'You'd have a fair chance, though. After all, our eyes aren't in working order, and we'll give you a start to add to the fun.'
'Ah, but you see I've always wanted to meet you lot. When I heard you were so clean you actually lived down the loo I abandoned my bungee-jump training right away and came straight here.'
The virago got sick of hearing me answer back. Angrily, she laid her ears back, showing the perfect wedge of her head, and opened her eyes wide. Then she raced out in front of the assembled team, claws like scalpels reaching longingly for yours truly.
'That's enough silly jokes! We must eliminate him or he'll give us away, like all the others.'
I had the suicidal nerve to suggest, 'If that's all that's worrying you, ma'am, surely amputation of the tongue would do the trick?'
Suddenly the boss lost his sense of humour. His milky eyeballs seemed clouded, as if with some dark liquid, and the mockery in his bulldog face suddenly and alarmingly changed to deadly earnest. At this the monstrous rabble fell perfectly silent and waited, motionless, as if to make sure the emperor of the sewers wasn't distracted from passing sentence by such irritating sounds as the rumbling of stomachs. In fact even though I was in such desperate danger, I couldn't help rather liking them. The light from the drainpipe gave their matted coats a silvery shimmer, making them resemble fans of a heavy metal band famed for its excesses on stage. Their pale eyes, hundreds of pairs of pale eyes standing out in the dark, might have been sparklers lit during the performance of a favourite song, and their bitten ears symbolic of the injuries you risk by indulging in too much consumption of such loud music. At bottom these children of eternal night were an extreme example of our own nature, representing us all as we wander silently in the dark realms of our souls.
Of course it might have been an idea to give a thought to my chances of flight in this nasty situation. But yet again my active brain and my incorrigible curiosity got the better of me. They made me stop and ask myself a few questions. For instance, what strange circumstances had brought all these animals down to the underworld? And why were they afflicted with blindness? Or had they always been blind? Why did they kill others of their kind? Because the sewage system was short of prey? In that case why didn't they finish eating their dead colleagues' bodies? And finally, the sixty-thousand dollar question: if they spent their whole time down here and never saw the light of day, why didn't they suffer from rickets?(6)
Thank God, however, it looked as if I'd soon be cured of my compulsive curiosity for good. The old boss remained lost in thought for a while, making the few uncouth facial expressions of which he was capable, and then shook himself hard (sending a number of clumps of caked mud flying) and solemnly pronounced judgement.
'You're right, brothers and sisters,' he said, indicating the Amazon who was still glaring accusingly in my direction. 'He must be eliminated. The number of fools visiting the Catacombs of Mercy is increasing daily. They come for cheap thrills and cunningly turn our weakness to their own ends. We've degenerated into attractions in some goddam sideshow of freaks. And they don't stop at spying on us either. Once they get back up above again they show off - they pretend their timid explorations were daring adventures, thus encouraging others to follow their example. And this reprehensible behaviour only serves to attract human attention to us. One of these days humans will learn our secret too, and then they'll send a disinfection squad down into the sewers to finish us off. We know we're doomed to die, dear brothers and sisters, and we don't fear death. But our mission, our sacred mission - who will carry it out then? Who will save all the lost souls, the souls who have died to rise again? Who will save the children, brothers and sisters?'
'Save the children! Save the children! Save the children!" the whole pack of them cried, speaking as one. I raised myself from my supine position, sat up on my hind legs and observed the effects of the high priest's clever oratory in amazement. As the blind often will in excitement, this grubby lot were weaving their heads back and forth in a regular pattern of movement. While they did so they kept on urging each other to save these apparently significant children, who were obviously dear to their hearts. Their chant was accompanied by spasmodic twitchings. I was just forming a hypothesis about the subject of their lament when, all of a sudden, I actually saw them - the children, I mean. They were clinging like young penguins between the front legs of the older females, snuggling close to the shaggy belly fur and half covered by the chest fur. That was why I hadn't noticed them before. They still had a little colour left in the irises of their eyes, so I concluded that they hadn't gone completely blind yet. By comparison with the adults, their fur was sparkling clean, suggesting that much loving care had been lavished on it. But there was something else which really surprised me. In every case, the adult females and the children they were caring for were of different breeds. A baby Siamese, for instance, was sheltering under the wing of a sturdy Maine Coon, and a young Birman female was being mothered by an Egyptian Mau with only one incisor left. Even allowing for the chance effects of interbreeding, the obvious difference between mothers and children was so striking that I had to assume these were all cases of adoption.
