The Seventh Sinner - Elizabeth Peters [25]
The assumption turned out to be incorrect. After several turns, which seemed to her to be the reverse of the course she had originally followed, she found herself in a room she didn’t remember having seen before. It was a fairly large room, approximately twenty feet square. Its floor was formed of buff-colored tiles, laid in a neat herringbone pattern. There were small blocked-up openings which might have been windows once upon a time, but it was difficult to imagine that any normal human activity had ever been carried on here. The room was not only deserted, it looked as if it had never been occupied.
For several minutes she had been increasingly conscious of a sound. It was not a frightening noise, being, in fact, the murmur of water Michael had mentioned earlier. As she proceeded, through a narrow curved corridor, the sound increased in volume. There was a single door at the end of the corridor. Beyond, in the odd dusty light, she could see part of a brick wall. She went on, hoping to find a passage through.
In the doorway she stopped short. There was no other door. The passage by which she had come was the only entrance into the room. But it was not the finality of the fact that caused her to stop and drove the breath out of her lungs in an explosive cry of horror.
Unlike the other, this room was occupied—but not, she thought, by any living thing. The man who lay face down on the floor, in a sickening puddle of red, was not alive. Nothing could bleed that much and still be alive.
When the sprawled body moved, she tried to scream, and failed; she had forgotten to breathe in, after the first shocked exhalation. Then she forgot about screaming. The eyes in the ashen face were glazed, but they caught her own eyes with a concentrated intensity of demand that made her forget her feelings. Jean knelt down on the dreadful floor and reached out to support the man’s hanging head.
She had recognized Albert even before she saw his face, from the patched clothing and plump body. She was never sure afterward whether he knew her or not; but he sensed another presence, and his desire to communicate was so strong it drove his fading will to an effort she would have believed impossible.
He tried to speak. She saw his mouth move and concentrated on its shape because she could not, would not, look at the gaping gash below. He had nothing left to speak with, not even breath. The fading eyes closed. Then they opened again on a new blaze of will, and one stained finger moved.
Later, trying desperately to find some small redeeming feature in the situation, Jean was glad that Albert’s failing mind missed the obvious source of writing material. His finger left no bloody trail; it merely scratched a darker pattern through the dust of the floor, and if she had not seen the shapes forming, she would never have recognized them. Caught in the hypnotic pull of the dying man’s concentration, she followed the slow, painful strokes with pent breath.
Then the hand clenched in a sudden spasm. The head dropped heavily onto Jean’s supporting hands. Gently she lowered it to the floor and stared with dilating eyes at her reddened hands, and the ugly streaks on her knees and skirt. She rose jerkily to her feet. Softly in the background, like a musical accompaniment, she could still hear the rippling murmur of running water.
4
JEAN WAS UNDER THE MISTAKEN IMPRESSION THAT she was thinking quite rationally. She began to scream—not in panic, she assured herself, but simply as a means of procuring help. She couldn’t run away, because that would mean leaving…him. It? The living entity has gender; the dead are neuter. She wondered whether she had chanced on some deep philosophic truth, or whether the difference only mirrored a meaningless distinction taken over from a language in which all nouns have gender. The designations made no sense; why should a French pen be feminine, and a pencil masculine?
Her breath gave out, and she