Fourth Mansions Read online

  “No, we should take always,” Jim Bauer said. “We are Harvesters and we harvest.”

  “We have come onto the trick of amplifying and projecting psychic energy,” Hondo continued. “Look out! By a trick or coincidence, we are all of us people of powerful passion carelessly channeled. By another trick we could turn into rutting animals. We are a bunch of psychic athletes, but we are neither very good nor very wise people. What right have we to pour fire into Michael Fountain or into anybody? We came onto an easy and harmless vehicle in Freddy Foley. He doesn't know what hit him, but I think he enjoys being the half-cocked fool. But we ran into stark and laughing mystery when we tackled Carmody Overlark himself. It's almost as if he were mind without real body. I have the feeling he could have annihilated us if he wished. Let's be careful.”

  This Hondo Silverio could have been by Ingres. (Out at St. Johns a five-year-old boy had been dying, but he didn't die. His temperature fell six degrees in six seconds. He was well. “It was the big snake, my friend the big snake,” the boy said, “he made me well right away. Why don't they let the big snake be a doctor, and make the little doctor be a snake?”) Hondo was a petroleum geologist and a driller. But he was also historical geologist and archeologist. He said that he had found his wife Salzy in Mexico City. But she said that he had blasted her out of a Mexican shale-formation where she had been in an old and evil stratum with serpents and saurians. There was sometimes a frightening gaiety about this couple, something of serpentine mottled green humor, wholly uncontrollable under-strata of recklessness bursting up in artesian fountains of water that was frosty with forbidden minerals. Oh, Hondo meant it when he said that they should be careful. He meant especially that he had to be careful.

  “We hope that there will be danger in releasing these things,” Letitia Bauer said with great seriousness. “We call ourselves the Harvesters and we talk of harvesting a better world. What I want is a livelier life and a deeper one, a life worth living and a death worth dying. I'd see the whole white froth of accommodation and present ease swept away in a moment if it would give us anything deeper.” (Over a hill, and not at all far away, a middle-aged couple jumped to their feet in trembling and horror. It was that damnable harp again! The sudden sounding of it was not pretty harp music. It was unworldly, atonal, now muted, now thunderous, horrifying and charming harp music. For three evenings it had played like that, enough to affright the dead. The harp, a newly acquired antique, was in a room by itself. It harped, but there was no harper, and it had no strings.) “Ah well, be it that widow and orphan and the weak and deficient are delivered from their poverty, then,” Letitia Bauer continued (herself sounding very much like a harp without strings), “but let the strong never be delivered from their struggle! If we have not this hope of danger, then all is lost in a swamp. Each one of us has a dangerous power in his own person. We have it very much more than seven times over when we set up a weave. Dangerous powers are not really dangerous unless they are used. Let us use them! Tonight we will pour what fire and what danger we can into Michael Fountain. There is no man needs them more.”

  Letitia Bauer was the pale or moon-colored, slim woman whom Burne-Jones had painted several times: as Beggar Main, as Norse Goddess, variously.

  The world jerked. Seismometers recorded high-grade seismic disturbance as the brain-weave now came rakishly and dangerously into action while the seven burgeoning persons of it seemed sometimes at ease, sometimes in passion, sometimes doing other things or nothing at all. But they reached critical psychic mass now, and every act of theirs would give a wobble to the world.

  The brain-weaving was something that the Harvesters themselves did not understand, though they had developed it deliberately. Now they gathered the power and the goal to themselves, and they projected it. They did not, any of them, understand it completely in their own persons, but they understood it more completely when the seven of them were linked together. Surely they would understand it in near totality when they had linked more and more strong persons to themselves. These seven were all projecting persons and they could feel their own effect welling through.

  Jim Bauer, mixing drinks at the little patio wheeled bar, had broken into rumbling and powerful song. Bauer had to have a big belly to support his big chest to support his big rough song. And he had to have a powerful neck to support the powerful and massive head in which so much of his activity was carried out. There was reason for everything in the spreading construction of him.