'We know the tale of our sad past, brothers and sisters, we know our fate,' said the big boss, picking up the thread of his discourse again and symbolically waving the uproar down to a tolerable level with his paws. The matronly wet-nurses were scowling at me as if I'd contradicted his last remarks.
'And since we know our fate so well, we are in duty bound to it. But how can we do our job properly when idiots keep putting irresponsible members of our own species on our tracks, and there's a danger they may set humans after us too? It's high time to make an example of someone.'
'Suppose I were to tell you I suffer from severe amnesia?' I desperately suggested, trying for a stay of execution. 'For instance, blow me if I haven't gone and forgotten my name again! Now was it Mimi or was it Pussy? Hold on, I believe it was Pinky ...'
What, no applause? No roars of laughter such as you get in a TV sitcom when the soundtrack fires off a gag? I was obviously the only member of my own audience able to see anything amusing in my clowning. Well, I could understand that it wouldn't seem so funny if you were already visualising the comic as lunch, chopped into fraternal portions, share and share alike. The Chartreux turned his blind gaze on me again. It was like encountering the rotating floodlight beam of some gruesome lighthouse.
'I'm sorry, little one,' he said, sounding like a father ruefully holding an empty bag of sweets in front of his little boy's nose. 'Nothing personal, you understand. We have to draw the line somewhere, to protect ourselves and our work, and you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
'And I certainly met the wrong brothers and sisters,' I finished, stating the obvious.
'Rhodes!' the Lord of the Sewers suddenly bellowed, ignoring my terrified babble.
Rhodes? Hm, not a bad idea at all. No doubt these relations of mine with their piratical tendencies had boats of some kind, maybe little steamers fuelled by their personal bio-gas, of which they certainly had ample supplies, and we were about to weigh anchor, reach the sea by way of the sewage system and chug off on holiday in the direction of Rhodes. Their distinctly alarming remarks just now had only been clumsy jokes, both a greeting and a test of a newcomer's courage. That's the way pirates act. Wow, those stinkers had really had me worried ...
The throng surrounding me with all the avidity of visitors to the Colosseum in days of old and glaring intently at me in spite of their total blindness began to part in the middle. A narrow passage gradually formed between the audience on the stone walkway. It began to dawn on me, as I observed this act of collective anticipation, that Rhodes was not the Mediterranean island with its aura of legend, or any other holiday destination either. 'Rhodes' must be beyond anything imaginable, just as certain things slumber behind the very last steely gates of the unconscious, things that even the producers of nightmare horror shows daren't stage. An u
neasy whisper passed through the grubby throng, and a sinister shadow could now be seen at the end of the corridor it had opened up. This shadow came closer and closer, positively rolling down the corridor like a tide of something slimy, and its approach was accompanied by a terrifying stamping that seemed to make the whole place tremble. Gradually a shapeless figure which towered at least a head above those surrounding it came into sight. There was something ox-like about its movements. Clumsily and with forceful impact the shadow marched on, and at every step it took its entire astonishing corpulence wobbled in slow motion, like waves of fat breaking. But darkness still concealed this monstrous giant, and I could only speculate about its true appearance.
