The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  “Not immediately,” said George Oaks. “Most likely, as I guess, after he’s had a go at your house tonight, Chatterton will try to get hold of you and me with a view to extracting information. Dead men can’t talk, you know. So my bet is that he’ll try to torture us a little first. Now you go and get some more Dog’s Nose before Syd goes to bed, and we’ll have another look at the Brevis papers.” I took away the tankards, which Syd refilled, and when I came back to the bedroom, George Oaks had the papers spread out on his bed.

  “Lock that bloody door,” he said. “Albert, put those cans on the washing-stand and come here quick! What d’you make of this, I ask you? Look and see. By the God, Albert, Kurt Brevis drew some maps, too—maps of no countries in this world!”

  Part Seven

  If calligraphy is an art, then Kurt Brevis was an artist. I have never seen more fastidiously elegant penmanship than that with which four of the seven sheets of paper were closely covered. He had written, as it seemed, with a needle point in black ink, and while I stared with blank incomprehension at the massed figures and mathematical symbols I marvelled at the meticulosity of the hand that had outlined them. I saw then that it is possible to beautify an equation just by loving it. I could see—never ask me how—that these μ’s and θ’s, α’s and π’s, these delicately angled cube roots, these top righthand dots of infinite recurrence, were inexplicably but with marvellous certainty shaped and placed in some terribly significant design. I could see a closing-in in the brackets, and inexorably-closing scissors in every α. Perhaps I was over-excited, but I swear to you that, just then, I saw Kurt Brevis’s notes as a kind of abstraction symbolising black Danger. Without meaning anything to me, it frightened me.

  “Never mind that, never mind that!” said George Oaks. “Look at these, look at these!” and with a quick, nervous gesture, he indicated the other three sheets of paper. These were the “maps of no countries in this world” which Kurt Brevis had drawn—there was no mistaking that fine strong hand, even though the contours must have been sketched in haste; it was impossible for the man to be slovenly.

  “Magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas!” cried George Oaks. “Now look at this one. What is it? Where is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It might be a group of islands, or a cluster of lakes. There’s nothing to indicate which is land and which is water. As for its whereabouts, how can one guess when there’s nothing to tell you north from south? This should be up your alley, George—you’ve told me often enough that you’re supposed to be a bit of a navigator, or something.”

  “I ought to know my maps of the world, especially maps of out-of-the-way places. But these maps, I swear, don’t look like any islands or lakes I ever saw in an atlas. The God guide me. First, Crabbe; now, Brevis!”

  “Did Austin Crabbe’s maps look anything like these?” I asked.

  “I can’t swear to that, but these look maddeningly familiar. They must be real places, Albert! Listen—as a boy, did you use to try and draw maps of imaginary places, as I did? Would you like to try now? I’ll tell you something: however well you do it, it won’t look real except in your dream. You can’t invent a plausible continent, any more than you can invent a plausible animal, vegetable, or mineral. You may stick Popocatepetl in Kew Gardens, or put Cuba in the Irish Sea, just as you may hang wings on a lion or horns on a pig—but you can’t make a new shape that looks real. You absolutely must draw on familiar things.”

  “I know all that,” I said. “Well?”

  “Well, look steadily at these maps, Albert, and you’ll see that they’re the real thing—outlines carved by some mysterious sea—shapes cut in the dark, inch by inch, through endless ages! You can see, somehow, that these can’t be the outlines of little places. Isn’t there something about them that conveys to you . . . something?”

  There was, indeed, a certain elemental ragged majesty in those contours.

  The largest of the islands (or lakes) in the first of the maps was a woman blown to smoke: I could see the curve of her back, the droop of her dragging leg, and the last supplicating gesture of her poor attenuated arms. Below her was balanced a kind of clown, throwing a great handful of tattered scraps into the wind, closely watched by something like a poodle dog; and at the clown’s foot lay a great basking shark blindly waiting.

  “I make nothing of this,” said I. “Yet I could swear that I’ve been there!”

  “And here?” said George Oaks, pointing to another map.

