The Best of Gerald Kersh (2 page)

A
SHOCKING
book might be written about Pio Busto’s apartment-house. It stands on a corner not far from Oxford Street. It stands. No doubt Busto, who knows all the laws pertaining to real-estate, has managed to find some loophole in the Law of Gravity; I can think of no other reason to account for the fact that his house has not yet fallen down. Pio Busto knows how to make a living by letting furnished rooms. He puts a sheet of wallboard across a small bedroom and calls it two apartments. His house is furnished with odds and ends raked from the junk-heaps in the Cattle Market. No space is wasted. He sleeps in a subterranean wash-house, and would convert even this into a bed-sitting-room if the coal-cellar were not crammed with spare furniture and bed-linen. He is something of a character, this Busto; he looks like Lorenzo the Magnificent, and sleeps with a savage old dog named Ouif; in
case of burglars he keeps a service revolver under his pillow, and a cavalry sabre hung on a bootlace over his head. He keeps evil spirits at bay with a rusty horseshoe, the lower half of a broken crucifix, and a lithograph of the Mona Lisa whom he believes to be the Virgin Mary.

His rooms are dangerous. You sigh; they shake. You sneeze, and down comes a little piece of ceiling. What is
more, the walls are full of holes, bored by tenants of an inquisitive turn of mind. The curiosity of these people is often highly irritating – your view is sometimes
obscured
by the eye of your neighbour, who is trying to peep back at you. But Busto’s tenants rarely stay long. They are mostly rolling stones, and by the time they come down to Busto’s house, which is very far from the bottom of things, they have acquired momentum. They come, and they go.

As for me, I lived for more than three months in one of the cheapest of those spy-hole-riddled bedrooms. I completed my education there. Through three or four tiny holes, which must have been bored by some neglected genius of espionage, I watched people when they thought they were alone. I saw things which walls and the darkness were made to conceal; I heard things which no man was ever supposed to hear. It was
degrading
, but impossible to resist. I stooped. I stooped to the keyhole of hell, and I learned the secrets of the damned.

Among the damned was Shakmatko.

*

Picture for yourself this terrifying man.

I saw him for the first time in the saloon bar of the ‘Duchess of Duoro’– long-drawn-out, sombre, pallid, and mysterious; dressed all in black. He had the unearthly, only partly human appearance of a figure in a Japanese print. I glanced at him, and said to myself, with a
sensation
of shock: ‘Good God, this man is all forehead!’ Imagine one of those old-fashioned square felt hats
without
a brim: his skull was shaped exactly like that. It towered straight upwards, white and glabrous. His
forehead
conveyed an impression of enormous weight – it
seemed to have pressed his face out of shape. You can reproduce something of his aspect if you model a human face in white plasticine, and then foreshorten it by squashing it down on the table. In plasticine that is all very well; but alive, in a public-house, it does not look so good.

And if all this were not enough, his eyes were hidden behind dark-blue spectacles.

As I looked he rose from his chair, stretching himself out in three jerks, like a telescope, and came towards me and said, in a hushed voice, with a peculiar foreign intonation:

‘Can you please give me a match?’

‘With pleasure.’

He recoiled from the light of the match-flame, shading his concealed eyes with a gloved hand. I thought of the Devil in Bon-Bon. The tightly clamped mouth parted a little, to let out a puff of smoke and a few more words.

‘I find the light hurts my eyes. Will you drink?’

‘Oh, thank you.’

He indicated a chair. When we were seated, he asked:

‘Pardon me. You live in this vicinity?’

‘Almost next door.’

‘Ah. In apartments?’

‘That would be a polite name for them.’

‘You will excuse my asking?’

‘Of course. Are you looking for a room?’

‘Yes, I am. But it must be cheap.’

‘I live on the corner. They have one or two rooms vacant there. They’re cheap enough, but——’

‘Are there tables?’

‘Oh! Yes, I think so.’

‘Then I will go there. One thing: I can pay in advance, but I have no references.’

‘I don’t suppose Busto will mind that.’

‘You see, I never stay long at one place.’

‘You like variety, I suppose?’

‘I detest variety, but I have to move.’

