Gerald Kersh - Prelude To A Certain Midnight

Too bad, too bad….

Near the centre of the third column smaller type said: Girl Sonia. Killer Still Free . The Police had a clue.

He laughed: at least, his face remained unchanged, and his stomach laughed.

Who could swear to me? he asked himself. Who, could swear on the Book? Clue! What clue? There is no clue, and they know it. Otherwise, why do they squeeze the story down and away? Their argument is, of course, that they have more in their minds than they want to say. But in our case, exactly what have they got? There was a black fog. if ten witnesses saw me pick the child up outside the School — what would their oaths be worth? In that fog, nothing. It happened to Sonia Sabbatani. So what? She might have been any of two or three hundred children. Clues? Hah! What clues?

I am standing on the corner of the street, and the girl happens to come by. ‘See you safely home.?’ I ask her, and she says: ‘Thanks very much, Mister So-and-So.’ She knew my voice. Face, figure, walk, anything at all — I didn’t reccgnize her myself in that fog, until she spoke! if I didn’t even know it was her until I heard her voice, how is anybody to know that the man is me?

Be calm, be reasonable — no nerves, no jitters; nothing but calm, calm! Black fog, and the night coming: what would anyone’s testimony be worth? Anyone’s oath, anywhere? And who was there in that dead old street? Nobody. Why should anyone be there? No property to protect — condemned houses. nothing more — why should a policeman, even, be there?

No reason at all. And there wasn’t anybody anywhere .

Yes, I was naughty. I was very naughty indeed ….

The Murderer shook his head, got out of his chair and carefully brushed his teeth.

… I deserve to be hanged. But even if they caught me, they wouldn’t hang me. They’d say I was insane. But I’m not. And they won’t catch me anyway. It wasn’t a nice thing to do. But the only alternative would have been to take Sonia to her home, and that would have been the end of that: she knew my voice. You can’t safely loiter about the same place twice. In that kind of weather you’re as good as masked like the Klu-Klux-Klan. Kill and have done. In any case, what did I mean to do? To kill? Simply to kill. it is a pity that it had to be little Sonia Sabbatani; but it had to be someone . Next time (he had not the slightest doubt that there would be a next time), next time, he would see… .

But this was the first kill, and he still thrilled with a curious mixture of pride and of shame at the thought of it like a young girl who has gone out and lost her virginity on the sly. He knew now what Zarathustra meant when he spoke of the murderer who ‘thirsted for the pleasure of the knife’. Of course, he had not used a knife. He owned several knives, but used them only to sharpen pencils, or to play with; their lean, cold blades, honed sharp and brightly polished, gave him a sense of power, made him feel dangerous. He liked to open and shut them — especially one wicked Spanish knife, with an engraved blade that might have been designed for cruel murder. This blade locked back by means of a primitive yet efficient device consisting of a perforated steel spring and a ratchet. It opened with a noise like the grinding of iron teeth, and ‘there it was, ten inthes long; the very sight of it made the blood stand still. It amused him sometimes to stand before a mirror, knife in fist, making quick, ferocious passes at himself, and dreaming dreams … always dreaming dreams… dreams of blood and death.

No, he had not used a knife this time.

There was, he thought, the Pleasure of the Thumbs; the Pleasure of the Strangler. ‘_Under my thumb_.’ How apt some of these metaphors were. There was power, absolute power, power ever life and death. Your thumbs sank in. You felt the heaving and the writhing of the little body. But it was doomed. You were DOOM. You were the Angel of Death. You were God. You could take life or give it back. You could — and did — let the little creature breathe again for a second or two. Why curtail a pleasure by gluttonous haste? You are a gourmet — you prolong your pleasures, tease yourself a little, and so increase your enjoyment of things. So you let the victim, the sacrificial offering, come back to life a little — not sufficiently alive to scream: that would never do. Just for two or three gulps of breath. Then — Under the Thumb, Under the Thumb! Who could have imagined that a child’s heart could beat so hard? Well, all good things must have an end. You finished it off at last.

All the same, next time he would use a knife. This might be a little dangerous, because of the splashes. Still, did they ever catch Jack the Ripper? And how many crimes did Fritz I-Iaarmann get away with before he had the bad luck to be caught? Or Peter Kürten. These two men ended on the gallows, it is true. Yet how calmly they died! Why? Because they had died in the knowledge that they had lived, and lived, and lived — lived more red-blooded life in their forty-year lifetimes than your ordinary respectable law-abiding citizen could live in a hundred years. It was dangerous, yes. But the danger that followed the kill was, so to speak, the savoury that rounded off the roast.

Next time the knife. Not the nice Spanish knife, the knife christened ‘Dago Pete’; but a very ordinary knife, a bread knife, a sixpenny vegetable knife, a kitchen knife, a shoemaker’s knife.

And after that, if only to baffle the Police by a variation of the modus operandi , a piece of cord. And after that … well, it would all depend upon circumstances.

29

Soon, having fallen into a reverie, the Murderer began to be sorry for himself. The ccstasy was passing. He told himself again that he had been ‘naughty’. Somewhere inside him a snivelling voice said: It isn’t my fault, I couldn’t help it . He reasoned with himself:

It isn’t my fault. Look at Peter Kürten. He said: ‘The woman who took me up when I first came out of prison was one whose temperament was the very opposite to my own. She liked cruel treatment.’ And then the Public Prosecutor said: ‘That, of course, will have increased the sadistic leanings .’…

There you are! Lots of boys have the impulse to be cruel, to kill. Lots of boys want to hunt down animals in jungles and kill them, be detectives and hunt down men and hang them — which amounts to the same thing. But they don’t all go out and be naughty in the same way as I have been naughty. I shouldn’t have been encouraged — given a big sexual thrill in that way .

I would still be a nice shy boy, doing nothing wrong — I mean to say nothing actually illegal — if it hadn’t been for Her .

She enjoyed being ill-treated. I would have been too timid even to suggest that kind of game. She suggested it. She made me feel that my manhood depended upon my power to hurt. If they hang me, they ought to hang Her. They cut Peter Kürten’s head off for seventy crimes of violence. What did they do to the woman who brought out what was in him? Nothing. Is this justice?

The Murderer went to his bookshelf and read what Professor Hübner had said:

‘_Sadism is infinitely many-sided and comprises a wide field, including anything from dreams of torturing animals, the exaggerated punishment of children, of fire-mania, to lust-murders, which are generally arrived at by a series of progressive actions. A certain tendency to cruelty was born in Kürten. Everything else has been acquired. In his case the meeting with the woman twice his age with the masochistic tendencies; the reading of works of sexual pathology, combined with his ego. tistical megalomania, were responsible for the extent of his sadism. This developed gradually_.’