by Richard Ayre
I stopped shaving. What was the point? My beard grew very long, as did my hair. On that early morning of the new millennium I had to tie it behind my head to keep it out of my eyes. I looked like a savage.
I turned off the radio; the sounds of the crowds had made my lip curl in anger at their stupid, pointless lives. How could they enjoy themselves when they would soon all be dead, along with their children and grandchildren? I hated them. I contemplated my existence for the millionth time, not even realising I was becoming just what Valin had said I would.
Slowly, I turned around and stared at the rope I had prepared over the main beam in the kitchen. The noose regarded me curiously. Will you? it seemed to ask. Dare you?
It had been hanging there for over a month. I licked my lips and stared at it.
I sniffed and took another long draft of whiskey, grimacing as it burned its way through me.
What the hell was I doing? What was I trying to achieve by hiding myself away like a recluse? What was the point of me? What was the point of anything?
I looked at that rope and felt the weight of my past pressing against me. All the things I had done, all the things I had seen. And they were as nothing to what stretched before me. What might my endless future bring? The cheering of the New Year crowds on the radio mocked me. I was apart. I was alien.
I was a man completely out of time. A strange Victorian cast-off, still continuing to exist in a shimmering, silvery world of technology and digitisation, still moving relentlessly forward long after I should have just lain down and given up. I was out of place and out of time. A misfit, lost in a frightening, futuristic nightmare.
Why me? Why had it happened to me? I should have died. I should have been just another name carved on a pristine white gravestone in Northern France. I should have been forgotten by now, like the rest of my generation. That had been my fate. That was what I should have become. But it had all changed when Valin stole into my life and touched me, unleashing this hell upon my soul.
Suddenly decisive, I grabbed the nearby stool and placed it under the noose. I stood on it, reached up and tightened the rope around my neck.
Won’t pass it along, won’t pass it along, won’t pass it along.
The thought tumbled through my whiskey-sodden brain.
And yet still I hesitated. Even then, after everything Valin had told me, after everything I had experienced, I felt the cold fingers of fear stroke my spine. To end it all, to just cease to be. What would it be like?
Could I even have it? I had been shot, stabbed. I’d had half my head blown off for God’s sake, and still I had lived. What would it take for me to die?
This was the reason for the rope. Maybe only this was the answer. Maybe I had to do it myself. Perhaps only suicide would kill the eternal, infernal energy inside me. This had been the thought going through my head when I had made the noose and tied it around the beam. I realised I had to know. If only as an experiment to make me know I really would last forever.
I waited a long time, standing on the stool, the rope hanging limply around my neck. The awful, endless thought repeated itself again and again. Could I die? Would I? I needed to know.
I kicked the stool away.
The pain was instant and immense. My hands scrabbled at my neck to try and stop the agony; I couldn’t help myself. I choked and spluttered. I felt cartilage crunch in my throat, and my lungs burned for air.
My tongue begin to emerge from my mouth, my eyes bulging, my vision fading. My legs kicked the empty air uselessly. My head felt as if it were about to burst. It went dark.
I awoke to the same sensations. My throat still burned, my legs still kicked, my lungs still scrabbled for air. I registered it was daytime, though. I faded again.
I don’t know how many times this happened, but I lived and died many, many times, each one as agonising and terrifying as the last. And as I did, I remembered at last what the Medic had done to me.
*
His hand descended from the gloom in the church. He was smiling: a strange, disturbing smile.
In his eyes I saw something flicker and twist. It was a dancing, turning blackness, a trailing snake of nebulous dark smoke that writhed endlessly.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that blackness. It hypnotised me. I tried to reach out to touch it, but I could not move at all now, my body was on the very edge of eternity. He placed his hand on my chest and the black snake in his eyes seemed to expand until they became completely opaque. They were twin holes in time itself, and the blackness seemed to flow from those eyes. Into me.
‘I pass it along,’ he whispered.
I felt the blackness enter me, and it was a warm flow that calmed my ruptured chest and spread rapidly throughout my entire body. I felt it setting dying nerves on edge, I felt it beginning to heal, closing ruined flesh and bone, rejuvenating veins, creating new blood, infected blood to run through those veins. I felt my heart begin to beat, stronger and stronger.
I gazed up at those eyes, until the blackness faded from them, emptied from them. Into me.
My pain decreased, my breathing eased. I could still only stare up at the Medic, who was no longer smiling. Instead, his face was thoughtful, unsure what to do now. He removed his hand and stared at it, and the blackness spun within me now that it had left him. Healing my broken body. Cursing my broken soul.
He stood up and looked around the church as if in a daze. Then he turned back to me once more.
‘Good luck, mon ami. I will try to keep an eye on you.’
He turned and disappeared into the darkness.
The infection swirled within me like electricity. I sighed. I was so tired. So tired.
I closed my eyes.
*
I awoke again to the awful, choking pain, then once more gurgled myself out of existence. And again. And again.
