The Best of Gerald Kersh (23 page)

‘In this detestable jungle, on one of my brief expeditions – brief, because I was alone and afraid – I stopped to watch a giant sloth hanging motionless from the largest bough of a half-denuded tree, asleep, impervious, indifferent. Then, out of that stinking green twilight came a horde of those jellyfish things. They
poured
up
the tree, and writhed along the branch.

‘Even the sloth, which generally knows no fear, was afraid. It tried to run away, hooked itself on to a thinner part of the branch, which broke. It fell, and at once was covered with a shuddering mass of jelly. Those boneless men do not bite: they suck. And, as they suck, their colour changes from grey to pink and then to brown.

‘But they are afraid of us. There is race-memory
involved
here. We repel them, and they repel us. When they became aware of my presence, they – I was going to say, ran away – they slid away, dissolved into the shadows that kept dancing and dancing and dancing under the trees. And the horror came upon me, so that I ran away, and arrived back at our camp, bloody about the face with thorns, and utterly exhausted.

‘Yeoward was lancing a place in his ankle. A
tourniquet
was tied under his knee. Near-by lay a dead snake. He had broken its back with that same metal plate, but it had bitten him first. He said: “What kind of a snake do you call this? I’m afraid it is venomous. I feel a numbness in my cheeks and around my heart, and I
cannot
feel my hands.”

‘I said: “Oh, my God! You’ve been bitten by a jara-jaca!”

‘“And we have lost our medical supplies,” he said, with regret. “And there is so much work left to do. Oh, dear me, dear me! … Whatever happens, my dear fellow, take
this
and get back.”

‘And he gave me that semi-circle of unknown metal as a sacred trust. Two hours later, he died. That night the circle of glowing eyes grew narrower. I emptied my rifle at it, time and again. At dawn, the boneless men disappeared.

‘I heaped rocks on the body of Yeoward. I made a pylon, so that the men without bones could not get at him. Then – oh, so dreadfully lonely and afraid! – I shouldered my pack, and took my rifle and my machete, and ran away, down the trail we had covered. But I lost my way.

‘Can by can of food, I shed weight. Then my rifle went, and my ammunition. After that, I threw away even my machete. A long time later, that semi-circular plate became too heavy for me, so I tied it to a tree with liana-vine, and went on.

‘So I reached the Ahu territory, where the tattooed men nursed me and were kind to me. The women chewed my food for me, before they fed me, until I was strong again. Of the stores we had left there, I took only as much as I might need, leaving the rest as
payment
for guides and men to man the canoe down the river. And so I got back out of the jungle….

‘Please give me a little more rum.’ His hand was steady, now, as he drank, and his eyes were clear.

I said to him: ‘Assuming that what you say is true: these “boneless men” – they were, I presume, the
Martians? Yet it sounds unlikely, surely? Do invertebrates smelt hard metals and——’

‘Who said anything about Martians?’ cried Doctor Goodbody. ‘No, no, no! The Martians came here, adapted themselves to new conditions of life. Poor fellows, they changed, sank low; went through a whole new process – a painful process of evolution. What I’m trying to tell you, you fool, is that Yeoward and I did
not
discover Martians. Idiot, don’t you see?
Those
boneless
things
are
men.
We
are
Martians!’

I
FOUND
one of the most remarkable stories of the
century
– a story related to the most terrible event in the history of mankind – in a heap of rubbish in the corridor outside the office of Mr Harry Ainsworth, editor of the
People,
in 1943.

Every house in London, in those dark, exciting days, was being combed for salvage, particularly scrap metal and waste paper. Out of Mr Ainsworth’s office alone came more than three hundred pounds of paper that, on consideration, was condemned to pulp as not worth keeping.

The pamphlet I found must have been lying at the bottom of a bottom drawer – it was on top of the salvage basket. If the lady, or gentleman, who sent it to the
People
will communicate with me I will gladly pay her (or him) two hundred and fifty English pounds.

