'I m-m-mean - to and fro - it m-m-may not be ordained -to and fro - for you to fi-fi-find your way home, Francis - to and fro ...'
Oh no? How sad. Perhaps it wasn't ordained for me to listen to any more of this drivel either. Perhaps it would be better just to lie down, close my eyes, and dream of nothing but the phenomenally harmonious movement of that tail. Why not? To and fro, to and fro, to and fro ...
... and a bright light flashed across my field of vision. The glare faded only gradually, finally clearing to show the face of a particularly handsome specimen of my own kind. Obviously I was in a dream, because the picture swayed in an odd way, as if I were seeing it from a rocking boat. My opposite number had a remarkable coat colour; in fact it was hard to say which of the various colours peculiar to our kind was predominant. They mingled in chaotic waves all over his head, yet they were so capriciously broken by stripes and patches that it was difficult to make out any particular pattern. For instance, an arrow of bright white went up from the right-hand side of his nose to the forehead, but in its turn this light patch was blurred by marks like ink-blots from the root of the nose upwards. The pattern was the same but in reverse on the other side of his nose, like a negative. It looked as if every artistic technique ever known had been used on that face, from the broadbrush strokes of the modern Expressionist school to the soft pastels of the Romantics. The shape of his head was very fine too. His ears were handsomely pointed and had grey tufts of hair growing out of them, his mouth firmly set (with black whiskers to the right and white whiskers to the left) and his forehead high. In short, this was a very Adonis of a European Shorthair.
His eyes were closed, but as if the lids had sunk in pain rather than weariness. It was heart-rending to see such a proud figure suffering. But this was only the first of the salvo of emotions about to affect me. I'd only just got accustomed to my unusual position when it changed again. Exactly how I don't know, but all of a sudden I seemed to be removing myself from my suffering brother. Like a camera pulled backwards by a ghostly hand and swaying all the time, I moved very slowly back, and my opposite number's entire body gradually came into view in the ever-expanding area of the viewfinder. I suddenly saw a thin rivulet of blood running from his mouth and trickling into the furrows of earth where he lay on his back. This revealed something new: I hadn't been standing face to face with Prince Charming just now, I'd been hovering over him like a feather the whole time, and indeed I still was.
My field of vision was getting noticeably larger, showing me more than I liked. The subject of my observations had assumed a dreadfully distorted attitude, all four limbs grotesquely stretching opposite ways as if after some devastating collision. His body, its spectacular tabby coat shining silvery in the light of the moon, had a great gaping wound in the belly as if he'd been hit by a ravenous combine harvester. The comparison wasn't all that far-fetched, because I could now see that he was lying in the middle of a ploughed field. The blood from his injury had formed a pool around him, reflecting the sky. Occasional black clouds passed across the huge full moon now and then, briefly dimming the light and casting a pall of dark blue over the dreadful still-life before me. When they moved on again, leaving the moonbeams free to illuminate every dark hole in the ground, however remote, I saw the worst thing of all: the way he was twitching. It wasn't the involuntary twitching caused by a confused dream of adventure in your sleep. This twitching was the result of unimaginable pain, pain greater than the nervous system of a living creature can deal with.
However, the thing that made this vision so extraordinarily interesting and that was to precipitate me into a crisis later wasn't the intensity of his suffering. That just meant release from all the pain in this world. Suddenly the injured victim opened his eyes, as abruptly and naturally as if the faint wing-beats of a moth had activated his highly sensitive radar system. In fact - I remember it even now - it was just as Schopenhauer said: 'Life may be seen as a dream, and death as waking.' For at the moment when he showed his glowing eyes streaked with iridescent green, radiating pure intelligence and great experience of life, his quivering and twitching suddenly stopped and an expression of relief and comfort came over his face. I ought to have felt relieved too, now that his unbearable torment had come to an end. But unfortunately I wasn't in the finale of some tear-jerking animated film which you switch off with a lump in your throat; I was in a realm beyond ordinary earthly laws. So I had to go on pondering the bitter mystery of our existence and staring it in the face, though I would rather have turned away.
