Nightshade and Damnations

by Gerald Kersh

  “What did you do there?” I asked.

  “My idea was to find somebody I could trust, to read those papers for me, see? If you want to know how I got my living, well, I did the best I could . . . never mind what. Well, one night, in a place where I was, I came across a student, mooching drinks, an educated man with no place to sleep. I showed him the doctor’s papers, and asked him what they meant. They made him think a bit, but he got the hang of them. The doctor had written down just how he’d mixed that digestive of his, and that only filled up one page. Four of the other pages were full of figures, and the only other writing was on the last page. It was all about me. And how he’d cured me.”

  I said: “With the yolks of eggs, oil of roses, and turpentine?”

  Corporal Cuckoo nodded, and said: “Yeahp. Them three and something else.”

  I said: “I’ll bet you anything you like I know what the fourth ingredient is, in this digestive.”

  “What’ll you bet?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.

  I said: “I’ll bet you a beehive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why, Corporal, it stands to reason. You said you wanted to raise chickens, roses, and bees. You said you wanted to go south for turpentine. You accounted for egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine in Doctor Paré’s formula. What would a man like you want with bees? Obviously the fourth ingredient is honey.”

  “Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “You’re right, bub. The doctor slipped in some honey. . . .” He opened a jackknife, looked at me narrowly, then snapped the blade back again and pocketed the knife, saying: “You don’t know the proportions. You don’t know how to mix the stuff. You don’t know how hot it ought to be, or how slow you’ve got to let it cool.”

  “So you have the secret of life?” I said. “You’re four hundred years old, and wounds can’t kill you. It only takes a certain mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, turpentine and honey. . . . Is that right?”

  “That’s right,” said Corporal Cuckoo.

  “Well, didn’t you think of buying the ingredients and mixing them yourself?”

  “Well, yes, I did. The doctor had said in his notes how the digestive he’d given me and Captain Le Rat had been kept in a bottle in the dark for two years. So I made a wine bottle full of the stuff and kept it covered up away from the light for two years, wherever I went. Then me and some friends of mine got into a bit of trouble, and one of my friends, a guy called Pierre Solitude got a pistol bullet in the chest. I tried the stuff on him, but he died. At the same time I got a sword-thrust in the side. Believe me or not, that healed up in nine hours, inside and out, of its own accord. You can make what you like of that. . . . It all came out of something to do with robbing a church.

  “I got out of France, and lived as best I could for about a year until I found myself in Salzburg. That was about four years after the battle in the Pass of Suze. Well, in Salzburg I came across some guy who told me that the greatest doctor in the world was in town. I remember that doctor’s name, because, well, who wouldn’t? It was Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He’d been a big shot in Basle a few years before. He was otherwise known as Paracelsus. He wasn’t doing much then.’ He hung around, most of the time, drinking himself crazy in a wine cellar called The Three Doves. I met him there one night—it must have been in 1541—and said my piece when nobody else was listening.” Corporal Cuckoo laughed harshly.

  I said: “Paracelsus was a very great man. He was one of the great doctors of the world.”

