The Best of Gerald Kersh (24 page)

Let out of the stocks with a severe reprimand,
smelling
horribly of dead fish, Hodge went to the Smack and ordered a quart of strong ale, which came in a heavy can. Rodgers, to whom Hodge had given only twelve shillings, came in for his modest morning draught, and told Hodge that he was nothing better than a damned rogue. He claimed half of the seven golden guineas. Hodge, having drunk his quart, struck Rodgers with the can, and broke his skull; for which he was hanged not long afterwards.

The Brighthelmstone Monster was an unlucky Monster.

The Reverend Arthur Titty also suffered. After the killing of Rodgers and the hanging of Hodge the
fishermen
began to hate him. Heavy stones were thrown against his shutters at night. Someone set fire to one of his haystacks. This must have given Titty something to think about, for rick-burning was a hanging matter, and one may as well hang for a parson as for a haystack. He made up his mind to go to London and live in politer society. So he was uprooted by the Monster. The
fishermen
hated the Monster too. They regarded it as a sort of devil. But the Monster did not care. It was languishing, dying of a mysterious sickness. Curious sores had appeared at various points on the Monster’s body – they began as little white bumps such as one gets from
stinging
-nettles, and slowly opened and would not close. The looseness of the skin, now, lent the dragons and fishes a disgustingly lifelike look: as the Monster breathed, they writhed. A veterinary surgeon poured melted pitch on the sores. The Reverend Titty kept it well soaked in sea water and locked it in a room, because it had shown signs of wanting to escape.

At last, nearly three months after its first appearance in Brighthelmstone, the Monster escaped. An old
manservant
, Alan English, unlocked the door, in the presence of the Reverend Arthur Titty, to give the Monster its daily mess of vegetables and boiled meat. As the key turned the door was flung open with such violence that English fell forward into the room – his hand was still on the door-knob – and the Monster ran out, crying aloud in a high, screaming voice. The Reverend Arthur Titty caught it by the shoulder, whereupon he was whisked away like a leaf in the wind and lay stunned at the end of the passage. The Monster ran out of the house. Three
responsible witnesses – Rebecca North, Herbert George and Abraham Herris (or Harris) – saw it running towards the sea, stark naked, although a north-east wind was blowing. The two men ran after it, and Rebecca North followed as fast as she could. The Monster ran straight into the bitter water and began to swim, its arms and legs vibrating like the wings of an insect. Herbert George saw it plunge into the green heart of a great wave, and then the heavy rain fell like a curtain and the Brighthelmstone Monster was never seen again.

It had never spoken. In the later stages of its disease its teeth had fallen out. With one of these teeth –
probably
a canine – it had scratched marks on the dark oak panels of the door of the room in which it was
confined
. These marks the Reverend Arthur Titty faithfully copied and reproduced in his pamphlet.

The Brighthelmstone fishermen said that the sea devil had gone back where it belonged, down to the bottom of the sea to its palace built of the bones of lost Christian sailors. Sure enough, half an hour after the Monster disappeared there was a terrible storm, and many seamen lost their lives. In a month or so Titty left
Brighthelmstone
for London. The city swallowed him. He published his pamphlet in 1746 – a bad year for natural philosophy, because the ears of England were still full of the Jacobite Rebellion of ’45.

Poor Titty! If he could have foreseen the real
significance
of the appearance of the Monster of
Brighthelmstone
he would have died happy … in a lunatic asylum.

Nobody would have believed him.

*

Now in April 1947 I had the good fortune to meet one of my oldest and dearest friends, a colonel in
Intelligence
who, for obvious reasons, must remain anonymous, although he is supposed to be in retirement now and wears civilian clothes, elegantly cut in the narrow-sleeved style of the late nineteen-twenties, and rather the worse for wear. The Colonel is in many ways a romantic character, something like Rudyard Kipling’s Strickland Sahib. He has played many strange parts in his time, that formidable old warrior; and his quick black eyes, disturbingly Asiatic-looking under the slackly-drooping eyelids, have seen more than you and I will ever see.

