The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (14 page)

Elisabeth had no thoughts of making Agatha her target. She had seized the revolver, not
to shoot down this elegant flesh-and-blood young woman, but with the last gesture of the
spy unmasked, her back against the wall, her supreme instinct a determination to sell
her life as dearly as she could.

But the gesture was lost on such an audience. What could it avail to put on greatness for
a dying man and a hysterical young woman?

So this is what Agatha saw suddenly: a maniac in the act of disintegrating before her
very eyes, standing before the mirror, grimacing, drooling, squinting, tearing her hair
out by the roots. For Elisabeth had given up: no longer able to bear this slackening in
the pace of Nemesis, she was trying to resolve her inner tension by letting herself
collapse, was struggling by means of this grotesque mime of imbecility to reduce life to
its ultimate absurdity, to push towards the frontiers of what might still have to be
endured, to attain the moment when the drama would have done with her at last, would
spew her forth.

“She’s gone mad! Help! Help!” screamed Agatha.

The word “mad” acted as a check upon Elisabeth; with an effort, she
controlled herself. She would be calm now. She had two weapons—death and
oblivion—in her trembling hands. With her head bowed, she stood erect.

She knew that the Room was rushing headlong down a giddy slope towards its end; but the
end was not yet and must be lived through: there must be no slackening of the tension.
Snatches of the multiplication table went whirling through her head, odds and ends of
figures, dates, street numbers: she added them all together, divided them, made nonsense
of them, started all over again. Suddenly she remembered the origin of the
mound
: “mound” was the word for “hill” in
Paul et Virginie
. Their island…. Where could it have been? The Ile
de France? The names of islands began to float across her mind. lie de France,
Mauritius, lie Saint Louis. She recited the names, transposed them, shuffled them,
annulled them, created void at last, achieved the vortex.

Paul felt the impact of her utter calm. He opened his eyes. She looked at him,
encountered a remote yet dwelling gaze, emptied of hatred now, beginning to deepen
secretly with curiosity. She saw, and felt a premonitory surge of triumph, knew that the
knot that bound them still held fast. Fixing her eyes unswervingly on his, spinning out
the thread of trance towards him, adding and subtracting automatically, making lists of
names and places, slowly she spread the net around him, surely she drew him backward
into nothingness, back into the Game, into their world of light and air, their Room.

With the preternatural clairvoyance of fever, she penetrated into the most secret places.
The shades obeyed her. What hitherto she had wrought mindlessly, building as bees build,
no more aware of motive or direction than a patient in a deep hypnotic sleep, she now
created and directed consciously. Like one who under sudden violent shock rises from
long paralysis and walks; she moved, she took her bearings.

She was drawing Paul, and Paul was following her: no doubt of it. Certainty was the rock
on which she based her unimaginable mental structure. She piped, she piped, she charmed
him; he swayed to her tune. Already, she knew it, he no longer felt Agatha clinging
round his neck; he had already become deaf to her laments. How should Elisabeth or Paul
have heard her? Her cries are pitched far below the key they have selected for their
requiem. Now they ascend; together they ascend. Elisabeth bears away her prey. They don
the buskins of the Attic stage and leave the underworld of the Atrides behind them.
Divine omniscience will not suffice to shrive them; they must put their trust in the
divine caprice of the Immortals. Courage, one little moment longer and they will be
where flesh dissolves, where souls embrace, where incest lurks no more.

Agatha’s screams resounded from another time, another place. To Elisabeth and Paul
they were of less significance than the majestic blizzard knocking on the windows. Dusk
had retreated before the lamp’s harsh glare; Elisabeth alone remained beyond its
radius, within the shadow of its blood-red kerchief, cloaked in its purple, spinning the
void, drawing Paul over the border from the realms of light into the realms of
darkness.

He was sinking. He was ebbing out towards Elisabeth, towards the snow, the Game, the
Room, their childhood. Still by a single thread of light the Maiden Goddess holds him
out of darkness; his stone body is still penetrated by one last all-pervading thought of
life. Still his eyes held his sister; but she was nothing more than a tall shape without
identity, calling his name. For still, her finger on the trigger, like one clasped with
her lover in the act of love, Elisabeth watched and waited on his pleasure, cried out to
him to hasten to his mortal spasm, to accompany her into the final moment of mutual
rapture and possession, mutual death.

Now he was spent, his head fell back. She thought the end had come, put the revolver to
her temple, pulled the trigger. With a roaring din, one of the screens crashed on her as
she fell. The walls were breached, the secret shrine exposed, raw, violated, a public
spectacle, to the eyes watching Paul in the snow-shrouded windows.

He saw them looking down on him.

While Agatha stood dumb, transfixed with terror, staring at the bloodstained corpse that
was Elisabeth, Paul saw them, splintered in the frosty panes, saw, thronging, pressing
in, the snowballers, their noses, cheeks, red hands. He recognized their features, their
capes, their woolen mufflers. He looked for Dargelos and could not find him; all he
could see was that one vast gesture of Dargelos’s lifted arm.

“Paul! Paul! Help! Help!”

But who is she to call upon his name? What part or lot has she in him? His eyes are
quenched. The thread is broken. The Room has flown; all that remains is the foul breath
of poison and one small stranded figure, the figure of some woman, dwindling, fading,
disappearing in the distance.