  “Oh, hell, he was only a fat old drunk. Certainly was higher than a kite when I saw him. Yelling his head off, banging on the table with an empty can. When I told him about this stuff, in strict confidence, he got madder than ever, called me everything he could think of—and believe me, he could think of plenty—and bent the can over my head. Broke the skin just where the hair starts. I was going to take a poke at him, but then he calmed down a bit and said in Swiss-German, I think it was, ‘Experiment, experiment! A demonstration! A demonstration! If you come back tomorrow and show me that cut perfectly healed, charlatan, I’ll listen to you.’ Then he burst out laughing, and I thought to myself, I’ll give you something to laugh at, bub. So I took a walk, and that little cut healed up and was gone inside the hour. Then I went back to show him. I’d sort of taken a liking to the old soak, see? Well, when I get back to this tavern there’s Doctor von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus, if you like, lying on his back dying of a dagger stab. He’d gotten into a fight with a woodcarver, and this woodcarver was as soused as he was, see? And so he let this Paracelsus have it. I never did have no luck, and I never will. We might have got along together, me and him: I only talked to him for half an hour, but so help me, you knew who was the boss when he was there, alright! Oh well, that was that.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “I’m just giving you the outline, see? If you want the whole story it’s going to cost you plenty,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I bummed around Salzburg for a year, got whipped out of town for being a beggar, got the hell out of it to Switzerland, and signed on with a bunch of paid soldiers, what they called condottieri, under a Swiss colonel, and did a bit of fighting in Italy. There was supposed to be good pickings there. But somebody stole my little bit of loot, and we never even got half our pay in the end. Then I went to France, and met a sea captain by the name of Bordelais who was carrying brandy to England and was short of a man. A fast little English pirate boat stopped us in the Channel, and grabbed the cargo, cut Bordelais’ throat and slung the crew overboard—all except me. The limey captain, Hawker, liked the look of me. I joined the crew, but I never was much of a sailor. That hooker—hell, she wasn’t bigger than one of the lifeboats on this ship—was called the Harry, after the King of England, Henry VIII, the one they made a movie about. Still, we did alright. We specialized in French brandy: stopped the froggy boats in mid-channel, grabbed the cargo, shoved the captain and crew overboard. ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ old Hawker always said. Well, I jumped the ship somewhere near Romney, with money in my pocket—I didn’t like the sea, see? I’d had half a dozen nasty wounds, but they couldn’t kill me. I was worried about what’d happen if I went overboard. You could shoot me through the head and not kill me, though it’d hurt like hell for a few days while the wound healed itself. But I just hated to think of what would happen if somebody tried to drown me. Get it? I’d have to wait under water till the fishes ate me, or till I just sort of naturally rotted away—alive all the time. And that’s not nice.

  “Well, as I was saying, I quit at Romney and got to London. There was an oldish widow with a linen-draper’s business near London Bridge. She had a bit of dough, and she took a fancy to me. Well, what the hell? I got married to her. Lived with her about thirteen years. She was a holy terror, at first, but I corrected her. Her name was Rose, and she died just about when Queen Elizabeth got to be queen of England. That was around 1558, I guess. She was scared of me—Rose, I mean, not Queen Elizabeth, because I was always playing around with honey, and eggs, and turpentine, and oil of roses. She got older and older, and I stayed exactly the same as I was when I married her, and she didn’t like that one little bit. She thought I was a witch. Said I had the philosophers’ stone, and knew the secret of perpetual youth. Hah, so help me, she wasn’t so damn far wrong. She wanted me to let her in on it. But, as I was saying, I kept working on those notes of Doctor Paré’s, and I mixed honey, turpentine, oil of roses, and yolks of eggs, just as he’d done, in the right proportions, at the proper temperature, and kept the mixture bottled in the dark for the right length of time . . . and still it didn’t work.”

  I asked Corporal Cuckoo: “How did you find out that your mixture didn’t work?”

  “Well, I tried it on Rose. She kept at me until I did. Every now and again we had kind of a lovers’ quarrel, and I tried the digestive on her afterwards. But she took as long to heal as any o
rdinary person would have taken. The interesting thing was, that I not only couldn’t be killed by a wound—I couldn’t get any older! I couldn’t catch any diseases! I couldn’t die! And you can figure this for yourself—if some stuff that cured any sort of wound was worth a fortune, what would it be worth to me if I had something that would make people stay young and healthy forever? Eh?” He paused.

  I said: “Interesting speculation. You might have given some of the stuff, for example, to Shakespeare. He got better and better as he went on. I wonder what he would have arrived at by now? I don’t know, though. If Shakespeare had swallowed an elixir of life and perpetual youth when he was very young, he would have remained as he was; young and undeveloped. Maybe he might still be holding horses outside theatres . . . or whistling for taxis, a stage-struck country boy of undeveloped genius. If, on the other hand, he had taken the stuff when he wrote, say, The Tempest—there he’d be still, burnt up, worn out, world-weary, tied to death and unable to die. . . . On the other hand, of course, some debauched rake of the Elizabethan period could go on being a debauched rake at high pressure, for centuries and centuries. But, oh my God, how bored he would get after a hundred years or so, and how he’d long for death! That would be dangerous stuff, that stuff of yours, Corporal Cuckoo!”

