Nightshade and Damnations

by Gerald Kersh

  I have no space to describe how the good doctor, in 1919, got lost in the Belt of Eternal Frost. Out of favor with the Bolsheviks, he made a crazy journey across Siberia toward Canada. In a kind of sheltered valley in that hideous hell of ice, he found a hut.

  “. . . I knocked. A man came; shabby 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; forever.’ ‘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 ax. It is wood. It breaks. There is a hole.

  I make a torch 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 forever.

  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 hands a doll made of a bone and a piece of old fur. With this she was playing when the Death Cold struck.

  I wanted more light. There was a burned 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 ax 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 gray 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. She has grown up with me, but now she has returned to sleep.

  “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 traveled. 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!”

  The Brighton Monster

  I found one of the most remarkable stories of the century—a story related to the most terrible event in the history of mankind—in a heap of rubbish in the corridor outside the office of Mr. Harry Ainsworth, editor of the People, in 1943.

  Every house in London, in those dark, exciting days, was being combed for salvage, particularly scrap metal and waste paper. Out of Mr. Ainsworth’s office alone came more than three hundred pounds of paper that, on consideration, was condemned to pulp as not worth keeping.

  The pamphlet I found must have been lying at the bottom of a bottom drawer—it was on top of the salvage basket. If the lady, or gentleman, who sent it to the People will communicate with me I will gladly pay her (or him) two hundred and fifty English pounds.

  As literature it is nothing but a piece of pretentious nonsense written by one of those idle dabblers in “natural philosophy” who rushed into print on the slightest provocation in the eighteenth century. But the significance of it is formidable.

  It makes me afraid.

  The author of my pamphlet had attempted to tickle his way into public notice with the feather of his pen by writing an account of a monster captured by a boatman fishing several miles out of Brighthelmstone in the county of Sussex in the summer of the year 1745.

  The name of the author was the Reverend Arthur Titty. I see him as one of those pushing, self-assertive vicars of the period, a rider to hounds, a purple-faced consumer of prodigious quantities of old port; a man of independent fortune, trying to persuade the world and himself that he was a deep thinker and a penetrating observer of the mysterious works of God.

  I should never have taken the trouble to pocket his Account of a Strange Monster Captured Near Brighthelmstone in the County of Sussex on August 6th in the Year of Our Lord 1745 if it had not been coincidence of the date: I w
as born on August 6. So I pushed the yellowed, damp-freckled pages into the breast pocket of my battledress, and thought no more about them until April 1947, when a casual remark sent me running, yelling like a maniac, to the cupboard in which my old uniforms were hanging.

  The pamphlet was still in its pocket.

  I shall not waste your time or strain your patience with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s turgid, high-falutin’ prose or his references to De rerum—this, that and the other. I propose to give you the unadorned facts in the very queer case of the Brighthelmstone monster.

  Brighthelmstone is now known as Brighton—a large, popular, prosperous holiday resort delightfully situated on the coast of Sussex by the Downs. But in the Reverend Titty’s day it was an obscure fishing village.

  If a fisherman named Hodge had not had an unlucky night on August 5, 1745, on the glass-smooth sea off Brighthelmstone, this story would never have been told. He had gone out with his brother-in-law, George Rodgers, and they had caught nothing but a few small and valueless fishes. Hodge was desperate. He was notorious in the village as a spendthrift and a drunkard, and it was suspected that he had a certain connection with a barmaid at the Smack Inn—it was alleged that she had a child by him in the spring of the following year. He had scored up fifteen shillings for beer and needed a new net. It is probable, therefore, that Hodge stayed out in his boat until after the dawn of August 6 because he feared to face his wife—who also, incidentally, was with child.

  At last, glum, sullen, and thoroughly out of sorts, he prepared to go home.

  And then, he said, there was something like a splash—only it was not a splash: it was rather like the bursting of a colossal bubble: and there, in the sea, less than ten yards from his boat, was the monster, floating.

  George Rodgers said: “By gogs, Jack Hodge, yon’s a man!”

  “Man? How can ’a be a man? Where could a man come from?”

  The creature that had appeared with the sound of a bursting bubble drifted closer, and Hodge, reaching out with a boat hook, caught it under the chin and pulled it to the side of the boat.

  “That be a merman,” he said, “and no Christian man. Look at ’un, all covered wi’ snakes and fire-drakes, and yellow like a slug’s belly. By the Lord, George Rodgers, this might be the best night’s fishing I ever did if it’s alive, please the Lord! For if it is I can sell that for better money than ever I got for my best catch this last twenty years, or any other fisherman either. Lend a hand, Georgie-boy, and let’s have a feel of it.”

  George Rodgers said: “That’s alive, by hell—look now, and see the way the blood runs down where the gaff went home.”

  “Haul it in, then, and don’t stand there gaping like a puddock.”

  They dragged the monster into the boat. It was shaped like a man and covered from throat to ankle with brilliantly colored images of strange monsters. A green, red, yellow and blue thing like a lizard sprawled between breast bone and navel. Great serpents were coiled above its legs. A smaller snake, red and blue, was picked out on the monster’s right arm: the snake’s tail covered the forefinger and its head was hidden in the armpit. On the left-hand side of its chest there was a big heart-shaped design in flaming scarlet. A great bird like an eagle in red and green spread its wings from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade, and a red fox chased six blue rabbits from the middle of his spine into some unknown hiding place between his legs. There were lobsters, fishes, and insects on his left arm and on his right buttock a devilfish sprawled, encircling the lower part of his body with its tentacles. The back of his right hand was decorated with a butterfly in yellow, red, indigo and green. Low down, in the center of the throat, where the bone begins, there was a strange, incomprehensible, evil-looking symbol.

