A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

  The Professor smiled bitterly.

  ‘She is greedy of money. It is the only thing she loves except her beauty and her power over men; and during the boy’s infancy – that word is used in the Will – she has full enjoyment of the estate. After he “attains to manhood” – I quote the Will again – hers is but a life-interest. Now you understand?’

  I did understand, and the daring of the woman dazzled me. She had made the Professor doubly her tool.

  ‘And so,’ I gurgled between tears and laughter, ‘Lord Clanbevan, who ought to be leaving Eton this year to commence his first Oxford term, is being carried about in the arms of a nurse, arrayed in the flowing garments of a six-months’ baby! What an astonishing conspiracy!’

  ‘His mother,’ continued the Professor calmly, ‘allows no one to approach him but the nurse. The family are only too glad to ignore what they consider a deplorable case of atavistic growth-arrest, and the boy himself—’ He broke off. ‘I have detained you,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I will not do so longer. Nor will I offer you my hand. I am as conscious as you are that it has committed a crime.’ And he bowed me out with his hands sternly held behind him.

  There were few more words between us, only I remember turning on the threshold of the laboratory, where I left him, to ask whether protium – radium, as it is now christened – checks the growth of every organic substance? The answer I received was curious:

  ‘Certainly, with the exception of the nails and the hair!’

  A week later the Professor was found dead in his laboratory … There were reports of suicide – hushed up. People said he had been more eccentric than ever of late, and theorised about brain-mischief; only I located the trouble in the heart. A year went by, and I had almost forgotten Lady Clanbevan – for she went abroad after the Professor’s death – when at a little watering-place on the Dorset coast, I saw that lovely thing, as lovely as ever – she who was fifty if a day! With her were the blue-cloaked elderly nurse and Lord Clanbevan, borne, as usual, in the arms of his attendant, or wheeled in a luxurious perambulator. Day after day I encountered them – the lovely mother, the middle-aged nurse, and the mysterious child – until the sight began to get on my nerves. Had the Professor selected me as the recipient of a secret unrivalled in the records of biological discovery, or had he been the victim of some maniacal delusion that cold October day when we met in Rotten Row? One peep under the thick white lace veil with which the baby’s face was invariably covered would clear everything up! Oh! for a chance to allay the pangs of curiosity!

  The chance came. It was a hot, waspy August forenoon. Everybody was indoors with all the doors and windows open, lunching upon the innutritive viands alone procurable at health resorts – everybody but myself, Lord Clanbevan, and his nurse. She had fallen asleep upon a green-painted esplanade seat, gratuitously shielded by a striped awning. Lord Clanbevan’s C-springed, white-hooded, cane-built perambulator stood close beside her. He was, as usual, a mass of embroidered cambric and cashmere, and, as always, thickly veiled, his regular breathing heaved his infant breast; the thick white lace drapery attached to his beribboned bonnet obscured the features upon which I so ardently longed to gaze! It was the chance, as I have said; and as the head of the blue-cloaked nurse dropped reassuringly upon her breast, as she emitted the snore that gave assurance of the soundness of her slumbers, I stepped silently on the gravel towards the baby’s perambulator. Three seconds, and I stood over its apparently sleeping inmate; another, and I had lifted the veil from the face of the mystery – and dropped it with a stifled cry of horror!

  The child had a moustache!

  The Great Beast of Kafue

  CLOTILDE GRAVES (1917)

  The discovery of an extant dinosaur

  in the present day would be an

  astonishing scientific discovery; thus, it

  is hardly surprising that a number of

  cryptozoologists continue to pin their

  hopes on myths such as the Loch Ness

  Monster, or the Mokèlé-mbèmbé of

  the Congo River Basin. In the second

  Clotilde Graves story of this collection,

  we are presented with a character study

  of a damaged dinosaur-hunter, whose

  motives are much less noble than the

  furtherment of human knowledge.

  IT HAPPENED at our homestead on the border of South-eastern Rhodesia, seventy miles from Tuli Concession, some three years after the War.

