The Berserkers

by Roger Elwood

  “Mix ’em right?” asked Adam idiotically. It seemed a huge joke. He swirled the brandy and tea dreamily in the cup. Its streaky, creamy, sticky whorls hypnotized his eyes.

  “Why, yes, don’t needfully always take ’em pure, the way they says. Like cookin’. And if I goes to doctor and says that little bit of cough’s troubling me more’n it should, and he give me something, well, stands to reason, that’s not going to cure me straight off, don’t it? Needs to keep me little bit of cough going a while, so’s to give ’em time to fill up their patient’s list, maybe give them high-up doctors away at hospital something to experiment at. No, he don’t give me the whole thing, just enough to start me on the road. And if you works away at it like I done here, year after year, like a mole, quietly, time comes you got a cure for nigh anything under the sun.”

  Adam thought of dedicated, overworked, high-souled physicians, their oath to cure and alleviate. They seemed very distant and unreal. Old Sad was here, earthly, solid, smelly, deep and convincing as the soil under them both.

  “’Sides, they do try a bit hard to get rid on things. Things what isn’t always as they think. My way’s to give ’em a help on their way.”

  “Help?”

  “Ah, well, yes. See, there’s ills and ailments what rightly ain’t. That’s your insides going to work to improve on you, or maybe give you what they thinks you ought to have. You wouldn’t hardly believe the number of souls, old maid ladies, and widderwomen, that’s got a growth inside of ’em that’s working away, trying to give ’em the baby they rightly wants, but can’t find no usual way to bring it about. There’s others gets it in their chests and such—reckon they was meant to be fishes, or maybe breathe up beyond the moon where there ain’t no air. Couse, they ain’t ready for that yet. They mostly dies. Where do it get you, now? There?”

  And Old Sad struck Adam sharply, and with the blow, a startled beast of pain leaped from its sleep, roaring.

  As Adam, coughing and weeping, bent over the rough table, he heard Old Sad dimly busy behind him, muttering and clinking things. He found in his hand a grimy egg cup full of damson brandy, and drank it, choking with anguish.

  The pain sank, and his brain began humming warmly. “You’ll forgive me for me hands gettin’ away with me,” said Old Sad, not very apologetically. “I didn’t know ’twas that bad with you, yet.”

  “All right. It’s all right,” gasped Adam.

  “Good, eh? Should be, yes! Six years old, that is. Two bottle of it left, and the new not ready yet. That’s only four years. Sorry of that clip I give you, sir. Have a little more, now.”

  Two or three egg cups later, Adam leaned back in his chair, laughing as if time had no meaning, over the stories Old Sad told him: old stories of savage and sardonic truth that must have had the wild Saxons in their woods hiccuping with laughter centuries before.

  “Given that bit of a pain of yours,” said Old Sad at last, suddenly, “if you was to try something for it, now—”

  “Try something?”

  “Ah. Something of mine. Something as’d help it make up its mind which way it want to go. No harm, eh?”

  Adam agreed, giggling. That part of him which was not overcome by damson brandy noted grimly that nothing now could do him much damage.

  “How do you know what it’ll do, though? Suppose it turns me into an opera singer, or drives me mad—or simply kills me straight out?”

  But Old Sad was unsatisfactory on every point, except that Adam wouldn’t die. He talked vaguely of instinct, but it sounded like a bluff. Adam suspected, with what was left of his reasoning powers, a vast self-confidence and a little genuine knowledge; perhaps, some creeping sly dark secrets, inherited from fathers and -grandfathers who hadn’t quite belonged to the human race. Arcane fragments which had been often burned, along with the owner. Something blurry and powerful, sneaking into the darkening hut, took over Old Sad and gave him authority.

  He scuttered from shelf to shelf, gathering armfuls, lifting, sifting. He posed, stuck a finger to his head, frowned, winked, and became portentously busy mixing.

  Perhaps the damson brandy had woven its potent spell a little over him too.

  Adam watched him vacuously, and accepted the results of his brewing, childlike, without argument.

