Prelude to a Certain Midnight

by Gerald Kersh

Asta went out, cutting little crescents into the floorboards with her angry, stamping heels. The fact was that she had not the beginning of an idea of what she proposed to do. First of all, she decided, it was necessary to look at the scene of the crime. She had no difficulty in finding the place: as soon as she asked the way a dozen men, women and children seemed to spring out of the earth. They all shouted directions. One girl asked her if she was on a newspaper. Asta said no. The girl did not believe her, and followed her, walking about eighteen inches behind her and keeping up a running commentary full of geographical information:

  “This is the street. All these houses are going to be pulled down. They’re condemned. Unfit frooman ‘abitation. That’s Mrs Switch’s house they’ve begun to pull down there. It was full of bugs. My mum says they pigged it, they didn’t live in it, they just pigged it. You wouldn’t keep a self-respecting pig in such a house. They used to let rooms. They made ever such a lot of money. My mum says anybody can make money that way. My mum says they lived twelve in one bedroom so as to let rooms. See where that grease mark is on the wall? They had a gas stove in the bedroom. You ask my mum.”

  “Why aren’t you at school?” asked Asta.

  “I’ve got ring-worm.”

  At the far end of the street a policeman stood, contemplating a pillar-box. In the remote distance someone was playing a barrel-organ. Asta, looking at the front of the house, was overwhelmed by a sort of sickness of heart. It was not merely that the house was derelict: not that it was unoccupied, unused, unusable, and for ever abandoned – it was that she could somehow perceive in the aspect of the place exactly what they meant when they said that it was Condemned. It was finished. It was better torn down and wiped off the face of the earth. She could see how, for the past fifteen years or so, no tenant of the house had been able to bring himself to spend as much as it cost to paint the railings or the window-frames. The place was condemned property: nothing was worth while. The house which, as the little girl had said, had been full of bugs, and was now half torn down, gaped at the rainy sky. Asta could see the greasy pink paper of the bedroom. It had been worth nobody’s while to hang paper there. There must indeed have been a gas stove in that bedroom: she could see the greasy black outline of it. Above this outline there was nailed an oblong of painted green tin, curling away from the wall at one corner. The demolition men had not yet started to break up the house in which Sonia Sabbatani had been murdered. It was exactly like every other house in that street: four storeys high, built of a muddy-mustard-coloured brick and sinking, as it seemed, into a squalid basement bristling with spear-headed rusting railings.

  Little boys had smashed the windows with stones. Every frame enclosed a shivered frieze of dust-encrusted grey glass. Through a splintery star of dark space in the ground-floor window she could see an empty, desolate room, and, on the only visible wall, an oblong of patterned paper, lighter than the rest, where a framed picture must have hung. The brass-headed nail was still protruding from the wall above it. Asta would have sworn that the picture which had hung framed in this space was of a little girl and a mastiff, with the caption: Love Me, Love My Dog.

  Now, standing in front of this empty house, Asta was almost afraid. She wanted to go home. She remembered certain bad dreams of ruins in wildernesses. So she became angry; stamped up the three dirty steps to the front door, and wrenched at the door-knob. She had expected to feel the resistance of a turned lock – indeed, she hoped to find the door immovably shut.

  But it opened.

  She found herself standing in a short, narrow passage leading to a steep, narrow staircase. There was a smell of dereliction, of damp, and, as it were, of darkness. On the left, beyond the door, she could see a heart-shaped mark where an umbrella-stand had stood. Beyond it a gas-bracket protruded. She went in. Her footsteps reverberated. This house enclosed something of the misery, the loneliness and the hollow silence of the outer dark. The street door slammed behind her with the noise of a gunshot. A foul wind was blowing through the passage. The house was evil. It was rotten; full of a dirty twilight and the stale stinks of a hundred and fifty dreary years. A flake of wet plaster came fluttering down past Asta’s face, startling her so that for the first time in thirty-odd years she uttered a cry of terror. Then, ashamed of herself and (because she was still afraid) even angrier than she had been before, she went forward.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Eighteen

  She had a shadowy, wrong-headed idea that she would find a clue, some shred of evidence – button, hair, or rag – which the police might have overlooked.

