The Brighton Monster
I FOUND one of the most remarkable stories of the cen-
tury - 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
witing 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 Bright-
helmstone in the County of Sussex on August 6th in the
Year of Our Lord 1^4$ if it had not been for the coinci-
dence of the date: I was born on 6 August. So I pushed
the yellowed, damp-freckled pages into the breast pocket
of my battledress, and thought no more about them
until April 1947, w'hen a casual remark sent me run-
ning, 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 5 August 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 6 August
because he feared to face his wife -who also, incident-
ally, 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 firedrakes, 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 coloured images of strange monsters. A
green, red, yellow and blue thing like a lizard sprawled
between breast-bone and navel. Great serpents were
coiled about 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 devil-fish 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 centre of the throat,
where the bone begins, there was a strange, incompre-
hensible, 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 I ’
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 Honour’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 fore-
head, 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 Rever-
ence, 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 shiptvrecked 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 Honour 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 emphasised 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 unmis-
takable 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 nation-wide 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 dejec-
tion 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 mouth-
ful 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; unquestion-
ably 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 fisher-
man 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
travelling 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, smell-
ing 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 draught, 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 fisher-
men 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 fisher-
men 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 sting-
ing-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 man-
servant, 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 door-knob - 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 to-
wards the sea, stark naked, although a north-east 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 - prob-
ably a canine - it had scratched marks on the dark oak
panels of the door of the room in which it was con-
fined. These marks the Reverend Arthur Titty faith-
fully 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 sea-
men lost their lives. In a month or so Titty left Bright-
helmstone 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 signifi-
cance of the appearance of the Monster of Brighthelm-
stone 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 In-
telligence 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 dis-
guise 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 admira-
tion 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 South-
Eastern 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,
■^0 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 rush-
ing 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 co-ordination 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
VTestler 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 - boxm?-
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 be-
cause 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 grin-
ning man who looked like a light heavy-weight, and a
beetle-browed middle-weight 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 breast-bone, 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 flash-bulb 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-look-
ing lobsters and goggle-eyed fishes, and on the left breast
there was the conventionalised shape of a heart.
— -icwas 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 in-
side breast pocket. The Colonel asked me what the devil
iv^as 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 eye-glass 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 w'hat 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-grey 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
colour. But he said nothing. I said: ‘This is the damned-
est 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 Moxms^
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
SatOy who zuent to sleep in one place and awoke in
a7iotker, 1 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 dis-
appeared 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?’
‘AVhy/ 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 -with-
out 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 under-
stand 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 Mer-
maids, Monsters, and Mermen that they picked out of
the sea and showed on fair-grounds until they died . . .
it makes you think.'
It makes you think.'
‘Do you observe, by the way,' said the Colonel, point-
ing to the Reverend Titty's pamphlet, ‘that poor little
Sato was sick with running sores, and that his teeth were
falling out? Radio-activity 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 then - Whoof! -
you find yourself in Brighton, in November 1745. No
wonder the poor wretch couldn't speak. That shock
would be enough to paralyse 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 youVe never seen be-
fore - 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.
