81
As he approached the final step in the seemingly endless line of stone steps leading to the ground floor, Bale slipped. He fell heavily against the wall - so heavily that he grunted in surprise when his shattered shoulder was caught a glancing blow by the balustrade.
Sabir sat up straighter in his chair. The police. They must have left someone here after all. Perhaps the man had simply crept upstairs to take a nap? It had been incredibly stupid of him not to have checked the house out before he settled down to start work.
Sabir gathered his papers together and went to stand with his back to the fire. There wasn’t time to make for the door. Best to bluff it out. He could always claim that he had needed to come back for some of his belongings. The dictionary and the wad of papers would bear him out.
Bale emerged around the corner of the living-room door like an apparition fresh from the grave. His face was deathly pale and his clotted eyes, in the light cast by the candles, resembled those of a demon. There was blood splattered down his front and more blood smeared like an oil slick across his neck and shoulder. He held a pistol in his left hand and as Sabir watched, horror-struck, Bale raised the pistol and brought it to bear on him.
For probably the first and only time in his life, Sabir acted entirely on impulse. He threw the dictionary at Bale and in the exact same movement he twisted in place until he was on his knees, facing the fire. A split second before the sound of the shot, Sabir thrust the original parchment and his paper copy deep into the flames.
82
Sabir awoke with no idea of where he was. He tried to move but could not. A fearful, noxious odour assailed his nostrils. He attempted to free his arms but they were immersed in a kind of mud. The mud reached to just above his collarbone, leaving his head free. Sabir frantically tried to lever himself out, but he only slipped deeper into the morass.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’
Sabir looked up.
Bale was squatting above him. Six inches above Sabir’s head was a small hole, little more than the width of man.
Bale was balancing the trapdoor that normally sealed the hole against his side. He shone his torch directly down on Sabir’s face. ‘You’re in a cesspit. An old one. This house has obviously never been on mains sewerage. It took me a while to find it. But you’ll have to admit that it’s perfect of its kind. There’s ten inches between the level of the shit and the roof of the pit. That’s just about the size of your head, Sabir, with a couple of inches left over for wastage. When I close and seal this trap you’ll have enough air for, oh, half an hour? That’s if the carbon monoxide from the decomposition of the food sugars doesn’t kill you first.’
Sabir became aware of a pain in his right temple. He wanted to put up his hand to feel for damage, but could not. ‘What have you done to me?’
‘I haven’t done anything to you. Yet. The damage to your face was from a ricochet. My bullet struck the fireplace just as you were turning to destroy the prophecies. The deformed slug sprang back and took part of your ear off. It also knocked you cold. Sorry for that.’
Sabir could feel the claustrophobia begin to take hold of him. He tried to breathe normally but found himself entirely incapable of that measure of control. He began to whoop, like the victim of an asthma attack.
Bale tapped Sabir lightly across the bridge of the nose with the barrel of his pistol. ‘Don’t go hysterical on me. I want you to listen. To listen carefully. You’re already a dead man. Whatever happens, I will kill you. You will die in this place. No one will ever find you in here.’
Sabir’s nose had begun to bleed. He tried to turn his head away from Bale’s pistol, fearing a second blow, but the sudden admixture of blood and excrement triggered his gag reflex. It took him some minutes to regain control of himself and stop retching. Eventually, when the fit was over, he raised his head as far as he could and dragged in some marginally fresh air from above. ‘Why are you still speaking to me? Why don’t you just get on with whatever you are intending to do?’
Bale winced. ‘Patience, Sabir. Patience. I am still speaking to you because you have a weakness. A fatal weakness that I intend to use against you. I was there when they put you in the wood-box back at Samois. And I saw your condition when they brought you out. Claustrophobia is what you fear most in this world. So I offer it to you. In exactly sixty seconds’ time I shall lock and seal this place and leave you here to rot. But you have one chance to buy back the girl’s life. The girl’s - not your own. You can dictate to me all that you know of the prophecies. No. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You had more than enough time to copy down the verses and translate them. I found the dictionary you threw at me. I heard your car arrive. I have estimated how long you were down in the sitting room and it runs into hours. Dictate what you know to me and I will shoot you through the head. That way you won’t die of suffocation. And I will promise to spare the girl.’
