

  Down. Down. No way to fight it. April is gone. I see only Irene, shimmering in the waves. Down.

  This cool dark cave.

  Where am I? I don’t know.

  Who am I? Dr. Richard Bjornstrand? April Lowry? Both of those? Neither of those? I think I’m Bjornstrand. Was. Here, Dickie Dickie Dickie.

  How do I get out of here? I don’t know.

  I’ll wait. Sooner or later I’ll be strong enough to swim out. Sooner. Later. We’ll see. Irene? April?

  Here, Dickie Dickie Dickie. Here.

  Where?

  Here.

  <>

  * * * *

  AND READ THE FLESH BETWEEN THE LINES

  by R. A. Lafferty

  Did you ever suspect that there were things left out of the history books, crucial connections not made and important explanations not given? There may be a reason, and it may be something a lot like R. A. Lafferty’s contention here—whole millennia of history and breeds of men lost to us because we can no longer fit them in. But if they’re real, can they be lost forever? Probably not, certainly not. They’ll find their way back in through the nooks and crannies of history, and between the panels of cartoons.

  * * * *

  1

  A Cave, a Cove, a Hub, a Club,

  A crowded, jumbled flame:

  The Magic Tree, the Future Shrub,

  Nostalgia is its name.

  —Old scribble on the wall of That Room

  by John Penandrew

  THERE HAD been a sort of rumbling going on in that old unused room over the garages at Barnaby Sheen’s place. Nobody paid much attention to it. After all, there were queerer things than a little rumble at Barnaby’s.

  There were the spooks, there were the experiments, there was the houseboy and bartender who should have been dead for a million years. There were the jokers and geniuses who came there. Who notices a rumble in an unused room? There were rumbles of many sorts going on at Barnaby’s.

  “The rumble in the old room is menacing and dangerous,” Barnaby told us one evening. “No, really, fellows, it isn’t one of my tricks. I don’t know what it is.”

  “It sounds like a friendly rumble to me,” Harry O’Donovan said. “I like it.”

  “I didn’t say that it was malevolent,” Barnaby gruffed with that odd affection which he sometimes put into his voice. “I like it too. We all like it. It likes us. But it is dangerous, very dangerous, without meaning to be. I have been over everything there: I can’t find the source of the rumble or the danger. I ask you four, as a special favor to me, to examine the room carefully. You all know the place since years long gone by.”

  The four of us, Dr. George Drakos, Harry O’Donovan, Cris Benedetti, who were three smart ones, and me, who wasn’t, went down and examined the old room. But just how thoroughly did we examine it?

  We examined it, at least, in more ways and times than the present. For that reason it is possible that we neglected it a little bit in its present state. The past times of it were so strong that it may hav
e intended its present state to be neglected, or it may have insisted that its whole duration was compressed in its casual present state.

  Let’s hear a little bit about this room, then.

  In the time of Barnaby Sheen’s grandfather, who came out here from Pennsylvania at the very first rumor of oil and who bought an anomalous “mansion,” this was not a room over the garages, but over the stables and carriagehouse.

  It was a hayloft, that’s what it was; an oatloft, a fodderloft. And a little corner of it had been a harness room with brads and hammers and knives and needles as big as sailmaker’s needles, and cobbler’s bench; and spokeshaves (for forming or trimming singletrees) and neat’s-foot oil and all such. The room, even in its latter decades, had not lost any of its old smells. There would always be the perfume of timothy hay, of sweet clover, of little bluestem grass and of prairie grass, of alfalfa, of Sudan grass, of sorghum cane, of hammered oats and of ground oats, of rock salt, of apples. Yes, there was an old barrel there that would remember its apples for a hundred years. Why had it been there? Do not horses love apples for a treat?

  There was the smell of shorts and of bran, the smell of old field tobacco (it must have been cured up there in the jungle of rafters), the smell of seventy-five-year-old sparks (and the grindstone that had produced them was there, operable yet), the smell of buffalo robes (they used to use them for lap robes in wagons and buggies). There was a forge there and other farrier’s tools (but they had been brought up from downstairs no more than sixty years ago, so their smell was not really ancient there).

  Then there were a few tokens of the automobile era, heavily built parts cabinets, tools, old plugs, old oil smell. There were back seats of very old cars to serve as sofas and benches, horns and spotlights and old battery cases, even very old carbide and kerosene headlights. But these were in the minority: there is not so much use for a room over the garages as for a room over the stables.

  There was another and later odor that was yet very evocative: it could only be called the smell of almost-ape.

  And then there were our own remnants somewhat before this latter thing. This had been a sort of clubroom for us when we were schoolboys and when we were summer-boys. There were the trunks full of old funny papers. They were from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe, the Kansas City Star, the Chicago Tribune—those were the big-city papers that were hawked in our town, and our own World and Tribune. There were a few New York and Boston and Philadelphia funny papers also. And the funnies of the different papers were not nearly so uniform then as they later became.

  There were the comparatively more recent comic books. We had been older then, almost too old for such things. Yet there were a few thousand of them, mostly the original property of Cris Benedetti and John Penandrew.