  Bauer projected with big hands, almost with holy hands; he mixed drinks with hands that were like the hands of God-over-the-world. He was the Harvester in his hands, and it meant something. He came at the mind of Michael Fountain then, came with massive head and barrel chest and great hands and rumbling spirit, and slipped off. Came again, slipped again badly, swore with a joyous rumble, came again as he mixed Michael's name with his powerful song, encountered strangeness that he had not known to be in that Michael Fountain, welled in and wrestled with that strangeness.

  Bauer was doing things with lime and sugar and tinkling glass rods, and at the same time he was burglarizing a mind eight hundred miles away. But was not Michael Fountain right here in the city?

  Somewhere and not right here in the city, a bewildered young man sat upon a battered bed, clasped his hands to his head, groaned deeply, and at the same time grinned a prodigious grin. The young man liked the encounter that stunned him, he liked the new violent pain in his head; he liked all new violent things whatsoever. “I have a new horned-bull in my head,” the young man said. He swayed with the pain of it and grinned more goblinishly.

  Wing Manion had peeled off a robe and gone down the crumbling steep concrete and iron stairway from the patio to the lake. She was into the chilly December water, and then down deep under the water and crouching in the secret mud. She encanted the name of the quizzical man who was her friend, as much as he knew how to be a friend to anyone. She would give a fiery sword to this Michael and he could turn it which way he would. She would teach this Fountain how to flow! She came to the man in his rumpled house and room.

  Michael Fountain knew her mind instantly. He liked Wing Manion, perhaps, more than the others of the group. But he slipped off from her instantly and almost untouched. He had always been an avoiding man. But Wing was puzzled in her surge. James Bauer was not there at work, and James had given the strong feeling that he had entered the mind. Wing broke water and reviewed and memorized the entire world in one intaking flash. Then she descended shimmering under a shelf of striated rock into a catfish castle. She came again at the mind of Michael Fountain with fire and metal and water, and again she slipped badly from him. She came again, slipped, and then struck the mind-trail of James Bauer and followed it seeking entrance. And the entrance she found was the most unexpected sort.

  Here was a new area, weird even to Wing Manion, and she added her own weirdness and excitement to it. Who would have imagined that there were such enchanted and crooked groves in dry Michael Fountain? Jim Bauer was there also, and the network had made its first linkage.

  “I had no idea there was such a man as this inside Michael Fountain,” Wing thought, like a catfish bubbling. “Why, that makes him everything we need. I will give this man inside the sword, I'll teach him to flow. Oh, how I could teach him, how he could teach me! What flow! What a flesh-fountain he is!”

  “Now I have a new bruja in my head,” a young man said. “I like the fire-witch. Which of us shall be burned up first? A bull and a witch, and I rise and go somewhere. There is something that this lout is called to do.”

  Michael Fountain, the dry man, paced the floor of his cluttered living room with the beginning of worry. Two of the young people had come at him, venturing, and he had sloughed them off. But they had fastened onto something, either inside him or outside him, they were fastening onto something that might already be wild enough without their mind-meddling. And they had accidentally brushed a third something: this was not the powerful, awakening, grotesquel
y grinning young man with a new bull and a new witch in his head ( Michael knew this young man somehow, either inside or outside of himself): this was another and weaker man, a man who had somehow been caught in the cross-blast of it and had died of it. “They've killed a man, unwittingly,” Michael Fountain said. “Somehow I will find out who it is tomorrow. In any case I will have to force the wild ones to give up directing their gadget.”

  Salzy Silverio had gone around the shoulder of the little lake to an overhung natural rock-garden under the cliff. She coiled herself there in the mossy rocks of serpentine shale and water trickled down on her. She was full of her own helical and otherwise twisted passion. Her husband Hondo went around to her, carrying drinks. There were green mottled sparks when the auras of the two of them came into contact. Oh, these were both gracious and benign and urbane persons, full of all graces and grace! Theirs was intelligence and vitality and kindness, and amid their strong coiling passions was a great center of compassion. They were the great and intelligent and superior and noble snakes such as rule one of the distant worlds of which one reads. Salzy had once stated when in one of her double-helical moods, that her husband Hondo had two pizzles, as have certain snakes. “Oh, is that true?” Letitia Bauer had demanded at the time. “I'll have to find out whether you're joking or whether it's true. It could be true, you know.” “It could be true,” Salzy had said snakishly.