Violet vapours were now rising from the open wound, rapidly coming together in the air to form a bright star-shape. When this metamorphosis was complete the magical glowing form made straight for me. I began to realise what was coming, and even in my trance-like state I tried to avert it by dint of mental acrobatics, the way you can stop disasters happening in a dream just by waking up. But on this occasion there was no waking up and no escape. The glittering purple light hit me, went through me, and it was as if a great bubble burst inside me, dissolving all interest in everything I had ever seen, suffered or attempted. There was no past and no future, only an eternal hovering in the presence of static bliss. All the same, two voices were arguing in my mind, two old enemies who wanted to bend me to their respective wills on this totally weird plane of being.
Glowing like a phosphorescent insect, I drifted further and further away from my dead colleague on the ground, while the irreconcilable adversaries of the shadow kingdom implacably pressed their opinions on me.
'Give him up, Francis!' one of them told me. 'Give him up. Nothing means anything to him now.'
'Don't go away, Francis!' said the other. 'His last hour is still far off. It will come some day, but not now.'
'But can't you feel it's better for him this way, Francis?' the other voice pointed out. 'Don't you realise it was only his blind, idiotic will that gave him the illusion of a full and happy life, when every day was really like begging for water in hell? Whatever it may look like, my friend, it's never worth it! Let him go, accept it, say goodbye!'
True, I thought, most of us spend our lives in an incredibly meaningless way, empty of significance, hollow and insensate. There's nothing but weary yearning, suffering, a dreamlike tottering progress from age to age until we die. We're like clockwork, wound up and going without knowing why. And every time one of us is conceived and born, the clockwork of life is wound up again, to play the tune it's already played countless times, bar by bar, beat by beat, with just a few insignificant variations.
However, the other voice in me wouldn't have this. 'Not everyone stumbles through life as if lost in the forest, Francis. Some are chosen to show others the way. Our friend down there spread order and harmony among his kind and will go on doing so yet. Only when you've lit a light for yourself can it shine for others too.'
The spirit voices argued more and more ferociously, trying to convince me of something whose full significance finally dawned upon me. My happy mood of a moment ago turned to panic. The stress of deciding whether to go back down or just say goodbye to him and this horrible world left me in a cruel state of anxiety; I could have screamed out loud with the tension of it all. My poor head would explode if this destructive brooding went on.
'Let go! Fly away!' cried one of the voices - a solemn order not to be denied, as if it came straight from the mouth of God.
'Don't leave him! Go back to him!' its counterpart demanded with equal vehemence.
Rising to the stars again through the warm winds of night, I glanced down at my blood-soaked colleague in the field. He now looked like a fallen angel who had crash-landed and been turned into a macabre cherub. He was a statue shining dimly on a dark, furrowed background. And yet his green eyes were looking at me as piercingly as if he were only playing dead. In spite of his condition, pretty far gone by now, he was obviously expecting me to deliver the final verdict. My decision would have been a lot easier if I hadn't known all along that it was I myself, none other
, who had just breathed his last down in that lonely ploughed field ...
'F-F-Francis! Francis! Francis!'
Ambrosius's amber eyes were bent on me with a surgeon's somewhat ghoulish curiosity, partly concerned, partly looking for confirmation of his success. The suspense slowly ebbed from his face as he realised that I'd survived the experiment more or less intact. Or had I? Was I still the same Francis after this mystical experience, which couldn't really be put down to wind in a hopelessly constipated digestive tract? Well, I told myself, life does have a way of coming to an end, my dear fellow, and then not even a shadow remains. At most, perhaps, a memory in the heads of those still living, getting fainter all the time, becoming insignificant, becoming meaningless. Heaven and hell didn't begin where life ended; that was where they stopped. Dammit, I'd never thought of that before. Well, who does?
'I was g-g-getting really worried about you, my friend. It wasn't very nice of me to hy-hy-hypnotise you without warning. But your do-do-dogged scepticism annoyed me. It was like a challenge, so I tr-tr-transgressed against my own ethics. And th-th-then, seances like this are child's play to me, so there was no real danger. But your deep trance went beyond what's n-n-normal, and even when I ordered you back to the real world you didn't react. For heaven's sa-sa-sake, what did you see?'
'The future, Ambrosius. The future.'
'So now do you believe our kind can see the future, or anyway part of it?'