The closer it came, the louder swelled the awe-inspiring murmur of the sewer-dwelling monsters, as if they themselves feared the spirit they had conjured up. Then it stepped out into the light, and if the morbid fascination exercised by this amazing creature hadn't taken hold of my entire being, I'd surely have fainted dead away. He was the biggest Red Persian male I had ever seen: a Titan, a dinosaur from that fabled world where you don't take precise notice of animals' dimensions. He had no eyes either, but in his case that was the literal truth. Both eyes had been put out by some monster even worse than himself. Instead of shrinking together, however, the edges of his eye sockets had grown farther apart, so that they looked like craters surrounded by harsh shadows on some eerie planet. The left corner of his mouth, distorted by a scar, was somewhere in the region of his cheekbone; a horrible operation of some kind, probably performed with a knife, had extended it towards his upper jaw. Consequently his lower jaw hung down, and his mouth, constantly open and producing torrents of saliva, showed teeth which were badly damaged but still looked as dangerous as a set of butcher's knives. His long Persian coat had large bare patches showing wrinkled skin, probably as the result of bad burns. Rhodes had obviously been the victim of the most barbaric ill-treatment ever suffered at the hands of the lowest species of animal on earth, a species which none the less for some mysterious reason always regards itself as the highest. All the same, the martyrdom he had suffered had not improved his character. Instead of adopting the attitude of a tolerant pacifist, he preferred the silent role of executioner. For if this mountain of flesh, with his powerful pong, who was obviously barking mad and had all the charm of a bulldozer - if he wasn't an ice-cold killer then I was a white poodle with its arse shaved bare.
Rhodes strode all the way down the passage left free for him, displaying more and more of the horrible details of his many deformities as he did so, and finally he stopped in front of me. His clumsy halt made the fatty tissue of his walrus-like body ripple wildly one last time, like foaming waves breaking on the rocks. Now I was gazing straight into the black holes in the flesh of his wrecked face. They looked like prehistoric tombs, like chasms which seemed to suck my whole mind into them. At the same time I felt almost as if I were admiring a ruined cathedral from the vantage point of a small tourist, which in a crazy sort of way I was.
'Take a good look at what human beings have made of him!' said the big boss. Only minutes before I'd thought his own appearance couldn't be surpassed for horror, but now, by comparison with the mammoth confronting me, he looked like a cuddly stuffed toy on children's TV.
'And look at what they have made of us. We can't see any more, sad to say, but you don't need eyes to know that the most violent animals in the world are not lions or cheetahs. So perhaps you can understand why we must use every means we can to keep them from discovering us. Take a good look at him, my friend, because I'm afraid he's the last thing you will ever see.'
So these guys really meant it seriously. In that case, what was the point of crouching here in fright? They were going to murder me anyway. But to die unresisting, accepting my own execution meekly and in fear - that would be a real disgrace, unworthy of a Francis. No, I'd die like a man with nuts, good hard ones, not a trembling coward whose last act of aggression was to fire off a fart to sour earth's atmosphere. And if you looked at it realistically, the cards weren't stacked too badly against me. After all, this lot were blind, and an unexpectedly bold reaction on my part might well send them scattering in confusion. Moreover, I might not be up to their own level of bloodlust, but I was certainly more athletic than they were. They bore the marks of many diseases and ailments; a number of them were overweight from eating a poor, unbalanced diet, and where speed of reaction was concerned, the majority would have great difficulty in competing with my own hyper-sharp senses. See it in the proper light, and I really had just one ridiculous little disadvantage: there was only one of me, and - how many? -perhaps a thousand of them.
At least, however, I now knew how to save my skin. It would be cruel, but they left me no choice ...
'Your time has come, little one,' said the chieftain, with grave dignity. 'You'd better close your eyes. It'll be easier that way, believe me. And as you were saying yourself just now, goodbye, stranger, we shall meet in heaven!'
A nasty smile crossed the Persian's distorted face, as if he'd been given permission to eat the whole birthday cake all by himself, and he bent a little way down to me. He seemed quite unaware of the time-honoured custom whereby our kind must go through a number of ritual moves such as aggressive hissing, tail-lashing, full frontal staring and whisker-bristling before launching into the attack. Instead, he did something which pointed the way, like a red arrow, straight to his Achilles heel. He swung his front leg and struck the left side of my head with his paw. I guessed that this strange move was not a bold challenge, but was made for a very simple reason: as Rhodes was blind, and in such bad condition that he had probably lost much of his sense of direction, he was using this trick to discover exactly where his opponent stood. He would simply deliver a sweeping blow in that opponent's general direction at first, and if his paw made contact he would know where his enemy was. Then he could wade in. The manoeuvre looked a bit like the way we 'play' with mice before dispatching them, a procedure humans find distasteful. The lords of creation forget that our original source of nourishment consisted of rats, relatively large prey animals equipped with dangerous teeth, so we needed to harry them until they were unconscious. Unfortunately these rough tactics have been extended to the relatively risk-free hunting of mice.
