Nightshade and Damnations Read online

  NIGHTSHADE AND

  DAMNATIONS

  GERALD KERSH

  With an introduction by

  HARLAN ELLISON

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Nightshade and Damnations by Gerald Kersh

  Originally published Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1968

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1947, 1948, 1953, 1954, 1957, 1958, 1962, 1968 by Gerald Kersh

  Introduction © 1968 by Harlan Ellison

  Reprinted with the kind permission of Mr. Ellison and the Estate of Gerald Kersh

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  INTRODUCTION

  Kersh, the Demon Prince

  Nightmares, phantasmagoria, horrors that lurk in the streets of today, the corrupting weaknesses of men; these are the bones and gristle of what this book contains.

  The flesh is the talent of Gerald Kersh.

  In England, Kersh is a much-revered author. His books are seldom out of print. They honor and respect him. Which is a bit unusual, when one considers that Kersh is an American, and that here in America we barely know his work. In ugly point of fact, his brilliant novels Night and the City and A Long Cool Day in Hell cannot be obtained, and the very best of his works, Fowlers End, has never been reprinted.

  It gives one pause. Why should it be so? Almost any hack who can write in something that approximates the English language can get published these days. Lady novelists unfit to carry Kersh’s pencil box sell millions in paperback. Non-novelists who rearrange the facts of contemporary history in narrative form find themselves lionized. Rock singers mislabeled poets scatter the pearls of their illiteracy across the bookstalls and get lotta pieces green paper in return. Then why should it be true that a man who has been captivating audiences with his offbeat and penetrating stories for over a quarter of a century should find it close to impossible to reach a wide American audience . . . ?

  I’ll be nice today. I won’t castigate the American reading public. It is too often led to the literary slaughter for me to kick it in the rump while it waits for the butcher’s hook. I’ll offer instead a totally specious reason for Kersh’s unfamiliarity to most readers, and thereby work into a rationale for this book having been edited by a man who has never met Gerald Kersh.

  Burn your newspaper!

  Shut your door and slip the police latch!

  Sit with lights out in a darkness that deepens!

  Now . . .

  Now you begin to live in the dark night of the soul.

  And in that endless night you meet Kersh.

  Kersh, damn him, the Demon Prince. Who speaks thus:

  “We hang about the necks of our tomorrows like hungry harlots about the necks of penniless sailors.”

  Kersh, who can describe the indescribable:

  “A man has a shape; a crowd has no shape and no color. The massed faces of a hundred thousand men make one blank pallor; their clothes add up to a shadow; they have no words. This man might have been one hundred-thousandth part of the featureless whiteness, the dull grayness, and the toneless murmuring of a docile multitude. He was something less than nondescript—he was blurred, without identity, like a smudged fingerprint. His suit was of some dim shade between brown and gray. His shirt had gray-blue stripes, his tie was patterned with dots like confetti trodden into the dust, and his oddment of limp brownish mustache resembled a cigarette-butt, disintegrating shred by shred in a tea-saucer.”

  Damn thee, Kersh, bastard! How many times have I tried to describe such a man and crumbled the paper into my waste basket? How many times have I sought the images, and never found them? Damn you, Kersh, for showing me, and all of us who strive to capture magic in a shot glass, how much better you are, how much more easily you can do it! For someone who has never tried to write, it looks simple. But like all great art—like the dancing of Fred Astaire and the silken sculpture of Calder—its complexity is best expressed by its appearance of simplicity.

  No, I’ve never met Kersh. But I’m editing Kersh, because it takes one to know one.

  It takes somebody who writes about households filled with LSD hippies who turn into vampires to know somebody who writes about a man who is pursued by men without bones. It takes somebody who writes of the soul of a hooker trapped in a slot machine to know somebody who writes of the man who found the Lid to the Under World. It takes somebody who knows the face of nightmare to truly introduce somebody who deals in nightshade and damnations.

  As you may have gathered, I admire Gerald Kersh and his work almost shamelessly. His stories have intrigued and stimulated me for many years. When I was asked to put together this marvelous group of stories, I considered it a rare privilege and honor.

  Then I set about reading everything I’ve ever read by Kersh, not to mention half-a-hundred others that had slipped past me somehow. From those stories I’ve selected what I consider to be the very finest, most memorable pieces Kersh’s endlessly inventive mind has let escape.

  But in the selection, oh what serendipity! what side benefits! what extra treasures I found:

  A phrase of such penetrating rationality, that I had it printed on big yellow cards, which I give to my friends, that reads:

  “. . . there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armor, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.”

  A random chance phrase that captured my imagination wholly; stopped me, stunned, at the perfection of the imagery:

  “A storm broke, and at every clap of thunder the whole black sky splintered like a window struck by a bullet—starred and cracked in ten thousand directions letting in flashes of dazzling light, so that I was stunned and bewildered.”