  First she went upstairs. In the attic there was nothing but mildew. The second floor back contained only some decomposing shreds of torn ticking stuck to bits of broken wood; this had been a mattress which someone had gutted for the sake of its horsehair, for which he might have got threepence or fourpence a pound. The next room must have been a bedroom also. There was a gaping cupboard containing a broken clothes-hanger and in a vile newspaper parcel unspeakable evidence that the last occupant of that sordid room had been a woman, not too particular in her personal habits. “Slut!” said Asta; and the sodden, echoing house called her a slut in her turn. Slut said the passage; slut said the staircase; slut muttered the cupboard. On the next landing there was a bathroom. Asta shuddered at the rusty iron bath-tub on high, ornate, cast-iron legs, and the water closet which, it seemed, was worked by means of a handle, like those electrical generators used for firing off charges of high explosive. It was stuffed with used newsprint like the head of a plagiarist. Asta went down to the first floor. She walked warily because wet rot, dry rot, the wear and tear of countless feet, and sheer weary decrepitude had made the stairs dangerous. A picture, about as big as this open book, hung on the wall: she noticed it as she passed. It had not been worth taking away – it was a vulgar little print, cut out of a cheap magazine. Somebody had loved this picture well enough to put it in a sixpenny frame and nail it up. It depicted a scarecrow of a woman with a black bonnet all askew, horribly drunk between two sturdy policemen, shrieking at the top of her voice. The caption read: Hark, Hark the hark at Heaven’s Gate Sings. The front room on the first floor must have been the most important bedroom of the house. There Asta saw a broken glass vase and a wonderfully designed red, blue, purple, and gold lustre chamber-pot of remarkable capacity; minus the handle, which lay, badly broken, inside it. Asta could see as clearly as if she had been present at the time how the lady of the house, in the excitement of packing, had broken this thing, which was part of a wedding present: she had picked up the fragments of the handle, fitted them together, wondered tearfully whether they might be seccotined or riveted together, but had given it up, putting the fragments neatly all in one place in case some poor devil might find a use for them. The floor was littered with bits of paper and studded with tin-tacks that had held down linoleum. In one place the floor had given way and a hole patched with the lid of a biscuit tin, hammered flat and fastened with nails. Stamped on the surface of this piece of corroded metal, still perfectly legible, was the name PEEK FREAN. There was also a common kitchen chair, broken and glued, broken and screwed, broken and nailed and finally irreparably broken and abandoned. As Asta touched it with her foot two or three fat slate-grey insects with more legs than she cared to think of darted out at dazzling speed and ran into a crack. She lit a cigarette, beginning to wish that she had not been such a fool as to stick her nose into this putrescent corpse of at house.

  A man must have occupied the bedroom next door: the black marks of a brilliantined head were clearly visible on the top stratum of the wallpaper, which, peeling in the damp, seemed to be opening like the pages of a fantastic picture-book illustrative of sixty years of popular taste. The linoleum in this room had not been worth taking up: it was falling to pieces. Originally it must have been blue with a red lozenge pattern; Asta could see traces of this pattern upon a background of something that resembled sackcloth. Four indentations marked the place where th
e bed had stood, and upon the adjacent wall there was a rash of reddish-brown blotches where bugs had been thumbed to death.

  The ground floor front was, of course, the sitting-room. There was a ruined cushion: it had been stuffed with chicken feathers, but had burst. These feathers lay, now, in the form of a straggling letter V, on the floor, so wet and dirty that they looked heavier than lead. The grate was red with rust. Scattered about the hearth lay a broken poker, part of an old brass fender green, with age, and a tennis boot covered with fungus. There was also a handsome ash-tray, badly cracked, with the inscription, Galeries Lafayette. And the whole place seemed to be full of broken, knotted, and rebroken string and spoiled brown paper.

  Asta went downstairs again. This journey to the basement of the house was a dangerous one. As she went deeper the stairs grew more and more treacherous. At the bottom something gave way under her heel, quietly and as it were deliberately, like a soft-shelled crab upon which one accidentally treads, and Asta had to disengage her heel from a bit of rotten wood. The scullery was a desolation. Someone had stolen the scullery sink –there were hideous scars upon the wall. Perhaps that same marauder had got away with the old-fashioned lead pipes, for where the pipes had been there were surfaces, rough and sore-looking, like picked scabs. Here again lay ten thousand odds and ends of brown paper, white wrapping paper, silver paper, newspaper, and looped and knotted lengths of all kinds of string – all wet, sodden, mildewed, untouchable.

  To this part of the house a little light penetrated between the area railings. Asta Thundersley’s heart felt like something she had eaten that had disagreed with her.

