Nightshade and Damnations

MEN WITHOUT BONES

“BUSTO IS A GHOST,

TOO MEAN TO GIVE US A FRIGHT!”

THE APE AND THE MYSTERY

THE KING WHO COLLECTED CLOCKS

BONE FOR DEBUNKERS

A LUCKY DAY FOR THE BOAR

VOICES IN THE DUST OF ANNAN

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CORPORAL CUCKOO?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Queen of Pig Island

The story of the Baroness von Wagner, that came to its sordid and bloody end after she, with certain others, had tried to make an earthly paradise on a desert island, was so fantastic that if it had not first been published as news, even the editors of the sensational crime-magazines would have thought twice before publishing it.

Yet the von Wagner Case is commonplace, considered in relation to the Case of the Skeletons on Porcosito, or “Pig Island,” as it is commonly called.

The bones in themselves are component parts of a nightmare. Their history, as it was found, written on mutilated paper in Lalouette’s waterproof grouch-bag, is such that no one has yet dared to print it, although it happens to be true.

In case you are unacquainted with the old slang of the road: a grouch-bag is a little pouch that used to hang about the necks of circus performers. It held their savings, and was tied with a gathered string, like the old-fashioned Dorothy-bag. This was necessary, because circus-encampments used to be hotbeds of petty larceny. So, on the high trapeze, the double-back-somersault man wore his grouch-bag. The lion-tamer in the cage of the big cats might forget his whip or lose his nerve—he would never forget or lose his grouch-bag, out of which could be filched the little moist roll of paper-money that was all he had to show for his constantly imperiled life.

Lalouette carried her grouch-bag long after the gulls had picked her clean. It contained 6,700 dollars and a wad of paper with a scribbled story, which I propose to make public here.

It is at once the most terrible and the most pathetic story I have ever had to tell.

At first the captain of the ship who landed on Porcosito, who subscribed to a popular science magazine, thought he had discovered the missing link—the creature that was neither man nor ape. The first skeleton he found had a sub-human appearance. The thorax was capacious enough to contain a small barrel; the arms were remarkably long, and the legs little and crooked. The bones of the hands, the feet, and the jaw, were prodigiously strong and thick. But then, not far away—it is only a little island—in a clump of bushes, he found another skeleton, of a man who, when he was alive, could not have been more than two feet tall.

There were other bones: bones of pigs, birds, and fishes; and also the scattered bones of another man who must have been no taller than the other little man. These bones were smashed to pieces and strewn over an area of several square yards. Wildly excited, happy as a schoolboy reading a mystery story, the captain (his name was Oxford) went deeper, into the more sheltered part of Porcosito, where a high hump or rock rises in the form of a hog’s back and shelters a little hollow place from the wind that blows off the sea. There he found the ruins of a crude hut.

The roof, which must have been made of grass, or light canes, had disappeared. The birds had come in and pecked clean the white bones of a woman. Most of her hair was still there, caught in a crack into which the wind had blown it or the draft had pulled it. It was long and fair hair. The leather grouch-bag, which had hung about her neck, was lying on the floor in the region of the lower vertebræ, which were scattered like thrown dice. This human skeleton had no arms and no legs. Captain Oxford had the four sets of bones packed into separate boxes, and wrote in his log a minute account of his exploration of the tiny island of Porcosito. He believed that he had discovered something unexplainable.

He was disappointed.

The underwriters of Lloyd’s in London had, with their usual punctiliousness, paid the many thousands of pounds for which the steamship Anna Maria had been insured, after she went down near Pig Island, as sailors called the place. The Anna Maria had gone down with all hands in a hurricane. The captain, officers, passengers, cargo, and crew had been written off as lost. Faragut’s Circus was on board, traveling to Mexico.

Captain Oxford had not found the remains of an unclassified species of overgrown, undergrown, and limbless monsters. He had found the bones of Gargantua the Horror, Tick and Tack, the Tiny Twins, and Lalouette.

She had been born without arms and legs, and she was the queen of Pig Island. It was Lalouette who wrote the story I am telling now.

Tick and Tack were tiny, but they were not twins.

A casual observer sees only the littleness of midgets, so that they all look alike. Tick was born in England, and his real name was Greaves. Tack, who was born in Dijon, Brittany, was the son of a poor innkeeper named Kerouaille. They were about twenty-five inches tall, but well-formed, and remarkably agile, so that they made an attractive dancing-team. They were newcomers to the circus, and I never saw them.

But I have seen Gargantua and Lalouette; and so have hundreds of my readers. Gargantua the Horror has haunted many women’s dreams. He was, indeed, half as strong and twice as ugly as a gorilla. A gorilla is not ugly according to the gorilla standard of beauty; Gargantua was ugly by any reckoning. He did not look like a man, and he did not quite resemble an ape. He was afflicted by that curious disease of the pituitary gland which the endocrinologists term acromegaly. There is a well-known wrestler who has it. Something goes wrong with one of the glands of internal secretion, so that the growth of the bones runs out of control. It can happen to anyone. It could happen to me, or to you; and it produces a really terrifying ugliness. Gargantua, as it happened, was by nature a man of terrible strength; George Walsh has told me that he might have been heavy-weight weight-lifting champion of the world. An astute promoter realized that there was money in his hideousness; so Percy Robinson rechristened himself. Gargantua the Horror grew a beard—which came out in tufts like paint-brushes all over his face—and became a wrestler. As a wrestler he was too sweet-natured and silly, so he drifted into a sideshow. Naked to the waist, wearing only a bearskin loincloth, he performed frightening feats of strength. In a fair in Italy I saw him lift on his back a platform upon which a fat man sat playing a grand piano. That same evening I saw Lalouette.

I would not have seen her if I had not been in the company of a beautiful and capricious woman who said, when I told her I had a prejudice against going to stare at freaks, that if I would not come with her she would go in alone. So I bought the tickets and we went into the booth.

Lalouette was an aristocrat among freaks. She drew great crowds. Having been born without arms and legs she had cultivated her lips and teeth, and the muscles of her neck, back and stomach, so that she could dress herself, wash herself, and, holding a brush or pencil in her lips, paint a pretty little picture in watercolors or write a letter in clear round longhand. They called her Lalouette because she could sing like a bird. One had the impression that she could do anything but comb her hair. She could even move a little, by throwing her weight forward and sideways in a strange rolling motion. Lalouette painted a little picture while we watched, and sang a little song, and my lady friend and I, overcome with admiration and with pity, agreed that a woman of her accomplishments might have been one of the greatest women in Europe if the Lord in His wisdom had seen fit to make her whole. For she was a lady, superbly educated, and extremely beautiful—a blonde with great black eyes and magnificent hair of white-gold. But there she was, a freak on a turntable; nothing but a body and a head, weighing fifty pounds.

