Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

He spoke quietly and in a carefully modulated voice; but there was a certain blank, lost look in his eyes that suggested to me that I keep within ducking distance of his restless hands which, now that I think of them, put me in mind of that grey, hairy, bird-eating spider.

‘Mobile, Alabama,’ I said.

‘Take me along?’ he asked.

‘None of my affair. Sorry. Passenger myself,’ I said. ‘The skipper’s ashore. Better wait for him on the wharf. He’s the boss.’

‘Would you happen, by any chance, to have a drink about you?’

Giving him some rum, I asked: ‘How come they let you aboard?’

‘I’m not crazy,’ he said. ‘Not actually … a little fever, nothing more. Malaria, dengue fever, jungle fever, rat-bite fever. Feverish country, this, and others of the same nature. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Goodbody, Doctor of Science of Osbaldeston University. Does it convey nothing to you? No? Well then; I was assistant to Professor Yeoward. Does that convey anything to you?’

I said: ‘Yeoward, Professor Yeoward? Oh yes. He was lost, wasn’t he, somewhere in the upland jungle beyond the source of the Amer River?’

‘Correct!’ cried the little man who called himself Goodbody. ‘I saw him get lost.’

Fruta! – Fruta! – Fruta! – Fruta! came the voices of the men in the hold. There was rivalry between their leader and the big black stevedore ashore. The flares spluttered. The green bananas came down. And a kind of sickly sigh came out of the jungle, off the rotting river – not a wind, not a breeze – something like the foul breath of high fever.

Trembling with eagerness and, at the same time, shaking with fever chills, so that he had to use two hands to raise his glass to his lips – even so, he spilled most of the rum – Doctor Goodbody said: ‘For God’s sake, get me out of this country – take me to Mobile – hide me in your cabin!’

‘I have no authority,’ I said, ‘but you are an American citizen; you can identify yourself; the Consul will send you home.’

‘No doubt. But that would take time. The Consul thinks I am crazy too. And if I don’t get away, I fear that I really will go out of my mind. Can’t you help me? I’m afraid.’

‘Come on, now,’ I said. ‘No one shall hurt you while I’m around. What are you afraid of?’

‘Men without bones,’ he said, and there was something in his voice that stirred the hairs on the back of my neck. ‘Little fat men without bones!’

I wrapped him in a blanket, gave him some quinine, and let him sweat and shiver for a while, before I asked, humouring him: ‘What men without bones?’

He talked in fits and starts in his fever, his reason staggering just this side of delirium:

‘… What men without bones? … They are nothing to be afraid of, actually. It is they who are afraid of you. You can kill them with your boot, or with a stick…. They are something like jelly. No, it is not really fear – it is the nausea, the disgust they inspire. It overwhelms. It paralyses! I have seen a jaguar, I tell you – a full-grown jaguar – stand frozen, while they clung to him, in hundreds, and ate him up alive! Believe me, I saw it. Perhaps it is some oil they secrete, some odour they give out … I don’t know …’

Then, weeping, Doctor Goodbody said: ‘Oh, nightmare – nightmare – nightmare! To think of the depths to which a noble creature can be degraded by hunger! Horrible, horrible!’

‘Some debased form of life that you found in the jungle above the source of the Amer?’ I suggested. ‘Some degenerate kind of anthropoid?’

‘No, no, no. Men! Now surely you remember Professor Yeoward’s ethnological expedition?’

‘It was lost,’ I said.

‘All but me,’ he said. ‘… We had bad luck. At the Anaña Rapids we lost two canoes, half our supplies and most of our instruments. And also Doctor Terry, and Jack Lambert, and eight of our carriers….

‘Then we were in Ahu territory where the Indians use poison darts, but we made friends with them and bribed them to carry our stuff westward through the jungle … because, you see, all science starts with a guess, a rumour, an old wives’ tale; and the object of Professor Yeoward’s expedition was to investigate a series of Indian folk tales that tallied. Legends of a race of gods that came down from the sky in a great flame when the world was very young….

‘Line by criss-cross line, and circle by concentric circle, Yeoward localised the place in which these tales had their root – an unexplored place that has no name because the Indians refuse to give it a name, it being what they call a “bad place”.’

His chills subsiding and his fever abating, Doctor Goodbody spoke calmly and rationally now. He said, with a short laugh: ‘I don’t know why, whenever I get a touch of fever, the memory of those boneless men comes back in a nightmare to give me the horrors….

‘So, we went to look for the place where the gods came down in flame out of the night. The little tattooed Indians took us to the edge of the Ahu territory and then put down their packs and asked for their pay, and no consideration would induce them to go further. We were going, they said, to a very bad place. Their chief, who had been a great man in his day, sign-writing with a twig, told us that he had strayed there once, and drew a picture of something with an oval body and four limbs, at which he spat before rubbing it out with his foot in the dirt. Spiders? we asked. Crabs? What?

‘So we were forced to leave what we could not carry with the old chief against our return, and go on unaccompanied, Yeoward and I, through thirty miles of the rottenest jungle in the world. We made about a quarter of a mile in a day … a pestilential place! When that stinking wind blows out of the jungle, I smell nothing but death, and panic….

‘But, at last, we cut our way to the plateau and climbed the slope, and there we saw something marvellous. It was something that had been a gigantic machine. Originally it must have been a pear-shaped thing, at least a thousand feet long and, in its widest part, six hundred feet in diameter. I don’t know of what metal it had been made, because there was only a dusty outline of a hull and certain ghostly remains of unbelievably intricate mechanisms to prove that it had ever been. We could not guess from where it had come; but the impact of its landing had made a great valley in the middle of the plateau.

‘It was the discovery of the age! It proved that countless ages ago, this planet had been visited by people from the stars! Wild with excitement, Yeoward and I plunged into this fabulous ruin. But whatever we touched fell away to fine powder.

‘At last, on the third day, Yeoward found a semicircular plate of some extraordinarily hard metal, which was covered with the most maddeningly familiar diagrams. We cleaned it, and for twenty-four hours, scarcely pausing to eat and drink, Yeoward studied it. And, then, before the dawn of the fifth day he awoke me, with a great cry, and said: “It’s a map, a map of the heavens, and a chart of a course from Mars to Earth!”

‘And he showed me how those ancient explorers of space had proceeded from Mars to Earth, via the Moon…. To crash on this naked plateau in this green hell of a jungle? I wondered. “Ah, but was it a jungle then?” said Yeoward. “This may have happened five million years ago!”

‘I said: “Oh, but surely! it took only a few hundred years to bury Rome. How could this thing have stayed above ground for five thousand years, let alone five million?” Yeoward said: “It didn’t. The earth swallows things and regurgitates them. This is a volcanic region. One little upheaval can swallow a city, and one tiny peristalsis in the bowels of the earth can bring its remains to light again a million years later. So it must have been with the machine from Mars …”