But slowly, over those brief, awful periods of agonising consciousness, a plan began to formulate in my mind. One thought at a time, interspersed with agony and terror and blackness, they formed themselves into an idea of rescue and, eventually, I was able to act upon them. I woke once more and instantly threw up an arm, managing to grab the rope and scrambled up it high enough to hang, one-handed, from the beam, taking the strain from my neck. I scrabbled and pulled at the noose and finally yanked it from my throat and fell to the floor, gasping, the pain of returning blood making my head feel like it would break. I passed out once more.
When I awoke again, my swollen throat had returned to normal, and the banging in my chest had ceased. I swallowed, feeling only slight discomfort. I scrambled to my knees, and slowly made it to my feet, only then noticing I had vomited everywhere and had fouled my jeans. Probably more than once.
Grimacing at the mess, I stripped and bathed in cold water, cleaning myself and dressing in fresh clothes. I inspected my neck in the mirror and saw only a faint, lightly-bruised line where the rope had strangled me to death so many times. The old thought raged through me.
It was useless. The power inside of me would not allow it.
I could not die.
I went into the front room and turned on the radio. It was the third of January. I had been choking and kicking and dying for three whole days. The new century stretched before me and I saw it only as a roaring red river and myself as nothing but flotsam, consigned forever to mindlessly follow its flow.
I opened another bottle of whiskey.
Maybe it had to be catastrophic.
I sat and drank and muttered madly to myself and thought my macabre thoughts again. Maybe some sort of explosion would do it. Or perhaps I could throw myself into the molten metal of a steel factory? That would do it, surely.
Even in the crazed state I was in, I shied away from the horror of that. What if it didn’t? What if it just left me a melted, pain-filled mess, with the evil life force within me still keeping me captive? No, there was only one conclusion I could come to about that sort of suicide. The power, the force, the life that infected me, wo
uld not allow me to do it.
With this awful revelation ringing in my head, I slowly slumped to the stone floor once more, and for the first time in years, I wept.
*
I gave up on everything. I could not even begin to envisage my endless future, so I ignored it. I existed without living. I continued with my solitary existence and it slowly drove me mad.
The years went by in a blur of meaninglessness from the radio. The twin towers in Manhattan came down and the war in Afghanistan began. Brazil won the World Cup. Saddam Hussain was toppled. The Beslan school hostage crisis ended in dreadfulness and slaughter. On one Boxing Day, over two hundred thousand people were killed by a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. David Cameron became Prime Minister. An earthquake in Japan led to the Fukushima nuclear power plant going into meltdown. Somebody set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon. World population reached seven billion.
I listened to it all on the radio, my only connection with the outside world. All the horror, all the bloodshed, all the vice told me everything I needed to know, and my hatred for humanity grew and grew. I could barely bring myself to look at the villagers as they stared at the filthy mad hermit who occasionally came into their midst to buy his whiskey and cigarettes.
I collected the supplies I needed and slunk quickly back to my croft, away from the world. I didn’t trust myself to be around the villagers, for I believed I no longer cared about hurting them. Indeed, I hated them so much now I was fearful I might stab one of them, just to see the light fading from their odious eyes.
One night, I awoke from another drunken stupor to the sounds of breaking glass. I jumped up and stalked, naked, into the main room of the croft, to find two dark figures inside.
They turned at the sound of my bare feet on the stone floor and I roared at them and ran towards them.
They both screamed at my appearance. I must have looked terrifying. My hair was long and matted and my beard hung almost to my waist. My toenails were like talons. I was filthy and stinking and grimed and I must have seemed like some sort of wild animal to them.
They turned to run, but I caught one of them by the scruff of the neck and slammed the figure to the floor as the other made his escape.
I grabbed the throat of the intruder with both hands and squeezed with all my might, screaming incoherently at the top of my voice.
I wanted to kill. There was a mad, burning anger inside me. How dare this pathetic, useless creature come into my house! I was a God! I would wreak my revenge on this impertinent insect.
But, as I stared down, I began to realise that the figure I was choking had the face of a youngster. A boy, no more than sixteen or seventeen stared back at me in terror, his eyes bulging, his face beginning to turn blue. He was just a child. He had short dark hair and the downy face of a teenager. He reminded me of the photo I’d seen of Molly O’Brian’s long dead son and I gasped in shock, letting him go.
I stood up, watching as he clutched at his throat, retching and gasping for air. He stared at me in utter terror. I saw he had pissed himself in his fear and I felt a shame that almost overcame me.
He started to climb to his feet, still watching me warily. I went and pulled open the door, standing to one side. He just stood there, dread still plain on his face.
‘Come on,’ I snapped. ‘Get out.’
Slowly, he came towards me and the door to freedom.
When he was beside me, I placed a long-nailed hand on his arm and he froze in panic.
‘Do not come back here,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s dangerous for you. Don’t come back.’
He said nothing, but suddenly fled. I listened to his footsteps disappearing into the darkness. After a few minutes I heard a car start up and saw taillights vanishing quickly. I never saw the boy or his mate again.
I closed the door and stared at my hands.
