Nightshade and Damnations

by Gerald Kersh

  Soon he looked at me and said: “You made this machinery, did you? I want to have a word with you. And you, Monsieur de Kock, you made this waxwork figure? For the moment it deceived me. You are a very talented man, Monsieur de Kock . . . and his Majesty collapsed on seeing your little work, gentlemen? Few artists live to boast of a thing like that.”

  If he had simply said: “Few artists can boast of a thing like that,” I might not be here to tell you this story. But when he said “live to boast,” I knew that there was something wicked in his mind. I knew that I was in frightful danger. Poor de Kock was already beginning to swell up like a pigeon, rolling his eyes and pushing out his chest. Kobalt went to a speaking-tube and blew into it, and then he said: “Major Krim? . . . Come down here at once with four or five men upon whom you can rely.” Turning to me he said: “When I give you the word, make that thing work again.”

  With an air of reverence—smiling now—he threw the sheet with which we had covered the dummy over the dead body of King Nicolas. Footsteps sounded. “Now!” said Kobalt to me and I pressed levers. Major Krim, a man with a scarred face, came in with four others. As they entered, the dummy got out of the chair and walked abstractedly a few paces while Kobalt, keeping a wicked eye on me, said: “His Majesty commands that Dr. Zerbin and the attendant Putzi be put under arrest instantly and kept incommunicado.”

  The thunderstruck doctor and the grief-stunned attendant were taken away. As the door closed the unhappy Putzi began to weep again, looking back over his shoulder at the thing covered by the sheet.

  “Oh, you may well cry, you scabby dog!” shouted Kobalt, and then the image sat down groaning and quivering with the inevitable asthmatic curses, and the door closed.

  Kobalt opened it again very quickly and glanced outside; shut it again and locked it, and said to me: “What a very remarkable man you are, my dear M. Pommel, to make something like that. Why, it is almost—if I may say so without irreverence—almost like God breathing the breath of life into clay. How does it work?”

  I have always been a timid and obliging man, but now—thank God—something prompted me to say: “Your Highness, that is my secret and I refuse to tell you.”

  Kobalt still smiled, but there was a stiffness in his smile and a brassy gleam in his eyes. He said: “Well, well, far be it from me to pry into your professional secrets—eh, M. de Kock? . . . How wonderful, how marvelous—how infinitely more important than the death of kings, who are only human after all and come and go—how very much more important is the work that makes a man live for ever! To be a great artist—only that is worth while. Ah, M. de Kock, M. de Kock, how I envy you!”

  Poor foolish de Kock said: “Oh, a mere nothing.”

  He had been drinking plum brandy. His vanity was tickled. I could not help thinking that if he had a tail he would wag it then.

  “How does that work?” asked Kobalt, and the very intonation of his voice was a gross flattery. I could not stop looking at the body of the king under the sheet; but de Kock, full of pride, said: “What do I know of such things? Your Highness, I am an artist—an artist—not a maker of clockwork toys. Your Highness, I neither know nor wish to know, nor have I the time to get to know, the workings of an alarm clock.”

  In quite a different tone of voice, Kobalt then said: “Oh, I see.” And so he gave another order, and Major Krim conducted de Kock to his suite, where, three weeks later, he was found with his brains blown out and the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth. The verdict was suicide: de Kock had emptied three bottles of a liqueur called Gurika that day.

  But that is not the point. As soon as the Major had led de Kock out of the workshop, Kobalt began to talk to me.

  Oh, that was a very remarkable and a very dangerous man! You were asking me about de Kock, earlier in the evening, and I said that I was not quite sure whether poor Honoré really committed suicide. Well, thinking again, I am convinced that he did not. The butt of the revolver was in his hand, the muzzle was in his mouth, and his brains were on the wall. There was one peculiar aspect of this suicide, as it was so called: the revolver was held in de Kock’s right hand, and I happened to know that he was left-handed. It seems to me that he would have picked up his revolver with the same hand that he used to pick up the tools of his trade. A man dies, if he must, as he lives—by his best hand. And then again: Dr. Zerbin and the attendant Putzi disappeared.