I had some conversation with her: she spoke five languages with perfect fluency, and had read many books. Enquiring into her history I learned that she came of a noble, ancient, overbred Viennese family. Indeed, royal blood ran in her veins, and some fortuneteller had told her mother the Countess that the child to which she was about to give birth would be a ruler, a queen.

But when the child was born they saw a monstrosity. The Count fainted. The Countess loved Lalouette and cherished her, devoted her wretched life to the unfortunate girl, who, soon after she could speak, demonstrated a proud and unyielding spirit. Conscious of her infirmity, Lalouette wanted to do things for herself, despising assistance—despising herself.

Her father could not bring himself to look at her. When she was seventeen years old her mother died and her father sent her away with her nurse. “All the money that you need, take,” he said, “only do not let me see this abortion.” Then, when the First World War came, the Count lost all his money and shot himself. The kind old nurse lost much of her kindness after that, and when an agent named Geefler offered her money if she could persuade the girl to go with him, the nurse, pleading sickness and poverty, had no difficulty in persuading Lalouette that this would be a good thing to do.

So the young lady changed her name. Geefler sold her to Gargamelov, who passed her on to Faragut; and she drew money up and down the world, until Faragut’s Circus went towards Mexico, and the Anna Maria was wrecked, and she found herself with Tick and Tack and Gargantua the Horror on Porcosito, the island of pigs.

Then the prophecy came to pass. She was the queen of Pig Island. She had three subjects: two dancing dwarfs and the ugliest and strongest man in the world; and she had no arms and no legs; and she was beautiful.

Gargantua was a man whose tenderness was in inverse proportion to his frightful ugliness. As soon as the Anna Maria began to sink he went instinctively to the weakest of his friends and offered them his muscles. To Tick and Tack he said: “Hold on to my shoulders.” They were in sight of land. He took Lalouette in his left hand, told the others to hold tight, and jumped overboard, and swam with his legs and his right hand. The ship went down. The Horror swam steadily. He must have covered five miles in the face of a falling high wind. At last his feet touched ground and he staggered up to a sandy beach as the sun was rising. The two little men were clinging to him still. His left hand, stronger than the iron which it could bend, held Lalouette. The dwarfs dropped off like gorged leeches, and the giant threw himself down and went to sleep—but not before he had made a hollow place in the soft, fine sand, and put Lalouette comfortably to rest.

It was then, I believe, that Gargantua fell in love with Lalouette. I have seen it happen myself—in less outrageous circumstances, thank God! The strong makes itself the slave of the weak. And he saved her life. It is the tendency of man to love that which he has risked his life to save.

Unhappy Gargantua! Poor Horror!

Armless and legless, Lalouette was the brain. In spite of her disability, she was the queen of Pig Island. She was without hope and devoid of fear; so she could command, since everything was clear in her mind. And she had read many books. Lalouette said: “Tick and Tack; there must be water here. One of you go to the left. The other goes to the right. Look for the place where things grow greenest——”

“Who d’you think you are, giving orders?” said Tick.

She said: “Oh yes, and another thing; empty your pockets.”

Tick had, among other things, a leather-covered loose-leafed notebook. Tack had a remarkably large-bladed knife which he carried, no doubt, to give himself confidence; but he was a fierce little man at heart. They all had money. Gargantua had a fine gold cigarette-lighter, and a few hundred sodden dollars in a sea-soaked pocket—he alone wore no grouch-bag. Lalouette had strung about her neck with her grouch-bag, a gold pencil.

“We’ll need all these things,” she said.

“Who the hell d’you think you are, giving us orders?” said Tick.

“Be quiet,” said Gargantua.

Lalouette continued, “That lighter is of no use as a lighter, because it’s full of water. But it has flint and steel! It strikes a spark. Good. Gargantua, leave it to dry.”

“Yes’m.”

“You two, on your way right and left, had better pick up dry driftwood—the drier the better. We can strike a spark with that lighter and make a fire. Having lit a fire we can keep it burning. It must not ever be allowed to go out. Your knife, Tack, will be useful too. . . . You, Gargantua, will go up the beach. There is a lot of wood here from ships. So there must be iron. Wood from ships has always iron. Iron is always useful. In any case bring wood that has been cut. We will build a little house. You shall built it, Gargantua—and you too, Tick, and you also, Tack. I shall tell you how you must build it.”

Tick began to protest. “Who d’you think——”

“Leave the lighter so that it dries in the sun,” said Lalouette, “and take care that your knife is dry and clean, Tack.”

“Always,” said Tack.

Gargantua said: “Here’s my lighter; you can have it if you like—it’s solid gold. A lady gave me it in France. She said——”

“You can have my notebook if you like,” said Tick sullenly. “It’s solid leather, that cover. Pull that gadget down and those rings open and the pages come out.”

“Please, if you will allow me, I will keep my knife,” said Tack.

“You may keep your knife,” said Lalouette. “But remember that we may all need it, your knife.”

“Naturally, Mademoiselle Lalouette.”

“Who does she think——” began Tick.

“Shush!” said Gargantua.

“No offence, Lalouette,” said Tick.

“Go now, please. Go!”

They went. Tick found a spring of fresh water. Tack reported the presence of wild pigs. Gargantua returned with an armful of wreckage; wood spiked with rusty nails; a massive thing like a broken mast in which was embedded an enormous iron pin.

“Light the fire,” said Lalouette. “You, Gargantua, make a spear of that long piece of iron. Make it sharp with stones. Then tie it tight to a stick. So you can kill pigs. You and you, Tick and Tack, go up to the rocks. I have seen birds coming down. Where there are birds there are eggs. You are light, you are dancers. Find eggs. Better still, find birds. When they sit on their eggs they are reluctant to go far away from their nests. Approach calmly and quietly, lie still, and then take them quickly. Do you understand?”

“Beautifully,” said Tack.

Tick said nothing.

“Better get that fire going first of all,” said Gargantua.

Lalouette said: “True. Boats must pass and they will see the smoke. Good, light the fire.”

“If I could find another bit of iron, or something heavy,” said Gargantua, “I could do better than this spiky sort of thing, Miss. I dare say I could bang it out to a bit of a blade once I got the fire going good and hot.”

“How?” said Lalouette.

