'Petrol,’ he said.
'Gasoline,’ I corrected him. He had no right to use the English word. He was an American hallucination.
I jerked the can in his direction, trying to drench him in the stuff. As the jet of liquid spewed out, he dissolved into the darkness which was crowding us both around, ever more insistently. I'd assumed that he would. I knew that he wouldn't stick around to the bitter end. He didn't have the courage to do that.
I knew that vampires were mortally afraid of fire. After all, I was one of them myself.
13
I locked the door to the flat, and wedged one of the dining chairs under the old-fashioned handle. I didn't want anyone bursting in. I knew that the fire station was less than half a mile away, and the windows of the flat were easily visible from the end of the street. It was only a short walk from there to the telephone boxes on the edge of St Saviour's Square. It wasn't that I was worried about being saved—I expected to be well beyond help by the time a concerned citizen could dial 999—but I didn't want anyone else getting hurt unnecessarily. I wanted the heroes of the fire brigade to be absolutely certain, when they arrived, that there was no earthly point in rushing in where angels feared to tread.
There were other preparations to be made.
First of all, I put the screw cap back on the can of gasoline. I'd let enough out while casually dismissing Maldureve to make the place stink, but I didn't want to soak the furniture just yet. That had to be done carefully. I didn't intend to burn to death; the real purpose of the petrol was to ensure that I was thoroughly cremated. I couldn't tell how dangerous I'd become, and I felt obliged to be as tidy as possible. There was Anne, of course, and Teresa, and the body of the little girl ... but Professor Viners knew the score now. He would be able to judge, once he'd investigated the generous donation of blood I'd made, whether any further precautions were necessary—and, if so, how best to proceed with them.
There was no point in leaving a note. I could make sure it didn't burn in any one of half a dozen ways—simply throwing it out of the window would have sufficed—but there was nothing I could usefully say. The truth would seem like madness to any potential reader, even Mike Viners. I had already told Viners enough; to tell him more would have been at best superfluous, at worst confusing. Once he heard the news about poor Janine Leigh, he'd know at once how seriously to take the matter; nothing I could possibly have said to him could have achieved as much as that simple revelation. The blood he'd taken from my veins was worth infinitely more than any amount of verbal explanation.
Blood can't hallucinate, or make mistakes, or lie.
It would have been nice, in a way, to have been able to communicate with Anne, but I knew that anything I wrote now, whatever means I might use to direct it to its intended recipient, would become public property. I didn't want the issue clouded. The necessary information was in the right hands; matters merely sentimental had to go by the board.
I went into the kitchen. I cut some bread from the rump of a loaf I'd bought that morning and half consumed at breakfast. I knew that I had to eat something. If I drank the scotch and the bourbon straight they were likely to make me sick before I was properly drunk. I needed to be thoroughly drunk—I was that much of a coward, in spite of the apparent reduction in my sensibility—but I wanted to approach drunkenness in a measured and sensible way. I needed to know what was happening. I needed to ease my way into the appropriate state, and to judge its imminence accurately.
I didn't bother to butter the bread. I just wolfed it down.
After the first couple of mouthfuls my supplies of saliva became inadequate, and I had to wash it down. I uncapped the scotch I'd bought the day before, which was still in the kitchen, and used it to help the rest of the bread down. I didn't use much to begin with, but I increased the dose bit by bit. It was cheap whisky—sheer force of habit had prevented my buying better quality—and it was a little raw, but I didn't mind. In a way, it was useful to feel that slight cutting edge, that marginal abuse of sensation. I didn't want it to be too much of a shock when I got to work with the scalpel. It was only a small bottle, and I finished it pretty quickly. I was still clear-headed, but that didn't matter. I still had the bourbon.
My motives were still clear in my mind and I went over them one by one, ritually and mechanically.
Destroying a possible centre of dangerous infection wasn't foremost among them, although there was certainly a chance that what Viners might find when he analysed my blood was that something in me had helped to turn a previously harmless virus into a vicious psychotropic plague. I couldn't overlook the possibility that I was as yet the sole carrier of a dangerous mutant which had only undergone its crucial transmutation within the last few days, after I'd infected Anne, perhaps even after I'd last screwed Teresa.
Nor was it a sense of justice that impelled me, although I'd always held hard to the opinion that the notions of retribution and punishment ought to be taken far more seriously than stupidly over-optimistic crap about rehabilitation. I'd always believed that an eye for an eye wasn't a bad principle to employ. I was the kind of person who felt a duty to stand by his beliefs and I was fully prepared to accept that I deserved to die for what I had done, not only to protect innocent people from my next bout of homicidal insanity but simply because I had killed an innocent person and in doing so had forfeited my own moral right to life.
My real reason for deciding to die—and perhaps it was a less worthy reason than either of the others—was that the alternative seemed worse.