He never talks about his work. An Intelligence officer who talks ceases automatically to be an Intelligence officer. A good deal of his conversation is of sport, manly sport – polo, pig-sticking, cricket, rugby football, hunting, and, above all, boxing and wrestling. I imagine that the Colonel, who has lived underground in
disguise
for so many years of his life, finds relief in the big wide-open games in which a man must meet his opponent face to face yet may, without breaking the rules, play quick tricks.

We were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes after dinner in my flat and he was talking about oriental wrestling. He touched on wrestling technique among the Afghans and in the Deccan, and spoke with
admiration
of Gama, the Western Indian wrestler, still a
rock-crusher
at an age when most men are shivering in slippers by the fire, who beat Zbyszko; remarked on a
South-Eastern
Indian named Patil who could knock a strong man senseless with the knuckle of his left thumb; and went on to Chinese wrestlers, especially Mongolians,
who are tremendously heavy and powerful, and use their feet. A good French-Canadian lumberjack (the Colonel said), accustomed to dancing on rolling logs in a
rushing
river, could do dreadful things with his legs and feet, like the Tiger of Quebec, who in a scissors-hold killed Big Ted Glass of Detroit. In certain kinds of wrestling size and weight were essential, said the Colonel. The Japanese wrestlers of the heavy sort – the ones that weighed three or four hundred pounds and looked like pigs – those big ones that started on all fours and went through a series of ritual movements; they had to be enormously heavy. In fact the heavier they were the better.

‘No, Gerald my lad, give me ju-jitsu,’ he said. ‘There is no one on earth who can defeat a master of ju-jitsu – except someone who takes him by surprise. Of course, a scientific boxer, getting a well-placed punch in first, would put him out for the count. But the real adept develops such wonderful co-ordination of hand and eye that if he happens to be expecting it he can turn to his own advantage even the lightning punch of a wizard like Jimmy Wilde. He could give away eight stone to Joe Louis and make him look silly. Georges Hackenschmidt, for instance, is one of the greatest catch-as-catch-can wrestlers that ever lived, and one of the strongest men of his day. But I question whether he, wrestling Catch, might have stood up against Yukio Tani? Oh, by the way, speaking of Yukio Tani, did you ever hear of a wrestler called Sato?’

‘I can’t say that I have. Why? Should I have heard of him?’

‘Why, he is, or was, a phenomenon. I think he was a better wrestler than Tani. My idea was to take him all
round the world and challenge all comers – boxers, wrestlers, even fencers, to stand up against him for ten minutes. He was unbelievable. Furthermore, he
looked
so frightful. I won a hundred and fifty quid on him at Singapore in 1938. He took on four of the biggest and best boxers and wrestlers we could lay our hands on and floored the whole lot in seven minutes by the clock. Just a minute, I’ve got a picture in my wallet. I keep it
because
it looks so damn funny. Look.’

The Colonel handed me a dog-eared photograph of an oddly assorted group. There was a hairy mammoth of a man, obviously a wrestler, standing with his arms folded so that his biceps looked like coconuts, beside another man, almost as big, but with the scrambled features of a rough-and-tumble bruiser. There was one blond
grinning
man who looked like a light heavy-weight, and a beetle-browed middle-weight with a bulldog jaw. The Colonel was standing in the background, smiling in a fatherly way. In the foreground smiling into the camera stood a tiny Japanese. The top of his head was on a level with the big wrestler’s breast-bone, but he was more than half as broad as he was tall. He was all chest and arms. The knuckles of his closed hands touched his knees. I took the picture to the light and looked more closely. The photographer’s flash-bulb had illuminated every detail. Sato had made himself even more hideous with tattooing. He was covered with things that creep and crawl, real and fabulous. A dragon snarled on his stomach. Snakes were coiled about his legs. Another snake wound itself about his right arm from forefinger to armpit. The other arm was covered with angry-
looking
lobsters and goggle-eyed fishes, and on the left breast there was the conventionalised shape of a heart.

It was then that I uttered an astonished oath and went running to look for my old uniform, which I found, with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s pamphlet still in the
inside
breast pocket. The Colonel asked me what the devil was the matter with me. I smoothed out the pamphlet and gave it to him without a word.