I was right to stay away from them. I had wanted to kill that boy. Not for breaking into my shit-hole of a house, but for daring to go against a being such as I. It seemed the darkness within me was almost absolute.
I thought it would not be long until I was totally merciless.
And God help humanity then.
*
I did not think that anything would change my life. I thought I would stay in my croft in Scotland forever, hiding away from humanity, both to save myself and to save them. But the attempted burglary must have altered something within me. Because, on a fine September morning in 2015, the day after the two boys had broken into my home, something changed completely.
It was as if I had suddenly woken up from a nightmare. It was quite bizarre. For some reason I suddenly felt more alive than I had done in almost twenty years. I rose from my stinking bed and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I saw a wild, bearded, long-haired monstrosity; I saw a beast.
I looked like an animal and I frowned at my reflection, suddenly ashamed of how I had let myself go. It was an odd feeling to be suddenly aware once more of my self. My appearance was suddenly so foreign to me now. A compulsion came over me then, stronger than anything I had ever experienced. I had to heed it.
I ran to the kitchen, grabbed a pair of scissors, and returned to the bathroom to start hacking away at my beard, and then I shaved it off completely. I started on my hair.
When I was finished, the sink was overflowing and my head looked like a rat had gnawed my hair off, but for the first time in decades I saw my own face staring back at me, not a stranger’s. It was the same face of course, albeit grimed with dirt, but it was the face of a man, not the animal I had been.
I made a fire and turned on the boiler, having my first hot bath in as long as I could remember. I had to fill the bath twice, the water turning black from the filth caked into my skin. I cut my hideously grown toenails and fingernails. Then I dressed in clean clothes.
I looked around the croft. It had been the one place in which I had lived the longest apart from the cottage with Madeleine, and I hated it. It stank. I couldn’t bear it and no longer wanted to be there. It had suddenly been consigned to my past.
Something was calling to me. Something was telling me I had to return to humanity, even though they were a species I looked upon with no more respect or curiosity than I would look upon insects. It was an urge I could not resist. I needed to be near them once more.
I picked up the keys for my Land Rover and, without a backwards glance, I closed the door of the croft behind me for the last time.
I drove south.
Part Three
XXV
The shop never made me rich, but it did make me feel something I had not felt for most of my long life. It made me happy.
It was tucked away down a side street in Kentish Town, London; and, as soon as I saw it, I knew it was the place I needed to be.
I spent almost every last penny of my money on it. Years of untouched interest accrued in various banks around Europe meant I had a sizeable amount. I bought the equipment I needed, which was very little actually, and I decorated it plainly but with a panache I never knew I possessed. I sat at a worktable by the window, carving and painting the traditional wooden toys I made and sometimes sold. I called the shop ‘Madeleine’s’.
For the rest of 2015 and, indeed, for the next two-and-a-half years, I concentrated only on making my toys and learning how to run a business. By August 2018 I was earning enough to live a sparse but comfortable enough life in the one-bedroomed apartment above the shop. Slowly, after years of self-loathing, I started to live again.
I still didn’t mix, of course. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make friends and I avoided going to the same pubs or restaurants as much as possible. I still kept myself to myself.
But, strangely, I found being alone was quite easy in a crowded metropolis such as London. The people who hurried by me on the streets were all so wrapped up in their own little worlds that they ignored anyone they came into contact with, and so I just lived my life and worked from day to day, no longer staring into an abyss of never-ending existe
nce and never-ending darkness. The inevitability of my life remained, of course; it was just that I didn’t dwell on it as much now.
It was strange how much I had changed in such a short time, and I wondered what the reason for this may have been.
I was, by then, one hundred and twenty-two years old, although I didn’t think about it a lot. My face and body remained as they had always been, and I knew that, one day, I would have to close the door of Madeleine’s for good and try my luck elsewhere. But perversely, the thought did not haunt me so much anymore. The compulsion that had made me come to London had soothed me. I felt better. I had an income, I worked at something I enjoyed, and I had a small but comfortable place to live in.
I liked London, I always had, and its noisy bustle seemed to help me begin to live again. I started to go to the theatre and the cinema once more. I even went to see a restored version of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, and I enjoyed it just as much as I had when I had seen it back in the 1920s. I was as settled as a man like me could be.
I believed the urge I had felt to return to humanity was the beginning of the end.
I was almost as old now as Valin had been when he passed it along to me, and I thought that maybe this was how it started. I began to believe that my vow to never pass the disease on was as useless as my desire to still be with Madeleine, whose memory was now once again, thankfully, strong within me; and as useless as trying to die before my time.
I supposed I may have had no choice in the matter. But of course, to pass it along I needed to be near other people, and that was why I had woken on that morning of 2015 and driven hundreds of miles to London. The swirling vortex of power within me was readying itself for a change of host. My end, perhaps, was in sight.
As I became reinterested in life once again, I began to wonder what had happened to the man who had made me the way I was. I looked up Valin’s records, a lot easier now because of the internet. He had died in 2003, seven years after our meeting, and had been buried in a pauper’s grave in Berlin.