Evidently the catastrophe had taken place some days previous, for all the rubble was neatly piled and the broken side of the building was fenced off.
So much the better, Peel decided. No doubt the house would be empty. He parked the car, unnoticed by the few people in the street, leaped out and walked briskly to the front door. Now that he had made his decision and formed his plans he was absolutely impassive.
There was no one inside. Peel went to the library, took pen and ink and seated himself at the desk.
Carefully, with lawyerlike acumen, he made out a new will cutting his wife off beyond legal impeachment.
While the ink was drying, he went to the front door and waited until a couple of laborers trudged by with shovels on their shoulders.
“You there!” Peel called.
They turned weary faces toward him. “Yes, sir?”
“Want to earn a flyer?”
Their faces glowed.
“Step in a moment.”
With many apologies for their muddied boots, they edged into the library, glancing around curiously.
Peel sat them down and read the will to them. They listened with open mouths, then witnessed his signature. Laboriously, with much protrusion of tongues, they signed their names and received’the bank note. Peel ushered them out and locked the door.
He paused grimly and took a breath. So much for Sidra. It was the old possessive instinct, he knew, that forced him to act this way. He wanted to keep his fortune, even after death. He wanted to keep his honor and dignity, even after death. He had made sure of the first. He would have to perform the second— quickly!
He thought for another moment, then nodded his head decisively and marched back to the kitchen.
From the linen closet he took down an armful of sheets and towels and with them padded the windows and edges of the doors. As an afterthought, he took a large square of cardboard and on it, with shoe-blacking, printed:
DANGER! GAS! He placed it outside the kitchen door.
When the room was sealed tight, Peel went to the stove, opened the oven door ‘and turned the gas cock over. The gas hissed out of the jets, rank and yet cooling. Peel knelt and thrust his head into the oven, breathing with deep, even breaths. It would not, he knew, take very long. It would not be painful.
For the first time in hours, some of the tension left him, and he relaxed almost gratefully, calmly awaiting his death. Although he had lived a hard, geometrically patterned life; and traveled a rigidly realistic road—now his mind reached back toward more tender moments, He regretted nothing; he apologized for nothing; he was ashamed of nothing—and yet he thought of the days when he first met Sidra with a sense of sorrow.
What slender youth, bedewed with liquid odors,
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Sidra?
He almost smiled. Those were the lines he wrote to her when, in the romantic beginning, he worshiped her as a goddess of youth, of beauty and goodness. Those had been great days—the days when he had finished at Manchester College and had come to London to build a reputation, a fortune, a life. A thin-haired boy with precise habits and precise thoughts. Dreamily he sauntered through the backwash of memory as though he were recalling an entertaining play.
He came to with a start and realized that he had been kneeling before the oven for twenty minutes.
There was something very much awry. He had not forgotten his chemistry and he knew that twenty minutes of illuminating gas should have been sufficient to make him lose consciousness. Perplexed, he got to his feet, rubbing his stiff knees. There was no time for analysis now. The pursuit would be on his neck at any moment.
Neck! That was an idea. Almost as painless as gas. Much quicker!
Peel shut off the oven, took a length of laundry rope from a cupboard and left the kitchen, picking up the sign en route. As he tore up the cardboard, his alert little eyes pried through the house, looking for the proper spot. Yes, there. In the stairwell. He could throw the rope over that beam and stand on the balcony above the stairs. When he leaped, he would have a ten-foot drop to the landing.
He ran up the stairs to the balcony, straddled the railing and carefully threw the rope over the beam.
He caught the flying end as it whipped around the beam and swung toward him. He tied it into a loose knot and ran it up the length of the rope until it snuggled tight. After he had yanked twice to tighten the knot, he put his full weight on the rope and swung himself clear of the balcony. The rope supported his weight admirably. There was no chance of its snapping.