  “Shakespeare?” he said, “Shakespeare? William Shakespeare. I met him. I met a buddy of his when I was fighting in the Netherlands, and he introduced us when we got back to London. William Shakespeare—puffy-faced man, bald on top; used to wave his hands about when he talked. He took an interest in me. We talked a whole lot together.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  Corporal Cuckoo replied: “Oh, hell, how am I to remember every god damn word? He just asked questions, the same as you do. We just talked.”

  “And how did he strike you?” I asked.

  Corporal Cuckoo considered, and then said, slowly: “The kind of man that counts his change and leaves a nickel tip . . . one of these days I’m going to read his books, but I’ve never had much time for reading.”

  I said: “So, I take it that your only interest in Paré’s digestive has been a financial interest. You merely wanted to make money out of it. Is that so?”

  “Why, sure,” said Corporal Cuckoo, “I’ve had my shot of the stuff. I’m alright.”

  “Corporal Cuckoo, has it occurred to you that what you are after is next door to impossible?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well,” I said, “your Paré’s digestive is made of egg yolk, oil of roses, turpentine, and honey. Isn’t that so?”

  “Well, yes. So what? What’s impossible about that?”

  I said: “You know how a chicken’s diet alters the taste of an egg, don’t you?”

  “Well?”

  “What a chicken eats changes not only the taste, but the color of an egg. Any chicken farmer can tell you that. Isn’t that so?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what a chicken eats goes into the egg, doesn’t it—just as the fodder that you feed a cow comes out in the milk? Have you stopped to consider how many different sorts of chickens there have been in the world since the Battle of Turin in 1537, and the varieties of chicken feed they might have pecked up in order to lay their eggs? Have you thought that the egg yolk is only one of four ingredients mixed in Ambroise Paré’s digestive. Is it possible that it has not occurred to you that this one ingredient involves permutations and combinations of several millions of other ingredients?”

  Corporal Cuckoo was silent. I went on: “Then take the roses. If no two eggs are exactly alike, what about roses? You come from a wine-growing country, you say! Then you must know that the mere thickness of a wall can separate two entirely different kinds of wine—that a noble vintage may be crushed out of grapes grown less than two feet away from a vine that is good for nothing. The same applies to tobacco. Have you stopped to think of your roses? Roses are pollinated by bees, bees go from flower to flower, making them fertile. Your oil of roses, therefore, embodies an infinity of possible ingredients. Does it not?”

  Corporal Cuckoo was still silent. I continued, with a kind of malicious enthusiasm. “You must reflect on these things, Corporal. Take turpentine. It comes out of trees. Even in the sixteenth century there were many known varieties of turpentine—Chian terebinthine, and what not. But above all, my dear fellow, consider honey! There are more kinds of honey in the world than have ever been categorized. Every honeycomb yields a slightly different honey. You must know that bees living in heather gather and store one kind of honey, while bees in an apple orchard give us something quite different. It is all honey, of course, but its flavor and quality is variable beyond calculation. Honey varies from hive to hive, Corporal Cuckoo. I say nothing of wild bees’ honey.”

  “Well?” he said, glumly.

  “Well. All this is relatively simple, Corporal, in relation to what comes next. I don’t know how many beehives there are in the world. Assume that in every hive there are—let us be moderate—one thousand bees. (There are more than that, of course, but I am trying to simplify.) You must realize that every one of these bees brings home a slightly different drop of honey. Every one of these bees may, in her travels, take honey from fifty different flowers. The honey accumulated by all the bees in the hive is mixed together. Any single cell in any honeycomb out of any hive contains scores of subtly different elements! I say nothing of the time element; honey six months old is very different from honey out of the same hive, left for ten years. From day to day, honey changes. Now taking all possible combinations of eggs, roses, turpentine and honey . . . where are you? Answer me that, Corporal Cuckoo.”