'Yes, but there's no reason for me to feel pleased about that, I'm afraid.'
'Did your future look so bad, then?'
'No, just a bit dead.'
'What?'
'I saw my own death, Ambrosius.'
'Could you t-t-tell when it was?'
'I didn't look ninety years old, if that's what you mean.'
'Still, if you don't know the ti-ti-time, that's not so bad. There could be years of ha-ha-happiness ahead of you yet.'
'Grounds for rejoicing, I'm sure. But I'd advise you not to play such tricks in future, or you could lose your hypnotic tail and find it in the jar where Diana keeps her paintbrushes. It was peculiar, though. I felt death was both a disaster and a blessing. My body was hovering ...'
Suddenly the alarms went off. I was still feeling shaken by my vision, and the shrill screech of the sirens shredded my nerves like a freshly sharpened butcher's knife, not to mention nearly bursting my eardrums. In a flash I jumped up and looked out of the window in fright. Outside, the halogen floodlights had turned night to day. Bewilderment was written all over Ambrosius's face too; he was staring as if electrified at the source of the alarm. What had roused the monitors from their twilight sleep? A bird flying low? A stray deer? Diana herself, gone completely off her rocker and holding a witches' sabbath down in the yard?
We jumped up on the window-sill together, ran down the tiles of the roof and peered over the side of the gutter. At first I could scarcely recognise the thing lying on the ground only a metre from the wooden veranda. It looked like some tramp's discarded grey, mottled bundle. But the halogen light was pitiless, insistent in its clarity, showing outlines clear and plain and even casting light on the little details - on the facts. And so I finally identified that bundle as the being I had seen only a few hours ago as if through a cloud of enchanted gossamer ...
Alcina!
There was a great gaping gash in her throat, reaching almost the whole way round her neck. As a result her head was almost separate from her body, attached only by the flesh at the nape of her neck. Her green eyes were wide open, staring straight at me, as if expecting some explanation of this brutal end to her honeymoon. The body itself seemed to have been attacked by land-dwelling piranhas. Covered with monstrous bites, it looked like a cushion which had been repeatedly stabbed in mindless rage until blood-red feathers burst out of it. The most shocking sight of all, however, was her tail. It had been bitten right in half, and the elongated backbone showed at its stump.
The sight was both a terrible blow and a reminder to me. Alcina's corpse blurred into a nightmarish scene before my eyes - in water-colour, because those eyes had filled with tears. I remembered her wild beauty, her seductive rolling and paddling, her eyes full of the sparkling green ocean racing by, and the infinite desire which had merged the two of us together, for an eternal moment, into a single, sacred, primal being. And part of me was thinking of the life we might have engendered that afternoon. I thought of my dead sons and daughters who were not to be. Yes, let the tears take my sight away entirely, blind me so that I need never see such horrors again! Let my vision of death come true as soon as possible, and then I could seek out Alcina and my unborn children in the eternal hunting grounds, sniff them, rub my nose tenderly against theirs. All I wanted now was deliverance - deliverance and a final farewell to a world run mad!
But at the same time I felt a fool. I'd posed to Ambrosius as the wily detective, although I had no notion of what was actually going on. Since no one would really believe such a thing of the Wild Ones, I'd offered a super-clever bit of deduction casting suspicion on a minority persecuted over the centuries. And now I had proof of their innocence. But at what a price! How irresponsible I'd been - how dishonourable! It wasn't my own tortuous mental processes that had unmasked the murderer, but Ambrosius and his intuition. Yes, the murderer had to be the Black Knight. He must have watched my love-making with Alcina, but he didn't attack then and there because he'd thought of something even more diabolical. Then he had revealed himself to me in a fit of megalomania, something serial killers with a supernatural aura about them are prone to do. And as a sadistic finale he had taught Alcina the full meaning of horror, then dragged the corpse in his teeth straight to the forecourt of the house and laid it right on my doorstep, so to speak - which meant he couldn't be far off at this very moment.
Remorse instantly turned to cold rage and a desire for revenge. Why should someone who thought it amusing to take other people's lives go on living himself? I felt as though I could put everything right if I went after the monster at once and challenged him to fight. By God, I had a good chance this time! It was all the same to me whether he, his ravening mastiff or both of them tore me to bits. At least I'd have done my duty and paid Alcina my last respects.