When he had climbed back to the railing, he shaped a hangman’s noose and slipped it over his head, tightening the knot under his right ear. There was enough slack to give him a six-foot drop. He weighed one hundred fifty pounds. It was just about right to snap his neck clean and painlessly at the end of the drop. Peel poised, took a deep breath, and leaped— His only thought as he fell was a chaotic attempt to figure how much time he had left to live. Thirty-two feet per second square divided by six gave him almost a fifth of a second.
Then there was a blinding jerk that racked his entire body, a dull crack that sounded large and blunt in his ears, and a sensation of intolerable pain in his neck.
And for the first time, Peel’s iron control was broken.
It took him fully five seconds to realize that he was still alive. He hung by his neck in a kind of horror and slowly understood that he was not dead. The horror crawled over his skin like a wave of chill ants, and for a long time he hung and shuddered, refusing to believe that the impossible had happened. He shuddered while his arms flailed helplessly and the chill reached his mind numbing it with terrible trepidation.
At last he reached into his pocket and withdrew a penknife. He opened it with difficulty, for his body was slowly turning palsied and unmanageable. After much sawing he at last severed the rope and dropped the last few feet to the landing. While he still crouched, he reached up fingers and felt his neck.
It was broken. His head was tilted at an angle that made everything seem topsy-turvy. He could feel the jagged edges of the broken cervical vertebrae. He shuddered again.
As Peel dragged himself up the stairs, he realized that something too ghastly to understand was taking place. There was no attempting a cool appraisal of this; there was no data to be taken, no logic to apply.
He reached the top of the stairs and lurched through the bedroom to the bath. In the mirror he examined his twisted neck.
With fumbling hands he groped in the medicine cabinet until he grasped his razor. He closed the cabinet door, then opened the blade, faintly admiring the six inches of gleaming steel. There was promise in the hair-fine, hollow-ground edge. He gripped the handle firmly, tilted his chin back as far as the twisted neck would allow, and with a firm, steady stroke sliced the steel across his throat.
Instantly he was deluged with a great gout of blood, and, as he drew breath, his windpipe was choked. He doubled over, coughing, and his throat was lathered with red foam. Still coughing and gasping, with the wind whistling madly through the ragged slit in his neck, Peel slowly crumpled to the tile floor and lay there while the blood gushed with every heartbeat and soaked him through. Yet as he lay there, gasping with little hacking, foaming coughs, he did not lose consciousness.
For the first time in all his life, Peel was afraid—desperately afraid. The agony of his twisted neck was nothing to the agony in his mind. He floundered on the bathroom floor and realized vaguely that life was clinging to him with all the possessiveness with which he had clung to life and the things he owned.
He crawled upright at last, not daring to look at his wax-white, bloodless face in the mirror, nor at the yawning red slash in his throat. The blood—what remained of it—had clotted slightly. He still could breathe normally at times. Gasping and almost completely paralyzed, Peel stumbled back into the bedroom and searched through Sidra’s dresser until he found her revolver.
It took all his presence of mind to ste
ady the muzzle at his chest and still his shaking hands.
Deliberately, he pumped three shots into his heart. And when the echo of the reports died away and the sharp powder tang lifted, he was still alive, with a great ghastly hole torn in him.
It’s the body, he thought crazily. Life clings to the body. So long as there’s a body—the merest shell to contain a spark—then life will remain. It possesses me, this life, but there’s yet a solution. I’m still enough of an engineer to work out a solution.
That solution, he knew, would have to be absolute disintegration. Let him shatter this body of his to particles—to bits—to a thousand pieces—and there would no longer be the cup of flesh to contain that persistent life. For that he needed explosives, and there was nothing in the house. Nor could he drag himself to his laboratory.
He lurched into his study and removed a deck of washable plastic playing cards from his drawer. For long minutes he cut them to pieces with his desk scissors, until he had a bowlful of minute pieces. He carried them to the bathroom and with the little strength that was left in his shattered body he removed a section of brass pipe from the tap inlet and carried it to his study.
