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.”