I ran to the car, calling: “Bill, Bill—!”
Tinsley didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
He just lay there behind the wheel, quietly, and the car moved ahead, slowly, so very slowly.
I got sick to my stomach. I reached in and braked the car and cut the ignition, not looking at him, my mind working in a slow kind of new and frightened horror.
I looked once more at Bill where he slumped with his head back.
It didn’t do any good to kill flies, kill moths, kill termites, kill mosquitoes. The Evil ones were too clever for that.
Kill all the insects you find, destroy the dogs and the cats and the birds, the weasels and the chipmunks, and the termites, and all animals and insects in the world, it can be done, eventually by man, killing, killing, killing, and after you are finished, after that job is done you still have—microbes.
Bacteria. Microbes. Yes. Unicellular and bi-cellular and multi-cellular microscopic life!
Millions of them, billions of them on every pore, on every inch of flesh of your body. On your lips when you speak, inside your ears when you listen, on your skin when you feel, on your tongue when you taste, in your eyes when you see! You can’t wash them off, you can’t destroy all of them in the world! It would be an impossible task, impossible! You discovered that, didn’t you, Bill.
I stared at him. We almost convinced you, didn’t we, Bill, that insects were not guilty, were not Watchers. We were right about that part of it. We convinced you and you got to thinking tonight, and you hit upon the real crux of the situation. Bacteria. That’s why the shower was running at home just now! But you can’t kill bacteria fast enough. They multiply and multiply, instantly!
I looked at Bill, slumped there. “The flyswatter, you thought the flyswatter was enough. That’s a—laugh.”
Bill, is that you lying there with your body changed by leprosy and gangrene and tuberculosis and malaria and bubonic all at once? Where is the skin of your face, Bill, and the flesh of your bones, your fingers lying clenched to the steering wheel. Oh, God, Tinsley, the color and the smell of you—the rotting fetid combination of disease you are!
Microbes. Messengers. Millions of them. Billions of them.
God can’t be everywhere at once. Maybe He invented flies, insects to watch his peoples.
But the Evil Ones were brilliant, too. They invented bacteria!
Bill, you look so different . . .
You’ll not tell your secret to the world now. I returned to Susan, looked in at her, not able to speak. I could only point for her to go home, without me. I had a job to do, to drive Bill’s car into the ditch and set fire to him and it. Susan drove away, not looking back.
And now, tonight, a week later, I am typing this out for what it is worth, here and now, in the summer evening, with flies buzzing about my room. Now I realize why Bill Tinsley lived so long.
While his efforts were directed against insects, ants, birds, animals, who were representatives of the Good Forces, the Evil Forces let him go ahead. Tinsley, unaware, was working for the Evil Ones. But when he comprehended that bacteria were the real enemy, and were more numerous and invisibly insidious, then the Evil Ones demolished him.
In my mind, I still remember the picture of the Elder Tinsley’s death when he was shot as a result of the quail flying against his gun. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem to fit into the picture. Why would the quail, representative of Good, kill the Elder Tinsley?
The answer to this comes clear now. Quail, too, have disease, and disease disrupts their neutral set-up, and disease, on that day long ago, caused the birds to strike down Tinsley’s weapon, killing him, and thus, subtly, animals and insects.
And another thought in my mind is the picture of the Elder Tinsley as he lay covered with ants in a red, quivering blanket.
And I wonder if perhaps they were not giving solace to him in his dying and decay, talking in some silent mandibled tongue none of us can hear until we die. Or perhaps they are all.
The game of chess continues. Good against Evil, I hope. And I am losing.
Tonight I sit here writing and waiting, and my skin itches and softens, and Susan is on the other side of town, unaware, safe from this knowledge which I must set on paper even if it kills me. I listen to the flies, as if to detect some good message in their uneven whirring, but I hear nothing.
Even as I write, the skin of my fingers loosens and changes color and my face feels partially dry and flaking, partially wet, slippery and released from its anchorage of softening bone, my eyes water with a kind of leprosy and my skin darkens with something akin to bubonic, my stomach gripes me with sickening gastric wrenches, my tongue tastes bitter and acid, my teeth loosen in my mouth, my ears ring, and in a few minutes the structure of my fingers, the muscles, the small thin, fine bones will be enmeshed, entangled, so much fallen gelatin spread over and down between the black lettered keys of this typewriter, the flesh of me will slide like a decayed, diseased cloak from my skeleton, but I must write on and on and on until etaoin shrdlucmfwyp . . . cmfwaaaaa dddddddddddddddddddd . . .
The End
