“Not a gecko,” he heard Susila saying, “not one of our nice little house lizards. A hulking stranger from outdoors, one of the bloodsuckers. Not that they suck blood, of course. They merely have red throats and go purple in the face when they get excited. Hence that stupid name. Look! There he goes!”
Will looked down again. Preternaturally real, the scaly horror with its black blank eyes, its murderer’s mouth, its blood-red throat pumping away while the rest of the body lay stretched along the floor as still as death, was now within six inches of his foot.
“He’s seen his dinner,” said Susila. “Look over there to your left, on the edge of the matting.”
He turned his head.
“Gongylus gongyloides,” she went on. “Do you remember?”
Yes, he remembered. The praying mantis that had settled on his bed. But that was in another existence. What he had seen then was merely a rather odd-looking insect. What he saw now was a pair of inch-long monsters, exquisitely grisly, in the act of coupling. Their bluish pallor was barred and veined with pink, and the wings that fluttered continuously, like petals in a breeze, were shaded at the edges with deepening violet. A mimicry of flowers. But the insect forms were undisguisable. And now even the flowery colors had undergone a change. Those quivering wings were the appendages of two brightly enameled gadgets in the bargain basement, two little working models of a nightmare, two miniaturized machines for copulation.
And now one of the nightmare machines, the female, had turned the small flat head, all mouth and bulging eyes, at the end of its long neck—had turned it and (dear God!) had begun to devour the head of the male machine. First a purple eye was chewed out, then half the bluish face. What was left of the head fell to the ground. Unrestrained by the weight of the eyes and jaws, the severed neck waved wildly. The female machine snapped at the oozing stump, caught it and, while the headless male uninterruptedly kept up his parody of Ares in the arms of Aphrodite, methodically chewed.
Out of the corner of his eye Will glimpsed another spurt of movement, turned his head sharply, and was in time to see the lizard crawling towards his foot. Nearer, nearer. He averted his eyes in terror. Something touched his toes and went tickling across his instep. The tickling ceased; but he could sense a little weight on his foot, a dry scaly contact. He wanted to scream; but his voice was gone and, when he tried to move, his muscles refused to obey him.
Timelessly the music had turned into the final Presto. Horror briskly on the march, horror in rococo fancy dress leading the dance.
Utterly still, except for the pulse in its red throat, the scaly horror on his instep lay staring with expressionless eyes at its predestined prey. Interlocked, the two little working models of a nightmare quivered like windblown petals and were shaken spasmodically by the simultaneous agonies of death and copulation. A timeless century passed; bar after bar, the gay little dance of death went on and on. Suddenly there was a scrabbling against his skin of tiny claws.
The bloodsucker had crawled down from his instep to the floor. For a long life-span it lay there absolutely still. Then, with incredible speed, it darted across the boards and onto the matting. The slitlike mouth opened and closed again. Protruding from between the champing jaws, the edge of a violet-tinted wing still fluttered, like an orchid petal in the breeze; a pair of legs waved wildly for a moment, then disappeared from view.
Will shuddered and closed his eyes; but across the frontier between things sensed and things remembered, things imagined, the horror pursued him. In the fluorescent glare of the inner light an endless column of tin-bright insects and gleaming reptiles marched up diagonally, from left to right, out of some hidden source of nightmare towards an unknown and monstrous consummation. Gongylus gongyloides by millions and, in the midst of them, innumerable bloodsuckers. Eating and being eaten—forever.
And all the while—fiddle, flute and harpsichord—the final Presto of the Fourth Brandenburg kept trotting timelessly forward. What a jolly little rococo death march! Left, right; left, right…But what was the word of command for hexapods? And suddenly they weren’t hexapods any longer; they were bipeds. The endless column of insects had turned abruptly into an endless column of soldiers. Marching as he had seen the Brown Shirts marching through Berlin, a year before the war.
Thousands upon thousands of them, their banners fluttering, their uniforms glowing in the infernal brightness like floodlit excrement. Numberless as insects, and each of them moving with the precision of a machine, the perfect docility of a performing dog. And the faces, the faces! He had seen the close-ups on the German newsreel, and here they were again, preternaturally real and three-dimensional and alive. The monstrous face of Hitler with his mouth open, yelling. And then the faces of assorted listeners. Huge idiot faces, blankly receptive. Faces of wide-eyed sleepwalkers. Faces of young Nordic angels rapt in the Beatific Vision. Faces of baroque saints going into ecstasy. Faces of lovers on the brink of orgasm. One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism.
And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror music. Onward Nazi soldiers. Onward Marxists. Onward Christian soldiers, and Muslims. Onward every chosen people, every Crusader and Holy War maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death. And suddenly Will found himself looking at what the marching column would become when it had reached its destination—thousands of corpses in the Korean mud, innumerable packets of garbage littering the African desert.
And here (for the scene kept changing with bewildering rapidity and suddenness), here were the five flyblown bodies he had seen only a few months ago, faces upwards and their throats gashed, in the courtyard of an Algerian farm. Here, out of a past almost twenty years earlier, was that old woman, dead and stark naked in the rubble of a stucco house in St. John’s Wood. And here, without transition, was his own gray and yellow bedroom, with the reflection in the mirror on the wardrobe door of two pale bodies, his and Babs’s, frantically coupling to the accompaniment of his memories of Molly’s funeral and the strains, from Radio Stuttgart, of the Good Friday music out of Parsifal.
The scene changed again and, festooned with tin stars and fairy lamps, Aunt Mary’s face smiled at him gaily and then was transformed before his eyes into the face of the whining, malignant stranger who had taken her place during those last dreadful weeks before the final transformation into garbage. A radiance of love and goodness, and then a blind had been drawn, a shutter closed, a key turned in the lock, and there they were—she in her cemetery and he in his private prison sentenced to solitary confinement and, one unspecified fine morning, to death. The Agony in the Bargain Basement. The Crucifixion among the Christmas-tree decorations. Outside or in, with the eyes open or with the eyes closed, there was no escape.
“No escape,” he whispered, and the words confirmed the fact, transformed it into a hideous certitude that kept opening out, opening down, into depth below depth of malignant vulgarity, hell beyond hell of utterly pointless suffering.
And this suffering (it came to him with the force of a revelation)—this suffering was not merely pointless; it was also cumulative, it was also self-perpetuating. Surely enough, frightfully enough, as it had come to Molly and Aunt Mary and all the others, death would come also to him. Would come to him, but never to this fear, this sickening disgust, these lacerations of remorse and self-loathing. Immortal in its pointlessness, suffering would go on forever. In all other respects one was grotesquely, despicably finite. Not in respect to suffering. This dark little inspissated clot that one called “I” was capable of suffering to infinity and, in spite of death, the suffering would go on forever.
The pains of living and the pains of dying, the routine of successive agonies in the bargain basement and the final crucifixion in a blaze of tin and plastic vulgarity—reverberating, continuously amplified, they would always be there. And the pains were incommunicable, the isolation complete. The awareness that one existed was an awareness that one was always alone. Just as much alone in Babs’s musky alcove as one had been alone with one’s earache or one’s broken arm, as one would be alone with one’s final cancer, alone, when one thought it was all over, with the immortality of suffering.
He was aware, all of a sudden, that something was happening to the music. The tempo had changed. Rallentando. It was the end. The end of everything for everyone. The