  Here, again, were lakes (or islands) and again there came over me an eerie sense of familiarity. “Have I been here before?” I said. On the right a monstrous parrot with extended claws screamed at another struggling woman whose right hand reached for the invisible. Her high-heeled foot almost touched the crowned or crested head of a great gross creature with a dropsical right arm, who wagged an admonitory forefinger. From the lower righthand corner of the map, the greedy conger eels were coming up for the killing: but from above a man with clasped hands was diving to the rescue from a jagged promontory.

  The third map might have represented the gnawed remains of some colossal elk, or moose. There, on the left, lay the shattered bone of the lower jaw with its loosened teeth; and on the right, the splintered fragments of an antler. Such forms belong to living rock—thunder the mallet, lightning the chisel, time the abrasive.

  “You see,” said George Oaks, “if you invent a map, if you imagine a place, it must be a place all alone. Now, the God wills that there can be no such thing as a totally disconnected place on earth. A world is a complete and beautiful thing, Albert. A blind understanding guides you to recognise a natural shape. You are satisfied, let us say, with the shape of Australia because something tells you that it is as it should be—that it belongs in a certain universal pattern——”

  “—No,” I said. “I accept the shape of Australia, for example, because I’m familiar with it: I know it’s there.”

  “Thanks to Captain Cook, who did not see but being blind believed . . . Albert, up to a point, I believe in the materialist conception of history. I do believe that the old explorers sought out new islands largely for profit—because there were fortunes to be made in pepper and cinnamon, elephant’s teeth and black ivory (I mean, slaves), gold and jewels, and what not——”

  I interrupted: “—Well, George, I’m ready to agree, if you like, that the old merchant speculators were motivated purely by a desire for dividends. But I don’t see——”

  “—You don’t see a shrewd man like Columbus striking westward in a shell like the Santa Maria in which no sensible passenger nowadays would sail from London Bridge to Margate. Eh? Neither do I, Albert, neither do I. I’m telling you that even Columbus, who was greedy enough for money to gyp the lookout-man out of his reward for sighting the New World—even Christopher Columbus was a man with a vision. He absolutely had to be a man with an eye for the main chance—otherwise how could he have made his sales talk acceptable to the financiers? He had to talk with passion and conviction of that gold where the sun went down. It was necessary for Columbus to sell himself to himself in order to pay dividends . . . because what he wanted, really, was a ship. Remember he was a reader of ancient maps; in other words, a brooder over puzzles. He had to reach beyond the known horizons for lost pieces, once he saw the world as a ball. . . . In effect, Albert, he knew in his heart that the known world was of the wrong shape, and it was this knowledge that ate him up rather than greed.”

  “Very well, then,” I said, “granting all that, where’s your point? There aren’t many square miles of this world left uncharted—certainly no great islands or inland seas, are there?”

  “No. The only places of which we haven’t got scale maps are largely jungles. But wait a bit, Albert. Hold hard! When you speak of The World, to what do you refer?”

  “The land and the sea, of course,” I said, “the w
hole surface of the world, which, you’ll admit, the cartographers have been over with a fine comb.”

  “There you are, you see!” cried George Oaks. “Look at him, a writer of fantastic fiction, the great Albert Kemp, who’s already convincing the suckers who read the shiny magazines that he is au fait with the mysteries of Time and Space, let alone the Cosmos! An interplanetary flight is a penny bus-ride to this one here, because his childish imagination has got hold of Rockets. Put him in a cigar-shaped container of Oojiam, the non-gravitational metal, and he is off to fight telepathic crocodiles in the liquid ammonia atmosphere of the planet Pluto—psst!—simple as all that! The earth is too tame for this passionate beast, eh? Furthermore, he knows that there is going to be an atomic war, and so he must take off from Terra with one blaster-pistol, one Rita Hayworth in a transparent nylon space-suit, and a ready-made man-child screaming: ‘Aw gee, Pop, when’m I gonna get one of them Venusian green-feathered, five-dimensional, multi-lingual, seven-legged singing teddy bears to play with?’ Whereupon Rita Hayworth, clinging to you like Scotch tape, gives you a kiss that sends a blast of super-heated steam down your gozzle and says: ‘Nnnnnn, hon, if Pop, who is president of Inter-Galactic Flights, Inc., knew we were here! Did you sabotage the Umbilicator? Lover, have you watered the jeep? . . . Gooksie, lover, super gooksie, let me feel your deltoids . . . By this time, of course, the earth is a dwindling speck—No?—and the galaxy a sparkling shower, like when Black Monty spat into the electric fan in O’Hanrahan’s place on the Avenue of the Americas, Lima City, Neptune, what time Ivanovitch the Martian spy drugged your drink with Poptol which paralyses the will . . .”

