He expected to feel a burning in the vein, a terrible chemical heat that would spread rapidly throughout his circulatory system, but the fire didn’t come. Nor did a chill shiver through him. He expected to experience vivid hallucinations, to be driven mad by a crawling sensation that suggested spiders squirming across the tender surface of his brain, to hear phantom voices echoing inside his skull, to be afflicted by either convulsions or violent muscle spasms, or by painful cramps, or by incontinence, to be overcome by either nausea or giddiness, to grow hair on the palms of his hands, to watch the room reel as his eyes spun like pinwheels, but the injection had no noticeable effect – except perhaps to make his fevered imagination register a few degrees higher on the thermometer of the unlikely.
Doc withdrew the needle.
A single bead of blood appeared at the point of the puncture.
‘One of two should pay the debt,’ Doc muttered not to Dylan, but to himself, an observation that seemed to make no sense. He moved behind Dylan, out of sight.
The crimson pearl quivered in the crook of Dylan’s left arm, as though pulsing in sympathy with the racing heart that had once harried it to the farthest capillary and from which it was now and forever estranged. He wished that he could reabsorb it, suck it back through the needle wound, because he feared that in the coming nasty struggle for survival, he would need every drop of healthy blood that he could muster if he hoped to prevail against whatever threat had been injected.
‘But debt payment isn’t perfume,’ Doc said, reappearing with a Band-Aid from which he stripped the wrapper as he talked. ‘It won’t mask the stink of treachery, will it? Will anything?’
Although once more speaking directly to Dylan, the man seemed to talk in riddles. His solemn words required somber delivery, yet his tone remained light; the half-whimsical sleepwalker smile continued to play across his features, waxing and waning and waxing again, much as the glow of a candle might flux and flutter under the influence of every subtle current in the air.
‘Remorse has gnawed at me so long that my heart’s eaten away. I feel empty.’
Functioning remarkably well without a heart, the empty man peeled the two protective papers off the Band-Aid tape and applied the patch to the point of the injection.
‘I want to be repentant for what I did. There’s no real peace without repentance. Do you understand?’
Although Dylan didn’t understand anything this lunatic said, he nodded out of a concern that failure to agree would trigger a psychotic outburst involving not a hypodermic needle but a hatchet.
The man’s voice remained soft, but a bleach of anguish at last purged all the color from it, even as – eerily – the smile endured: ‘I want to be repentant, to reject entirely the terrible thing I did, and I want to be able to honestly say that I wouldn’t do it again if I had my life to live over. But remorse is as far as I’m able to go. I would do it again, given a second chance, do it again and spend another fifteen years racked by guilt.’
The single drop of blood soaked into the gauze, leaving a dark circle visible through the vented covering. This particular Band-Aid, marketed for children, came decorated with a capering and grinning cartoon dog that failed either to lift Dylan’s spirits or to distract his attention from his booboo.
‘I’ve got too much pride to be contrite. There’s the problem. Oh, I know my flaws, I know them well, but that doesn’t mean I can fix them. Too late for that. Too late, too late.’
After dropping the Band-Aid wrappings in the small waste can by the desk, Doc fished in a pants pocket and withdrew a knife.
Although ordinarily Dylan wouldn’t have used the word weapon to describe a mere pocketknife, no less menacing noun would be adequate in this instance. You didn’t need either a dagger or a machete to cut a throat and sever a carotid artery. A simple pocketknife would do the job.