  I beg your pardon, all this happened later. I was telling you that when I was alone in the workshop with Kobalt, he talked to me. He said that he would give me scores of thousands, together with the highest honors that man could receive, if I would communicate to him the secret of that unhappy dummy that de Kock and I had made to amuse the King who now crouched dead in his chair. I have always been timid but never a fool. I became calm, extremely calm, and I said:

  “I think I see your point, your Highness. Without his Majesty, you are nothing. Naturally you want to be what you are and to save what you have—you want to be, as it were, the regent in everything but name. If the news of his Majesty’s death reaches Tancredy, you are out. You may even have to run for your life, leaving many desirable things behind you. Yes,” I said, “I believe that I can see to the back of your scheme. Once you are acquainted with the working of this doll, you will work it. King Nicolas III, the poor old gentleman, was the father of his country, with half a century of tradition behind him. As long as King Nicolas could show himself to the people, the monarchy was safe. And as long as the monarchy was safe, you were great. This dummy here looks so much like his unhappy Majesty that even you, at close quarters, were deceived for a moment. If the real king had not been sitting over there, you would never have known anything. I may go so far as to say that the figure de Kock made and I animated is even stronger than the king because it can stand up and walk of its own accord, which his Majesty could not; and say the same things in the same voice. It can even write his Majesty’s signature.”

  This, in point of fact, was perfectly true. The arthritic fingers of the king had no suppleness left in them, so that he wrote with his arm. Keep your arm stiff, grip a pen between the thumb and the first finger of your right hand, write the name Nicolas and you will see what I mean. Like this:

  I had saved this for a last surprise—God forgive me. To demonstrate the truth of what I was saying (for I felt that I was fighting for my life) I got an inked pen, put it between the fingers of the dummy, and squeezed the thumb inwards. Immediately, upon a piece of paper which I presented, the pen scratched out the royal signature, and then the fingers opened and the pen was tossed aside.

  “I will not tell you as much as I know,” I said, “because I know that if I do, I shall be a dead man. It is useless for you to pry into the inside workings of this dummy because you will never discover three very important things. Only I can tell you how the clockwork is wound. There are nine different springs, which must be tightened in their proper order. There are certain very perishable parts, and these must be constantly replaced. I warn you that you had better leave me alone.”

  I said all this out of the mad bravado of a very nervous man, you understand. Having finished, and feeling myself on the verge of hysterics, I picked up a bottle that de Kock had left on my bench, and gulped down a couple of mouthfuls of it.

  “I don’t suppose you know that I could make you talk,” said Kobalt, in a voice that made me shudder.

  In reply I told him the honest truth. I said: “I am sure you could. But please don’t. I can’t stand pain. Oh, it is not only that,” I added, as I saw him beginning to smile, “I can’t stand pain—that’s perfectly true—but when I said I shouldn’t do it if I were you, I meant to say that the things I handle are actually more delicate than feathers. You could make me talk easily—you could make me talk by threatening me only with your fist. But don’t you see?—the things I would tell you to do need a certain sort of hand, a certain kind of skill, and t
he training of many years. You’d never be able to do what you made me tell you to do. And I couldn’t do it myself because you would have thrown me out of gear. Honestly, your Highness, you’d better leave me alone.”

  Kobalt looked at me steadily and coldly for a long time and then said: “My dear Monsieur Pommel, heaven forbid that I should argue with an expert. You’re the greatest man of your time in your profession or, for that matter, any other. Let it be exactly as you say. Let us be friends. You are a cleverer man even than I thought.”

