Death in Seville

by David Hewson

  She never got there. A foot came across her field of vision, kicked the blade away; she heard him laughing and suddenly her right shoulder blade exploded in pain, a sharp, stabbing agony that tore into the muscles of her back like cold fire.

  She screamed, louder than ever, then pulled her left hand from underneath her, reached round behind her back, felt the sinews straining in her arm. The dart was there. She could touch the feather and the shaft, embedded deep into her flesh. She steeled herself for the pain, tugged at the hard metal body, then yanked it out of her roughly, from a side angle, making the wound complain more. The agony cut through her mind like a knife. There was a preternatural clarity to the sequence of events now. Every moment was lucid, apparent to her in its finest detail, every tiny action had a finite life to it, like frames in a film. She could see the grains of dust floating up from the floor as she rolled over again, onto her back. She could smell him now: sweat and shoe polish and the faint, sour odour of urine. The sounds of the night, of her small, diminishing universe, came to her as individual stamps of identity, each carrying its own label: the far-off hammer of a klaxon beating against stone walls, the lilting moans of the dying and injured in the street, the rustle of the man’s robe above her. The beating of wings, moths’ wings, in the humid, cloying air.

  This is what happens before you die, she thought. This swift magnification of the senses, a momentary focusing of the personality on the last, immediate elements of existence. She felt her life flickering like a candle in the breeze above her. Then she stopped moving, was flat on her back, eyes wide open, staring at him. For just a moment he pulled back the cowl to get a better look. An ordinary face – thirty, perhaps older; dark hair short and tight around the skull; dark, flashing eyes; a smooth, tanned complexion. He was grinning. In his right fist, clenched tightly upright, sleek and silver, was the sword. Then he was hooded again, stepping forward, slowly, deliberately.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ Maria said quietly, her aching back against the ground, staring up at him, listening to the switch slowing again, waiting, hoping. ‘I don’t know you.’

  Another shape filled her view. Large and familiar, shouting, a voice she recognized, a voice that held hope. She saw the sword go up in the air, heard the ticking of the light switch falling away to nothing.

  The night paused, then plunged back into darkness and she was moving again, rolling any way she could, right and left, trying to get out of the way of the mayhem above her, the shouts, the lights, the noise.

  There were more voices, more screams. She yelled in agony as someone stepped on her, making the wound in her back jump like an electric shock.

  Footsteps racing up the stairs in the blackness, the sound of her apartment door slamming.

  Some kind of peace.

  Some kind of safety.

  The light went on again and it blinded her, made her cover her eyes with her hands. She tried to think about her body: the pain in her back. Was there something else? Was she hurt more than this?

  There seemed nothing more. That, at least, seemed certain.

  The voices. Quemada? Velasco? They were coming down the stairs again, yelling at each other, screaming obscenities that echoed off the narrow walls like the shouts of madmen.

  She opened her eyes and looked at them. They held their guns loose by their sides and were rushing steadily down the steps, something else on their minds.

  In the doorway, fallen like a great beast, lay Torrillo. The sword stuck out from his jacket like a silver stump. His face was as pale as writing paper. His huge chest rose and fell in shallow movements.

  She crawled over to him and put a hand to his face. It was cool and moist. Around the base of the weapon the blood coagulated, dark and sticky. She leaned over and whispered in his ear, ‘Don’t die, Bear. Don’t die.’

  And then she was sobbing, shoulders heaving, her body gripped by an involuntary animal spasm.

  ‘I’ll get the medic,’ said Quemada, and he stepped over them into the street.

  What seemed like an age later he returned with a thin young man in a white nylon jacket, a red cross on the front.

  ‘I’m going to report you for this,’ the medic said. ‘I got work out there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Quemada, waving the pistol at him. ‘You got work here too.’

  ‘Put the fucking gun down,’ yelled Velasco. ‘Are you crazy, for Chrissake?’

  Quemada walked over to his partner and thrust his face in front of Velasco’s nose, so close that only a pencil-width separated them.