  Near the kitchen there was an ancient wash-house, with a copper boiler built in a round cylinder of half-rotten brick that had once been whitewashed, and a window as big as a pocket handkerchief that was not designed to open. The smell of five generations of filthy linen hung in the thick grey air of the wash-house. As Asta hurried out of it she saw an archway. It was the opening of a malodorous little vault, the roof of which was the pavement of the street. Looking up, she saw the rusty under-surface of the lid of the coal-hole. There was coal dust under her feet; and now her feet were as sensitive as teeth – she walked on her toes. In the coal-cellar there was a crushed tea chest of peeling plywood, a few shovelfuls of wet coal dust, and a demolished leather sofa.

  This was the love nest of the undiscovered murderer. Here the beautiful child Sonia Sabbatani had been ravished and found dead, with her head in a puddle, some lengths of knotted string about her wrists; gagged with abominable rags.

  As the police surgeon lifted Sonia, one of the fat grey insects had run out of her ear.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Nineteen

  Asta wanted to be sick. She had never before been so afflicted with loathing. She had never experienced such a sense of disgust. For the first time in her life she found herself disturbed by two equally powerful impulses: she wanted to run away, hide her head, forget all about this thing; and at the same time she wanted to rush forward with her head down and find out all about it. She turned to go home. Then something happened that made her heart stagger between two beats. A heavy, solemn footstep sounded in the passage just over her head.

  It is unlikely that Asta Thundersley actually became pale, but she felt herself going pale: she felt that a great cold funnel had been thrust into her bosom and that all her vital parts, reduced to pulp, had been squirted down into her lower gut. She felt cold, she felt damp, and her belly rumbled so that the arch of the squalid coal-cellar picked up the echo and threw it back. Asta’s first impulse was to look for a place to hide. But then she became angry again; gathered herself, tensed her muscles, set her teeth, rushed upstairs and found herself face to face with a policeman who, in his turn, became greenish-white and recoiled.

  He said: “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was informed that someone had been nosing around here.”

  “Oh, you were, were you? I wouldn’t mind betting that you were informed by a little girl with ring-worm. Is that so?”

  “Well, it was a little girl who told me. She said somebody was nosing around.”

  “Oh, she said somebody was nosing around? Well I can tell you for a fact that somebody is nosing around. I am nosing around. On whose behalf? On my own behalf. Anybody’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind: is that quite clear? I am involved in mankind. Get that into your thick head, you and your ridiculous helmet. I’m looking. Is there any law against looking?”

  “That front door ought to be locked, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ma’am me, my name is Thundersley, Miss Asta Thundersley.”

  “I didn’t mean to bother you, ma’am, but that front door ought to have been locked.”

  “By the by, officer, do you happen to know whether the police force is looking for traces of coal dust?”

  “I must get back on the beat, mum.”

  “Get back wherever the hell you like, you bloodhound without a nose!”

  The policeman went out. Asta Thundersley went away to where she thought she might find a taxi.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Twenty

  At the cab rank she met a man she knew. His name was Schiff. He was a kind of scientist, a German who called himself an Austrian and got himself up to look like an Englishman in ginger tweeds, big brown boots and a fair moustache. No one knew exactly what his background was, but everyone knew that he had something to do with medicine. Now he is working for a firm that manufactures nose syringes and fountain-pens. Then he was looking for a patron and had his eye on Asta Thundersley. She told him what was on her mind. He quoted Groddeck:

  “Why are you concerned so much about sadist-masochism? What says Groddeck? ‘What you have read and learned about sadism and masochism is… untrue. To brand as perversions these two inescapable human desires which are implanted in every human being without exception, and which belong to his nature just as much as his skin and hair, was the colossal stupidity of a learned man… Everyone is a sadist; everyone is a masochist; everyone by reason of his nature must wish to give and to suffer pain; to that he is compelled by Eros.’ So said Groddeck.”

  “I don’t give a damn what Groddeck said,” said Asta Thundersley. “If I had your friend Groddeck here I’d give him a piece of my mind. Didn’t Groddeck ever come across – ”

  “‘Humanity created for itself a god who suffered, because it felt that pain was a way to heaven, because sorrow and bloody torment it esteemed divine’.”

  “Bah! To hell with your filth! Does it make murder good, you fool?”

