Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

The truth is that I was sick at the thought of what I was about to do. It is one thing to imagine killing a man, it is quite another when the living, breathing man stands before you. The two men parted, and Abel Mundy made his way along the slippery pavement towards me.

At that instant, I began walking in the opposite direction, giving no indication that I recognised him, until our shoulders bumped and he stopped and looked in my face. This was my first miscalculation, for two reasons. Firstly, I should have known better than to attempt to convince him that a second coincidence had caused our paths to cross. He was a suspicious man, and this put him on guard for some mischief. I would have done better to concoct a reason for seeking him out in person, and indeed, many times when I had foreseen the meeting, this had been how I envisaged it. But somehow, at the crunch, my sense deserted me. The second mistake was to bump shoulders with him. I needed no reminder of the disparity between our strengths. I knew that in any fair encounter I would be the one to come off worse, and the thought of it put fear in me.

‘Holmes?’ said he.

‘Abel Mundy!’ I replied. The surprise in my voice sounded patently false to me. ‘Just the fellow I need! Are you in a hurry, Abel? Can you spare me a minute?’

‘I am somewhat pressed, Holmes,’ he said, and I knew he suspected a trick.

Although I was armed, confronting him seemed like desperate folly, like throwing myself against a statue or a mountainside. I saw him pounding me slowly senseless with his big fists, and the fear of it swallowed me up like quicksand. I staggered forward and threw up at his feet.

‘Christ, man, are you drunk?’ he said.

Too indisposed to speak, I nodded weakly at him, and vomited again.

He lifted me up by the collar of my coat like a kitten, knocking my hat off in the process.

‘On your feet, man,’ said Mundy. Over my protestations, he marched me up the street and into a doorway some fifty yards from where I had been taken ill. I protested weakly, feeling like a condemned man on the trap waiting for the ground to drop away from my feet and to hear the snap of my own neck. Roughly, he bundled me inside the warehouse and dropped me on to a chair; then he left me.

My wits had deserted me. I sat mute in the darkness, gradually conscious of the rough boards beneath my feet and the smells of spice and river water that contended in the air. I did not think to run away: I could not see where I had come in. My mouth tasted foul, and my hands shook. I felt as weak as a baby.

I do not know how much later it was when Mundy returned and handed me a cup. ‘It’s been standing a while,’ he said. I drank the water gratefully while he wandered over to the window and lit a cheroot. ‘Better?’ said he.

I nodded and wiped my mouth, even though he could not have seen me in the darkness.

‘You young fellows,’ he said with a laugh. ‘All piss and swagger.’ I saw sparks fly from the floor as he dropped his smoke and ground out the coal with a boot heel. ‘Well, if you’re convalescing, young Holmes, I need to be on my way. I would drink no more today, if I were you.’

‘I’m not drunk, Abel,’ I said.

‘And I’m not Abel Mundy, neither,’ said he. ‘I could smell the drink on you.’

‘I’m not drunk, Abel,’ I said. ‘I’m sick with fear.’ He said nothing. ‘I mean to kill a man,’ I said, ‘and the fear of it sickens me.’

‘That’s a queer way to talk,’ he said quietly.

We sat silently in the darkness. The only sounds were the river lapping beneath us, and the rats rustling among the sacks and barrels.

‘Who is this man?’ he said finally. ‘Who is he, Holmes? What in God’s name are you talking about? You’re full of drink and you’re babbling, man. You’re talking nothing but nonsense.’ I could see him pacing in front of the window.

‘I mean to kill you, Abel Mundy. Turn your face to that window, or by heaven, I’ll shoot you dead,’ I said, drawing a brace of pistols from my greatcoat.

‘You, Holmes? A eunuch? A half-man, fit for the harem, to cook chocolate and dress dancing girls? Why, stow your nonsense, or I’ll break you like a twig.’ He stood stock-still, weighing up the odds against him, deliberating whether to charge me or to wait.

‘I assure you, you will find threatening me a singularly unfruitful course of action,’ I told him. ‘Now do as I say.’

‘What the devil?’ was the mildest of the volley of imprecations he uttered, but he did as I commanded.

I told him that unless he agreed to leave the country immediately I would take his life on the spot.

He turned suddenly and sprang. The flash of the pistol lit the darkness. I felt the heat of it across my hand. In the panic, the other weapon fell to the ground. Mundy lay in the darkness groaning. I found the second pistol and placed the muzzle behind his ear. With a huge effort, I pulled the trigger, but my efforts were rewarded with a click. The mechanism had broken in the fall.

Mundy dragged himself upwards with a groan and I felt his huge hands close on my ankle. I took up the chair on which I had been seated and brought it crashing down on his skull. It felled him, but even then the man was so strong that he rose to his knees with a groan and grabbed at my hands. Again and again, I struck him with the chair with a kind of rising horror and pity, and a desperate wish that each blow would be the last of him. The chair by now having come apart, I was forced to belabour him with the parts of it, a chair leg, a spoke, whatever was left in my hands. He turned his face to me in the half-light as I struck savagely with the crude lumps of wood, black blood streaming from his nostrils and staining his teeth.

‘For Jesus’ sake, pity,’ he groaned.

‘Where was your pity, Abel Mundy? Where was your pity?’ And I beat him until he moved no longer, until I knew he was dead, and then for a while after, because of the terrible darkness inside me.

Afterwards, I fumbled through the pockets of his coat for his cheroots and matches. As I placed one between my lips, I tasted the blood on my fingers and a shiver went through me.

All my preparations had come to this. I had planned to offer him exile, but I had beaten him to death with a trick and his blood was all over me. And yet, until I said the words aloud I did not believe them myself: I meanto killyou, Abel Mundy. From that moment, all the fear left me and I knew I would succeed, because, for all his strength, my will was stronger.

About the warehouse were several empty barrels into one of which, with much effort, I forced Abel Mundy’s body. I had no means of sealing the barrel, and the corpse’s hand continually dropped out as I rolled it along the floor, until I no longer bothered to push it back inside, so that it lashed the dirty ground with every revolution of the cask. I was some time wondering how I could make the barrel sink, and I further knew that the gas building up inside the dead man would tend to raise him, barrel and all, to the surface, unless there were a counterweight sufficient to keep him down. I was fortunate, indeed, to find a great stack of lead blocks each marked for half a hundredweight and used for weighing cargo.

I rolled the barrel into a skiff that was among several kept by on the wharf, and placed the blocks in after, as many as I could safely put in it, then fastened all with lengths of rope.

Fog had obscured the opposite bank and was closing fast, lessening my danger of being observed, but rendering my navigation more perilous. I took up the oars and rowed my cargo out to where I could see neither bank; here buoys were fixed in the deepest part of the river.

My ballast was so heavy that there was barely freeboard between the gunwales and the water, and I shipped a little water with each stroke. When I had reached what I took to be the centre of the river, I stove in the bottom of the skiff with a hatchet, until the river boiled up through it, sucking down the little boat and the barrel. The water was icy and dank, and all the harder to negotiate because of my heavy clothes and shoes. Having reached the farther bank, I struggled through the mud up to the nearest stairs, and as I reached out to steady myself on the stone, I saw my hands had been washed clean of blood, and with the darkening effect of the water on my clothes, it was impossible say which liquid was the Thames and which Abel Mundy.