“I was ’prentice to a blacksmith, ’m,” said Gargantua. “My dad was a smith, before the motor-cars came in.”

“What? You have skill then, in those great hands of yours?”

“Yes’m. Not much. A bit, but not much.”

“Then make your ‘bit of a blade,’ Gargantua.”

“Thank you, ’m.”

“Can you make me a comb?”

“Why, I dare say, yes. Yes, I should say I could make you a bit of a comb, ’m. But nothing fancy,” said Gargantua, shutting one eye and calculating. “Something out of a little bit of wood, like.”

“Do so, then.”

“Yes’m. If Mr. Tack doesn’t mind me using his knife.”

“Could you also build a house, Gargantua?”

“No ’m, not a house; but I dare say I might put you up a bit of a shed, like. Better be near the drinking water, though. And I shouldn’t be surprised if there was all sorts of bits of string along the beach. Where there’s sea there’s fish. And don’t you worry—I’ll bring you home a nice pig, only let me get that fire going nice and bright. And as for fish,” said Gargantua, plucking a nail out of a plank and making a hook of it between a finger and thumb—“sharpen that up and there you are.”

“Clever!” said Tick, with malice.

“But he always was clever,” said Tack tonelessly, but with a bitter little smile. “We already know.”

Gargantua blinked, while Lalouette said, “Be quiet, please, both of you.”

Then Gargantua nodded and growled, “That’s right. You be quiet.”

Tick and Tack exchanged glances and said nothing until Lalouette cried: “Come! To work!”—when Tick muttered, “Who the hell do they think they are, giving orders?”

“Come on now, you two!” shouted Gargantua.

I believe it was then that the two midgets Tick and Tack began to plot and conspire against Gargantua the Horror, and I am convinced that they too in their dwarfish way were in love with Lalouette.

They followed Lalouette’s instructions, and struck sparks out of Gargantua’s lighter to kindle powdery flakes of dry driftwood whittled with Tack’s big-bladed knife. Tick blew the smolder into flame and the men fed the fire until it blazed red-hot, so that Gargantua, having found a thick slab and a pear-shaped lump of hard rock for his anvil and hammer, beat his iron spike into a good spearhead which he lashed to a long, strong pole. Then they had a crude but effective pike, with which Gargantua killed wild pigs.

Porcosito is not called Pig Island without reason. It used to be overrun with swine, bred from a pedigree boar and some sows that Sir John Page sent to Mexico in 1893, in the Ponce de Leon, which was wrecked in a squall. Only the pigs swam ashore from that shipwreck. Porcosito seems to be an unlucky island.

Gargantua hunted ruthlessly. The pigs were apathetic. The boars charged—to meet the spear. The four freaks ate well. Tick and Tack fished and caught birds, gathered eggs and crabs. Lalouette directed everything and at night, by the fire, told them stories and sang to them, recited all the poetry she could remember, and dug out of her memory all she had ever read of philosophy. I believe that they were happy then; but it makes an odd picture—the truncated beauty, the stunted dancers, and the ugliest man on earth, grouped about a flickering fire while the songs of Schubert echo from the rocks and the sea says hush . . . hush . . . on the beach. I can see the sharp, keen faces of the midgets; and the craggy forehead of the giant wrinkled in anguish as he tries to understand the inner significance of great thoughts expressed in noble words. She told them stories, too, of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome—of Regulus, who went back to Carthage to die; of the glorious dead at Thermopylæ, and of the wise and cunning Ulysses, the subtlest of the Greeks, who strove with gods and came home triumphant at last. She told them of the triumph of Ulysses over Circe, the sorceress who turned men into beasts; and how he escaped with his crew from the cave of the one-eyed giant Cyclops. He was colossal; the men were small. Ulysses drilled his sailors to move like one man, and, with a sharpened stick, blinded the giant and escaped.

She let them comb her hair. The French dwarf Tack was skillful at this, and amusing in conversational accompaniment to the crackling of the hair and the fire. Tick hated his partner for this. Yet the gigantic hands of Gargantua were lighter on her head than the hands of Tick or Tack—almost certainly because the little men wanted to prove that they were strong, and the giant wanted to demonstrate that he was gentle.

It was Gargantua who combed Lalouette’s beautiful bright hair, evening after evening, while Tick and Tack sat exchanging looks. No words: only looks.

Sometimes the little men went hunting with Gargantua. Alone, neither Tick nor Tack could handle the heavy spear. But it must be remembered that they were a dancing team, trained to move together in perfect accord. So, while Tick directed the forepart of the shaft, Tack worked close behind him, and they put their combined, perfectly synchronized strength and agility into a dangerous leap-and-lunge. Once they killed a fat boar. This must have made them confident of their power to kill.

This is not all guesswork. I have ground for my assumption, in what Lalouette wrote in Tick’s loose-leaf notebook, holding the gold pencil in her teeth and guiding it with her lips, before she bit the paper into a ball and pushed it with her tongue into her grouch-bag.

It takes courage and determination to kill a wild boar with a spear. A boar is fearless, powerful, unbelievably ferocious, and armored with hard hide and thick muscle. He is wickedly obstinate—a slashing fury, a ripping terror—two sickles on a battering-ram, animated by a will to kill, uninhibited by fear of death.

Having killed a boar, Tick and Tack, in their pride, resolved to kill Gargantua.

Lalouette says that she, unwittingly, gave them the idea, when she told them the story of Ulysses and Cyclops.

But the foolish giant called Gargantua the Horror, billed as the strongest and ugliest man on earth, must have been easy to kill. He worked all day. When Lalouette’s hair was combed and her singing ceased, he went away modestly to sleep in the bushes. One night, after he had retired, Tick and Tack followed him. Gargantua always carried the spear. Lalouette listened drowsily for the comforting rumble of Gargantua’s snoring a few yards away; she loved him, in a sisterly way.

. . . Ha-khaaa . . . kha-ha . . . khaaaa-huk . . . khaaaa . . .

As she listened, smiling, the snoring stopped with a gasp. Then Tick and Tack came back carrying the spear, and in the firelight Lalouette could see that the blade of the spear was no longer clean. The redness of it was not a reflected redness.

Thus she knew what the little men had done to Gargantua. She would have wept if she could; but there was no hand to wipe away her tears, and she was a proud woman. So she forced herself to pretend to be asleep.

Later she wrote: I knew that this was the end. I was sorry. In this place I have felt strangely calm and free, happier than I have ever been since my dear mother used to hold me in her arms and tell me all the stories I told here; stories of gods and heroes and pygmies and giants, and of men with wings . . .

