He replied, without hesitation, “A crimson and emerald-green hawk stooping between the shoulders and a foxy red fox chasing six bluey-green rabbits down his backbone; an octopus on the right buttock throwing out the tentacles around groin and belly—very clever piece of work—must have hurt him like the devil.”
“Look here,” I said pointing to the relevant passage in the pamphlet.
My friend the Colonel will swear horribly over trivialities. But when he is deeply moved he says: “Well! Really!” He said it now.
“But wait a minute,” I said. “This Brighton Monster scratched something on the door. The old Reverend took a copy of it. Turn over four or five pages and you’ll see it there, I think.”
The Colonel looked at the copied marks scratched by the monster with one of its own teeth on the door of its cell. The spongy old paper was crumpled and cracked, and the marks were blurred by time, and by the dampness of lumber rooms and the moisture of my body. He looked at them, found a piece of paper and a pencil, laid the paper against a wall, and copied the inscription, holding the pencil half an inch from the point. When he turned, I saw that the red of his face had faded to grayish pink.
“Well?” I said.
“Little Sato had been baptized, you know. He was a Christian, among other things. I don’t know if I mentioned it.”
“No, you didn’t. Why?”
“Why, this says: I was asleep with my wife. It was all a bad dream. Now I know that it was not a dream. God have mercy on poor Sato who must die. Hiroshima 1945. How can it be? Sato had a wife, and they lived somewhere in Hiroshima. . . . He was in the Jap navy—submarines—and he was on leave in August, 1945, when they dropped that damned thing which I wish to God they’d never thought of. I don’t understand this. There must be a mistake somewhere. Yet this is Sato all right. What do you make of it? This beats me. I suppose, of course, poor little Sato got it when we dropped that confounded atom bomb. But—”
“I never was in favor of fiddling about with atoms,” I said, “it always seemed to me that there is a limit to what one ought to know. All those fantastic blasts and horrible disintegrations! One feels like the sorceror’s apprentice! You will observe, by the way, that this wretched Brighton Monster suffered from peculiar cancerous sores?”
The Colonel said: “Poor Sato! I liked the little fellow. But my dear Kersh, I hate to think what I can’t help thinking. To die, that’s nothing. It’s easier to die than to live, once you get the hang of it. But this nasty business—it seems to indicate that you don’t actually die when you run into one of those damned things. That was Sato, without a doubt. But imagine it—just imagine it! I don’t believe I ever mentioned that I was married once? You go to sleep happily, and then . . . Poor little Sato! Flipped back two hundred years. Or it might be forward two hundred years . . . Of course the earth turns and space shifts. He might have found himself in the middle of the Sahara Desert, or at the South Pole, or in some place where they’d worship him like a god straight out of heaven. But Kersh, Kersh, think of the horror of it! The nightmare—you were asleep—that turns out to be no nightmare at all. You wake up, with a sigh of relief, and there is your nightmare still. The loneliest death imaginable! Can you wonder at poor Sato’s despair? A Jap will kill himself as soon as look at you. So he ran out and threw himself into the sea. . . . How cold it must have been for him in Brighton in November!”
So, out of a salvage basket on the third floor of No. 93 Long Acre, London, W.C. 2 came the only evidence of a double death —the unique history of a man unhappily destined to be a victim of natural philosophy twice in two hundred years.
Here is food for thought, but I do not like the thought it feeds.
THE EXTRAORDINARILY HORRIBLE DUMMY
An uneasy conviction tells me that this story is true, but I hate to believe it. It was told to me by Ecco, the ventriloquist, who occupied a room next to mine in Busto’s apartment house. I hope he lied. Or perhaps he was mad? The world is so full of liars and lunatics that one never knows what is true and what is false.
All the same, if ever a man had a haunted look that man was Ecco. He was small and furtive. He had disturbing habits; five minutes of his company would have set your nerves on edge. For example, he would stop in the middle of a sentence, say Ssh! in a compelling whisper, look timorously over his shoulder and listen to something. The slightest noise made him jump. Like all Busto’s tenants, he had come down in the world. There had been a time when he topped bills and drew fifty pounds a week. Now, he lived by performing to theatre queues.
And yet he was the best ventriloquist I have ever heard. His talent was uncanny. Repartee cracked back and forth without pause, and in two distinct voices. There were even people who swore that his dummy was no dummy, but a dwarf or a small boy with painted cheeks, trained in ventriloquial back-chat. But this was not true. No dummy was ever more palpably stuffed with sawdust. Ecco called it Micky; and his act, “Micky and Ecco.”
All ventriloquists’ dummies are ugly, but I have yet to see one uglier than Micky. It had a home-made look. There was something disgustingly avid in the stare of its bulging blue eyes, the lids of which clicked as it winked; and an extraordinarily horrible ghoulishness in the smacking of its great, grinning, red wooden lips. Ecco carried Micky with him wherever he went, and even slept with it. You would have felt cold at the sight of Ecco, walking upstairs, holding Micky at arm’s length. The dummy was large and robust; the man was small and wraithlike; and in a bad light you would have thought: The dummy is leading the man!
I said he lived in the room next to mine. But in London you may live and die in a room, and the man next door may never know. I should never have spoken to Ecco but for his habit of practicing ventriloquism by night. It was nerve-racking. At the best of times it was hard to find rest under Busto’s roof; but Ecco made nights hideous, really hideous. You know the shrill, false voice of the ventriloquist’s dummy? Micky’s voice was not like that. It was shrill, but querulous; thin, but real—not Ecco’s voice distorted, but a different voice. You would have sworn that there were two people quarreling. This man is good, I thought. Then: But this man is perfect! And at last, there crept into my mind this sickening idea: There are two men!
In the dead of night, voices would break out:
“Come on, try again!”
“I can’t!”
“You must—”
“I want to go to sleep.”
“Not yet; try again!”
“I’m tired, I tell you; I can’t!”
“And I say try again.”
Then there would be peculiar singing noises, and at length Ecco’s voice would cry:
“You devil! You devil! Let me alone, in the name of God!”
One night, when this had gone on for three hours I went to Ecco’s door, and knocked. There was no answer. I opened the door. Ecco was sitting there, gray in the face, with Micky on his knee. “Yes?” he said. He did not look at me, but the great painted eyes of the dummy stared straight into mine.
I said, “I don’t want to seem unreasonable, but this noise . . .”
Ecco turned to the dummy and said, “We’re annoying the gentleman. Shall we stop?”
Micky’s dead red lips snapped as he replied, “Yes. Put me to bed.”
Ecco lifted him. The stuffed legs of the dummy flapped lifelessly as the man laid him on the divan and covered him with a blanket. He pressed a spring. Snap! the eyes closed. Ecco drew a deep breath and wiped sweat from his forehead.