  A September storm raged; the green, broad-leaved tobacco plants tossed like the waves of the ocean I had crossed and re-crossed, journeying to and coming back from my dead mother’s wet, sad country of Ireland to this land of my father and his father’s father.

  The acacias and kameel thorns and the huge cactus-like euphorbia that fringed the water-courses and the irrigation channels had wrung their hands all day without ceasing; like Makalaka women at a native funeral. Night closed in: the wooden shutters were barred, the small-paned windows fastened, yet they shook and rattled as though human beings without were trying to force a way in. White-wash fell in scales from the big tie-beams and cross-rafters of the farm kitchen, and lay in little powdery drifts of whiteness on the solid table of brown locust-tree wood, and my father’s Dutch Bible that lay open there. Upon my father’s great black head that was bent over the Book were many streaks and patches of white that might not be shaken or brushed away.

  It had fallen at the beginning of the War, that snow of sorrow streaking the heavy curling locks of coarse black hair. My pretty young mother – an Irishwoman of the North – had been killed in the Women’s Laager at Gueldersdorp during the Siege. My father served as Staats gunner during the Investment – and now you know the dreadful doubt that heaped upon those mighty shoulders a bending load, and sprinkled the black hair with white.

  You are to see me in my blue drill roundabout and little homespun breeches sitting on a cricket in the shadow of the table-edge, over against the grim sterk figure in the big, thong-seated armchair.

  There would be no going to bed that night. The dam was overfull already, and the next spate from the hill sluits might crack the great wall of mud-cemented saw-squared boulders, or overflow it, and lick away the work of years. The farm-house roof had been rebuilt since the shell from the English naval gun had wrecked it, but the work of men today is not like that of the men of old. My father shook his head, contemplating the new masonry, and the whitewash fell as though in confirmation of his expressed doubts.

  I had begged to stay up rather than lie alone in the big bed in my father’s room. Nodding with sleepiness I should have denied, I carved with my two-bladed American knife at a little canoe I meant to swim in the shallower river-pools. And as I shaped the prow I dreamed of something I had heard on the previous night.

  A traveller of the better middle-class, overseer of a coal-mine working ‘up Buluwayo way’, who had stayed with us the previous night and gone on to Tuli that morning, had told the story. What he had failed to tell I had haltingly spelled out of the three-weeks-old English newspaper he had left behind.

  So I wrought, and remembered, and my little canoe swelled and grew in my hands. I was carrying it on my back through a forest of tall reeds and high grasses, forcing a painful way between the tough wrist-thick stems with the salt sweat running down into my eyes … Then I was in the canoe, wielding the single paddle, working my frail crank craft through sluggish pools of black water, overgrown with broad spiny leaves of water-plants cradling flowers of marvellous hue. In the canoe bows leaned my grandfather’s elephant-gun, the inlaid, browned-steel-barrelled weapon with the diamond-patterned stock and breech, that had always seemed to my childish eyes the most utterly desirable, absolutely magnificent possession a grown-up man might call his own.

  A paauw made a great commotion getting up amongst the reeds; but does a hunter go after paauw with his grandfather’s elephant-gun? Duck were feeding in the open spaces of sluggish black water. I heard what seem
ed to be the plop! of a jumping fish, on the other side of a twenty-foot high barrier of reeds and grasses. I looked up then, and saw, glaring down upon me from inconceivable heights of sheer horror, the Thing of which I had heard and read.

  At this juncture I dropped the little canoe and clutched my father round the leg.

  ‘What is it, mijn jongen?’

  He, too, seemed to rouse out of a waking dream. You are to see the wide, burnt-out-looking grey eyes that were staring sorrowfully out of their shadowy caves under the shaggy eyebrows, lighten out of their deep abstraction and drop to the level of my childish face.

  ‘You were thinking of the great beast of Kafue Valley, and you want to ask me if I will lend you my father’s elephant-rifle when you are big enough to carry it that you may go and hunt for the beast and kill it; is that so?’

  My father grasped his great black beard in one huge knotted brown hand, and made a rope of it, as was his way. He looked from my chubby face to the old-fashioned black-powder 8-bore that hung upon the wall against a leopard kaross, and back again, and something like a smile curved the grim mouth under the shaggy black and white moustache.

