Maurice Level - Thirty Hours with a Corpse, and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol

When the meal was finished, the woman put the child to bed and washed up the crockery. In the silence that followed nothing could be heard but the tick-tock of the clock and the irregular breathing of the sleeper, who turned and tossed on his bed. It struck ten; he arranged his plan of attack. In an hour the man would go… Afterwards, he would be master of the place.

The thought of the coming massacre gave him more joy than the hope of the plunder. All was still. The man and the woman, the one sleeping, the other reading, had no suspicion that in the shadow a man lay in wait. Gradually a drowsiness stole over him, and he started when a voice said:

“It’s eleven o’clock.”

He rubbed his eyes and slowly stretched himself. The man got up, put on his shoes, and thrust his arms through the sleeves of his coat.

“Above all, don’t catch cold,” said the woman. “I have heated some coffee; will you have it?”

“Yes.”

While he was sipping it, the woman went on:

“Won’t you put on your other overcoat?”

Ferrou felt that she was stretching her hand toward the hanging and started. But when the man replied: “No, this one will do very well,” he breathed again, and still shaking with fright, said to himself:

“You, you hellcat, you shall pay for that presently!…”

She went on:

“You haven’t forgotten anything? What time will you be back?”

“About seven or eight o’clock as usual.”

He was ready. Standing up, the collar of his overcoat buttoned up, he seemed bigger and stronger than before. Behind his curtain Ferrou was growing unnerved: “You are never going then!…” The man, his hand on the handle of the door, turned back.

“Don’t forget to fasten the bars of the shutters and bolt the door.”

The sound of wheels grated on the road and stopped.

“Here they are,” said the man.

He went out and began to talk to the newcomers in the garden.

“You haven’t forgotten anything? Yes.—The coach-house properly shut?—Yes, yes.—Let’s be off then. Go in, Marie; it’s snowing, it’s a very bad night.”

“Worse than you think!” snarled Ferrou.

His knife was burning his fingers; he longed to have done with it all. But the man still lingered. His voice rang clear through the cold air:

“Pass me the lantern. Let me see if everything is in its place.”

Suddenly his voice, till then very kind, rose angrily:

“Just look how you have fastened that! The sheath is not even buckled. And it’s badly balanced. In less than a quarter of an hour half the blade would be on the ground. You’d have mud in the slides and on the posts. Come, give a hand!”

Ferrou listened, mocking:

“The finest porcelain, at least, to need so much care.”

The man went on:

“What have you been thinking about? At the first jolt, the tub would have tipped off.”

Ferrou ceased sneering. A cold shiver ran down his back. The Blade… the Posts… the Tub… Separately, these words meant nothing… Put together… they suggested, might mean a terrible thing… Where was he?… Who was this man who had lain sleeping there and was now saying these words to the other man?

The voice softened:

“There, that will do. It would have been a fine thing if you had blunted the knife of the guillotine.”

Trembling, Ferrou repeated: “The knife of the guillotine!…” and his teeth began to chatter. In a flash, these last words had brought the whole of the awful thing before him. He seemed to hear the mysterious noises that come in the night to wake those who are condemned to death, the hammer-knocks of the sinister carpenter; he seemed to see the pale faces of the assistants who enter the cell; the big red posts set up outside in the gray dawn of the morning…

“Ready,” said a voice—the voice of the man.

Then Ferrou, gasping with fear, biting his fingers to stop himself from shrieking, stammered, forgetting that he might be heard:

“The executioner! I have been watching the executioner sleep!”

The cart had set off at a good pace and the woman was just going to shut the door, but forgetting that he had crouched there for hours waiting to kill, he flung away his knife, knocked her out of his way with a thrust of his shoulder, rushed into the garden, leaped over the fence and began to run blindly down the road, fleeing from Paris whose distant noises and familiar odors would soon be augmented by the sound of cracking bone and crushed flesh and the fusty smell of blood.

ONE HOUR ago I was a prisoner. And what a prisoner! It was not a question of my honor or my liberty: it was my head that was at stake.

I have known terrible nights haunted by the nightmare of the guillotine. I have trembled as some ghastly fascination made me lift my clammy hands to my neck to trace the narrow line the knife would make there. I have shuddered at the hostile murmurs of the crowd. The hoarse roar: “To the scaffold with him!” has rung and echoed in my ears.

But that is all over now. I am free. Once again I have seen the noisy streets and the bright lights of the shops. Presently, quite at ease, I shall dine. Sitting by the fire I shall smoke my pipe, and tonight I shall fall asleep quietly in the warm bed that is waiting for me.

And yet never have I felt myself so much of a criminal as at this moment just after my judges have acquitted me. I am wondering what aberration prevented them from knowing the kind of being I really am. The power of systematic denial stupefies me, and I feel that if I am to regain my clearness of mind, I must write down the truth I have hidden for the last three months with a cleverness and cynicism that have ended by almost making me believe my own lies.

For I really am a murderer; I killed a woman.

Why?… I do not know. I have never been able to understand why I did it.

Certainly not because of jealousy; I did not love her. Not to rob her; I am rich, and the few francs they found on her could never have tempted me. Nor was it done in anger…

We were in this room. She was standing near that mirror; I was sitting just where I am at this moment. I was reading. She said to me:

“Let’s go out… Let’s go for a stroll in the Bois.”

Without raising my eyes, I replied:

“No, I’m tired. Let’s stay here.”

She insisted. I persisted in my refusal. She kept on insisting, and her voice aggravated me. She spoke very angrily, sneering at my inertia, laughing scornfully, shrugging her shoulders. Several times I tried to stop her:

“Will you be quiet?… I beg you to be quiet…”

She continued. I got up and began to pace the room, and as I walked up and down I saw on the mantelshelf a little revolver that I used to carry in my pocket at night. I took it up mechanically. The moment I touched it an extraordinary frame of mind took possession of me. The voice of my mistress which had till then merely aggravated me, unnerved me to an extent I cannot describe. It was not what she was saying that irritated me; it was her voice, just her voice. If she had been jibbering meaningless words or reciting beautiful poetry, I should have felt just the same exasperation. An irresistible longing for quiet, for complete repose, seized me. How, why did my mind connect this imperious desire for the silence I could not command with the revolver I held in my hand?… I only know that I imagined myself brandishing the weapon, pressing the trigger, and I also saw the woman fall, without a cry…

As a rule such ideas are only giddy hallucinations that flash through the brain and are gone as quickly as they came. But this time it seemed as if this particular vision had caught into my mind in the way a jagged fingernail will catch in floss silk, getting more securely entangled as one tries to free it. I placed the revolver on the table. I could not help looking at it. I tried to turn my head away; my eyes drew me toward it.