As literature it is nothing but a piece of pretentious nonsense written by one of those idle dabblers in ‘Natural Philosophy’ who rushed into print on the slightest provocation in the eighteenth century. But the significance of it is formidable.

It makes me afraid.

*

The author of my pamphlet had attempted to tickle his way into public notice with the feather of his pen by
writing an account of a Monster captured by a boatman fishing several miles out of Brighthelmstone in the county of Sussex in the summer of the year 1745.

The name of the author was the Reverend Arthur Titty. I see him as one of those pushing self-assertive vicars of the period, a rider to hounds, a purple-faced consumer of prodigious quantities of old port; a man of independent fortune, trying to persuade the world and himself that he was a deep thinker and a penetrating observer of the mysterious works of God.

I should never have taken the trouble to pocket his
Account
of
a
Strange
Monster
Captured
Near 
Bright
helmstone
in
the
County
of
Sussex
on
August
6th
in
the
Year
of
Our
Lord
1745
if it had not been for the
coincidence
of the date: I was born on 6 August. So I pushed the yellowed, damp-freckled pages into the breast pocket of my battledress, and thought no more about them until April 1947, when a casual remark sent me
running
, yelling like a maniac, to the cupboard in which my old uniforms were hanging.

The pamphlet was still in its pocket.

*

I shall not waste your time or strain your patience with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s turgid, high-falutin’ prose or his references to
De
rerum
–
this, that and the other. I propose to give you the unadorned facts in the very queer case of the Brighthelmstone Monster.

Brighthelmstone is now known as Brighton – a large, popular, prosperous holiday resort delightfully situated on the coast of Sussex by the Downs. But in the Reverend Titty’s day it was an obscure fishing village.

If a fisherman named Hodge had not had an unlucky
night on 5 August 1745, on the glass-smooth sea off Brighthelmstone, this story would never have been told. He had gone out with his brother-in-law, George Rodgers, and they had caught nothing but a few small and valueless fishes. Hodge was desperate. He was notorious in the village as a spendthrift and a drunkard, and it was suspected that he had a certain connection with a barmaid at the Smack Inn – it was alleged that she had a child by him in the spring of the following year. He had scored up fifteen shillings for beer and needed a new net. It is probable, therefore, that Hodge stayed out in his boat until after the dawn of 6 August because he feared to face his wife – who also,
incidentally
, was with child.

At last, glum, sullen, and thoroughly out of sorts, he prepared to go home.

And then, he said, there was something like a splash – only it was not a splash: it was rather like the bursting of a colossal bubble: and there, in the sea, less than ten yards from his boat, was the Monster, floating.

George Rodgers said: ‘By gogs, Jack Hodge, yon’s a man!’

‘Man? How can ’a be a man? Where could a man come from?’

The creature that had appeared with the sound of a bursting bubble drifted closer, and Hodge, reaching out with a boat-hook, caught it under the chin and pulled it to the side of the boat.

‘That be a Merman,’ he said, ‘and no Christian man. Look at ’un, all covered wi’ snakes and firedrakes, and yellow like a slug’s belly. By the Lord, George Rodgers, this might be the best night’s fishing I ever did if it’s alive, please the Lord! For if it is I can sell that for
better money than ever I got for my best catch this last twenty years, or any other fisherman either. Lend a hand, Georgie-boy, and let’s have a feel of it.’

George Rodgers said: ‘That’s alive, by hell – look now, and see the way the blood runs down where the gaff went home.’

‘Haul it in, then, and don’t stand there gaping like a puddock.’