  Hondo and Salzy had entered the brain-weave, and now there were five additional linkages added to the one that had been before. “That there be fire in the Fountain and new snakes for old!” they wove. They brushed the conventional Michael Fountain but lightly, slipping off and shivering him, and entered at once into the weird young man who was possibly interior to that Michael, who was possibly far distant from him and yet known to him. And that young man was now on his feet, he was running, loping in that ungainly but rapid and tireless way that big men of his race have. He was loping down dusky but warm December streets toward the river. Inside his gloriously bursting head was a she-snake of his own high people, one who had been blasted out of old sleeping shale-strata; and with her was a noble creature as male as himself, deep with artesian welling-up.

  Arouet Manion entered the brain-weave with cool pantheistic elegance. He would bring ancient ice and not fire to the Fountain. His spiritual fathers had taught him that the highest goal was to put out the lights of heaven, but the next highest was to exalt the earth. He really had this mystic attachment to the earth and he could communicate it. He had a real place in the brain-weave; it could not have worked fully without him; it may be that his place was to pervert it, but place it was. He touched the surface Michael not at all, he was immediately into the young man.

  Arouet did not inhibit the fire-force and violent surge of the mind and network he entered. He sent a rale and tremor through it all, and then a giant reaction. He was like explosion and shattering of ice followed by a steeliness and outre precipitation. The wrongness of the man set up roaring tensions and angry despondencies but it strengthened the intrusion. Its false mystique would influence and move this new dynamic mass for the stark life of its surge. It added its diabolical gaping nothingness, and the reaction to that was white fury. The mind of Arouet Manion had great natural energy wrapped around a void, and it contributed a new angular velocity and a mad rain of strange particles. The brain-weave would not work fully without Arouet; it would not work fully if any one of the seven were missing. “Pray that it may not work, pray that it may not work at all,” Michael Fountain gasped, white and trembling from near brushes with it.

  The linkages multiplied, and then multiplied again as Letitia Bauer came with her own ashen and angular passion and swift hope of danger. The brain-weave was fabricating a new and uncontrollable personage in the name of Michael Fountain, but did he know it? He knew it in fright and agony, and he slipped away from it again and again. He had felt the death of one man caught in it accidentally; he felt the total penetration of another. But were not both of these himself in some way?

  The brain-weave had entered, deeply and forever, into a mind under that of Michael Fountain, and yet it was a mind associated with his. Had the brain-weave made a new mind and a new man and named it Michael Fountain?

  A ghost in red chalk completed the brain-weave, a red wraith of disarming simplicity and shattering profundity: so young an anima that she still had not shook off the poltergeistic manifestations of her own adolescence; a numinous pink spook, lazy with summer lightning and instantaneous with blood-gaiety, shyly murderous, with a laugh like breaking crystal, eldritch and ethereal: Biddy Bencher the young red witch.

  They had completed the heptameles, the seven-person weave. It was full to overflowing, and it overflowed with a lightning-line of power.

  A loping lumpkin of a young man had fallen in half faint and full pain against the guard-rail of the bridge, bleeding and glassy-eyed. He was struck by the line of power so that the thin soles of his shoes smoked. Such strikes had killed others, but this one would transfix and animate him.

  Now he burst into a real carcajada, a guffaw, an elephant laugh. He came onto his feet again. He still reeled, but now he reeled with a swagger. He was Miguel Fuentes and he had just become a main person in the world.

  “Now I have a canelón, a cinnamon cookie in my head,” the young man joked with a thick tongue: for canelón means gargoyle as well as cinnamon cookie, and Biddy Bencher was both.