  The potion was white. Clear, bland, brilliant white, purer than china, or paint, or linen, or stiff unmarked snow. It glowed and blinded. He had never seen such a white.

  He drank it blinking. It seemed to push itself smoothly down his throat. He could feel it flowing down the gullet, lining the duodenum, lipping over and dropping, thick pure clear drops into his ruined stomach.

  “It’s damned cold!—no, it’s hot—or is it fizzy? I can’t tell what the hell it is!”

  “Ah, they know something, they doctors and chemists!” Old Sad shook his head wisely, in admiration of their knowledge. “They got a beautiful gift for thinking up things—what they just needs, times, is someone with a beautiful gift for using ’em—and mixing ’em right.”

  Adam stood up carefully. He felt as if he were transfixed from throat to navel with a bright white benevolent shaft. Under it, the damson brandy was humming and clucking away merrily—coarse, by comparison, but unconquered.

  Old Sad’s cries to mind the stump and the stone on the path by the pig bin grew faint behind him as he floated homeward, rather than walked.

  Beth was angry because supper was spoiled, and because she had been anxious at his long delay. She was angrier when she heard that he had somehow forgotten to tell Old Sad about the chimney. They went to bed without talking much.

  Adam woke in the night, wildly thirsty. The tea and brandy had been too strong, too sticky sweet.

  He drank water in the bathroom, staring at himself silver under the light, with the black doorway behind him.

  He tried to remember that all over the country hundreds of others shared a wakeful night with him; but being in the night was like being along in the country of the dead. Only ghosts wandered faintly. Bright hospitals, all-night garages and cafes and laundries, echoed in empty corners of his mind, unreal.

  At breakfast, he drank all the coffee, and Beth had to make more. She was pleased that he could drink it, but anxious, because his thirst was unusual. Anything unusual to her was dangerous. He smiled at her.

  She sniffed. “Drinking with Old Sad seems to have done you good. Like an anesthetic.”

  He realized with a start of surprised laughter that she had thought it vulgar. Welcome Old Sad to the chimney, give him tea and biscuits; yes, but not drink with him.

  “The air’s wonderful.” Adam walked restlessly to the kitchen window. He could not sit down for long. “There are so many scents—trees, damp moss, rain and leaves and earth. Lovely.”

  “It’s a nasty, soggy, gray day. Have something to eat, Adam?”

  “No, it’s rich, organic, eager.” He looked at the table thoughtfully. “Beth, I should like a Welsh rarebit, a really big one, with a lot of mustard, and some pickle.”

  She looked at him in huge surprise.

  “For breakfast?”

  “Yes.” His senses viewed everything on the table with complete clarity. He knew beforehand the taste and texture with a judiciousness he had never felt before.

  “Something hot—something very hot,” he said avidly.

  While he ate his Welsh rarebits—two of them—he felt a majestic sense of great appetite heightened by experience. He felt the whole grateful passage of the food down his welcoming tubes. A slight, not unpleasant sensation followed it—rather like the burning coolness after sucking mints.

  Several days later, Old Sad came with his brushes. Beth had sent a message by one of the village girls.

  Beth welcomed him a little coldly, but Adam was almost boisterous. It was a golden, damp decaying morning, and Adam went out and watched the brushes flower sootily from the chimney.

  A divine restlessness in him would not let him stand still. He danced on the straggly chrysanthem
ums, singing a little tunelessly. Beth and Old Sad watched him from the door, Beth alarmed, Old Sad emignatic.

  “You gave him something the other day,” accused Beth. She knew Old Sad.

  “Nothing but what done him good,” he defended. “You heard him yourself, when I come in, what he said about feeling a proper man now. Madam,” he added, as an afterthought.

  Adam stopped singing and bent double. He rubbed surprised hands across the front of his body. His mouth seemed to be opened, gasping.

  “What did you give him?”

