Gallery of the Dead

Twenty-Nine

‘Shhhhh,’ the man whispered as he stared straight into Timothy Davis’s eyes. His tone of voice was comforting and reassuring. ‘It will be OK, Tim. It will all be OK now. Trust me.’

Timothy blinked once... twice... three times. The movement was slow and lethargic and though his eyes were still open they were fading fast. The images they registered came in blurry and distorted, as if he were looking at the world through a thick sheet of plastic.

His ears weren’t doing much better, either. Though he could still hear the man’s voice, the words he spoke failed to make much sense, not because they were incoherent or spoken too softly, but because Timothy’s brain, now starved of blood, lacked the capacity to understand them.

The man took a step back and grabbed a lungful of soiled air. It had been a very slow-moving and difficult couple of hours, especially because this had been the first ever time that the man had tried anything like this. The procedure had been a lot harder and taken a lot longer than he had anticipated, but it was all paying off with dividends.

The man had to admit that he’d had his doubts. When he’d first come up with the concept for Timothy Davis, he wasn’t sure it would actually work, and because there was absolutely no way he could test the procedure beforehand, doubts had begun creeping up on him, so much so that the man had considered using a completely different method to achieve what he had set out to achieve. A method that would’ve been almost impossible to properly keep under control. But now he was glad that he had stuck with his original plan. In the man’s eyes, what he had just done was a masterpiece — a work of pure art — and he still wasn’t done yet. For his concept to be absolutely perfect, there were still a couple of finishing touches he had to add, but there was no rush. The man knew that he had all the time in the world, so for a moment he allowed himself to indulge in his own self-glorifying ecstasy.

‘Ple... please.’

Not even Timothy knew where the strength to utter that word had come from, and though his plea had been barely louder than a whisper, it had been enough to shatter the man’s invisible vanity mirror and drag him back to the moment.

His stare rested on Timothy’s now pale face. Life was draining from it fast.

‘It really is OK, Tim,’ the man replied. ‘You don’t have to fight it anymore. Just relax and let it happen.’

Timothy tried to look back at the man, but his unfocused eyes were losing direction. Around him, the room, the air, all of it seemed to be getting colder and colder.

‘Do go gentle into that good night, my friend,’ the man insisted, but by then Timothy’s ears were incapable of discerning sounds.

Timothy felt his heart drumming against the inside of his chest as if he had just run a marathon at top speed. Breathing was getting harder and harder. He couldn’t feel his toes anymore. In fact, he couldn’t feel his legs either... or his fingers... or his hands... or even his arms. Timothy’s whole body seemed to have deserted him, while his heart was literally beating the life out of him.

‘Rejoice, Tim,’ the man said. ‘For this is actually our moment of glory. Yours and mine, and do you know why?’ The man smiled proudly. ‘Because when I’m done, you’ll be immortalized.’

A second later, Timothy Davis took his last breath on this earth.