The Isle of Blood

“You’ve done it now,” Torrance whispered. “See, I might hesitate. I’m at the age where the idea of hanging actually gives me pause, but he’s just a child, and children think they will live forever. He’s got a strong case. He thinks you may have killed Warthrop, you know, and I’m thinking he may be right.”

“I didn’t kill him!”

“Well, he sure didn’t die the way you described it. My money is on Kearns. Kearns killed him.”

“No one killed him—no one. I swear to you, no one!” His eyes fell upon me; I was the one who held death itself—and therefore his life—in my hand.

“He’s alive,” he gasped. “There. He’s alive! Is that satisfactory to you?”

“First he’s dead; now he’s alive,” Torrance said. “Next you’ll have him appearing in a traveling minstrel show.”

He released Arkwright and snapped his fingers at me. He wanted the pwdre ser.

Arkwright cried out, “I’m telling you the truth! And I’ll tell you what else. The bastard wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for me! That’s the ironic thing. Warthrop owes his life to me, and you’re going to take mine for the debt!”

“Owes you his life,” Torrance echoed.

“Yes, his life. They wanted to kill him. Wanted to kill both of us. But I put a stop to it. I stopped them—”

“‘Them,’” said Torrance.

“No, no, please. I can’t tell you that.”

“‘They wanted to kill him.’”

“They’ll kill me. They will hunt me down like a dog and they—”

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“Listen to me!” Arkwright screeched. His eyes were darting back and forth—to me, to Torrance, to me again, back to Torrance. To whom should he appeal? The child who had composed this play, or the actor who was performing it? “If I tell you that, I’m a dead man.”

“You’re a dead man if you don’t.”

The lady or the tiger. Perhaps the analogy was not so poor after all.

I could contain myself no longer. “Where is Dr. Warthrop?” I blurted out.

He told us, and the answer held no meaning for me. I had never heard of the place, but Torrance had. He stared at Arkwright for a long moment, and then burst into laughter.

“Well… all right, then! I like it. It’s… Well, it’s crazy. But it also makes some sense. Inclines me toward some skeptical belief, Arkwright.”

“Good! And now you know where he is and you’re letting me go. Aren’t you?”

But Torrance had not finished thinking it through. He had reached the crux of it, the two identical doors.

“‘They,’ you said. ‘They wanted to kill him.’ There was Kearns and you and them. Or was it Kearns and you, and then them?”

“I don’t even know what you’re saying

. Oh, Christ help me!” His eyes rolled in my direction. “Christ, help me,” he whispered desperately.

I thought I understood, and stepped in as Torrance’s interpreter. “How do you know John Kearns?”

“I don’t know John Kearns from Adam. Never met him, never saw him before, and never heard of him before this bloody business began. And I wish I never had!”

“Got it!” Torrance shouted. “It’s Kearns, then them, and then you. Not you and Kearns—not you with Kearns. You’re not with Kearns, and you’re not with them. You’re with…” He stamped his foot. I was reminded of a rambunctious stallion eager to be free of his stall. “Servant to the Crown… Servant to the Crown! I get it now. That’s good.”

All was still then. Even the dust seemed to pause in its fitful ballet. There was Arkwright in his chair and Torrance standing behind him and me against the wall, and there was the lamplight and the nidus

and the spatula, and, glistening on the spatula, pwdre ser, the rot of stars that made men rot, and inside each of us das Ungeheuer, the thing unwinding that whispers I AM with the force to break the world in half, the thing in you and the thing in me, the thing in Thomas and the thing in Jacob wall, o doors, two for each of us.

Jacob chose his door first, reaching down and untying the ropes that bound the hands of Thomas, and Thomas in the chair shivered like a man who opens the front door of his warm house on a cold morning. Jacob chose his door and freed Thomas’s hands, and after he had freed his hands and Thomas knew the bracing wind on his face, the blast that meant he was free, that he’d endured, Jacob yanked back Thomas’s head, and Thomas howled, and his hands came up, but it was too late because Jacob had opened the door; the door was flung wide, and into Thomas’s mouth went the spatula, to the back of his throat, and Thomas gagged.

Torrance stepped back as Arkwright went forward, fighting desperately to stand, but his legs were still bound to the chair and he pitched forward onto the cold floor, and his screams were inhuman slaughterhouse screeches. He scuttled across the floor, the chair’s back pushing his chest down and scraping back and forth as he legs jerked and pulled against the ropes, and then he stopped, his back arched, and he emptied his stomach.

What came next could not have lasted more than a minute:

“Will! Will!” Torrance shouted.

A slap across my cheek, hard enough to rock me back on my heels.

“Get. Out. NOW.”