"End of the Line" (1961)

John Gillan had been lying dead on his back. A great part of his tongue had been chopped off and the bare end of his nose. However what had killed him was a spike driven into the lower center of his chest. The spike was a steel footing designed as a base for a wooden post or pier such as are sometimes used for support in these ramshackle buildings. It had its floor plate, and the center spike was meant to drive into the wooden pole to secure it. The spike—much sharpened—was driven clear to the plate into the lower chest of John Gillan, and the face of it looked like a large round badge worn on his chest. From the bleeding it would seem that the two wounds had been instantaneous, or near the same time. He had not been first killed and later mutilated, or not much later.

“End of the Line” is not one Lafferty liked. In his records, he wrote “NOT VERY GOOD,” and he did not try to place the story. Considering that he sent a story he considered to be bad, the in other ways very important “Johnny Crookedhouse,” to over twenty places, one concludes that he had absolutely zero faith in “End of the Line.” It went to the hucksterish learn-to-write-and-sell-fast agent A. L. Fierst, was returned, and moldered after January 1963.

The story has typical Lafferty elements. There are teenagers and detectives. Centrally, there is an initiation ritual. As is often the case with pre-nucleation stories, the supernatural is an overlay on a rationalized mystery that itself becomes slightly complicated by philosophical ambiguities in the plot because that is how Lafferty creates.

Sergeant Joe Cook receives a mysterious, muffled phone call reporting the death of a teenager named John Gillan. The caller, who claims to be Gillan himself, says that his tongue has been cut out, and he tells the police to go to an abandoned car barn. Cook and Captain Shakelton arrive to find Gillan dead, impaled on a steel spike with a severed tongue. The crime scene is filled with bizarre, occult elements. There is dead, torn apart chicken, half of a dead rat, a sulfury gutted candle, and weird symbols drawn in goat blood on the floor.

The investigation divides the police along philosophical lines established in the story's opening sentences:

“Now and then a case will come along that is insulting to the reason,” Dr. Kirn had once said. “When this happens, the only thing we can do is reason it out of existence. The grotesque never actually happens.” “It does happen,” Captain Shakelton had insisted evenly. “The people of this world are all of them grotesque animals. They cover it a little, but the cover's thin. The grotesque is basic.”

That rings true as core Lafferty.

Captain Shakelton suspects an occult ritual murder and interviews residents of a nearby, sketchy neighborhood called Fortune Tellers’ Row known for its local superstitions and supposed voodoo practices. In contrast, Doctor Kirn, a highly rational police captain who rejects the truly grotesque, says there must be a logical explanation. By analyzing the victim's social circle, Kirn deduces that the phone call was made by another teenager, Peter Fay, a close, admiring friend who unconsciously imitates Gillan's voice and mannerisms out of flattery and then consciously does so in the call to the cops.

The police haul in Fay and two other teenage friends. Usually, Lafferty relishes police interrogations, but this time the kids confess quickly to what happened. It was a freak accident rather than a ritualistic sacrifice. It just looked so damn occult because the boys were initiating John Gillan into their secret "End of the Line Club." The boys copied random occult symbols from a book called Witchcraft Through the Ages to make the whole thing feel mysterious and spooky. The final test of bravery was insane:

“The bear trap we already had there and set, and the long spike on its facing. John had to go down over the spike set under his chest, in the push-up position, and stick his tongue out and lick the inside bottom jaw of the bear trap. That trap can cut clear through one-by-fours in one bite. It sure makes you nervous to do the last test.”

This time, however, passing rat jumped out, hit the tab on the bear trap, and sprung the trap. The bear trap snapped close, clipping off Gillan's tongue, causing him to fall onto the spike. Impaled, he writhed onto his back, tongueless, and the boys reeled in the bear trap, which was on a chain, through a window. Then they anonymously called the authorities, hoping John could be saved.

If there is a big idea in this story, it is the dialectic between Captain Kirn and Captain Shakleton, who both end up being right and wrong. If one had to call it, Kirn is probably the one who is more wrong.

At the end of the story, he thinks he has been vindicated. After all, it is Kirn who solves the case. A supernatural ritual didn't actually happen. Or did it?

Look at what happens: teenagers build a ritual out of Chaldee letters, goat's blood, racialized French, Pennsylvania Dutch hexes, a metal spike, and a bear trap. In a way, the ritual does work. Not the way the teenagers meant for it to, but the ritual creates the death. The Sign of the Short Spear and the Sign of the Tongue turn out to be prophecies that are fulfilled. We are told that John Gillian was a good kid. Maybe Gillan was just too wholesome to have full “The End of the Line Club” membership, and occult forces sort it out.

Kirn certainly doesn’t see it this way. He says that the initiation ritual scene is "about a week old in its combination but very ancient in all its elements." He means it dismissively. Teenagers playing with old superstitions. Yet in the final exchange, Kirn concedes something important, Shakelton’s main thesis. Shakelton says,

“Well, you found the right way of looking at it, Kirn, but it was still a little grotesque.” “It was—but understandable. You may be right that the people of the world are all of them grotesque animals thinly covered. At a certain age the cover is very thin.”

Again, core Lafferty.

“End of the Line” is preposterous. It raises some interesting issues on Lafferty’s ethnoessentialism (see the resource below). But Lafferty is right that it is not good, with its extreme plot contrivance. I know I am terribly biased that Lafferty writes nothing that is not, in some way, fun. For instance, I think "End of the Line" has Lafferty’s first mention of Kabbalah, and perhaps his first use of one of his recurring recurrent occult images, Chaldee letters. That I would need to check on. If the unpublished stories are ever published, the story will have its place.

End of the Line Notes.pdf

Download PDF • 283KB