by Gerald Kersh
Furthermore, there was the question of Motive. Robbery? Nothing in the house had been touched. The old lady had nothing worth stealing. Revenge? Most unlikely: she had no friends and no enemies – lived secluded with her little niece, doing no harm to anyone…. You see, there was a certain amount of sense in the coroner’s verdict…. Still …
‘Only let me solve this mystery, and I’m made,’ I said to myself.
I solved it, and I broke myself.
*
… Now, as you must know, when you are in doubt you had better first examine yourself.
People get into a sloppy habit of mind. I once read a detective story called The Invisible Man, in which everybody swore he had seen nobody; yet there were footprints in the snow. ‘Nobody’, of course, was the postman, in this story; ‘invisible’ simply because nobody ever bothers to consider a postman as a person.
I was quite sure that in the mystery of Miss Pantile there must have been something somebody overlooked. I don’t mean Sherlock Holmes stuff, like cigarette-ash, and what not. Not a clue, in the generally accepted sense of the term, but something.
And I was convinced that somehow, out of the corner of my mind’s eye, I had seen in Miss Pantile’s bedroom, a certain something-or-other that was familiar to me, yet very much out of place. Nothing bad in itself – an object in itself perfectly innocent; but, in the circumstances, definitely queer. Now what was it?
I racked my brains – Lord, but I racked my silly brains! – trying to visualise in detail the scene of that bedroom. I was pretty observant as a youngster – I tell you, I might have got to be Detective-Inspector if I’d had the sense to keep my mouth shut at the right time – and the scene came back into my mind quite clearly.
There was the room, about sixteen feet by fourteen. Main articles of furniture, a pair of little bedsteads with frames of stained oak; crewel-worked quilts. Everything neat as a pin. A little dressing-table, blue crockery with a pattern of pink roses. Wallpaper, white with a pattern of red roses. A little fire-screen, black, crewel-worked again with yellow roses and green leaves. Over the fireplace, on the mantelshelf, several ornaments – one kewpie doll with a ribbon round its waist, one china cat with a ribbon round its neck, half a pair of cheap gift-vases with a paper rose stuck in it, and a pink velvet pincushion. At the end of the mantelshelf nearest the little girl’s side of the room, several books——
‘– Ah-ah! Hold hard, there!’ my memory said to me. ‘You’re getting hot! … You remember the old game of Hot-and-Cold, I dare say, in which you have to go out of the room, and then come back and find some hidden object? When you’re close to it, you’re hot; when you’re not, you’re cold. When my memory said ‘hot’, I stopped at the mental image of those books, and all of a sudden the solution to the Spindleberry Road mystery struck me like a blow between the eyes.
And here, in my excitement, I made my big mistake. I wanted, d’you see, to get the credit, and the promotion that would certainly come with it.
Being due for a week-end’s leave, I put on my civilian suit and went down to Luton, where the orphan girl Titania was staying in the care of some distant cousin, and by making myself pleasant and being tactful I got to talking with the kid alone, in a tea shop.
She got through six meringues before we were done talking….
*
She was a pale-faced little girl, sort of pathetic in the reach-me-down black full mourning they’d dressed her in. One of those surprised-looking little girls with round eyes; mouth always part-open. Bewildered, never quite sure whether to come or to go, to laugh or to cry. Devil of a nuisance to an officer on duty; he always thinks they’ve lost their way, or want to be taken across a street. It’s difficult for a busy man to get any sense out of them, because they start crying at a sharp word.
Her only true distinguishing mark or characteristic was her hair, which was abundant and very pretty. Picture one of those great big yellow chrysanthemums combed back and tied with a bit of black ribbon.
I asked her, was she happy in her new home? She said: ‘Oh yes. Auntie Edith says, as soon as it’s decent, I can go to the pictures twice a week.’
‘Why,’ I asked, ‘didn’t your Auntie Lily let you go to the pictures, then?’
Titania said: ‘Oh no. Auntie Lily wouldn’t go because picture houses are dangerous. They get burnt down.’
‘Ah, she was a nervous lady, your Auntie Lily, wasn’t she,’ I said, ‘keeping the house all locked up like that at night.’
‘She was afraid of boys,’ Titania said, in an old-fashioned way. ‘These boys! What with throwing stones and letting off fireworks, they can burn you alive in your bed. A girl isn’t safe with these boys around.’