  “Just a something. You couldn’t rightly put a name to what it was. But ’twas all right for taking. I keeps me rub-on things different from me swallow-down things. Couldn’t be any worse, now, could he, judging be what I saw on him? I give what was in him a help along, that’s all.” •

  “A help along! You stupid old man!” said Beth venomously. She leaned out, looking at Adam. Old Sad watched her with his peculiar wild cunning grin, apparently not offended. He began to roll himself a shapeless cigarette, whistling some mournful aged ditty.

  “Adam!” called Beth. He straightened up at once, and waved at her.

  “It’s all right, love. Just a horrible attack of burps, like an oil lamp burning inside me. Welsh rarebits, of course.”

  As he stood in the sunshine, Beth had the curious impression that his flesh was, in fact, opaquely lit from behind or within by flame.

  “There’s something wrong with him. You’ve given him something horrible, and he’s going to have a fever. Look at him.”

  Old Sad peered out again. “Weren’t horrible, at all. Good wholesome stuff from doctors and respectable chemists, is all. Now don’t he look better? Was worse be a sight, afore he took it.”

  “He looks all wrong to me—unnatural.” Beth was desperate. “He looks too well—and yet not right at all.”

  In the garden, the sun went behind a cloud. Adam hiccupped loudly. Then a bright column of steady colorless flame broke like a beacon from his throat, and sprang upward into the soft air.

  “Damn me!” said Old Sad. He looked sideways at Beth. He had never understood what use others had for a conscience, but some things had power to trouble him.

  Beth gave a wordless shriek. Adam had put his head back and was gazing curiously and proudly at the column of white fire, of which he was the source.

  The game grew thicker, purer white by minutes, and the silence of the garden gathered around Adam, focusing him.

  The line of his throat throbbed with terrible slow intensity, and his skin pulsed with the dense whiteness.

  Old Sad began tiptoeing away. He whispered hoarsely, “I’ll be gettin’ along, then. I got a mess o’ things to see to.”

  “You’ll stay here, while I phone the doctor, you wicked old devil,” said Beth fiercely. “You’ll stay with him. Someone must.”

  “But ’tis your place to be with your man,” argued Old Sad feebly, looking fearfully at the quiet inhuman figure on the lawn.

  Beth didn’t answer, sobbing as she fled to the telephone.

  The doctor was badly shaken. He and Adam were old enemies; now he felt that his patient was taking some sort of sublime revenge on all doctors and the mortality they nested in.

  He examined Adam, though, with his usual stiff elderly matter-of-factness, his white bushy eyebrows pulled down in annoyance and distaste. The examination was brief. He could not do more in face of the gaping ring of white faces which had begun to appear round the hedge; and he did not like to draw Adam indoors. He did not know what the flame would do there.

  “He’s in no pain,” he said shortly to Beth. “But I’d like to get him into the hospital. Must be some absolutely unique variant of spontaneous combustion. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  His mind blenched at the idea of this stock-still blazing creature in the neat mechanical cosiness of an ambulance.

  Adam found himself pain-free, unable to speak, and gripped by exaltation.

  Within the confines of his little bright world, images moved as clearly and sharply as lightening. He could hear and understand what was taking place outside, but dimly and sluggishly, as if it were under water.

  The movements of Beth and the doctor, and Beth’s friend Cressy, who presently came to offer what comfort she could, swam before his eyes, and their words came through thick and delayed.

  The things he touched felt exaggerated and mysterious in detail: it was as if he had his eyes shut, and when he opened them everything would be changed and unfamiliar.

  The only thing he knew clearly was that hunger was still clutching him with live beseeching claws, as if he had not eaten for weeks.

  He went into the kitchen, with Beth following him. The flame did not appear to burn or change or move aside. He searched clumsily among the strange, newly presented images that he found on what used to be to him shelves and tables.

  “Food?” asked Beth, trembling. “Oh, Adam, what is it? What’s happened? Do you know what you want?”

  He found a piece of white wrapping paper, and wrote on it with a crayon. Line after line of beautiful, utterly strange script flowed beneath his fingers. It meant nothing to Beth, and in anger and despair, she threw it out of the window.

