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The Best of Gerald Kersh

Page 22

by Gerald Kersh


  It was then that I uttered an astonished oath and went running to look for my old uniform, which I found, with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s pamphlet still in the inside breast pocket. The Colonel asked me what the devil was the matter with me. I smoothed out the pamphlet and gave it to him without a word.

  He looked at it, and said: ‘How very extraordinary!’ Then he put away his eye-glass and put on a pair of spectacles; peered intently at the smudged and ragged drawing of the Brighthelmstone Monster, compared it with the photograph of Sato and said to me: ‘I have come across some pretty queer things in my time, but I’m damned if I know what to make of this.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘was your Sato tattooed behind? And if so, in what way?’

  Without hesitation the Colonel said: ‘A red-and-green hawk stooping between the shoulder-blades, a red fox chasing six blue-grey rabbits down his spine, and an octopus on the right buttock throwing out tentacles that went round to the belly. Why?’

  Then I opened Titty’s pamphlet and put my finger on the relevant passage. The Colonel read it and changed colour. But he said nothing. I said: ‘This is the damnedest coincidence. There’s another thing. This so-called Monster of Brighton scratched something on the door of the room where he was locked up, and the old parson took a pencil rubbing of it. Turn over four or five pages and you’ll see a copy of it.’

  The Colonel found the page. The spongy old paper was worn into holes, blurred by time and the dampness of lumber-rooms and the moisture of my body. He said: ‘It looks like Japanese. But no Japanese would write like that surely …’

  ‘Remember,’ I said, ‘that the Brighton Monster scratched its message with one of its own teeth on the panel of an oak door. Allow for that; allow for the fact that it was weak and sick; take into consideration the grain of the wood; and then see what you make of it.’

  The Colonel looked at the inscription for ten long minutes, copying it several times from several different angles. At last he said: ‘This says: I was asleep. I thought that it was all a bad dream from which I should awake and find myself by the side of my wife. Now I know that it is not a dream. I am sick in the head. Pity me, poor Sato, who went to sleep in one place and awoke in another. I cannot live any more. I must die. Hiroshima 1945.’

  ‘What do you make of that?’ I asked.

  The Colonel said: ‘I don’t know. I only know the bare facts about Sato because, as I have already told you, I was trying to find him. (a) He had a wife, and a home somewhere in Hiroshima, (b) He was in the Japanese Navy, and he went on leave in August 1945. (c) Sato disappeared off the face of the earth when they dropped that damned atom bomb. (d) This is unquestionably a picture of Sato – the greatest little wrestler the world has ever known. (e) The description of the tattooing on the back of this Monster tallies exactly with Sato’s … I don’t know quite what to make of it. Sato, you know, was a Christian. He counted the years the Christian way. Hiroshima 1945. I wonder!’

  ‘What do you wonder?’

  ‘Why,’ said the Colonel, ‘there can’t be the faintest shadow of a doubt that Sato got the middle part of the blast of that frightful atom bomb when we dropped it on Hiroshima. You may or may not have heard of Dr Sant’s crazy theories concerning Time in relation to Speed. Now imagine that you happen to be caught up – without disintegrating – in a species of air-pocket on the fringe of an atomic blast and are flung away a thousand times faster than if you had been fired out of a cannon. Imagine it. According to the direction in which you happen to be thrown you may find yourself in the middle of Tomorrow or on the other side of Yesterday. Don’t laugh at me. I may have been frying my brains in the tropics most of my life, and I may be crazy; but I’ve learned to believe all kinds of strange things. My opinion is that my poor little Sato was literally blown back two hundred years in time.’

  I said: ‘But why blown backwards only in time? How do you account for his being struck by the blast in Hiroshima and ending in Brighton?’

