Prelude to a Certain Midnight

by Gerald Kersh

  3⁄8 (three eighths) Mixture

  5⁄8 (five eighths) ROUSPETEUR FRERES CHAMPAGNE

  Swizzle with swizzle-stick.

  This tastes like fruit-juice, and is good.

  After that she opened letters from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to this, that, or the other.

  She was tired and sad. Her thoughts were wandering… Whosoever kicks a dog kicks a man by proxy: that was her opinion. A blow-fly is an evil thing, better dead.

  Kill the blow-fly and have done.

  Find pleasure in tearing off the wings or the legs of that fly, and the time will come when you will have graduated from fly to mouse, mouse to rat, rat to cat, cat to dog, dog to child -

  Enough, enough is enough! (Asta shuddered). Pull a fly’s wings off, and you rip off the wings of a bird.

  Pluck off the fly’s legs and you tear a man between four wild horses.

  Kill if you must, but kill clean! That which you must kill so that you may live is your adversary. Then kill it quickly, and have done: the longer it lives in pain, the greater its power in the end.

  The tormented beetle takes a terrible revenge at last… the imprisoned gold-fish rounds up its jailers in hundreds and thousands… the game-cock or the terrier dying in the pit sets man against man in vaster pits at long last: the tortured beast is master of the world when all is said and done.

  All cruelty is one.

  “Down with it!” cried the spirit of Asta Thundersley, as she plunged into the day’s correspondence, most of which referred to the case of a woman in Buckinghamshire who kept underfed ducks in a basement. Eagles, chickens, ducks… aviators, infantrymen, sailors… heavens above, earth beneath, and waters under the earth – all cruelty and oppression were one. There was only one calloused heart in the Universe, and only one good heart. There was only the Devil on one hand and God on the other.

  “Hal” said Asta. The hairs at the nape of her neck bristled and grew damp. She was about to make a fool of herself again – this time about ducks.

  At four o’clock Thea Olivia, who had eaten three-quarters of a pound of meat, some vegetables, and a bit of cheese as big as your fist off a tray in her room, came down in lavender-and-grey for tea.

  “My inky-fingers?” she said to Asta, who was licking an envelope. “How is my little inky-fingers?”

  “Hello, Duck,” said Asta.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Twenty-Eight

  The man who had murdered Sonia Sabbatani dressed himself with care. He was an extremely sensitive man, dainty in his habits, sensitive to harsh words, and given to misinterpreting sidelong glances. His nostrils, also, were uncomfortably sensitive. If he had not been smoking too much – ten cigarettes in a day were too much, for he smoked only to defend himself against other people’s breath – he could shut his eyes and recognize people he had met by their smell. He was, therefore, considerate of other people’s nostrils. Anxious not to give offence, he scoured his body, especially his feet, as thoroughly as a surgeon scours his hands, twice a day. He detested above all things the odour of breath. It offended him profoundly. He had the nose of a tobacco-blender or a tea-taster, and could tell with reasonable accuracy at half a yard what anyone had eaten since breakfast time. Radishes disgusted him; cheese turned his stomach; beer caused him to retch. At the same time this man liked to meet people. He was a young man with his way to make in the world – a man with ambition – and it was necessary for him to make contacts, as the saying goes. So he had developed a remarkable knack of controlling his breathing. He never in any circumstances inhaled through his nose while anyone in his immediate vicinity was breathing out through the mouth. His sensitivity cut both ways: it seemed to him that he must offend others as others offended him. So he had cultivated a trick of holding his breath. He had been holding his breath, off and on, for nearly twenty years. Thus, his shoulders were drawn back and his chest thrust forward: he had acquired the lungs of a pearl-fisher. His trepidation in relation to bad smells had given birth to highly individual ways of standing, looking, and holding his head. He was of normal height. In talking to a short man he held his head high with the chin thrust out. And if he happened to be in intimate conversation with a tall man he kept his nose down, tucking in his chin and still contriving to look the other straight in the eye. So he had what might have been mistaken for a military carriage: only he leaned backwards. His distinct erectness contrasted oddly with the expression of his face. The nostrils appeared to be struggling between a tendency to expand in an interested sniff, and snap shut in a spasm of distaste. He kept most of his mouth closed when he talked, using only one side of it – the side farthest from whoever he was talking to. He knew that this habit might lead people to believe that he was trying to make himself look tough; so he made his expression affable by means of his eyes and eyebrows. The Murderer’s eyes were singularly unexpressive; but he could force his eyebrows into a whimsical, almost apologetic expression. He had one devouring fear – that somebody with bad teeth or bronchitis (he could diagnose a bronchial halitosis at three-and-a-half feet) might come up to him and talk right into his face. So, when anyone came near him he put out an anxious hand. If the person speaking to him was a man, the murderer took him by the lapel; if a woman, by the elbow. In any case, he kept people at a distance. And still he wanted to be with people.