  And so it happened, my friend, that the real King Nicolas III—God rest his soul—was secretly buried somewhere in the country, having been carried out of the palace in a wine cask, while the dummy made by de Kock and animated by me became a head of state. The news was given out that the old king, miraculously recovered, could walk again, with only one attendant. I was that attendant. I had to be with him, to wind him up, keep him in good repair and press the proper levers. Every day I took him down to the workshop and he sat while I went on with my work on the great clock of Nicolas, which—as all the world must know—I completed. Another artist took up work on the moving figures where de Kock had left off. That is why experts have observed certain discrepancies.

  It is fantastic, when you come to think of it: I was the real ruler of that country. I was the hand, the voice, the presence and the personality of his Majesty, King Nicolas III! Kobalt continued to be a man of power. When he, in conjunction with the Minister of the Interior, put forward the Monopol bill that included clauses involving the oppression and persecution of Jews, I caused King Nicolas to run a wet pen across the document. He tossed away the pen with a groan and an oath, without signing. After that, the whole world marveled at the renewed vigor of this aged man.

  At about this time, my dear Minna came into the story. I hate to say it, but old King Nicolas—like the aged King David in the scriptures—used to keep himself warm at night through the proximity of young women. I provided a young woman. His Majesty had always loved women of a certain shape with red hair. He said that their very presence kept him alive. It was necessary for me to have someone whom I could take into my confidence, because my nerves were giving way. Remember, all this went on for several years. My dear Minna kept company at night with the wax image of Nicolas III. I taught her how to work the levers that made it move, and cut for her a copy of the big key—it had a handle like a corkscrew—that went into the little hole in the region of the left kidney and wound him up. From the beginning there was a deep sympathy between us . . . was there not, Minna, my little love?

  It was Minna, in fact, who made a nobleman of me. She said: “Why should you not call yourself by the same title as others do?” She was right. I was a foreigner, and not well born. People were talking. It was impossible for me to discuss things with the gentry as man-to-man. I procured a Patent of Nobility and, over the signature of his Majesty, became the Count de Pommel.

  Meanwhile, I believe, I was instrumental in bringing about more reforms. We taxed the big landowners, we built big blocks of flats for workmen, we sent an expedition to observe weather conditions; we brought engineers from Scotland to improve the tramway system and installed electric light, and we did a great deal to establish the paper industry. We cultivated tobacco in the south and were beginning to draw revenue from exports. I had always wondered why the whole world had not heard of aka, the smoked roe of a fish that lived only in one of our lakes. Aka is delicious. We made a monopoly of it, salted it, bottled it, and sold it back to our own country and to the world.

  If all had been well, I might have made an earthly paradise. But it was too good to last. All the intrigues of Kobalt, all the agitation of the Liberal-Democrats could not hurt us. The monarchy had never been stronger. No, it was the will of God. In the first place, the surface of de Kock’s dummy began, naturally, to show signs of wear and tear. I could have adjusted that. I could have found another waxwork artist and kept him perpetually incarcerated. I could easily have done this. It was not a matter of the first importance. A thousand times more important than the appearance of his Majesty was, in the long run, the way he behaved. How he moved, and what he said, you understand, depended on me.

  One morning I awoke out of an anxious dream and found that my hand was unsteady. Do not misunderstand me—mine was not a drunken tremor, because I never used to drink. It was anxiety, I think, that made me shake. It was extremely serious. Everything depended on my skill. I began to worry. And the more I worried, the more I trembled. I could easily, no doubt, have employed a highly skilled watchmaker, and trained him, telling him exactly what to do . . . keeping him in confinement, incommunicado. But I did not dare. Also my magnifying glass began to be misty, and the mist would not wipe off. To be brief, my eyes were going. A tremor and a foggy eye—that is death to a watchmaker.

  Yet again, in spite of everything, in spite of all I had done, the Liberal-Democrats had got stronger under Tancredy. Trouble was brewing. Still, I should have stayed on to the end if Minna had not been there. Thank God, she made me see reason. Dear Minna said: “What is all this to you, Pommel, my dear? You are a Swiss. Most of your money is in the Bank of Lausanne. You can retire and do what you like. The great clock of Nicolas is finished. The old king died years ago. Be sensible and get out now!”

