visibly, his multitude of punctures and lacerations were scabbing over,
closing up. Beneath the ugly bluish blackness of the bruises that he
had suffered from the brutal impact with the garbage truck, there was
already a visible yellow hue arising as the blood from dead and making
his way through the levels of hell on a Dantean journey. Sometimes he
thought he had killed people, although he could not remember who, and
then he did briefly remember and shrank from the memory, – not only
shrank from it but convinced himself that it was not a memory at all but
a fantasy, for of course he was incapable of cold-blooded murder.
Of course.
Yet at other times he thought about how exciting and satisfying it would
be to kill someone, anyone, everyone, because in his heart he knew they
were after him, all of them, out to get him, the rotten bastards, as
they had always been out to get him, though they were even more
determined now than ever. Sometimes he thought urgently, Remember the
mice, the mice, the dernnged mice bashing themselves to pieces against
the walls of their cages, and more than once he even said it aloud,
“Remember the mice, the mice,” but he had no -idea what those words
meant, what mice, where, when?
He saw strange things, too.
Sometimes he saw people who could not possibly be there, his long-dead
mother, a hated uncle who had abused him when he had been a little boy,
a neighborhood bully who had terrorized him in grade school. Now and
then, as if suffering from the delirium tremens of a chronic alcoholic,
he saw things crawling out of the walls, bugs and snakes and more
frightening creatures that defied definition.
Several times, he was certain that he saw a path of perfectly black
flagstones leading down into a terrible darkness in the earth. Always
compelled to follow those stones, he repeatedly discovered the path was
illusory, a figment of his morbid and fevered imagination.
Of all the apparitions and illusions that flickered past his eyes and
through his damaged mind, the most unusual and the most disturbing were
the shadowfires. They leaped up unexpectedly and made a crackling sound
that he not only heard but felt in his bones. He would be moving right
along, walking with reasonable surefootedness passing among the living
with some conviction, functioning better than he dared believe he
could-when suddenly a fire would spring up in the shadowed corners of a
room or in the shadows clustered beneath a tree, in any deep pocket of
gloom, flames the shade of wet blood with hot silvery edges, startling
him. And when he looked close, he could see that nothing was burning,
that the flames had erupted out of thin air and were fed by nothing
whatsoever, as if the shadows themselves were burning and made excellent
fuel in spite of their lack of substance.
When the fires faded and were extinguished, no signs of them remained-no
ashes, charred fragments, or smoke stains.
Though he had never been afraid of fire before he died, had never
entertained the pyrophobic idea that he was destined to die in flames,
he was thoroughly terrified of these hungry phantom fires. When he
peered into the flickering brightness, he felt that just beyond lay a
mystery he must solve, though the solution would bring him unimaginable
anguish.
In his few moments of relative lucidity, when his intellectual capacity
was nearly what it once had been, he told himself that the illusions of
flames merely resulted from misfiring synapses in his injured brain,
electrical pulses shorting through the damaged tissues.
And he told himself that the illusions frightened him because, above all
else, he was an intellectual, a man whose life had been a life of the
mind, so he had every right to be frightened by signs of brain
deterioration. The tissues would heal, the shadowfires fade forever,
and he would be all right. That was also what he told himself. But in
his less lucid moments, when the world turned tenebrous and eerie, when
he was gripped by confusion and animal fear, he looked upon the
shadowfires with unalloyed horror and was sometimes reduced to paralysis