Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

Kobalt turned, quick as a snake, with murder in his eyes. But then he saw the figure in the chair and his mouth hung open. He looked from it to the dead King. You know how death changes people. His Majesty, poor man, was all shrunk and shrivelled and blue, and looked somehow less than half as big as he had been five minutes before. The dummy, in every hair and every baggy pouch and wrinkle, was the image of the King as he had been when he was alive. Kobalt came slowly towards me. I never was a brave man, and loathe violence. I thought Kobalt was going to kill me, and all in a rush I said: ‘Don’t be hasty! De Kock and I are perfectly innocent, I swear it. His Majesty wanted a waxwork figure just to play a trick. A figure … like this….’

And I pressed levers. I made the wax image of Nicolas III stand up. It walked twelve rheumaticky paces, looked at the corpse of the King, turned on its heel, strode back, sat down groaning and trembling, and puffed at Kobalt all the vile words you have ever heard, in a voice like the voice of His Majesty. Then it was still, except for a swaying of the head and a continuous tremor. In a quiet place, of course, anyone could have heard the noise of the powerful clockwork that made it move. But in the Palace of poor King Nicolas III, where there were more than seven hundred clocks, the noise of cogs, ratchets and pendulums was perpetually in everybody’s ears; even the members of the kitchen staff when they were out imagined that they were still hearing the ticking of clocks.

Kobalt actually bowed to the image and started to say: ‘Your Majesty,’ but he stopped himself after the first syllable, and said: ‘How very remarkable!’

‘It is only a doll,’ said de Kock, and there was a certain gratification mixed with the terror in his voice, ‘a wax doll, a mere nothing.’

‘It looks real enough,’ I said, pressing the levers again; whereupon the figure got up, stood, walked twelve paces, turned, walked back, sat, groaned with agony and damned our eyes. Kobalt touched its wax forehead and shuddered. He went over to the King and felt his hand. Then his keen eyes veiled themselves. I could see that he was thinking hard and fast. It was not difficult to guess what was in his mind; the end of the King was the end of Kobalt. He, too, was as good as dead.

Soon he looked at me and said: ‘You made this machinery, did you? I want to have a word with you. And you, Monsieur de Kock, you made this waxwork figure? For the moment it deceived me. You are a very talented man, Monsieur de Kock … and His Majesty collapsed on seeing your little work, gentlemen? Few artists live to boast of a thing like that.’

If he had simply said: ‘Few artists can boast of a thing like that,’ I might not be here to tell you this story. But when he said ‘live to boast,’ I knew that there was something wicked in his mind. I knew that I was in frightful danger. Poor de Kock was already beginning to swell up like a pigeon, rolling his eyes and pushing out his chest. Kobalt went to a speaking-tube and blew into it, and then he said: ‘Major Krim? … Come down here at once with four or five men upon whom you can rely.’ Turning to me he said: ‘When I give you the word, make that thing work again.’

With an air of reverence – smiling now – he threw the sheet with which we had covered the dummy over the dead body of King Nicolas. Footsteps sounded. ‘Now!’ said Kobalt to me and I pressed levers. Major Krim, a man with a scarred face, came in with four others. As they entered, the dummy got out of the chair and walked abstractedly a few paces while Kobalt, keeping a wicked eye on me, said: ‘His Majesty commands that the Dr Zerbin and the attendant Putzi be put under arrest instantly, and kept incommunicado .’

The thunderstruck doctor and the grief-stunned attendant were taken away. As the door closed the unhappy Putzi began to weep again, looking back over his shoulder at the thing covered by the sheet.

‘Oh, you may well cry, you scabby dog!’ shouted Kobalt, and then the image sat down groaning and quivering with the inevitable asthmatic curses, and the door closed.

Kobalt opened it again very quickly and glanced outside; shut it again and locked it, and said to me: ‘What a very remarkable man you are, my dear M. Pommel, to make something like that. Why, it is almost – if I may say so without irreverence – almost like God breathing the breath of life into clay. How does it work?’

I have always been a timid and obliging man, but now – thank God – something prompted me to say: ‘Your Highness, that is my secret and I refuse to tell you.’

Kobalt still smiled, but there was a stiffness in his smile and a brassy gleam in his eyes. He said: ‘Well, well, far be it from me to pry into your professional secrets – eh, M. de Kock? … How wonderful, how marvellous – how infinitely more important than the death of kings, who are only human after all and come and go – how very much more important is the work that makes a man live for ever! To be a great artist – only that is worth while. Ah, M. de Kock, M. de Kock, how I envy you!’

Poor foolish de Kock said: ‘Oh, a mere nothing.’

He had been drinking Plum Brandy. His vanity was tickled. I could not help thinking that if he had a tail he would wag it then.

‘How does that work?’ asked Kobalt, and the very intonation of his voice was a gross flattery. I could not stop looking at the body of the King under the sheet; but de Kock, full of pride, said: ‘What do I know of such things? Your Highness, I am an artist – an artist – not a maker of clockwork toys. Your Highness, I neither know nor wish to know, nor have I the time to get to know, the workings of an alarm clock.’

In quite a different tone of voice, Kobalt then said: ‘Oh, I see.’ And so he gave another order, and Major Krim conducted de Kock to his suite, where, three weeks later, he was found with his brains blown out and the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth. The verdict was suicide: de Kock had emptied three bottles of a liqueur called Gurika that day.

But that is not the point. As soon as the Major had led de Kock out of the workshop, Kobalt began to talk to me.

Oh, that was a very remarkable and a very dangerous man! You were asking me about de Kock, earlier in the evening, and I said that I was not quite sure whether poor Honoré really committed suicide. Well, thinking again, I am convinced that he did not. The butt of the revolver was in his hand, the muzzle was in his mouth, and his brains were on the wall. There was one peculiar aspect of this suicide, as it was so called: the revolver was held in de Kock’s right hand, and I happened to know that he was left-handed. It seems to me that he would have picked up his revolver with the same hand that he used to pick up the tools of his trade. A man dies, if he must, as he lives – by his best hand. And then again: Dr Zerbin and the attendant Putzi disappeared.

I beg your pardon, all this happened later. I was telling you that when I was alone in the workshop with Kobalt, he talked to me. He said that he would give me scores of thousands, together with the highest honours that man could receive, if I would communicate to him the secret of that unhappy dummy that de Kock and I had made to amuse the King who now crouched dead in his chair. I have always been timid but never a fool. I became calm, extremely calm, and I said:

‘I think I see your point, Your Highness. Without His Majesty, you are nothing. Naturally you want to be what you are and to save what you have – you want to be, as it were, the Regent in everything but name. If the news of His Majesty’s death reaches Tancredy, you are out. You may even have to run for your life, leaving many desirable things behind you. Yes,’ I said, ‘I believe that I can see to the back of your scheme. Once you are acquainted with the working of this doll, you will work it. King Nicolas III, the poor old gentleman, was the Father of his country, with half a century of tradition behind him. As long as King Nicolas could show himself to the people, the monarchy was safe. And as long as the monarchy was safe, you were great. This dummy here looks so much like His unhappy Majesty that even you, at close quarters, were deceived for a moment. If the real King had not been sitting over there, you would never have known anything. I may go so far as to say that the figure de Kock made and I animated is even stronger than the King because it can stand up and walk of its own accord, which His Majesty could not; and say the same things in the same voice. It can even write His Majesty’s signature.’