‘I didn’t…’ Sabir had trouble getting the words out. ‘I didn’t…’
‘Yes you did. I have the pad you were pressing on. You wrote many lines. You translated many lines. Later, I will have the pad analysed. But first you will give me what I want. If you fail to do this, I will find the girl and I will do to her exactly what was done to the pregnant woman by the Hangman of Dreissigacker. Right down to the very last lash - the very last scalding - the very last screw of the rack. She told you about that, didn’t she, your little Yola? The bedtime story that I read to her while she was waiting to die? I can see by your face that she did. Haunting, wasn’t it? You can save her from that, Sabir. You can die a hero.’ Bale levered himself up on to his feet. ‘Think about it.’
The trapdoor slammed shut, returning the cesspit to a condition of total darkness.
83
Sabir started to scream. It wasn’t a rational sound, based on a desire to get out. It was an animal sound, dragged from some doomed place deep inside him - a place in which hope no longer had a foothold.
There was a noise above him of something heavy being dragged across the trapdoor. Sabir fell silent, like a wild animal sensing the approaching line of beaters. The darkness in which he found himself was absolute - so dark, in fact, that the blackness seemed almost purple to his wildly staring eyes.
The gag reflex began again and he could feel his heart clenching in his chest with each explosive expectoration. He tried to focus his mind on the outside world. To take himself beyond the cesspit and this hideous darkness which threatened to engulf him and drive him mad. But the darkness was so complete and his fear so acute, that he could no longer dominate his own thoughts.
He tried to drag his arms up from beneath him. Were they tied? Had Bale done even that to him?
With each movement he sank deeper into the sump.
Now it was
up to his chin and threatening to invade his mouth. He began to wail, his arms flapping like chicken wings in the viscous liquid below him.
Bale would come back. He had said he would come back. He would come back to ask Sabir about the prophecies. That would afford Sabir the crucial leverage he needed. He would get Bale to pull him out of the cesspit so that he could write down all that he knew. Then he would overpower him. No power on earth would ever get Sabir back inside here once he was out. He would die if necessary. Kill himself.
It was then that Sabir remembered Bale’s useless left arm. It would be physically impossible for Bale ever to pull him out. Drag him to the cesspit he could. Control an unconscious man’s slide into the sump he could - that would simply have been a matter of leverage and of snagging his inert body by the collar and allowing gravity to do the rest. But there was no way on God’s earth that Bale could ever get him back out again.
Slowly, incrementally, the gases in the cesspit were having their effect. Sabir felt himself drawn upwards as if by an outside force. At first his entire body seemed forced against the sealed cover of the cesspit like a man sucked against the porthole of a depressurised plane. Then he burst through and up into the air, his body bent into the shape of a U by the centrifugal throw-out. He threw his arms as wide as he was able and his body-shape reversed itself, until he was rocketing upwards in the shape of a C - in the shape of a skydiver - but with the force and speed of his ascension having no discernible effect.
He looked down at the earth below him with a sublime detachment, as if this expulsive exodus was in no way part of his own experience.
Then, deep inside his hallucination, his body began a gradual process of discombobulation. First his arms were torn off - he saw them swirling away from him on a current of air. Then his legs.
Sabir began to moan.
With a frightful wrench, his lower torso, from his waist down to his upper thighs, ripped apart from his body, dragging intestines, lights, bowel and bladder in its wake. His chest burst apart and his heart, lungs and ribs shredded from his body. He tried to snatch at them, but he had no arms. He was powerless to control his body’s liquefaction and soon all that was left of him was his head, just as it had been in his shamanic dream - his head approaching him, face on, its eyes dead.
As the head came closer its mouth opened and from inside a snake began to issue - a thick, uncoiling python of a snake, with scales like those of a fish and staring eyes and a mouth that seemed to unhinge itself, becoming ever larger. The python turned and swallowed Sabir’s head - Sabir could see the shape of his head moving down the python’s body, driven by its myosin-fuelled muscles.
Then the python turned and its face was his face, even down to his newly damaged ear. The face tried to talk to him but Sabir could no longer make out the sound of his own voice. It was as if he was both inside and outside the snake’s body at one and the same time. Somehow, though, Sabir sensed that his incapacity to hear came from the internal head, which was being drawn like forcemeat through the lozenge of the snake’s body.
It’s like a birth, Sabir decided. It’s like coming down through the birth canal. That’s why I’m claustrophobic. It’s my birth. Something to do with my birth.
Now Sabir could see through the snake’s eyes, feel through the snake’s skin. He was the snake and it was him.
