The Best of Gerald Kersh (9 page)

‘Who does she think——’ began Tick.

‘Shush!’
said Gargantua.

‘No offence, Lalouette,’ said Tick.

‘Go now, please. Go!’

They went. Tick found a spring of fresh water. Tack reported the presence of wild pigs. Gargantua returned with an armful of wreckage; wood spiked with rusty nails; a massive thing like a broken mast in which was embedded an enormous iron pin.

‘Light the fire,’ said Lalouette. ‘You, Gargantua, make a spear of that long piece of iron. Make it sharp with stones. Then tie it tight to a stick. So you can kill pigs. You and you, Tick and Tack, go up to the rocks. I have seen birds coming down. Where there are birds there are eggs. You are light, you are dancers. Find eggs. Better still, find birds. When they sit on their nests they are reluctant to go far away from their nests. Approach
calmly and quietly, lie still, and then take them quickly. Do you understand?’

‘Beautifully,’ said Tack.

Tick said nothing.

‘Better get that fire going first of all,’ said Gargantua.

Lalouette said: ‘True. Boats must pass and they will see the smoke. Good, light the fire.’

‘If I could find another bit of iron, or something heavy,’ said Gargantua, ‘I could do better than this spiky sort of thing, Miss. I dare say I could bang it out to a bit of a blade once I got the fire going good and hot.’

‘How?’ said Lalouette.

‘I was ’prentice to a blacksmith, ’m,’ said Gargantua. ‘My dad was a smith, before the motor-cars came in.’

‘What? You have skill then, in those great hands of yours?’

‘Yes’m. Not much. A bit, but not much.’

‘Then make your “bit of a blade”, Gargantua.’

‘Thank you, ’m.’

‘Can you make me a comb?’

‘Why, I dare say, yes. Yes, I should say I
could
make you a bit of a comb, ’m. But nothing fancy,’ said
Gargantua
, shutting one eye and calculating. ‘Something out of a little bit of wood, like.’

‘Do so, then.’

‘Yes, ’m. If Mr Tack doesn’t mind me using his knife.’

‘Could you also build a house, Gargantua?’

‘No, ’m, not a house; but I dare say I might put you up a bit of a shed, like. Better be near the drinking water, though. And I shouldn’t be surprised if there was all sorts of bits of string along the beach. Where there’s sea there’s fish. And don’t you worry – I’ll bring you home a nice pig, only let me get that fire going nice and
bright. And as for fish,’ said Gargantua, plucking a nail out of a plank and making a hook of it between a finger and a thumb,’ ‘– sharpen that up and there you are.’

‘Clever!’ said Tick, with malice.

‘But he always was clever,’ said Tack, tonelessly, but with a bitter little smile. ‘We already know.’

Gargantua blinked, while Lalouette said: ‘Be quiet, please, both of you.’

Then Gargantua nodded and growled: ‘That’s right. You be quiet.’

Tick and Tack exchanged glances and said nothing until Lalouette cried: ‘Come! To work!’ – when Tick muttered: ‘Who the hell do they think they are, giving orders?’

‘Come on, now, you two!’ shouted Gargantua.

I believe it was then that the two midgets Tick and Tack began to plot and conspire against Gargantua the Horror, and I am convinced that they too in their dwarfish way were in love with Lalouette.

They followed Lalouette’s instructions, and struck sparks out of Gargantua’s lighter to kindle powdery flakes of dry driftwood whittled with Tack’s big-bladed knife. Tick blew the smoulder into flame and the men fed the fire until it blazed red-hot, so that Gargantua, having found a thick slab and a pear-shaped lump of hard rock for his anvil and hammer, beat his iron spike into a good spearhead which he lashed to a long, strong pole. Then they had a crude but effective pike, with which Gargantua killed wild pigs.

Porcosito is not called Pig Island without reason. It used to be overrun with swine, bred from a pedigree boar and some sows that Sir John Page sent to Mexico in 1893, in the
Ponce
de
Leon,
which was wrecked in a
squall. Only the pigs swam ashore from that shipwreck. Porcosito seems to be an unlucky island.

