Neither Man Nor Dog

by Gerald Kersh

  “This is Yak. You’ll be comfortable here. Such a bed! You’ll never want to get up again. Good night! Sleep well!” The door closed on him. We were alone with Yak.

  “Let’s get out of here,” whispered Dempsey, shaking like a leaf; but it seemed ridiculous, now, to go back into the streets. If I have one English trait, it is that I would face death rather than do something that seems ridiculous. Moreover, I had my revolver.

  I said to Yak, in German: “We want a bed.”

  He shook his head. He did not understand; and all the time, he looked at us with one wicked little red eye.

  “What’s Russian for ‘bed’, Dempsey?”

  “I don’t know. Oh, please, please, let’s get out of here!”

  “And freeze to death?”

  Yak moved, pushing us before him. He steered us upstairs, to the first floor, struck a match, and lit a lamp. The flame popped and spread. We were in a tiny bedroom containing a great old bed, and no other furniture. The windows, I noticed, had been firmly boarded up. I turned again to Yak, and said in a tone of authority:

  “We must be called at five o’clock.”

  He shook his head.

  I made gestures. I pointed to him; then to Dempsey and myself: indicated an imaginary clock; conveyed, in pantomime, sleeping and waking up, and spread out five fingers.

  “What’s Russian for ‘five o’clock’?” I asked.

  “Something like ‘pyet chessov’,” said Dempsey.

  “Pyet chessov!” I said, very loudly.

  Yak nodded, and then, with a grin that made my blood run cold, said: “Pyet chessov.”

  He went out. Something went click.

  “He’s locked the door!” cried Dempsey.

  I tried the door. It was locked. I knocked. There was no answer.

  “My God!” exclaimed Dempsey. “This is terrible. I didn’t want to come here. It’s all your fault. You insisted. Now see what a mess we’re in. I had a feeling that something was going to happen. Now we’re caught, like rats in a trap. Oh, God, what are we going to do?”

  “Perhaps it’s only a custom here, in case a lodger runs away without paying his rent.”

  “He would have asked us to pay in advance,” said Dempsey, “but he knows there’s no need to. He’ll get all we’ve got without asking. We’ll never see daylight. We’re finished.”

  “I’ve got a revolver.”

  “My God, my God!” whispered Dempsey.

  “We can lie down, and keep warm,” I said, “I’m freezing, and I’m dead beat. I’m going to lie down.”

  I did so, covering myself with the malodorous bedclothes—the greasy matting, and the mangy bearskin rug. Dempsey leapt into bed beside me, and sat bolt upright, tense with terror, and shivering so that the bed shook.

  “Relax,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Take your boots off.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Lie down.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got a premonition. My premonitions are always right. I’m psychic. You might get out of this, I never shall. I tell you, I know I shan’t get out of here alive. Listen. You’ve been my friend, my only friend. Take my papers and my—open your eyes, please, open your eyes and listen to me. I shall die here. Something tells me . . . I know. There’s death in this house—what’s that?”

  It was a shuffling noise. In the middle of the room looking at us with sickening curiosity, sat two large black rats. I waved a hand at them, to drive them away; they did not move.

  “They’re waiting for us,” said Dempsey, “they know. Rats know.”

  A blast of wind struck the house. A piece of ice, dislodged from the roof, slid down with a grating noise and fell into the street. Dempsey’s teeth were chattering like castanets. I laid my revolver between us, and propped myself up against the head-board of the bed. There seemed to be two weights pressing down upon my eyelids. I struggled against sleep, but vast waves of weariness were running through my body.

  “What’s that?” whispered Dempsey. Something was scratching at the door. I looked, with the big revolver poised for a snap-shot. It was another rat.

  “Keep quiet,” I said, “let me get a few minutes’ rest.”

  Nothing, nothing in the world could have kept me awake. Consciousness was slipping away from me . . . down and down and down an infinite precipice of smooth black glass. . . .

  Then I was asleep, and I remember that I was involved in a bizarre and meaningless dream . . . I was being led out into a yard, and a voice was saying to me: “You are to impersonate the Emperor Napoleon . . .” I saw the rings of a thousand rifle-­muzzles. There was a terrific explosion. I was blown away, head over heels, roaring with laughter, over a tremendous black landscape, soaring like a bird. Then I looked up, and saw hovering over me a gigantic machine bristling with hooks. It descended, caught me. I struggled to free myself, and heard a voice whisper: “Wake up! For God’s sake! Wake up!”