But that night, looking through the lashes of her half-closed eyes, she saw Tick untying the blade of the spear. He worked for an hour before he got it loose, and then he had a sort of dirk, more than a foot long, which he concealed in a trouser-leg. Tack, she thought, had been watching him also; for as soon as Tick closed his eyes and began to breathe evenly, he took out the knife which he had never allowed them to take away from him, and stabbed his partner through the heart.

He carried the body out of the range of her vision, and left it where he let it fall—Lalouette never knew where.

Next morning Tack said to her, “At last we are alone. You are my queen.”

“The fire?” she said, calmly.

“Ah yes. The fire. I will put wood on the fire, and then perhaps we may be alone after all this time.”

Tack went away and Lalouette waited. He did not return. The disposition of his bones, and the scars on them, indicate that he was killed by a boar. There was no more driftwood nearby. Tack went into the trees to pick up whatever he might find. As I visualize it, he stooped to gather sticks, and looked up into the furious and bloody eyes of a great angry boar gathering itself for a charge. This must be so; there is no other way of accounting for the scattering of his shattered bones. Hence, the last thing Tack saw must have been the bristly head of a pig, a pair of curled tusks, and two little red eyes. . . .

The last words in what may be described as Lalouette’s journal are as follows:

This is the history of the Queen of Pig Island, and of the bones Captain Oxford found.

Frozen Beauty

Do I believe this story?

I don’t know. I heard it from a Russian doctor of medicine. He swears that there are certain facets of the case which—wildly unbelievable though it sounds—have given him many midnight hours of thought that led nowhere.

“It is impossible,” he said, “in the light of scientific knowledge. But that is still a very uncertain light. We know little of life and death and the something we call the Soul. Even of sleep we know nothing.

“I am tired of thinking about this mad story. It happened in the Belt of Eternal Frost.

“The Belt of Eternal Frost is in Siberia.

“It has been cold, desperately cold, since the beginning of things . . . a freak of climate.

“Did you know that a good deal of the world’s ivory comes from there? Mammoth ivory—the tusks of prehistoric hairy elephants ten thousand years dead.

“Sometimes men digging there unearth bodies of mammoths in a perfect state of preservation, fresh enough to eat after a hundred centuries in the everlasting refrigerator of the frost.

“Only recently, just before Hitler’s invasion, Soviet scientists found, under the snow, a stable complete with horses—standing frozen stiff—horses of a forgotten tribe that perished there in the days of the mammoths.

“There were people there before the dawn of history; but the snow swallowed them. This much science knows. But as for what I am going to tell you, only God knows. . . .”

I have no space to describe how the good doctor, in 1919, got lost in the Belt of Eternal Frost. Out of favor with the Bolsheviks, he made a crazy journey across Siberia toward Canada. In a kind of sheltered valley in that hideous hell of ice, he found a hut.

“. . . I knocked. A man came; shabby and wild as a bear, but a blond Russian. He let me in. The hut was full of smoke, and hung with traps and the pelts of fur animals.

“On the stove—one sleeps on the brick stove in the Siberian winter—lay a woman, very still. I have never seen a face quite like hers. It was bronze-tinted, and comely, broad and strong. I could not define the racial type of that face. On the cheeks were things that looked like blue tattoo marks, and there were rings in her ears.

“‘Is she asleep?’ I asked, and my host replied; ‘Yes; forever.’ ‘I am a doctor,’ I said; and he answered; ‘You are too late.’

“The man betrayed no emotion. Maybe he was mad, with the loneliness of the place? Soon he told me the woman’s story. Absolutely simply, he dropped his brief sentences. Here is what he said:

I have lived here all my life. I think I am fifty. I do not like people around me.

About fifteen . . . no, sixteen years ago I made a long journey. I was hunting wolves, to sell their skins. I went very far, seven days’ journey. Then there was a storm. I was lucky. I found a big rock, and hid behind it from the wind. I waited all night. Dawn came. I got ready to go.

Then I see something.

The wind and storm have torn up the ground in one place, and I think I see wood. I kick it. I hit it with my ax. It is wood. It breaks. There is a hole.

I make a torch and drop it down. There is no poisonous air. The torch burns. I take my lamp and, with a little prayer, I drop down.

There is a very long hut. It is very cold and dry. I see in the light of my lamp that there are horses. They are all standing there frozen; one with hay or something, perhaps moss, between his teeth. On the floor is a rat, frozen stiff in the act of running. Some great cold must have hit that place all of a sudden—some strange thing, like the cold that suddenly kills elephants that are under the snow forever.

I go on, I am a brave man. But this place makes me afraid.

Next to the stable is a room. There are five men in the room. They have been eating some meat with their hands. But the cold that came stopped them, and they sit—one with his hand nearly in his mouth; another with a knife made of bronze. It must have been a quick, sudden cold, like the Angel of Death passing. On the floor are two dogs, also frozen.

In the next room there is nothing but a heap of furs on the floor, and sitting upon the heap of furs is a little girl, maybe ten years old. She was crying, ever so long ago. There are two round little pieces of ice on her cheeks, and in her hands a doll made of a bone and a piece of old fur. With this she was playing when the Death Cold struck.

I wanted more light. There was a burned stone which was a place for a fire.

I look. I think that in the place where the horses are, there will be fodder. True; there is a kind of brown dried moss. The air is dry in that place! But cold!

I take some of this moss to the stone, and put it there and set light to it. It burns up bright, but with a strong smell. It burns hot. The light comes right through the big hut, for there are no real walls between the rooms.

I look about me. There is nothing worth taking away. Only there is an ax made of bronze. I take that. Also a knife, made of bronze too; not well made, but I put it in my belt.

Back to the room with the furs in it, where the fire is blazing bright. I feel the furs. They are not good enough to take away. There is one fur I have never seen, a sort of gray bear skin, very coarse. The men at the table, I think, must have been once, long ago, strong men and good hunters. They are big—bigger than you or me—with shoulders like Tartar wrestlers. But they cannot move any more.

I stand there and make ready to go. There is something in this place I do not like. It is too strange for me. I know that if there are elephants under the frost, still fresh, then why not people? But elephants are only animals. People, well, people are people.

But as I am turning, ready to go, I see something that makes my heart flutter like a bird in a snare. I am looking, I do not know why, at the little girl.

There is something that makes me sorry to see her all alone there in that room, with no woman to see to her.

