Gerald Kersh - Prelude To A Certain Midnight

A man must have occupied the bedroom next door: the black marks of a brilliantined head were clearly visible on the top stratum of the wallpaper, which, peeling in the damp, seemed to be opening like the pages of a fantastic picture-book illustrative of sixty years of popular taste. The linoleum in this room had not been worth taking up: it was falling to pieces. Originally it must have been blue with a red lozenge pattern; Asta could see traces of this pattern upon a background of something that resembled sackcloth. Four indentations marked the place where the bed had stood, and upon the adjacent wall there was a rash of reddish-brown blotches where bugs had been thumbed to death.

The ground floor front was, of course, the sittingroom. There was a ruined cushion: it had been stuffed with chicken feathers but had burst. These feathers lay, now, in the form of a strag. gling letter ‘s’, on the floor, so wet and dirty that they looked heavier than lead. The grate was red with rust. Scattered about the hearth lay a broken poker, part of an old brass fender green with age, and a tennis boot covered with fungus. There was also a handsome ashtray, badly cracked, with the inscription Galeries Lafayette . And the whole place seemed to be full of broken, knotted, and rebroken string and spoiled brown paper.

Asta went downstairs again. This journey to the basement of the house was a dangerous one. As she went deeper the stairs grew more and more treacherous. At the bottom something gave way under her heel, quietly and as it were deliberately, like a soft-shelled crab upon which one accidentally treads, and Asta had to disengage her heel from a bit of rotten wood. The scullery was a desolation. Someone had stolen the scullery sink — there were hideous scars upon the wall. Perhaps that same marauder had got away with the old-fashioned lead pipes, for where the pipes had been there were surfaces, rough and sorelooking, like picked scabs. Here again lay ten thousand odds and ends of brown paper, white wrapping paper, silver paper, newspaper, and looped and knotted lengths of all kinds of string — all wet, sodden, mildewed, untouchable.

To this part of the house a little light penetrated between the area railings. Asta Thundersley’s heart felt like something she had eaten that had disagreed with her.

Near the kitchen there was an ancient washhouse, with a copper boiler built in a round cylinder of half-rotten brick that had once been whitewashed, and a window as big,, as a pocket handkerchief that was not designed to open. The smell of five generations of filthy linen hung in the thick grey air of the washhouse. As Asta hurried out of it she saw an archway. It was the opening of a malodorous little vault, the roof of which was the pavement of the street. Looking up, she saw the rusty under-surface of the lid of the coal-hole. There was coal dust under her feet; and now her feet were as sensitive as teeth — she walked on her toes. In the coal-cellar there was a crushed tea chest of peeling plywood, a few shovelfuls of wet coal dust,and a demolished leather sofa.

This was the love nest of the undiscovered murderer. Here the beautiful child Sonia Sabbatani had been ravished and found dead, with her head in a puddle, some lengths of knotted string about her wrists; gagged with abominable rags.

As the police surgeon lifted Sonia, one of the fat grey insects had run out of her ear.

19

Asta wanted to be sick. She had never before been so afflicted with loathing. She had never experienced such a sense of disgust. For the first time in her life she found herself disturbed by two equally powerful impulses: she wanted to run away, hide her head, forget all about this thing; and at the same time she wanted to rush forward with her head down and find out all about it. She turned to go home. Then something happened that made her heart stagger between two beats. A heavy, solemn footstep sounded in the passage just over her head.

It is unlikely that Asta Thundersley actually became pale, but she felt herself going pale: she felt that a great cold funnel had been thrust into her bosom and that all her vital parts, reduced to pulp, had been squirted down into her lower gut. She felt cold, she felt damp, and her belly rumbled so that the arch of the squalid coal-cellar picked up the echo and threw it back. Asta’s first impulse was to look for a place to hide. But then she became angry again; gathered herself, tensed her muscles, set her teeth, rushed upstairs and found herself face to face with a policeman who, in his turn, became greenish-white and recoiled.

He said: ‘What are you doing here?’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I was informed that someone had been nosing around here.’

‘Oh, you were, were you? I wouldn’t mind betting that you were informed by a little girl with ring-worm. Is that so?’

‘Well, it was a little girl who told me. She said somebody was nosing around.’

‘Oh, she said somebody was nosing around? Well I can tell you for a fact that somebody is nosing around. I am nosing around. On whose behalf? On my own behalf. Anybody’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind: is that quite clear? I am involved in mankind. Get that into your thick head, you and your ridiculous helmet. I’m looking. Is there any law against looking?’

‘That front door ought to be locked, ma’am.’

‘Don’t ma’am me, my name is Thundersley, Miss Asta Thundersley.’

‘I didn’t mean to bother you, ma’am, but that front door ought to have been locked.’

‘By the by, officer, do you happen to know whether the police force is looking for traces of coal dust?’

‘I must get back on the beat, mum.’

‘Get back wherever the hell you like, you bloodhound without a nose!’

The policeman went out. Asta Thundersley went away to where she thought she might find a taxi.

20

At the cab rank she met a man she knew. His name was Schiff. He was a kind of scientist, a German who called himself an Austrian and got himself up to look like an Englishman in ginger tweeds, big brown boots and a fair moustache. No one knew exactly what his background was, but everyone knew that he had something to do with medicine. Now he is working for a firm that manufactures nose syringes and fountain-pens. Then he was looking for a patron and had his eye on Asta Thundersley. She told him what was on her mind. He quoted Groddeck:

‘Why are you concerned so much about sadist-masochism? What says Groddeck? “What you have read and learned about sadism and masochism is … untrue. To brand as perversions these two inescapable human desires which are implanted in every human being without exception, and which belong to his nature just as much as his skin and hair, was the colossal stupidity of a learned man. … Everyone is a sadist; everyone is a masochist; everyone by reason of his nature must wish to give and to suffer pain; to that he is compelled by Eros.” So said Groddeck.’

‘I don’t give a damn what Groddeck said,’ said Asta Thundersley. ‘If I had your friend Groddeck here I’d give him a piece of my mind. Didn’t Groddeck ever come across —’

‘“Humanity created for itself a god who suffered, because it felt that pain was a way to heaven, because sorrow and bloody torment it esteemed divine.”

‘Bah! To hell with your filth! Does it make murder good, you fool?’

‘“Was your skin never reddened by the sucking of the mouth? Did you never bite into an encircling arm and did it not seem good to you to be bruised. … Why, most dear lady, even the child wants to be punished — he yearns for it, he pants for a beating as my father used to say. And he uses a thousand tricks to attract punishment. The mother soothes the child on her arm with gentle pats and the child smiles; she washes it and kisses it on its rosy little bottom, which only just now was so full of dirt, and as the last and greatest treat she gives the dancing baby a slap which sets it crowing for joy.” So said Groddeck. Of Groddeck, the Master, Freud said: “We shall gain a great deal by following the suggestion of Dr Groddeck .. and we need feel no hesitation in finding a place for Dr Groddeck’s discovery in the fabric of science.” Pay no attention, dear lady. All this is not your world.’