Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

But the will to live beat on insistently. He felt it like the rhythmic striking of a tiny match. It flared briefly, then guttered out. Each time the light grew weaker, the heat less warm.

Finally, nothing sparked.

And he knew the time had come.

He took the rope first, drawing it from the top drawer of his bedroom dresser. He shaped one end into a noose, then walked into the narrow corridor and flung it over the metal bar.

The chair tottered shakily as he stood upon it, but not enough to prevent him from tying the rope to the bar. The noose caressed his throat like a scarf.

He was ready now.

Kessler gave his final command, Jump!

He tensed to obey. Then a thought split the fog. Which way to face? The wall? The door? The terrace? In the radical narrowness of his world, the choices appeared nearly infinite. A laugh broke from him. Fierce and aching. Filled with self-loathing. In the last instant, as he kicked the chair from beneath his feet, he heard his laughter twist into a scream.

The end came.

All of it.

Every word.

“At last,” Kessler said. He was grinning maliciously, his teeth broken and crazily slanted, a mouthful of tiny, desecrated tombstones. “At last I am bored enough to kill you.”

Slovak wondered if he might yet deny Kessler that final victory. Glancing over the edge of the building, he calculated the speed of his descent, the force of the impact, imagined the sound of his bones as they ground into the street below, sensed the sweetness of oblivion.

Kessler took the pistol in both hands and steadied his aim. “Yours was a heart I truly loved to break,” he said as he drew back the hammer.

Slovak closed his eyes. He waited to hear the crack of Kessler’s pistol when he pulled the trigger. Instead, he heard the tiny cry of a metal hinge.

He opened his eyes. Kessler stood motionless, his ears cocked to the same sound.

For an instant Slovak felt the glimmer of hope that something miraculous might yet save him. Sergeant Reardon in his old frock coat, perhaps, or some nameless watchman on bored patrol. But when the figure emerged from behind the door, small and cowering, all hope departed, and Slovak turned back toward the narrow ledge, the street below, his final resting place.

“Get back downstairs,” Kessler snarled. “I’ll do this myself.”

Slovak opened his eyes. Sykes was standing on the roof, his ravaged face now lost in a ghostly vacancy.

“Get back downstairs, I said,” Kessler barked. “Now!”

Sykes did not move, and instantly, without the interval of a single second, Kessler fired and Sykes spun to the left, a geyser of blood spurting from his chest. Another shot sent him staggering backward, while a second, third, fourth, and fifth jerked him violently left and right. He had collapsed against the rooftop door by the time Kessler reached him, placed the pistol in his gaping mouth, and fired a final time. Sykes’ eyes fluttered with the impact; blood spewed from his head in a fine pink spray.

“Worthless,” Kessler said. He whipped the barrel from Sykes’ shattered mouth and turned it once again toward Slovak. “No bullet left for you, old friend. Another time, perhaps?” He jerked open the door and fled down the stairs.

To his own amazement, Slovak took after him. With his pursuit, his heaviness vanished, as if, with each step, a layer of weariness peeled away, leaving him light and swift and keen.

At the bottom of the stairs he plunged through the door and out into the evening mist. He could hear the clatter of horses’ hooves, the rattle of a departing carriage. He turned and saw it, a black stain on the graying air, Kessler at the reins, the long whip snapping in the fetid air, drawing bursts of blood and sweat from the backs of his horses as he raced down the deserted street and away.

“Gone,” Slovak whispered. “Gone…”

“Go on in.”

A voice.

“He’s damn lucky, you know. If that girl with his mail hadn’t heard…”

“Is he conscious?”

Her voice.

“He goes in and out.”

Footsteps. A touch. Her hand.

“It’s not too late, Paul. It’s not too late to find him.” Kessler.

“We’ll work together.”

A curtain fell.

The ending changed:

“Gone,” Slovak whispered. “Gone… go…” The heaviness returned to him; the gravity of his old despair fell mercilessly upon his shoulders. He staggered forward, bone-weary, breathless, a huge, formless mass rolling like a great stone over the jagged cobblestones. It rolled and rolled, through the darkening streets, down the spectral alleyways, past the mountainous residue of crime, waiflike children and the ghostly whores, grimy brothels, garish halls. Night gripped him like a black-glowed hand, but still Slovak moved on relentlessly, unable to stop himself, with the momentum of all cracked and ragged things, weariness providing its own shattered wings.

And so the night passed and dawn broke, and in the first flickering light Slovak found himself in the foggy park, his throat burning with the night’s long thirst, his eyes stung by the fumes and dust of the awakening city.

Perhaps, for a brief moment, he slept. He could not tell. He knew only that at some indeterminate point he became aware that a figure now sat near him, tall, with broad shoulders, gray strands woven into her dark hair.

“Slovak,” she said.

He turned to face her.

She lifted her head to reveal a jagged scar that circled her throat in a necklace of wounded flesh. “He did this to me,” she said.

Slovak knew instantly whom she meant. “Kessler.”

She peered at him fiercely, man’s dream of vengeance glowing hotly in her eyes. “Do you think it’s too late to find him?”

Slovak saw the black carriage disappear into the swirling fog, Kessler’s freckled arm waving. He felt a wholly unexpected hope rise in him. Small and delicate. Carried on the faintest wings.

“No,” he said. “Never.”