All the light and the heat of the fire is on her, and I think I see her open her eyes! But is it the fire that flickers? Her eyes open wider. I am afraid, and run. Then I pause. If she is alive? I think. But no, I say, it is the heat that makes her thaw.

All the same, I go back and look again. I am, perhaps, seeing dreams. But her face moves a little. I take her in my arms, though I am very afraid, and I climb with her out of that place. Not too soon. As I leave, I see the ground bend and fall in. The heat has loosened the ice that held it all together—that hut.

With the little girl under my coat, I go away.

No, I was not dreaming. It is true.

I do not know how. She moves. She is alive. She cries. I give her food; she eats.

That is her, over there, master. She was like my daughter. I taught her to talk, to sew, to cook—everything.

For thousands and thousands of years, you say, she has lain frozen under that snow—and that this is not possible. Perhaps it was a special sort of cold that came. Who knows? One thing I know. I found her down there and took her away. For fifteen years she has been with me—no, sixteen years.

Master, I love her. There is nothing else in the world that I love. She has grown up with me, but now she has returned to sleep.

“That’s all,” the doctor said.

“No doubt the man was mad. I went away an hour later. Yet I swear—her face was like no face I have ever seen, and I have traveled. Some creatures can live, in a state of suspended animation, frozen for years. No, no, no, it’s quite impossible! Yet, somehow, in my heart I believe it!”

The Brighton Monster

I found one of the most remarkable stories of the century—a story related to the most terrible event in the history of mankind—in a heap of rubbish in the corridor outside the office of Mr. Harry Ainsworth, editor of the People, in 1943.

Every house in London, in those dark, exciting days, was being combed for salvage, particularly scrap metal and waste paper. Out of Mr. Ainsworth’s office alone came more than three hundred pounds of paper that, on consideration, was condemned to pulp as not worth keeping.

The pamphlet I found must have been lying at the bottom of a bottom drawer—it was on top of the salvage basket. If the lady, or gentleman, who sent it to the People will communicate with me I will gladly pay her (or him) two hundred and fifty English pounds.

As literature it is nothing but a piece of pretentious nonsense written by one of those idle dabblers in “natural philosophy” who rushed into print on the slightest provocation in the eighteenth century. But the significance of it is formidable.

It makes me afraid.

The author of my pamphlet had attempted to tickle his way into public notice with the feather of his pen by writing an account of a monster captured by a boatman fishing several miles out of Brighthelmstone in the county of Sussex in the summer of the year 1745.

The name of the author was the Reverend Arthur Titty. I see him as one of those pushing, self-assertive vicars of the period, a rider to hounds, a purple-faced consumer of prodigious quantities of old port; a man of independent fortune, trying to persuade the world and himself that he was a deep thinker and a penetrating observer of the mysterious works of God.

I should never have taken the trouble to pocket his Account of a Strange Monster Captured Near Brighthelmstone in the County of Sussex on August 6th in the Year of Our Lord 1745 if it had not been coincidence of the date: I was born on August 6. So I pushed the yellowed, damp-freckled pages into the breast pocket of my battledress, and thought no more about them until April 1947, when a casual remark sent me running, yelling like a maniac, to the cupboard in which my old uniforms were hanging.

The pamphlet was still in its pocket.

I shall not waste your time or strain your patience with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s turgid, high-falutin’ prose or his references to De rerum—this, that and the other. I propose to give you the unadorned facts in the very queer case of the Brighthelmstone monster.

Brighthelmstone is now known as Brighton—a large, popular, prosperous holiday resort delightfully situated on the coast of Sussex by the Downs. But in the Reverend Titty’s day it was an obscure fishing village.

If a fisherman named Hodge had not had an unlucky night on August 5, 1745, on the glass-smooth sea off Brighthelmstone, this story would never have been told. He had gone out with his brother-in-law, George Rodgers, and they had caught nothing but a few small and valueless fishes. Hodge was desperate. He was notorious in the village as a spendthrift and a drunkard, and it was suspected that he had a certain connection with a barmaid at the Smack Inn—it was alleged that she had a child by him in the spring of the following year. He had scored up fifteen shillings for beer and needed a new net. It is probable, therefore, that Hodge stayed out in his boat until after the dawn of August 6 because he feared to face his wife—who also, incidentally, was with child.

At last, glum, sullen, and thoroughly out of sorts, he prepared to go home.

And then, he said, there was something like a splash—only it was not a splash: it was rather like the bursting of a colossal bubble: and there, in the sea, less than ten yards from his boat, was the monster, floating.

George Rodgers said: “By gogs, Jack Hodge, yon’s a man!”

“Man? How can ’a be a man? Where could a man come from?”

The creature that had appeared with the sound of a bursting bubble drifted closer, and Hodge, reaching out with a boat hook, caught it under the chin and pulled it to the side of the boat.

“That be a merman,” he said, “and no Christian man. Look at ’un, all covered wi’ snakes and fire-drakes, and yellow like a slug’s belly. By the Lord, George Rodgers, this might be the best night’s fishing I ever did if it’s alive, please the Lord! For if it is I can sell that for better money than ever I got for my best catch this last twenty years, or any other fisherman either. Lend a hand, Georgie-boy, and let’s have a feel of it.”

George Rodgers said: “That’s alive, by hell—look now, and see the way the blood runs down where the gaff went home.”

“Haul it in, then, and don’t stand there gaping like a puddock.”

They dragged the monster into the boat. It was shaped like a man and covered from throat to ankle with brilliantly colored images of strange monsters. A green, red, yellow and blue thing like a lizard sprawled between breast bone and navel. Great serpents were coiled above its legs. A smaller snake, red and blue, was picked out on the monster’s right arm: the snake’s tail covered the forefinger and its head was hidden in the armpit. On the left-hand side of its chest there was a big heart-shaped design in flaming scarlet. A great bird like an eagle in red and green spread its wings from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade, and a red fox chased six blue rabbits from the middle of his spine into some unknown hiding place between his legs. There were lobsters, fishes, and insects on his left arm and on his right buttock a devilfish sprawled, encircling the lower part of his body with its tentacles. The back of his right hand was decorated with a butterfly in yellow, red, indigo and green. Low down, in the center of the throat, where the bone begins, there was a strange, incomprehensible, evil-looking symbol.

The monster was naked. In spite of its fantastic appearance it was so unmistakably a male human being that George Rodgers—a weak-minded but respectable man—covered it with a sack. Hodge prised open the monster’s mouth to look at its teeth, having warned his brother-in-law to stand by with an axe in case of emergency. The man-shaped creature out of the sea had red gums, a red tongue, and teeth as white as sugar.

