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

Still trembling with fear and passion, he drew back and looked at his victim. The light of the lamp was too small to allow him to distinguish either the rent made by the knife in the disordered shirt or any trace of blood. Apparently the stroke had gone straight to the heart, for the expression of the face had not changed. The first thrust, well-aimed and lightning-swift, had stopped life as if it had been a shot from a revolver. Proud of his skill, he muttered menacingly:

“So you were at home watching me! Well, you have seen, haven’t you?”

But as he bent over the quiet face and noted that the expression was the same, it flashed into his mind that the knife might only have pierced the coverings, that perhaps the old man was still alive, still watching him with the same supreme irony.

He raised the knife again and drove it in, drew it out and brought it down with savage frenzy, and intoxicated by the dull sound it made as it entered the chest, he continued to strike, exciting himself by oaths and exclamations that he forgot to stifle. The shirt was now in rags, the flesh one large wound. But untouched by the knife, the face still kept its impassive calm, its terrifying stare. He lost his head, and flinging his lamp away, seized the old man by the throat to give a last certain stroke.

But his right hand remained up in the air and the cry of rage did not pass his lips, for under the other hand he felt, not the damp and throbbing flesh from which life was escaping in a flow of blood, but flesh that had no last quiver of life in it, which was cold with the awful iciness that is like nothing else in the world—dead flesh, dead for long hours!… His arm fell.

He had never been afraid of crime. His knife had often been red: his face had been wet with the warm stream that leaped from severed arteries: he knew the smell of blood, the death-rattle that comes when life is flowing from the body… Death caused by his own hands was nothing… But this!… And instinctive respect for the Dead suddenly rose from some obscure depth in his murderer’s soul, and a superstitious fear of the Great Mystery froze him… He had believed the house was empty, and he had shut himself in with a corpse!… A corpse… this, then, accounted for the unearthly silence and the pall-like mystery of the darkness!…

Somewhere in the far distance a clock struck five, and without daring to turn his head toward the abandoned spoils, with his hat in his hand and vague memories of prayers rising in his terrified mind, he stumbled over the furniture and fled from the house…

“FORGIVE ME… Forgive me.”

His voice was less assured as he replied:

“Get up, dry your eyes. I, too, have a good deal to reproach myself with.”

“No, no,” she sobbed.

He shook his head.

“I ought never to have left you; you loved me. Just at first after it all happened… when I could still feel the fire of the vitriol burning my face, when I began to realize that I should never see again, that all my life I should be a thing of horror, of Death, certainly I wasn’t able to think of it like that. It isn’t possible to resign oneself all at once to such a fate… But living in this eternal darkness, a man’s thoughts pierce far below the surface and grow quiet like those of a person falling asleep, and gradually calm comes. Today, no longer able to use my eyes, I see with my imagination. I see again our little house, our peaceful days, and your smile. I see your poor little face the night I said that last goodbye. The judge couldn’t imagine any of that, could he? And it was only fair to try to explain, for they thought only of your action, the action that made me into… what I am. They were going to send you to prison where you would slowly have faded… No years of such punishment for you could have given me back my eyes… When you saw me go into the witnessbox you were afraid, weren’t you? You believed that I would charge you, have you condemned? No, I could never have done that, never…”

She was still crying, her face buried in her hands.

“How good you are!…”

“I am just…”

In a voice that came in jerks she repeated:

“I repent, I repent; I have done the most awful thing to you that a woman could do, and you—you begged for my acquittal! And now you can even find words of pity for me! What can I do to prove my sorrow? Oh, you are wonderful… wonderful…”

He let her go on talking and weeping; his head thrown back, his hands on the arms of his chair, he listened apparently without emotion. When she was calm again, he asked:

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know… I shall rest for a few days… I am so tired… Then I shall go back to work. I shall try to find a place in a shop or as a mannequin.”

His voice was a little stifled as he asked: “You are still as pretty as ever?”

She did not reply.

“I want to know if you are as pretty as you used to be?”

She remained silent. With a slight shiver, he murmured: “It is dark now, isn’t it? Turn on the light. Though I can no longer see, I like to feel that there is light around me… Where are you?… Near the mantelpiece?… Stretch out your hand. You will find the switch there.”

No sense even of light could penetrate his eyelids, but from the sudden sound of horror she stifled, he knew that the lamp was on. For the first time she was able to see the result of her work, the terrifying face streaked with white swellings, seamed with red furrows, a narrow black band round the eyes. While he had pleaded for her in court, she had crouched on her seat weeping, not daring to look at him; now, before this abominable thing, she grew sick with a kind of disgust. But it was without any anger that he murmured:

“I am very different from the man you knew in the old days— I horrify you now, don’t I? You shrink from me?…”

She tried to keep her voice steady. “Certainly not. I am here, in the same place…”

“Yes, now… and I want you to come still nearer. If you knew how the thought of your hands tempt me in my darkness. How I should love to feel their softness once again. But I dare not… And yet that is what I wanted to ask you: to let me feel your hand for a minute in mine. We, the blind, can get such marvelous memories from just a touch.”

Turning her head away, she held out her arm. Caressing her fingers, he murmured:

“Ah, how good. Don’t tremble. Let me try to imagine we are lovers again just as we used to be… but you are not wearing my ring. Why? I have not taken yours off. Do you remember? You said, ‘It is our wedding-ring.’ Why have you taken it off ?”

“I dare not wear it…”

“You must put it on again. You will wear it? Promise me.”

She stammered:

“I promise you.”

He was silent for a little while; then in a calmer voice:

“It must be quite dark now. How cold I am! If you only knew how cold it feels when one is blind. Your hands are warm; mine are frozen. I have not yet developed the fuller sense of touch. It takes time, they say… At present I am like a little child learning.”

She let her fingers remain in his, sighing:

“Oh, my God… my God…”

Speaking like a man in a dream, he went on:

“How glad I am that you came. I wondered whether you would, and I felt I wanted to keep you with me for a long, long time: always… But that wouldn’t be possible. Life with me would be too sad. You see, little one, when people have memories like ours, they must be careful not to spoil them, and it must be horrible to look at me now, isn’t it?”

She tried to protest; what might have been a smile passed over his face.

“Why lie? I remember I once saw a man whose mistress had thrown vitriol over him. His face was not human. Women turned their heads away as they passed, while he, not being able to see and so not knowing, went on talking to the people who were shrinking away from him. I must be, I am like that poor wretch, am I not? Even you who knew me as I used to be, you tremble with disgust; I can feel it. For a long time you will be haunted by the remembrance of my face… it will come in between you and everything else… How the thought hurts… but don’t let us go on talking about me… You said just now that you were going back to work. Tell me your plans; come nearer, I don’t hear as well as I used to… Well?”