I made the same adventurous leap as last night, shot through the open window to the roof, and from there dropped in daring flight to the ground. The storm still hadn't stopped raging. Rain was falling in such torrents you might have thought there was a burst pipe of giant dimensions up in the sky. Lightning was flashing all over the place, and you could hear trees exploding as they were struck. As I raced through the forest at breathtaking speed, I concentrated utterly on my infallible instincts. I thought they'd soon pick up the murderers' trail, and they did. Without making a single conscious decision, I changed direction several times, made my way through thick barriers of bushes, crossed unknown forest paths, passed farmyards where hysterical dogs barked at me, skirted the Fossilised Forest again, clambered up sheer cliffs and jumped rushing streams. I finally left the forest behind and came to arable land. And there, exhausted and breathless, on the edge of a bare ploughed field rising steeply up a slope, I saw them about two hundred metres away from me.
Veiled by the rain, they were trotting at a comfortable pace towards the top of this sloping field. When they had left the crest of the hill behind them, they would be lost from my sight. I didn't know if I would be able to summon up the strength to follow them then. Strictly speaking, the whole situation resembled a more or less covert form of suicide. If they found out that I was still alive, the last person to know their secret, they'd certainly kill me. Well, so be it. There was more of the detective in me than, with my usual cynicism, I liked to admit. And detectives have to track down murderers at all costs.
While I was getting my breath back, they had reached the top of the rise. Now they really did look like the 'grey ghosts' who had struck fear and terror into humans for so long. Hundreds of backs shone with a silvery gleam in the distance, like the last troops of a defeated army retreating, and hundreds of wet tails swung gently to and fro in time like crumpled windscreen wipers struggling in vain against the rain.
'Hey, you murderers, where do you think you're going?' I yelled at the top of my voice, and then I began slowly marching towards them. They all stopped abruptly and turned to me. There was no surprise on their faces, only something like annoyance that for all their efforts a troublesome problem still hadn't been solved. The sight of all these desperadoes gave me a nasty sinking feeling, but I'd rather have died than let them go without a word of loathing.
Suddenly it stopped raining. A stiff breeze got up, and the lowering black clouds began to drift apart. Through the gaps in the cloud cover you could see the majestic deep blue of the sky with the full moon in it. What did this impressive picture remind me of? The ploughed field, the dark night sky, the full moon with dark clouds driving across it ...
'Don't come any closer if you value your life, Francis!' cried Aurelia. Hobbling, she pushed past the females around her. When she had made her way through she stood there in front of her troop of bedraggled and rather weary-looking queens and looked at me reproachfully. We were all wet through, and the strong wind cut into us like the Snow Queen's frosted fingernails.
'You won't get away scot-free from the last person to know your cannibalistic past, Aurelia. Here I am, and this tale of blood won't really be over until you've killed me.'
'I had no idea you could be so sanctimonious, my son. It's all very well for people living in palaces of full feeding bowls to condemn the low moral standards of the starving. Have you ever spent a winter in the forest, Francis? In a forest so heavily managed that it looks like a germ-free idyll on sentimental wallpaper? Do you really think you could survive even a week in this deceptive paradise - in rain and ice, pursued by hunters with guns, terrorised by cars, caught in traps? How would you hunt with hordes of humans looking for fun kicking up a racket with their bicycles, kites, caravans and camping gear and scaring your prey away? Would you just give a weary grin when you saw your children starve to death at your side? Or your own parents? Or are you only a conceited detective bent on bringing killers to justice however much necessity made them act as they did?'
'Oh, so it's necessity that justifies such barbarism. In that case I suppose you tore Ambrosius to pieces like a hare in a dog-race out of necessity too.'
'Don't paint the dead better than they were in life, Francis. Of course we were the ones who actually killed your brothers and sisters, but Ambrosius set up the gory, archaic atmosphere and the cult. He gave us our medieval names and acted as if the Black Knight really existed, as if he was a deity we must worship. He was so crazy he came to believe in his own masquerade. He made us think we were a chosen people, so we had a right to decide on the life and death of other animals. Ambrosius didn't force us to commit murder, that's true. But he helped us do it in every way he could.'
'It was your own idea to make mincemeat of Alcina, though, right?'
'Yes. After meeting you she was a changed character. She said we ought to drop our destructive ways because they were sinful. We regarded her attitude as treachery, executed her, and left the corpse outside the house in the forest as a warning to you. And as a way of laying a false trail too. But then we thought some more about what she'd said, and we saw the hopelessness of our situation. Suddenly we felt as if our view had been blocked by a great black wall all this time. When you turned up, large cracks began appearing in that wall, and we recognised our dreadful guilt. Gradually we understood what cruel monsters we'd become, how far we had left the innocence of the animal kingdom behind. The only thing we still had in common with other creatures was our animal appearance, a deceptive mask hiding bestial pariahs and rivers of blood. We felt deep shame when we realised that, Francis; oh, we were dreadfully ashamed of ourselves. We wanted to forget it all and obliterate everything that might remind us. So we sent you off to the lynx, expecting him to eat you, and we dealt with Ambrosius ourselves. We know it's easy to find reasons for doing evil, my son, but now we also know that survival won't excuse everything. We are guilty, intolerably guilty. And you are right to condemn us, Francis. I only ask you to remember that we were already condemned before we touched a hair of the coats of your own kind.'
