Nightshade and Damnations

by Gerald Kersh

  I was calm now, and I saw that it was not a rat. It was something like a man; a little, distorted man. The light hurt it, yet it could not look away—the big eyes contracted, twitching and flickering, out of a narrow and repulsive face fringed with a pale hair.

  “O, O, O,” it said—the wet, chisel-toothed mouth was quivering on the edge of a word.

  I noticed then that it was standing on something gray—looked again, and saw my woolen jacket. It had been trying to take this jacket away. But in the right-hand pocket there were a coin and a small key: they had struck together and awakened me.

  I was no longer afraid so I became kind. “Calm,” I said, as one talks to a dog, “Calm, calm, calm! Quiet now, quiet!”

  The little white one held up a wrist from which drooped a skinny, naked hand like a mole’s paw, and whispered:

  “Oh-oooo.”

  “Sit!” I said.

  It was terrified and in pain. I had broken its wrist: I should say his wrist—he was a sort of man; a male creature; wretched, filthy and dank, dwarfish, debased; greenish-white like mildew, smelling like mildew, cold and wetly-yielding like mildew; rat-toothed, rat-eared and chinless; yet not unlike a man. If he had stood upright he would have been about three feet tall.

  This, then, was the nameless thing that had struck such terror into the bloody old chieftain of the savages of the Central Belt—this bloodless, chinless thing without a forehead, whose limbs were like the tendrils of a creeping plant that sprouts in the dark, and who cringed, twittering and whimpering, at my feet. Its eyes were large like a lemur’s. The ears were long, pointed, and almost transparent; they shone sickly-pink in the light, and I could see that they were reticulated with thin, dark veins. There had been some attempt at clothing—a kind of primitive jacket and leggings of some thin gray fur, tattered and indescribably filthy. My stomach turned at the feel of it, and its deathly, musty smell.

  This, then, was one of the fairies, one of the little people of The Dead Place, and I had it by the neck.

  I may say, at this point, that I have always believed in fairies. By “fairies” I do not mean little, delicate, magical, pretty creatures with butterfly wings, living among the flowers and drinking nectar out of bluebell blossoms. I do not believe in such fairies. But I do believe in the little people—the gnomes, elves, pucks, brownies, pixies, and leprechauns of legend. Belief in these little people is as old as the world, universal, and persistent. In the stories, you remember, the outward appearance of the little people is fairly constant. They are dwarfish. They have big eyes and long, pointed features. They come out at night, and have the power to make themselves invisible. Sometimes they are mischievous. They have been known to steal babies from their cradles. The horrified mother, starting awake, finds, in the place of her plump, rosy infant, a shriveled little horror. The little people have carried her baby away and left one of their own in its place—a changeling as it is called. It is best to keep on the good side of the little people, because they can play all kinds of malevolent tricks—spoil the butter, frighten the cows, destroy small objects. You will have observed that they have no power to seriously injure mankind; yet they carry with them the terror of the night. In some parts of the world, peasants placate the little people by leaving out a bowl of hot porridge or milk for them to drink, for they are always hungry and always cold. Note that. Every child has read the story of the cold lad of the hill: A poor cobbler, having spent his last few coins on a piece of leather, fell asleep, too tired to work. When he awoke in the morning he found that the leather had been worked with consummate skill into a beautiful pair of slippers. He sold these slippers and bought a larger piece of leather, which he left on the bench together with a bowl of hot soup. Then he pretended to fall asleep and saw, out of the corner of his eye, a tiny, pale, shivering, naked man who crept in and set to work with dazzling speed. Next morning there were two pairs of slippers. This went on for several days. Prosperity returned to the house of the cobbler. His wife, to reward the little man, knitted him a little cloak with a hood. They put the garment on the bench. That night the little man came again. He saw the cloak and hood, put them on, with a squeal of joy, capered up and down the cobbler’s bench admiring himself, and at last sprang out of the window saying, “I have taken your cloak, I have taken your hood, and the cold lad of the hill will do no more good.” He never appeared again. He had got what he wanted: a woolen cloak with a hood.

  The little people hate the cold, it appears.

  Now if they are sensitive to cold and hunger, as all the stories indicate, they must be people of flesh and blood. Why not? There are all kinds of people. There is no reason why, in the remote past, certain people should not have gone to live underground, out of the reach of fierce and powerful enemies. For example, there used to be a race of little men in north Britain called the Picts. History records them as fierce and cunning little border raiders—men of the heather, who harried the Roman garrisons in ancient times and stole whatever they could lay their hands on. These Picts—like the African bushmen who, by the way, were also very little people—could move so quickly and surely that they seemed to have a miraculous gift of invisibility. In broad daylight a Pict could disappear, and not a single heather-blossom quivered over his hiding place. The Picts disappeared off the face of the earth at last. Yet, for centuries, in certain parts of Scotland, the farmers and shepherds continued to fear them. They were supposed to have gone underground, into the caves, from whence they sometimes emerged to carry off a sheep, a woman, a cooking-pot or a child.

