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By Root 1264 0

thinking that at last he was about to drop off to sleep. But once again those unseen fingers opened his eyelids; in the darkness he saw the murder re-enacted, in all its gory detail. The knife went in; the body jerked. Streaks of blood stained the night; the wound in the throat gaped wide open, like an axe mark in a tree. He gave up the struggle and lay on his back; the nightmare must run its course. He could hear the wheels of his mind turning. His brain groaned in its effort to make sense of the thoughts that assailed him. They came from far back, from his childhood. He had thought he was cured. For months, ever since he had first possessed Séverine, there had been no sign of his old craving; and now, after listening to this tale of murder, whispered into his ear as she lay naked against him, their bodies intertwined, it had returned, more intense than ever. He moved away from her so that she was not touching him; the least contact with her flesh sent a fire running through him. He felt a terrible burning along his back, as if the mattress he lay on had become a bed of coals. There was a pricking sensation in his neck, like red-hot needles. He tried putting his hands outside the bedclothes, but they quickly became frozen and made him shiver. His hands frightened him; he drew them back under the bedclothes and clasped them together across his stomach, finally sliding them under his buttocks to pin them down, as if he were afraid they might do something awful, something he had no wish to do but did all the same.

Every time the cuckoo clock struck the hour, Jacques counted. Four o‘clock, five o’clock, six o’clock. He longed for day to come; he hoped that the dawn might chase this nightmare away. Again he turned towards the windows, peering at the glass for the first sign of daylight. But all he could see was the pale reflection of the snow. At a quarter to five he had heard the train arrive from Le Havre. It was only forty minutes late; the line was obviously clear again. It was not until after seven that he saw the windows begin to whiten, and a pale milky glimmer slowly filtered into the room. At last the light returned; a strange half-light in which the furniture seemed to be floating. The stove reappeared, then the cupboard and the sideboard. He could still not close his eyes; in fact they ached from trying to see in the dark. Suddenly, even before it was completely light and before he could actually see it, he sensed, on the table beside him, the presence of the knife he had used to cut the cake the night before. And now, this knife was all he could see, a little knife with a pointed blade. As it grew lighter, all the light coming in through the two windows was reflected in that one small blade. He was so frightened of his hands that he thrust them further beneath him; he could feel them growing restless, defying him, asserting their will. Were these hands his own? He must have inherited them from someone else. They must have been passed down by some remote ancestor from the days when men strangled wild beasts in the forest!

In order not to see the knife, Jacques turned over towards Séverine. She was sleeping peacefully, utterly exhausted, breathing like a child. Her thick, black hair was undone and fell down over her shoulders like a dark pillow. Between the strands of hair, under her chin, he saw her throat, delicate, milky white with just a trace of pink. He looked at her as though she were a stranger. Yet he adored her; he carried her image with him wherever he went and never stopped desiring her, even when he was driving his train. So much so that one day he had woken up as if from a dream to find himself driving at full speed through a station with the signals at red. He could not take his eyes away from her white throat; he was seized with a sudden, irresistible fascination. He was still fully aware of what was happening and to his horror he felt himself being compelled to take the knife from the table and plunge it to the hilt into this woman’s flesh. He heard the thud of the blade as it went in; he saw the