Nightshade and Damnations

by Gerald Kersh

  Yet, the monster was an extremely sick monster. It ate little, sometimes listlessly chewing the same mouthful for fifteen minutes. It liked to squat on its haunches and stare unblinkingly at the sea. It was assumed that it was homesick for its native element, and so it was soused at intervals with buckets of brine and given a large tub of sea water to sleep in if it so desired. A learned doctor of medicine came all the way from Dover to examine it and pronounced it human; unquestionably an air-breathing mammal. But so were whales and crocodiles breathers of air that lived in the water.

  Hodge, alternately threatening and whimpering, claimed his property. The Reverend Arthur Titty called in his lawyer, who so bewildered the unfortunate fisherman with Latin quotations, legal jargon, dark hints and long words that, cursing and growling, he scrawled a cross in lieu of a signature at the foot of a document in which he agreed to relinquish all claim on the monster in consideration of the sum of seven guineas, payable on the spot. Seven guineas was a great deal of money for a fisherman in those days. Hodge had never seen so many gold pieces in a heap, and had never owned one. Then a traveling showman visited the Reverend Arthur Titty and offered him twenty-five guineas for the monster, which Titty refused. The showman spoke of the matter in the Smack, and Hodge, who had been drunk for a week, behaved “like one demented,” as Titty wrote in a contemptuous footnote. He made a thorough nuisance of himself, demanding the balance of the twenty-five guineas which were his by rights, was arrested and fined for riotous conduct. Then he was put in the stocks as an incorrigible drunkard, and the wicked little urchins of Brighthelmstone threw fish-guts at him.

  Let out of the stocks with a severe reprimand, smelling horribly of dead fish, Hodge went to the Smack and ordered a quart of strong ale, which came in a heavy can. Rodgers, to whom Hodge had given only twelve shillings, came in for his modest morning draft, and told Hodge that he was nothing better than a damned rogue. He claimed half of the seven golden guineas. Hodge, having drunk his quart, struck Rodgers with the can, and broke his skull; for which he was hanged not long afterwards.

  The Brighthelmstone monster was an unlucky monster.

  The Reverend Arthur Titty also suffered. After the killing of Rodgers and the hanging of Hodge the fishermen began to hate him. Heavy stones were thrown against his shutters at night. Someone set fire to one of his haystacks. This must have given Titty something to think about, for rick-burning was a hanging matter, and one may as well hang for a parson as for a haystack. He made up his mind to go to London and live in politer society. So he was uprooted by the monster. The fishermen hated the monster too. They regarded it as a sort of devil. But the monster did not care. It was languishing, dying of a mysterious sickness. Curious sores had appeared at various points on the monster’s body—they began as little white bumps such as one gets from stinging-nettles, and slowly opened and would not close. The looseness of the skin, now, lent the dragons and fishes a disgustingly lifelike look: as the monster breathed, they writhed. A veterinary surgeon poured melted pitch on the sores. The Reverend Titty kept it well soaked in sea water and locked it in a room, because it had shown signs of wanting to escape.

  At last, nearly three months after its first appearance in Brighthelmstone, the monster escaped. An old manservant, Alan English, unlocked the door, in the presence of the Reverend Arthur Titty, to give the monster its daily mess of vegetables and boiled meat. As the key turned, the door was flung open with such violence that English fell forward into the room—his hand was still on the doorknob—and the monster ran out, crying aloud in a high, screaming voice. The Reverend Arthur Titty caught it by the shoulder, whereupon he was whisked away like a leaf in the wind and lay stunned at the end of the passage. The monster ran out of the house. Three responsible witnesses—Rebecca North, Herbert George and Abraham Herris (or Harris)—saw it running towards the sea, stark naked, although a northeast wind was blowing. The two men ran after it, and Rebecca North followed as fast as she could. The monster ran straight into the bitter water and began to swim, its arms and legs vibrating like the wings of an insect. Herbert George saw it plunge into the green heart of a great wave, and then the heavy rain fell like a curtain and the Brighthelmstone monster was never seen again.

  It had never spoken. In the later stages of its disease its teeth had fallen out. With one of these teeth—probably a canine—it had scratched marks on the dark oak panels of the door of the room in which it was confined. These marks the Reverend Arthur Titty faithfully copied and reproduced in his pamphlet.

  The Brighthelmstone fishermen said that the sea devil had gone back where it belonged, down to the bottom of the sea to its palace built of the bones of lost Christian sailors. Sure enough, half an hour after the monster disappeared there was a terrible storm, and many seamen lost their lives. In a month or so Titty left Brighthelmstone for London. The city swallowed him. He published his pamphlet in 1746—a bad year for natural philosophy, because the ears of England were still full of the Jacobite rebellion of ’45.

  Poor Titty! If he could have foreseen the real significance of the appearance of the monster of Brighthelmstone he would have died happy . . . in a lunatic asylum.

  Nobody would have believed him.