His hand burst out of the sump near to his face. He felt the hand reach for his neck, as though it were still not part of him.
He was still the snake. He had no hands.
The hand reached for the necklet the shaman had given him.
Snake. There was snake in the necklet.
Poison. There was poison in the necklet.
He must take it. Kill himself. Surely that was what the dream had been telling him?
Suddenly he was back in the reality of the cesspit. There was a scraping sound above him. In a moment Bale would be opening the hatch.
With his free hand Sabir tore a wad of fabric off the front of his shirt and rammed it into his mouth. He thrust it down his throat, blocking off all access to his windpipe.
He felt the gag reflex trigger, but ignored it.
Bale was sliding the hatch open.
Sabir broke the vial of poison into his mouth. He was breathing only through his nose now. He could feel the poison lying on his tongue. Dispersing against the roof of his mouth. Filtering up his nasal passages and through his sinuses.
When the hatch slid back, Sabir played dead. In the split second before the light struck him, he allowed his head to drop forward and rest on the surface of the scum, so that Bale would imagine he had drowned himself.
Bale grunted in irritation. He reached down to raise Sabir’s head.
Sabir grabbed the collar of Bale’s shirt with his free hand. Temporarily unbalanced, Bale started to topple.
Using the impetus of the downward movement, Sabir steered Bale’s head through the hatch. His eyes fixed themselves on the open wound on Bale’s neck.
As Bale’s head came briefly parallel with his own, Sabir sank his teeth into the wound, forcing his tongue inside the bullet hole, dispersing the poison deep into Bale’s veins.
Then he spat what remained of the poison into the cesspool surrounding him and prepared to die.
84
Joris Calque’s interview with the Countess had proved to be the equivalent of a coitus reservatus - in other words, he had delayed completion for so long that the final effect had been little more satisfying than a wet dream.
He had convinced himself before the interview that it was he who held the upper hand. The Countess, surely, must be on the defensive? She was an old woman - why didn’t she simply open up and have done with it? There was no capital punishment in France any more. In fact the Count would most probably be carted off to an asylum, where he could play dynastic games to his heart’s content in the sure and certain knowledge that after fifteen or twenty years he would be ejected back into the system with a ‘harmless’ label tagged around his neck.
Instead, Calque had found himself facing the human equivalent of a brick wall. Rarely in his career had he encountered a person so sure of the moral justifi cations of their actions. Calque knew that the Countess was the driving force behind her son’s behaviour - he simply knew it. But he couldn’t remotely prove it.
***
‘Is that you, Spola?’ Calque held the cellphone six inches in front of his mouth, as one would hold a microphone. ‘Where are Sabir and Dufontaine now?’
‘Sleeping, Sir. It is two o’clock in the morning.’
‘Have you checked on them recently? Within the last hour, say?’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Well, do so now.’
‘Shall I call you back?’
‘No. Take the telephone with you. That’s what these things are for, isn�
�t it?’
Sergeant Spola eased himself up from the back seat of his police meat-wagon. He had made himself a comfortable nest out of a few borrowed blankets and a chair cushion which Yola had purloined for him. What was Calque thinking of? This was the middle of the night. Why would Sabir or the gypsy want to go anywhere? They weren’t being accused of anything. If Calque asked his opinion, he would tell him that there was no sense at all in wasting police manpower trailing non-suspects around in the enjoyment of their lawful rights. Spola had a lovely warm wife waiting for him at home. And a lovely warm bed. Those constituted his lawful rights. And, typically, they were in the process of being violated.
‘I’m looking at the gypsy now. He’s fast asleep.’
‘Check on Sabir.’
‘Yes, Sir.’ Spola eased the internal door of the caravan open. Such bloody nonsense. ‘He’s lying in his bed. He’s…’ Spola stopped. He took a further step inside the room and switched on the light. ‘He’s gone, Sir. They packed his bed full of cushions to make it look as if he was asleep. I’m sorry, Sir.’
‘Where’s the girl?’
‘Sleeping with the women, Sir. Across the way.’
‘Get her.’
‘But I can’t, Sir. You know what these gypsy women are like. If I go blundering in there…’
‘Get her. Then put her on the phone.’
85
Spola squinted through the windscreen at the passing trees. It had started to rain and the police car’s headlights were reflecting back off the road, making it difficult to judge distances.
THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECIES Page 40