"Get Off the World" (1958)

“Looking at the Japanese from the outside (as I must) it seems that one of your finest literary entertainments and pleasures is the ‘Ghost Story’. And the essence of the Ghost Story is the juxtaposition of horror and fun, or reality and dream state, of the familiar suddenly gone strange and weird, of the loved and cherished suddenly turned frightening, and of the comic standing up like a giant among the various realities and rationalities.” “I seldom write ‘ghost stories’ per se, but I do constantly try to deal in ‘joyful entertainments’: A thing can be at the same time a ‘joyful entertainment’ and an allegory and an archetype, and sometimes accidentally a ‘ghost story’. The most subtle ‘ghost story’ is the discovering of a ghost inside oneself, which is the essence of the ‘double blood’ experiences.” — Letter, 1993

Despite its title, the unpublished prenucleation story “Get Off the World” is not science fiction, but a rationalized ghost story and an early foray into noir.

James Francis Battleby is a simple man who needs to disappear, and fast. He has just discovered that his employer has crossed the line into some unspecified but perfidious criminality. The problem is that he has only nine thousand dollars in savings, while the three powerful men involved, Thomas Cromwell Crawley, Melvin Masterman, and Hugo Erpresser, not only want him dead but also have the resources and connections to arrange it. Battleby first goes to a disappearer and locator, who turns down the sum. He then goes to Wreckville for the help of Willy McGilly. McGilly lays out the reality of the situation:

"Then to me also your case seems to have no solution. There are six possible courses, flight, disguise, diversion, appeasement, attack, death. The first and last are nearly automatic; you run till you are caught and when you are caught you die. Disguises have endless variations and only one thing in common: none of them will work."

From here, the story becomes a series of weird-menace pranks that scare the antagonists. McGilly stages a fake suicide using a substitute body provided by his morgue worker nephew. While thugs are looking for Battleby, a shotgun blast is heard in an alley. The body is discovered with its face blown off (one assumes McGilly pulled the trigger) and is sent to the funeral home to be buried. Crawley, Masterman, and Erpresser attend the funeral. Erpresser has doubts about the positive identification of the corpse.

Following the funeral, the pranks begin. McGilly is going to psychologically torment them, not that they don’t have it coming. Erpresser goes back to his room in a ritzy high-rise and finds a life-like rubber replica of Battleby's face, and Masterman finds artificial bloody fingers planted in his coat pocket. Then, from beyond the grave, Battleby telephones Crawley. Battleby weaponizes his supposed demise to unnerve his former boss:

"Oh, I'm dead enough. I heard the three of you talking by my coffin when nobody else was close. Do you want me to tell you what you said? Pine boxes have a wonderful resonance from the inside."

He demands that the men publish a confession and go to prison. Crawley calls the hitman "Breaker Brock." Brock insists the assassination was successful. The next night, the men trace an eleven PM call from Battleby to a public telephone booth located outside the graveyard where the substitute body is buried.

The men and Brock climb the cemetery fence after finding a communication wire running directly from the phone book to where the reader expects it to be, down into the fresh grave. Masterman digs up the coffin. As he prepares to open it, the telephone rings from within the coffin. Lafferty captures the abrupt shift from tense thriller to absurd, weird menace:

Melvin had uncovered the coffin and nearly opened the lid when the muted voice of Battleby within it abruptly ceased. Then after a short pause a phone began to ring within the coffin. "Answer it, you little bugger, let's see you answer it," said Melvin Masterman. "If he answers it I'll die," said Thomas Crawley, and then without seeing whether he did or not Thomas Cromwell Crawley toppled over dead.

Masterman answers the coffin telephone and speaks to McGilly (the rotting corpse of the substitute with his face blown off is still there). Battleby says that Crawley has "just walked in the door." Unnerved, Erpresser returns to his apartment, where Battleby and McGilly subdue him and steal his hidden wealth. Having cut off some of the corpses' fingers to get them printed, Masterman goes insane and is apprehended by authorities while wandering the streets saying a nursery rhyme. We aren’t told what the rhyme is, but, with the bloody fingers in mind, maybe "Ten Fat Sausages," "Five Little Ducks," or piggies. McGilly "impounds" the fortunes of the three wealthy men, keeps half of Battleby’s life savings, and the story ends with Willy and his nephew, who works in the morgue, talking about how little nine thousand dollars is. "Nine thousand dollars wouldn’t keep a seaman in snuff through one watch."