  ‘It was the only way he’d come. Understand? Partner? You know what it’s like out there?’

  Velasco pulled back, sniffed and stared blankly out of the door. Then he looked at Maria and said, ‘You OK?’

  She was lying by the side of Torrillo, talking to him, whispering in his ear.

  She looked OK, thought Velasco. He didn’t want to ask more. He didn’t want to know more. He didn’t want to be here.

  The medic bent down, looked at the weapon in the big man’s chest.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘What the hell . . . ?’

  ‘Do something,’ Quemada ordered. ‘Pull it out. Whatever.’

  The man took Torrillo’s pulse, looked again at the wound. Then he got on his radio.

  ‘You. The headcase with the gun,’ said the medic. ‘Go to my van. Ask them for the accident kit.’

  Quemada disappeared into the night.

  Maria listened to Torrillo’s breathing. It was so shallow it seemed insufficient to support him, to push enough oxygen through that massive frame.

  ‘Is he gonna live?’ asked Velasco. ‘He’s a cop. Good guy. Is he gonna live?’

  The medic eyed the wound, the blood slowly seeping from it.

  ‘Search me,’ he said.

  Then he looked at Maria. She had passed out on the floor, rolled over onto her side. A small bloodstain was spreading out from near her shoulder blade, making a dark circular patch on the fabric of the dressing gown.

  ‘Jesus!’ said the medic, and he climbed over the great fallen form of Torrillo and felt for her pulse.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Buzzing . . .

  The rustle of a thousand tiny wings.

  Buzzing . . .

  In front of her face they swarm and swim, a thick, live blanket of tiny bodies, red and yellow and black. She holds her breath until her lungs turn black with pain, until she feels they will burst. Still she refuses to breathe. They swarm so thickly, so thickly, that to do so would be to take them into her body, to populate her lungs with that quick and stirring mass of thin and chitinous creatures.

  Buzzing . . .

  Still louder, still darker, they begin to block out the light. She can feel their wings, their hard, shiny bodies on her skin, can feel them crawling over her face, their thin, spidery legs probing, tormenting. She wants to flail her arms, she wants to tear them off her body, but she knows this is impossible. The wasps are the universe. There is nothing more. The air itself has gone. The world is a thick and endlessly moving swarm of vividly coloured insects engulfing her. The light disappears, her lungs are bursting. A pain, hard as steel, shoots up from her spine and stabs into the back of her head. No oxygen, no life. She opens her mouth and tries to scream, but as she does so they fly to her, crawl past her lips, tiny, dirty legs on her tongue, her teeth, small dry bodies in her throat, delving further and further. She can feel them inside her, moving. She can feel the tiny legs in her windpipe, her lungs, her stomach. They populate her, as readily as they would populate a corpse, and Maria wonders, from somewhere within her that they have not yet reached: Is this death? Is this dying?

  Then, from the very pit of her stomach, the nausea begins, a simple reflexive heaving that carries no intelligence, that ignores the fear that the reasoning side of her mind now kindles: they will sting, as they are disturbed, as they are forced from her body, they will sting her, from the inside out, stab tiny needles of poison into the pulsing blood vessels of her
tortured body, kill her with a thousand deadly needles.

  She sits up and the heaving gets worse. There is a rush inside her, a dry, living motion. She opens her mouth wide and they leave, the swarm pushed out into the dark, still buzzing, still angry.

  She heaves again, and this time there is light from somewhere, a bright, yellow radiance, still somewhat hidden by the retreating mass of the swarm, the kind of light you get from a single incandescent bulb. It gets brighter and brighter as the swarm retreats. There are shapes she can make out, half-familiar: she is in a room. The walls, the floor, everywhere is now pale, almost translucent, with a faint violet tint. The light bulb, livid yellow, swings above her, hanging from a twisted corded wire that falls from the ceiling. She looks at it: there is no join, the wire swings gently, from side to side, through the ceiling itself, like some cheap pendulum, attached to a pinion far, far above.

