Kronk

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Gabriel did not know why he had returned to 1735, Babscastle Boulevard. Gabriel did not know anything. Perhaps it was a sentimental journey. Perhaps he was chasing ghosts. Perhaps he was simply looking for tangible souvenirs of his lost love. Perhaps he was hoping that Supergitt would play another funny trick and turn back the clock, take the mainspring out of time, so that he could hold Camilla in his arms once more.

The house was deserted. The garden, where a squirrel, a lamb and a fat white rabbit had once frolicked with the big cats at night, was an overgrown desolation. Gabriel could not open the main door to the house, but he did not need to. Practically every window had been smashed — no doubt as the result of the tender attentions of prepubes or students.

Gabriel, carefully nursing a precious bottle of vodka, got in through one of the ground-floor windows, cutting himself slightly in the process. He went into the lounge. Surprisingly, it had not changed greatly since he had last seen it — was it months ago, years ago? Anyway, in another kind of time.

Something other than animals had knocked the grand piano about a bit, and curtains had been torn down from their hangings. But there were still rabbit and sheep droppings on what was left of the Indian carpet, there were still claw and tooth marks on the cocktail cabinet and the piano; and the settee looked as if it had wrestled with a panther or a lion yesterday.

However, spiders had taken over. Presumably they had invaded from the garden; and now almost everywhere there was the fine tracery of webs that somehow locked everything in a lost pocket of time.

Gabriel did a quick tour of the house. It was a mistake to visit the bedroom where he and Camilla had first blissfully exhausted each other. The bed and wardrobe had been smashed, ransacked drawers pulled hastily from chests had been flung in all directions. Remnants of Camilla’s clothing lay in absurd places, oddly mocking him.

It was a mistake also to visit the bathroom, where Gabriel had compulsively made love to Camilla on the floor before taking her away to escape the real or imagined attentions of the Security boyos. For a moment, as he surveyed the bathroom, Gabriel imagined he saw the two wet marks left by two wet bodies on the carpet. But when he inspected more closely, the marks were broad stains — possibly of blood. And quite possibly the result of some bizarre student caper.

He went downstairs once more into the lounge, and sat on the settee to drink vodka and wait a while for a ghost that would never come. After two deep swigs of vodka, he put the cork in the bottle and stretched arms that had been aching with sheer tension.

By chance, as he stretched, one of his hands slipped between the torn back of the settee and the tattered seat cushion. By chance, his hand encountered something thin and smooth.

Automatically his fingers closed on it. He pulled it out. Gabriel had found an unposted letter.

It was addressed to Camilla.

With suddenly shaking fingers, Gabriel opened the letter and began to read it.

“My darling wife,” he read. “I am writing here what I lack the courage to say to you, and I shall arrange for this letter to be delivered when I am not at home. I am, as you know, a devout and professional coward; and I want you to have expended whatever emotion you may find it necessary to expend and reached whatever decisions you need to reach before I get back.

“You no doubt wonder why I intend to continue my work even though MicroWar has given me the push. And I am sure that now you are sober (yes, I did fix the drinks) you are wondering why I insisted on injecting you with P 939.

“Dearest, despite all my glib explanations on that intense and somewhat alcoholic evening, I did not inject you with P 939 either for the advancement of science or so that I could measure phase development in a human being. All that was gobbledegook.

“I injected you so that I could exert a very simple but, I hope, effective form of blackmail.

“You see, the trouble is that I love you very dearly. I know you do not love me and that I am no good at sex. But that does not matter. I am content to be with you, to know that I can watch Marilyn Monroe, that sad, gay child enchantress, and know that I, too, can hold her -

you — in my arms with tenderness and sometimes even with passion.

“I know you do not love me, and that does not matter. What does matter is that I also know that you do not intend to renew our marriage contract, and that you will hold me to the agreement, take the money and just disappear.

“I could not bear to lose you. That is why I injected you (how I wish I could have done it the other way!) with P 939. Because now, my love, you need me as I need you.

“You see, until I have found an answer — and believe me, I am not very far off — the longterm effects of P 939 are disastrous, if not devastating.

“I first noticed what I call the cumulative eruption effect when I had a second generation rabbit living harmoniously with an infected fox at the zoo. One day I discovered that the rabbit (then mature after receiving P 939 in late adolescence) had kicked the fox to death. It was a great shock to me.

“I began to investigate — with mice, next time. I used mice because the mouse metabolism and life-cycle is comparatively fast, and I wanted quick results. I put a stray cat through to phase three, then I allowed it to live at the zoo with half a dozen infected white mice. I had done my arithmetic; and sure enough, within six hours of the predicted time, the mice attacked the cat. I checked the experiment, of course, and repeated it with other short-living, fastbreeding animals and was able to determine the operative cycle of P 939. I could not have done this with large animals, you understand, because it would all have taken too long. I was up against time — the time when you would take your money and go.

“But now, my darling, I hope it will be impossible for you to leave me. Because if you do, within four or five years you will become insanely violent. All the pent up aggression of the years of tranquillity will be released in one long murderous onslaught. Almost certainly you will become quite homicidal, and if you do not destroy yourself society will have to lock you away.

“Whereas, if you stay with me, I will guarantee to find an effective means of destroying the spirochete or neutralizing its long-term effect. Properly developed, P 939 can bring mankind to greatness. In its present state, it could be the most terrible scourge the world has ever known.

“Hate me, be indifferent to me, despise me. But please, my darling Camilla, my dearest Marilyn, do not leave me. I beg you to consider this problem calmly and to understand that only my great love for you could have driven me to such extremes. Your affectionate and loving husband — for always, I hope. Eustace.”

Gabriel read the letter once, twice, three times. He was stunned. Eustace the comical genius was revealed as Eustace the fiendish fiend. P 939, the world-saver, was revealed as P 939, the universal annihilator. And the great crusade of peace was revealed as the super-colossal crusade of ultimate, absolute violence. Big, big joke.

Gabriel and Camilla and Messalina and every unconscious volunteer in the unknown army of salvation had slaved and copulated and gorged themselves and become frustratingly deadeningly non-aggressive all in vain.

Big Joke. BIG BIG JOKE!

That twisted Supergitt upstairs had excelled himself. This was the all-time greatest.

It was even funny enough to make you cry.

Gabriel cried. He cried and drank vodka, and cried and drank vodka, and then walked mindlessly away from the mausoleum that was 17356 Babscastle Boulevard, walking back into the poor, dear, doomed world of men.

“Kronk,” said the raven.