  ‘I’m no mathematician,’ said the Colonel, ‘but as I understand, the earth is perpetually spinning and Space is therefore shifting all the time. If you, for example, could stand absolutely still, here, now, where you are, while the earth moved – if you stood still only for one hour, you’d find yourself in Budapest. Do you understand what I mean? That atomic blast picked little Sato up and threw him back in Time. When you come to think of that, and remember all the curious Monsters they used to exhibit in Bartholomew’s Fair during the eighteenth century – when you think of all the Mermaids, Monsters, and Mermen that they picked out of the sea and showed on fair-grounds until they died … it makes you think.’

  ‘It makes you think.’

  ‘Do you observe, by the way,’ said the Colonel, pointing to the Reverend Titty’s pamphlet, ‘that poor little Sato was sick with running sores, and that his teeth were falling out? Radio-activity poisoning: these are the symptoms. Poor Sato! Can you wonder why he got desperate and simply chucked himself back into the sea to sink or swim? Put yourself in his position. You go to sleep in Hiroshima, in August 1945 and then – Whoof! – you find yourself in Brighton, in November 1745. No wonder the poor wretch couldn’t speak. That shock would be enough to paralyse anyone’s tongue. It scares me, Kersh, my boy – it puts a match to trains of thought of the most disturbing nature. It makes me remember that Past and Future are all one. I shall really worry, in future, when I have a nightmare … one of those nightmares in which you find yourself lost, struck dumb, completely bewildered in a place you’ve never seen before – a place out of this world. God have mercy on us, I wish they’d never thought of that disgusting Secret Weapon!’

  *

  You are free to argue the point, to speculate and to draw your own conclusions. But this is the end (or, God forbid, the beginning) of the story of the Brighton Monster.

  Frozen Beauty

  DO I believe this story?

  I don’t know. I heard it from a Russian doctor of medicine. He swears that there are certain facets of the case which – wildly unbelievable though it sounds – have given him many midnight hours of thought that led nowhere.

  ‘It is impossible,’ he said, ‘in the light of scientific knowledge. But that is still a very uncertain light. We know little of life and death and the something we call the Soul. Even of sleep we know nothing.

  ‘I am tired of thinking about this mad story. It happened in the Belt of Eternal Frost.

  ‘The Belt of Eternal Frost is in Siberia.

  ‘It has been cold, desperately cold, since the beginning of things … a freak of climate.

  ‘Did you know that a good deal of the world’s ivory comes from there? Mammoth ivory – the tusks of prehistoric hairy elephants ten thousand years dead.

  ‘Sometimes, men digging there unearth bodies of mammoths in a perfect state of preservation, fresh enough to eat after a hundred centuries in the everlasting refrigerator of the frost.

  ‘Only recently, just before Hitler’s invasion, Soviet scientists found, under the snow, a stable complete with horses – standing frozen stiff – horses of a forgotten tribe that perished there in the days of the mammoths.

  ‘There were people there before the dawn of history; but the snow swallowed them. This much science knows. But as for what I am going to tell you – only God knows.’

  (I have no space to describe how the good doctor, in 1919, got lost in the Belt of Eternal Frost. Out of favour with the Bolsheviks, he made a crazy journey across Siberia towards Canada. In a kind of sheltered valley in that hideous hell of ice, he found a hut.)

  ‘I knocked. A man came; shaggy and wild as a bear, but a blond Russian. He let me in. The hut was full of smoke, and hung with traps and the pelts of fur animals.

  ‘On the stove – one sleeps on the brick stove in the Siberian winter – lay a woman, very still. I have never seen a face quite like hers. It was bronze-tinted, and comely, broad and strong. I could not define the racial type of that face. On the cheeks were things that looked like
blue tattoo-marks, and there were rings in her ears.

  ‘“Is she asleep?” I asked, and my host replied: “Yes, for ever.” “I am a doctor,” I said; and he answered: “You are too late.”

  ‘The man betrayed no emotion. Maybe he was mad, with the loneliness of the place? Soon he told me the woman’s story. Absolutely simply, he dropped his brief sentences. Here is what he said:

  *

  I have lived here all my life. I think I am fifty. I do not like people around me.

