Gerald Kersh - Prelude To A Certain Midnight

‘Then I shall lock you up in a dark room and feed you on bread and water, and break your spirit that way.’

The girl Muriel asked: ‘What does he do?’

The host looked blank and then said: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I think he writes.’

‘Well, everybody writes nowadays. What does he write?’

‘He’s very cagy about it. But once I caught him reading the Weekly Sweetheart . You know, that tuppenny rag that has stories about mill-girls and baronets and all that sort of thing. It’s my theory that he writes that kind of stuff, but I couldn’t say for certain. I shouldn’t be surprised though, because he doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.’

Muriel nodded and said: ‘Well, I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to admit that I wrote tripe like that, would you?’

The wife said: ‘I don’t see why not. What’s the matter with it? There’s nothing shameful in it, is there? I’d just as soon write stories about mill-girls and baronets as go about in corduroy trousers writing highbrow poetry. It’s an honest living, and —’

Her husband whooped with laughter and shouted: ‘Ah-ha ! Here speaks the married woman! Honest living! Ah-ha! Ah-ha — the pay envelope, the pay envelope! There you are, you see the irresistible fascination of the pay envelope, eh?’

‘Darling, don’t be such a bloody idiot,’ said his wife.

‘I wasn’t saying there was anything wrong in writing that sort of stuff,’ said Muriel, ‘but if a man happens to be shy and sensitive.., you know what I mean.’

The husband said: ‘Oh sure, sure, we know what you mean all right, we know what you mean, Muriel, my dear. You and your Weekly Sweetheart .’

‘I wonder —’ said Muriel, and then stopped.

‘You see, darling, she wonders. She wonders,’ said the husband, affectionately patting the hindquarters of his wife. ‘There’s the secret of that fatal fascination. He gets them wondering, my poppet, he gets them wondering. He gives them food for thought.’

‘All he gives me is the creeps,’ she said, toying with the lobe of his ear.

‘Oh, forget him, my poppet!’

‘With pleasure, my own!’

31

While this conversation was in progress, the Murderer was back in his bedsitting-room. He had switched on the light, drawn the curtains, taken off and carefully hung up his only decent grey suit, and put on a tired-looking old blue woollen dressinggown. He had work to do. The idea of work was distasteful to him: he just wanted to dream. But a man must eat, keep a roof ovei his head, and dress respectably. He had a craving for new suits. Once in a while he saw himself as Beau Brummell swaggering in impeccable coats, immaculate linen, and cravats that took an hour to tie — the haughty, the intolerably insolent, the fastidious buck whose wit was more to be feared than… say, a Spanish knife — an elegant Blade.

He caught himself on the shadowy verge of another daydream and dragged himself to his little table. He had to work. The Ubiquity Press paid him a guinea a thousand words. There were men who made fat livings out of Ubiquity at that rate, but they could work like demons: words seemed to pour out of them like sugar from a torn paper-bag. The Murderer was something of an artist: he laid out his second-hand sentences with the meticulosity of a rag-picker sorting rubbish; by hand, with a fine-pointed pen. At present he was working on a new serial for The Knuckleduster , a boys’ paper that specialized in tales of violence. He had invented a character named ‘Ironskin Obst’ who had discovered a serum that gave his skin the impregnability of fine steel without impairing its flexibility. Fire a gun at Obst and the bullet flattened itself against his forehead; throw him off a cliff, and instead of smashing himself on the rocks below Obst smashed the rocks. Hit him, and you beat your hand to pulp. The only way to get at Ironskin was with a blowlamp — and an extra-special blowlamp at that. The Villain had such a blowlamp.

The pity of it was that words came so slowly. He had to exert himself to make five pounds a week, and he detested exertion; he wanted to dream.

He sat down sighing, dipped a long, sharp, shiny nib in the ink-pot and began to write:

IRONSKIN OBST!

by

DASHWOOD STEEL

He liked this nom-de-plume even better than the one with which he signed his stories in Young Detective Weekly — ‘Dirk Pike’. Readers of The Thunderbolt knew him as ‘Lance Stockmar’. Sometimes he contributed to The Smasher under the pseudonym ‘Carver Riddle’. When he wrote for the Weekly Sweetheart he took pleasure in signing himself ‘Rayon Knickerbocker’. But ‘Dashwood Steel’ was the name he liked best of all — the name he would have chosen for himself if he had had any say in the matter.

Ironskin Obst laughed as the red-hot iron seared his eyeballs , he wrote. Then he nibbled his penholder. If only such things could be! But no, no dreams just now! Work… .

Nothing could hurt him. Knives broke and bullets rebounded from the serum-strengthened body of Ironskin Obst. Even fire was powerless to hurt him .

But oh, oh, oh if only such things could be! Oh for impregnability, and the attributes of Samson Herk, who could poke his finger through the side of a submarine! Such physical strength, combined with the powers of Svenska Xgali, the Schoolboy Hypnotist… .

But the sneering oblong mouth of the gas fire asks for shillings.

To work!

Genius is ninety per cent perspiration… which smells. The world is grim and hard, and stinks. What can a sensitive man do?

He wrote.

32

His landlady, who spoke of him as the nicest gentleman she had ever let rooms to, had put flowers on his dressing-table. The Murderer selected a small yellow chrysanthemum and stuck it in his buttonhole.

Then he went out. He walked slowly. It was not that he did not know where Frame Place was: he wanted to give himself the thrill that came of talking to a policeman.

‘Oh, officer…’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I wonder if you could tell me the best way to get to Frame Place?’

‘Well now, Frame Place, let’s see. Go straight along as you’re going, and when you get to the end of the street turn right, take the first on your left, go straight on and bear right left, and there you are. It’s a kind of crescent, sort of.’

The Murderer went on his way. He was laughing to himself. If that poor fool of a policeman had lifted out a hand and grabbed him by the collar, he would have made himself a sergeant. And there he was, pounding a beat, while he — the Murderer –was at large.

On the next street corner he asked. another policeman for a light.

‘You’re welcome, sir, if I’ve got one.’

The Murderer walked steadily up the long shadowy street. He was thinking, incongruously, of his father, who had died in the War, of his mother, who had come of a good family, of his uncle-by-marriage, who was an ironmonger, of his mother’s sister, who was remotely related to a baronet, and of his brother, who was a corn chandler….

He reached Asta Thundersley’s house in Frame Place by the river.

Another man in a grey suit had just rung the bell. The Murderer said: ‘I’m rather afraid we must be a little early.’

The other man, who seemed also to be of a quiet, reticent disposition, said: ‘Oh yes. I shouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t right. Early, yes; I’m rather afraid we must be.’

They looked at each other. After what he thought was a decent interval the Murderer approached the bell-push with an extended forefinger; whereupon the other man retreated several paces — obviously he did not want the people of the house to think that he had had the temerity to ring twice. The Murderer saw this and paused. They avoided each other’s eyes. But just then a man and a woman came up. The man looked crushed and angry — as if everything had been squeezed out of him except one deep, dark hate. And it was easy to see that the woman was the object and the inspiration of this hate. She was a big. blonde, with little pale eyes set too close to a nose shaped like a potato. Her face appeared flat and powdery as a flounder dusted with flour before it is thrown into a frying-pan; and her mouth protruded like the scalloped edge of a pie. Without hesitation she thrust a hand forward and held her thumb on the button of the bell for a good five seconds. Then The Tiger Fitzpatrick threw the door open and, muttering something that sounded like an apology, uncouthly bowed them in.