They forced it to swallow a little gin—Hodge always had a flask of gin in the boat—and it came to life with a great shudder, and cried out in a strange voice, opening wild black eyes and looking crazily left and right.

“Tie that up. You tie that’s hands while I tie that’s feet,” said Hodge.

The monster offered no resistance.

“Throw ’un back,” said George Rodgers, suddenly overtaken by a nameless dread. “Throw ’un back, Jack, I say!”

But Hodge said: “You be mazed, George Rodgers, you born fool. I can sell ’e for twenty-five golden guineas. Throw ’un back? I’ll throw ’ee back for a brass farthing, tha’ witless fool!”

There was no wind. The two fishermen pulled for the shore. The monster lay in the bilge, rolling its eyes. The silly, good-natured Rodgers offered it a crust of bread which it snapped up so avidly that it bit his finger to the bone. Then Hodge tried to cram a wriggling live fish into its mouth, but “the monster spat it out pop, like a cork out of a bottle, saving your Honor’s presence.”

Brighthelmstone boiled over with excitement when they landed. Even the Reverend Arthur Titty left his book and his breakfast, clapped on his three-cornered hat, picked up his cane, and went down to the fish-market to see what was happening. They told him that Hodge had caught a monster, a fish that looked like a man, a merman, a hypogriff, a sphinx—heaven knows what. The crowd parted and Titty came face to face with the monster.

Although the monster understood neither Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian nor French, it was obvious that it was a human being, or something remarkably like one. This was evident in its manner of wrinkling its forehead, narrowing its eyes, and demonstrating that it was capable of understanding—or of wanting to understand, which is the same thing. But it could not speak; it could only cry out incoherently and it was obviously greatly distressed. The Reverend Arthur Titty said: “Oafs, ignorant louts! This is no sea monster, you fools, no lusus naturae, but an unfortunate shipwrecked mariner.”

According to the pamphlet, Hodge said: “Your Reverence, begging your Reverence’s pardon, how can that be, since for the past fortnight there has been no breath of wind and no foreign vessel in these parts? If this be an unfortunate shipwrecked mariner, where is the wreck of his ship, and where was it wrecked? I humbly ask your Reverence how he appeared as you might say out of a bubble without warning on the face of the water, floating. And if your Honor will take the trouble to observe this unhappy creature’s skin your Reverence will see that it shows no signs of having been immersed for any considerable period in the ocean.”

I do not imagine for a moment that this is what Hodge really said: he probably muttered the substance of the argument in the form of an angry protest emphasized by a bitten-off oath or two. However, the Reverend Arthur Titty perceived that what the fisherman said was “not without some show of reason” and said that he proposed to take the monster to his house for examination.

Hodge protested vigorously. It was his monster, he said, because he had caught it in the open sea with his own hands, in his own boat, and parson or no parson, if Titty were the Archbishop himself, an Englishman had his rights. After some altercation, in the course of which the monster fainted, the Reverend Arthur Titty gave Hodge a silver crown piece for the loan of the monster for philosophical observation. They poured a few buckets of sea water over the monster which came back to consciousness with a tremulous sigh. This was regarded as positive proof of its watery origin. Then it was carried to Titty’s house on a hurdle.

It rejected salt water as a drink, preferring fresh water or wine, and ate cooked food, expressing, with unmistakable grimaces, a distaste for raw fish and meat. It was put to bed on a heap of clean straw and covered with a blanket which was kept moistened with sea water. Soon the monster of Brighthelmstone revived and appeared desirous of walking. It could even make sounds reminiscent of human speech.

The Reverend Arthur Titty covered its nakedness under a pair of his old breeches and one of his old shirts . . . as if it had not been grotesque-looking enough before.

He weighed it, measured it, and bled it to discover whether it was thick or thin-blooded, cold or hot-blooded. According to Titty’s fussy little account the monster was about five feet one and three-quarter inches tall. It weighed exactly one hundred and nineteen pounds, and walked upright. It possessed unbelievable strength and superhuman agility. On one occasion the Reverend Arthur Titty took it out for a walk on the end of a leather leash. The local blacksmith, one of Hodge’s boon companions, who was notorious for his gigantic muscular power and bad temper—he was later to achieve nationwide fame as Clifford, who broke the arm of the champion wrestler of Yorkshire—accosted the Reverend Arthur Titty outside his smithy and said: “Ah, so that’s Hodge’s catch as you stole from him. Let me feel of it to see if it be real,” and he pinched the monster’s shoulder very cruelly with one of his great hands—hands that could snap horseshoes and twist iron bars into spirals. The inevitable crowd of children and gaping villagers witnessed the event. The monster picked up the two-hundred-pound blacksmith and threw him into a heap of scrap iron three yards away. For an anxious second or two Titty thought that the monster was going to run amok, for its entire countenance changed; the nostrils quivered, the eyes shone with fierce intelligence, and from its open mouth there came a weird cry. Then the creature relapsed into heavy dejection and let itself be led home quietly, while the astonished blacksmith, bruised and bleeding, limped back to his anvil with the shocked air of a man who has seen the impossible come to pass.

Yet, the monster was an extremely sick monster. It ate little, sometimes listlessly chewing the same mouthful for fifteen minutes. It liked to squat on its haunches and stare unblinkingly at the sea. It was assumed that it was homesick for its native element, and so it was soused at intervals with buckets of brine and given a large tub of sea water to sleep in if it so desired. A learned doctor of medicine came all the way from Dover to examine it and pronounced it human; unquestionably an air-breathing mammal. But so were whales and crocodiles breathers of air that lived in the water.

Hodge, alternately threatening and whimpering, claimed his property. The Reverend Arthur Titty called in his lawyer, who so bewildered the unfortunate fisherman with Latin quotations, legal jargon, dark hints and long words that, cursing and growling, he scrawled a cross in lieu of a signature at the foot of a document in which he agreed to relinquish all claim on the monster in consideration of the sum of seven guineas, payable on the spot. Seven guineas was a great deal of money for a fisherman in those days. Hodge had never seen so many gold pieces in a heap, and had never owned one. Then a traveling showman visited the Reverend Arthur Titty and offered him twenty-five guineas for the monster, which Titty refused. The showman spoke of the matter in the Smack, and Hodge, who had been drunk for a week, behaved “like one demented,” as Titty wrote in a contemptuous footnote. He made a thorough nuisance of himself, demanding the balance of the twenty-five guineas which were his by rights, was arrested and fined for riotous conduct. Then he was put in the stocks as an incorrigible drunkard, and the wicked little urchins of Brighthelmstone threw fish-guts at him.