They dragged the Monster into the boat. It was shaped like a man and covered from throat to ankle with brilliantly coloured images of strange monsters. A green, red, yellow and blue thing like a lizard sprawled between breast-bone and navel. Great serpents were coiled about its legs. A smaller snake, red and blue, was picked out on the Monster’s right arm: the snake’s tail covered the forefinger and its head was hidden in the armpit. On the left-hand side of its chest there was a big heart-shaped design in flaming scarlet. A great bird like an eagle in red and green spread its wings from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade, and a red fox chased six blue rabbits from the middle of his spine into some unknown hiding place between his legs. There were lobsters, fishes, and insects on his left arm and on his right buttock a devil-fish sprawled, encircling the lower part of his body with its tentacles. The back of his right hand was decorated with a butterfly in yellow, red, indigo and green. Low down, in the centre of the throat, where the bone begins, there was a strange,
incomprehensible
, evil-looking symbol.

The Monster was naked. In spite of its fantastic appearance it was so unmistakably a male human being that George Rodgers – a weak-minded but respectable man – covered it with a sack. Hodge prised open the
Monster’s mouth to look at its teeth, having warned his brother-in-law to stand by with an axe in case of emergency. The man-shaped creature out of the sea had red gums, a red tongue and teeth as white as sugar.

They forced it to swallow a little gin – Hodge always had a flask of gin in the boat – and it came to life with a great shudder, and cried out in a strange voice, opening wild black eyes and looking crazily left and right.

‘Tie that up. You tie that’s hands while I tie that’s feet,’ said Hodge.

The Monster offered no resistance.

‘Throw ’un back,’ said George Rodgers, suddenly overtaken by a nameless dread. ‘Throw ’un back, Jack, I say!’

But Hodge said: ‘You be mazed, George Rodgers, you born fool. I can sell ’e for twenty-five golden guineas. Throw ’un back? I’ll throw
’ee
back for a brass farthing, tha’ witless fool!’

There was no wind. The two fishermen pulled for the shore. The Monster lay in the bilge, rolling its eyes. The silly, good-natured Rodgers offered it a crust of bread which it snapped up so avidly that it bit his finger to the bone. Then Hodge tried to cram a wriggling live fish into its mouth, but ‘the Monster spat it out
pop
, like a cork out of a bottle, saving your Honour’s presence.’

Brighthelmstone boiled over with excitement when they landed. Even the Reverend Arthur Titty left his book and his breakfast, clapped on his three-cornered hat, picked up his cane, and went down to the fish-market to see what was happening. They told him that Hodge had caught a monster, a fish that looked like a man, a merman, a hypogriff, a sphinx – heaven knows
what. The crowd parted and Titty came face to face with the Monster.

Although the Monster understood neither Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian nor French, it was obvious that it was a human being, or something remarkably like one. This was evident in its manner of wrinkling its
forehead
, narrowing its eyes, and demonstrating that it was capable of understanding – or of wanting to understand, which is the same thing. But it could not speak; it could only cry out incoherently and it was obviously greatly distressed. The Reverend Arthur Titty said: ‘Oafs, ignorant louts! This is no sea monster, you fools, no
lusus
naturae,
but an unfortunate shipwrecked mariner.’

According to the pamphlet, Hodge said: ‘Your
Reverence
, begging your Reverence’s pardon, how can that be, since for the past fortnight there has been no breath of wind and no foreign vessel in these parts? If this be an unfortunate shipwrecked mariner, where is the wreck of his ship, and where was it wrecked? I humbly ask your Reverence how he appeared as you might say out of a bubble without warning on the face of the water, floating. And if your Honour will take the trouble to observe this unhappy creature’s skin your Reverence will see that it shows no signs of having been immersed for any considerable period in the ocean.’

I do not imagine for a moment that this is what Hodge really said: he probably muttered the substance of the argument in the form of an angry protest emphasised by a bitten-off oath or two. However, the Reverend Arthur Titty perceived that what the fisherman said was ‘not without some show of reason’ and said that he proposed to take the Monster to his house for examination.