  Now in April 1947 I had the good fortune to meet one of my oldest and dearest friends, a colonel in Intelligence who, for obvious reasons, must remain anonymous, although he is supposed to be in retirement now and wears civilian clothes, elegantly cut in the narrow-sleeved style of the late nineteen-twenties, and rather the worse for wear. The colonel is in many ways a romantic character, something like Rudyard Kipling’s Strickland Sahib. He has played many strange parts in his time, that formidable old warrior; and his quick black eyes, disturbingly Asiatic-looking under the slackly-drooping eyelids, have seen more than you and I will ever see.

  He never talks about his work. An Intelligence officer who talks ceases automatically to be an Intelligence officer. A good deal of his conversation is of sport, manly sport—polo, pig-sticking, cricket, rugby football, hunting, and, above all, boxing and wrestling. I imagine that the colonel, who has lived underground in disguise for so many years of his life, finds relief in the big wide-open games in which a man must meet his opponent face to face yet may, without breaking the rules, play quick tricks.

  We were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes after dinner in my flat and he was talking about oriental wrestling. He touched on wrestling technique among the Afghans and in the Deccan, and spoke with admiration of Gama, the Western Indian wrestler, still a rock-crusher at an age when most men are shivering in slippers by the fire, who beat Zbyszko; remarked on a southeastern Indian named Patil who could knock a strong man senseless with the knuckle of his left thumb; and went on to Chinese wrestlers, especially Mongolians, who are tremendously heavy and powerful, and use their feet. A good French-Canadian lumberjack (the colonel said), accustomed to dancing on rolling logs in a rushing river, could do dreadful things with his legs and feet, like the Tiger of Quebec, who in a scissors-hold killed Big Ted Glass of Detroit. In certain kinds of wrestling size and weight were essential, said the colonel. The Japanese wrestlers of the heavy sort—the ones that weighed three or four hundred pounds and looked like pigs—those big ones that started on all fours and went through a series of ritual movements; they had to be enormously heavy. In fact the heavier they were the better.

  “No, Gerald my lad, give me ju-jitsu,” he said. “There is no one on earth who can defeat a master of ju-jitsu—except someone who takes him by surprise. Of course, a scientific boxer, getting a well-placed punch in first, would put him out for the count. But the real adept develops such wonderful coordination of hand and eye that if he happens to be expecting it he can turn to his own advantage even the lightning punch of a wizard like Jimmy Wilde. He could give away eight stone to Joe Louis and make him look silly. Georges Hackenschmidt, for instance, is one of the greatest catch-as-catch-can wrestlers that ever
lived, and one of the strongest men of his day. But I question whether he, wrestling catch, might have stood up against Yukio Tani? Oh, by the way, speaking of Yukio Tani, did you ever hear of a wrestler called Sato?”

  “I can’t say that I have. Why? Should I have heard of him?”

  “Why, he is, or was, a phenomenon. I think he was a better wrestler than Tani. My idea was to take him all round the world and challenge all comers—boxers, wrestlers, even fencers, to stand up against him for ten minutes. He was unbelievable. Furthermore, he looked so frightful. I won a hundred and fifty quid on him at Singapore in 1938. He took on four of the biggest and best boxers and wrestlers we could lay our hands on and floored the whole lot in seven minutes by the clock. Just a minute, I’ve got a picture in my wallet. I keep it because it looks so damn funny. Look.”

  The colonel handed me a dog-eared photograph of an oddly assorted group. There was a hairy mammoth of a man, obviously a wrestler, standing with his arms folded so that his biceps looked like coconuts, beside another man, almost as big, but with the scrambled features of a rough-and-tumble bruiser. There was one blond grinning man who looked like a light heavyweight, and a beetle-browed middleweight with a bulldog jaw. The colonel was standing in the background, smiling in a fatherly way. In the foreground, smiling into the camera, stood a tiny Japanese. The top of his head was on a level with the big wrestler’s breastbone, but he was more than half as broad as he was tall. He was all chest and arms. The knuckles of his closed hands touched his knees. I took the picture to the light and looked more closely. The photographer’s flashbulb had illuminated every detail. Sato had made himself even more hideous with tattooing. He was covered with things that creep and crawl, real and fabulous. A dragon snarled on his stomach. Snakes were coiled about his legs. Another snake wound itself about his right arm from forefinger to armpit. The other arm was covered with angry-looking lobsters and goggle-eyed fishes, and on the left breast there was the conventionalized shape of a heart.

  It was then that I uttered an astonished oath and went running to look for my old uniform, which I found, with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s pamphlet still in the inside breast pocket. The colonel asked me what the devil was the matter with me. I smoothed out the pamphlet and gave it to him without a word.

  He looked at it, and said: “How very extraordinary!” Then he put away his eyeglass and put on a pair of spectacles; peered intently at the smudged and ragged drawing of the Brighthelmstone monster, compared it with the photograph of Sato, and said to me: “I have come across some pretty queer things in my time, but I’m damned if I know what to make of this.”

  “Tell me,” I said, “was your Sato tattooed behind? And if so, in what way?”