  She looks again and there is a table that was not there before. It is dark, grained wood, the pattern repeated in blocks on its surface, like one of those rendered computer graphics they used in the university: a simulacrum of something organic, a fiction that reduces reality to a mechanistic algorithm.

  There is someone sitting at the table. Perhaps more than one person. She blinks, then looks again, and she is sitting at the table herself, still in her dressing gown. Her arms, holding tightly to the chair in which she sits, are covered in blood. It stains her hands a deep scarlet and she wonders if it will ever come off. Across the table someone is smiling at her. She can feel the warmth there even before she lifts her head to look. She looks, but she knows, before she sees his face. Luis is sitting there, the old Luis, the healthy Luis, before the cancer began to eat him. He sits, the familiar posture, shoulders a little hunched, thin collarbone visible at the suntanned neck. He wears a pale-brown cotton shirt with a button-down collar. She remembers washing it for him, remembers how he used to laugh when she ironed it, recalls his words: ‘We got jobs in a university so that we could iron?’

  Luis looks at her and he is the old Luis. There is a light in his eyes that disappeared a good six months before the end. Maybe even before he knew he was ill. The body begins to die before the mind acknowledges the change: this must be true, she thought. How else could you cope?

  He smiles again and this time his lips begin to curl back, slowly, slyly. Maria watches, is forced to watch, though inside her head is bursting, screaming to get away, pleading for some respite.

  Luis opens his mouth. His teeth, once so white, so perfect, are now blackened stumps, shiny in the bright yellow light. The odour of decay comes to her from across the room. It hangs in the air like a fetid cloud. And still his mouth opens wider, wider than is humanly possible.

  Maria tries to look away, but her head refuses to turn. The smell is becoming unbearable. She feels herself breathing it in, feels the taste of it on her tongue, in her throat.

  Inside his mouth something moves, a dark thing, live and threatening. It grows, changes shape, comes out from his throat, swarms over his teeth. The single entity turns into a thriving, crawling mass. It crawls onto his lips, scarlet red, yellow and black, the wasps, the bloodied wasps, they swarm from his lungs, they begin to devour his face.

  Her voice locks as it tries to scream. Now they are starting to sting. She can see his lips swelling with the poison; they become bloated, fleshy protuberances, livid and ugly. And still he smiles, while the buzzing gets louder and louder.

  She can hear a thin, keening sound. It is her own voice. Something escapes the spell that keeps her in check. This slender fact raises some spark within her. She looks at Luis and thinks: You are not real. She tries to say the words. They come, but they do not sound right. The noise is like baby talk: Yu unot ril. The buzzing fades a little, the creature across the table loses something of its focus. The ghastly, distended face becomes hazy, two-dimensional. The light dims. It is now paler, more ethereal, and the figure no longer resembles a human being.

  I am looking at the Devil, thinks Maria. This is him and all his works. And I am not afraid.

  She leans over, tries to focus on the figure, finds it impossible. She breathes deeply. The air is close, hot, steamy, but it no longer tastes of putrefaction. The buzzing is almost gone. She could believe, she does believe, that it existed only in her head.

  ‘You are not real,’ she says, and this time the words ring out. It is her voice, her own, unmistakable, unwavering.

  She pulls her body back, sits upright, feels the pain stinging her in the shoulder, then wills her eyes to close. They do and the world becomes soft, blood-red shot through with the pattern of veins. The room fills, for a moment, with the sound of a massive insect, the rattling whir of giant wings. She feels their flapping and the gust on her face. She does not breathe in. Then the sound is gone, the air is fresher, cooler.

  She opens her eyes. Across the table sits Torrillo. He is wearing a white shirt. Red stains, dark and wet and shiny, mark the lower half of his body. The silver blade still protrudes from his abdomen. He is smiling, the old smile, the real smile. His teeth are real, though there is blood on them, and blood in his throat too. But this is Torrillo, the man. Somehow, she knows.

  ‘Bear . . .’ she says. And then the words fly away from her, hang distant in the air somewhere out of reach.

  He grins, the big familiar grin.

