The Best of Gerald Kersh (3 page)

‘For years and years I have had no permanent home. I have been driven from place to place like a leaf on the wind. It has driven me all over the world. It has become attached to me. It has learned my scent. The time has come when it does not have to look long for my track. Two days, three days, then it is with me. My God, what am I to do?’

‘Couldn’t you, perhaps consult the Psychical Research people?’

‘I have done so. They are interested. They watch. Needless to say, when they watch, it will not come. I,
myself
, have sat up for nights and nights, waiting for it. It hides itself. And then – the moment comes when I
must
sleep – and in that moment——

‘Coward! Devil! Why won’t it show its face? How can I ask anybody for help? How can I dare? Nobody would believe. They would lock me up in an asylum. No no, there is no help for me.

‘No help. Look, I ran away from it last night. I came here today. Yet it found me, this evening. There is no escape. It has caught up with me. It is on my heels. Even at this moment, it is sitting behind me. I am tired of running away. I must stay awake, but I long for sleep. Yet I dare not go to sleep. If I do, it will creep in. And I am tired out.

‘Oh, my God, what can I do? It is with me now. This very night. If you don’t believe me, come and see.’

Shakmatko led me out, to the door of his room. There, clinging to my arm, he pointed.

The chessboard lay in the fireplace. The pieces were scattered about the room, together with hundreds of pieces of paper, torn as fine as confetti.

‘What
can
I do,’ asked Shakmatko.

I picked up the chessmen, and, replacing the board on the table, arranged them in their correct positions. Then, turning to Shakmatko, I said:

‘Listen. You’re tired. You’ve got to get some sleep. You come and sleep in my bed. I’ll watch.’

‘You are a man of high courage,’ said Shakmatko. ‘God will bless you. And
you,
damned spirit of anarchy——’ He shook his fist at the empty room.

I took him back, and covered him with my blanket. Poor old man, he must have been nearly dead for want of rest! He gave a deep sigh, and was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.

I tiptoed to his room and sat down. I did not really believe in ghosts; but for all that, I kept my eye on the chessboard, and turned up the collar of my coat so as to protect my ears in the event of flying bishops.

An hour must have passed.

Then I heard a sound.

It was unmistakably a footstep. I clenched my fists and fixed my eyes on the door. My heart was drumming like rain on a tin roof. A floorboard creaked. The handle of the door turned and the door opened.

I had already steeled myself to the expectation of something white, something shadowy, or some awful invisibility. What I actually saw proved to be far more horrible.

It was Shakmatko. His eyes were wide open, but rolled up so that only the bloodshot white parts were visible. His face was set in a calm expression. His hands were held out in front of him: he was walking in his sleep.

I leapt up. I meant to cry out: ‘Shakmatko!’ but my tongue refused to function. I saw him walk steadily over to the table sweep the pieces off the board with a terrific gesture, and fling the board itself against the opposite wall.

The crash awoke him. He gave a start which shook him from head to foot. His eyes snapped back to their normal positions, and blinked, in utter terror, while his voice broke out:

‘Damn you! Have you found me out again? Have you hunted me down again so soon? Accursed——’

‘Shakmatko,’ I cried, ‘you’ve been walking in your sleep.’

He looked at me. His large, whitish eyes dilated. He brandished a skinny fist.

‘You!’ he said to me, ‘you! Are you going to say that, too?’

‘But you were,’ I said. ‘I saw you.’

‘They all say that‚’ said Shakmatko, in a tone of abject hopelessness. ‘They all say that. Oh, God, what am I to do? What
am
I to do?’

I returned to my room. For the rest of the night there was complete quiet, but it was nearly dawn before I managed to fall asleep.

*

I awoke at seven. I was drawn, as by a magnet, to Shakmatko’s room. I dressed, went to his door, and tapped very gently. There was no answer. It occurred to me that he had run away. I opened the door and looked in. Shakmatko was lying in bed. His head and one arm hung down.

He looked too peaceful to be alive.

I observed, among the chessmen on the floor, a little square bottle labelled
Luminal.

In that last sleep Shakmatko did not walk.