Hodge protested vigorously. It was his Monster, he
said, because he had caught it in the open sea with his own hands, in his own boat, and parson or no parson, if Titty were the Archbishop himself, an Englishman had his rights. After some altercation, in the course of which the Monster fainted, the Reverend Arthur Titty gave Hodge a silver crown piece for the loan of the Monster for philosophical observation. They poured a few buckets of sea water over the Monster which came back to consciousness with a tremulous sigh. This was regarded as positive proof of its watery origin. Then it was carried to Titty’s house on a hurdle.

It rejected salt water as a drink, preferring fresh water or wine, and ate cooked food, expressing, with
unmistakable
grimaces, a distaste for raw fish and meat. It was put to bed on a heap of clean straw and covered with a blanket which was kept moistened with sea water. Soon the monster of Brighthelmstone revived and appeared desirous of walking. It could even make sounds reminiscent of human speech.

The Reverend Arthur Titty covered its nakedness under a pair of his old breeches and one of his old shirts … as if it had not been grotesque-looking enough before.

He weighed it, measured it, and bled it to discover whether it was thick or thin-blooded, cold or
hot-blooded
. According to Titty’s fussy little account the Monster was about five feet one and three-quarter inches tall. It weighed exactly one hundred and nineteen pounds, and walked upright. It possessed unbelievable strength and superhuman agility. On one occasion the Reverend Arthur Titty took it out for a walk on the end of a leather leash. The local blacksmith, one of Hodge’s boon companions, who was notorious for his gigantic
muscular power and bad temper – he was later to achieve nation-wide fame as Clifford, who broke the arm of the champion wrestler of Yorkshire – accosted the Reverend Arthur Titty outside his smithy and said: ‘Ah, so that’s Hodge’s catch as you stole from him. Let me feel of it to see if it be real,’ and he pinched the Monster’s shoulder very cruelly with one of his great hands – hands that could snap horseshoes and twist iron bars into spirals. The inevitable crowd of children and gaping villagers witnessed the event. The Monster picked up the two-hundred-pound blacksmith and threw him into a heap of scrap iron three yards away. For an anxious second or two Titty thought that the Monster was going to run amok, for its entire countenance changed; the nostrils quivered, the eyes shone with fierce intelligence, and from its open mouth there came a weird cry. Then the creature relapsed into heavy
dejection
and let itself be led home quietly, while the astonished blacksmith, bruised and bleeding, limped back to his anvil with the shocked air of a man who has seen the impossible come to pass.

Yet, the Monster was an extremely sick Monster. It ate little, sometimes listlessly chewing the same
mouthful
for fifteen minutes. It liked to squat on its haunches and stare unblinkingly at the sea. It was assumed that it was homesick for its native element, and so it was soused at intervals with buckets of brine and given a large tub of sea water to sleep in if it so desired. A learned doctor of medicine came all the way from Dover to examine it and pronounced it human;
unquestionably
an air-breathing mammal. But so were whales and crocodiles breathers of air that lived in the water.

Hodge, alternately threatening and whimpering,
claimed his property. The Reverend Arthur Titty called in his lawyer, who so bewildered the unfortunate
fisherman
with Latin quotations, legal jargon, dark hints and long words that, cursing and growling, he scrawled a cross in lieu of a signature at the foot of a document in which he agreed to relinquish all claim on the Monster in consideration of the sum of seven guineas, payable on the spot. Seven guineas was a great deal of money for a fisherman in those days. Hodge had never seen so many gold pieces in a heap, and had never owned one. Then a travelling showman visited the Reverend Arthur Titty and offered him twenty-five guineas for the Monster, which Titty refused. The showman spoke of the matter in the Smack, and Hodge, who had been drunk for a week, behaved ‘like one demented’, as Titty wrote in a contemptuous footnote. He made a thorough nuisance of himself, demanding the balance of the twenty-five guineas which were his by rights, was arrested and fined for riotous conduct. Then he was put in the stocks as an incorrigible drunkard, and the wicked little urchins of Brighthelmstone threw fish-guts at him.