The Thing Itself Read Online Free PDF Page B

beyond the locked door. I could not tell you.
    The warmth of the air burned my throat. I could no longer stay standing. I half slumped, half fell sideways, and my arm banged against one of the heaters – it felt like molten metal, and I yelled. I rolled off it and lay on the floor, and breathed and breathed.
    I may have passed out. I have no idea how I got inside. I was probably only out for a few moments, because the next thing I knew was that my hands were in agony. Absolute agony! It felt like the gom jabbar, like they had both been stuffed into a tub of boiling water. Looking back I can now say what it was: it was sensation returning to my frostbitten flesh. But by God I’ve never felt such pain. I screamed and screamed like the Spanish Inquisition had gone to work on me. I writhed, and wept like a baby.
    Somehow I dragged myself into a sitting posture, with my back against the wall and my legs straight out on the floor. Roy was standing in the common room doorway. In his right hand he was holding what I assumed was a gun, although I later realised it was a flare pistol.
    ‘You murdering bastard,’ I said. ‘Have you come to finish the job? You going to shoot me down like a dog?’ Or that’s what I tried to say. What came out was: ‘yrch yrch orch orch orch’. God, my throat was shredded .
    ‘The thing-in-itself,’ he said. There was a weird bend in his voice. I blinked away the melting icicles from my eyelashes and saw he was crying . ‘The thing-as-such. The thing per se . I have experienced it unmediated.’ His face was wet. Tears slippy-sliding down, and dripping like snot from his jowls. I’d never seen him like that before.
    ‘What,’ I croaked, ‘did you put in my whisky?’ Oh God, the pain in my hands ! And now my feet were starting to rage and burn too. Oh, it was ghastly.
    He stopped crying, and wiped his face in the crook of his left arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Even at this juncture he was not able to look me in the eye. He lifted his right hand, holding the flare pistol, slowly, until he was holding it across his chest, like James Bond in the posters.
    I was weeping. Not because I was scared of dying, but just because my hands and feet hurt with such sharp and focused intensity.
    Roy took a breath, lifted the flare pistol to his own head, and pulled the trigger. There was a crunching bang, and Roy flopped to the ground. The common room was filled with fluorescent red-orange light and an extraordinarily loud hissing sound. For a moment we were in a luridly lit stage set of Hades.
    What had happened was this: the tip and fuse of the flare projectile had lodged itself in Roy’s skull, and had ejected the illumination section and its little asbestos parachute at the ceiling, where it snagged against the polystyrene tiles and burned until it was all burned out.
    I sat in that ferociously red-lit room, with molten chunks of polystyrene dripping on to the carpet. I was agonised by my hands, feet, face. Then the shell itself burned free and fell to the ground, where it fizzled out.
    Roy was not dead. Nor was I, amazingly. It took me a while, and an effort, and the whole way along I was sobbing and begging the cosmos to take the pain away; but I got to the radio, and called for help. They sent an air ambulance that laid a pattern of flares on the unlit runway during their first fly by and landed alongside them on their second. It took four hours, but they got to us, and we did not die in the interval.
    I crawled back to Roy, unconscious on the floor, and pulled the shell-tip from the side of his head. There was no blood, although the dent was very noticeable – the skin and hair lining the new thumb-sized cavity all the way in. There was little I could do, beyond put him in the recovery position.
    Then I clambered painfully on the sofa, my hands and feet hurting a little less. Then, surprisingly enough, I fell asleep. Roy had dissolved a sleeping tablet in the whisky, of course, to knock me out;