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By Root 1432 0

body jerk three times and then go stiff as the blood flowed from the wound. He tried desperately to put the nightmare from his mind, but with every second that passed his resolve was weakening, as if it were being drowned by this one obsession and driven towards that distant shore where one accepts defeat and surrenders to instinct. Everything became a blur; his hands had defiantly overcome his attempt to hide them and had freed themselves. He realized only too well that he was no longer in control of them and that if he continued to gaze at Séverine they would have their way and kill her. With one final effort he threw himself out of the bed and fell rolling on the floor like someone who was drunk. He picked himself up, but his feet got caught in the clothes that Séverine had left lying there, and he nearly fell down again. He lurched about, desperately looking for his own clothes. His one thought was to get dressed, take the knife and go and kill some other woman out in the street. The urge was too strong to resist; he had to kill someone. But he couldn’t find his trousers; he had them in his hand three times before realizing what they were. He had great difficulty trying to put his shoes on. Although it was now broad daylight, the room seemed to be filled with a red mist, like dawn on a cold, foggy morning, when everything appears hazy. He was shaking uncontrollably. He had finally managed to get dressed. He had taken the knife and hidden it up his sleeve, determined to go out and kill the first woman he met in the street, when he heard a movement from the bed and a long drawn-out sigh. He stood by the table, rooted to the spot, his face turning white.

Séverine was waking up.

‘What is it, darling? Do you have to go so soon?’

He didn’t answer her or look at her, hoping she would go back to sleep.

‘Where are you going to, darling?’

‘I won’t be long,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go to the station. Go back to sleep.’

She was still very drowsy and had closed her eyes again.

‘I’m so tired,’ she murmured. ‘So tired. Come and kiss me before you go, darling.’

Jacques did not move. He knew that he only had to turn round with the knife in his hand and take one look at her lying naked in bed, with her hair undone, so delicate, so pretty, and the will-power that restrained him would collapse. His hand would rise of its own accord and plunge the knife into her throat.

‘Kiss me, darling ...’

Her voice faded to a whisper; she murmured that she loved him and fell quietly back to sleep. In desperation, he opened the door and fled.

It was eight o‘clock when Jacques found himself outside in the Rue d’Amsterdam. The snow had not yet been cleared away; the footsteps of the few people that were about could scarcely be heard. He immediately spotted an old woman, but she disappeared round a corner into the Rue de Londres. He didn’t follow her. He almost bumped into two men as he walked down towards the Place du Havre, clutching the knife, with the blade hidden up his sleeve. A girl of about fourteen emerged from a house on the other side of the street, and he crossed over towards her, only to see her disappear into a baker’s shop next door. He was too impatient to wait for her to come out and continued his search further on down the street. From the minute he had left the room with the knife in his hand he had become a different person, another being, a creature he had often felt stirring within him, a strange visitor from the distant past, consumed by an inborn desire to kill. It had killed before and it wanted to kill again. Everything around him appeared to Jacques as if in a dream; he had only one thought in his mind. He must kill. His normal day-to-day life no longer existed; he moved through the streets like a sleepwalker, with no recollection of the past and no sense of the future, driven by this one overriding obsession. He had become an automaton. He was no longer himself. Two women brushed past him as they came up from behind. He quickened his step and had just caught them up when they stopped to talk to a man. The three of them