In a fit of sudden madness Adriana sprang to her feet, tore the sheet off the bed, and marched on determined legs into the bathroom, dragging the sheet behind her. Once inside she coiled the sheet up into a makeshift rope, at one end of which she fashioned a noose. It appeared now that her hands were possessed of a will of their own; indeed, throughout this episode she felt almost as if she were a mere spectator, hovering somewhere outside her body and watching someone else, some stranger who happened to be a mirror image of her, this alien being tying the sheet-rope over the shower pipe.
When the rope was in place a brief pang of sorrow clamped its jaws over her throat when her thoughts turned to her parents, and the fact that they would never see her again or discover what fate had befallen their youngest daughter. She realised that after this deed was done Sigurd would no doubt dispose of her body in a canal, or bury her beneath six feet of wet concrete in a construction yard. She was also quite sure that he would most likely defile her body; he’d cut off her hands, her feet, her head, all of them, probably, with that fearsome sword of his. It wouldn’t matter though, for what harm could the living do to the dead?
Another splinter of pain jabbed its rough-edged agony beneath her fingernails as she thought of Roxana. The girl was no doubt dead now. Not dead in body – no, these cruel monsters needed to keep that part of her alive in order to continue profiting from it – but surely her soul, her mind, her will to live, all of these would have been smashed to pieces like so many shards of shattered porcelain. She wished she could have saved Roxana, somehow, but such thoughts were follies; she was powerless against the brutality and pitiless menace she was up against here.
As she climbed onto the toilet seat and slipped the noose over her neck, she thought briefly of the Japanese woman. Perhaps she could in some small way have helped the woman in whatever mission she was on against Sigurd and his brutes, but, unfortunately, such a thing would not be possible now. No red dragon in a stormy sky had come to her, and it was simply too late to wait for such vagaries to come to fruition.
Perhaps the hardest thing to let go of, in these final moments, were those dreams she had entertained for as long as she could remember. She had long fantasised about the iconic art galleries and museums of the world, of discovering the wonder of the treasures they held, of delving into the world’s great libraries and universities, and drinking in the knowledge therein with the unquenchable thirst of a dry sponge.
She had constructed such rich, vivid fantasies of walking among those ancient corridors with books tucked under her arm, visualising the bronze warmth of late summer rays bleeding through the spaces between towering pillars. Such dreams she had had, of conversing with all manner of scholars in an array of tongues, and she had pictured herself standing before lecture halls, packed wall to wall with keen young minds, as she disseminated the knowledge that she had absorbed, knowledge that had inspired generation after generation of brilliant thinkers.
She had dreamed of travel, of love, of romance with some imagined suitor – someone kind and loving and generous – of one day starting a family, and of hopefully uplifting others from the stranglehold of poverty via education. And all of these dreams were about to expire here, in a mouldy bathroom in a Bangkok brothel.
Adriana choked back a bitter sob, not wanting to break down, but she nonetheless allowed a tear to run down her cheek as she tightened the noose around her throat and prepared to step off the edge of the toilet seat.
‘Goodbye mama, goodbye papa,’ she whispered hoarsely to the empty room. Then she jumped.
The noose gripped her throat with the savage garrotting of a pair of steel hands, and the animal instinct deep within the most primeval part of her mind forced her legs to kick against this fast-approaching death. Her hands, possessed now of their own will, were reaching for the noose, trying to pull it off, but with single-minded determination she held them at bay.
‘No,’ she growled through gritted teeth, ‘I want to die! I want to die! I want this!’
Her tongue was swelling within her mouth, becoming larger and larger by the second, as if it were a potato growing in accelerated stop-motion. She felt herself becoming light-headed even as her lungs started burning, burning, burning with blistering heat within her breast, as every atom of which she was composed screamed out for oxygen. A strange euphoria began to spread through her system, starting in her fingertips and toes, and then travelling through the entirety of her nervous system. This sensation coincided with the appearance of a brilliant light, glowing at the end of a dark tunnel that was forming at the periphery of her vision.
This is it … this is the end…
She wasn’t sure if it was her own voice saying these words or the voice of someone else, but at this point she no longer cared. A rapturous joy was gushing through her body, illuminating every molecule of her being with hues of saturated colour, and the dazzling white light was swallowing her, enveloping her in what she could only describe as the purest love and bliss she had ever known. She closed her eyes, immersing herself in the glowing supernova of ecstasy, experiencing a sensation of weightlessness, as if her tired soul was being truly liberated from
