The Best of R. A. Lafferty

Introduction by Gregory Feeley

“Cliffs That Laughed” appeared in the March 1969 issue of Magazine of Horror, surely one of Lafferty’s less likely markets (it was edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes, who had published some of Lafferty’s earliest stories and who doubtless knew enough to ask for more). It was reprinted in Lafferty’s second collection, 1972’s Strange Doings, but has scarcely been seen since. It certainly cannot be called a horror story, although what Freud called “the horror of incest” definitely plays a role. But what kind of story is it?

It’s a tale told in a bar, at least in part—but interleaved with another tale, told decades earlier to the same narrator, by a Malay storyteller he met while stationed in Indonesia, who gained new inspiration when he gained access to American comic books. The storyteller’s tale, which begins with “flute notes ascending” and ends with “flute notes descending,” offers a pleasing sense of unity, but the other story, about three soldiers who disappeared on an Indonesian island in 1945, “keeps interposing itself” upon it. In the end, however, the two tales complete each other, forming a deeply bizarre saga that the narrator (his protestations notwithstanding) weaves into a third tale, the one we read.

The tale’s elements will be familiar for Lafferty fans: a bloodthirsty but colorful pirate; a willful young woman intent on withholding sexual favors; a fell scheme foiled by a clever trick. Neither will these readers be surprised by the rather idealized portrait of pirates, nor with what Andrew Ferguson calls Lafferty’s “lurid depictions of death and dismemberment.” What does startle us is that the trick turns on the incest taboo, something Lafferty never otherwise wrote about. The brutal but poetic Willy Jones finally wins over Margaret, daughter of a man he murdered, and succeeds in consummating his love, but when he disregards her warning not to resume pirating, she exacts a grotesque vengeance upon his return to their sinister island, which forever frustrates his desire to “board” his wife lest he unwittingly commit the abomination of incest. Since her trick requires both Margaret and her nubile—indeed indistinguishable—daughter (born and bred during Willy’s twenty-year absence) to be at once dead and alive, the grotesque family romance seethes with the Freudian unheimlich or uncanny, and leads in time to father, mother, and daughter banding perversely together to attract other men to the island and then slaughter them as they “frolicked” with the two beautiful women.

This tangle of rage and baffled lust—the impulse to incest deflected into murderous resolve—gets its sequel in the tale told in the bar, by an American soldier who alone escaped from Willy Jones Island in 1945 and now, after twenty years’ journeying home, wishes for nothing but to go back again. A Malay folk tale updated by Wonder Woman (complete with numerous elements common to incest myths, such as identical mother and daughter and a questing figure who was declared dead yet is still alive) turns into the evocation of a composite Belle Dame Sans Merci, who leaves the men she encounters wracked by sexual enthrallment and desolation. It is a strange short story even for Lafferty, and this is without mentioning the “golems” (who are clearly something else) or the uncanny intermediate condition that haunts the text, such as the “middle state” between life and death (which mother and daughter now inhabit) or the “middle land” that the soldier traverses beneath the earth.

And what does the title signify? There are no cliffs in the story. The soldier now returning to his death remembers the two women as being “like volcanoes” and declares that “we climbed them like mountains. Man, the uplift on them! The shoulders were cliffs that laughed. The swaying—”

It’s an odd image (it does not sound like shoulders that he is praising) and recalls a short story Lafferty published a year later, “The Cliff Climbers,” in which the eponymous cliff—which the narrator tells us at the outset is actually “a spire”—clearly (like the “up-thrust” or “rock chimney” in “Continued on Next Rock,” also published in 1970) stands as a synecdoche, too blatant for readers to overlook, for a centuries-long male desire, one that (as in “Continued on Next Rock”) proves destructive to both pursuer and pursued.

Lafferty’s use of “cliff” as an image of displaced sexuality remains finally mysterious, as do his reasons for offering a different version of the three soldiers’ disappearance in his 1971 novel The Devil is Dead. “There is only one story in the world,” the storyteller reminds us, and the version proffered in “Cliffs That Laughed” gives us myth, humor, and virtuosity. For utter clarity, you need look to another writer.

Cliffs That Laughed

Between ten and ten-thirty of the morning of October 1, 1945, on an island that is sometimes called Pulau Petir and sometimes Willy Jones Island (neither of them its map name), three American soldiers disappeared and have not been seen since.