  ‘The gun you shall have, boy, when you are of age to use it, or a 450-Mannlicher or a 600-Mauser, the best that may be bought north of the Transvaal, to shoot explosive or conical bullets from cordite cartridges. But not unless you give me your promise never to kill that beast, shall money of mine go to the buying of such a gun for you. Come now, let me have your word!’

  Even to my childish vanity the notion of my solemnly entering into a compact binding my hand against the slaying of the semi-fabulous beast-marvel of the Upper Rhodesian swamps smacked of the fantastic if not of the absurd. But my father’s eyes had no twinkle in them, and I faltered out the promise they commanded.

  ‘Nooit – nooit will I kill that beast! It should kill me, rather!’

  ‘Your mother’s son will not be valsch to a vow. For so would you, son of my body, make of me, your father, a traitor to an oath that I have sworn!’

  The great voice boomed in the rafters of the farm kitchen, vying with the baffled roaring of the wind that was trying to get in, as I had told myself, and lie down, folding wide quivering wings and panting still, upon the sheepskin that was spread before the hearth.

  ‘But – but why did you swear?’

  I faltered out the question, staring at the great bearded figure in homespun jacket and tan-cord breeches and veldschoens, and thought again that it had the hairy skin of Esau and the haunted face of Saul.

  Said my father, grimly –

  ‘Had I questioned my father so at twice your age, he would have skinned my back and I should have deserved it. But I cannot beat your mother’s son, though the Lord punish me for my weakness … And you have the spirit of the jager in you, even as I. What I saw you may one day see. What I might have killed, that shall you spare, because of me and my oath. Why did I take it upon me, do you ask? Even though I told you, how should a child understand? What is it you are saying? Did I really see the beast? Ay, by the Lord!’ said my father thoughtfully, ‘I saw him. And never can a man who has seen, forget that sight. What are you saying?’

  The words tumbled over one another as I stammered in my hurry –

  ‘But – but the English traveller said only one white man besides the Mashona hunter has seen the beast, and the newspaper says so too.’

  ‘Natuurlijk. And the white man is me,’ thundered the deep voice.

  I hesitated.

  ‘But since the planting of the tobacco you have not left the plaats. And the newspaper is of only three weeks back.’

  ‘Dat spreekt, but the story is older than that, mijn jongen. It is the third time it has been dished up in the Buluwayo Courant, sauced up with lies to change the taste as belly-lovers have their meat. But I am the man who saw the beast of Kafue, and the story that is told is my story, nevertheless!’

  I felt my cheeks beginning to burn. Wonderful as were the things I knew to be true of the man, my father, this promised to be the most wonderful of all.

  ‘It was when I was hunting in the Zambezi Country,’ said my father, ‘three months after the Commandaants of the Forces of the United Republics met at Klerkadorp to arrange conditions of peace—’

  ‘With the English Generals,’ I put in.

  ‘With the English, as I have said. You had been sent to your – to her people in Ireland. I had not then thought of rebuilding the farm. For more than a house of stones had been thrown down for me, and more than so many thousand acres of land laid waste …

  ‘Where did I go? Ik wiet niet. I wandered op en neer like the evil spirit in the Scriptures.’ The great corded hand shut the Book and reached over and snuffed the tallow-dip that hung over at the top, smoking and smelling, and pitched the black wick-end angrily on the red hearth-embers. ‘I sought rest and found none, either for the sole of my foot or the soul in my body. There is bitterness in my mouth as though I have eaten the spotted lily-root of the swamps. I cannot taste the food I swallow, and when I lie down at night something lies down with me, and when I rise up, it rises too and goes by my side all day.’

  I clung to the leg of the table, not daring to clutch my father’s. For his eyes did not seem to see me anymore, and a blob of foam quivered on his beard that hung over his great breast in a shadowy cascade dappled with patches of white. He went on, I scarcely daring to breathe –

  ‘For, after all, do I know it is not I who killed her? That accursed day, was I not on duty as ever since the beginning of the Investment, and was it not a splinter from a Maxim Nordenfeld fired from an eastern gun-position, that—’ Great drops stood on my father’s forehead.

