Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

the armchair, hugging the smoke at the base of his lungs. His mouth becomes dryer. He smiles. He knows he shall pay for this tomorrow: languor, constipation, headaches perhaps. His smile broadens. Tomorrow can take care of itself. Who is to say any of them shall live so long?

When he has done he lays the pipe down carefully on the box and goes out to get a mouthful of wine to smooth his throat. He takes a candle with him; his shadow moves over the wall like a grey, ponderous sail. The decanter is still on the table in the drawing room. He takes one of the dirty glasses, sniffs it, and pours out a small measure of wine, swills his mouth and swallows.

Going out again he sees there is another light, flickering in the corridor outside James Dyer's room. Who is standing there? He squints, and makes out Zaira, the servant girl. He goes towards her, thinking how he has not properly noticed before the loveliness of her hair, very black against the white of her skin. He expects her to turn at his approach; he does not wish to startle her, but she is staring fixedly into Dyer's room. When he sees the expression on her face he wants to be back in his own room. He wants nothing to do with this. He whispers her name; she clutches his arm, transmits to him her terror. Dyer is in bed, lying on his back, eyes closed. Mary is beside the bed. The Reverend opens his mouth to speak but Mary looks up at him, silences him. For a moment he wonders if Dyer is dead, but then sees the slow swelling of his chest, the slight palp of the skin over his heart. Zaira whimpers. There is the noise of her water running off her leg on to the floor. The Reverend starts forward, a single step, then stops. The room is sealed. There

are forces here he knows nothing of, a magic more powerful than his own. He cannot prevent her. One of Mary's hands is in, now the other works in beside it. There is no blood; the flesh parts like water, like sand. Her arms are trembling, her face racked with the effort of her secret business. Dyer does not move, only sometimes sighs like a sleeper in a dream. When it is finished she sits heavily in a chair, her head falls forward, her shoulders slump. The room is suddenly calm; ordinary. A man sleeping in a bed, and a woman next to him, sleeping in a chair. The Reverend goes in, sets down his candle on the bedside cabinet, buttons Dyer's nightshirt, then pulls up the covers. Zaira is watching him. Is she afraid of him too? He takes her hand and leads her away, quickly, along the corridor.

SIXTH

The instant before he wakes he experiences an ecstasy, a moment of luminous terror, such as a man who stumbles from the edge of a cliff must feel, somersaulting over the distant rocks. Or a felon, launched to eternity by the hangman's shove, flying through the crowd's hush. Everything is seen, everything is understood, in clear light, in calm air. Then the wind breaking in waves over his head. The light shrieking. James Dyer dies. Wakes in hell.

At first he knows only that he must escape from the fire in the bed. Then from the fire on the floor. Then from the fire in the air. Not until he reels towards the door does he realise: he is the fire; the fire is himself. And only by escaping from himself shall he escape the flames. There are knives in his bag, and he is not yet afraid of knives. He could die like Joshua, slaking the intolerable thirst with a razor. He gropes for the bag, cannot find it, cannot see anything, his bag, his hands. There is nothing but a slab of paler dark where one of the shutters is open. He opens the others, fumbles with the catch on the window. He hears himself sobbing. The catch gives, the window opens. Snow dances in upon his face. He drags himself on to the sill, coils as if he means to spring on to the frozen river. Then he is gripped from behind, pulled down to the fioor, lies there, writhing like an insect. He wants to fight her,

but cannot find the strength. She is fiill of purpose. She is making him dress. She does not understand that he cannot go on, that he is enduring the unendurable.

Outside they take the darkest streets. The wooden houses are asleep, clinging to the ground, heavier than palaces. A dog whines, an infant bawls, a lamp flickers in a house. Someone is sick there perhaps, the family kneeling by the bed. The doctor will not come on a night like this, nor the priest.

Mary does not wait for him; neither will she let him go. He labours behind her, on two legs, on four. He knows that she is his only hope, the beginning and the end of the nightmare. What else is there to hold to? He is one hour old, trapped inside of himself, a blind man inside a burning house. He is like the others now.

When he opens his eyes it is light. There is no sign of the city. He tries to sit up but when he moves the fire courses through his body. He tries to speak but his throat is too dry. He licks at the snow. Slowly, as though crossing a river of the thinnest ice, he moves. His hands curl, uncurl. He turns his head. A bird is watching him, blue-black feathers shivering in the wind. It studies him. The eye has no depth. A black light trembles on its surface. The bird hops closer. Fear of the bird is greater than his fear of the fire. He sits up, screaming, flinging from his hands fistfuls