T
HERE
was no such man as Shakmatko, but there really was Busto's lodging-house. It was just as I described it: a rickety, rotting melancholy old house not far from New Oxford Street. The day came when Busto was kicked out: his lease had expired five years before, anyway. He fought like a trapped lynx to retain possession of the place, but the Borough Surveyor and the Sanitary
Inspector
had it in iron pincers. It was condemned and executed, torn to pieces, taken away in carts. And a good riddance, I say! Yet in retrospect one half regrets such demolitions. ‘Where is the house in which I lived?' one asks; and, walking past, looks up at the housebreakers, and sighs … ‘Ahhhhh….'

Pah!

Time is more than a healer. It is a painter and
decorator
; a gilder and a glorifier. It converts the gritty
particles
of half-forgotten miseries into what sentimental old gentlemen call Pearls of Memory. Memory! Memory; Fooey on Memory! What a smooth liar it is, this
Memory
! I have heard a shrapnel-tattered veteran recalling, with something suspiciously like sentimental regret, the mud of Passchendaele. I could feel twinges of
pleasurable
emotion about Busto's, if I let myself go. Yet I endured several miseries there. The place was chock-full 
of my pet aversions. Bed-bugs, of which I have always had a nameless horror, came out at night and walked over me. For some reason unknown to science they never bit me. But other insects did. I used to lie in bed, too hungry and tired to sleep, and look out of the window over the black roofs, and listen to the faint, sad noises of the sleeping house; and marvel at the fearsome strength of vermin. Sandow, Hackenschmidt, gorillas, whales; they are nothing. For truly awful physical force watch insects. Compare the heart-bursting sprints of Olympic runners with the effortless speed of the spider; the bloody and ferocious gluttony of the wolf with that of the louse; the leap of the panther with the jump of the flea!

Busto's ghoulish presence filled the house. One worried about the rent. Sometimes I wrote verse at night, in true poetic style, by the light of a halfpenny candle – oh, most execrable verse, full of inspissated, treacly, heavy blue-black gloom….

– that kind of thing. What green caves? I forget. I think they were to be found in a ‘sea to sink in'. What sea? Sink what? I don't remember. I also wrote a novel called
The
Blonde
and
Oscar.
It was so sordid that it made publishers' readers scratch themselves. Compared with it,
L'Assommoir
was like something by Mrs Humphry Ward, and
Jude
the
Obscure
a kind of
Winnie
the
Pooh.
Prostitutes? Millions of 'em. Degenerates? On every page. I left no stone unthrown; explored every
drainpipe
; took three deep breaths, attached a stone to my
feet, exhaled, and sank to the bottom of the cesspit with a hideous gurgle. I tell you, publishers dropped it with muffled cries, and afterwards scrubbed their hands, like men who reach for pebbles on a beach and accidentally pick up something disgusting.

I was always having fights with other lodgers. My nerves were on edge. I was, in any case, a bit of an idiot, foolish with an uninspired foolishness – hell is full of such. I was unbelievably bumptious, arrogant,
loud-mouthed
, moody, quarrelsome, bull-headed, touchy, gloomy, and proud in a silly kind of way. At the prospect of a rough-house I boiled over with murderous joy. Only one man on earth inspired me with fear, and that was Busto.

*

Pio Busto used to cross himself before a lithograph of the Mona Lisa. He thought it represented the Virgin Mary. But in any case it was generally believed that Busto had no soul to save.

How small, how bent, and how virulent was Pio Busto, with his bulldog jaws, and his spine curved like a
horseshoe
! How diabolical were the little eyes, hard and black as basalt, that squinted out of his pale, crunched-up face! Ragged, dirty, and lopsided, he had the appearance of a handful of spoiled human material, crumpled and thrown aside, accidentally dropped out of the cosmic
dustbin
. It was said of him: ‘Busto is not human. Busto is not alive. Busto is a ghost, too mean to give us a fright.'

He really seemed to have no thought beyond wringing out the rents of his abominable little furnished rooms. As soon as the money was due, up popped Busto like the Devil in a legend:
‘My
landlorda gim
me
time to pay?
Hah? Hooh!' If you asked him for a match he would say: ‘Buy a box.' There was a quality of doom about his avarice. Professional bilkers took one look at Busto and ran for their lives. Unemployed waiters – always habitual grumblers and irrepressible mutterers-under-the-breath – remained silent in his presence. He uttered few words, but his thin lips, corrugated like the edges of
scallop-shells
, sawed off a whole repertoire of formidable noises. His
Hooh!
expressed all the scorn in the world: his
Hah?
was alive with malice.