‘Ah, landladies are often very difficult to get on with.’

‘It is not that. A large number of people live in this house of yours?’

‘A good few. Why?’

‘I do not like to be alone.’ At this, he looked over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me the address?’

‘I’m going that way. Come along with me, if you like.’

‘You are far too kind.’ He reached down and picked up a great black suitcase which had been standing
between
his feet. It seemed to drag him down as if it were full of lead. I said:

‘Can I give you a hand?’

‘No, no, no, thank you so very much.’

We walked back to the house.

*

‘First afloor fronta vacant, thirteen bob. Very nice aroom. Top floor back aten bob, electric light include. Spotless. No bug,’ lied Busto.

‘Ten shillings. Is there a table in that room?’

‘Corluvaduck! Bess table ina da world. You come up. I soon show you, mister.’

‘As long as there is a table.’

We went upstairs. Straining at his suitcase the stranger climbed slowly. It took us a long time to reach
the top of the house, where there was a vacant bedroom next to mine. ‘Ecco!’ said Busto, proudly indicating the misbegotten divan, the rickety old round table and the cracked skylight, half blind with soot. ‘Hokay?’

‘It will do. Ten shillings a week; here is a fortnight’s rent in advance. If I leave within a week, the residue is in lieu of notice. I have no references.’

‘Hokay. What name, in case of letters?’

‘There will be no letters. My name is Shakmatko.’

‘Good.’

Shakmatko leaned against the door. He had an air of a man dying of fatigue. His trembling hand fumbled for a cigarette. Again he recoiled from the light of the match, and glanced over his shoulder.

Pity took possession of me. I put an arm about his shoulders, and led him to the divan. He sat down,
gasping
. Then I went back to pick up his suitcase. I stooped, clutched the handle; tensed myself in anticipation of a fifty-six-pound lift; heaved, and nearly fell backwards down the stairs.

The suitcase weighed next to nothing. It was empty except for something that gave out a dry rattling noise. I did not like that.

*

Shakmatko sat perfectly still. I watched him through the holes in the wallboard partition. Time passed. The autumn afternoon began to fade. Absorbed by the opacity of the skylight, the light of day gradually
disappeared
. The room filled with shadow. All that was left of the light seemed to be focused upon the naked top of Shakmatko’s skull, as he sat with his head hanging down. His face was invisible. He looked like the
featureless
larva of some elephantine insect. At last when night had fallen, he began to move. His right hand became gradually visible; it emerged from his sleeve like
something
squeezed out of a tube. He did not switch the light on, but, standing a little night-light in a saucer, he lit it cautiously. In this vague and sickly circle of
orange-coloured
light he took off his spectacles, and began to look about him. He turned his back to me. Snick-snick! He opened the suitcase. My heart beat faster. He
returned
to the table, carrying an oblong box and a large board. I held my breath.

He drew a chair up to the table, upon which he
carefully
placed the board. For a second he hugged the box to his breast, while he looked over his shoulder; then he slid the lid off the box, and, with a sudden clatter, shot out on to the board a set of small ivory chessmen. He arranged these, with indescribable haste, sat for a while with his chin on his clenched hands, then began to move the pieces.

I wish I could convey to you the unearthly atmosphere of that room where, half buried in the shadows, with the back of his head illuminated by a ray of moonlight, and his enormous forehead shining yellow in the feeble radiance of the night-light, Shakmatko sat and played chess with himself.

After a while he began to slide forward in his chair, shake his head, and shrug his shoulders. Sometimes in the middle of a move the hand would waver and his head would nod; then he would force himself to sit upright, rub his eyes violently, look wildly round the room, or listen intently with a hand at his ear.

It occurred to me that he was tired – desperately tired – and afraid of going to sleep.

Before getting into bed I locked my door.

*

It seemed to me that I had not been asleep for more than a minute or so when I was awakened by a loud noise. There was a heavy crash – this, actually, awoke me – followed by the noise of a shower of small hard objects scattered over a floor. Then Shakmatko’s voice, raised in a cry of anguish and terror:

‘You again! Have you found me so soon? Go away! Go away!’

