Feelings of Fear (30 page)

“All the same, I know what I saw, after that accident, and I don't believe that it was shock that caused me to see it, or concussion, or psychological trauma. As I lay in the road, Martin, I saw things that would make your hair stand on end.”

“So what are you saying to me?” asked Martin.

“I'm saying nothing. But you listened to all of your fellow society members this afternoon, didn't you? They're all bereaved, just as you are. None of them want to carry on without their family or their partners. They all want to die. But none of them want to kill themselves with tablets, or exhaust fumes, or by cutting their wrists. When they die, they want to feel what their loved ones felt. They want to suffer in the same way. Sylvia wants to burn; Sticky wants to be crushed; Theresa wants to be trapped below ground. This will be their redemption.

“You know what I'm talking about, Martin. How many mornings have you lain awake and thought about Sarah, and what she felt like, when that steel wire cut off her head? You want to experience that too, don't you, Martin? – or else you wouldn't have answered my advertisement. The Sympathy Society isn't the Samaritans. The Sympathy Society
really
sympathizes. We'll give you what you're craving for. The same death that your loved one suffered.”

Martin's mouth was totally dry. “You'll do that – you'll burn Sylvia? You'll trap Theresa under the ground?”

Tybalt nodded. “Nobody else understands, Martin, but I do. You want to die. But trying to cut your throat with a steak knife … that doesn't even compare, does it? What did Sarah feel? After her head was cut off, did she still
think
for a second or two? Did she see her body, still speeding along on that jet-ski, with blood pumping out of her neck? You want to know that, don't you, Martin?”

Martin cleared his throat, and nodded.

Tybalt leaned forward and touched his knee with chalky fingernails. “The Sympathy Society can arrange for you to be killed in any way you choose. There's only one thing we ask in return. We need to record your impressions with synaptic monitors … we need to see what
you see, think what you think, the instant you die. I saw something terrible when I lay on the road after my motorcycle accident, and I need to know whether I was hallucinating or not.”

“What did you see?” asked Martin.

Tybalt shook his head. “I don't want to put any ideas in your head. Besides, if I tell you, you won't want to be killed at all.”

“I want to die,” said Martin. “I want you to cut off my head, and kill me. I need to know what Sarah went through. I need to know exactly what she felt like.”

“There you are,” said Tybalt, with unexpected gentleness. “That's why we call ourselves The Sympathy Society.”

The following morning was chilly and overcast, and inside the house it was so gloomy that they had to switch the lights on. They gathered for breakfast in the kitchen, although Martin couldn't manage anything more than a cup of coffee. Sylvia sat at the head of the table, her hair all pinned up. She looked even paler than usual, and there were dark circles under her eyes. Around her neck hung a small silver crucifix.

At half past eight, Tybalt came in through the garden door. He was wearing a long black overcoat with the collar turned up. “Well,” he said, chafing his hands together. “Everything's ready, Sylvia, if you are.”

Sylvia set down her teacup. She looked around the table, at each of them, although she didn't smile. “I don't like goodbyes,” she said. “Anyway, we're all going to meet again, aren't we?”

Theresa reached across the table and took hold of her hand. There were tears in her eyes. “I envy you,” she said. “You don't know how much I envy you.”

Tybalt said, “None of you have to come out and watch. This is Sylvia's moment, after all. But if you want to be with her, I'm sure she'll appreciate it.”

Sylvia stood up. She was wearing a plain green linen dress, and she was barefoot. Tybalt went back out into the garden and she followed him, leaving the door ajar.

Theresa said, “I'm not going. I can't.” Terence didn't say anything, but made no move to get up from the table. Sticky went through to the hallway and came back with his brown tweed overcoat and his
checkered scarf. “I'm going. Poor girl deserves somebody there. Terrible thing, to die on your own.”

“Don't”
said Theresa. Sticky laid an apologetic hand on her shoulder. “Sorry … didn't mean it like that.”

Martin didn't know whether he wanted to witness Sylvia's death or not; but Sticky said, “Come on, old boy. You never know. When you see this, you might change your mind.”