‘That’s what your poor Auntie said, isn’t it, Titania? Now you’re not afraid of boys, are you?’
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘Brian was a boy. He was my brother.’
‘What, did Brian die, my little dear?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He died of the ’flu, when Mummy did. I had the ’flu, too. But I didn’t die; only I was delicate afterwards. I had the rheumatic fever, too.’
‘Your brother Brian must have been a fine big boy,’ I said. ‘Now about how old would he have been when he passed away? Twelve?’
‘Thirteen and a quarter,’ said Titania. ‘He was teaching me how to spit.’
‘And so he passed away, and I’m very sorry to hear it,’ I said. ‘… And your Auntie Lily wouldn’t let you go to the pictures, would she? Well, you must always obey your elders, as you are told in the Catechism. Who did you like best on the pictures?’
Her face sort of lit up, then, d’you see? She told me: ‘Best of all I liked Pearl White in a serial, Peg o’ the Ring. Oh, it was good! And John Bunny and Flora Finch——’ She giggled at the memory. ‘But we had only got to Part Three of The Clutching Hand, when Mummy and Brian died, and I went to live with Auntie Lily…. Apart from the danger of fire, picture palaces are unhealthy because they are full of microbes. Microbes carry germs…. Auntie Lily used to wear an Influenza Mask on her face when she went out – you know, you can’t be too careful these days,’ said this serious little girl.
‘And kept all her windows locked up, too, I dare say,’ I said. ‘Well, your elders and betters know best, no doubt…. But I mean to say, what did you do with yourself? Play with dolls?’
‘Sometimes. Or, sometimes, I did sewing, or read books.’
‘Ah, you’re a great one for reading, Titania,’ I said, ‘like your poor mother used to be. Why, Titania is a name out of a fairy story, isn’t it? A clever girl like you could read anything she could get her hands on, if she were locked up with nobody to talk to. I bet you read your poor brother’s old books, too. I remember noticing on the mantelpiece a bound volume of the Boy’s Own Paper. And also … now let me see … a book with a black and yellow cover entitled One Thousand Things a Clever Boy Can Do – is that it?’
She said: ‘Not Things! Tricks.’
‘And right you are! One Thousand Tricks a Clever Boy Can Do. And I’ll bet you mastered them all, didn’t you?’
She said: ‘Not all of them. I didn’t have the right things to do most of them with——’
‘There’s one trick in that book, which I have read myself,’ I said, ‘which you did master, though, and which you did have the right apparatus for, Titania, my dear. Tell you what it is. You get a medium needle and stick it down the centre of a soft cork. Then you get a penny and place this penny between two little blocks of wood. Put your cork with the needle in it on top of the penny, and strike the cork a sharp blow with a hammer. The cork will hold the needle straight, so that it goes right through that penny. That’s the way you killed your poor Auntie Lily, isn’t it, Titania?’
Finishing the last of her meringue, she nodded. Having swallowed, she said, ‘Yes,’ and, to my horror, she giggled.
‘Why, then,’ I said, ‘you must come back to London with me, d’you see, and tell my Inspector all about it.’
‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘Only you mustn’t say anything to Auntie Edith.’
I told her: ‘Nobody will do anything dreadful to you; only you must confess and get it off your poor little mind.’
Titania’s second cousin Edith, by courtesy called ‘Auntie’, came with the child and me to London … and there, in the police station, she flatly denied every word of everything, and cried to be sent home.
Put yourself in my position, stigmatised as a madman and a brute! I lost my temper, one word led to another, and I ‘tendered my resignation’….
I shall never forget the sly expression on the girl Titania’s face when she went back with her Auntie Edith to Luton.
I have no idea what has happened to her since. She will be about thirty-eight or thirty-nine by now, and I should not be at all surprised if she had turned out to be quite a handful.
The Queen of Pig Island
THE story of the Baroness von Wagner, that came to its sordid and bloody end after she, with certain others, had tried to make an earthly paradise on a desert island, was so fantastic that if it had not first been published as news, even the editors of the sensational crime-magazines would have thought twice before publishing it.
Yet the von Wagner Case is commonplace, considered in relation to the Case of the Skeletons on Porcosito, or ‘Pig Island’, as it is commonly called.