  He had bathed fastidiously. Now he knotted his tie. He was pleased with himself, and smiled at his reflection in the mirror. The reflection smiled back at him slyly and knowingly, and nodded as if to say: We two have something on each other, but we are in accord. You keep my secret and I’ll keep yours.

  The Murderer looked at his little clock. It was twenty-seven minutes past six; too early, much too early. He did not want to hurry. He would sit, perfectly calmly, and then – say in an hour – go out and walk slowly to Asta’s place. And there he would sit very quietly in one of those deep cool chairs with the linen covers… the cool, clean linen covers that did not in any circumstances provoke perspiration… sit, and be nice to people, and let people be nice to him, and eat canapes and drink one or two drinks, and make a gentlemanly evening of it. A party was always useful: one never knew whom one might meet. Asta Thundersley was a lady; eccentric, but unquestionably a lady. It all helped: in any case, the cost of an evening meal was saved.

  The Murderer was in a pleasant humour, in love with the world. He shook open the evening paper, EMERALD – INSURANCE CO. FIGHTS WIDOW’S CLAIM. The unhappy burglar had paid up his premiums, but the Comet Fire and Life maintained that Emerald had committed suicide.

  Too bad, too bad…

  Near the centre of the third column smaller type said: Girl Sonia. Killer Still Free. The Police had a clue.

  He laughed: at least, his face remained unchanged, and his stomach laughed.

  Who could swear to me? he asked himself. Who could swear on the Book? duel What clue? There is no clue, and they know it. Otherwise, why do they squeeze the story down and away? Their argument is, of course, that they have more in their minds than they want to say. But in our case, exactly what have they got? There was a black fog. If ten witnesses saw me pick the child up outside the School – what would their oaths be worth? In that fog, nothing. It happened to Sonia Sabbatani. So what? She might have been any of two or three hundred children. Clues? Hah! What clues?

  I am standing on the corner of the street, and the girl happens to come by. “See you safely home?” I ask her, and she says: “Thanks very much, Mister So-and-So.” She knew my voice. Face, figure, walk, anything at all – I didn’t recognize her myself in that fog, until she spoke! If I didn’t even know it was her until I heard her voice, how is anybody to know that the man is me?

  Be calm, be reasonable – no nerves, no jitters; nothing but calm, calm! Black fog, and the night coming: what would anyone’s testimony be worth? Anyone’s oath, anywhere? And who was there in that dead old street? Nobody. Why should anyone be there? No property to protect –
condemned houses, nothing more – why should a policeman, even, be there?

  No reason at all. And there wasn’t anybody anywhere.

  Yes, I was naughty. I was very naughty indeed….

  The Murderer shook his head, got out of his chair and carefully brushed hk teeth.

  …I deserve to be hanged. But even if they caught me, they wouldn’t hang me. They’d say I was insane. But I’m not. And they won’t catch me anyway. It wasn’t a nice thing to do. But the only alternative would have been to take Sonia to her home, and that would have been the end of that: she knew my voice. You can’t safely loiter about the same place twice. In that kind of weather you’re as good as masked like the Klu-Klux-Klan. Kill and have done. In any case, what did I mean to do? To kill? Simply to kill. It is a pity that it had to be little Sonia Sabbatani; but it had to be someone. Next time (he had not the slightest doubt that there would be a next time), next time, he would see…

  But this was the first kill, and he still thrilled with a curious mixture of pride and of shame at the thought of it like a young girl who has gone out and lost her virginity on the sly. He knew now what Zarathustra meant when he spoke of the murderer who ‘thirsted for the pleasure of the knife’. Of course, he had not used a knife. He owned several knives, but used them only to sharpen pencils, or to play with; their lean, cold blades, honed sharp and brightly polished, gave him a sense of power, made him feel dangerous. He liked to open and shut them – especially one wicked Spanish knife, with an engraved blade that might have been designed for cruel murder. This blade locked back by means of a primitive yet efficient device consisting of a perforated steel spring and a ratchet. It opened with a noise like the grinding of iron teeth, and there it was, ten inches long; the very sight of it made the blood stand still. It amused him sometimes to stand before a mirror, knife in fist, making quick, ferocious passes at himself, and dreaming dreams… always dreaming dreams… dreams of blood and death.