  One of the village girls had crept up to the window to see the strange thing inside. She caught the crumpled paper, unfolded it and looked at it. It was so strange and lovely that she carried it home, and pinned it up above her bed, and slept happily underneath it at nights.

  Adam’s hands moved blindly about the shelves. With immense labor he found tins of meat, curry powder, Tabasco, cayenne, lemon rind, salad cream, sauces and vinegar, and a carton full of salt. He staggered to the stove, chopping and cramming the stuff into the same saucepan, while Beth watched stupidly.

  He heated it, until it began to brown and bubble on the sides of the pan; then he ate it in huge haste, scooping it ravenously up from the saucepan with a wooden spoon he had managed to find. It was the painstaking silence and the searing cold flare, and the utter remoteness of the creature who had been her husband that broke Beth’s nerve; she ran for the garden, to the doctor and Cressy, stammering and gabbling and weeping. The gaping crowd by the hedge, shamed at last into compassion, drifted off, and Cressy took Beth to her house. Old Sad had long ago crept off by his own private byways. Alone in the trampled garden, the doctor waited for the ambulance to arrive; and in the kitchen, Adam pawed absorbedly at the greasy table.

  He had seen a series of fiery glorious symbols in his brain, and he wanted to set them down.

  They would benefit all mankind. But the mediums of his former world were at once too coarse and too elaborate for this fine simplicity.

  At the hospital, even the specialists in charred, mangled, burned flesh passed him from hand to hand as quickly as they could.

  They were at a loss to know what to do for him, and there was no one at home when they rang the number the doctor had left with them.

  At last, however, the telephone clacked tinnily, and one young doctor left Adam thankfully, and spoke into the receiver.

  “Oh, hallo, yes! [his wife] I’m sorry, Mrs. Tamblyn, but there seems nothing we can do for your husband. He’s—no, he’s still the same. We can’t tell, I’m afraid. It looks like some kind of radiation, but we can’t— Cancer, you said? No, that’s absolutely—well, I’m sorry,

  Mrs. Tamblyn, I do understand, but we examined him very carefully. No, no trace of any growth at all. Just this queer strong source of light that seems to envelop all his organs. None of our machines register it. Do you know anything about the start of it all? I see. I see. That’s quite amazing. We’ll have to get hold of this man Sadding, of course—no, I just can’t say at all, I’m really sorry, but this is absolutely new to us.”

  Later in the week, a clutch of chemists and physicists descended upon Old Sad, and carried him away from his jackdaw and ferrets.

  They kept him for a while, and then released him hopelessly to a puzzled police force, that debated what
kind of charge it could press against him.

  At about the same time, Adam was driven quietly back to his cottage and left at the gate of it.

  The ambulance men drove to thankfully, without looking back.

  Adam was thinner and more restless. The white flame covered his whole neck now and rose up into his jaws. His skin had a white bloom like early opening plum leaves.

  He watched the ambulance go, leaning against a young larch that had already begun to brown at the approach of winter. He could see his plume of spouting flame ascending through the branches above him. It was much thinner where it rose through his mouth, and its tip was three or four feet above his head.

  Then he turned and loped into the woods, his head stretched to watch the blossoming stars, so near and friendly on this chilly evening.

  He ran on without cold or hunger or tiredness in the gathering dusk. He passed Old Sad’s cottage and stopped, in some vague sense of recognition. The animals were hungry, but when he opened the doors of the cages, they did not run out, but surged into corners away from him. So he left them and in the darkness still ran on, listening to the glorious riot of sound within his mind.

  He ran on, through weeks and months, into winter woods and fields. The flame thickened and contained the upper part of his body inside it, and when this happened, he regained speech after a fashion.

  The people of the district grew used to him and began to take him as a kind of minor prophet. Many of them wanted signs and omens, surrounded though they were by all the intricacies of civilization; and a leaf he touched or a path he took could give a message to them.

  They would have given him food or clothes if he had needed either now.

  He in his turn found that trees and people seemed to recede slowly from him, in feeling and meaning.