‘Come on!’ Kelly screamed. ‘Come on!’
Mountain stepped forward and lifted the cane. I shrank away, pressing my back against the wall. Kelly swivelled around on one spiked heel and Mountain moved with her. They bent over, undulating like jazz dancers, and he slashed her savagely across the buttocks.
I was staring and I might have made some sort of noise. Mountain came out of his near-trance long enough to look at me. ‘This is private,’ he growled. I saw his arm swing back and then I could see the hairs on his hand, and then it felt as if one of those giant metal balls demolishers use had bounced off my skull.
25
The drug cut through the pain or the pain cut through the drug, I don’t know which. I was in a state somewhere between consciousness and oblivion and slipping back and forwards between the two. I was closing my eyes a lot, because the things I thought I saw when I had them open were worse than the things I thought I saw when they were closed.
I heard a lot of yelling and opened my eyes. I saw two people moving around each other, hitting and screaming. I closed my eyes.
‘You bastard!’ she screamed as the whip hit her. She must have gathered saliva because I heard her spit it at him. He responded with a very hard slap.
‘You shit!’
Swish.
‘Turd! You shit-sucking turd!’
I kept my eyes closed. The shapes on the backs of my eyelids were definitely better, softer. But then my eyes stung and watered, and I had to look again. I’d seen people gripped by passions and lusts beyond their control before. In Malaya I’d seen men who were drunk on killing focus their whole being on the act. I’d seen opium smokers transfixed by the details of pipe preparation and tendrils of smoke in rooms that smelled of rat. I’d seen kleptomaniacs who trembled and wet themselves as they approached the objects they intended to steal, but who became coldly efficient at the critical moment. The passion of Kelly and Mountain was like that: an enclosed, excluding force field with its own laws and excruciating satisfactions.
The energy and excitement they generated and consumed threatened to spill over and seek some other outlet. It was distinctly uncomfortable being the only other outlet around. The drug was giving me the horrors, first of sight, now of sound. I couldn’t stand the screaming and grunts. I crooned to myself dopily, and for a time everything became calm and quiet. I felt nothing; I was asleep somewhere soft and white.
Then I was awake again, and feeling pain everywhere. I had the power of movement back, although my vision was distorted and blurry. I struggled to get some give in the ropes, but there was none. I looked wildly around the room as their grunts and groans increased in tempo and loudness: the door was twenty feet off and shut tight; there was a whip on the floor a few feet away but, with me trussed up like that, it was about as useful as a Mars Bar.
Then I doubted that I was conscious, because I could see Mountain and Kelly in triplicate up on the bed. Six people on one bed. The Mountains were teasing the Kellys, moving up and down, advancing and withdrawing. The Kellys hammered with their free fists. The Mountains ignored the blows. They tensed and drove down. The Kellys screamed and flexed so hard the Mountains had to pin them with their whole bodies. Three free arms flopped over the side of the bed, and I could see the hands clenching and unclenching.
The images faded and I heard only sound, distantly, as if it was coming from another room-Kelly screamed and Mountain began to roar to blot out the sound. ‘Finished,’ he bellowed. ‘Finished! Finished!’ Then he yelled the word in French, and ranted away in what sounded like German, but could have been Russian or Polish for all I knew. His pounding rocked the bed and seemed to shake the floor. The room filled with the screams and roars and bumps. My vision came back, and in single image, but the action seemed suddenly to go into slow motion. I saw Kelly bend her arm and move it back to claw at the end of the mattress. She pulled out a knife with a long, broad blade and her knuckles cracked under the strain as she manipulated it in her palm. She got it right and jerked the arm and drove it down hard into Mountain’s back; he bucked and the knife came free and she drove it down again. The muscles in Kelly’s arm bunched and danced as she tugged the knife free and dug it in at a different angle and in a different place. Mountain arched up and yelled something that died in his throat. He flopped down on top of the woman and she dug and slashed at him. The blood spurted and flowed out of him; it puddled on the bed and dripped down onto the floor and flowed thickly across towards me.
Kelly sobbed and moaned and tried to get free of the corpse. She kicked and thrashed and it rolled clear of her. Her breath was coming in harsh gusts from her mouth and sibilant whistles from her nose. She hacked at the wrist rope, holding the knife the wrong way; the rope came free, but she cut herself in the process. Then she slashed through the ankle ropes, and cut herself some more. When she got to her knees on the bed, she was a nightmarish figure, streaked and smeared with blood from her head to her pubic hair. Her eyes stared wildly around the room. She pushed Mountain’s body off the bed, and it fell with a thump.
I was struggling like a madman, almost dislocating my shoulders in the effort to get my hands under my feet and up in front me. Fear of the knife drove me; my only idea was to have some protection from it, even my tied hands. I got my hands clear; it felt as if I had crushed some vertebrae to do it and I’d certainly skinned my wrists up to the forearms. I pressed back and levered myself up to an almost standing position against the wall. She saw me and screamed. Maybe I screamed too. She launched herself from the bed, and came at me with the knife raised above her head. Her mouth was wide open, and her tongue protruded like a black snake.
She stumbled, re-gained balance and came on with the knife descending. I yelled this time for sure and pushed off the wall like a swimmer on the last turn; I lowered my head, went in under the knife, and butted her in the stomach driving as much of my weight into it as my trembling, cramped legs would permit. She staggered back and dropped the knife. I went to my knees but struggled up again. She was sagging, coming forward and I butted her again, and her own falling weight helped drive the wind and limb control out of her. She crumpled down to the carpet and lay still.
I scrambled across the floor, grabbed the knife and wriggled to the nearest corner like a hunted beast. I crouched there and panted, looking at the fallen woman and still feeling defenceless despite the knife. I gripped the handle with my feet and sawed through the wrist ropes, then I cut my feet free with a hacking chop that seared into my left ankle. Dee Kelly started to moan and move. I swapped the knife into my right hand; my vision was red-filmed with fear and pain and horror. She got to her knees and lumbered towards me as I pulled myself up. The blood-caked hair stood up on her head and her eyes bulged. I threw the knife away and did what Dempsey did to Firpo when he had him on his knees: I swivelled and put everything into a short left that landed flush on her blood-daubed jaw. Her head flicked back and she flopped to the floor and lay still.
26
When my heart rate had slowed to a hundred and my eyes were back in their sockets, I dragged myself over to look at Bill Mountain. His eyes were staring open and his jaw was locked in a dropping, askew position. In death, he looked depressed.
I rolled Deirdre Kelly’s eyelids back and everything appeared to be normal under them. Her pulse was strong and her tongue was free in her mouth. A concussion at most. Her outstretched foot touched the whipping post, and I tied her ankle to it with a piece of bloodstained rope just to be sure.
Opening the door and walking out of that room was like hiking down a country trail on a mild Spring day. The passageway smelled of tobacco and marijuana smoke but there was no blood underfoot or on the walls. The party was long over and the apartment was a shambles, except for the bar, which had been tidied and cleaned. All the bottles and glasses had been washed, corked and stacked away. I wandered into the bathroom and found my clothes there, bundled up. I climbed into the space capsule shower and ran the water to scalding hot; I lathered and rinsed until all the blood was off me and I was clean and pink. The cuts on my wrists weren’t bleeding but the one on my ankle was. I wadded up a paper napkin and put it over the cut under my sock.