At seven o’clock, Tybalt knocked discreetly on his bedroom door and asked him if he were ready.
It had been impossible to find a lake or a reservoir where they could moor two boats close together and stretch a steel line between them. So Tybalt had devised a substitute: a motorcycle, and a wire tied at neck-level between two substantial horse-chestnut trees.
It was a sharp, sunny morning. They walked together down to the paddock, with Martin pushing the motorcycle.
“I haven’t been on a bike for years,” he told Tybalt. What he was trying to say was: I hope I don’t make a mess of this, and blind myself, or cut half my face off, instead of dying instantly.
Tybalt said, “You’ll be fine. Just make sure you’re going full-throttle.”
He sat patiently in the saddle while Tybalt attached the electrodes. “It’s funny,” he said. “I feel really at peace.”
“Yes,” said Tybalt. “Death is a good place to go to, when you understand what life really is.”
“So what is life, really?”
“Life is mostly imaginary. That’s what I saw when I nearly died, coming off that motorbike. Our imagination always protects us from ugliness, and unhappiness, and fear. We have a gift for rationalizing our existence, to make it seem bearable. We’re always looking on the bright side.”
“It’s human nature,” said Martin.
“No, no. You don’t realize what I’m talking about when I say ‘imaginary.’ I mean that our lives as we know them and recognize them are mostly in our minds. You’ll see, believe me. Beauty is imaginary. Happiness is imaginary.”
“I was happy with Sarah.”
“You imagined you were happy with Sarah.”
“I just don’t follow.”
Tybalt stuck on the last electrode. “I can’t explain it any more clearly than that. You’ll just have to experience it for yourself.”
“No-tell me!”
Tybalt shook his head. “If I told you, Martin, you wouldn’t believe me. This is something you have to witness for yourself. Now, start up your engine, and think of Sarah. Think how she felt.”
Martin took a deep breath. It was plain that Tybalt wasn’t going to explain himself any further. All the same, what he had said had given Martin a strange feeling of dread, as if there were something far worse beyond those horse-chestnut trees than instant oblivion.
He pressed the self-starter, and the motorcycle whined into life. Tybalt leaned close to him and said, “You’re still sure about this? You can change your mind … go home, build a new life. I won’t think any the less of you.”
Go home to what? A silent flat, with Sarah’s clothes still hanging in the closet? Years of grief, and loneliness?
“The recording wires will play out behind you,” said Tybalt. “Don’t worry about them. Go as fast as you can. And keep your chin up.”
Martin revved the motorcycle again and again. The sun began to come out behind the trees, and the morning looked almost heavenly. At last he thought: this is the moment. This is it. The dew was glittering and a flight of starlings came bursting past. You couldn’t leave the world at a better time.
The motorcycle sped across the paddock. Martin thought of Sarah, on her jet-ski. He could see the two horse-chestnuts but he couldn’t even see the wire yet. It must have been the same for Sarah. Perhaps she didn’t see it at all. He opened the throttle wider and the motorcycle bucked and jostled over the grass at more than fifty miles an hour. The breeze fluffed in his ears; the sun shone in his eyes. Chin up, remember.
He felt the blow. It was like a tremendous karate-chop to the adam’s apple. He heard the motorcycle roaring off-key, and then suddenly everything was spinning out of control. His head hit the grass, and bounced, and he saw, he could actually see.
And he understood then what Tybalt had been trying to tell him, and why Tybalt had been trying so hard to see what only the dying can see.
He couldn’t scream, because he was decapitated, and his brain was a split-second instant away from total death. But he could scream inside his mind. And that was how he died, screaming.
Tybalt sat alone in the house in front of his computer, running the recordings again and again. Martin’s was one of the clearest. He could see him approaching the horse-chestnut trees. At the last second, he could see the wire.
Then – as Martin’s head flew from his body – he saw what he himself had seen when he nearly died on the Kingston bypass.
He saw the polluted yellow sky, with tattered rooks circling everywhere. He saw gnarled and shriveled trees, and grass as slimy as seaweed. He saw a distant house with a sagging roof, and fires burning in the distance. He saw hideous, hunched creatures running along the lane. He even glimpsed a brief blurred image of himself, the way he really was.
A tall, white-faced figure, distant and sinister, with frightening deformities.
He switched off the computer and went downstairs. He opened the back door and stepped out into the garden. The sun was still shining – or, at least, it was still shining in his imagination. He lit a cigarette.
A cat came stalking through the grass. It stopped for a moment, and stared at him, almost as if it instinctively knew what he had discovered with technology: that it was not a tortoiseshell with gray eyes and gleaming fur, but something grotesque, like he was, and that both of them were living in a hell on earth.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © 2000 by Graham Masterton.
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ISBN: 9781448204441
eISBN: 9781448203857
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Feelings of Fear Page 24