  I said: “Cut it out, will you, George?”

  “You unmitigated fathead, you interplanetary great suckling! You child with a Buck Rogers pistol! Tell me something. How far into the sky has man flown, or even fired a projectile? Answer me.”

  “I believe that’s a military secret,” I said.

  “I can tell you, without breaking it, that we’ve sent a projectile up to the very rim of the earth’s atmosphere. Say, sixty miles. That is to say, about one four-thousandth part of the distance between here and the moon. Is that right?”

  “Well?”

  “Now—this being up your alley, Albert, you being so familiar with the world as to be contemptuous of it—tell me, how deep is the deepest excavation we have made into the earth, as from sea level? Shall we say about a mile? I believe that copper mine in Montana is about a mile deep. You tell me, Albert, you know the world—it’s a dwindling speck to you . . . Say a mile, then. All right. Then, when you have finished firing your pop-guns at Sirius, will you pause to consider that man, even in favourable conditions and given the stimulus of heavy dividends, has succeeded in penetrating less than one four-thousandth part of the distance between Charing Cross station and the earth’s core? Have you forgotten, Albert, that there are the Waters Under the Earth? Have you never stopped to think that beneath your feet, quite uncharted, lies a fantastic underworld of caverns, underground rivers, and ghostly islands floating in sunless lakes? Has no one ever told you that the land under London itself is nothing but a kind of lid that covers a subterranean sea? Did no one ever tell you that the land you know as England is nothing but a skin, only a mile or two thick, on top of another place? Eh, star-gazer?”

  I said: “My God, George! What the devil are you trying to tell me? Be serious with me. You’re not hinting, are you, that these maps here are charts of the waters under the earth?”

  “I’m hinting nothing, Albert. I’m saying, simply, that we have explored and charted only the surface of this world, and that there is another world below the surface. I am saying that these maps of Kurt Brevis’s are maps of real places, great places, that do not belong on the face of the earth as I know it. And, if you like, I’m saying this: Every one of Kadmeel’s later enterprises has been in the nature of an excavation, a digging-down. While the rest of the world has been watching the heavens, Lord Kadmeel has been burrowing deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth.”

  “Couldn’t it be that, anticipating an atom war, Kadmeel is digging underground factories?” I asked.

  “Could be,” said George Oaks, putting the papers under his pillow. “Pass the Dog’s Nose, and let’s go to sleep. Tomorrow we talk to Ohm Robertson.”

  So we switched off the lights. George Oaks fell asleep in the middle of a yawn. I teeter-tottered for a while between wide wakefulness and broken nightmares of black chasms rushing down to lightless bodies of bottomless water. . . . Somewhere under a dank dome something flapped wet, leathery wings, and a cold wind stinking of rotten fish fanned my face . . . The winged thing plunged. The broken water splashed phosphorescent so that I caught a glimpse of a toothed beak closing on a kind of slug with blind white eyes and tentacles . . . Behind me a beautifully modulated voice said: “Take it easy, now, Kemp, it’s only a pterodactyl diving for a slug-fish,” and I turned and saw Chatterton. “You want to look out for the mudworms, though—they’re naughty; reproduce through their teeth, you know, three months of the year, and if they bite you they plant a whole bally colony in your flesh. Takes you half a year to die and, believe me, it isn’t funny for the fellow concerned. We generally shoot you if you get bitten by a mudworm, for your own sake, you know. . . . You’ll get used to it, old man . . . And, by the bye, if you see something like a sea anemone kind of hopping about on its stem, shine a light on it double-quick—that’ll kill it. Its sting brings you out in ulcerated warts all over—unhealable, too, and with an absolutely putrid stink.” Then Chatterton disappeared, leaving me alone in the dark, and something flabby and cold coiled itself about me; a detestable bubbling voice sniggered: “. . . May I take your soul, sir?”—and something like a wet rubber cap fastened itself between my shoulder-blades, and I was sucked away in a spiral, down and down, so that I started awake and was afraid to close my eyes for a while.