“I’m going back there, I tell you! It was worth it. The limbs that laughed! Let them kill me! I’ll get there! Oh, here, here, I’ve got to get hold of myself.

“The three soldiers were Sergeant Charles Santee of Orange, Texas; Corporal Robert Casper of Gobey, Tennessee; and PFC Timothy Lorrigan of Boston which is in one of the eastern states. I was one of those three soldiers.

“I’m going back there if it takes me another twenty years!”

No, no, no! That’s the wrong story. It happened on Willy Jones Island also, but it’s a different account entirely. That’s the one the fellow told me in a bar years later, just the other night, after the usual “Didn’t I used to know you in the Islands?”

“One often makes these little mistakes and false starts,” Galli said. “It is a trick that is used in the trade. One exasperates people and pretends to be embarrassed. And then one hooks them.”

Galli was an hereditary storyteller of the Indies. “There is only one story in the world,” he said, “and it pulls two ways. There is the reason part that says, ‘Hell, it can’t be’ and there is the wonder part that says, ‘Hell, maybe it is.’” He was the storyteller, and he offered to teach me the art.

For we ourselves had a hook into Galli. We had something he wanted.

“We used the same stories for a thousand years,” he said. “Now, however, we have a new source, the American Comic Books. My grandfather began to use these in another place and time, and I use them now. I steal them from your orderly tents, and I have a box full of them. I have Space Comics and Commander Midnight; I have Galactic Gob and Mighty Mouse and the Green Hornet and the Masked Jetter. My grandfather also had copies of some of these, but drawn by older hands. But I do not have Wonder Woman, not a single copy. I would trade three-for-one for copies of her. I would pay a premium. I can link her in with an island legend to create a whole new cycle of stories, and I need new stuff all the time. Have you a Wonder Woman?”

When Galli said this, I knew that I had him. I didn’t have a Wonder Woman, but I knew where I could steal one. I believe, though I am no longer sure, that it was Wonder Woman Meets the Space Magicians.

I stole it for him. And in gratitude Galli not only taught me the storyteller’s art, but he also told me the following story:

“Imagine about flute notes ascending,” said Galli. “I haven’t my flute with me, but a story should begin so to set the mood. Imagine about ships coming out of the Arabian Ocean, and finally to Jilolo Island, and still more finally to the very island on which we now stand. Imagine about waves and trees that were the great-great-grandfathers of the waves and trees we now have.”

It was about the year 1620, Galli is telling it, in the late afternoon of the high piracy. These Moluccas had already been the rich Spice Islands for three hundred years. Moreover, they were on the road of the Manila galleons coming from Mexico and the Isthmus. Arabian, Hindu, and Chinese piracy had decayed shamefully. The English were crude at the business. In trade the Dutch had become dominant in the Islands and the Portuguese had faded. There was no limit to the opportunities for a courageous and dedicated raider in the Indies.

They came. And not the least of these new raiding men was Willy Jones.

It was said that Willy Jones was a Welshman. You can believe it or not as you like. The same thing has been said about the Devil. Willy was twenty-five years old when he finally possessed his own ship with a mixed crew. The ship was built like a humpbacked bird, with a lateen sail and suddenly appearing rows of winglike oars. On its prow was a swooping bird that had been carved in Muskat. It was named the Flying Serpent, or the Feathered Snake, depending on what language you use.

“Pause a moment,” said Galli. “Set the mood. Imagine about dead men variously. We come to the bloody stuff at once.”

One early morning, the Feathered Snake overtook a tall Dutchman. The ships were grappled together, and the men from the Snake boarded the Dutch ship. The men on the Dutchman were armed, but they had never seen such suddenness and savagery as shown by the dark men from the Snake. There was slippery blood on the decks, and the croaking of men being killed. “I forgot to tell you that this was in the passage between the Molucca Sea and the Banda,” Galli said.

The Snake took a rich small cargo from the Dutch ship, a few able-bodied Malay seamen, some gold specie, some papers of record, and a dark Dutch girl named Margaret. These latter things Willy Jones preempted for himself. Then the Snake devoured that tall Dutchman and left only a few of its burning bones floating in the ocean.

“I forgot to tell you that the tall Dutch ship was named the Luchtkastell,” Galli said.