They went out into the garden. The grass was wet underfoot and dew was clinging to the branches of the apple-trees. Martin was shivering, and it wasn't because of the cold. In the far corner of the garden stood a dilapidated shed with broken windows, and just in front of it, Sylvia was already kneeling on the ground. Tybalt was standing over her, taping electrodes to her temples with silver fireproof tape. A little distance away stood an old metal table with a PC standing on it, and a collection of equipment for recording Sylvia's heart-rate and brain activity.

Martin and Sticky stopped and stood at a respectful distance, close to one of the trees. A robin perched on the fence close by, beadily watching them. Sylvia looked so plain and pale she reminded Martin of St Joan, about to be burned at the stake. But her expression was completely calm, and her eyes were lifted toward the sky, as if she were quite prepared for what was going to happen to her. As if she were quietly looking forward to it.

It took nearly ten minutes for Tybalt to fix the last electrode, and Martin was beginning to lose his nerve. “I think I'll go back inside,” he told Sticky. But Sticky took hold of his hand, and gripped it tight, and wouldn't let it go. “You're best staying,” he said.

Tybalt went across to the metal table and switched on his PC and his recording equipment. Then he went to the shed and came back with a large blue petrol-can. He told Sylvia to cover her face with her hands, and then he unscrewed the lid and poured the contents all over the top of her head. Sylvia shuddered, and let out a muffled, high-pitched
ah!
It wasn't petrol. It was a thick, greenish gel, which dripped slowly down her neck and over her shoulders. Martin could smell it, even from twenty feet away. It was paint-stripper, and it must have been searing the exposed skin on Sylvia's hands and neck already.

Tybalt's expression was grim, and he worked as quickly as he could.
He picked up a large paintbrush and smeared the gel all down Sylvia's dress, back and front, and over her legs. She was trembling in agony already, but she kept her hands pressed over her face, and the only sound she made was a thin, repetitive “
eeeshh – eeeshh – eeeshh—
” But the pain that she was suffering was nothing to the pain she would be suffering next.

Without any hesitation, Tybalt took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket, and snapped it into flame.

“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” he asked her, in a voice so quiet that Martin could scarcely hear him.

With her hands still clamped over her face, Sylvia nodded. Tybalt lit the top of her piled-up hair, and instantly her head burst into flame.

Martin jolted with shock, but Sticky kept gripping his hand. He had never seen anybody burn before, and it was so horrific that he couldn't believe what he was looking at. Sylvia's hair caught fire in a whirl of tiny sparks, and then her ears shriveled and curled over like blackened bacon-rinds. She kept her hands over her face even though the tips of her fingers were alight. But then the fumes from the paint-stripper exploded with the softest
whoomph
and she was completely buried in flames.

Martin couldn't understand how she could bear the pain without moving. The flames were so fierce that he could hardly see her, only her blackening elbows and her scarlet-charred feet. But then she threw open her hands and screamed the most terrible scream that he had ever heard in his life. It wasn't just a scream of agony, it was a scream of total despair.

Sylvia tried to stagger on to her feet. Martin instinctively tried to move forward to help her, but Sticky held him back. “It's what she wants, man! It's what she came here for!”

Sylvia toppled sideways on to the grass, with flames literally pouring out of her face. She opened and closed her mouth two or three times, but her lungs were too burned for her to scream again. The flames ate through her dress and turned the flesh on her thighs into charcoal. She quivered, as her nerve-endings were burned, but eventually she stopped quivering and it was clear that she was dead. Thick smoke rose into the gray morning sky, and the smell of roasted meat brought a surge of bile into Martin's throat.

Tybalt switched off his equipment and approached them gravely. “I think she understood what her husband went through. I hope so.”

“Did you record anything?” asked Martin.

“I won't know till later, when I analyze all of the images.”

“I wouldn't like to think that she died like that for nothing.”

“She didn't die for nothing. She died because she's a human being, and human beings should have the choice to die in any way they want to. You haven't changed your mind, have you?”

