First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (26 page)

I was gasping for breath. I was suffocating. Then more light began to break through, then a little more light. The boulder was shrinking slowly, but steadily. Till it became a spot again, a tiny black spot. Then it disappeared.

Someone had been knocking at my office door. I got up and opened it. My legs felt weak.

“Are you all right?” Lila Trapper was looking at me anxiously. “I heard noises,” she said. “It sounded like a dog yelping.” She went to the desk, took a Kleenex out of a box and handed it to me. “You’ve been drooling,” she said.

I left the office that night after everyone had gone. I put a note on Lila’s desk saying I was a bit under the weather and needed to take a few days off.

The next day was October thirtieth, the eve of what I had come to consider my birthday—my thirty-third birthday.

The morning and the afternoon passed without any visitation from the mote. That gave me a chance to collect
myself. I felt I’d been through enough in my life so far to prepare me for whatever kind of ordeal might be in store for me. I put the little box of cyanide pills in my pocket. They would be my allies if worst came to worst.

By six o’clock, it was already dark outside. I was sitting in the armchair, waiting, when the mote appeared and rapidly began growing, just as it had at the office. Again, it darkened my inner being so much, I felt as though I were walled up alive in a cave. Again I did the only thing I could: I concentrated all my strength on not looking at that dreadful blackness. I squinted at the edges, I tried to hold on to the slivers of light that were left; it was as though a trapdoor had been slammed shut on a dungeon. Only one thin blade of light was left.

After a while, as before, the sliver began to widen: the mote was dwindling, slowly but surely, till it was soon only a spot again. But it didn’t go away completely this time. It remained at the fringes of my awareness, a tiny throbbing area. What was most disturbing was the sense I had that it was just waiting, building up its strength for another onslaught.

That was when a new, more frightening thought came to me. All along, I’d assumed that whatever the spot was, it always began as something tiny that was capable of growing bigger. Now I wondered whether it ever had been as small as I’d thought. The more I thought, the more certain I was that it had all been a matter of perspective: the way the moon, because of its distance, appears no bigger than a silver dollar. The mote was actually something massive: it wasn’t a case of its growing bigger; in fact, all that happened lately was that it was coming nearer.

Not a very reassuring thought.

It had been a humid day. Now, at seven o’clock, one of those vicious fall storms hit Camberloo. The wind and the rain were awful. Balled lightning ran down the telephone wires in the Park. There was a period of calm. The mote, which had been pulsing in the distance, chose that moment to begin its approach.

I took some breaths and prepared myself.

As the mote came nearer, I heard noises. At first I thought they must be coming from me, I must be whimpering because I was so afraid. But it wasn’t me. The noises were unpleasant, snarling sounds, like something a wolf might make. And they were coming from the direction of the mote.

I was terrified, but I concentrated on the surface of the mote as it advanced. Was there a face hidden in its blackness? Was there a mouth? Were there any features? Was the face like a gargoyle’s, or some awful creature of the imagination?

It was very close now, shutting me up in my cave. Its snarling was loud and angry. I kept looking desperately at that surface, but all I could see was an impenetrable blackness.

As before, just when I thought there was no hope, the mote stopped and began its steady retreat. Again, it lingered in the distance.

The mind’s a curious thing. Even though I was terrified, I kept trying to analyse the object that was doing the terrifying. And I came up with a theory that seemed to me very convincing: the mote itself was an implement, a tool of something else, something behind it—
SOMETHING THAT SNARLED
—something that pushed it forward, something that had a purpose. It wasn’t out to kill me. It wanted to squeeze me out. It wanted to take my place.

Maybe I should have been relieved to think my life
was in no danger. But I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. I found the idea of being taken over not only frightening, but disgusting.

I made a resolution, knowing the mote, flickering in the distance, was watching me.

I slowly took the little pillbox out of my pocket and put one of the pills on the table beside me. Then I sat back in the armchair and waited. I felt a strength I’d forgotten I had. If I was to be annihilated, I’d do the job myself. Maybe, for all I knew, in that way I’d wipe out whatever was behind the mote along with myself. One thing was sure: I’d die before I’d allow it to take me over. My pride in my own, independent existence was stronger than my fear of death.