Preposterousness is usually raised to being a virtue in Lafferty, but because "Get Off the World" works in the low-mimetic register of noir, it becomes preposterous in a way that would need parody to land—and it doesn’t look to me as if the story is parody, though it is metafictional. Lafferty plays it a little too straight. You can see the plot’s organization by sorting its effects into three categories—face, voice, and fingers—and by tracking how the ghost prank turns everything: the identities of three criminals break down just as the Battleby-as-ghost rests on the ideas of dismemberment and dislocation.

A few things to note. As in “Three Men in the Morning,” Past Master, and a handful of other Lafferty stories, we get the three-men-against-one setup. More importantly, even in early Lafferty much of social reality is a precarious, staged consensus, vulnerable to manipulation. This fits his never-ending fascination with the con game, not just as a source of fun, but as a way to test epistemological and ontological commitments.

Here, the con pits its rigid triad of “conscienceless crooks,” Crawley, Masterman, and Erpresser, against an escalating practical joke. As the joke unfolds, it attacks the boundaries of each crook’s personal identity. Personhood is weirdly modular and artificial; you can swap it out as easily as you can swap a rubber mask onto a victim. The bad guys try to dominate this arrangement by monopolizing information and coercing silence, through Battleby’s death, to hide their crimes. But it turns out to be harder than they think. Instead of snuffing out the voice by killing the person, the killing of the person seems to free the voice. Their reliance on a stable, empirical reality underwriting their crimes makes them vulnerable to a counter-con, as McGilly exploits the limits the three crooks assume are immutable. They play by the rules of organized crime. McGilly doesn’t.

In the broader context of Lafferty’s development, “Get Off the World” shows his early fascination with the rationalized supernatural. He seems drawn to the wildly paranormal, as we know, but not yet comfortable enough to go all in, one of the clearest signatures of prenucleation. That contrasts with his later work where the paranormal is left open or fully realized (as in his revision of Loup Garou, which shifts from faking a werewolf to a reality in which werewolves exist). This time he takes the classic trope of the call from beyond the grave and rationalizes it within the context of the con. The haunting is demystified into a trick run through a telecommunications circuit. The supernatural becomes information manipulation. The bodily horrors and spectral theater are never untethered from Willy McGilly’s menacing pranks.

At the same time, there is real weirdness here, driven by the uncanny relationship between the authentic and the artificial. The story creates a symmetry between the fake bloody wax fingers and the real ones, and between the phenolic rubber mask and the two actual faces (the absent because obliterated shotgun victim-face and the living Battleby face).

Perhaps one way to understand the story is just through a simple ghost story. The traditional ghost story puts pressure on integral human identity through dematerialization. Lafferty’s materialist con game in "Get Off the World" goes in the other direction. It produces an ontological loosening through play with material substitution. By introducing synthetic replicas of the self, the story displaces the boundaries of identity, dismantling them through physical proliferation rather than through the absence via spectralization. The uncanny realization of this material substitution is described when Erpresser confronts the face in his mirror:

He went back to the large mirror intending at least to pull the face off of it, and it was then that he noticed for the first time in his agitation that this face was neither rubber, wax, nor phenolic; but instead was made of a rather pasty stuff of which the face of Battleby himself was composed. Erpresser hadn't known that there was a live man in the room with him.

It is also a good example of a Lafferty signature: he combines extreme violence and gore with images of the artificial (fake fingers and a fake face) to produce moments of real violence that remain trapped within a larger context of derealization. My favorite example of this in Lafferty is in "Or Little Ducks Each Day," where Peckinpah-level violence is derealized through ketchup yet still shocks.

For whatever reason, the story never really gets off the ground, and fairly late into it, Lafferty breaks the fourth wall, as if he recognizes that the story’s modal constraints and plot are working against each other. He is innovating but not innovating enough. This narrative intrusion implicates the reader in the absurdity:

A man can be as sane as you (no not you, I'm not sure about you) and still not be able to explain adequately why he is walking down an empty street after midnight reciting a childish jingle to a handful of bloody fingers not his own. You'd have thought that man was crazy too.

It is an interesting story. In hindsight points to more exciting ideas, but I see why it didn’t sell. It should be in a complete edition of Lafferty.

Get Off the World Notes.pdf

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