I heard myself saying, in a sickly, stupid voice: “Why didn’t you save some of your pay, all those years?”
Corporal Cuckoo replied, with scorn: “Why didn’t I save my pay! Because I’m what I am, you mug! Hell, once upon a time, if I’d kept away from cards, I could’ve bought Manhattan Island for less than what I lost to a Dutchman called Bruncker drawing ace-high for English guineas! Save my pay! If it wasn’t one thing it was another. I lay off liquor. Okay. So if it’s not liquor, it’s a woman. I lay off women. Okay. Then it’s cards or dice. I always meant to save my pay; but I never had it in me to save my goddam pay! Doctor Paré’s stuff fixed me—and when I say it fixed me, I mean, it fixed me, just like I was, and am, and always will be. See? A foot soldier, ignorant as dirt. It took me nearly a hundred years to learn to write my name, and four hundred years to get to be a corporal. How d’you like that? And it took will power, at that! Now here’s my proposition: fifty-fifty on the story. Once I get proper publicity in a magazine, I’ll be able to let the digestive out of my hands with an easy mind—see? Because nobody’d dare to try any funny business with a man with nationwide publicity. Eh?”
“No, of course not,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Sure, sure, Corporal.”
“Good,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “Now in case you think I’m kidding, take a look at this. You saw what I done?”
“I saw, Corporal.”
“Look,” he said, thrusting his left hand under my nose. It was covered with blood. His shirt-cuff was red and wet. Fascinated, I saw one thick, sluggish drop crawl out of the cloth near the buttonhole and hang, quivering, before it fell on my knee. The mark of it is in the cloth of my trousers to this day.
“See?” said Corporal Cuckoo, and he licked the place between his fingers where his knife had cut down. A pale area appeared. “Where did I cut myself?” he asked.
I shook my head: there was no wound—only a white scar. He wiped his knife on the palm of his hand—it left a red smear—and let the blade fall with a sharp click. Then he wiped his left hand on his right, rubbed both hands clean upon the backs of his trouser legs, and said, “Am I kidding?”
“Well!” I said, somewhat breathlessly. “Well . . . !”
“Oh, what the hell!” groaned Corporal Cuckoo, weary beyond words, exhausted, worn out by his endeavors to explain the inexplicable and make the incredible sound reasonable. “. . . Look. You think this is a trick? Have you got a knife?”
“Yes. Why?”
“A big knife?”
“Moderately big.”
“Okay. Cut my throat with it, and see what happens. Stick it in me wherever you like. And I’ll bet you a thousand dollars I’ll be alright inside two or three hours. . . . Go on. Man to man, it’s a bet. Or go borrow an axe if you like; hit me over the head with it.”
“Be damned if I do,” I said, shuddering.
“And that’s how it is,” said Corporal Cuckoo, in despair. “And that’s how it is every time. There they are, making fortunes out of soap and toothpaste . . . and here I am, with something in my pocket to keep you young and healthy forever—ah, go and chase yourself! I never ought to’ve drunk your rotten Scotch. This is the way it always is. You wear a beard just like I used to wear before I got a gunpowder burn in the chin at Zutphen, when Sir Philip Sidney got his; or I wouldn’t have talked to you. Oh, you dope! I could murder you, so help me I could! Go to hell!”
Corporal Cuckoo leapt to his feet and darted away so swiftly that before I found my feet he had disappeared. There was blood on the deck close to where I had been sitting—a tiny pool of blood, no larger than a coffee-saucer, broken at one edge by the imprint of a heel. About a yard and a half away I saw another heel mark in blood, considerably less noticeable. Then there was a dull smear, as if one of the bloody rubber heels had spun around and impelled its owner towards the left. “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” I shouted. “Oh, Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”
But I never saw Corporal Cuckoo again, and I wonder where he can be. It may be that he gave me a false name. But what I heard I heard, and what I saw I saw; and I have five hundred dollars here in an envelope for the man who will put me in touch with him. Honey and oil of roses, eggs and turpentine; these involve, as I said, infinite permutations and combinations. So does any comparable mixture. Still, it might be worth investigating. Why not? Fleming got penicillin out of mildew. Only God knows the glorious mysteries of the dust, out of which come trees and bees and life in every form, from mildew to man.
I lost Corporal Cuckoo before we landed in New York on July 11, 1945. Somewhere in the United States, I believe, there is a man, tremendously strong in the arms, and covered with terrible scars, who has the dreadfully dangerous secret of perpetual youth and life. He appears to be about thirty-odd years of age, and has watery, greenish eyes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington-on-Thames, near London, in 1911. He left school and took on a series of jobs—salesman, baker, fish-and-chips cook, nightclub bouncer, freelance newspaper reporter—and at the same time was writing his first two novels. His career began inauspiciously with the release of his first novel, Jews Without Jehovah, published when Kersh was 23: the book was withdrawn after only 80 copies were sold when Kersh’s relatives brought a libel suit against him and his publisher. He gained notice with his third novel, Night and the City (1938) and for the next thirty years published numerous novels and short story collections, including the novel Fowlers End (1957), which some critics, including Harlan Ellison, believe to be his best.
Kersh fought in the Second World War as a member of the Coldstream Guards before being discharged in 1943 after having both his legs broken in a bombing raid. He traveled widely before moving to the United States and becoming an American citizen, because “the Welfare State and confiscatory taxation make it impossible to work over there, if you’re a writer.”
Kersh was a larger than life figure, a big, heavy-set man with piercing black eyes and a fierce black beard, which led him to describe himself proudly as “villainous-looking.” His obituary recounts some of his eccentricities, such as tearing telephone books in two, uncapping beer bottles with his fingernails, bending dimes with his teeth, and ordering strange meals, like “anchovies and figs doused in brandy” for breakfast. Kersh lived the last several years of his life in the mountain community of Cragsmoor, in New York, and died at age 57 in 1968 of cancer of the throat.
Nightshade and Damnations by Gerald Kersh
Originally published Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1968
First Valancourt Books edition 2013
Copyright © 1947, 1948, 1953, 1954, 1957, 1958, 1962, 1968 by Gerald Kersh
Introduction © 1968 by Harlan Ellison
Reprinted with the kind permission of Mr. Ellison and the Estate of Gerald Kersh
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia http://www.valancourtbooks.com
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