Gargantua hunted ruthlessly. The pigs were apathetic. The boars charged – to meet the spear. The four freaks ate well. Tick and Tack fished and caught birds,
gathered
eggs and crabs. Lalouette directed everything and at night, by the fire, told them stories and sang to them; recited all the poetry she could remember, and dug out of her memory all she had ever read of philosophy. I believe that they were happy then; but it makes an odd picture – the truncated beauty, the stunted dancers, and the ugliest man on earth, grouped about a flickering fire while the songs of Schubert echo from the rocks and the sea says
hush
…
hush
… on the beach. I can see the sharp, keen faces of the midgets; and the craggy
forehead
of the giant wrinkled in anguish as he tries to understand the inner significance of great thoughts
expressed
in noble words. She told them stories, too, of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome – of Regulus, who went back to Carthage to die; of the glorious dead at Thermopylæ, and of the wise and cunning Ulysses, the subtlest of the Greeks, who strove with gods and came home triumphant at last. She told them of the triumph of Ulysses over Circe, the sorceress who turned men into beasts; and how he escaped with his crew from the cave of the one-eyed giant Cyclops. He was colossal; the men were small. Ulysses drilled his sailors to move like one man, and, with a sharpened stick, blinded the giant and escaped.

She let them comb her hair. The French dwarf Tack was skilful at this, and amusing in conversational
accompaniment
to the crackling of the hair and the fire. Tick hated his partner for this. Yet the gigantic hands of
Gargantua were lighter on her head than the hands of Tick or Tack – almost certainly because the little men wanted to prove that they were strong, and the giant wanted to demonstrate that he was gentle.

It was Gargantua who combed Lalouette’s beautiful bright hair, evening after evening, while Tick and Tack sat exchanging looks. No words: only looks.

Sometimes the little men went hunting with
Gargantua
. Alone, neither Tick nor Tack could handle the heavy spear. But it must be remembered that they were a dancing-team, trained to move together in perfect accord. So, while Tick directed the fore-part of the shaft, Tack worked close behind him, and they put their
combined
, perfectly synchronised strength and agility into a dangerous leap-and-plunge. Once they killed a fat boar. This must have made them confident of their power to kill.

This is not all guesswork. I have ground for my assumption, in what Lalouette wrote in Tick’s loose-leaf notebook, holding the gold pencil in her teeth and
guiding
it with her lips, before she bit the paper into a ball and pushed it with her tongue into her grouch-bag.

It takes courage and determination to kill a wild boar with a spear. A boar is fearless, powerful, unbelievably ferocious, and armoured with hard hide and thick muscle. He is wickedly obstinate – a slashing fury, a
ripping
terror – two sickles on a battering-ram, animated by a will to kill, uninhibited by fear of death.

Having killed a boar, Tick and Tack, in their pride, resolved to kill Gargantua.

Lalouette says that she, unwittingly, gave them the idea, when she told them the story of Ulysses and Cyclops.

But the foolish giant called Gargantua the Horror, billed as the strongest and ugliest man on earth, must have been easy to kill. He worked all day. When Lalouette’s hair was combed and her singing ceased, he went away modestly to sleep in the bushes. One night, after he had retired, Tick and Tack followed him.
Gargantua
always carried the spear. Lalouette listened drowsily for the comforting rumble of Gargantua’s snoring a few yards away; she loved him, in a sisterly way.

… Ha-khaaa … kha-ha … khaaaa-huk … khaaaa …

As she listened, smiling, the snoring stopped with a gasp. Then Tick and Tack came back carrying the spear, and in the firelight Lalouette could see that the blade of the spear was no longer clean. The redness of it was not a reflected redness.

Thus she knew what the little men had done to
Gargantua.
She would have wept if she could; but there was no hand to wipe away her tears, and she was a proud woman. So she forced herself to pretend to be asleep.

Later she wrote:
I knew that this was the end. I was sorry. In this place I have felt strangely calm and free, happier than I have ever been since my dear mother used to hold me in her arms and tell me all the stories I told here; stories of gods and heroes and pygmies and giants, and of men with wings….

But that night, looking through the lashes of her
half-closed
eyes, she saw Tick untying the blade of the spear. He worked for an hour before he got it loose, and then he had a sort of dirk, more than a foot long, which he concealed in a trouser-leg. Tack, she thinks, had been watching him also; for as soon as Tick closed his eyes and began to breathe evenly, he took out the knife which he
had never allowed them to take away from him, and stabbed his partner through the heart.

He carried the body out of the range of her vision, and left it where he let it fall. Lalouette never knew where.

