The Best of Gerald Kersh (25 page)

‘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.

D
O
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!’

W
E
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.

Under the Flower Show, which was scheduled for 14 August, was pinned a wretched little bill advertising, for the same date, a ‘Grand Carnival’ in Wagnall’s Barn on Long Meadow, Wettendene. Everything was covered with dust.

It is a wonderful place for dust. It is necessary, in The
Mucky Duck cellar, to take your drink fast or clasp your hand over the top of the glass before it accumulates a grey scum or even a dead spider: the nobility and gentry like it that way. The gnarled old four-ale drinkers go to The Green Man: they have no taste for quaintness.

I knew nobody in Wettendene, and am shy of making new acquaintances. The ‘Grand Carnival’ was to begin at seven o’clock; entrance fee sixpence, children half price. It could not be much of a show, I reflected, at that price and in that place: a showman must be hard up, indeed, to hire a barn for his show in such a place. But I like carnivals and am interested in the people that follow them; so I set off at five o’clock.

Long Meadow is not hard to find: you go to the end of Wettendene High Street, turn sharp right at Scott’s Corner where the village ends, and take the winding lane, Wettendene Way. This will lead you, through a green tunnel, to Long Meadow, where the big Wagnall’s Barn is.

Long Meadow was rich grazing land in better times, but now it is good for nothing but a pitiful handful of sheep that nibble the coarse grass. There has been no use for the barn these last two generations. It was built to last hundreds of years; but the land died first. This had something to do with water – either a lack or an excess of it. Long Meadow is good for nothing much, at present, but the Barn stands firm and four-square to the capricious rains and insidious fogs of Wettendene Marsh. (If it were not for the engineers who dammed the river, the whole area would, by now, be under water.) However, the place is dry, in dry weather.

Still, Long Meadow has the peculiarly dreary
atmosphere
of a swamp and Wagnall’s Barn is incongruously
sturdy in that wasteland. It is a long time since any produce was stocked in Wagnall’s Barn. Mr Etheridge, who owns it, rents it for dances, amateur theatrical shows, and what not.

That playbill aroused my curiosity. It was boldly printed in red, as follows:

I left early, because I like to look behind the scenes, and have a chat with a wandering freak or two. I
remembered
a good friend of mine who had been a Human Skeleton – six foot six and weighed a hundred pounds – ate five meals a day, and was as strong as a bull. He told good stories in that coffee-bar that is set up where the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Combined Circuses rest in Florida for the winter. I ‘tasted sawdust’, as the saying goes, and had a
yearning
to sit on the ground and hear strange stories. Not
that I expected much of Wettendene. All the same the strangest people turn up at the unlikeliest places….

Then the rain came down, as it does in an English summer. The sky sagged, rumbled a borborygmic threat of thunderstorms, which seemed to tear open clouds like bags of water.

Knowing our English summer, I had come prepared with a mackintosh, which I put on as I ran for the shelter of the barn.

I was surprised to find it empty. The thunder was loud, now, and there were zigzags of lightning in the east; what time the pelting rain sounded on the meadow like a maracca. I took off my raincoat and lit a cigarette – and then, in the light of the match flame, I caught a glimpse of two red-and-green eyes watching me, in a far corner, about a foot away from the floor.

It was not yet night, but I felt in that moment such a pang of horror as comes only in the dark; but I am so constituted that, when frightened, I run forward. There was something unholy about Wagnall’s Barn, but I should have been ashamed not to face it, whatever it might be. So I advanced, with my walking-stick; but then there came a most melancholy whimper, and I knew that the eyes belonged to a dog.

I made a caressing noise and said: ‘Good dog, good doggie! Come on, doggo!’ – feeling grateful for his
company
. By the light of another match, I saw a grey poodle, neatly clipped in the French style. When he saw me, he stood up on his hindlegs and danced.

In the light of that same match I saw, also, a man squatting on his haunches with his head in his hands. He was dressed only in trousers and a tattered shirt.
Beside him lay a girl. He had made a bed for her of his clothes and, the rain falling softer, I could hear her breathing, harsh and laborious. The clouds lifted. A little light came into the barn. The dog danced,
barking
, and the crouching man awoke, raising a haggard face.

‘Thank God you’ve come,’ he said. ‘She can’t breathe. She’s got an awful pain in the chest, and a cough. She can’t catch her breath, and she’s burning. Help her, Doctor – Jolly Jumbo has left us high and dry.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Went on and left you here, all alone?’