  No, he had not used a knife this time.

  There was, he thought, the Pleasure of the Thumbs; the Pleasure of the Strangler. “Under my thumb.” How apt some of these metaphors were. There was power, absolute power, power over life’ and death. Your thumbs sank in. You felt the heaving and the writhing of the little body. But it was doomed. You were DOOM. YOU were the Angel of Death. You were God. You could take life or give it back. You could – and did – let the little creature breathe again for a second or two. Why curtail a pleasure by gluttonous haste? You are a gourmet – you prolong your pleasures, tease yourself a little, and so increase your enjoyment of things. So you let the victim, the sacrificial offering, come back to life a little – not sufficiently alive to scream: that would never do. Just for two or three gulps of breath. Then – Under the Thumb, Under the Thumb! Who could have imagined that a child’s heart could beat so hard? Well, all good things must have an end. You finished it off at last.

  All the same, next time he would use a knife. This might be a little dangerous, because of the splashes. Still, did they ever catch Jack the Ripper? And how many crimes did Fritz Haarmann get away with before he had the bad luck to be caught? Or Peter Kürten. These two men ended on the gallows, it is true. Yet how calmly they died! Why? Because they had died in the knowledge that they had lived, and lived, and lived – lived more red-blooded life in their forty-year lifetimes than your ordinary respectable law-abiding citizen could live in a hundred years. It was dangerous, yes. But the danger that followed the kill was, so to speak, the savoury that rounded off the roast.

  Next time the knife. Not the nice Spanish knife, the knife christened ‘Dago Pete’; but a very ordinary knife, a bread knife, a sixpenny vegetable knife, a kitchen knife, a shoemaker’s knife.

  And after that, if only to baffle the Police by a variation of the modus operandi, a piece of cord. And after that… well, it would all depend upon circumstances.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Twenty-Nine

  Soon, having fallen into a reverie, the Murderer began to be sorry for himself. The ecstasy was passing. He told himself again that he had been ‘naughty’. Somewhere inside him a snivelling voice said: It isn’t my fault, I couldn’t help it. He reasoned with himself:

  It isn’t my fault. Look at Peter Kürten. He said: “The woman who took me up when I first came out of prison was one whose temperament was the very opposite to my own. She liked cruel treatment.” And then the Public Prosecutor said: “That, of course, will have increased the sadistic leanings.”…

  There you are! Lots of boys have the impulse to be cruel, to kill. Lots of boys want to hunt down animals in jungles and kill them, be detectives and hunt down men and hang them – which amounts to the same thing. But they don’t all go out and be naughty in the same way as I have been naughty. I shouldn’t have been encouraged – given a big sexual thrill in that way…

  I would still be a nice shy boy, doing nothing wrong – I mean to say nothing actually illegal – if it hadn’t been for Her.

  She enjoyed being ill-treated. I would have been too timid even to suggest that kind of game. She suggested it. She made me feel that my manhood depended upon my power to hurt. If they hang me, they ought to hang Her. They cut Peter Kürten’s head off for seventy crimes of violence. What did they do to the woman who brought out what was in him? Nothing. Is this justice?

  The Murderer went to his bookshelf and read what Professor Hübner had said:

  “Sadism is infinitely many-sided and comprises a wide field, including anything from dreams of torturing animals, the exaggerated punishment of children, of fire-mania, to lust-murders, which are generally arrived at by a series of progressive actions. A certain tendency to cruelty was born in Kürten. Everything else has been acquired. In his case the meeting with the woman twice his age with the masochistic tendencies; the reading of works of sexual pathology, combined with his egotistical megalomania, were responsible for the extent of his sadism. This developed gradually.”