  Without hesitation the colonel said: “A red-and-green hawk stooping between the shoulder-blades, a red fox chasing six blue-gray rabbits down his spine, and an octopus on the right buttock throwing out tentacles that went round to the belly. Why?”

  Then I opened Titty’s pamphlet and put my finger on the relevant passage. The colonel read it and changed color. But he said nothing. I said: “This is the damnedest coincidence. There’s another thing. This so-called monster of Brighton scratched something on the door of the room where he was locked up, and the old parson took a pencil rubbing of it. Turn over four or five pages and you’ll see a copy of it.”

  The colonel found the page. The spongy old paper was worn into holes, blurred by time and the dampness of lumber-rooms and the moisture of my body. He said: “It looks like Japanese. But no Japanese would write like that surely . . .”

  “Remember,” I said, “that the Brighton monster scratched its message with one of its own teeth on the panel of an oak door. Allow for that; allow for the fact that it was weak and sick; take into consideration the grain of the wood; and then see what you make of it.”

  The colonel looked at the inscription for ten long minutes, copying it several times from several different angles. At last he said: “This says: I was asleep. I thought that it was all a bad dream from which I should awake and find myself by the side of my wife. Now I know that it is not a dream. I am sick in the head. Pity me, poor Sato, who went to sleep in one place and awoke in another. I cannot live any more. I must die. Hiroshima 1945.”

  “What do you make of that?” I asked.

  The Colonel said: “I don’t know. I only know the bare facts about Sato because, as I have already told you, I was trying to find him. (a) He had a wife, and a home somewhere in Hiroshima. (b) He was in the Japanese Navy, and he went on leave in August 1945. (c) Sato disappeared off the face of the earth when they dropped that damned atom bomb. (d) This is unquestionably a picture of Sato—the greatest little wrestler the world has ever known. (e) The description of the tattooing on the back of this monster tallies exactly with Sato’s . . . I don’t know quite what to make of it. Sato, you know, was a Christian. He counted the years the Christian way. Hiroshima 1945. I wonder!”

  “What do you wonder?”

  “Why,” said the colonel, “there can’t be the faintest shadow of a doubt that Sato got the middle part of the blast of that frightful atom bomb when we dropped it on Hiroshima. You may or may not have heard of Dr. Sant’s crazy theories concerning time in relation to speed. Now imagine that you happen to be caught up —without disintegrating—in a species of air-pocket on the fringe of an atomic blast and are flung away a thousand times faster than if you had been fired out of a cannon. Imagine it. According to the direction in which you happen to be thrown you may find yourself in the middle of tomorrow or on the other side of yesterday. Don’t laugh at me. I may have been frying my brains in the tropics most of my life, and I may be crazy; but I’ve learned to believe all kinds of strange things. My opinion is that my poor little Sato was literally blown back two hundred years in time.”

  I said: “But why blown backwards only in time? How do you account for his being struck by the blast in Hiroshima and ending in Brighton?”

  “I’m no mathematician,” said the colonel, “but as I understand, the earth is perpetually spinning and space is therefore shifting all the time. If you, for example, could stand absolutely still, here, now, where you are, while the earth moved—if you stood still only for one hour, you’d find yourself in Budapest. Do you understand what I mean? That atomic blast picked little Sato up and threw him back in time. When you come to think of that, and remember all the curious monsters they used to exhibit in Bartholomew’s Fair during the eighteenth century—when you think of all the mermaids, monsters, and mermen that they picked out of the sea and showed on fairgrounds until they died . . . it makes you think.”

  “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? Radioactivity 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 paralyze 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.

  MEN WITHOUT BONES

  We were loading bananas into the Claire Dodge at Puerto Pobre, when a feverish little fell
ow came aboard. Everyone stepped aside to let him pass—even the soldiers who guard the port with nickel-plated Remington rifles, and who go barefoot but wear polished leather leggings. They stood back from him because they believed that he was afflicted-of-God, mad; harmless but dangerous; best left alone.

  All the time the naphtha flares were hissing, and from the hold came the reverberation of the roaring voice of the foreman of the gang down below crying: “Fruta! Fruta! FRUTA!” The leader of the dock gang bellowed the same cry, throwing down stem after stem of brilliant green bananas. The occasion would be memorable for this, if for nothing else—the magnificence of the night, the bronze of the Negro foreman shining under the flares, the jade green of that fruit, and the mixed odors of the waterfront. Out of one stem of bananas ran a hairy gray spider, which frightened the crew and broke the banana-chain, until a Nicaraguan boy, with a laugh, killed it with his foot. It was harmless, he said.

  It was about then that the madman came aboard, unhindered, and asked me: “Bound for where?”

  He spoke quietly and in a carefully modulated voice; but there was a certain blank, lost look in his eyes that suggested to me that I keep within ducking distance of his restless hands which, now that I think of them, put me in mind of that gray, hairy, bird-eating spider.

  “Mobile, Alabama,” I said.

  “Take me along?” he asked.

  “None of my affair. Sorry. Passenger myself,” I said. “The skipper’s ashore. Better wait for him on the wharf. He’s the boss.”