The bones in themselves are component parts of a nightmare. Their history, as it was found, written on mutilated paper in Lalouette’s waterproof grouch-bag, is such that no one has yet dared to print it, although it happens to be true.
In case you are unacquainted with the old slang of the road: a Grouch-Bag is a little pouch that used to hang about the necks of circus performers. It held their savings, and was tied with a gathered string, like the old-fashioned Dorothy-Bag. This was necessary, because circus-encampments used to be hotbeds of petty larceny. So, on the high trapeze, the double-back-somersault man wore his grouch-bag. The lion-tamer in the cage of the big cats might forget his whip or lose his nerve – he would never forget or lose his grouch-bag, out of which could be filched the little moist roll of paper-money that was all he had to show for his constantly imperilled life.
Lalouette carried her grouch-bag long after the gulls had picked her clean. It contained 6,700 dollars and a wad of paper with a scribbled story, which I propose to make public here.
It is at once the most terrible and the most pathetic story I have ever had to tell.
*
At first the captain of the ship who landed on Porcosito, who subscribed to a Popular Science magazine, thought he had discovered the Missing Link – the creature that was neither man nor ape. The first skeleton he found had a sub-human appearance. The thorax was capacious enough to contain a small barrel; the arms were remarkably long, and the legs little and crooked. The bones of the hands, the feet, and the jaw were prodigiously strong and thick. But then, not far away – it is only a little island – in a clump of bushes, he found another skeleton, of a man who, when he was alive, could not have been more than two feet tall.
There were other bones: bones of pigs, birds, and fishes; and also the scattered bones of another man who must have been no taller than the other little man. These bones were smashed to pieces and strewn over an area of several square yards. Wildly excited, happy as a schoolboy reading a mystery story, the captain (his name was Oxford) went deeper, into the more sheltered part of Porcosito, where a high hump or rock rises in the form of a hog’s back and shelters a little hollow place from the wind that blows off the sea. There he found the ruins of a crude hut.
The roof, which must have been made of grass, or light canes, had disappeared. The birds had come in and pecked clean the white bones of a woman. Most of her hair was still there, caught in a crack into which the wind had blown it or the draught had pulled it. It was long and fair hair. The leather grouch-bag, which had hung about her neck, was lying on the floor in the region of the lower vertebræ, which were scattered like thrown dice. This human skeleton had no arms and no legs. Captain Oxford had the four sets of bones packed into separate boxes, and wrote in his log a minute account of his exploration of the tiny island of Porcosito. He believed that he had discovered something unexplainable.
He was disappointed.
The underwriters of Lloyd’s in London, had, with their usual punctiliousness, paid the many thousands of pounds for which the steamship Anna Maria had been insured, after she went down near Pig Island, as sailors called the place. The Anna Maria had gone down with all hands in a hurricane. The captain, officers, passengers, cargo and crew had been written off as lost. Faragut’s Circus was on board, travelling to Mexico.
Captain Oxford had not found the remains of an unclassified species of overgrown, undergrown, and limbless monsters. He had found the bones of Gargantua the Horror, Tick and Tack, the Tiny Twins and Lalouette.
She had been born without arms and legs, and she was the Queen of Pig Island. It was Lalouette who wrote the story I am telling now.
*
Tick and Tack were tiny, but they were not twins.
A casual observer sees only the littleness of midgets, so that they all look alike. Tick was born in England, and his real name was Greaves. Tack, who was born in Dijon, Brittany, was the son of a poor innkeeper named Kerouaille. They were about twenty-five inches tall, but well-formed, and remarkably agile, so that they made an attractive dancing-team. They were newcomers to the Circus, and I never saw them.