He looked at it, and said: ‘How very extraordinary!’ Then he put away his eye-glass and put on a pair of spectacles; peered intently at the smudged and ragged drawing of the Brighthelmstone Monster, compared it with the photograph of Sato and said to me: ‘I have come across some pretty queer things in my time, but I’m damned if I know what to make of this.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘was your Sato tattooed behind? And if so, in what way?’

Without hesitation the Colonel said: ‘A red-and-green hawk stooping between the shoulder-blades, a red fox chasing six blue-grey rabbits down his spine, and an octopus on the right buttock throwing out tentacles that went round to the belly. Why?’

Then I opened Titty’s pamphlet and put my finger on the relevant passage. The Colonel read it and changed colour. But he said nothing. I said: ‘This is the
damnedest
coincidence. There’s another thing. This so-called Monster of Brighton scratched something on the door of the room where he was locked up, and the old parson took a pencil rubbing of it. Turn over four or five pages and you’ll see a copy of it.’

The Colonel found the page. The spongy old paper was worn into holes, blurred by time and the dampness of lumber-rooms and the moisture of my body. He said: ‘It looks like Japanese. But no Japanese would write like that surely …’

‘Remember,’ I said, ‘that the Brighton Monster scratched its message with one of its own teeth on the panel of an oak door. Allow for that; allow for the fact that it was weak and sick; take into consideration the grain of the wood; and then see what you make of it.’

The Colonel looked at the inscription for ten long minutes, copying it several times from several different angles. At last he said: ‘This says:
I
was
asleep.
I
thought
that
it
was
all
a
bad
dream
from
which
I
should
awake
and
find
myself
by
the
side
of
my
wife.
Now
I
know
that
it
is
not
a
dream.
I
am
sick
in
the
head.
Pity
me,
poor
Sato,
who
went
to
sleep
in
one
place
and
awoke
in
another.
I
cannot
live
any
more.
I
must
die.
Hiroshima
1945
.’

‘What do you make of that?’ I asked.

The Colonel said: ‘I don’t know. I only know the bare facts about Sato because, as I have already told you, I was trying to find him. (a) He had a wife, and a home somewhere in Hiroshima, (b) He was in the Japanese Navy, and he went on leave in August 1945. (c) Sato disappeared off the face of the earth when they dropped that damned atom bomb. (d) This is unquestionably a picture of Sato – the greatest little wrestler the world has ever known. (e) The description of the tattooing on the back of this Monster tallies exactly with Sato’s … I don’t know quite what to make of it. Sato, you know, was a Christian. He counted the years the Christian way.
Hiroshima
1945.
I wonder!’

‘What do you wonder?’

‘Why,’ said the Colonel, ‘there can’t be the faintest shadow of a doubt that Sato got the middle part of the blast of that frightful atom bomb when we dropped it on Hiroshima. You may or may not have heard of Dr Sant’s
crazy theories concerning Time in relation to Speed. Now imagine that you happen to be caught up –
without
disintegrating – in a species of air-pocket on the fringe of an atomic blast and are flung away a thousand times faster than if you had been fired out of a cannon. Imagine it. According to the direction in which you happen to be thrown you may find yourself in the middle of Tomorrow or on the other side of Yesterday. Don’t laugh at me. I may have been frying my brains in the tropics most of my life, and I may be crazy; but I’ve learned to believe all kinds of strange things. My opinion is that my poor little Sato was
literally
blown
back
two hundred years in time.’

I said: ‘But why blown backwards only in time? How do you account for his being struck by the blast in Hiroshima and ending in Brighton?’

‘I’m no mathematician,’ said the Colonel, ‘but as I understand, the earth is perpetually spinning and Space is therefore shifting all the time. If you, for example, could stand absolutely still, here, now, where you are, while the earth moved – if you stood still only for one hour, you’d find yourself in Budapest. Do you
understand
what I mean? That atomic blast picked little Sato up and threw him back in Time. When you come to think of that, and remember all the curious Monsters they used to exhibit in Bartholomew’s Fair during the eighteenth century – when you think of all the
Mermaids
, Monsters, and Mermen that they picked out of the sea and showed on fair-grounds until they died … it makes you think.’