Next morning Tack said to her: ‘At last we are alone. You are my Queen.’

‘The fire?’ she said, calmly.

‘Ah yes. The fire. I will put wood on the fire, and then perhaps we may be alone after all this time.’

Tack went away and Lalouette waited. He did not return. The disposition of his bones, and the scars on them, indicated that he was killed by a boar. There was no more driftwood near-by. Tack went into the trees to pick up whatever he might find. As I visualise it, he stooped to gather sticks, and looked up into the furious and bloody eyes of a great angry boar gathering itself for a charge. This must be so: there is no other way of accounting for the scattering of his shattered bones. Hence, the last thing Tack saw must have been the bristly head of a pig, a pair of curled tusks, and two little red eyes….

*

The last words in what may be described as Lalouette’s Journal are as follows:

A
wind
is
blowing.
The
fire
is
dying.
God
grant
that
my
end
may
be
soon.

This is the history of the Queen of Pig Island, and of the bones Captain Oxford found.

T
HE
Carpathians have always been the rocky-breasted wet nurse of sombre and terrible fantasy. Dracula came out of these parts in which, as the peasants whisper,
crossing
themselves: ‘The dead ride hard.’ Hungary, and Austria, have always been breeding grounds for
vampires
, werewolves, witches, warlocks, together with their bedevilments and bewitchings.

Psychoanalysis started in these parts. There are
hundreds
of professional psychologists (witch-doctors) from most other countries in the world who have studied under Freud, Jung, Adler, Groddeck, and the rest. Most of them go away with unblinking conviction: a species of owl stuffed with conjecture curdled into dogma. It is interesting, by the way, to observe that most of these fumblers in the dark are in a state of permanent nervous breakdown – an occupational disease you get when you try to take someone else’s soul to pieces and clean it and reassemble it. No man in the world ever emptied his heart and mind in an analyst’s office or anywhere else – only madmen try, who do not know what they are
talking
about; their candour is fantasy.

Anglo-Saxons ought to leave psychology to take care of itself. They break their hearts trying to make an exact science of what – considering the infinite permutations and combinations of the human mind – can never crystallise out of mere philosophy. In the end, it all boils
down to repetitive case-histories, reports, and other
rubbish
– sex in statistical tedium, with the spicy bits veiled in the obscurity of a dead language.

So, in effect, said that shrewd little mental specialist whom I will call Dr Almuna, when I met him in a select scientific group at a cocktail party. He runs the Almuna Clinic – a polite, expensive kind of looney bin not far from Chicago – and specialises in dope fiends and
alcoholics
.

Almuna is good company. This cheerful man who has kept clean because he has learned how to wash his hands in any kind of water – this Almuna, a kindly cynic,
believes
everything and nothing. There is nothing didactic about Dr Almuna: he admits that the more he knows he knows, the less he knows he knows.

Once, in the course of a conversation he said to me, in reply to a certain question: ‘know the lobes of a brain, and have followed the convolutions of many brains, and the patterns of behaviour of many men and women. And still I cannot pretend to understand. I try, believe me! But every human brain is a separate labyrinth. He would be a lucky man who, in a lifetime, got to the heart of anybody’s brain. No, no; quite simply, I do not try to explain. I treat, and endeavour to understand. The other way lies theory. Hence, fanaticism; and so delusion …’

On the occasion to which I have referred, when earnest professional men made a group and discussed cases, Dr Almuna was there, cocking his head like a parrot; one eye shut; avidly attentive. Some practitioner whose name I forget was talking of a case of ‘sympathetic pains’. He had investigated and thoroughly
authenticated
the case of a girl who, at three o’clock in the
morning
of 7 January 1944 uttered a piercing shriek and cried: ‘I’m shot!’ She pointed to a spot under the
collarbone
. There, mysteriously, had appeared a small blue dot, exquisitely painful to the touch. It transpired that exactly at that moment her brother, who was serving overseas, had been struck by a bullet in that very place.

Dr Almuna nodded, and said: ‘Oh, indeed, yes. Such cases are not without precedent, Doctor. But I think I can tell of an even more extraordinary instance of physical sympathy between two brothers …’

Smiling over his cigar, he went on:

*

These two brothers, let us call them John and William, they came to me at my clinic in Vienna, in the spring of 1924, before Mr Hitler made it imperative that I leave for foreign parts – even Chicago!