  A special character, who lumbered or flopped or hurled himself across the pages of a story so unforgettably that he became a real person, someone added to my list of authentic acquaintances.

  But it is not merely for the terror and strangeness and breath-holding qualities that I commend these Kersh fables to you. Each of them says something potent and immediate about the world in which we live.

  Depending on how you want your mind bent, “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” once and for all demolishes the myth of military nobility . . . or solidifies it for all time.

  “The Queen of Pig Island” says something new and terrible about the nature of love. “The Ape and the Mystery” indicates a rational size for the cap-A in Art. “A Lucky Day for the Boar” might well be printed as a small pamphlet and included in any orientation kit given to young executives starting in at advertising agencies. “Voices in the Dust of Annan” and “The Brighton Monster” comment with a kind of hideous clarity on war and where it leads us.

  And I’ve included “Busto Is a Ghost, Too Mean to Give Us a Fright!” because of the sheer unexcelled brilliance of the descriptions therein. There are others, as well, that make salient points about what is happening to you today . . . but mostly they’re here because they are whopping good yarns.

  Kersh still writes, and better than ever, I’d venture. But he isn’t a bright-eyed, bushy-quilled writer of twenty any longer. As Kersh is so painfully persistent in reminding us, we all d
ie. But most men die, and no one knows they have passed this way. It can never be so with Kersh. He is leaving a legacy—expanding with each impact of a typewriter key—that has influenced, and is still influencing, generations of younger writers.

  By the excellence of what he has done, Gerald Kersh infuriates and spurs other writers to try and beat him at his own game.

  Perhaps one day, one of us will realize that it is impossible to beat a Demon Prince. The sonofabitch uses magic. No mortal can write this well.

  Harlan Ellison

  New York City

  September 5, 1967

  Harlan Ellison (b. 1934) is a prolific American writer best known for his short stories and screenplays in the science fiction genre. In over fifty years of writing, he has created over seventy books, ten screenplays, numerous television scripts, and seventeen hundred short stories. The Washington Post called him “one of the greatest living American short story writers,” and the Los Angeles Times proclaimed him the “20th Century Lewis Carroll.” He has won the Hugo Award nine times, the Nebula Award four times, the Bram Stoker Award five times, including its lifetime achievement award, the Edgar Award twice, and the World Fantasy Award twice, among many other awards. He lives in California.

  NIGHTSHADE AND DAMNATIONS

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  NIGHTSHADE AND DAMNATIONS

  The Queen of Pig Island

  Frozen Beauty

  The Brighton Monster

  MEN WITHOUT BONES

  “BUSTO IS A GHOST,

  TOO MEAN TO GIVE US A FRIGHT!”

  THE APE AND THE MYSTERY

  THE KING WHO COLLECTED CLOCKS

  BONE FOR DEBUNKERS

  A LUCKY DAY FOR THE BOAR

  VOICES IN THE DUST OF ANNAN

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CORPORAL CUCKOO?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The Queen of Pig Island

  The story of the Baroness von Wagner, that came to its sordid and bloody end after she, with certain others, had tried to make an earthly paradise on a desert island, was so fantastic that if it had not first been published as news, even the editors of the sensational crime-magazines would have thought twice before publishing it.

  Yet the von Wagner Case is commonplace, considered in relation to the Case of the Skeletons on Porcosito, or “Pig Island,” as it is commonly called.

  The bones in themselves are component parts of a nightmare. Their history, as it was found, written on mutilated paper in Lalouette’s waterproof grouch-bag, is such that no one has yet dared to print it, although it happens to be true.

  In case you are unacquainted with the old slang of the road: a grouch-bag is a little pouch that used to hang about the necks of circus performers. It held their savings, and was tied with a gathered string, like the old-fashioned Dorothy-bag. This was necessary, because circus-encampments used to be hotbeds of petty larceny. So, on the high trapeze, the double-back-somersault man wore his grouch-bag. The lion-tamer in the cage of the big cats might forget his whip or lose his nerve—he would never forget or lose his grouch-bag, out of which could be filched the little moist roll of paper-money that was all he had to show for his constantly imperiled life.

  Lalouette carried her grouch-bag long after the gulls had picked her clean. It contained 6,700 dollars and a wad of paper with a scribbled story, which I propose to make public here.

  It is at once the most terrible and the most pathetic story I have ever had to tell.

  At first the captain of the ship who landed on Porcosito, who subscribed to a popular science magazine, thought he had discovered the missing link—the creature that was neither man nor ape. The first skeleton he found had a sub-human appearance. The thorax was capacious enough to contain a small barrel; the arms were remarkably long, and the legs little and crooked. The bones of the hands, the feet, and the jaw, were prodigiously strong and thick. But then, not far away—it is only a little island—in a clump of bushes, he found another skeleton, of a man who, when he was alive, could not have been more than two feet tall.