  ‘He stung you, Maria? He stung you, huh?’

  She nods.

  ‘It hurts?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘He sure stung me.’

  Torrillo puts his hand around the hilt of the sword, tries to pull it out of his body. He grins. ‘Stung me good.’

  The green mask and the red velvet walls.

  The voice is thin, a little cracked. She tries to look behind his eyes. Somewhere there, somewhere he doesn’t want her to see, flits the tiny, foreign shadow of fear.

  ‘You saved me, Bear.’

  ‘I did?’ he says, eyes wide open. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Can I . . . ?’ She wonders whether she should ask this, whether she needs to. ‘Can I save you?’

  He thinks about this. ‘I don’t know. Like I said. He stung me good.’

  ‘I want to.’ She can feel the tears starting to brim in her eyes now. ‘Let me do something.’

  He is still smiling. He is still thinking. ‘You ever see that Woodstock movie, Maria?’

  ‘Woodstock?’

  ‘Sure. Cops are allowed to watch movies, you know. Cops are allowed to like music.’

  ‘Yes. Years ago.’

  ‘You remember that part where it starts to rain? Rain real bad?’

  ‘I remember. I think I remember.’

  ‘You remember, the guy on the stage? He’s called Wavy Gravy or something. He’s watching it all fall apart, feeling the people in the crowd getting pissed off with the thing, getting angry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And says, “Maybe, just maybe, if we all started thinking about the rain, willing it to go away, it would.” So they all start thinking. They all start shouting, “No rain, no rain, no rain . . .” Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands of them. “No rain, no rain, NO RAIN.”’

  ‘Did it work? I can’t remember. Did it work?’

  Bear laughs. A thick, wet line of blood runs down his chin, stains the front of his shirt.

  ‘You know, the funny thing? I can’t remember, either. The rain stopped, for sure, but did it stop quickly? I don’t know. I just don’t know. They didn’t put that in the movie. Does it matter?’

  ‘This isn’t a movie.’

  ‘No. It isn’t. I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So maybe what we need is that kind of faith. Can’t come from me. I’m sleeping somewhere. Dying. Can’t come from the captain, or any of us cops. It’s got to come from you. That’s why you’re here. Don’t ask me how I know. I can’t answer. I just do.’

  ‘Why? Why me?’

  He puffs
out his cheeks, looks a little like Dizzy Gillespie, expels a big lungful of breath. He seems paler, she thinks, he looks tired. His face, his body, is becoming fainter, disappearing like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

  ‘If I knew it all, Maria, I’d tell you,’ he says.

  Then he folds his arms in front of him, one resting lightly on the sword embedded in his body, closes his eyes and goes to sleep, fading, fading, fading.

  ‘Bear?’

  No sound.

  Buzzing . . .

  Loud this time. A pain, deep and sharp, stabs her arm.

  Buzzing . . .

  She screams. The nausea comes back, but this time it is real.

  A harsh liquid, acid and vile, fills her throat, the bile rises inside her, she throws up, feels the hot, scorching vomit spit violently up from her, gags on the last, bitty remains in the mouth, sniffs noisily, notes the bitter taste behind her eyes.

  Someone is holding her. A voice makes comforting noises. The light is glaring. The night is full of sound: sirens and shouts, crying and the clatter of gurneys on stone.

  She opens her eyes. Close above her, one arm around her shoulder, stands a medic. In his free hand he holds a hypodermic or a line, or something she can’t quite name. His face swims into view: neutral, watching, impassive.

  He speaks and the words are out of synch with his lips.

  ‘You’ll be OK,’ he says. ‘The wound’s not so bad.’

  She rolls over to her side, feels the pain in her back shouting at her.

  ‘Bear?’ she asks, quietly.

  But the body has gone and outside the night is alive with activity.

  ‘Bear?’ she says again.

  The darkness comes on her once more, falls like a heavy, leaded curtain, takes her into unconsciousness in spite of herself.

  ‘No rain . . .’ she whispers. Then the big chemical barn door of the drug slams her into sleep.