John came with his brother William. It was a plain case, open and shut, of dipsomania. Aha, but not so plain! Because there was such a sympathy between these brothers, William and John, that the weakness of the one affected the other.

William drank at least two bottles of brandy every day. John was a teetotaller – the very odour of alcohol was revolting to him. William smoked fifteen strong cigars a day. John detested the smell of tobacco smoke – it made him sick.

Yet account for this, if you like, gentlemen – William, the drunkard, and the smoker, was a harmless kind of fellow, while his brother John, the total abstainer, the non-smoker, showed every symptom of chronic
alcoholism
, cirrhosis of the liver, and a certain fluttering of the heart that comes of nicotine poisoning!

I do not suppose that any doctor has had the good luck to have such a case on his hands. There was William, breathing brandy and puffing cigar smoke like a steam engine, in the pink of condition; blissfully
semicomatose
; happy. And there was John, with a strawberry nose, a face like a strawberry soufflé, eyes like poached egs in pools of blood, fingers playing mysterious arpeggios all over the place – a clear case of alcoholic polyneurotic psychosis – but John had never touched a drop.

It was John who did most of the talking – the one with the strawberry nose. He said: ‘Dr Almuna, for God’s sake, stop him! He’s killing me. He’s killing himself, and he’s killing me.’

William said: ‘Pay no attention, Doc. John’s the man of nerves. Me, I take things easy.’

At this John cried: ‘Nerves! Damn you, William, you’ve torn mine to shreds!’

William said, quite placidly: ‘Give me some brandy, Doctor.’

And then you would have been amazed to see the play of expression on the face of John, the plaintive one. He folded his hands and gripped them tight to stop the tremor; and I have never seen a more remarkable
combination
of desire and revulsion in a human
countenance
.

‘Don’t!’ he said; and then: ‘… Well, Doctor, if you think it’s okay …’

Alas, that I should say it – to an inquiring mind,
however
well-disposed, all men are guinea-pigs. Besides, it might be argued, who was John to say what the suave and comfortable William might, or might not, have? Experimentally, if you like, I gave William three ounces
of brandy in a measured glass. It went down like a thimbleful, and he smiled at me – a smile that was pleasant to see.

And believe me or believe me not, his brother John began to retch and hiccup and blink at me with eyes out of focus, while William, having lit a strong cigar, folded his hands on his stomach and puffed smoke!

Sympathy, what? Wow, but with a vengeance!

At last, after a fit of deep coughing, and something like nausea, brother John said: ‘You see, Doctor? Do you see? This is what I have to put up with. William won’t let me work. Do you appreciate that? He won’t let me work!’

Both John and William were evidently men of
substance
. They had arrived in a custom-built
Mercedes-Benz
, were tailored by Stolz, and carried expensive jewellery. It is true that William was covered with
cigar-ash
, and that his platinum watch had stopped in the afternoon of the previous day; but it was impossible not to detect a certain air of financial independence.

John, the strawberry-faced, the tremulous one, he was neat as a pin, prim, dapper. I wish I knew the laundress who got up his linen. He wore a watch-chain of gold and platinum and, on the little finger of his left hand, a gold ring set with a large diamond. There was about two carats of diamond, also, stuck in his black satin tie….

How shall I describe to you this weird mixture of dandyism and unkemptness in John? It was as if
someone
had disturbed him in the middle of a careful toilet. His clothes were beautifully cut and carefully pressed. You might have seen your face in the mirrors of his shoes. But his hair needed trimming – it came up to the
neck in little feathers – and his finger-nails were not very tidy. William was flagrantly, cheerfully – I may even say atavistically – dirty, so as to be an offence to the eye and to the nostrils. Still, he too wore well-cut clothes and jewellery: not diamonds; emeralds. Only rich men can afford to be so elegant or so slovenly.

So I asked: ‘Work, Mr John? Come now, what do you mean by “work”?’

William, rosy and contented, was smiling and nodding in a half-sleep – the picture of health and well-being. And his brother John, who had not touched a drop, was in a state of that feverish animation which comes before the sodden sleep that leads to the black hangover.

He said: ‘Oh, I don’t
need
to work – I mean, not in point of economy. Mother left us enough, and much more than enough. Don’t you worry about your fee, Doctor——’

‘You leave Mother out of this,’ said William. ‘Little rat. Always picking on Mother, poor old girl. Give us another bit of brandy, Doctor: this is a bore.’

