A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Veda stands there against the wall, the smoking gun in her hand, moaning: “You have killed a god!” If she really worshipped that thing, her whole world has come to an end. The gun slips from her hand, clatters to the floor. I swoop for it and get it again. She sinks down to her knees, her back against the wall, very still, looking at me. Her breath is coming very fast, she doesn’t betray her feelings in any other way.

Sometimes under the greatest tension, in moments almost of insanity, you can think the clearest. I am almost insane just then. And, in a flash, the whole set-up comes to me, now that it’s too late, now that the old man and the kid are gone. That lunge at the blanket just now has told me the whole story. The thick flannel I found in her drawer!

She held that before the opening in the crate and extracted the venom that way — when the cobra struck. Then she mixed it with her rouge in the little wooden mortar. Then she waxed her lips with camphor ice, freezing the pores tight shut, forming an impervious base for the red stuff. Then she kissed them, smeared them with it, offered them a cigarette to smoke—

They’re still there on the dresser, her long, thick-tipped cigarettes. I take a couple out of the box. Then I take the little bottle of mucilage, standing with all the perfumes, and I let a drop of it fall on the end of each cigarette. She did that too — I know that, now.

It dries in no time, but the moisture of the human mouth will dampen it again and cause the paper to stick to the lips. She sees me do all this, and yet she doesn’t move, doesn’t try to escape. Her god is dead, the fatalism of the East has her in its grip. Almost, I relent. But — “Charlie, I dowanna die!” rings in my ears.

I turn to her. You’d think nothing had happened, you’d think the kid was only asleep back there in his room, the way I talk to her. “Have a cigarette.”

She shakes her head and backs away along the wall.

“Better have a cigarette,” I say, and I take up the gun and bead it at her forehead. This is no act, and she can tell the difference. I won’t even ask her a second time. She takes a cigarette. “What have I done?” she tries to say.

“Nothing,” I answer, “nothing that I can prove, or even care to prove any more. Doll up. You have it with you.”

She smiles a little, maybe fatalistically, or maybe because she still thinks she can outsmart me. She rouges her lips. She raises the cigarette. But I see the half-curves it makes. “No you don’t, not that end. The way it’s supposed to be smoked.”

She puts the glued end in and I hold the match for her. She can’t tell yet about it but the smile goes and her eyes widen with fear.

I light my own — that’s glued, too. “I’m going to smoke right along with you; one of these is no different from the other. See, I have a clear conscience; have you?” I’m going to match her, step by step — I want to know just when it happens. I didn’t know I could be that cruel, but — “Charlie, I dowanna die!”

She begins by taking quick little puffs, not letting it stay any time in her mouth, and each time she puts it in at a different place. She thinks she’ll get around it that way. That’s easy to stop. “Keep your hands down. Touch it one more time and I’ll shoot.”

“Siva!” she moans. I think it is their goddess of death or something. Then to me: “You are going to kill me?”

“No, you are going to kill yourself. You last through that cigarette and you are welcome to your insanity plea when they get here from L.A.”

We don’t talk any more after that. Slowly the cigarettes burn down. I don’t take mine out, either. A dozen times her hands start upward and each time the gun stops them. Time is on my side. She begins to have trouble breathing, not from fear now, from nicotine and burnt paper. Her eyes fill with moisture. Not even an inveterate smoker can consume a ten-inch fag like that without at least a couple of clear breaths between drags.

I can’t stand it myself any more and out comes my own, and there’s a white-hot sting to my lower lip. She holds on, though, for dear life.

So would I, if death was going to be the penalty. I can see her desperately trying to free hers by working the tip of her tongue around the edges. No good. She begins to strangle deep down in her throat, water’s pouring out of her eyes. She twists and turns and retches and tries to get a free breath. It’s torture, maybe, but so were the thousand red-hot needles piercing that kid’s body upstairs — awhile ago.

All at once, a deep groan seems to come all the way up from her feet. The strangling and the gasping stop and the cigarette is smoldering on the floor. A thread of blood runs down her chin — purer, cleaner than the livid red stuff all around it. I lay the gun down near her and I watch her. Let her make her own choice!

“There’s only one more bullet in it,” I tell her. “If you think you can stand what’s coming, you can pay me back with it.”

She knows too well what it’s going to be like, so she has no time to waste.