Martin thought about Sarah speeding toward the cable. “No,” he said. “I haven't changed my mind. But I wouldn't want to burn, like Sylvia did.”

They went back into the house. Theresa was sitting in the corner, in tears. Terence was hunched in his chair, saying nothing.

“She's gone,” said Sticky, unnecessarily. “A good girl, a very brave ending.”

Later that evening, Martin knocked on the door of Tybalt's study. Tybalt was sitting in front of his PC, frowning at the blurry, silvery-gray images that danced on the screen. As soon as Martin came in, he switched it off.

“Anything?” asked Martin.

Tybalt shook his head. “Not so far. It's too soon to tell. There's a lot of filtering to do, a lot of enhancing. But I think I caught
something
today.”

Martin hesitated. Tybalt appeared tense, and anxious for him to go, as if he had recorded some images from Sylvia's last agonized seconds of life that he didn't want to discuss.

“Of course – as soon as I come up with anything …” Tybalt began.

Martin nodded. Then he said, “Who's next?”

“Theresa. Hers will take the longest, of course. There's an old dry well, right at the end of the garden, beyond the orchard. I had it bored deeper, fifty feet or so. She's going to go down tomorrow morning.”

“Isn't anybody going to miss us? What about our bodies? Aren't you worried about the police?”

Tybalt gave a small, secretive smile. “By the time the police come looking, The Sympathy Society will have moved to pastures new. And
everyone here has written a letter, explaining that they have taken their own lives. As will you, when your turn comes.”

“Yes,” said Martin, at last.

Theresa dropped herself down the dry well at the end of the garden just after dawn the following day. It was drizzling slightly, and her hair was stuck wetly to her forehead. They kissed her, each of them, before she went. She was obviously frightened, but she was smiling.

Tybalt attached the last electrodes to her forehead, with reels of cable so that he could monitor her alpha-rhythms right down at the bottom of the well. She knelt down in the brambly grass, and then, quite abruptly, she slithered out of sight.

They heard her cry out. “My leg! I think I've broken my leg!” But they didn't answer, and she didn't cry out again. She had chosen to suffer the same death as her daughter, and her daughter had broken her left wrist and her collarbone, when she fell.

There was nothing more to do. They walked through the orchard and back to the house.

Three days later, it was Terence's turn. Tybalt had arranged to hire a tractor fitted with a disk plow. It was delivered to the top of the lane that ran down the side of the house, and Terence himself drove it down to the paddock past the orchard. He whistled as he steered it on to the grass. For the first time since Martin had met him, he seemed cheerful and contented.

This was one death that Martin really didn't want to witness. But, again, Sticky insisted. They walked to the paddock by way of the orchard, and Martin stood for a while by the well, listening. Theresa had insisted that nobody should peer down the well to see how she was, because that would mean that she wasn't completely forgotten, the way her daughter had been forgotten.

He listened, but he heard nothing. Tybalt had checked this morning and said that she was still alive, but “very, very weak.”

The tractor was parked beside the paddock gate, with its engine chugging over. Terence was already lying underneath the plow, between its shining circular disks. He was stripped to the waist, with Tybalt's electrodes fastened to his forehead. He caught sight
of Martin and Sticky making their way across the grass, and he gave them an elated thumb's up.

Martin went up and hunkered down next to him. “Are you all right?” he asked him.

“Couldn't be better. I've been looking forward to this. You don't know how much.”

“Aren't you frightened at all?”

“Frightened? What of? Pain? Dying? If we were all frightened of pain and dying, we'd all sit at home with a blanket over our heads, wouldn't we?”

Tybalt came over. “Are you ready, Terence? This is what you really want?”

Terence's eyes were bright. “Come on, Mr Miller. Let's get this over with. The sooner the better.”

Tybalt reached out and touched Terence's lips with the tips of his fingers, as if he were a cardinal giving benediction. Then he stood up and said, “Better stand clear, Martin.”

He went to the tractor and climbed into the cab. He revved the engine two or three times, and each time Terence grinned in anticipation. Then, with no further warning, he engaged the plow.