  I opened my eyes with a groan, and saw the terrified face of Dempsey. “Look!” he said, “oh, God, look!”

  The door was opening. In the widening black oblong, I saw the revolting face of Yak, moving as silently as the ghost of an evil passion, indescribably hideous in the ghastly lamplight. He entered the room. Dempsey screamed, and then, drowning the scream, came the stunning bang of the heavy revolver, with the stinging smell of cordite. Yak dropped a vast hand to his chest, fell back against the wall, and sat down, his legs spread out in front of him. I leapt out of bed. Yak’s right hand came slowly away from his breast, wet with blood, as he spread it out like a fan in front of us, stared, with utter astonishment, and said, in a fading whisper:

  “Pyet . . . chessov . . .”

  At that moment, the bell of a church boomed the first stroke of five.

  “Idiot!” I said, as I snatched the revolver out of Dempsey’s hand, “he was only coming to wake us up!”

  We caught the first ferry-boat. Within a week, we had put five hundred miles between ourselves and Nyevinossi-Novgorod. Dempsey began to recover from the shock. At first, he said: “How was I to know? It was excusable.” Then: “How do you know he was only coming to wake us up?” Then: “I’m not at all sure that I didn’t save both our lives”; and finally: “I’m absolutely certain that I caught him in the act. Thank God, I didn’t lose my presence of mind!”

  He grew quite aggressive. In Oslo, he reprimanded a barber. In Berlin, he swore at a waiter. I left him in Paris. That was in 1920. I hear that he is married since then. He treats his wife with extraordinary severity, and was heard calling her a “sickening idiot” in the presence of strangers. He still finds it difficult to stand a direct look, but he is a roaring lion with subordinates, and has cultivated a quite terrifying manner of handing his hat to cloakroom attendants.

  He is acquiring something of the reputation of a man of iron.

  The Woman and the Fire

  Not even the police touch the people on the benches near the Dogs’ Cemetery. Dirt is their armour; lice are their watchdogs. Wash them and they die. Every morning, pink disinfectant is scattered over the places where they have rested. The disinfectant is dust which the wind blows away. By nightfall the Untouchable People are back, dragging behind them all they ever possessed—their shadows. You hear nothing from them: there is nothing they want to say. They don’t even beg—to beg is to hope, and they have no hope. Nothing is known of their lives. After sunrise they seem to disappear from the earth like mist. The fact is, that nobody looks at them: everybody looks away from them because they are disgusting, like sores. There are more things to be seen than men care to look at. Once—only once—I saw a man approach these frightful men and women of the dustbins. He was a young priest, and it was at midnight. He put his left arm about the shoulders of one of the most atrocious of them all—a woman—and raised to her lips a can of soup.

  She shook her head and, with an incoherent spluttering cry, spat out the mouthful of soup. Then she disappeared into her rags with a wriggle
like a startled earwig.

  Years later I heard that same woman talk. Everybody in West London has seen her. She used to come out after twilight in Mortimer Street, where the dustbins of the gown-­manufacturers lie. She contrived to comb a few saleable handfuls of silk-cuttings out of the rubbish. Speaking of her, a Corsican who owned a coffee-shop said: “She is not Gloria Swanson, but she is a person: she does not live in the Ritz Hotel, but she gets along.” He used to leave a sandwich for her on the lid of his ash-can every night. Was it Christian charity? Or was he laying offerings upon a dusty altar after dark, in obedience to dim forebodings? She was like a witch in a Transylvanian folk-tale. You could see nothing of her face but a nose, one tooth, a chin, a pair of red-rimmed eyes. A wolfish mat of hair hid the rest. On her head she wore a straw boater with an old Etonian ribbon; on her feet, rubber slippers. Each foot resembled a sockful of walnuts. Her skirt was made of two old coats fastened together with pins: I was haunted by a dread that one day it might fall off in my presence. But it never did. She wore, also, half a dozen jerseys and pullovers, a pea-jacket, and an ancient Army greatcoat blackleaded like a stove with accumulated dirt. Everybody was afraid of her. She might not be able to cast spells or look at you with the Evil Eye; but she could do worse—touch you. That would be too horrible.