Let out of the stocks with a severe reprimand, smelling horribly of dead fish, Hodge went to the Smack and ordered a quart of strong ale, which came in a heavy can. Rodgers, to whom Hodge had given only twelve shillings, came in for his modest morning draft, and told Hodge that he was nothing better than a damned rogue. He claimed half of the seven golden guineas. Hodge, having drunk his quart, struck Rodgers with the can, and broke his skull; for which he was hanged not long afterwards.

The Brighthelmstone monster was an unlucky monster.

The Reverend Arthur Titty also suffered. After the killing of Rodgers and the hanging of Hodge the fishermen began to hate him. Heavy stones were thrown against his shutters at night. Someone set fire to one of his haystacks. This must have given Titty something to think about, for rick-burning was a hanging matter, and one may as well hang for a parson as for a haystack. He made up his mind to go to London and live in politer society. So he was uprooted by the monster. The fishermen hated the monster too. They regarded it as a sort of devil. But the monster did not care. It was languishing, dying of a mysterious sickness. Curious sores had appeared at various points on the monster’s body—they began as little white bumps such as one gets from stinging-nettles, and slowly opened and would not close. The looseness of the skin, now, lent the dragons and fishes a disgustingly lifelike look: as the monster breathed, they writhed. A veterinary surgeon poured melted pitch on the sores. The Reverend Titty kept it well soaked in sea water and locked it in a room, because it had shown signs of wanting to escape.

At last, nearly three months after its first appearance in Brighthelmstone, the monster escaped. An old manservant, Alan English, unlocked the door, in the presence of the Reverend Arthur Titty, to give the monster its daily mess of vegetables and boiled meat. As the key turned, the door was flung open with such violence that English fell forward into the room—his hand was still on the doorknob—and the monster ran out, crying aloud in a high, screaming voice. The Reverend Arthur Titty caught it by the shoulder, whereupon he was whisked away like a leaf in the wind and lay stunned at the end of the passage. The monster ran out of the house. Three responsible witnesses—Rebecca North, Herbert George and Abraham Herris (or Harris)—saw it running towards the sea, stark naked, although a northeast wind was blowing. The two men ran after it, and Rebecca North followed as fast as she could. The monster ran straight into the bitter water and began to swim, its arms and legs vibrating like the wings of an insect. Herbert George saw it plunge into the green heart of a great wave, and then the heavy rain fell like a curtain and the Brighthelmstone monster was never seen again.

It had never spoken. In the later stages of its disease its teeth had fallen out. With one of these teeth—probably a canine—it had scratched marks on the dark oak panels of the door of the room in which it was confined. These marks the Reverend Arthur Titty faithfully copied and reproduced in his pamphlet.

The Brighthelmstone fishermen said that the sea devil had gone back where it belonged, down to the bottom of the sea to its palace built of the bones of lost Christian sailors. Sure enough, half an hour after the monster disappeared there was a terrible storm, and many seamen lost their lives. In a month or so Titty left Brighthelmstone for London. The city swallowed him. He published his pamphlet in 1746—a bad year for natural philosophy, because the ears of England were still full of the Jacobite rebellion of ’45.

Poor Titty! If he could have foreseen the real significance of the appearance of the monster of Brighthelmstone he would have died happy . . . in a lunatic asylum.

Nobody would have believed him.

Now in April 1947 I had the good fortune to meet one of my oldest and dearest friends, a colonel in Intelligence who, for obvious reasons, must remain anonymous, although he is supposed to be in retirement now and wears civilian clothes, elegantly cut in the narrow-sleeved style of the late nineteen-twenties, and rather the worse for wear. The colonel is in many ways a romantic character, something like Rudyard Kipling’s Strickland Sahib. He has played many strange parts in his time, that formidable old warrior; and his quick black eyes, disturbingly Asiatic-looking under the slackly-drooping eyelids, have seen more than you and I will ever see.

He never talks about his work. An Intelligence officer who talks ceases automatically to be an Intelligence officer. A good deal of his conversation is of sport, manly sport—polo, pig-sticking, cricket, rugby football, hunting, and, above all, boxing and wrestling. I imagine that the colonel, who has lived underground in disguise for so many years of his life, finds relief in the big wide-open games in which a man must meet his opponent face to face yet may, without breaking the rules, play quick tricks.

We were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes after dinner in my flat and he was talking about oriental wrestling. He touched on wrestling technique among the Afghans and in the Deccan, and spoke with admiration of Gama, the Western Indian wrestler, still a rock-crusher at an age when most men are shivering in slippers by the fire, who beat Zbyszko; remarked on a southeastern Indian named Patil who could knock a strong man senseless with the knuckle of his left thumb; and went on to Chinese wrestlers, especially Mongolians, who are tremendously heavy and powerful, and use their feet. A good French-Canadian lumberjack (the colonel said), accustomed to dancing on rolling logs in a rushing river, could do dreadful things with his legs and feet, like the Tiger of Quebec, who in a scissors-hold killed Big Ted Glass of Detroit. In certain kinds of wrestling size and weight were essential, said the colonel. The Japanese wrestlers of the heavy sort—the ones that weighed three or four hundred pounds and looked like pigs—those big ones that started on all fours and went through a series of ritual movements; they had to be enormously heavy. In fact the heavier they were the better.

“No, Gerald my lad, give me ju-jitsu,” he said. “There is no one on earth who can defeat a master of ju-jitsu—except someone who takes him by surprise. Of course, a scientific boxer, getting a well-placed punch in first, would put him out for the count. But the real adept develops such wonderful coordination of hand and eye that if he happens to be expecting it he can turn to his own advantage even the lightning punch of a wizard like Jimmy Wilde. He could give away eight stone to Joe Louis and make him look silly. Georges Hackenschmidt, for instance, is one of the greatest catch-as-catch-can wrestlers that ever lived, and one of the strongest men of his day. But I question whether he, wrestling catch, might have stood up against Yukio Tani? Oh, by the way, speaking of Yukio Tani, did you ever hear of a wrestler called Sato?”

“I can’t say that I have. Why? Should I have heard of him?”

