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By Root 1422 0

up with pillows to make sleep difficult. He invented a maggot called the Flealouse. It was white and featureless except on the underside, which was all mouths. It bred in connective tissues and moved by eating a trench in the surfaces it travelled among. It spread through bodies without upsetting them at first, for it sweated a juice which worked on the nerves like a drug, making diseased people plumper and rosier, more cheerful and active. Then it started feeding on the brain. The victims felt no less happy but their actions became mechanical and frenzied, their words repetitive and trite. Then the lice, whose movement so far had been sluggish and gradual, suddenly attacked the main bodily organs, growing hugely as they did so. Infected people turned white, collapsed in the street, swelled and burst like rotten sacks of rice, each grain of which was a squirming louse. Then the lice themselves split open releasing from their guts swarms of winged insects so tiny that they could enter anybody through pores in the skin. In less than a century the Flealouse infected and ate every other sort of life on the globe. The earth became nothing but rock under a heaving coat of lice of every size, from a few inches up to five hundred feet. Then they began to eat each other. In the end only one was left, a titan curled round the equator like a grub round a pebble. The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content.

While elaborating this fantasy he fell asleep several times and continued it in dreams, sometimes being a victim of the Flealouse, sometimes a Flealouse himself. The dreams were so detailed that horror made him recoil into wakefulness and fix wide-open eyes on the electric light, hoping the pain of the dazzle would keep him conscious. Meanwhile pan of his mind tried to get free with the desperation of a rat roasting in a revolving cage.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!”

“You can’t.”

“Why? Why? Why?”

“Your mind is rotting. Minds without love always breed these worms.”

“How can I get love?”

“You can’t. You can’t.”

Something happened shortly after five in the morning. He was struggling against thoughts of the lice and against the sleep which made them seem solid when the image of Molly Tierney came like coolness to a heated brow. He lay down filling slowly with relief. He would go to her the next day and explain calmly, without pathos, that only she could stop him going mad. If she refused to love him what happened after that would be her responsibility, not his. And she might help. This was not a world of certainties but of likelihoods, so the glorious lovely accident must happen sometimes. The Flealouse vanished from his mind. He fell into a smooth, wholly dreamless sleep.

He woke as his father was drawing the curtains.

“How’s your mind this morning?”

“It’s all right now. It’s fine.”

“But will it last?”

“I think so.”

“And you don’t want a doctor?”

“Certainly not.”

“Good. Three weeks ago, Duncan, you told me you had been robbed of goods worth fifteen shillings. That was a lie. Now I want the truth.”

“The goods cost three pounds.”

“I know. I was looking in your pocket for handkerchiefs to wash when I found the invoice. I was shifting it to its proper place on the spike in the scullery when I noticed the true amount.”

Mr. Thaw went to the window and stood, hands in pockets, looking down the street. There was a small distinct frenzied sound in the room like a mouse gnawing wood or a steel nib scribbling on paper.

“For God’s sake stop scratching!” said Mr. Thaw. “Aren’t there enough bloodstains on the sheets?”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t understand why you had to lie about it, unless from a love of lying for its own sake. You could have hidden the truth just by keeping your mouth shut.”

“I came as near truth as I dared.”

“Dared? What were you afraid of? Did you think I’d thrash you?”

“I deserve to be thrashed.”

“But Duncan, I’ve not thrashed you since you were a wee boy!”

Thaw considered this and said, “True.”

“Furthermore, how could you keep hiding the right amount from me?