As he was doing so, Carys opened her eyes. There had been a vile, grinding return; more terrible for Marty than for herself, who was used to the sensation. But it was never entirely pleasant to feel muscle and fat congeal around the spirit.
Marty's eyes had opened too, and he was looking down at the body he occupied. It was heavy, and stale. So much of it-the layers of skin, the hair, the nails-was dead matter. Its very substance revolted him. Being in this state was a parody of the freedom he'd just tasted. He started up from his slumped position with a small cry of disgust, as if he'd woken to find his body crawling with insects.
He looked across to Carys for reassurance, but her attention had been claimed by a sight concealed from Marty by the partially closed door.
She was watching a spectacle she knew from somewhere. But the point of view was different, and it took awhile for her to place the scene: the man on his knees, his neck exposed, his arms spread a little from his body, fingers splayed in the universal gesture of submission; the executioner, face' blurred, raising the blade to decapitate his willing victim; somebody laughing somewhere nearby.
The last time she'd seen this tableau she'd been behind Mamoulian's eyes, a soldier in a snow-spattered yard, awaiting the blow that would cancel his young life. A blow that had never come; or rather had been deferred until now. Had the executioner waited so long, living in one body only to discard it for another, trailing Mamoulian through decade upon decade until at last fate assembled the pieces of a reunion? Or was this all the European's doing? Had his will summoned Breer to finish a story accidentally interrupted generations before?
She would never know. The act, begun a second time, was not to be postponed again. The weapon sliced down, almost dividing head from neck in one blow. A few tenacious sinews kept it rocking-nose to chest-from the trunk for two succeeding blows before it departed, rolling down between the European's legs and coming to rest at Tom's feet. The boy kicked it away.
Mamoulian had made no sound; but now, headless, his torso gave vent: Noise came from the wound with the blood; complaints sounded, it seemed, from every pore. And with the sound came smoky ghosts of unmade pictures, rising from him like steam. Bitter things appeared and fled; dreams, perhaps, or fragments of the past. It was all one now. Always had been, in fact. He had come from rumor; he the legendary, he the unfixable, he whose very name was a lie. Could it matter if now his biography, fleeing into nothingness, was taken as fiction?
Breer, unassuaged, began to berate the open wound of the corpse's neck with the machete, slicing first down then sideways in an effort to cleave the enemy into smaller and yet smaller pieces. An arm was summarily lopped off; he picked it up to sever hand from wrist, forearm from upper arm. In moments the room, which had been almost serene as the execution took place, became an abattoir.
Marty stumbled to the door in time to see Breer strike off Mamoulian's other arm.
"Look at him go!" said the American boy, toasting the bloodbath with Whitehead's vodka.
Marty watched the carnage, unblenched. It was all over. The European was a dead man. His head lay on its side under the window; it looked small; vestigial.
Carys, flattened against the wall beside the door, caught Marty's hand. "Papa?" she said. "What about Papa."
As she spoke Mamoulian's corpse pitched forward from its kneeling position. The ghosts and the din it had spilled had stopped. Now there was only dark blood splashing from it. Breer bent to further butchery, opening the abdomen with two slashes. Urine fountained from the punctured bladder.
Carys, revolted by the attacks, slipped out of the room. Marty lingered a while longer. The last sight he caught as he followed Carys was the Razor-Eater picking up the head by the hair, like some exotic fruit, and delivering a lateral cut to it.
In the hallway Carys was crouching at her father's side; Marty joined her. She stroked the old man's cheek. "Papa?" she said. He wasn't dead, but neither was he truly alive. There was a flicker in his pulse, no more. His eyes were closed.
"No use..." Marty said as she shook the old man's shoulder, "he's as good as gone."
In the gaming room Chad, had begun to shriek with laughter. Apparently the slaughterhouse scenes were reaching new heights of absurdist brio.
"I don't want to be here when he gets bored," Marty said. Carys made no move. "There's nothing we can do for the old man," he said.
She looked at him, bewildered by the dilemma.
"He's gone, Carys. And we should go too."
A silence had started in the abattoir. It was worse, in its way, than the laughter, or the sound of Breer's labors.
"We can't wait around," Marty said. He roughly pulled Carys to her feet and propelled her toward the front door of the penthouse. She made only faint objection.
As they slipped away downstairs, somewhere up above them the blond American began to applaud again.
The dead man worked at his work for a good time. Long after the domestic traffic on the highway had dwindled to a trickle, leaving only the long-distance freight drivers to roar their way north. Breer heard none of it. His ears had long since given out, and his eyesight, once so sharp, could barely make sense of the carnage that now lay on every side of him. But when his sight failed completely, he still had the rudiments of touch. This he used to finish his commission, dividing and subdividing the flesh of the European until it was impossible to tell apart the piece that spoke and the piece that pissed.
Chad tired of the entertainment long before that point was reached. Grinding out his second cigar with his heel he sauntered through to see how things were progressing elsewhere. The girl had gone; the hero too. God loves them, he thought. The old man was still lying in the hallway, however, clutching the gun, which he'd retrieved at some point in the proceedings. His fingers spasmed once in a while, nothing more. Chad went back into the bloody chamber, where Breer was on his knees among the meat and the cards, still chopping, and raised Tom off the floor. He was in a languid state, his lips almost blue, and it took a good deal of cajoling to get any action out of him. But Chad was a born proselytizer, and a short talk got some enthusiasm back into him. "Nothin' we can't do now, you know?" Chad told him. "We're baptized men. I mean we've seen everything, haven't we? There ain't nothing in this whole wide world the Devil can fight us with, because we've been there. Ain't we been there?"
Chad was high on his new-found freedom. He wanted to prove the point, and he had this fine idea-"You'll like this, Tommy"-of doing a dump on the old man's chest. Tom didn't seem to care either way, and he just watched while Chad dropped his trousers to do the dirty work. His bowels would not oblige. As he started to stand upright, however, Whitehead's eyes snapped open, and the gun fired. The bullet missed plowing into Chad's testicles by a hairbreadth, but scored a fine red mark on the inside of his milk-white thigh, and whistled past his face to slam into the ceiling. Chad's bowels gave then, but the old man was dead; he'd died with the shot that came so close to blowing off Chad's manhood.
"Near thing," Tom said, his catatonia broken by Chad's near-mutiliation.
"Guess I'm just lucky," the blond boy replied. Then they took their revenges as best they could, and went their way.
I'm the last of the tribe, thought Breer. When I'm gone the Razor-Eaters will be a thing of the past.
He hauled himself from the Pandemonium Hotel knowing that what coherence his body had was fast diminishing. His fingers could barely grip the petrol can he'd stolen from the boot of a car before he'd come to the hotel, and had left, awaiting these last rites, in the foyer. It was as difficult to grasp with his mind as it was with his fingers, but he did the best he could. He couldn't name the things that sniffed at his carcass as he squatted among the rubbish; couldn't even remember who he was, except that he had seen, once, some fine and wonderful sights.