‘Quite right, Doctor.’

I said: ‘I’m not a doctor.’

‘Jumbo promised to send a doctor from the village,’ the man said, with a laugh more unhappy than tears. ‘Jolly Jumbo promised! I might have known. I did know. Jolly Jumbo never kept his word. Jumbo lives for hisself. But he didn’t ought to leave us here in the rain, and Dolores in a bad fever. No, nobody’s got the right. No!’

I said: ‘You might have run down to Wettendene yourself, and got the doctor.’

‘“Might” is a long word, mister. I’ve broke my ankle and my left wrist. Look at the mud on me, and see if I haven’t tried…. Third time, working my way on my elbows – and I am an agile man – I fainted with the pain, and half drowned in the mud…. But Jumbo swore his Bible oath to send a physician for Dolores. Oh, dear me!’

At this the woman between short, agonised coughs, gasped: ‘
Alma
de
mi
corazan –
heart of my soul – not leave? So cold, so hot, so cold. Please, not go?’

‘I’ll see myself damned first,’ the man said, ‘and so will Dot. Eh, Dot?’

At this the poodle barked and stood on its hindlegs, dancing.

The man said, drearily: ‘She’s a woman, do you see, sir. But one of the faithful kind. She come out of Mexico. That
alma
de
mi
corazan
–
she means it.
Actually
, it means “soul of my heart”. There’s nothing much more you can say to somebody you love, if you mean it…. So you’re not a doctor? More’s the pity! I’d hoped you was. But oh, sir, for the sake of Christian charity, perhaps you’ll give us a hand.

‘She and me, we’re not one of that rabble of
layabouts
, and gyppos, and what not. Believe me, sir, we’re artists of our kind. I know that a gentleman like you doesn’t regard us, because we live rough. But it would be an act of kindness for you to get a doctor up from Wettendene, because my wife is burning and coughing, and I’m helpless.

‘I’ll tell you something, guv’nor – poor little Dot, who understands more than the so-called Christians in these parts, she knew,
she
knew! She ran away. I called her: “Dot – Dot – Dot!” – but she run on. I’ll swear she went for a doctor, or something.

‘And in the meantime Jolly Jumbo has gone and left us high and dry. Low and wet is the better word, sir, and we haven’t eaten this last two days.’

The girl, gripping his wrist, sighed: ‘Please, not to go, not to leave?’

‘Set your heart at ease, sweetheart,’ the man said. ‘Me and Dot, we are with you. And here’s a gentleman who’ll get us a physician. Because, to deal plainly with you, my one-and-only, I’ve got a bad leg now and a bad
arm, and I can’t make it through the mud to
Wettendene
. The dog tried and she come back with a bloody mouth where somebody kicked her …’

I said: ‘Come on, my friends, don’t lose heart. I’ll run down to Wettendene and get an ambulance, or at least a doctor. Meanwhile,’ I said, taking off my jacket, ‘peel off some of those damp clothes. Put this on her. At least it’s dry. Then I’ll run down and get you some help.’

He said: ‘All alone? It’s a dretful thing, to be all alone. Dot’ll go with you, if you will, God love you! But it’s no use, I’m afraid.’

He said this in a whisper, but the girl heard him, and said, quite clearly: ‘No use. Let him not go. Kind voice. Talk’ – this between rattling gasps.

He said: ‘All right, my sweet, he’ll go in a minute.’

The girl said: ‘Only a minute. Cold. Lonely ——’

‘What, Dolores, lonely with me and Dot?’

‘Lonely, lonely, lonely.’

So the man forced himself to talk. God grant that no circumstances may compel any of you who read this to talk in such a voice. He was trying to speak evenly; but from time to time, when some word touched his heart, his voice broke like a boy’s, and he tried to cover the break with a laugh that went inward, a sobbing laugh.

Holding the girl’s hand and talking for her comfort, interrupted from time to time by the whimpering of the poodle Dot, he went on:

*

They call me Alpha, you see, because my girl’s name is Beta. That is her real name – short for Beatrice
Dolores. But my real name is Alfred, and I come from Hampshire.

They call us ‘tumblers’, sir, but Dolores is an artist. I can do the forward rolls and the triple back-
somersaults
; but Dolores is the genius. Dolores, and that dog, Dot, do you see?