About once a month he used to get drunk on Red Lisbon – a deadly and incalculable wine concocted of the squeezed-out scrapings of rotted port-casks and laced with methylated spirits – a terrible drink of doubtful origin, which smites the higher centres as with a sandbag. It is otherwise known as Lunatic's Broth, or Red Lizzie. Busto would consume bottles of it, and even offer small saucers-full to his dog, Ouif. This, also, was a taciturn animal; shaggy, half-deaf, suspicious, and altogether badly formed. It was as if some amateur Creator had tried to piece together a bull-terrier with odds and ends of Airedale, Saluki, Dachshund, and jackal. Ouif shared his master's bed. Dogs have no æsthetics, so it is easy for them to be noble. Besides, it is physically necessary for a dog to attach himself to somebody, if only a man like Busto, just as a man must love some living thing, even a dog like Ouif.

Without Ouif, how could Busto have lived in the atmosphere of hate with which he surrounded himself? He trailed a tradition of pitilessness. Extortion was his métier. As he went his rounds, his feet seemed to squeeze out of the squeaking stairs all the squealing notes in the gamut of human misery. Hopelessness had soaked into
the pores of his ancient house; multitudes of passing tenants had left behind them the ghosts of their anguish and despair. Busto's was the step before the bottom. People came, lingered, clinging desperately as to a rock overhanging an abyss; then weakened and dropped out of sight. The time always came when Busto said: ‘Clear out before twellovaclock!' Almost every rent-day, some
unhappy
defaulter was thrown out.

My rent-day was Saturday. One Saturday evening I was hurrying in with the necessary nine-and-six, when I met Mr Butts in the passage. He was an addresser of envelopes, a man with a booming voice, no shirt, and a monocle, most of whose earthly possessions were contained in a four-pound biscuit-tin. He was carrying this tin under his arm.

‘Going?' I asked.

‘Yes, my dear sir, I am,' said Mr Butts.

‘Did Busto——'

‘Of course. But he is sorry, now. You know, my dear sir, I never go out of my way to do anybody any harm, but people who wrong me always suffer for it afterwards. Busto throws me out into the street. Very good. An hour ago, his dog was run over. You see?'

‘No! His dog?'

‘Run over, my dear sir, by a taxi. Could you lend me fourpence?'

‘Twopence?'

‘A thousand thanks, my dear sir…. Good-bye,
good-bye
!'

The door slammed heavily. The rickety
umbrella-stand
vibrated to a standstill. Silence, darkness, and the evil odours of dampness and decay settled upon the
passage
. I went downstairs to the disused wash-house in

which Busto lived and slept. I knocked. He tore the door open and cried: ‘Yes? Yes?' But when he saw me his face fell, and he said: ‘Oh, you. Hooh! I toughta you was da vet.'

‘The vet?' I said. ‘Why, is Ouif ill?'

‘Yes.'

‘May I see him? I know a little bit about dogs.'

‘Yeh? Come in.'

Ouif lay on Busto's bed, surrounded with pillows and covered with a blanket.

‘Run over, eh?' I said.

‘Ah-ah. How you know?'

Without replying, I lifted the blanket. Ouif was crushed, bent sideways. Practically unconscious, he breathed with a strenuous, groaning noise, his mouth wide open.

‘Whacan I do?' asked Busto. ‘I touch 'im, it 'urts. You tella me. What I oughta do?'

I passed my hand gently down the dog's body. Ouif was smashed, finished. I replied: ‘I don't think there's anything much you can do.'

‘A hotawatta-bottle?'

‘A hot-water bottle's no use. Wait till the vet comes.'

‘Hooh. But what
I
do? Dis is
my
dog. Brandy?'

‘Don't be silly. Brandy'll make him cough, and it hurts him even to breathe.'

‘Hell!' exclaimed Busto, savagely.

I touched Ouif's stomach. He yelped sharply. I covered him again.

‘How did it happen?'