  Superstition turned these small, terrified creatures into fairies. In Cornwall again, many people used to believe in piskies—little creatures with big eyes, who wrapped themselves up in garments with pointed hoods and whom it was wise to placate with bowls of milk. It seems to me not unreasonable to assume that, during the long, drawn out periods of strife on the western borders of Britain, certain little weak people went underground, and made a new life for themselves secure in the darkness of the caves. Living in the dark, of course, they would grow pale. After many generations they would have developed a cat’s faculty for seeing in the dark. And for feeling their way they would have developed a bushman’s knack of disappearing—of keeping absolutely still in cover. But they were human beings and could not entirely divorce themselves from their fellows; so they stayed—half-yearning, and half-terrified—not far from ordinary human habitation. The little people are supposed to know the whereabouts of great buried treasures. This also is possible. Their remote ancestors may have taken their riches with them to bury, meaning to unearth them in safer times which never came. Again, these strange underground men, who knew every stone, every tree, and every tuft of grass in their country, may easily have come across treasures buried by other men. They would have retained the human instinct to pick up and carry away something bright or valuable, and so they carried everything that they found to the mysterious places below the surface of the earth where they lived their mysterious lives; and since they had no real use for the money they had acquired, they let it accumulate. In how many fairy tales has one read of the well-disposed little one who left behind him a bright gold coin.

  I am convinced that ever since frightened men began to run away and hide, there have been little people, in other words, fairies. And such was the drooling, nightmarish little thing that trembled in my grip that night in the tent.

  I remembered, then, how frightened I had been. As I thought of all the awe that such creatures had inspired through the ages, I began to laugh. The little man—I had better call him a man—listened to me. He stopped whimpering. His ears quivered, then he gave out a queer, breathless, hiccuping sound, faint as the ticking of a clock. “Are you human?” I asked.

  He trembled, and laboriously made two noises: “Oon-ern.”

  He was trying to repeat what I had said. I led him to an angle of the tent so that he could not escape, and tied up
his wrist with an elastic plaster. He looked at it, gibbering. Then I gave him a piece of highly-sweetened chocolate. He was afraid of that too. I bit off a corner and chewed it, saying, “Good. Eat.”

  I was absurdly confident that, somehow, he would understand me. He tried to say what I had said—Oo-ee, and crammed the chocolate into his mouth. For half a second he slobbered, twitching with delight, then the chocolate was gone. I patted his head. The touch of it made me shudder, yet I forced my hand to a caress. I was the first man on earth who had ever captured a fairy: I would have taken him to my bosom. I smiled at him. He blinked at me. I could see by the movement of his famished little chest that he was a little less afraid of me. I found another piece of chocolate and offered it to him. But in doing so, I lowered my flashlight. The chocolate was flicked out of my hand. I was aware of something that bobbed away and ran between my legs. Before I could turn, the little man was gone. The flap of the tent was moving. If it had not been for that, and a stale, dirty smell, I might have thought I had been dreaming.

  I turned the beam of my flashlight to the ground.

  This time, the little man had left tracks.

  As I was to discover, the little people of The Dead Place used to cover their tracks by running backwards on all fours and blowing dust over the marks their hands and feet had made. But my little man had not had time to do this tonight.

  Dawn was beginning to break. I filled my pockets with food and set out. Nothing was too light to leave a mark in that place, but the same quality that made the fine dust receptive made every mark impermanent. I began to run. The little man’s tracks resembled those of a gigantic mole. The red dust sun was up and the heat of the day was coming down, when I came to the end of his trail. He had scuttled under a great, gray heap of shattered stone. This had been a vast—possibly a noble—building. Now it was a rubbish heap; packed tight by the inexorable pull of the earth through the centuries. Here was fairyland, somewhere in the depths of the earth.

  Enormous edifices had been crushed and scattered like burnt biscuits thrown to the wild birds. The crumbs were identifiable. The shape of the whole was utterly lost. The loneliness was awful. Inch by inch I felt myself slipping into that spiritual twilight which sucks down to the black night of the soul. The tracks of the little man had disappeared—the dust was always drifting, and the contours of the lost city were perpetually changing. Yesterday was a memory. Tomorrow was a dream. Then tomorrow became yesterday—a memory; and memory blurred and twirled away with the dust devils. I was sick. There was a bad air in the ruins of Annan. I might have died, or run away, if there had not been the thunderstorm.

  It threatened for forty-eight hours. I thought that I was delirious. Everything was still, dreadfully still. The air was thick, and hard to breathe. It seemed to me that from some indefinable part of the near distance I heard again that thin, agonized singing which I had heard once before. Male and female voices wailed a sort of hymn:—

  Aaah, Balasamo,

  Balasamo! Oh!

  Sarna Corpano! . . . Oh-Oh!

  Binno Mosha

  Sada Rosha

  Chu mila Balasamo! . . . Oh!