  The monster was naked. In spite of its fantastic appearance it was so unmistakably a male human being that George Rodgers—a weak-minded but respectable man—covered it with a sack. Hodge prised open the monster’s mouth to look at its teeth, having warned his brother-in-law to stand by with an axe in case of emergency. The man-shaped creature out of the sea had red gums, a red tongue, and teeth as white as sugar.

  They forced it to swallow a little gin—Hodge always had a flask of gin in the boat—and it came to life with a great shudder, and cried out in a strange voice, opening wild black eyes and looking crazily left and right.

  “Tie that up. You tie that’s hands while I tie that’s feet,” said Hodge.

  The monster offered no resistance.

  “Throw ’un back,” said George Rodgers, suddenly overtaken by a nameless dread. “Throw ’un back, Jack, I say!”

  But Hodge said: “You be mazed, George Rodgers, you born fool. I can sell ’e for twenty-five golden guineas. Throw ’un back? I’ll throw ’ee back for a brass farthing, tha’ witless fool!”

  There was no wind. The two fishermen pulled for the shore. The monster lay in the bilge, rolling its eyes. The silly, good-natured Rodgers offered it a crust of bread which it snapped up so avidly that it bit his finger to the bone. Then Hodge tried to cram a wriggling live fish into its mouth, but “the monster spat it out pop, like a cork out of a bottle, saving your Honor’s presence.”

  Brighthelmstone boiled over with excitement when they landed. Even the Reverend Arthur Titty left his book and his breakfast, clapped on his three-cornered hat, picked up his cane, and went down to the fish-market to see what was happening. They told him that Hodge had caught a monster, a fish that looked like a man, a merman, a hypogriff, a sphinx—heaven knows what. The crowd parted and Titty came face to face with the monster.

  Although the monster understood neither Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian nor French, it was obvious that it was a human being, or something remarkably like one. This was evident in its manner of wrinkling its forehead, narrowing its eyes, and demonstrating that it was capable of understanding—or of wanting to understand, which is the same thing. But it could not speak; it could only cry out incoherently and it was obviously greatly distressed. The Reverend Arthur Titty said: “Oafs, ignorant louts! This is no sea monster, you fools, no lusus naturae, but an unfortunate shipwrecked mariner.”

  According to the pamphlet, Hodge said: “Your Reverence, begging your Reverence’s pardon, how can that be, since for the past fortnight there has been no breath of wind and no foreign vessel in these parts? If this be an unfortunate shipwrecked mariner, where is the wreck of his ship, and where was it wrecked? I humbly ask your Reverence how he appeared as you might say out of a bubble without warning on the face of the water, floating. And if your Honor will take the trouble to observe this unhappy creature’s skin your Reverence will see that it shows no signs of having been immersed for any considerable period in the ocean.”

  I do not imagine for a moment that this is what Hodge really said: he probably muttered the substance of the argument in the form of an angry protest emphasized by a bitten-off oath or two. However, the Reverend Arthur Titty perceived that what the fisherman said was “not without some show of reason” and said that he proposed to take the monster to his house for examination.

  Hodge protested vigorously. It was his monster, he said, because he had caught it in the open sea with his own hands, in his own boat, and parson or no parson, if Titty were the Archbishop himself, an Englishman had his rights. After some altercation, in the course of which the monster fainted, the Reverend Arthur Titty gave Hodge a silver crown piece for the loan of the monster for philosophical observation. They poured a few buckets of sea water over the monster which came back to consciousness with a tremulous sigh. This was regarded as positive proof of its watery origin. Then it was carried to Titty’s house on a hurdle.

  It rejected salt water as a drink, preferring fresh water or wine, and ate cooked food, expressing, with unmistakable grimaces, a distaste for raw fish and meat. It was put to bed on a heap of clean straw and covered with a blanket which was kept moist
ened with sea water. Soon the monster of Brighthelmstone revived and appeared desirous of walking. It could even make sounds reminiscent of human speech.

  The Reverend Arthur Titty covered its nakedness under a pair of his old breeches and one of his old shirts . . . as if it had not been grotesque-looking enough before.

  He weighed it, measured it, and bled it to discover whether it was thick or thin-blooded, cold or hot-blooded. According to Titty’s fussy little account the monster was about five feet one and three-quarter inches tall. It weighed exactly one hundred and nineteen pounds, and walked upright. It possessed unbelievable strength and superhuman agility. On one occasion the Reverend Arthur Titty took it out for a walk on the end of a leather leash. The local blacksmith, one of Hodge’s boon companions, who was notorious for his gigantic muscular power and bad temper—he was later to achieve nationwide fame as Clifford, who broke the arm of the champion wrestler of Yorkshire—accosted the Reverend Arthur Titty outside his smithy and said: “Ah, so that’s Hodge’s catch as you stole from him. Let me feel of it to see if it be real,” and he pinched the monster’s shoulder very cruelly with one of his great hands—hands that could snap horseshoes and twist iron bars into spirals. The inevitable crowd of children and gaping villagers witnessed the event. The monster picked up the two-hundred-pound blacksmith and threw him into a heap of scrap iron three yards away. For an anxious second or two Titty thought that the monster was going to run amok, for its entire countenance changed; the nostrils quivered, the eyes shone with fierce intelligence, and from its open mouth there came a weird cry. Then the creature relapsed into heavy dejection and let itself be led home quietly, while the astonished blacksmith, bruised and bleeding, limped back to his anvil with the shocked air of a man who has seen the impossible come to pass.