  It happened on the night of the first great air-raid over London. It was a bad night, that one: we remembered all we had ever read about high-explosive and the annihilation of cities. The bombs came down and the fires climbed up; London was burning and the red sky pulsated like a wound. I was trying to get home. In Holborn a man dragged me into a doorway just as a big bomb fell on a block of offices. Several hundreds of tons of masonry seemed to hiccup; then burst open and subsided in thunder, while a great twist of dark orange flame threw itself up out of the ruins. “Does your mother know you’re out?” asked the man, with irony. A hot wind was blowing, and above the noise of the blitz there rose the quick, clear ringing of fire-bells. Incendiary bombs were falling: they fell with a hiss, struck with a little crack and let out a blinding light . . . a devouring white light that ate into things. I went on, hugging the doorways. Near Gray’s Inn Road, a tobacco-shop had been torn apart like a Christmas cracker: there must have been twenty thousand cigarettes on the pavement. But two men were standing there, pushing the packets aside with their feet and fumbling in their pockets by the cigarette-machine. One of them stopped me and said: “Got change for two shillings?” I had no change. The man who had stopped me said: “I could do with a smoke, too . . .” We looked down at the cigarettes on the pavement. “No, play the game,” said the other man, spurning them with an angry foot.

  We all walked away, and I knew then that whoever won this War, the English could never lose it. The bombs were still falling. I heard a fireman saying: “The Docks’ve gone up in smoke.” Everybody moved in a nightmarish tangle of flickering shadows. I heard the throb of another raider and the scream of another bomb; dived into another doorway. The blast picked me up and threw me down a flight of stairs, having flung down half a dozen firemen for me to fall upon. We picked ourselves up. One of them said: “My brother got buried under a wall down East this evening.” “Good God!” I said. He added: “A red-hot wall.”

  I waited in the doorway, trying to spit out the vile taste of age-old plaster-dust mixed with the fumes of high explosive. And there I saw the old woman of the Untouchable People.

  She was crouching there with her sack, and her face looked bright and ruddy in the glare of the burning city. The fireman who had lost his brother asked her if she was all right. She did not answer: she did not even look up at him.

  “You go and get in a shelter,” he said.

  She waved a hand in a gesture which said: Mind your own business; leave me alone.

  “Jerry!” shouted somebody, shouldering in among us. Again we heard the dive of the enemy and the rush of the bomb, and felt the concussion of the explosion like a punch in the head as we threw ourselves down. After that a shower of fire-bombs fell. One of them dropped on the pavement a yard or two away from our doorway, and spat splashes of whiteness like an acetylene-welder as it burnt itself out. The firemen were gone to their work. I was watching the old woman. She was looking at the fire-bomb on the pavement. The brilliance of its burning had faded. She glanced furtively from left to right; put down her sack of rags; shuffled out into the street and, crouching over the dying red glow, warmed her hands.

  It was then that I heard her speak. She said, in a clear thin voice: “I haven’t had a fire of my own for fifty years.”

  Even as she spoke the glow went out.

  The raiders passed. London lay under the smoke of its burning and listened to the tolling of the fire-bells. I never saw the old woman again.

  The Fortunes of the Pryskys

  In the winter of the year 1809, a baker named Jan Prysky crouched behind a dough-trough and watched his apprentice, a thin little boy named Wladislaw, who was loitering near a tray of rolls. Jan Prysky held his breath. Wladislaw edged closer to the tray. The steam of the hot bread seemed to intoxicate him like wine. He gulped, looked furtively to the right and the left, and then, exactly fulfilling Prysky’s expectation, snatched a roll and bit a great mouthful out of it.

  “What!” shouted Jan Prysky, leaping up, “have I caught you at last?—bandit and robber!——” He was a huge man with fierce moustaches. The apprentice dropped the roll and cringed. The baker swung a heavy hand. Wladislaw ducked his head, threw himself to the floor, slipped between his master’s legs, and ran away, never to return. Prysky’s hand grazed itself against the brass top of a little triangular weighing-machine.