  There were other bones: bones of pigs, birds, and fishes; and also the scattered bones of another man who must have been no taller than the other little man. These bones were smashed to pieces and strewn over an area of several square yards. Wildly excited, happy as a schoolboy reading a mystery story, the captain (his name was Oxford) went deeper, into the more sheltered part of Porcosito, where a high hump or rock rises in the form of a hog’s back and shelters a little hollow place from the wind that blows off the sea. There he found the ruins of a crude hut.

  The roof, which must have been made of grass, or light canes, had disappeared. The birds had come in and pecked clean the white bones of a woman. Most of her hair was still there, caught in a crack into which the wind had blown it or the draft had pulled it. It was long and fair hair. The leather grouch-bag, which had hung about her neck, was lying on the floor in the region of the lower vertebræ, which were scattered like thrown dice. This human skeleton had no arms and no legs. Captain Oxford had the four sets of bones packed into separate boxes, and wrote in his log a minute account of his exploration of the tiny island of Porcosito. He believed that he had discovered something unexplainable.

  He was disappointed.

  The underwriters of Lloyd’s in London had, with their usual punctiliousness, paid the many thousands of pounds for which the steamship Anna Maria had been insured, after she went down near Pig Island, as sailors called the place. The Anna Maria had gone down with all hands in a hurricane. The captain, officers, passengers, cargo, and crew had been written off as lost. Faragut’s Circus was on board, traveling to Mexico.

  Captain Oxford had not found the remains of an unclassified species of overgrown, undergrown, and limbless monsters. He had found the bones of Gargantua the Horror, Tick and Tack, the Tiny Twins, and Lalouette.

  She had been born without arms and legs, and she was the queen of Pig Island. It was Lalouette who wrote the story I am telling now.

  Tick and Tack were tiny, but they were not twins.

  A casual observer sees only the littleness of midgets, so that they all look alike. Tick was born in England, and his real name was Greaves. Tack, who was born in Dijon, Brittany, was the son of a poor innkeeper named Kerouaille. They were about twenty-five inches tall, but well-formed, and remarkably agile, so that they made an attractive dancing-team. They were newcomers to the circus, and I never saw them.

  But I have seen Gargantua and Lalouette; and so have hundreds of my readers. Gargantua the Horror has haunted many women’s dreams. He was, indeed, half as strong and twice as ugly as a gorilla. A gorilla is not ugly according to the gorilla standard of beauty; Gargantua was ugly by any reckoning. He did not look like a man, and he did not quite resemble an ape. He was afflicted by that curious disease of the pituitary gland which the endocrinologists term acromegaly. There is a well-known wrestler who has it. Something goes wrong with one of the glands of internal secretion, so that the growth of the bones runs out of control. It can happen to anyone. It could happen to me, or to you; and it produces a really terrifying ugliness. Gargantua, as it happened, was by nature a man of terrible strength; George Walsh has told me that he might have been heavy-weight weight-lifting champion of the world. An astute promoter realized that there was money in his hideousness; so Percy Robinson rechristened himself. Gargantua the Horror grew a beard—which came out in tufts like paint-brushes all over his face—and became a wrestler. As a wrestler he was too sweet-natured and silly, so he drifted into a sideshow. Naked to the waist, wearing only a bearskin loincloth, he performed frightening feats of strength. In a fair in Italy I saw him lift on his back a platform upon which a fat man sat playing a grand piano. That same evening I saw Lalouette.

  I would not have seen her if I had not been in the company of a beautiful and capricious woman who said, when I
told her I had a prejudice against going to stare at freaks, that if I would not come with her she would go in alone. So I bought the tickets and we went into the booth.

  Lalouette was an aristocrat among freaks. She drew great crowds. Having been born without arms and legs she had cultivated her lips and teeth, and the muscles of her neck, back and stomach, so that she could dress herself, wash herself, and, holding a brush or pencil in her lips, paint a pretty little picture in watercolors or write a letter in clear round longhand. They called her Lalouette because she could sing like a bird. One had the impression that she could do anything but comb her hair. She could even move a little, by throwing her weight forward and sideways in a strange rolling motion. Lalouette painted a little picture while we watched, and sang a little song, and my lady friend and I, overcome with admiration and with pity, agreed that a woman of her accomplishments might have been one of the greatest women in Europe if the Lord in His wisdom had seen fit to make her whole. For she was a lady, superbly educated, and extremely beautiful—a blonde with great black eyes and magnificent hair of white-gold. But there she was, a freak on a turntable; nothing but a body and a head, weighing fifty pounds.