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