  “Get out with you all now!” the germinating man ordered. “You have done me! You have changed me the man, and I will remember what I must do. I think I will dismember the world with my hands as though it were a cabrito, a kid to be barbecued. I will remember the big thing and I will do it.”

  This timeless man (who had lately been a young man) lurched across International Bridge and set about effecting certain things in the world.

  II: EITHER AWFUL DEAD OR AWFUL OLD

  Simplicity into the world all bare,

  Unweaponed, careless, witless, artless clown,

  Lays hands on curly anacondas there

  And drags the very dragons through their town.

  Simplicitas: Orthcutt

  BIDDY BENCHER came into the Scatterbrain Lounge later that night. She was fevered and spent, but quite alert and full of monkeyness.

  In the floor of the Scatterbrain there was a bronze disc countersunk, and on it was the inscription THIS IS THE EXACT CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. Whether it was the exact center is an unsettled question. Hugh Hamtree, who owned and operated the Scatterbrain, said that the disc was already there when he took over the place. The previous owner, Birdie Mounteagle, was remembered as a whimsical man.

  “Freddy, little left eye of an owl,” Biddy cried when she saw young Foley there, “did you not have a startling idea today? I had heard, no, I had felt, that you had something going. Had you not a one-in-a-million idea?” Lustful mouth and innocent eyes, this Biddy was a cinnamon cookie full of arsenic.

  “Biddy, I still have the idea, but how do you know? How are you people monkeying with me?”

  “We don't monkey. We infuse with real live pop-skull and green lightning. I have to know. What was the rare idea, little frog-foot, and how did it go?”

  “The same as all my one-in-a-million ideas. I'm not allowed to follow it out. I'm not even allowed to think about it.” That unplowed face of Foley was getting faint plow-marks now.

  “Did old Tankersley order you to get drunk and forget about it?”

  “He did. And it isn't as much fun when you take it for medicine.”

  “How can men retain positions of authority and remain unreceptive to such striking ideas as yours? Ah, what was the idea?”

  “I don't want to talk about it, Biddy,” Freddy said stubbornly.

  “That's a black lie. You do want to talk about it. At least I want to talk about it. And are we not one, my own mouse-ear?”

  “We are one if you say we are, Biddy. Well, I had the notion that perhaps Carmody Overlark (everyone has heard of hi
m these last several years) was the same man as Khar-ibn-Mod, a Mameluke diplomat who served an Egyptian Caliph some years back.”

  “How many years back, Freddy?” (Those are innocent eyes?)

  “About five hundred years, Biddy. It seems sillier when I say it out loud.”

  “Why, it doesn't sound silly at all, little blueberry bush.”

  “Why are you about to bust then, Biddy?” (How can he be a man yet, when this she-kid treats him like a kid?)

  “It's my new diet, Freddy; I eat nothing but bubbles now. But I can see how Mr. Tankersley might not dive right into a story like that without being pushed. Why do you think they're the same man, bendy pretzel?”

  “Ah, they look a lot alike and their names are kind of alike,” Freddy said sadly.

  “Theories have been built on slighter bases. They didn't stand up very well, though. How would Carmody still be around after five hundred years, little honey-locust? Wouldn't he be either awful dead or awful old?”

  “There's an alternative, Biddy, but I shiver at mentioning it. Laughter of a loved one can be very cruel. Not that you would laugh at me till I'm gone.”

  “And not that you love me when I'm not here. Will you tell it to me all at once or a little at a time?”

  “A little at a time, Biddy. I love you but I don't trust you. I can hear Bauer and Manion hooting now when they find out what you've made me do. But there's something to it, Biddy! I know now that there is. You've put me onto something real with your meddling. Biddy, find out all that you can about Carmody Overlark. I'm going to find out what he does and how he does it.”

  “The guy might have gotten froze in a block of ice in that Egyptian river,” the proprietor Hugh Hamtree interrupted. “Then they might have just found him and thawed him out a couple of years ago. They deep-freeze a lot of things now. I can't see where they lose any flavor at all. If he was froze solid quick enough — ”