Category: Avram Davidson

Bloody Man by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bloody Man by Avram Davidson (Fantastic, August 1976) begins with Jack Limekiller, a Canadian ex-pat living in British Hidalgo (British Honduras), asking Archbishop Le Beau, who is scaling fish, for work:

“They tell me . . . ” Limekiller hesitated, briefly. Was it My Lord? Your Lordship? Or was it . . . it was, wasn’t it . . . Your Grace?
Some saints levitate. Some are telepathic. It was widely said and widely believed that William Constance Christian Le Beau was a saint.
“Just ‘Archbishop’ will do, Mr. Limekiller,” the old man said, without looking up. Scrip . . . scrop . . . scrip. . . Jack found himself looking covertly around. Perhaps for loaves.
“Ah . . . thank you, sir . . . Archbishop. . . . they tell me that I might be able to pick up a charter for my boat. Moving building supplies, I understand. Down to Curasow Cove? For a bungalow you want built?”
Flop went the fish into the basket.  p. 6

After receiving the Archbishop’s agreement and a letter of introduction, Limekiller sets about obtaining the materials he requires. He soon finds out, however, that there aren’t any supplies in sleepy Point Pleasaunce, so his travels take around the town and beyond, which provides the reader with a number of delightful picture-postcard descriptions of the places he visits and the people he meets:

Well, there was the Royal Telegraphy. Her Majesty’s Government did not exactly go to much effort to advertise the fact that there was, but Limekiller had somehow found the fact out. The service was located in two bare rooms upstairs off an alley near the old Rice Mill Wharf, where an elderly gentleman wrote down incoming messages in a truly beautiful Spencerian hand. . . . or maybe it was Copperplate. . . . or Chancery. . . . or Volapiik. What the Hell. It was beautiful. It was, in fact, so beautiful that it seemed cavalier to complain that the elderly gentleman was exceedingly deaf, and that, perhaps in consequence, his messages did not always make the most perfect sense.
Gambling that the same conditions did not obtain at the Royal Telegraphy Office in Port Caroline, Limekiller sent off several wires, advising the Carolinian entrepreneurs what he wanted to buy, and that he was coming in person to buy it.
“How soon will these go off?” he asked the aged telegrapher.
“Yes, that is what I heard myself, sir. They say the estate is settle, sir. After ahl these years.” And he shook his head and he smiled a gentle smile of wonder.  p. 11

Stepping out into the pre-dawn was like stepping into a clean, cool pool. Already, at that hour, people were about . . . grave, silent, polite. . . . the baker setting the fires, the fisherman already returning with their small catch. The sun climbed, very tentatively, to the edge of the horizon. For a moment, it hesitated. Then, all at once, two things happened. The national radio system, which had gone off the air at ten the night before, suddenly awoke into Sound. Radios were either dead silent or at full-shout. In one instant, every radio in Port Caroline, and in the greater Port Caroline Area, roared into life. And at the same moment, the sun, suddenly aware that there was nothing to oppose it, shot up from the sea and smote the land with a blast of heat.  p. 17

Most of the first part of the story is travelogue like the above, but Limekiller eventually begins to hear mentions and rumours of a ghostly mystery, the “Bloody Man” of the tale:

“An’ one day, me see some-teeng, mon, me see some-teeng hawreed. Me di see eet, mon. Me di see di bloody mon—”
“Hush up you mout’,” said Piggott. But the other, a much older fellow, did not hear, perhaps, or did not care, perhaps. “Me di see di blooddee mon. Me di see he, ah White-MON, ahl cot een pieces ahn ahl blood-dee. Wahn, two, t’ree, de pieces ahv heem dey ahl come togeddah. De mon stahn op befah me, mon. He stahn ahp befah me. Ahl bot wahn piece, mon. He no hahv wahn piece een he side, mon. He side gape, mon, gape open. Eet bleed, mon. Eet BLEED!”
And now other faces than the proprietor’s were turned to the narrator.
“Hush up you mout’, mon!” other voices said, gruff.
Brown man, glass of brown rum in his brown hand. Sweat on his face. Voice rising. “Ahn so me di know, mon. Me di know who eet ees, mon. Eet ees de blood-dee Cop-tain. Eet ees Cop-tain Blood!”  p. 15

This supernatural thread slowly develops through Limekiller’s subsequent trip down to Curasow Cove with his shipment—he witnesses a fishing grounds dispute between the locals and Arawak tribesmen from the south, displaced because of sightings of the apparition—and then Limekiller himself sees the Bloody Man when his boat enters a supernatural mist. Then (spoiler) after talking to Harlow, one of the locals who provides information about who the apparition might be (there is talk of Blackbeard and the Flying Dutchman, etc.), Limekiller asks the Archbishop for help in laying the ghost to rest.
In the climactic scene, and after fighting off the Fallen (who summon waterspouts and sharks), the Archbishop administers the sacrament to the Bloody Man and he disappears.
There is an interesting historical postscript where the ghost is revealed as Captain Cook (who met his death in Hawaii, thousand of miles away), and whose ghost has supposedly returned to the area because of a light-hearted oath made by Cook before his death.
I really enjoyed the wonderful description and colourful detail of this story (it is probably my favourite of the ‘Limekiller’ series1) but I suspect the average genre reader’s enjoyment will depend on whether they take to the sprawling travelogue that occurs before the fantasy elements come to the fore.
**** (Very Good). 19,250 words. Story link. Book purchase link UK/USA.