'Don't worry, mate!' croaked Rhodes in a hoarse, rusty voice after delivering his blow. It sounded as if his vocal cords were made of old iron. 'You won't feel a thing.'
He obviously intended to slit my throat.
'Do that again and I'll murder you!' I promised.
The audience gasped. Defying Rhodes was clearly next to blasphemy. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the lips of Big Daddy Golden Earring curl into a pleased smile. He was rather enjoying this dubious show, though he seemed to have no doubt of its outcome. So far as Rhodes personally was concerned, he simply had not reckoned on such a development. He was a picture of total bewilderment. He was growling with a mixture of scorn and disbelief, but now and then he stopped for a moment and looked baffled, as if he were trying his hardest to make sense of my challenge. Then he shook his head vigorously again, which suggested that his attempts had led nowhere, and uttered another booming laugh.
'Murder me, will you, my friend?' he finally snarled with all the superiority of the sole of a shoe poised to squash a black beetle. The audience was now holding its breath. 'It'll be pretty strenuous. Bring you out in a sweat, you know.' With which he struck me on the head again with his other paw, this time hard enough to hurt, and with his claws out. They left a deep scratch in my right ear. Blood welled out of it.
I unsheathed the claws of my own forepaw, went like lightning for his empty left eye socket and drove my claws through the rubbery flesh. When they reached the brain I turned them into deadly hooks. Rhodes's slack lower jaw dropped a little further; his water-melon of a head shook in my grip like a kettle boiling dry just before it explodes, and a jet of blood shot from his nostrils. Then I withdrew my claws, and he slumped to the ground l
ike a shot elephant. As he fell he uttered a blood-curdling howl which echoed on and on in that stony labyrinth. It sounded like a train of tanker trucks going over the edge of a precipice and slowly falling apart to the sound of metallic screeching.
'Ooooooooooooh!' went the crowd around us, striking up a chorus fit to make your flesh creep, as if the last agony of Rhodes were being telepathically transferred to their own nervous systems. There was awe at the moment of release rather than sympathy for the dying Rhodes in that cry; it suggested an unsettling affinity with the liberating power of death, and struck a hidden chord in me too. They couldn't actually watch me deal the mortal blow, but they all seemed to feel that Rhodes was lost for ever as executioner in the Catacombs of Mercy.
His penetrating howl became a miserable wheeze, and the wheeze finally dwindled to a despairing moan which echoed for a little longer and then died away entirely. His head dropped to one side and he breathed his last. I looked at the lifeless colossus with pity. Pangs of conscience began to set in. Against the background of the gently flowing stream, he now looked the very image of a fat man taking an afternoon nap on the beach. Rhodes lay on his back, all four paws outstretched, and but for the thin trickle of blood under his nose you might indeed have thought he was asleep. This was the second corpse I'd seen in under an hour. However, whatever I did I mustn't let my scruples show, not unless I wanted to undermine the credibility of my ice-cold Mickey Rourke act.
'Well, I said I'd murder him if he did that again,' I remarked in bored tones, turning to my audience. 'Anyone else fancy a bout?'
While the others were still open-mouthed and busy trying to recover from their astonishment, the Oriental lady, who had taken cover behind the boss when Rhodes appeared, shot out again. For a moment I thought I was going to have to tackle this termagant too, and largish cracks appeared in the cool façade I was maintaining with some difficulty. However, the all-clear sounded when Naomi Campbell in furs raced past me and began sniffing hard at the corpse. Then she laid her head against his belly, which towered up like a sand dune, and listened. The diagnosis was obviously not what she'd expected.
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