Willy Jones watched the Luchtkastell disappearing under the water. He examined the papers of record, and the dark Dutch girl Margaret. He made a sudden decision: he would cash his winnings and lay up for a season.

He had learned about an island in the papers of record. It was a rich island, belonging to the richest of the Dutch spice men who had gone to the bottom with the Luchtkastell. The fighting crew would help Willy Jones secure the island for himself; and in exchange, he would give them his ship and the whole raiding territory and the routes he had worked out.

Willy Jones captured the island and ruled it. From the ship he kept only the gold, the dark Dutch girl Margaret, and three golems which had once been ransom from a Jew in Oman.

“I forgot to tell you that Margaret was the daughter of the Dutch spice man who had owned the island and the tall ship and who was killed by Willy,” Galli said, “and the island really belonged to Margaret now as the daughter of her father.”

For one year Willy Jones ruled the small settlement, drove the three golems and the men who already lived there, had the spices gathered and baled and stored (they were worth their weight in silver), and built the Big House. And for one year he courted the dark Dutch girl Margaret, having been unable to board her as he had all other girls.

She refused him because he had killed her father, because he had destroyed the Luchtkastell which was Family and Nation to her, and because he had stolen her island.

This Margaret, though she was pretty and trim as a kuching, had during the affair of the Feathered Snake and the Luchtkastell twirled three seamen in the air like pinwheels at one time and thrown them all into the ocean. She had eyes that twinkled like the compounded eyes of the devil-fly; they could glint laughter and fury at the same time.

“Those girls were like volcanoes,” the man said. “Slim, strong mountains, and we climbed them like mountains. Man, the uplift on them! The shoulders were cliffs that laughed. The swaying—”

No, no! Belay that last paragraph! That’s from the ramble of the fellow in the bar, and it keeps intruding.

“I forgot to tell you that she reminds me of Wonder Woman,” Galli said.

Willy Jones believed that Margaret was worth winning unbroken, as he was not at all sure that he could break her. He courted her as well as he could, and he used to advantage the background of the golden-green spicery on which they lived.

“Imagine about the Permata bird that nests on the moon,” Galli said, “and which is the most passionate as well as the noblest-singing of the birds. Imagine about flute notes soaring.”

Willy Jones made this tune to Margaret:

The Nutmeg Moon is the third moon of the year.

The Tides come in like loose Silk all its Nights.

The Ground is animated by the bare Feet of Margaret

Who is like the Pelepah of the Ko-eng Flower.

Willy made this tune in the Malaya language in which all the words end in ang.

“Imagine about water leaping down rocky hills,” Galli said. “Imagine about red birds romping in green groves.”

Willy Jones made another tune to Margaret:

A Woman with Shoulders so strong that a Man might ride upon them

The while she is still the little Girl watching for the black Ship

Of the Hero who is the same age as the Sky,

But she does not realize that I am already here.

Willy made this tune in the Dutch language in which all the words end in lijk.

“Imagine about another flute joining the first one, and their notes scamper like birds,” Galli said.

Willy Jones made a last tune to Margaret:

Damnation! That is enough of Moonlight and Tomorrows!

Now there are mats to plait, and kain to sew.

Even the smallest crab knows to build herself a house in the sand.

Margaret should be raking the oven coals and baking a roti.

I wonder why she is so slow in seeing this.

Willy made this tune in the Welsh language in which all the words end in gwbl.

When the one year was finished, they were mated. There was still the chilliness there as though she would never forgive him for killing her father and stealing her island; but they began to be in accord.

“Here pause five minutes to indicate an idyllic interlude,” Galli said. “We sing the song Bagang Kali Berjumpa if you know the tune. We flute, if I have my flute.”

The idyllic interlude passed.

Then Willy’s old ship, the Feathered Snake, came back to the Island. She was in a pitiful state of misuse. She reeked of old and new blood, and there were none left on her but nine sick men. These nine men begged Willy Jones to become their captain again to set everything right.

Willy washed the nine living skeletons and fed them up for three days. They were fat and able by then. And the three golems had refitted the ship.

“All she needs is a strong hand at the helm again,” said Willy Jones. “I will sail her again for a week and a day. I will impress a new crew, and once more make her the terror of the Spice Islands. Then I will return to my island, knowing that I have done a good deed in restoring the Snake to the bloody work for which she was born.”

“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.