  I thought of Monty Cello upside-down, dying in the well, and I reproached myself for thinking: At least I didn’t have to meet his eyes when Halfacre came . . . Then it seemed to me quite logical that Lord Kadmeel, digging and digging deeper and deeper in a frenzy of fear, should indeed have come upon a watery world under the earth’s crust. . . . But surely, it would be a hot, steamy place, rotten rich with mulch, dripping with the drained fertility of the sunlit world above—cancerous with life run wild and malignant, dominated by monstrous creatures of corruption?

  At last I fell asleep, thinking of Ohm Robertson, and wondering what he would say.

  Oaks shook me awake at half-past six. “Breakfast,” he said, offering me a glass beer-mug full of black tea and a cold baby chicken stuck on a carving fork. “Have a petit poussin, and when that’s gone call for more. An Annual Outing of the Froth Blowers, or something, didn’t turn up for dinner as scheduled yesterday. There are thirty-seven little chickens in the ice-box, stark naked, with their legs in the air—a veritable extermination camp of young fowl. I’ve just eaten two . . . Eat up. Better let the tea settle a bit; I couldn’t find a strainer . . . Better hurry up and come down, Albert. The police want a word with you.”

  “Who, me? What now?”

  “Calm, calm, Albert; everything is all right, everything’s perfect—couldn’t be better. Just as I said, your house was broken into about half-past three this morning. What is there to be excited about? I foretold it, didn’t I? And exactly as I guessed, Halfacre had a couple of coppers from Brighthaven on the prowl outside. It seems that the burglars were three-handed. Two of them got into the house, and the third was posted as sentry. Those yobs from Brighthaven—they’re too slow to catch a cold, the thumb-fingered chaw-bacons—let one of the inside men slip away, the gawking fly-catchers; the most important of the three, you may bet your life. They collared the outside man all right. Apparently he mixed it and there was a bit of a bundle. One of them, apparently, was ‘injured’—I suppose that means he was kicked
on the shin, or something. Anyway, their prisoner yelled bloody murder. The idiots, they ought to have got up behind him and throttled him; but I suppose they were afraid that might be unconstitutional or something, the flat-footed fatheads. However, they snaffled him, he calls Cave, and Bollard has no alternative but to tangle single-handed with the other two in the upstairs passage. They jump him, and he knocks one down; would’ve got the other, only it’s too dark to see straight, so he only grabs him by the foot, whereupon the man kicks him in the stomach. Man then kicks loose, leaving his shoe in Bollard’s hands, jumps out of the back bedroom window, slides down kitchen roof, and gets away. Bollard might have stopped him but, rushing after him, forgets that low beam in the passage—don’t we all?—and hits himself on the forehead and knocks himself groggy for a couple of seconds, which is all the other fellow needs. Thus, when the lights are switched on, what have we got? Two gypsies, a little the worse for wear, and one gent’s lightweight tan calf shoe with a Goodrich rubber heel—no gyppo’s shoe, no hop-picker’s shoe, but a well-preserved gentlemanly monk-shoe, that fastens with a buckle, as made by Staples of Northampton for the American Officers’ P.X. in the 1940s. . . . In addition to Sergeant Bollard’s squeezed-out fingerprints, there must, of course, be some of the owner’s dabs on the shoe around the heel and the strap. I reminded Bollard of this, but he had already taken it into consideration; had the shoe wrapped up in tissue paper—had the insolence to tell me that a criminal might wipe possible dabs from a pistol or a doorknob, but never from his own shoe, it being the last thing on earth he’d expect to leave behind him . . . They read too many detective stories, the dogs!”

  “No doubt the man was wearing gloves,” I said, buttoning my trousers.