  “‘Was your skin never reddened by the sucking of the mouth? Did you never bite into an encircling arm and did it not seem good to you to be bruised… Why, most dear lady, even the child wants to be punished – he yearns for it, he pants for a beating as my father used to say. And he uses a thousand tricks to attract punishment. The mother soothes the child on her arm with gentle pats and the child smiles; she washes it and kisses it on its rosy little bottom, which only just now was so full of dirt, and as the last and greatest treat she gives the dancing baby a slap which sets it crowing for joy.’ So said Groddeck. Of Groddeck, the Master, Freud said: ‘We shall gain a great deal by following the suggestion of Dr Groddeck… and we need feel no hesitation in finding a place for Dr Groddeck’s discovery in the fabric of science.’ Pay no attention, dear lady. All this is not your world.”

  “It is my world, and if, Dr Schiff, you have nothing more to contribute, you can go and – ”

  Schiff said: “Dear lady. Dear, good kind lady. I beg you. Do not look at it like this. Everything is not so easy. There is a good reason for everything. Let us have no sweeping generalizations. Nothing occurs without a good reason.”

  “To hell with your good reasons,” said Asta, with the memory of the derelict house still in her mind. “There isn’t any good reason for anyone to do what that man d
id. I’m going to find who did it, and, so help me God in heaven, I’m going to hang him. I don’t want him oh earth.”

  She started to walk away, but Schiff followed her. Asta habitually walked fast, and he was a short-legged, short-winded little man. Still, he kept up with her and trotted beside her talking in gasps:

  “Consider, consider. There is much you want to do. Socially, socially, I grant you very properly. You are a lady with money.”

  “None to give to you, I assure you.”

  “Not so fast, not so fast. Give? Who said give? It is I who want to give. I want to give advice, advice worth money.”

  “I suppose you want me to invest in some wildcat scheme of yours, is that it?”

  “Listen,” said Schiff, as Asta slowed down. “I knew Georg Groddeck. I have studied psychology in Vienna. I know what I’m talking about. There is something you want to achieve. As a millionairess or a multi-millionairess you will achieve what you hope to achieve five times more quickly.”

  “I’m not a millionairess, or half a quarter of a millionairess. And if I didn’t know where my next bit of bread was coming from I’d still achieve what I wanted to achieve, as you put it; so stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Schiff.”

  Schiff said: “I wasn’t suggesting that you were a millionairess, or a half, or a quarter, or an eighth of a millionairess. I was only going to tell you how to become – not a millionairess, but something like a tenth part of a millionairess. I wanted only to tell you how to make a hundred thousand pounds. I am a psychologist. Also, I am a chemist. I am a psychological cosmeticist. I was with Groddeck, and I knew Coty. Listen. This is the era of the new self-consciousness. This is the period of the self-inflicted psychic wound; the age of masochism. Now, you do not win a lady’s heart by saying: ‘Dear lady, you are so sweet.’ You say, as brutally as possible: ‘Holy God in heaven, woman, you stink like a dead pig- for Jesus Christ’s sake wash yourself.’ You say: ‘Look at yourself! You are as shaggy as an ungroomed horse, you untidy bitch – do something about it, or you will never get married.’ Now I, Miss Thundersley, have evolved a deodorant. Because I know you, and trust you, and like you, I will give you the formula. It is as follows: Glyceryl Minosterat, Triethanolomine Sterate, Glycerine, Hexamethylenetetramine, a dash of perfume, and water. It is a very good deodorant. It holds back the sweat. It takes away the stink. What more do you want? It is a genuine article. I have a good name for it: POO. But, psychologically speaking, the formidable aspect of the advertising campaign is that the copy contains the following statement: Contains Hexamethylenetetramine. Naturally, it must. It could not exist without Hexamethylenetetramine. But consider, psychologically, the impact of that word – Hexamethylenetetramine- slap bang in the public eye! And consider also that long word in relation to the brand-name of the product – PO. And consider again, psychologically, the value of the brand-name, POO. A ridiculous name? I grant you that. Completely ridiculous, and even, in a way, slightly improper, since it suggests someone holding the nostrils. Poo! Poo! What happens? The name POO in itself breeds publicity. It makes its own publicity. People say: ‘Get yourself some POO.’ They say things like that. It passes into the language. In the end, a critic says of a play: ‘It needs POO.’ It may be argued that the purchaser may not like to ask for a product named POO. I have a way around that. Actually we call it Po2. In other words, pee double o, which spells POO – Po2. I am absolutely convinced that given a little support it would make a fortune. Or then again, an astringent lotion. And what does it take? A little alum, zinc sulphate; menthol for an illusion of coolness, witch hazel, alcohol, Diethylene Glycol and, of course, water. The operative thing is this: one says, This astringent contains Diethylene Glycol: psychologically it’s irresistible. I have also a tooth-powder – ”