  Then the storm broke, and I thanked God for it. It cleared the air and it cleared my head. The sky seemed to shake and reverberate like a sheet of iron. Lightning feinted and struck, and the rain fell. Between the thunder I could still hear the singing. As dawn came the storm rumbled away, and the aspect of the ruins was changed.

  Annan wore a ragged veil of mist. Thin mud was running away between the broken stones. The sun was coming up and in a little while the dust would return; but for the moment the rain had washed the face of the ruin.

  So I found the lid of the underworld.

  It was a disc of eroded metal that fitted a hole in the ground. I struck it with my hammer: it fell to pieces. The pieces dropped away, and out of the hole in the ground there rose a dusty, sickening, yet familiar smell. The hole was the mouth of an ancient sewer. I could see the rusty remains of a metal ladder. The top rung was solid—I tried it with my foot. The next rung supported my weight. I went down.

  The fifth rung broke, and I fell.

  I remember that I saw a great white light—then a great dark. Later—I do not know how much later—I opened my eyes. I knew that I was alive, because I felt pain. But I was not lying where I had fallen. I could see no circle of daylight such as I had seen in falling, at the mouth of the manhole. There was nothing to be seen: I was in the dark. And I could hear odd little glottal voices.

  “Water!” I said.

  “Ah-awa,” said a thin, whining voice. Something that felt like a cracked earthenware saucer was pressed against my lips. It contained a spoonful or two of cold water; half a mouthful. The cracked earthenware saucer was taken away empty and brought back full. I took hold of it, to steady it.

  It was a little cupped hand, a live hand.

  I knew then that I had fallen down into the underground world of the little people that haunt the desolate ruin called Annan, or The Bad Place. I was in fairyland. But my right leg was broken. My flashlight was broken, and I was in the dark.

  There was nothing to be done. I could only lie still.

  The little people squatted around me in a circle. One high, ecstatic, piping voice began to sing:

  Ookil’ karabin,

  Ookil’ karabin!

  Thirty or forty voices screeched:—

  Isapara mibanara,

  Ikil’ karabin!

  Then, abruptly, the singing stopped. Something was coming. These little people knew the art of making fire, and understood the use of light. One of them was holding a tiny vessel, in which flickered a dim, spluttering flame no larger than a baby’s fingernail. It was not what we would call illumination. It was better than darkness, it permitted one to see, at least, a shadow. You will never know the comfort that I found in that tiny flame. I wept for joy. My sobbing jolted my broken leg, and I must have fainted. I was a wounded man, remember. Shivering in a wet cold that came from me and not from the place in which I lay, I felt myself rising in waves of nausea out of a horrible emptiness.

  The little people had gone, all but one. The one that stayed had my elastic plaster on his left wrist. His right hand was cupped, and it held water, which I drank. Then he made a vague gesture in the direction of my pockets—he wanted chocolate. I saw this in the light of the little lamp, which still flickered. His shadow danced; he looked like a rat waltzing with a ghost. I had some chocolate in my pocket, and gave him a little. The light was dying. I pointed at it with a forefinger and gesticulated up, up, up with my hands.

  He ran away and came back with another lamp.

  I can tell you now that the oil that feeds those little lamps is animal fat—the fat of rats. The wicks of the lamps are made of twisted rat-hair. The little men of Annan have cultivated rats, since they went underground. There are hereditary rat-herds, just as there used to be hereditary shepherds and swine-herds. I have learned something—not much—of the habits of the little men of the dust in Annan. They dress in rat-skin clothes and have scraped out runs, or burrows, which extend for miles to the thirty-two points of the compass. They have no government and no leaders. They are sickly people. They are perishing.

  Yet they are men of a sort. They have fire, although they cannot tolerate the glare of honest daylight. They have—like all of their kind—a buried treasure of useless coins. They have the vestiges of a language, but they are always cold. The poor creature whose wrist I broke had wanted my woolen jacket; now I gave it to him, and he wept for joy. They cultivated fungi—which I have eaten, not without relish—augment their diet of the rank meat which they get by butchering the gray creatures that provide them with food, fat, and fur. But they are always hungry. The rats are getting slower and less reliable in their breeding: the herds are thinning out.

  My littl
e man kept me supplied with meat and water. In the end I began to understand the meaning of his whispering and snuffling underworld language. This fairy, this man of the dust of Annan, was kind to me in his way. He adored me as a fallen god. Sometimes, when I raved and wept in delirium, he ran away. But he always came back. My leg was throbbing. I knew that infection was taking hold of the wound, and began to lose hope down in the dark. I tried to detach my mind from the miserable condition of my body. I listened to the strange songs of the rat-people. It was through the chant Balasamo that I learned their language. It came to me in a flash of revelation as I lay listening, Balasamo, Balasamo . . . The tune wove in and out. It gave me no peace. I had heard something like it at home. Doctor Opel had been lecturing on ancient music. . . .

  Suddenly I understood. I remembered.