  “And what about me?” said the Murderer, “what about me?”

  The best thing was to put it out of his mind for the time being. The thing of which he had frequently dreamed with pleasurable shudders had happened. It was going to happen again. But he felt a certain delicacy about it. If anyone talked to him of it, he would feel embarrassed.

  But he thanked God that his mind could focus itself upon big, noble issues.

  Almost with tears in his eyes, the Murderer thought of Mankind, for he liked to think of himself as the kindest and sweetest of men, full of noble sentiments, and motivated by a desire to benefit mankind. He devoted a considerable proportion of his day-dreaming to fantasies of conquest, or sometimes of self-immolation.

  Sometimes he saw himself as a martyr.

  Down in the smoky torture-chamber behind his everyday mind he stretched himself on an imaginary rack by the wild, leaping light of flaring flambeaux. The winches creaked; the ropes snapped taut and shrieked as they strained over the blocks. The torturers gasped and grunted as they threw their weight upon the windlasses. But he, the hero, made no sound, except for the snapping of his dislocated joints. He smiled quietly into the faces of the executioners. “Now will you talk?” He only smiled. The Hooded Inquisitor made a sign. The torturers put out their strength. In the dancing torchlight the strong muscles of their shoulders and backs seemed to jump and tremble like imprisoned things that wanted to burst their way out. The agony was unbearable: yet he bore it. “Now will you give us the names of your confederates?”

  He smiled. At last, as he lay dying (one of his legs had come off) the Inquisitor said to him in a voice of awe: “You’re an obstinate heretic, but by all His Saints, you are a man!”

  Sometimes – it depended upon his mood, which in turn depended upon the events of the day – he was riding into a conquered city upon a great white horse.

  From head to foot he was encased in sombre, black armour. The lurid light of a blazing building writhed upon hauberk, gorget, and cuisse. His visor, thrown
back, left uncovered his face, which was noble and proud, stern but pure. Behind him rode his Knights clad all in steel; and behind them marched his Men-at-Arms under a forest of gleaming spears. As he rode, thousands of the townsmen he had liberated came thronging about him, weeping with gratitude, fighting for one little bit of the dung of his horse which they would preserve as a holy relic.

  “God bless the Liberator!” He rode on; stern, preoccupied. In the great castle taken from the Tyrant he sat upon a great velvet chair, magnificent in a robe of velvet blacker than night, embroidered with gold arabesques, and did justice. Cold and clean but terrible was the justice of the Liberator! The Baron Otmar starved the poor? Then let him be bound with silken cords and left to die of hunger in sight of a table laid with innumerable dishes of savoury meat… but give him a cup of water every day, so that he may live long enough to know the meaning of hunger.

  The Baron Something had worked his vassals to death? Then let him be imprisoned in a cell in which there was a cage containing ten thousand starving rats and let this cage be devised so that only by the forward and backward movement of a stiff, heavy lever could the rats be prevented from escaping. Let him work that one out! And in the streets oxen were being roasted whole, wine spurted from the fountains, and everyone cried: “God bless the Liberator!”

  Again, he was the captain of a great liner. In the middle of one dreadful night, there was a grinding crash. The ship had struck an iceberg and was sinking fast. Women and children first! He brandished a big, blue revolver. Back there, you dogs, and let the women and children get into the boats first! A man – an enormous, handsome Greek god of a man, who had always showed off his superior muscles and weight – leapt forward, mad with panic. The revolver spat yellow fire, and the handsome face became, abruptly, like strawberry jam. All the other men stood, cowed, while the women and the children got into the boats. Everyone on deck got off. Only he, the captain, was left. “For God’s sake, Skipper, come down.” No, the weight of one more passenger might sink the boat; he would go down with his ship. But as the boats pulled away (he could hear everybody saying that the captain was a saint and a hero) he heard a little whimpering cry. Somewhere a girl was imprisoned. He lifted beams of a ton weight, tore down barriers of broken iron, smashed bulkheads with a blow of the fist, and there she was, radiant and beautiful, but terrified. The fear of death was upon her. “There, there little woman…” The shock of the collision had torn off all her outer garments. He took her on deck. The ship was settling. The boats had disappeared. “This is the end,” he said. They locked in an unbreakable embrace as the ship went down…