  There was the taxidermy of George Drakos: stuffed owls, snakes, barn swallows, water puppies, mountain boomers, flying squirrels, even foxes and wildcats. And there were the dissections (also of Drakos) of frogs, of cat brains, of fish, of cow eyes, and many other specimens. The best of these (those still maintaining themselves in good state) were preserved in formaldehyde in Pluto Water bottles. Pluto Water bottles, with their bevel-fitted glass corks and wire-clamp holders, will contain formaldehyde forever: this is a fact all too little known. (Is Pluto Water still in proper history, or has it been relegated out?)

  There were the lepidoptera (the butterfly and night-moth collections) of Harry O’Donovan, and my own aggregations of rocks and rock fossils. And there were all the homemade radios, gamma-ray machines, electrical gadgets generally, coils, magnet wire, resistors, tubes, of Barnaby Sheen.

  There were also—hold it, hold it! If everything in that room were listed, there would not be books enough in the world to contain it all (there were even quite a few books there). There would be no limit to the remnants, not even to the remnants of a single day.

  But we had all of us lived several mutually exclusive boyhoods that hinged on that room. Within the framework of history as now constituted, these variants could not all have happened. But they did.

  * * * *

  The room had developed a benevolent rumble that might be dangerous. Barnaby Sheen couldn’t find what it was; and we could not. It was a soundly built room, oak and hickory and black locust wood; it had been there a long time. It was older than the fine house that had replaced the anomalous old “mansion” there. If it was dangerous (and Barnaby said that it was), we could not discover that danger.

  The world itself had a deeper and more worrisome series of rumbles. We leave the room over the garages now and go to the world. We are sorry to have spent so much time on such a little thing as that room. It is just that it has stuck in our minds somehow.

  * * * *

  2

  Young Austro said “carrock, carrock.”

  O’Donovan said “grumble.”

  Loretta gave with spirit knock.

  The room said “rumble, rumble.”

  —Rocky McCrocky (in cartoon balloon)

  We were together for the first time in eighteen months. Barnaby Sheen was back in the country, Cris Benedetti was back in the country, Harry O’Donovan was back in the state, George Drakos was back out of his seclusion. I was there; I hadn’t been anywhere.

  Really, Barnaby was back for the second time. He’d been home two weeks before this, and that after more than a year’s absence. Then, after he’d unpacked most of his things, he snapped his fingers and said as though dreaming some lively dream, “I forgot something over there. I’ll just go back and see about it. I’ll be back again in a couple of weeks.”

  But “over there” was halfway around the globe, in Ethiopia, about seventy miles northwest of Magdala on the Guna slopes. Barnaby had mineral concessions there. There also he had found a concentration of most interesting fossils, some of them still living and walking. Barnaby used a cover story of doing seismograph petroleum survey work, but he was into many things.

  But now he was back for the second time and we were together.

  Austro had just brought us our drinks, though listlessly. Austro was houseboy and bartender and was of an old and doubted species. But he worked distractedly now, not with his old sharpness. Since he had learned to read he always had some crude sheet or sheaf of gaudy and juvenile literature under his arm or in his hand.

  “Well, Barney, you went halfway around the world again,” Drakos said. “Did you bring back what you went after?”

  “Oh, no. It wasn’t a thing such as one can bring or carry. At least I don’t believe that it was.”

  “But you said that you had forgotten something over there and that you were going to go back and see about it.”

  “Yes, I said that, but I wasn’t too lucky in seeing about the matter. I couldn’t remember what it was; that’s the trouble. I still can’t quite.”

  “You went halfway around the world to get something you had left behind? And when you got there you had forgotten what it was? Barney!” This was Harry O’Donovan chiding him.

  “Not quite right, Harry,” Barnaby said. “I didn’t forget it when I got back there. I went back there because I had already forgotten it: because I had always forgotten it, I guess. I went back there to try to remember it. I consulted with some of Austro’s elder kinsmen (he’s only a boy, you know). I meditated a bit in those mountains. I’m good at that: I should have been a hermit (why, I suppose that I am!) or a prophet. But I remembered only part.”

  * * * *

  These were really the men who knew everything? Sometimes it didn’t quite seem like it.

  * * * *

  “How does Austro handle things when you are gone?” George Drakos asked. “Being able to speak only one word might be a disadvantage, and beyond that he isn’t very bright. How is he accepted?”

  “Austro is quite bright, George,” Barnaby told him. “He is accepted within the house, and he doesn’t go out much. Here there are several persons who accept and understand him perfectly, in spite of his seeming
to speak only one word.”

  “Which several persons, Barney?”

  “Oh, my daughter Loretta. And, ah, Mary Mondo.”

  “Barney, they don’t count!” Drakos shouted in near anger.

  “They do with me. They do with Austro. They do with all of you a little.”

  “Barney, George means, or at least I mean, is Austro accepted as human?” Cris asked.

  “Oh, well, yes, he’s accepted as of the kindred. It’s hard to put into words. There’s a missing kindred word, you know. Besides mother, father, brother, sister, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, uncle, aunt niece, nephew, cousin, female cousin, in-laws, there is yet another. Delineate it, name it: then we may know what Austro is.”