Busto flung up his big, earth-coloured fists in a
helpless
gesture. ‘Me, I go buya one-two bottla wine ova da road. Ouif run afta me. Dam taxi comes arounda da
corner. Brr-rrr-oum!
Fffff!
Run aright ova da dog,
withouta
stop!' shouted Busto, opening and closing his hands with awful ferocity. Hell, Ker-
ist
! If I getta holda diss fella. Gordamighty I tear 'im up a-to
bits
!
Lissen; I tear outa diss fella's 'eart an' tear
dat
up a-to bits too! Yes!' shrieked Busto, striking at the wall with his knuckles and scattering flakes of distemper. ‘Lissen, you tink 'e die, Ouif?'

‘I'm afraid he might. All his stomach's crushed. And his ribs. All the bones——'

‘Basta,
basta,
eh? Enough.' Busto slouched over to the table, seized a bottle of wine and filled two teacups. ‘Drink!' he commanded, handing one to me; and emptied his cup at a gulp. I swallowed a mouthful of the wine. It seemed to vaporise in my stomach like water on a red-hot stove –
psssst!
–
and the fumes rushed up to my head. Busto drank another cup, banging down the bottle.

‘You like this dog, eh?' I said.

‘I send my fraynd for the vet. Why don't dey come, dis vet?'

There was a knock at the front door. Busto rushed
upstairs
, and then came down followed by a wizened man who looked like a racing tipster, and a tall old man with a black bag.

‘Dissa my dog.'

‘What happened?' asked the vet.

‘Run over,' said the little man, ‘I told yer, didn't I?'

‘Well, let's have a look.' The vet stooped, pulled back the blanket, and began to touch Ouif here and there with light, skilful hands; looked at his eyes, said ‘Hm!' and then shook his head.

‘So?' said Busto.

‘Nothing much to be done, I'm afraid. Quite hopeless.'

‘'E die, hah?'

‘I'm afraid so. The best thing to do will be to put him out of his misery quickly.'

‘Misery?'

‘I say, the kindest thing will be to put him to sleep.'

‘Kill 'im, 'e means,' said the wizened man.

‘Lissen,' said Busto. ‘You mak this dog oright, I give you lotta money. Uh?'

‘But I tell you, nothing can possibly be done. His pelvis is all smashed to——'

‘Yes, yes, but lissen. You maka dis dog oright, I give you ten quid.'

‘Even if you offered me ten thousand pounds, Mister … er … I couldn't save your dog. I know how you feel, and I'm sorry. But I tell you, the kindest thing you can possibly do is put him quietly to sleep. He'll only go on suffering, to no purpose.'

‘Dammit, fifty quid!' cried Busto.

‘I'm not considering money. If it were possible to help your dog, I would; but I can't.'

‘Dammit, a hundreda quid!' yelled Busto. ‘You tink I aina got no money? Hah! Look!' He dragged open his waistcoat.

‘Nothing can be done. I'm sorry,' said the vet.

Busto rebuttoned his waistcoat. ‘So what you wanna do? Killum?'

‘It's the only merciful thing
to
do.'

‘How mucha dat cost?'

‘Mmmmm, five shillings.'

‘But make 'im oright, dat aina possible?'

‘Quite impossible.'

‘Not for no money?'

‘Not for all the money in the world.'

‘Hooh! Well, what you want?'

‘For my visit? Oh, well, I'll say half a crown.'

‘Go way,' said Busto, poking half a crown at him.

‘The dog will only suffer if you let him live on like this. I really——'

‘I give-a you money for cure. For killum? No.'

‘I'll do it for nothing, then. I can't see the dog
suffering
——'

‘You go way. Dissa
my
dog, hah?
I
killum! You go way, hah?' He approached the vet with such menace that the poor man backed out of the room. Busto poured another cup of Red Lisbon, and drained it at once. ‘You!' he shouted to me, ‘Drink! … You, Mick! Drink!'

The wizened man helped himself to wine. Busto fumbled under one of the pillows on the bed, very gently in order not to disturb the dog, and dragged out a huge old French revolver.

‘Hey!' I said. ‘What are you going to do?'

‘Killum,' said Busto. He patted the dog's head; then, with a set face, stooped and put the muzzle of the
revolver
to Ouif's ear. With clenched teeth and contracted stomach-muscles, I waited for the explosion. But Busto lowered his weapon; thought for a moment, rose and swung round, all in the same movement, confronting the lithograph of Mona Lisa.