"Dig a Crooked Hole" (1976)

The Collective Unconscious is all one, of course, just as all the waters of the Earth are one. And those ghost-fish called the archetypes are to be found repeating themselves all through it. And yet they do change, slowly but relentlessly: and possibly the Crooked Hole Drilling Company has had much to do with their recent changes.

Your allegation that I treat my followers as patients is demonstrably untrue. . . . It is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own neurosis. But one [meaning Jung] who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely. — Sigmund Freud, 1913

Two writers who influenced Lafferty and are underread now are Ambrose Bierce and Lafcadio Hearn. However withering Lafferty could be when the subject of atheism came up, he admired the savagely atheistic Bierce’s sudden reversals, what I have called, in Lafferty’s case, Janusian peripeteia. It is not a very good name, but the move occurs so often in Lafferty that it ought to have one.

Of Bierce, Lafferty said, “He was a mixed comic and horror writer. You’ve got this humor stuff coming at you—and bam!—there’s poor mother, plunged into the boiling cauldron.” So many of Lafferty’s stories are built on moments like that. In “Dig a Crooked Hole,” Lafferty imagines a kind of science fiction with Bierce, not Wells or Verne, as its inaugurator. He writes, “In the year 1893, Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published a paper, ‘Interception of the Emanations from Underground Nourishing Strata as a Cause for Hysterical Phenomena.’ This paper was the beginning of modern analytical psychology. In the same year, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce wrote ‘The Well-Digger’s Daughter.’ This was the beginning of modern analytical science fiction.” Of course, that paper by Freud and Breuer does not exist, and there is no “Well-Digger’s Daughter.” However, anyone who is interested in Lafferty's schizo-gashes should read Bierce's "A Psychological Shipwreck" (1879).

Lafferty’s brief alternative history at the beginning of “Dig a Crooked Hole” is easy to skim past, but I want to spend a moment on it. It imagines a world in which there would have been no need for a Freud-Jung split. Had this been our Prime, it would be common knowledge that archetypes are not intrapsychic, but part of the Oceanic that contains us. “Dig a Crooked Hole” is one of those stories in which Lafferty is doing his Fortean thing, making the psychic exterior to the braincase. His father had been in the oil business, and a crooked well is usually one of the worst things that can happen in drilling; the early literature of the industry is full of explanations of its dangers and of how hard it is on equipment. In the story, we get the history of a family that specializes in digging crooked wells to tap into the extraphysical. It is an unpublished story, and not one many people are likely to enjoy, I think, because it is so deeply embedded in the private symbol systems of Lafferty’s more obscure experimentation in the seventies. But like the rest of the unpublished, completed short fiction, it ought to be in print, so that people can see what Lafferty was up to.

We learn about Peter McGuire, who is a third-generation crooked-hole driller. Crooked-hole drillers are experts in managing and routing psychic accumulations, such as the Collective Unconscious. Lafferty sets up the story so that these accumulations manifest beneath the earth as physical fluids and solids. Peter tells us his family history, and along the way, we learn that people who live in upper-story dwellings are cut off from these vital underground emanations. Lafferty explains the historical consequences of this separation:

There has always been a strange "Arrogant History" of persons living in Palaces, Castles, Manor Houses, and large Town Houses, with their servants living below stairs and themselves living above. Those topfloor masters feed on the brains of those below them, as vampires or vultures feed, but they do not feed on the balanced psychic broth that is below all of them. So the masters on their high levels become arrogant . . . but they lack balance and compassion."

The McGuires were one of the first families to learn how to remedy and exploit this. For instance, generations ago, they learned how to use specialized drilling equipment to pump psychic deposits directly to wealthy clients who live in high buildings or to drain apartments of their psychic underlay to induce psychosis. There is something else the three generations of McGuires have. They all end up being pigeon fanciers, and they are profound enemies of conspiracy.

So, back to the third-generation McGuire, Peter. He discovers that there is a conspiracy against the country, so he uses his crooked-well equipment to tap into the plot of the group planning to overthrow the government. The evidence? Peter presents twenty-seven jars of extracted liquid to federal authorities as physical evidence of the impending coup. The agents who evaluate this dismiss his literalism:

“And just what is this rotten water — say, look at the little bitty minnows swimming around in the green stuff! — supposed to be guilty of?" another Federal man asked. "It is, as you can plainly see if you analyze it, guilty of plotting the overthrow of our government and the toppling of the president and his thirty top brains," I said. "It is a veritable coup that the conspirators are plotting. And I have all the wet evidence right here. Neat, huh?”

Following this, they detain him in a federal institution known as the Bug in Washington, D.C., the same place Freddy Foley goes in Fourth Mansions. Both men have a three-day stay there.

Peter decides to use reverse psychology to manipulate his captors into throwing him into a deep underground cell:

“My lungs demand that I be placed in the highest apartment of this institution,' I said, thinking fast. "In no case should I be placed near the ground, and surely not below the ground. The emanations from the dank earth cause me great suffering." So they put me in the lowest and smallest cell of the Bug, clear underground. It had worked, and I was happy with it.”

Of course, it’s exactly where he wants to be. He is in the perfect place to absorb concentrated psychic energy, which lets him determine that the coup will inevitably happen. One month later, the conspiracy succeeds. The toppled president and his thirty top advisors are crammed into that exact underground cell. At this point, Peter is elsewhere, secretly pumping psychic sludge into the room, monitoring the captured leaders as they absorb the concentrated emanations. They’re dying off one by one, but becoming increasingly hyper-intelligent as they die off. The last man is the President, who now has accumulated all the psychic materials. Unfortunately, this is driving, or has driven, him mad.

So, where is Peter during this time? Well, the conspirators arrested him. They then convicted him using nine of those same jars of extracted psychic fluid as evidence of treason, claiming the swill was the verbatim record of his own secret thoughts. He has been sentenced to remain indefinitely atop a 188-foot-tall, three-foot-wide memorial pillar. The conspirators want him to die of exposure, starvation, or total psychosis due to his isolation from the earth's psychic strata. But Peter is hanging on. He knows how to drill crooked wells, and he is using secret, ultra-long-stem crooked-hole techniques to access psychic pools from his high vantage point. The winds blow fiercely, and he is up on that tower, but he is protected from vultures by his flock of pigeons. They keep him alive with regurgitated pigeon milk and supply him with the materials needed to write the account we have been reading. Rather than casting the pages to the streets himself, he relies on his avian network:

With sheets of paper stolen and brought to me by the pigeons out of open office windows, with pigeon feather for a quill pen and the pigeondirt for ink (I know that it makes for messy-looking writing, and I'm sorry about that), I have written this account. The pigeons will keep carrying these sheets into whatever open windows they can find... And if we are not able to mount a resistance, well, I have learned wisdom from all this psychic, crooked-hole slurry that I have been absorbing. I pump it into me from everywhere. I am so smart and completed that it dazzles me.

This is Lafferty at his strangest, full of conspiracy, weird in-jokes (“pigeon milk” is old slang for codswallop), Catholic history (the stylites), and social satire. Peter is on top of the monument. Is he really still digging the wells, or has he himself gone mad? The minnows in the jars are the great fishy archetypes Lafferty mentions early in the story. There are odd synchronicities: a pigeon saved the building of the Washington Monument, and the last passenger pigeon was named Martha, after Martha Washington. Does the story work? It does, but one has to be very attuned to his methods.