Once again I had tears in my eyes. Oh, what hard decisions life called for! It was all so difficult. The sheer will to live had caused injustice that cried out to heaven, and lovely forest elves had turned into morbid monsters. So that was the solution of my case, the answer to the riddle. It gave me no satisfaction, though; on the contrary, it caused me great pain. Whatever torches we may kindle, I thought, however far their light may reach, our horizon will always be bounded by darkest night. For the answer to the last riddle in the world must necessarily deal with things in themselves, not appearances. The concepts of good and evil disappeared, leaving only my own little feelings behind. Feelings of mourning for the victims, hatred for the killers who themselves were victims to be pitied, and so on and so forth until everything lost its meaning in a tunnel with no light at the end of it, also known as the world.
I felt that events had changed me. I was not the Francis I had been before my flight. So I no longer wanted to go back to Gustav and enjoy a comfortable life, closing my eyes to all the suffering outside the door. At the same time I felt deep revulsion from these creatures, who might be naively described as innocent animals. A stone or a clover leaf could be innocent, but not a living creature. We were all guilty, through no personal fault of our own, just because we were here in this world, because we needed, rejected, loved and killed each other. No, I would turn my back on the incomprehensible world and content myself with a hermit's life. All I wanted was to go back to the lynx's cave and spend the rest of my life in obscurity there.
However, a sober look at my surroundings induced severe doubts of my ability to achieve this reclusive ambition. I suddenly noticed that my present location was the precise scene of my vision of death: the field apparently going on and on to infinity, the silvery light of the full moon broken only by stray black clouds. My God, this was it. I was going to be torn into blood-stained mincemeat by hundreds of claws. What a way to go!
'Francis, you must have heard the tales of old or sick elephants who go to a certain spot when they feel death approaching,' said Aurelia, as she carefully put one paw behind another, just like all the other Wild Ones behind her. Half the company had already disappeared over the brow of the hill. I stood there in the middle of the field, watching them in silence.
'Such places are called elephants' graveyards. The place where we are going is said to have more prey animals than this dark land of misfortune, and the human population is lower. But more likely, much more likely, it will be our graveyard. We still don't really know how to hunt and lead the natural life of our species. So basically we're on the way to our death. But come what may, good fortune or bad, we're never going to injure anyone but our proper prey again. We are leaving madness and murder behind, and we hope that for all our sins, an unspoiled nature will take us to its heart.'
All the Wild Ones except Aurelia had now gone over the top of the hill and were out of my sight. Aurelia stopped there on the crest of the field, giving me a long look from grey-green eyes in which all hope was extinguished. Behind her, a cloud drifted away, exposing the huge moon whose reflected silvery light made Aurelia only a silhouette. Then, suddenly, she got up on her hind legs and reached out her forepaws as if to embrace me from afar.
'Francis, my son!' she cried, sobbing, and I burst into copious tears myself. 'Forgive us! Forgive us, my son! Forgive us!'
'There's nothing to forgive!' I called back. 'May God forgive you - or all the innocent creatures you've butchered, if you ever meet them again. I came here to curse you, but now I know you were cursed already, long ago. I don't wish you luck, but I don't wish you hell on earth either. Go in peace, and show respect for life!'
'If you don't want to wish us luck, then remember us in your prayers, Francis. Goodbye, my son!'
A hesitant wave, a hobbling jump, and she too had gone over the top of the hill. In the place where she had been standing a moment ago there was now nothing but the light of the bloated moon, and another dark cloud slowly drifting over it.
'The best prayer I can say is to wish all living creatures free from pain,' I whispered, and I stayed there for quite a while, gazing listlessly at the silvery moonlight. So my vision of death hadn't come true in the end, which seemed to show that Ambrosius was right in saying the hypnotic seance and its alarming effects were just a conjuring trick. Of course the death I'd seemed to see predicted could still catch up with me somewhere similar at a later date. But I felt very strongly that it would happen either here and now, or in some section of my life which was entirely unknown to me.
Still feeling affected by recent sad events, I longed for nothing but the safety of the cave in the Fossilised Forest. From this day on, that lonely spot should be my protective capsule against the filthy stink of the world. I would meditate there on the last mysteries of life, in intensive conversation with my atrophied instincts. Nor would I cease from trying to discover who created everything, probably including evil.
I turned my eyes away from the moon, which was shining as if it had been polished, and wiped the tears from my eyes with my paw. Then I turned round, and was shot ...
... and died.
