“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 wrestle 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.
There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room from a great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry.
“I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.
“Timacheff, you fool!” Vincent Rue bawled to the space above them. “Watch your damned special effects! You’re wrecking the place!”
Unquestionably, that Timacheff was good. He used his special effects in classes on phenomenology that he taught up there.
“The head, the head! Don’t let them forget the head!” Day-Torch cried in a flaming voice.
“I just remembered that Timacheff is out of town and is holding no classes today,” Kit-Fox muttered in vulpine wonder.
“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian Mountain boomed. Then he was gone from the midst of them. He would be a factor, though, “in days to come.”
“The head, the head!” Day-Torch flamed and scorched.
Christopher and Vincent tried to straighten up the unconscious Buford Strange. They shook him, but he came apart and one arm came off him. He was revealed as a straw-man filled with bloody straw, and no more.
“Why, he’s naught but a poorly made scarecrow,” Christopher Foxx said in wonder. “He was right that one who falls back from it cannot become an ordinary man again. He will be less than man.”
“That’s funny. He always looked like a man to me,” Vincent Rue said.
“The head, the head! You forget the head. Let the head fall down!” Day-Torch cried.
And the head fell down.
It smashed itself like a bursting pumpkin on the broken floor.
4.
About the Author
R. A. Lafferty began selling fiction regularly in the early 1960s and went full-time as a writer in 1971. His novels include Past Master (1968), Fourth Mansions (1969), and the Native American historical Okla Hannali (1972). You can sign up for email updates here.
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Copyright Acknowledgments
“Seven-Day Terror” by R. A. Lafferty © The Locus Science Fiction Foundation. First published in If, March 1962.