  It seemed to me that Minna was right. I could no longer trust myself to work as I used to. I arranged for Minna and for me what the French call a coupe-fil, a “wire-cutter”—a diplomatic passport. Having plenty of money—my wages only, and no plunder—put away in Switzerland, I drove with Minna over the border, and so, after many years, came home.

  A little later, I learned that Kobalt had led his Majesty to address a delegation of Liberal-Democrats. Kobalt pressed the wrong levers. His Majesty sat down, cursed abominably, got up, walked twelve paces—straight into the fire—and stood, his hair and clothes blazing. As he stood, he melted. The fire took hold of the wax. The burning wax ran over the thick carpet. One wing of the palace was burned down. After that, upon the slogan The king is dead: long live the people, the Liberal-Democrats scrambled up to power, and then were overthrown by the Communal-Workers’ party. The Communal-Workers were later accused of having shot King Nicolas III in a cellar. Tancredy went into exile. The last time I heard of Kobalt, he was supposed to be running a very prosperous nightclub in one of the Latin-American countries . . . but I do not know anything about this, and I do not care to know. I cannot think of that man without a shudder.

  But, on the whole, it is a strange story in its way—No? A little out of the ordinary—Yes?

  BONE FOR DEBUNKERS

  On a blast of bitter east wind that rushed down Great Russell Street came a spatter of cold raindrops that bit like small shot. I reached the portico of the British Museum one jump ahead of the storm, and there, standing apart from the students who had come out of the reading room for air and sandwiches, illuminated by a lightning flash, stood Karmesin in a black rubber Inverness cape reaching to his ankles and an oilskin hat shaped like a gloxinia. One hand grasped a Kaffir knobkerrie with a gold-plated head, while the other applied motions as of artificial respiration to his half-drowned moustache, and he was glaring at a Polynesian monolith in such a manner that I half expected its great stone eyes to look uneasily away.

  “Third storm this morning,” I said. He looked at me, glowering like the Spirit of the Tempest.

  “A wretched day would not be complete without you. I would invite you to offer me coffee, if I did not object to sitting at table with imbeciles,” he muttered. “Do you realize I could sue you, your publishers and printers, your distributors, newsagents and booksellers for millions? And I would, too, if I needed petty cash. How dare you describe me as ‘either the greatest criminal or the greatest liar the world has ever known’? This is libelous: a liar always betrays a desire to be believed. Damn your impudence, have I ever cared whether you believed me or not?”

&nb
sp; “No,” I said, “but——”

  “No,” he interrupted. “And you assume that a truly great criminal never talks of his work, but how wrong you are! A confession unsupported by evidence is only a story, and I leave no evidence. I run no risk in telling you certain incidents, you scribbler, to enable you to put a few greasy pennies in your moth-eaten pockets. Remember this: the most pitiful sucker on earth is your sceptic. If you insist, we will go to the Cheese Restaurant and have a bit of Brie and a glass of wine.”

  The rain abating, we went; but Karmesin was not easily to be placated this morning. He continued, “It’s not so much your catchphrases that annoy me as your writing; I read your version of how, having disguised myself as a statue in Westminster Abbey, I discovered a sonnet of Shakespeare in Spenser’s tomb, and I blushed for you.”

  “All I did was——” I began, but Karmesin interjected, “You be quiet!” At least the cheese appeared to please him. “I like Brie and wine,” he said.

  “They are the two things in this world that are impossible to fake. Not even Melmoth Agnew could successfully counterfeit their flavor.”

  “Strange name,” I said.

  “Strange man,” said Karmesin. “If only you could write, what a story you might tell about him and me—for without me, he is nothing—and about the Society for the Clarification of History.” He shook his great head. “But I can just see you describing Melmoth Agnew, for instance, as ‘an anaglyphic character’—here you put three dots—‘a personality in low relief’—then more dots—‘In other words, he had practically no individuality of his own.’”