  About fifteen … no, sixteen years ago I made a long journey. I was hunting wolves, to sell their skins. I went very far, seven days’ journey. Then there was a storm. I was lucky. I found a big rock, and hid behind it from the wind. I waited all night. Dawn came. I got ready to go.

  Then I see something.

  The wind and storm have torn up the ground in one place, and I think I see wood. I kick it. I hit it with my axe. It is wood. It breaks. There is a hole.

  I make a torch with some old paper that I have, and drop it down. There is no poisonous air. The torch burns. I take my lamp, and, with a little prayer, I drop down.

  There is a very long hut. It is very cold and dry. I see in the light of my lamp that there are horses. They are all standing there, frozen; one with hay or something, perhaps moss, between his teeth. On the floor is a rat, frozen stiff in the act of running. Some great cold must have hit that place all of a sudden – some strange thing, like the cold that suddenly kills elephants that are under the snow for ever.

  I go on. I am a brave man. But this place makes me afraid.

  Next to the stable is a room. There are five men in the room. They have been eating some meat with their hands. But the cold that came stopped them; and they sit – one with his hand nearly in his mouth; another with a knife made of bronze. It must have been a quick, sudden cold, like the angel of death passing. On the floor are two dogs, also frozen.

  In the next room there is nothing but a heap of furs on the floor, and sitting upon the heap of furs is a little girl, maybe ten years old. She was crying, ever so long ago. There are two round little pieces of ice on her cheeks, and in her hand a doll made of bone and a piece of old fur. With this she was playing when the Death Cold struck.

  I wanted more light. There was a burnt stone which was a place for a fire.

  I look. I think that in the place where the horses are there will be fodder. True; there is a kind of brown dried moss. The air is dry in that place! But cold!

  I take some of this moss to the stone, and put it there and set light to it. It burns up bright, but with a strong smell. It burns hot. The light comes right through the big hut, for there are no real walls between the rooms.

  I look about me. There is nothing worth taking away. Only there is an axe made of bronze. I take that. Also a knife, made of bronze too; not well made, but I put it in my belt.

  Back to the room with the furs in it, where the fire is blazing bright. I feel the furs. They are not good enough to take away. There is one fur I have never seen, a sort of grey bear-skin, very coarse. The men at the table, I think, must have been once, long ago, strong men and good hunters. They are big – bigger than you or me – with shoulders like Tartar wrestlers. But they cannot move any more.

  I stand there and make ready to go. There is something in this place I do not like. It is too strange for me. I know that if there are elephants under the frost, still fresh, then why not people? But elephants are only animals. People, well, people are people.

  But as I am turning, ready to go, I see something that makes my heart flutter like a bird in a snare. I am looking, I do not know why, at the little girl.

  There is something that makes me sorry to see her all alone there in that room, with no woman to see to her.

  All the light and the heat of the fire is on her, and I think I see her open her eyes! But is it the fire that flickers? Her eyes open wider. I am afraid, and run. Then I pause. If she is alive? I think. But no, I say, it is the heat that makes her thaw.

  All the same, I go back and look again. I am, perhaps, seeing dreams. But her face moves a little. I take her in my arms, though I am very afraid, and I climb with her out of that place. Not too soon. As I leave, I see the ground bend and fall in. The heat has loosened the ice that held it all together – that hut.

  With the little girl under my coat, I go away.

  No, I was not dreaming. It is true.

  I do not know how. She moves. She is alive. She cries. I give her food; she eats.

  That is her, over there, master. She was like my daughter. I taught her to talk, to sew, to cook – everything.

  For thousands and thousands of years, you say, she has lain frozen under that snow – and that this is not possible. Perhaps it was a special sort of cold that came. Who knows? One thing I know. I found her down there and took her away. For fifteen years she has been with me – no, sixteen years.

  Master, I love her. There is nothing else in the world that I love.

  *

  ‘That’s all,’ the doctor said.

  ‘No doubt the man was mad. I went away an hour later. Yet I swear – her face was like no face I have ever seen, and I have travelled. Some creatures can live, in a state of suspended animation, frozen for years. No, no, no, it’s quite impossible! Yet, somehow, in my heart I believe it!’