But I have seen Gargantua and Lalouette; and so have hundreds of my readers. Gargantua the Horror has haunted many women’s dreams. He was, indeed, half as strong and twice as ugly as a gorilla. A gorilla is not ugly according to the gorilla standard of beauty; Gargantua was ugly by any reckoning. He did not look like a man, and he did not quite resemble an ape. He was afflicted by that curious disease of the pituitary gland which the endocrinologists term Acromegaly. There is a well-known wrestler who has it. Something goes wrong with one of the glands of internal secretion, so that the growth of the bones runs out of control. It can happen to anyone. It could happen to me, or to you; and it produces a really terrifying ugliness. Gargantua, as it happened, was by nature a man of terrible strength; George Walsh has told me that he might have been heavy-weight weight-lifting champion of the world. An astute promoter realised that there was money in his hideousness: so Percy Robinson rechristened himself Gargantua the Horror, grew a beard – which came out in tufts like paint-brushes all over his face – and became a wrestler. As a wrestler he was too sweet-natured and silly, so he drifted into a sideshow. Naked to the waist, wearing only a bear-skin loincloth, he performed frightening feats of strength. In a fair in Italy I saw him lift on his back a platform upon which a fat man sat playing a grand piano. That same evening I saw Lalouette.
I would not have seen her if I had not been in the company of a beautiful and capricious woman who said, when I told her I had a prejudice against going to stare at freaks, that if I would not come with her she would go in alone. So I bought the tickets and we went into the booth.
Lalouette was an aristocrat among freaks. She drew great crowds. Having been born without arms and legs she had cultivated her lips and teeth, and the muscles of her neck, back, and stomach so that she could dress herself, wash herself, and, holding a brush or pencil in her lips, paint a pretty picture in water-colours or write a letter in clear round longhand. They called her Lalouette because she could sing like a bird. One had the impression that she could do anything but comb her hair. She could even move a little, by throwing her weight forward and sideways in a strange rolling motion. Lalouette painted a little picture while we watched, and sang a little song, and my lady friend and I, overcome with admiration and with pity, agreed that a woman of her accomplishments might have been one of the greatest women in Europe if the Lord in His wisdom had seen fit to make her whole. For she was a lady, superbly educated, and extremely beautiful – a blonde with great black eyes and magnificent ha
ir of white-gold. But there she was, a freak on a turn-table; nothing but a body and a head, weighing fifty pounds.
I had some conversation with her: she spoke five languages with perfect fluency, and had read many books. Enquiring into her history I learned that she came of a noble, ancient, overbred Viennese family. Indeed, royal blood ran in her veins, and some fortune-teller had told her mother the Countess that the child to which she was about to give birth would be a Ruler, a Queen.
But when the child was born they saw a monstrosity. The Count fainted. The Countess loved Lalouette and cherished her, devoting her wretched life to the unfortunate child, who, soon after she could speak, demonstrated a proud and an unyielding spirit. Conscious of her infirmity, Lalouette wanted to do things for herself, despising assistance – despising herself.
Her father could not bring himself to look at her. When she was seventeen years old her mother died and her father sent her away with her nurse. ‘All the money that you need, take,’ he said, ‘only do not let me see this abortion.’ Then, when the First World War came, the Count lost all his money and shot himself. The kind old nurse lost much of her kindness after that, and when an agent named Geefler offered her money if she could persuade the girl to go with him, the nurse, pleading sickness and poverty, had no difficulty in persuading Lalouette that this would be a good thing to do.
So the young lady changed her name. Geefler sold her to Gargamelov, who passed her on to Faragut; and she drew money up and down the world, until Faragut’s Circus went towards Mexico, and the Anna Maria was wrecked, and she found herself with Tick and Tack and Gargantua the Horror on Porcosito, the Island of Pigs.
Then the prophecy came to pass. She was the Queen of Pig Island. She had three subjects: two dancing dwarfs and the ugliest and strongest man in the world; and she had no arms and no legs; and she was beautiful.
*
Gargantua was a man whose tenderness was in inverse proportion to his frightful ugliness. As soon as the Anna Maria began to sink he went instinctively to the weakest of his friends and offered them his muscles. To Tick and Tack he said: ‘Hold on to my shoulders.’ They were in sight of land. He took Lalouette in his left hand, told the others to hold tight, and jumped overboard, and swam with his legs and his right hand. The ship went down. The Horror swam steadily. He must have covered five miles in the face of a falling high wind. At last his feet touched ground and he staggered up to a sandy beach as the sun was rising. The two little men were clinging to him still. His left hand, stronger than the iron which it could bend, held Lalouette. The dwarfs dropped off like gorged leeches, and the giant threw himself down and went to sleep – but not before he had made a hollow place in the soft, fine sand, and put Lalouette comfortably to rest.