  His huge frame shook. The clenched hand resting on the solid table of locust-beam shook that also, shaking me, clinging to the table-leg with my heart thumping violently, and a cold, crawling sensation among the roots of my curls.

  ‘At first, I seem to remember there was a man hunting with me. He had many servants, four Mashona hunters, wagons drawn by salted tailless spans, fine guns and costly tents, plenty of stores and medicine in little sugar-pills, in bottles with silver tops. But he sickened in spite of all his quinine, and the salted oxen died, just like beasts with tails; and besides, he was afraid of the Makwakwa and the Mashengwa with their slender poisoned spears of reeds. He turned back at last. I pushed on.’

  There was a pause. The strange, iron-grey, burnt-out eyes looked through me and beyond me, then the deep, trembling voice repeated, once more changing the past into the present tense –

  ‘I push on west. My life is of value to none. The boy – is he not with her people? Shall I live to have him back under my roof and see in his face one day the knowledge that I have killed his mother? Nay, nay, I will push on!’

  There was so long a silence after this that I ventured to move. Then my father looked at me, and spoke to me, not as though I were a child, but as if I had been another man.

  ‘I pushed on, crossing the rivers on a blown-up goatskin and some calabashes, keeping my father’s elephant-gun and my cartridges dry by holding them above my head. For food there were thorny orange cucumbers with green pulp, and the native women at the kraals gave me cakes of maize and milk. I hunted and killed rhino and elephant and hippo and lion, until the head-men of the Mashengwa said that the beast was a god of theirs, and the slaying of it would bring a pestilence upon their tribe; so, I killed no more. And one day I shot a cow hippo with her calf, and she stood to suckle the ugly little thing while her life was bleeding out of her, and after that I ceased to kill. I needed little, and there were yet the green-fleshed cucumbers, and ground-nuts, and things like those.’

  He made a rope of his great beard, twisting it with a rasping sound.

  ‘Thus, I reached the Upper Kafue Valley where the great grass swamps are. No railway then, running like an iron snake up from Buluwayo to bring the ore down from the silver-mines that are there.

  ‘Six days’ trek from the mines – I went on foo
t always, you will understand – six days’ journey from the mines, above where L’uengwe River is wedded to Kafue, as the Badanga say, is a big water.

  ‘It is a lake – or rather, two lakes – not round, but shaped like the bowls of two wooden spoons. A shore of black, stonelike baked mud round them, and a bridge of the same stone is between them, so that they make the figure that is for 8.’

  The big, hairy forefinger of my father’s right hand traced the numeral in the powdered whitewash that lay in drifts upon the table.

  ‘That is the shape of the lakes, and the Badanga say that they have no bottom, and that fish taken from their waters remain raw and alive, even on the red-hot embers of their cooking stove. And they gave me tortoise to eat and told me, partly in words of my own moder Taal they had picked up somehow, partly in sign language, about the Great Beast that lives in the double lake that is haunted by the spirits of their dead.’

  I waited, my heart pumping at the bottom of my throat, my blood running horribly, delightfully chill, to hear the rest.

  ‘The hunting spirit revives in a man, even at death’s door, to hear of an animal the like of which no living hunter has ever brought down. The Badanga tell me of this one, tales, tales, tales! They draw it for me with a pointed stick on a broad green leaf, or in the ashes of their cooking-fires. And I have seen many a great beast, but, voor den donder! never a beast such as that!’

  I held on to my stool with both hands.

  ‘I ask the Badanga to guide me to the lair of the beast for all the money I have upon me. They care not for gold, but for the old silver hunting-watch I carry they will risk offending the spirits of their dead. The old man who has drawn the creature for me, he will take me. And it is January, the time of year in which he has been before known to rise and bellow – Maar! – bellow like twenty buffalo bulls in spring-time, for his mate to rise from those bottomless deeps below and drink the air and sun.’