It’s well known that sorting out R.A. Lafferty’s estate has been, in legal terms, a mess. What’s less well known is how “The Six Fingers of Time” contributed to that mess.

For almost a decade, the Lafferty estate was a byword for snarled probate cases. Though he had a valid will leaving everything to his last surviving sibling, Anna, she died while he was in a nursing home. The several strokes he had suffered as well as the gradual deterioration caused by Alzheimer’s meant he was not of sound mind to update the will; as neither Anna nor any other of Lafferty’s siblings had any children, this meant that his estate and literary rights passed to all his surviving relatives—and though Ray and his brothers and sister may have been unusual in their lack of issue, the rest of the family more than made up for this oversight.

The foremost task of Lafferty’s executor was moving on the literary rights to a group better equipped to represent and propagate Lafferty’s work. But thanks to the probate situation, every single heir (of majority age) would have to approve such an agreement: though extraordinary effort they were just on the verge of one when something happened that spooked some of the heirs—or rather, got them thinking that they had hold of something much more valuable than was probably the case.

See, in 1994, Nicholson Baker wrote a novel called The Fermata. A film company bought the option, and hired Robert Zemeckis and Neil Gaiman to produce a screenplay. As is often the case, the studio also took out options on any intellectual property whose central conceit was near that of Baker’s book—which was a protagonist with the ability to stop time and manipulate the people around him as he wished. Whether it was Gaiman—who certainly would’ve recognized the surface similarities to “Six Fingers of Time”—or someone else who advised taking out the option, the result was a large amount of money being paid to the Lafferty estate to ensure that a movie would not made of that story, lest it encroach on The Fermata. Some of the heirs—a few of whom had heard of Philip K. Dick, or noticed that sci-fi seemed to be doing well in the theaters and wasn’t Uncle Ray a famous sci-fi writer?—decided to hold out for the money they were sure was on the way, and quashed the original deal.

As of this writing, of course, Baker’s Fermata has yet to be filmed, and the screenplay has gone through at least three versions. (A film in 2006, Cashback, did rip off that central conceit, but it lacked the grotesque seediness of Baker’s novel, and pretty much everything from Lafferty’s story.) And up through the actual sale of the state to the Locus Foundation last year, “Six Fingers” was still the last and only high-dollar Hollywood option taken out on any of Lafferty’s tales—which might have explained the willingness of the heirs to finally agree to the sale for $75,000 (with a provision for splitting the purse, should Tinseltown come calling in the future).

The odd thing in all this, of course (or an odd thing) is that the stoppage of time is likely the least original element in “Six Fingers of Time” (Robert Bloch’s “The Hell-Bound Train” is only one of many tales around that time presenting similar temporal tricks). In Lafferty’s telling, the time-manipulation and the juvenile pranks played by the protagonist are only the setup for a game played for much higher stakes than a peek or two in the women’s locker room: the ability to greatly slow time is reserved for those who have, whether vestigially or fully-formed, six fingers on each hand, and who belong to a different recension from the standard-issue man on the street.

Lafferty would use this background conspiracy more effectively in later works, especially The Devil Is Dead and the Coscuin Chronicles; here that history is compressed into the space of a novelette and made into a race against, not the time of the clock, but the span of one’s life, as the hero must learn enough (across many disciplines—yet another Lafferty autodidact) in the time he has to bring the conspiracy to light.

Thanks to its being in the public domain, “The Six Fingers of Time” is the first Lafferty story many new readers encounter, and that seems a shame. It has all the horror of a great Lafferty work, but very little of the humor; the coexistence of the two is what marks him at his peak. Yet it is undeniably a story that leaves an impression: many among the non-devoted remember it with a chill, along with its implications of a global and likely cosmic conspiracy of extradigital individuals to maintain their immortality and amusement at the expense of all others on earth. Hell, even the number six itself is charged with a certain spookiness, a “wrongness” not in the least diminished by the thought that it divides neatly into all measurements of time.

The end of the tale is ambiguous: nearing the great vision of the conspiracy’s extent, and the transmission of that vision to the public, the prematurely aged protagonist dies in his sleep, and his adversaries sedately rejoice. For a decade such appeared to be the fate of Lafferty’s own vision—until the Locus sale gave instead a reason for all of his fans and supporters to rejoice. Let there be nothing sedate about it! But let us also remember that there remains much work to be done.

Finished December 1959. Published in If, ed. H.L. Gold, September 1960. Collected in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, New York: Ace Books, 1970.