  Corporal Cuckoo struggled with this for a few seconds, and then said: “I don’t get it. You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

  “I never said so,” I said, uneasily.

  “No, you never said so. Well, listen. Don’t give me all that double talk. I’m doing you a favor. Look—”

  He took out and opened his jackknife, and scrutinized his left hand, looking for an unscarred area of skin. “No!” I shouted, and gripped his knife-hand. I might have been trying to hold back the piston rod of a great locomotive. My grip and my weight were nothing to Corporal Cuckoo’s.

  “—Look,” he said, calmly, and cut through the soft flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand until the knife-blade stopped on the bone, and the thumb fell back until it touched the forearm. “See that?”

  I saw it through a mist. The great ship seemed, suddenly, to roll and plunge. “Are you crazy?” I said, as soon as I could.

  “No,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I’m showing you I’m not, see?” He held out his mutilated hand close to my face.

  “Take it away,” I said.

  “Sure,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “Watch this.” He pushed the almost-severed thumb back into place, and held it down with his right hand. “It’s okay,” he said, “there’s no need to look sick. I’m showing you, see? Don’t go—sit down. I’m not kidding. I can give you a hell of a story, a fact story. I can show you Paré’s little notebook and everything. You saw what I showed you when I pulled up my shirt? You saw what I’ve got right here, on the left side?”

  I said: “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s where I got hit by a nine-pound cannon ball when I was on the Mary Ambree, fighting against the Spanish Armada—it smashed my chest so that the ribs went through my heart—and I was walking about in two weeks. And this other one on the right, under the ribs—tomorrow I’ll show you what it looks like from the back—I got that one at the Battle of Fontenoy; and there’s a hell of a good story there. A French cannon ball came down and hit a broken sword that a dead officer had dropped, and it sent that sword flying right through me, lungs and liver and all. So help me, it came out through my right shoulder blade. The other one lower down was a bit of a bombshell at the Battle
of Waterloo—I was opened up like a pig—it wasn’t worth the surgeon’s while to do anything about it. But I was on my feet in six days, while men with broken legs were dying like flies. I can prove it, I tell you! And listen—I marched to Quebec with Benedict Arnold. Sit still and listen—my right leg was smashed to pulp all the way down from the hip to the ankle at Balaklava. It knitted together before the surgeon had a chance to get around to me—he couldn’t believe his eyes, he thought he was dreaming. I can tell you a hell of a story! But it’s worth dough, see? Now, this is my proposition—I’ll tell it, you write it, and we’ll split fifty-fifty, and I’ll start my farm. What d’you say?”

  I heard myself saying, in a sickly, stupid voice: “Why didn’t you save some of your pay, all those years?”

  Corporal Cuckoo replied, with scorn: “Why didn’t I save my pay! Because I’m what I am, you mug! Hell, once upon a time, if I’d kept away from cards, I could’ve bought Manhattan Island for less than what I lost to a Dutchman called Bruncker drawing ace-high for English guineas! Save my pay! If it wasn’t one thing it was another. I lay off liquor. Okay. So if it’s not liquor, it’s a woman. I lay off women. Okay. Then it’s cards or dice. I always meant to save my pay; but I never had it in me to save my goddam pay! Doctor Paré’s stuff fixed me—and when I say it fixed me, I mean, it fixed me, just like I was, and am, and always will be. See? A foot soldier, ignorant as dirt. It took me nearly a hundred years to learn to write my name, and four hundred years to get to be a corporal. How d’you like that? And it took will power, at that! Now here’s my proposition: fifty-fifty on the story. Once I get proper publicity in a magazine, I’ll be able to let the digestive out of my hands with an easy mind—see? Because nobody’d dare to try any funny business with a man with nationwide publicity. Eh?”