So I sat, waiting.

“Do your worst,” I thought. “You can’t win.”

I didn’t have to wait long. The mote came rushing forward at a breathtaking speed. The snarling sound was ferocious.

I didn’t flinch, in spite of the blackness and the noise. Soon, only a glimmer of light was left. I was having trouble breathing. But I didn’t panic. I held the pill up to my lips.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. “Leave me alone!”

The noise, the darkness were awful. I couldn’t fight them any longer. It was useless. I opened my lips to swallow the pill.

As soon as my hand reached my mouth, the onslaught let up. The mote slowly backed off. The snarling changed to a whimpering sound. I could hear laboured breathing. I was suddenly alert: could that heavy breathing mean that the thing behind the mote had to struggle too? What if it was as hard for that thing to push as it was for me to resist? What if that thing was capable of growing tired?

More and more light shone in. I kept up my new, defiant mood till the mote seemed to be on the run. Even when it was just a faraway, throbbing spot, I didn’t give up.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted, over and over again.

Its flickering became more and more irregular. Then it disappeared. I looked for it everywhere. No sign of it. For the first time in weeks, I was alone.

I was happy, but I wasn’t complacent. I sat in my armchair, alert, waiting. A half-hour passed. An hour. Still no sign of the mote.

Two hours passed. It was nine o’clock.

I began to allow myself to relax. Like a soldier who’s been under fire for a long period, and now the mortars have stopped. Or like an animal that’s slipped out of the claws of a predator. I was suddenly starving. I hadn’t eaten since lunch, and I’d been through hell. And it was the eve of my birthday.

I went to the kitchen and made some sandwiches. I drank a beer and a large cognac in celebration of myself. Maybe I believed the mote was gone for good. Maybe I just felt confident about how to deal with it from now on. Maybe the combined effects of the beer and the cognac gave me false courage. Whatever.

Not long after, I was undressing for bed when a huge flash of lightning shorted all the electricity in the building and the street outside. I didn’t worry. I lit some candles in my bedroom. I put one of them on the dresser in front of the photograph of my mother and father I’d inherited from Doctor Giffen. I put another candle on the bedside table and laid a cyanide pill beside it, within easy reach.

But I wasn’t really worried. I thought: The mote never comes when I’m asleep. Even if it comes to torment me again, it won’t be while I’m asleep. When I’m asleep, I’m
safe. I remember yawning and thinking: It never comes when I’m asleep.

I left the candles to burn themselves out. Minnie lay at the bottom of the bed, purring.

I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when the final attack began. What woke me was the sound of Minnie’s claws scrabbling on the wooden floor as she leapt from the bed to escape. The candles were burned halfway down.

The mote was blacker than ever and came at me with paralysing speed. My arms were crossed on my chest and I couldn’t move them to reach for the pill. With the candles around me I was laid out like a corpse at a wake. The mote’s approach was absolutely silent. No snarling, no laboured breathing, no noise of any sort. Just blackness and awful presence. I had no hope, but I was still curious. Why had I been chosen?

Who, or what, was Andrew Halfnight about to become?

D
ID YOU EVER FEEL
you could walk away from yourself? That was the way it was with me the next morning, the morning of my birthday. It was as though I were watching someone else awaken; as though I no longer inhabited my body. I was an objective observer, could see what was going on in my mind, but it was no longer under my control. I saw it as though from behind a glass or under water. I watched myself, a plump white man with dull eyes, get out
of bed and dress. The little black-and-white cat watched me too.

When I was ready, I pinned a note to the outside of my door for the building superintendent, and went to a car-rental agency that rented out used cars. I chose one of those old monsters, the kind of car people used to drive long ago. Then I drove out of the city, heading north, and I drove and drove for hours, past small and large lakes towards the hills where the season of snow comes early.

Where I was exactly among those snowy hills, I didn’t know.