“Why, he is, or was, a phenomenon. I think he was a better wrestler than Tani. My idea was to take him all round the world and challenge all comers—boxers, wrestlers, even fencers, to stand up against him for ten minutes. He was unbelievable. Furthermore, he looked so frightful. I won a hundred and fifty quid on him at Singapore in 1938. He took on four of the biggest and best boxers and wrestlers we could lay our hands on and floored the whole lot in seven minutes by the clock. Just a minute, I’ve got a picture in my wallet. I keep it because it looks so damn funny. Look.”

The colonel handed me a dog-eared photograph of an oddly assorted group. There was a hairy mammoth of a man, obviously a wrestler, standing with his arms folded so that his biceps looked like coconuts, beside another man, almost as big, but with the scrambled features of a rough-and-tumble bruiser. There was one blond grinning man who looked like a light heavyweight, and a beetle-browed middleweight with a bulldog jaw. The colonel was standing in the background, smiling in a fatherly way. In the foreground, smiling into the camera, stood a tiny Japanese. The top of his head was on a level with the big wrestler’s breastbone, but he was more than half as broad as he was tall. He was all chest and arms. The knuckles of his closed hands touched his knees. I took the picture to the light and looked more closely. The photographer’s flashbulb had illuminated every detail. Sato had made himself even more hideous with tattooing. He was covered with things that creep and crawl, real and fabulous. A dragon snarled on his stomach. Snakes were coiled about his legs. Another snake wound itself about his right arm from forefinger to armpit. The other arm was covered with angry-looking lobsters and goggle-eyed fishes, and on the left breast there was the conventionalized shape of a heart.

It was then that I uttered an astonished oath and went running to look for my old uniform, which I found, with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s pamphlet still in the inside breast pocket. The colonel asked me what the devil was the matter with me. I smoothed out the pamphlet and gave it to him without a word.

He looked at it, and said: “How very extraordinary!” Then he put away his eyeglass and put on a pair of spectacles; peered intently at the smudged and ragged drawing of the Brighthelmstone monster, compared it with the photograph of Sato, and said to me: “I have come across some pretty queer things in my time, but I’m damned if I know what to make of this.”

“Tell me,” I said, “was your Sato tattooed behind? And if so, in what way?”

Without hesitation the colonel said: “A red-and-green hawk stooping between the shoulder-blades, a red fox chasing six blue-gray rabbits down his spine, and an octopus on the right buttock throwing out tentacles that went round to the belly. Why?”

Then I opened Titty’s pamphlet and put my finger on the relevant passage. The colonel read it and changed color. But he said nothing. I said: “This is the damnedest coincidence. There’s another thing. This so-called monster of Brighton scratched something on the door of the room where he was locked up, and the old parson took a pencil rubbing of it. Turn over four or five pages and you’ll see a copy of it.”

The colonel found the page. The spongy old paper was worn into holes, blurred by time and the dampness of lumber-rooms and the moisture of my body. He said: “It looks like Japanese. But no Japanese would write like that surely . . .”

“Remember,” I said, “that the Brighton monster scratched its message with one of its own teeth on the panel of an oak door. Allow for that; allow for the fact that it was weak and sick; take into consideration the grain of the wood; and then see what you make of it.”

The colonel looked at the inscription for ten long minutes, copying it several times from several different angles. At last he said: “This says: I was asleep. I thought that it was all a bad dream from which I should awake and find myself by the side of my wife. Now I know that it is not a dream. I am sick in the head. Pity me, poor Sato, who went to sleep in one place and awoke in another. I cannot live any more. I must die. Hiroshima 1945.”

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

The Colonel said: “I don’t know. I only know the bare facts about Sato because, as I have already told you, I was trying to find him. (a) He had a wife, and a home somewhere in Hiroshima. (b) He was in the Japanese Navy, and he went on leave in August 1945. (c) Sato disappeared off the face of the earth when they dropped that damned atom bomb. (d) This is unquestionably a picture of Sato—the greatest little wrestler the world has ever known. (e) The description of the tattooing on the back of this monster tallies exactly with Sato’s . . . I don’t know quite what to make of it. Sato, you know, was a Christian. He counted the years the Christian way. Hiroshima 1945. I wonder!”

“What do you wonder?”

“Why,” said the colonel, “there can’t be the faintest shadow of a doubt that Sato got the middle part of the blast of that frightful atom bomb when we dropped it on Hiroshima. You may or may not have heard of Dr. Sant’s crazy theories concerning time in relation to speed. Now imagine that you happen to be caught up —without disintegrating—in a species of air-pocket on the fringe of an atomic blast and are flung away a thousand times faster than if you had been fired out of a cannon. Imagine it. According to the direction in which you happen to be thrown you may find yourself in the middle of tomorrow or on the other side of yesterday. Don’t laugh at me. I may have been frying my brains in the tropics most of my life, and I may be crazy; but I’ve learned to believe all kinds of strange things. My opinion is that my poor little Sato was literally blown back two hundred years in time.”

I said: “But why blown backwards only in time? How do you account for his being struck by the blast in Hiroshima and ending in Brighton?”

“I’m no mathematician,” said the colonel, “but as I understand, the earth is perpetually spinning and space is therefore shifting all the time. If you, for example, could stand absolutely still, here, now, where you are, while the earth moved—if you stood still only for one hour, you’d find yourself in Budapest. Do you understand what I mean? That atomic blast picked little Sato up and threw him back in time. When you come to think of that, and remember all the curious monsters they used to exhibit in Bartholomew’s Fair during the eighteenth century—when you think of all the mermaids, monsters, and mermen that they picked out of the sea and showed on fairgrounds until they died . . . it makes you think.”

“It makes you think.”

“Do you observe, by the way,” said the colonel, pointing to the Reverend Titty’s pamphlet, “that poor little Sato was sick with running sores, and that his teeth were falling out? Radioactivity poisoning: these are the symptoms. Poor Sato! Can you wonder why he got desperate and simply chucked himself back into the sea to sink or swim? Put yourself in his position. You go to sleep in Hiroshima, in August 1945 and then—Whoof!—you find yourself in Brighton, in November 1745. No wonder the poor wretch couldn’t speak. That shock would be enough to paralyze anyone’s tongue. It scares me, Kersh, my boy—it puts a match to trains of thought of the most disturbing nature. It makes me remember that past and future are all one. I shall really worry, in future, when I have a nightmare . . . one of those nightmares in which you find yourself lost, struck dumb, completely bewildered in a place you’ve never seen before—a place out of this world. God have mercy on us, I wish they’d never thought of that disgusting secret weapon!”

You are free to argue the point, to speculate and to draw your own conclusions. But this is the end (or, God forbid, the beginning) of the story of the Brighton monster.