There was a small spirit lamp on his desk, used to keep pots of coffee hot. Peel lit the lamp, placed a dry pot over it on the gimbals and dropped a lead paper weight in. After hours, it seemed, the lead melted. He used half the molten metal to plug one end of the pipe tight.
It took all his remaining energy to return to the bathroom for the forgotten bits of playing cards, but he knew it would be the last trip he would have to make. He rammed the frayed shreds of nitrocellulose into the brass pipe, using a heavy pencil as a ramrod. When the pipe was packed solid, he put in the heads of three matches and sealed the open end with the remaining lead and then placed the end of the pipe directly in the spirit flame.
With a sigh, he drew his desk chair close and hunched before the heating bomb. Nitrocellulose—a powerful-enough explosive when ignited under pressure. It was only a question of time, he knew, before the pipe would burst into violent explosion and scatter him around the room—scatter him in blessed death.
The agony in his chest and neck made him rock gently and sway from side to side. He began to whimper like a child as each individual nerve took up the screaming chorus of pain. The red froth at his throat burst forth anew, while the blood on his clothes caked and hardened.
Slowly the bomb heated.
Slowly the minutes passed.
Slowly the agony increased.
Peel rocked and whimpered, and when he reached out a palsied hand to push the bomb a little closer into the flame, his fingers could not feel the heat. He could see the red-caked flesh scorch and blister but he felt nothing. All the pain writhed inside him—none outside.
It made noises in his ears, that pain, but even above the blunt sounds he heard the dull tread of footsteps far out in the house. They were coming toward him, slowly and almost with the inexorable tread of fate. Panic struck him at the thought of the police and Sidra’s triumph. He tried to coax the spirit flame higher.
The steps passed through the downstairs hall and then began to mount the steps of the stairway. Each steady thud sounded louder and more terrifying. Peel hunched lower and in the dim recesses of his mind began to pray. The steps reached the top of the stairs, turned and advanced on his study. There was a faint whisper as the study door was thrust open. Running hot and cold with pain and fear, Peel refused to turn.
So abruptly that it jarred him, a voice said: “Now then, Bob, what’s all this?”
He neither turned nor answered.
“Bob!” the voice called hoarsely, “don’t be a fool!”’
Vaguely he understood that he had heard that voice somewhere.
Steps sounded again, then a figure stood at his elbow. With bloodless eyes he flicked a frightened glance up. It was Lady Sutton. She still wore the sequined evening gown.
“My hat!” she gasped, her tiny eyes goggling in their casement of flesh, “you’ve gone and messed yourself up, haven’t you!”
“Go away—” His words were cracked and whistling as half his breath hissed through the slit in his throat. “I will not be haunted.”
“Haunted?” Lady Sutton laughed shrilly. “That’s a good one, that is.”
“Go away,” Peel muttered. “You’re dead.”
“What’ve you got there?” Lady Sutton inquired in brassy tone. She hesitated for a moment. “Oh, I see; a bomb. Going to blow yourself to bits, eh, Bob?”
‘His lips formed soundless words. Still he hunched over the heating bomb.
“Here,” Lady Sutton said. “Let me—” She reached forward to knock the brass tube off the gimbals.
With a convulsive effort Peel struggled to his feet and grasped her arm with clawing hands. She was solid for a ghost. Nevertheless he flung her back.
“Let be!” he wheezed.
“Now stop this, Bob!” Lady Sutton ordered. “I never intended this much misery for you.”
Without bothering to puzzle at her words, he struck at her feebly as she tried to get past him to the bomb. She was far too strong for him. He turned quickly and flung himself forward toward the spirit lamp, arms outstretched to infold it and protect it from interference.
Lady Sutton cried: “Bob! You damned fool!”
There was a blinding explosion. It smashed into Peel’s face with a flaring white light and a burst of shattering sound. The entire study rocked and a portion of the wall fell away. A heavy shower of books rained down from the jolted shelves. Smoke and dust filled space with a dense cloud.