  Carnival on the Downs

  WE are a queer people: I do not know what to make of us. Whatever anyone says for us is right; whatever anyone says against us is right. A conservative people, we would turn out our pockets for a rebel; and prim as we are, we love an eccentric.

  We are an eccentric people. For example: we make a cult of cold baths – and of our lack of plumbing – and a boast of such characters as Dirty Dick of Bishopsgate, and Mr Lagg who is landlord of The White Swan at Wettendene.

  Dirty Dick of Bishopsgate had a public house, and was a dandy, once upon a time. But it seems that on the eve of his marriage to a girl with whom he was in love he was jilted, with the wedding breakfast on the table. Thereafter, everything had, by his order, to be left exactly as it was on that fatal morning. The great cake crumbled, the linen mouldered, the silver turned black. The bar became filthy. Spiders spun their webs, which grew heavy and grey with insects and dirt. Dick never changed his wedding suit, nor his linen, either. His house became a byword for dirt and neglect … whereupon, he did good business there, and died rich.

  Mr Lagg, who had a public house in Wettendene, which is in Sussex, seeing The Green Man, redecorated and furnished with chromium chairs, capturing the carriage trade, was at first discouraged. His house, The White Swan, attracted the local men who drank nothing but beer – on the profit of which, at that time, a publican could scarcely live.

  Lagg grew depressed; neglected the house. Spiders spun their webs in the cellar, above and around the empty, mouldering barrels, hogsheads, kilderkins, nipperkins, casks, and pins. He set up a bar in this odorous place – and so made his fortune. As the dirtiest place in Sussex, it became a meeting place for people who bathed every day. An American from New Orleans started the practice of pinning visiting cards to the beams. Soon, everybody who had a card pinned it up, so that Lagg’s cellar was covered with them.

  When he went to town, Lagg always came back with artificial spiders and beetles on springy wires, to hang from the low ceiling; also, old leather jacks, stuffed crocodiles and spiky rays from the Caribbean gulfs, and even a dried human head from the Amazon. Meanwhile, the cards accumulated, and so did the bills advertising local attractions – cattle shows, flower shows, theatricals, and what not.

  And the despisers of what they called the ‘great Unwashed’ congregated there – the flickers-away of specks of dust – the ladies and gentlemen who could see a thumb print on a plate. Why? Homesickness for the gutter, perhaps – it is an occupational disease of people who like strong perfumes.

  I visited The White Swan, in passing, on holiday. The people in Wettendene called it – not without affection – The Mucky
Duck. There was the usual vociferous gathering of long-toothed women in tight-cut tweeds, and ruddy men with two slits to their jackets howling confidences, while old Lagg, looking like a half-peeled beetroot, brooded under the cobwebs.

  He took notice of me when I offered him something to drink, and said: ‘Stopping in Wettendene, sir?’

  ‘Overnight,’ I said. ‘Anything doing?’

  He did not care. ‘There’s the flower show,’ he said, flapping about with a loose hand. ‘There’s the Christian Boys’ Sports. All pinned up. Have a dekko. See for yourself.’

  So I looked about me.

  That gentleman from New Orleans, who had pinned up the first card on the lowest beam, had started a kind of chain reaction. On the beams, the ceiling, and the very barrels, card jostled card, and advertisement advertisement. I saw the card of the Duke of Chelsea overlapped by the large, red-printed trade card of one George Grape, Rat-Catcher; a potato-crisp salesman’s card half overlaid by that of the Hon. Iris Greene. The belly of a stuffed trout was covered with cards as an autumn valley with leaves.

  But the great hogshead, it seemed, was set aside for the bills advertising local attractions. Many of these were out of date – for example, an advertisement of a Baby Show in 1932, another of a Cricket Match in 1934, and yet another for ‘Sports’ in 1923. As Mr Lagg had informed me, there were the printed announcements of the Christian Boys’ affair and the Flower Show.

 

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