CHAPTER 8
Diana had arrived too late. Her last efforts to find the murderous rabble before they disappeared in the direction of Scandinavia had not been altogether successful. Presumably the satellite pictures had shown the unusual migration movement, and despite the filthy weather Diana had immediately set off after the Wild Ones. But instead of getting the whole bunch of them in her sights, somewhere offering a good vantage point, she picked off just one, and that one a red herring.
The red herring in question was a certain detective by the name of Francis who had just decided to change his profession to that of hermit. Was? Had? In fact, in my present state time no longer meant anything. And a bullet from Diana's gun had landed me in that state. A case of mistaken identity with what you might call dramatic consequences. I hadn't even really registered being hit; I just noticed a sudden quivering in my body before my paws momentarily left the ground, and then my legs crumpled like the limbs of a rubber doll. I tumbled over on my back, unable to move.
Everything else happened just as it had in my vision of death, or rather almost, for unlike that brief scene, with which we're already familiar, this one had a sequel. While I lay there in enforced immobility, obliged to watch the moon shining behind dark clouds with my eyelids half closed, the pain began, and it was bad. I felt as if all my nerve endings had been shifted outside me, and some inspired sadist was scrubbing them with a wire brush. All I wanted was a quick death. I squinted down at myself out of the corner of one eye and saw that I was losing a lot of blood. A pool of it had already formed around me. Then an involuntary twitching went through me; it couldn't relieve the pain, but it did take my mind off it to some extent. After a while the twitching stopped too. At the same time, so did everything that had once been of any significance.
As if they'd turned off the torture machine, all my pain suddenly vanished. Violet swathes of light surrounded my body, giving it a bright aura. What a wonderful feeling, being permeated by this magical light as if by water from a sacred spring. I didn't have long to wait for the next miracle. I found myself rising very gradually from the ground while rotating slowly round my own axis. There was something infinitely pleasing about all these gentle movements. When my face was fully turned to the ploughed field I could see what was happening down on earth. But nothing much seemed to be going on. There lay Francis in a broad furrow of the field, with a bleeding wound in his belly, twitching with pain. All of a sudden he opened his eyes and went rigid, like a phased shot in a film. So I'd been able to witness my own death from outside my body. How exciting!
I floated onwards and upwards, moving further and further from the corpse, and the smaller the husk of Francis down on earth looked, the more unimportant and trivial were those little problems and notions that had given him the illusion of life for an infinitesimally short time. You have to be old, I thought, you have to have lived a long time before you realise how short life is. And whatever happiness you've had, there's never really any denying the pain that life entails. My fearing death so much all the same only went to show what a will to live I'd had: I was nothing but that will, I'd known nothing else.
Suddenly I became aware of having been appointed arbitrator in a heated debate. That struck a familiar chord too; after all, I'd already heard those voices arguing vehemently during my vision of death. However, this time they weren't engaged in a proper dialogue, but symbolised two opposing forces in my soul. One force insisted on the power of the will and on life, the other on the pointlessness of all earthly things and on deliverance. It seemed that I didn't have much time to make up my mind, because by now I was so far from the field that the bleeding figure of Francis looked no larger than a tiny dot. As I rose to the firmament at the leisurely pace of a hot-air balloon, I saw Diana emerge from the darkness and stride across the field towards the corpse, her gun lowered.
Although I was so far away, I could see the burning question in the open eyes of my corporeal counterpart. Francis was looking intently at me. Come on, mate, he seemed to be saying, make up your mind, don't keep me in suspense. I thought about it. My hovering motion was like being asleep but fully conscious, soothing and rapturous at once. The world below was a dark spot, full of warriors fighting point-lessly in an unjust war with no prospects of ei
ther victory or peace at the end of it. And yet ... and yet there were still a few knots I'd have liked to untangle, a few things I'd have liked to try, a few parts of life I'd have liked to live ...
No! What was over was over. I'm letting go of you, life, I cried, I'm turning away from you. And as my cry died away in the depths of the sky I found I could not only float on upwards but also fly in all directions, as naturally as a happy dreamer. I flew over poor dead Francis, who had come to a pretty silly end when you stopped to think of it, I flew over fields and meadows, I cut capers, I performed breathtaking aerial acrobatics with all paws outstretched. The earth raced by below me at incredible speed, giving me one last look at all those who'd once meant something to me. I saw the Wild Ones padding silently and thoughtfully towards the northern forests in the grey light of dawn. I sailed down, almost touching them, and they all raised their heads at once with a bitter smile, as if they felt my soul near them. But my swift flight allowed no lingering. Many kilometres further on, in a rocky landscape, I saw Eight the lynx on his way north too, and I hoped with all my heart that he would have enough strength left to cross the Arctic Circle and reach his beloved Canada. When he became aware of my spiritual presence he stopped and glanced up, and he too smiled, but not bitterly like the Wild Ones: he smiled as you might at an aviator friend who's just performed a particularly daring aerial manoeuvre.
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