Meanwhile, the flames had already consumed the curtains and their greedy tongues were panting up toward the ceiling. Molten plastic slime dripped down, burning itself into the carpet and spreading flames. The room filled with horribly smelling smoke and suffocating heat, and the bright, flickering light of the fire provided both of us bleeding gladiators with a light that suited our fighting mood. I wanted nothing so much as to get out of this hell, but feared that the old soldier confronting me, obviously fighting his last battle, wasn't about to allow it. So we licked our wounds, snarling at each other, and prepared ourselves for the next bout while the wildly dancing Krishna of flames roared up, extending a thousand hands toward the master's library.
Blood gushing from his chest, Pascal suddenly sprang at me like lightning, as if a bomb had exploded under him; he sunk his murderous fangs into my neck, and pulled me down onto the glass top of the desk. Scratching each other's noses, eyes, and soft parts, we tumbled onto the desk again and again until at last we fell, stubbornly intermeshed, to the floor. The odd thing about it all was that I felt hardly any pain, though I knew I would feel it later.
On the carpet, most of it already blazing away, we fought with the unyielding intensity that seizes fighters when they begin to realize that only one will survive. We hacked away at each other with our claws as if we were playing with a mouse, biting and tearing away at each other's bodies the way we would ravage a dead rabbit, blood from both of us jetting up and merging in the air as if Professor Julius Preterius had returned from the dead to conduct one of his crudest experiments on us.
But gradually we tired. Our jabs became more and more sluggish, our biting only a halfhearted tugging, and our wrestling and scratching a kind of automatic embrace that might well put an end to both of us. Then Pascal lost his breath for a moment and suddenly leaned on me. With all my remaining strength, I took this chance to etch a bleeding line into his face with the claws of my right paw. He gave out a piercing shriek and collapsed backwards. I leaped back about four feet, squatted on my back legs, and ran my tongue over the many wounds on my body. I do not believe I really licked them—it was more of a reflex—because I had no more strength left and lacked all presence of mind.
Pascal, on the other hand, did nothing, nothing at all. He merely sat on his rear and stared at me through milky eyes like a wax doll, as if drugged. His dark fur was now soaked with the blood that was pouring terribly quickly from his wounds onto the carpet.
All the books that had taught Claudandus so much about humans and animals were now blazing merrily away. The fire gave rise to a heat that made breathing nearly impossible. We were going to suffocate in only a few seconds, and then we would burn. And ultimately human beings were the ones we had to thank for it. Not Pascal, not Claudandus, not we had been the first to begin the killing. They, the impure, were the cause for all the evil in the world, the cause that things had come to this point.
Suddenly he jumped!
It was a suicide jump, a jump made with no regard to where and how he would land, a jump made with the very last reserves of strength, using so much that the jumper knew he would not be able to summon any more energy, even to bat an eyelid. It was a powerful jump, as quick as an arrow and with the force of a falling meteor.
When he shot toward me, screeching, I automatically threw myself on my back, jerked up my right paw, and let one single claw flash out. And when Pascal soared over me whistling, I hacked his throat, my claw cutting him so deeply I believed I had sliced his vocal chords. He crashed hard on the other side, rolled over once, and remained lying down, silent.
I ran to him and turned his head toward me. He was bleeding horribly, and I saw that the cut was larger than I originally thought. I could almost see into his esophagus. Nevertheless, a roguish grin flitted over his face. He opened his eyes with an infinite slowness and with difficulty looked at me intently. No anger, no reproach, and no fear were in them—also no regret.
"So much darkness in the world," he wheezed. "So much darkness, Francis. No light. Only darkness. And there is always someone who will take it upon himself Always. Always. Always. I have become evil, but once I, too, was good …"13
Epilogue
The house burned down and was reduced to ashes. Along with the house burned the lifeless body of him to whom human beings had given various names, but whose real name remained a mystery that he took with him to a place where neither names nor race mattered. The diabolical program FELIDAE and millions of data on sheer guilt and horror were also sacrificed to the flames. I myself was able to flee the inferno at the