I wasn't afraid of Hell, in the sense of an eternal afterlife. Never for one instant had I been able to believe in the existence of the kind of soul which could go on to eternal punishment or eternal reward, and all Maldureve's crazy talk about the borderlands of existence had not shaken that item of faith. I had no doubt whatsoever that my soul—my consciousness, my psyche, my intelligence, my persona—would die with my body, and utterly cease to be. The only hells which had ever existed, I was morally certain, existed on Earth: man-made, man-administered hells. In torture chambers, in concentration camps, in trenches dug for the conduct of war, there were real and actual and loathsome hells, as there were in the worst kinds of housing projects, the worst kinds of sweatshops, the worst kinds of ghettos, the worst kinds of prisons and the worst kinds of insane asylums. I could tolerate the idea of death, which held no threat over someone like me save the threat of oblivion, but I couldn't tolerate the idea of being condemned to a living hell, which would certainly have been my fate had I cared to wait for Detective Sergeant Miller and his colleagues to seek me out and charge me with what I had done.
Such, at least, was the theory on which I based my plans.
Putting the theory into practice was not quite as easy as this uncompromising summary might suggest.
As I worked my way slowly down the bourbon bottle, I wished with all my heart that I was at home. At home there was a gun in my father's desk, and another in his bedroom cabinet and a third in my mother's purse. Even the least of them—even the small Saturday-night special my mother carried in stark defiance of the law whenever she went out alone—would have been adequate to blow my brains out through the top of my skull in response to one convulsive jerk of a trigger. That kind of instantaneous and merciful release seemed to me now to be the one thing left in life that was worth desiring: the only happiness, the only heaven. Had I not been a stranger in a strange land, lonely and afraid in a world I never made, I might have had some similar recourse. Shotguns, I had heard it rumoured, were available in all the very best houses in England. Alas, I had no means of access to any such house. The only thing I could lay my hands on was a scalpel.
I had never understood why so many suicides used poisons, and unreliable poisons at that. Pills would have been particularly inappropriate to my case, but I couldn't see any justification for their use in any case, if the practicalities of self-murder were what counted. Even in gun-free England there are railway stations through which fa
st trains rush like raging juggernauts, and subterranean London is honeycombed with subways wired to deliver a fatal jolt to anyone who cares to leap down from the platform. Instant annihilation is available to all who seek it. I wondered, as I drank my last supper, what the attraction of pills was to those who were drawn to that particular method of self-exorcism. Was it the gambling element—the sense of placing one's personal fate in the hands of some grander unpredictability? Was it a calculated dissociation of act and consequence, as if by separating them in time one could reduce one's moral responsibility? Or was it the fact that some peculiar bond of intimacy already existed between pill-poppers and their chosen instruments, just as there did between many gun-eaters and theirs?
I was attracted, inevitably, to the last hypothesis. This was only natural, given that I could more easily draw a parallel with myself. The scalpel on the table was not mine, and I had no way of knowing whether I had ever used that particular tool before in performing elementary brain surgery on a rabbit or a cat, but there was a propriety in my relationship with it. I was a scientist, and a scalpel was a scientist's implement. I hoped that I would be able to wield it with scientific precision and objectivity.
I hoped. I dared not take it for granted. Had I not been a coward, I would not have needed the scotch, let alone the bourbon. Had I not been a coward, I wouldn't have been so terrified by the contemplation of a living hell.
By the time I'd finished the bourbon, its effects were taking a powerful hold. I'd never in my life drunk so much in so short a period of time. Thanks to the bread in my stomach, however, which was holding the liquor like a sponge, my spiritual ascent into intoxication was relatively graceful, like a Boeing 767 taking off: power and discretion in perfect combination. I stood up immediately and unscrewed the cap of what I now perversely decided to call, in belated recognition of local etiquette, my petrol can.
I spread the precious liquid very carefully, laying down a spiral trail so that the flames would march in military order throughout the room. The gallon didn't go quite as far as I had planned, and there was barely enough left at the end to fill the empty bourbon bottle. I placed the bottle precisely in the centre of the table, and made a wick out of three clean handkerchiefs which I had taken from the chest of drawers and neatly entwined.
I brought the matches from the kitchen and set them down beside the whisky bottle. I took a single match out of the box and placed it neatly on top.
Having no particular expertise in the making of Molotov cocktails, I couldn't make an expert guess at how long it would take for the wick, once lit, to ignite the gas—the petrol—in the body of the bottle, or how soon after that the spreading lake of burning fuel would turn the room into a blazing inferno. I knew that scenes I had witnessed in the movies would not be reliable, given that directors and special-effects men paid such close attention to the melodramatic potential of gaudy explosions. In the movies, you always see fiery explosions three times, from three different camera angles. I knew that I wouldn't have that luxury in real time. I didn't know for sure whether I would have ten seconds or two minutes to do what I had to do, which was to let enough blood out of my body to fall gently unconscious.
There was once, I vaguely remembered, a famous British military man who had been enjoying an amiable conversation at his home with a couple of friends when he suddenly asked to be excused, went directly to his bathroom, and there took up the razor which he used for shaving, and efficiently cut his throat from ear to ear, presumably while observing himself in the mirror. Not having majored in history, I was uncertain of his name—it might have been Clive of India, or General Wolfe, but not Gordon of Khartoum, whom I had seen done to death in quite a different fashion in the movie starring Charlton Heston. I desperately wanted to do likewise, but I wasn't certain that I could, even without the mirror to inhibit me. I knew that I could find the carotid arteries readily enough, but severing them both with a single sweep would require considerable force, given that they were protected by surrounding muscles. I wasn't sure that I could dig that deep—or, even if I could do it, that I could get from one to the other in one unrelenting sweep.