As the cloud cleared, Lady Sutton still stood alongside the place where the desk had been. For the first time in many years—in many eternities, perhaps, her face wore an expression of sadness. For a long time she stood in silence. At last she shrugged and began to speak.
“Don’t you realize, Bob,” she said in a low voice, “that you can’t kill yourself? The dead only die once, my boy, and you’re dead already. You’ve all been dead for days. How is it that none of you could realize that? Perhaps it was that ego that Braugh spoke of— Perhaps— But you were all dead before you reached the shelter that night. You should have known when you saw your bombed house. That was a heavy raid last Thursday—very heavy.”
Slowly she raised her hands and began to unpeel the gown that covered her. In the dead, unnatural silence, the little sequins rustled and tinkled. They glittered as the gown dropped from her body to reveal—nothing. Mere empty space.
“I enjoyed that little murder,” she said. “It was amusing—.quite amusing to see the dead attempt to kill. That’s why I let you go on with it. It was amusing—”
She removed her shoes and stockings. She was now nothing more than arms, shoulders and a gross head in space. Nothing more. The face was still heavy and still wore the slightly sorrowful expression.
“But it was ridiculous trying to murder me,” she went on, “seeing who I was. It was even a little ridiculous producing that play. Because, Bob, Astaroth does happen to be a lady—so to speak—and I happen to be Astaroth.”
With a sudden motion, the head and arms jerked into the air and then dropped to the floor alongside the heaped-up dress. They clattered dully like waxen figures, and yet the voice continued from the smoke-filled space. Where the dusty mist swirled, it revealed a figure of emptiness—a mere outline in space—a bubble— and yet a figure horrible to behold.
“Yes,” the voice went on, softening slightly to a quiet tone, “I am Astaroth, Bob—Astaroth, as old as the ages—as old and bored as eternity itself.” It took on a pleading note. “That’s why I had to play my little joke on you back in the shelter. I had to turn the tables and have a bit of a laugh. Satan knows, you cry out for a bit of novelty and entertainment after an eternity of arranging hells for the damned! And Satan knows, there’s no hell like the hell of boredom—”
The passionate, pleading voice broke off.
And a thousand scattered bloody fragments
of Robert Peel heard and understood. A thousand particles, each containing a tortured spark of life, heard the voice of Astaroth and understood.
“Of life I know nothing,” Astaroth cried out, “but death I do know—death and justice. I know that each living creature creates its own hell forevermore. What you are now, you have wrought with your own hands. Hear ye all, before I depart—if any of ye can deny this—if any one of you would argue this—if any one of you would cavil at the Justice of Astaroth—let him speak! Speak now!”
Through all the far reaches the voice echoed, and there was no answer.
A thousand pain-thomed particles of Robert Peel heard and made no answer.
Theone Dubedat heard and made no answer.
A questing doubt-crazed Christian Braugh heard and made no answer.
A rotting, self-devouring Digby Finchley heard and made no answer.
All the damned of all eternity in an infinity of self-made hells heard and understood and made no answer.
For the Justice of Astaroth is unanswerable.
* * *
Ms. Found in a Champagne Bottle
Introduction
FRANK Zachary is my ideal of the complete Renaissance Man, despite (or perhaps because of) an incomplete formal education. If you have no connection with publishing, you've never heard of this genius, which isn't strange. He's an art director, and in the tight enclave of art directors, largely unknown to the public, Frank is acknowledged to be the greatest of them all. You have to be an exalted nonpareil to win any sort of praise from that jealous crowd, so you can imagine Frank's fantastic qualities.
He and I admire each other very much, which raises a perplexing problem for me. I've sometimes noticed that artists whom I admire from afar turn out to be admirers of myself when at last we meet. That happened, for example, with Al Capp. My perplexity is this: Are they merely giving a courteous response to my outspoken enthusiasm for them, or do we have something in common that attracts us to each other's work? I honestly don't know.
Selected Stories of Alfred Bester Page 28