1. The ‘Jack Limekiller’ series of stories (which were later collected into a book) at ISFDB.

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson (Galaxy May 1958) opens with a Mr Whatney visiting a bicycle shop run by Oscar. Mr Whatney asks where Ferd (the other owner) is, and Oscar tells Whatney he is now on his own. The story of why begins with a habit of Oscar’s that irritated Ferd:

The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar would ask, “How does that machine feel to you? All right?”
“Why . . . I guess so.”
Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, “Well, I’ll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd.” Ferd always nodded gloomily.
He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, “Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park.”
“Leaving me all alone here all that time,” Ferd grumbled.

The rest of the story sees various other elements introduced, beginning with a couple with a baby visiting the shop in need of a replacement safety pin for the child’s nappy. Neither Oscar nor Ferd can find one in the shop, but later on Ferd finds a drawer full. Ferd wonders why this kind of thing happens, along with other phenomena like wardrobes suddenly filling up with coat hangers.
Running in parallel with these events is Ferd’s restoration of a red French racing bike, which he angrily smashes up after Oscar takes it to chase a female cyclist. When the bike later regenerates itself (and draws blood when Ferd tries to ride it) it leads him to speculate that there may be mimetic life on Earth:

“Maybe they’re a different kind of life form. Maybe they get their nourishment out of the elements in the air. You know what safety pins are— these other kinds of them? Oscar, the safety pins are the pupa forms and then they, like, hatch. Into the larval forms. Which look just like coat hangers. They feel like them, even, but they’re not. Oscar, they’re not, not really, not really, not . . .”

The story closes (spoiler) with Oscar telling Whatney he is now in a relationship with Norma (the female cyclist), breeding American and French racing bikes, and that Ferd “had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck.”
This is an enjoyable and amusing read but the ending didn’t work for me, probably because I thought that the safety pin/coat hanger lifecycle would extend to the bikes (maybe it did and I just missed it) and (b) I didn’t really get why the coat hangers would kill Ferd (unless, again, they are the previous life stage of the bikes).
I assume this story mostly got a Hugo Award for its quirk (the observational humour about safety pins and coat hangers) and its (for the time) perhaps risqué suggestion that Oscar is having sex with a succession of young women in the woods.
** (Average). 3,650 words. Story link.

The Golem by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Golem by Avram Davidson (F&SF, March 1955) opens with an android arriving at the porch of an elderly Jewish couple and sitting down on one of their chairs. As he tries to deliver his apocalyptic warnings the pair variously kvetch, interrupt and ignore him:

The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.
“When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.
“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”
“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.
“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”
“All mankind—” the stranger began.
“Shah! I’m talking to my husband. . . . He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”
“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.
“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich, I suppose he came to California for his health.”
“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—”
Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.
“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”
“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.
“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”
“I am not a human being!”
“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time.  pp. 113-114 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

Later the android says something rude to the wife and the man slaps it across the face and breaks it. Then the couple talk about golems, and the man sorts the internal wiring exposed when he hit the creature. The golem is more submissive when it is repaired, and the man tells it to mow the grass.
This is quite amusing to start with but it tails off at the end.
*** (Good). 1,800 words.

No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson (Playboy, July 1959) opens with a Mr Melchior and his personnel manager, Mr Taylor, driving to lunch with a psychologist, Dr Colles. Melchior tells Colles about an otherwise normal man who murdered a rival just to secure a promotion, and goes on to ask Colles to produce a test that will weed out such individuals from his company.
Inserted into this strand of the narrative is a section about an employee of Melichor’s called Joe Clock, who has borrowed money from a workmate but, as we see, has no intention of paying it back. Joe later completes the psychological screening test that Colles develops:

There are lots worse crimes than murder. Probably . . . Sure. Lots worse. The average person will do anything for money. Absolutely right they would. Why not, if you can get away with it? Sure. And the same way, that’s why you got to watch out for yourself.
There are worse things than losing your home. What? Catching leprosy?
And then the way to answer the question changed. Now you had to pick out an answer. Like, Most people who hit someone with their car at night would (a) report to the police first (b) give first aid (c) make a getaway if possible. Well, any damn fool would know it was the last. In fact, anyone but a damn fool would do just that. That’s what he did that time. (c)
Now, a dope like Aberdeen: he’d probably stop his car. Stick his nose in someone else’s tough luck. Anybody stupid enough to lend his rent money—  p. 38-39 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

The story develops further (spoiler) when Colles notices, having completed the work some weeks before, problematic mentions of Melchior and his ex-employees in the newspapers. He then discovers that nearly all the company men shown by the test to have psychopathic tendencies are still employed.
Colles confronts Melchior with this information—and then asks to work for him (there are a couple of earlier hints in the story that Colles is fairly amoral). The story finishes with a biter-bit ending where the personnel manager Taylor (another one of the story’s many psychopaths) has Melchior and Colles shot by Joe Clock and another man.
This is well enough told, and interesting enough, but the idea is barely credible. And some will see where the plot is going, or be unsurprised when they get there.
** (Average). 6,350 words.