I considered the other alternatives. Slitting my wrists, of course, was quite out of the question. I knew well enough that one had to cut lengthwise along the forearm rather than across the wrist, and that the artery would not be difficult to locate or to reach, but I also knew how impossible it would be to transfer the scalpel from hand to hand with the job half done.
I gave more serious consideration to the heart, but I knew how deceptive the gaps between the ribs could be, and how difficult it might be to drive a blade through the intercostal tissues, even if it had a sharp point. The scalpel I had borrowed was designed for cutting, not for stabbing. I didn't want the instrument getting stuck with the job undone. Above all else, I didn't want that.
I also considered the femoral arteries as a possible target. It would be an unusual method, I knew, and one suited only to expert anatomists. They were deep-set, but if each could be severed with a well-aimed stab, no sweeping would be necessary. Again, it was the design of the scalpel that forced me to reject the possibility.
It had to be the carotids. In spite of the problem of getting from ear to ear, it had to be done that way. That was what the scalpel was designed to do. My chosen weapon determined my method.
I undressed, but only partly. I removed my trainers and socks, my trousers and shorts. And then I paused, trying to come to terms with my cowardice.
I told myself that I had not quite reached the appropriate point of alcoholic anaesthesia, but I knew that I was lying. Fear was beginning to take hold as the moment of truth approached. I was possessed now by a new and more subtle demon, which was extending its horrid grip throughout my being, insinuating its deadening presence into my limbs, trying to deny my rational will the power to institute the actions which I had so carefully programmed.
I took up the match and the box, and made as if to strike, but my hand froze. The intention was there, but the response was not. I ordered the hand to move, but it had acquired an alien will of its own—a demonic will, supernaturally opposed to that which was native and natural and rightly sovereign.
There was a knock on the door: a sharp, imperious rapping.
I recognised the knock. I knew at once that it was Detective Sergeant Miller, come to play Nemesis, probably with half a dozen uniformed officers to back him up.
I tried with all my might to strike the match, but I couldn't do it.
'Mr Molari! Are you there, Mr Molari?’ It was Miller's voice.
I tried with all my might to move my rigid fingers, but they wouldn't obey me.
I heard Miller try the door. I saw the handle turn, and heard the straining of the lock. The lock was flimsy, but the chair set beneath the handle was an extra line of defence. I knew that if they tried to break the door down the chair would ultimately make no difference, because the set-up was simply too frail to withstand the kind of pressure the policemen could put on. But they could only use shoulder-charges or kicks; they surely hadn't come equipped with a sledgehammer.
'Mr Molari,’ said Detective Sergeant Miller's voice, still coolly reasonable. ‘I need to talk to you. I know you're in there. Please open the door.'
I exerted the full force of my will, feeling that if reason could not triumph over demons and blind fear then the whole world was lost and damned.
The match struck, as if by its own volition. I touched the light to the sodden wick descending from the lip of the whisky bottle. Then I took up the scalpel, holding it in my fist as though it were a dagger, and I set the blade beneath my left ear. I cut into my flesh, towards the throbbing artery.
Once the initial cut was made, it all became easier. Once that first hurdle was overcome, and I realised how little pain there was, it wasn't difficult at all to draw the keen blade across, in a long slow arc. I felt it sever the left jugular, the windpipe, the right jugular.
It was such a beautiful arc,
so stylish, so uncompromising, that it brought tears to my eyes. Nothing could interrupt or retard it, not even the cartilaginous reinforcements about the trachea.
When I reached the right carotid, not without a certain awkwardness because of the kind of grip I'd taken, I felt a blissful tide of relief sweep through me.
I had done it. I was dead. I had cheated Maldureve. I had cheated Hell itself.
I saw one of the door panels splinter and burst inwards. I had not realised that the structure itself was so flimsy. I saw the detective peeping through the gap. He had caught the smell of gasoline, and had taken action because of it. He was alone. I wished that he had not been able to do what he had done, thus exposing himself to unnecessary danger. I didn't want him to be hurt, to be burned. But he could only look. He couldn't get through the door, to do anything foolish
'Oh, shit,’ said Detective Sergeant Miller. His voice carried to me as though delivered by a telephone link, from a vast distance.
'Watch this,’ I said, triumphantly—or perhaps would have said, had there been any breath to say it with. I knew that I could now do anything I wanted to, and that all the demons in Hell could not contrive to stay my hand.
I plunged the point of the scalpel into my right eye, which had given me more than enough offence.
The operation, astonishingly, was a success. My left eye recovered its sight. The darkness which had beset me for so long was dispelled as the room burst forth into a riot of vivid yellow fire, and I saw the colour of my own blood, flooding out of me.
My blood was red: beautifully, gorgeously, youthfully red.
I knew that I would be able to appreciate the sight for less than a second, so I tried as hard as I could to draw a full measure of appreciation from it. The pain made it difficult. The pain had come back too, along with my power of sight.
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