His door opened. I opened my door, looked out, and saw him, standing at the top of the stairs, brandishing a small silver crucifix at the black shadows which filled the staircase.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

He swung round instantly, holding out the crucifix. When he saw me, he caught his breath in relief.

‘Ah, you. Did I disturb you? Forgive me. I – I——May I come into your room?’

‘Do,’ I said.

‘Please close the door quickly,’ he whispered as he came in.

‘Sit down and pull yourself together. Tell me, what’s troubling you?’

‘I must leave here in
the morning,’ said Shakmatko, trembling in every limb; ‘it has found me again. So soon! It must have followed on my very heels. Then what is the use? I can no longer escape it, even for a day. What can I do? Where can I go? My God, my God, I am surrounded!’

‘What has found you? What are you trying to run away from?’ I asked.

He replied: ‘An evil spirit.’

I shivered. There are occasions when the entire fabric of dialectical materialism seems to go phut before the forces of nightmarish possibilities.

‘What sort of evil spirit?’ I asked.

‘I think they call them Poltergeists.’

‘Things that throw – that are supposed to throw
furniture
about?’

‘Yes.’

‘And does it throw your furniture about?’

‘Not all my furniture. Only certain things.’

‘Such as——’

‘Chess-pieces and things connected with the game of chess. Nothing else. I am a chess-player. It hates chess. It follows me from place to place. It waits until I am asleep, and then it tries to destroy my chess-pieces. It has already torn up all my books and papers. There is nothing left but the board and pieces: they are too strong for it, and so it grows increasingly violent.’

‘Good heavens!’

‘Perhaps you think that I am mad?’

‘No, no. If you had told me that you had merely been seeing things I might have thought so. But if one’s
chessboard
flies off the table, that is another matter.’

‘Thank you. I know I am not mad. My name may be unfamiliar to you. Are you interested in chess?’

‘Not very. I hardly know the moves.’

‘Ah. If you were you would have heard of me. I beat Paolino, in the tournament at Pressburg. My game on that occasion has gone down in history. I should certainly have been world champion but for that Thing.’

‘Has it been troubling you for long?’

‘My dear sir, it has given me no peace for twenty years.
Conceive; twenty years! It visited me, first of all, when I was in Paris training with Ljubljana. I had been
working
very hard. I think I had been working nearly all night. I took a hasty lunch, and then lay down and went to sleep. When I woke up I had a feeling that something was wrong: a malaise. I went quickly into my study. What did I see? Chaos!

‘All my books on chess had been taken out of the
bookcase
and dashed to the floor so violently that the bindings were broken. A photograph of myself in a group of
chess-players
had been hurled across the room, torn out of the frame, and crumpled into a ball. My chess-pieces were scattered over the carpet. The board had disappeared: I found it later, stuffed up the chimney.

‘I rushed downstairs and complained to the concierge. He swore that nobody had come up. I thought no more of it; but two days later it happened again.’

‘And didn’t you ever see it?’

‘Never. It is a coward. It waits until nobody is looking.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I ran away. I packed my things, and left that place. I took another flat, in another quarter of Paris. I thought that the house, perhaps, was haunted. I did not believe in such things; but how is it possible to be sure? From the Rue Blanche, I moved to the Boulevard du Temple. There I found that I had shaken it off. I sighed with relief, and settled down once again to my game.

‘And then, when I was once again absorbed, happy, working day and night, it came again.

‘My poor books! Torn to pieces! My beautiful notes – savagely torn to shreds! My beloved ivory pieces –
scattered
and trampled. Ah, but they were too strong for it. It could destroy books and papers; it could destroy
thought; it could destroy the calm detachment and peace of mind necessary to my chess – but my ivory pieces and my inlaid ebony board; those, it has never been able to destroy!’

‘But what happened then?’

‘I ran away again. I found that by moving quickly and suddenly, I could avoid it. I took to living in streets which were difficult to find; complicated turnings,
remote
back-alleys. And so I often managed to lose it for a while. But in the end, it always found me out. Always, when I thought I had shaken it off for ever; when I settled down to calm work and concentration; there would come a time when I would awake, in horror, and find my papers fluttering in tiny fragments; my pieces in chaos.