With a positively suicidal leap, and before Ambrosius could express his alarm, I let myself drop from the roof to the forecourt some four metres below. As I did so, I automatically turned my head down, placed the front of my body at an angle of a hundred and eighty degrees to the ground, stretched out my forepaws, spread my hind legs wide and twisted the back of my body, using my tail to balance myself. I landed on all-fours, with my back arched to reduce the shock of impact - right beside Alcina's corpse. I can't tell you how dreadful she looked at close quarters. But I wasn't in a mood for mourning now; I felt like killing blindly and with relish. Never before, not even in my worst attacks of rage, had I felt such a craving to destroy. But life, vile life, had yet another surprise in store. Or as Schopenhauer puts it: 'No one knows what his own powers of suffering and action are until something sets them in motion - just as we do not see, from the calm surface of water in a pool, the way it can fall intact from a precipice, foaming and raging.'
CHAPTER 6
Like a kamikaze diver going down into the raging inferno of the waves, I plunged into the dark forest without the faintest idea which way the killer had gone. Behind me, I heard Diana run out of the house. Her assortment of floodlights made the place look like an open-air disco. But I took no interest whatsoever in that. I was possessed by my wish to make mincemeat of Alcina's murderers, although I was ready to admit without the faintest envy that they had more experience of butchery. My vision of death had left me in an oddly fearless state. Fear, I thought, is for those who believe themselves immortal. But in the next few minutes, and not just then, I was to discover that things were rather more complicated than that.
My instincts had spontaneously set me on the right track, for I heard a rustling noise in the deep darkness of the undergrowt
h, a rustling noise moving away from me at the same speed as I was trying to get at it. What's more, it seemed to be coming from two directions at once, which suggested that Crazy Hugo and the mastiff had now parted company and were running away separately. Running away from me, too - what a triumph! I speeded up and began to run. Bushes and branches whipped into my face as I raced madly on, taking daring leaps over hillocks. High on the opiates manufactured by the body itself, I pursued the phantoms of the night, absolutely convinced I could overpower and execute them. Another sound began to accompany the rustling: an angry growling, the kind made by creatures at bay. I ignored the awkward question of why two such ruffians should fear a flyweight like me; paradoxically, the angry sounds made by my quarry gave me positively supernatural powers. Full of enthusiasm, I raced on, faster and faster and faster. Soon I could hear them only just ahead of me. I could even pick up their scent. That was odd: they didn't smell at all as I'd expected. Well, what did I think they ought to smell like? Employees at the city cemetery after a rather unsavoury exhumation? They didn't smell a bit like that. The scent given off by their glands reflected wild, restless life, along with all the complicated overtones and messages which only an animal nose can decode.
The two of them ... Two of them? Suddenly I wasn't so sure whether I really was after two fugitives. Because the closer I came, the more confused did the rustling sounds become, drifting apart as if a whole group were fanning out. Or was I suffering aural delusions caused by the rustling of the leaves which we were all brushing as we ran past them? Before I knew it I seemed to have caught up with my quarry and be running parallel. I felt fear ... but hadn't I foresworn fear only a few minutes ago? Hadn't I banished it from my life long ago, seeing no use for it in the face of death? However, worse was to come. Suddenly we weren't level any more. One of us had put on a sprint, like the winning horse in a race, while the others had throttled back their speed in a very curious way. And of course the idiotic racehorse was none other than your friend Francis Ironheart. With the goal so close to my eyes, or rather my ears, I'd overdone things. The enemies I'd been pursuing were now behind me, and all of a sudden they were after me instead of vice versa. At the same time, my thirst for revenge instantly changed to naked desire for survival. It dawned on me, with all the unpleasantness of an electric shock, that I'd gone and fallen into a trap. No one had really been running away from little Francis and his threats of revenge, oh no! They'd thrown him a bait in the shape of Alcina's body, that was more like it, thereby luring him out of Diana's house to finish him off at their leisure. Now that's what I call a brilliant plan, I thought. I evidently knew my way around the diabolical thought processes of psychopaths as well as Michael Jackson knows his around the New York subway system.
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