These things I did know: that I’d driven endless miles along an ever-narrowing road gouged out by a snow-plough; and that it was my birthday. No cars passed me; those I overtook were also of the old-fashioned kind, all fins and humps, like this one I was driving.

As for stopping, I stopped only once, at a place called High Point Look-out. I pulled in by the barrier fence and rolled my window down. I breathed in the brisk air and gazed across the frozen waves of hills. The cold tickled the little hairs of my nostrils.

All so familiar, I couldn’t help thinking. It’s all so familiar.

I arrived at the motel after a few more bends in the road, an old-fashioned motel with a flickering electric sign: The Highlander. By the door was a carved figure of a kilted soldier with a raised claymore. The receptionist didn’t look up when I came in, nor when I asked for the room number.

“Thirteen,” she said, her needles clacking, clacking, a grey-haired woman intent on her knitting.

I walked along the spongy corridor with its stain-proof, dark brown carpet. It seemed to me I’d walked along so many such corridors.

At number thirteen, I turned the handle and pushed the door open.

The room was like a million other motel rooms, but just a little old-fashioned, with its dark panelled walls. She was standing by the bed, naked and smiling; and something about her made me feel I should know her. For some reason, the sight of her filled me with such sadness I could have wept.

So it has come to this, I kept thinking over and over again; after all these years, it has come to this. She stood there, in the stuffy room, prepared for me. I breathed deeply and shut the door behind me. I leaned against it for a moment, wanting to say something—ask her name perhaps, where we had met before—I needed to do at least that. I tried to speak. But she only smiled, put her finger to her lips and shook her head.

“Say nothing, my dear one,” she said. “Come to me now.”

So I took off the old plaid coat I’d found in the car (how I came to be wearing it, I couldn’t remember—a coat with a musty, familiar smell). And as I stripped off the rest of my clothing, I stripped off my sadness too. I concentrated only on the dull urges of my body, till they obligingly took charge, the way they always did. My chest began to thud so that I feared it might split apart and give birth, at last, to a heart. I wanted to spill myself into her quickly, get it over with quickly, get it done quickly, go back quickly to wherever it was I belonged.

But my mind was no mystery to her.

“No, no,” she said. “This time you must not rush.”

She pulled back the covers and made me lie on the bed. A bottle of oil stood on the bedside table. She poured some of it into her hands. Then she knelt on the bed and spread the warm ooze of it on me, rubbing it into every part of my
body, rubbing, lingering especially on the purple stain on my chest, then on down, stroking me softly, after a while turning me over, humming to herself as she worked.

When the oiling of the body was over, she sighed—contentedly, I thought—and then she herself lay down.

“Now,” she said. “Let us begin.”

I climbed onto her, propped myself up on my arms for a moment and looked into her eyes: I felt I must see into her, discover who she was. I would even have kissed her on the mouth—something I rarely did. But she avoided my lips and kissed my cheek, fondled my thinning hair, ran her hands over my plump body (every day in the mirror, I noticed how plump I had become, plump and white: a plump, white man). She caressed me for a while, then she moved my head down to her breasts, and held me while I sucked. I felt her nipple rise to my tongue and I closed my eyes, buried my nose in her softness, thought I could even smell milk just a quarter of an inch beneath the flesh.

“Enough,” she whispered. “Enough, my dear.”

And now she pushed my head gently down, past the convergence of her ribcage, and down past the sweet mandala of her navel. Down I slid on her arching body; I slid over her belly to the junction of her legs and the soft cluster of hair, the sweet, sweet smell of her. I tried to enter her with my tongue.

“No,” she gasped. “No.”

And now she began to revolve under me, turning smoothly with the oil, till she had inverted herself a hundred and eighty degrees, and I could feel her head between my knees.

Ah, I thought. Ah.

I urged my penis towards her face, waiting to feel the soft wetness of her lips.

But “No,” she said. “No, my sweet.”

And she continued slithering upwards till only our legs were still entangled, she lying face up at the bottom of the bed, I face down in the pillows.

What did she want of me? I wondered. Why was she delaying?