Before I could stop him, William got hold of the bottle and swallowed a quarter of a pint. He was very strong in the hands, and I had to exert myself to take the bottle away from him. After I had locked it up, it was – believe me! – it was poor John who said, in a halting voice: ‘I think I am going to be sick.’ What time William, blissfully chewing the nauseous stump of a dead cigar, was humming ‘O Doña Clara’, or some such trash.

And upon my soul, gentlemen, John joined in, in spite of himself, making what is politely called ‘harmony’:

Then John stopped, and began to cry.

He said: ‘That’s all he knows, you see? You see what he is? A pig, a vulgar beast. My tastes are purely classical. I adore Bach, I love Mozart, I worship Beethoven. William won’t let me play them. He breaks my records. I can’t stop him. He’s stronger in the hands than I am – exercised them more. Day and night he likes to bang hot jazz out of the piano; and he won’t let me think, he won’t let me work – Doctor, he’s
killing
me! What am I to do?’

William lit another green cigar and said: ‘Ah, cut it out, will you? … Why, Doc, the other day this one ordered in a record by a guy called Stravinsky, or
something
.’ He chuckled. ‘It said on the label,
Unbreakable.
But I bust it over his head; didn’t I, Johnny? Me, I like something with a bit of life in it … rhythm. You know?’

John sobbed. ‘My hobby is painting miniatures on ivory. William won’t let me. He mixes up my paints——’

‘Can’t stand the smell of ’em,’ said William.

‘– Jogs my arm and, if I protest, he hits me. When I want to play music, he wants to go to sleep. Oh, but if
I
want to sleep and
he
wants to make a noise, try and stop him!’

‘Let’s have a little more brandy,’ said William.

But I said to him, solemnly: ‘The stuff is deadly poison to you, Mr William. I strongly urge that you spend about three months in my sanatorium.’

‘I won’t go,’ he said. ‘Nothing the matter with me.
I’m
okay.’

‘Make him go,
make
him go!’ his brother screamed. ‘Oh, William, William, for God’s sake – for
my
sake – go to the sanatorium!’

‘I’m okay,’ said William, cheerfully. ‘You’re the one that needs the sanatorium. I’m not going. I’d rather stay at home and enjoy myself. A short life and a merry one. Ha?’

And the extraordinary fact of the matter was, William was, as he said, okay – liver impalpable, kidneys sound, heart in excellent condition – he, who drank two quarts of brandy every day of his life! A tongue like a baby’s, eyes like stars, steady as a rock. It was John who showed the stigmata of the alcoholic and the cigar-fiend – he who had never tasted liquor or
tobacco
.

How do you like that for sympathy?

John whispered brokenly: ‘I might have tried to bear it all; only last week this sot proposed marriage to our housekeeper! Marriage! To our housekeeper! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it!’

William said: ‘Why not? Nice woman. Johnny hates her, Doc, but she understands me. Past her prime, maybe, but comfortable to be with. Shares my tastes. Likes cheerful music. Don’t say no to a highball. Cooks the way I like it – plenty of pepper, rich stuff with a lot of spice. This Johnny-boy, here, all he can take is milk and boiled weakfish. Yes, so help me, I’m going to marry Clara…. Sure you can’t let me have another little bit of brandy, Doc? An itsy-boo?’

I said: ‘No. For the last time, are you sure that you won’t come to my sanatorium?’

‘Sure as you’re sitting there,’ said William, while John sobbed helplessly on the sofa.

So, to conclude: The brothers John and William went out to where their great limousine was waiting in the dusk, and drove away.

Shortly afterwards, John died in delirium of cirrhosis, nephritis, dropsy, and ‘the whole works’ – as you put it. His brother William died soon after, and they were buried together in the Sacred Heart cemetery.

Curious, what?

*

The good Dr Almuna rubbed his hands and chuckled.

A listening psychiatrist said: ‘Most extraordinary,’ and began an explanation that promised to be
interminable
.

But Dr Almuna cut him short. He said: ‘The
explanation
, my dear Doctor, is an exceedingly simple one.
Perhaps
I failed to mention that John and William were Siamese twins, and had only one liver between them. And poor John had the thin end of it, which cirrhosed in advance of William’s.’

He added: ‘Intriguing, what? Perhaps the only case on record of a man drinking his teetotal brother to death.’