  When Prysky’s fury had abated a little, he sucked his injured hand, and picked up the bitten roll and ate it. He was a man who abhorred waste. Then he went to dinner.

  Three days later his hand swelled. Four days later a lump swelled under his arm, and his whole body throbbed. The surgeon said: “Come, sir, be brave. On the battlefield we can take off an arm like this in ten seconds.” He removed Prysky’s arm in two minutes thirty seconds: but that, he swore, was the fault of Prysky, who struggled during the operation.

  Jan Prysky had to employ an assistant. The assistant, having made himself familiar with most of Prysky’s customers, opened a bakery of his own in the same street.

  Prysky was ruined. He did not know where to turn for a meal and a bed. One evening, in a main thoroughfare of Warsaw, he stopped a likely-looking pedestrian, and, showing his empty sleeve, said: “Spare a coin for an old soldier.” His extended hand received a piece of silver. It was easy. Prysky had found his vocation. Later, he described himself as Jan Prysky, late of Poniatowski’s Lancers, and wore a faded uniform. Times were hard: Napoleon had overcrowded the beggary profession. Nevertheless, Prysky, who was a fine figure of a man, did well. He married a girl named Etelka, daughter of a begging-letter-writer named Polacek. They lived in ditches and cellars, whining their way across Europe, instructing their little boy Janko in the tricks of their trade.

  “Hang on to every grosch,” said Prysky. “Always take. Spend nothing. Men are fools: women are worse. Crawl, and they give with both hands. Nobody refuses food to a hungry man. Buy nothing, not even bread, and stick your takings in your belt.”

  Etelka died in Prague. Jan died in a doss-house in Hamburg. Janko, searching his clothes, found ten thousand francs in gold and securities. He, having thoroughly digested his father’s teaching, left Jan’s body to be buried by the burghers; wrapped the money about his lean waist; slunk into the street, marked the kind face of a decent housewife in a group near a sausage-shop, and whispered: “Gnädige Frau, for the love of God, a copper . . .”

  “Poor boy, how thin you are,” said the housewife.

  Janko remembered that, and thenceforth ate as little as possible. By 1835, when his son Karl was born, he was known in the doss-house as “The Skull”. His appearance was corpse-like, and hideous. Karl was a hunchback. “Dear God, I thank you,” said Janko. “
That hump will be worth its weight in gold.”

  It was. Karl grew up shameless, quick-witted, and cunning. Janko was proud of him. Wretchedly weeping, the little hunchback led him by the hand through the market places of Middle Europe, crying: “For my dying father, spare one coin, one copper coin! Have pity!” His pathos wrung crusts from starving artisans. Once, in Dresden, a thin woman with red spots on her cheek-bones took off her shawl, although the day was bitterly cold, and said: “Your need is greater, poor child. God bless you!” Janko boasted about this, saying: “My father was clever, and I am no fool, but this boy could put us both in a sack and tie us up.”

  Janko died in 1870, leaving forty thousand marks. More valuable still, he left a paralysed widow. Karl wheeled her from town to town in a crazy old barrow. What she thought of it all, God knows, for she could not talk. She managed to keep alive for ten years after Janko’s death. Karl milked a hundred charities on her behalf, and was very sorry to leave her corpse in Chemnitz. He had wheeled it from door to door for three days, weeping hideously, asking for the wherewithal to give it decent burial. He was compelled to abandon it in a doorway after that. The weather was hot. All the better for sleeping out.

  Karl was lucky. In a remote East German village he found a female freak. Her head and body were of normal size, but her arms and legs were scarcely twelve inches long. He wooed and won her. She went away with him. It was perfectly in order: there was nothing about the union that might have offended the most censorious soul in the world. He married her legally. The village, in a rush of sentiment, gave them a wedding-party. A Graf von Felsenmühle tossed the bride a hundred marks, “for lingerie”.

  Their son Johann was born in 1879. By this time Karl had to change his money into banknotes. Unbelievably ragged, indescribably dirty, inhumanly squalid, he concealed about his untouchable person the sum of a hundred and thirty-five thousand marks—something like six or seven thousand pounds, which Johann was to inherit.