The Mad and the Bad

30

Thompson awoke sweltering. The sun was shining on his face through a gap in the foliage and the killer was bathed in sweat. Hastily he got into a crouch, his head swiveling like a weathervane, but the surrounding woods were calm. The singing of the birds and the sighing of the wind were the only sounds. Thompson consulted his watch. It had stopped. He looked up. Judging by the sun, the morning was well advanced. The man clicked his tongue with irritation. For years he had never slept so late.

He got to his feet. He felt ill. He had difficulty walking as far as the upper fringe of the wood. Prone in the grass, he scanned the round-topped mountains. Here and there, kilometers away and shimmering, were little brownish groupings of what were long-horned cattle. No human beings were to be seen.

Thompson scratched his cheek. His growth of beard itched. The killer was exasperated. He had to nourish himself, yet the very idea turned his stomach. If he could just manage to slip through the roadblocks, reach a town, and get in to see a doctor, perhaps he could be set to rights by a blood transfusion.

But no. The doctor would ask questions. And ask himself questions. The whole region must be in an uproar by now. “Massacre in Montbrison,” the headlines probably read. Thompson got up. His leg muscles were jittery beneath him. He made his way, under cover, to the stream. Once there, he lay on his stomach to drink.

As he lowered his lips to the running water something splashed downstream, then reached him in a flash of gray. Thompson extended his arm. He rolled over sideways, ending on his back in the grass with his fingers clasped about the gills of a wriggling trout. Thompson observed the fish’s struggles, how it opened and closed its mouth convulsively. It was interesting. The killer placed his thumbs beneath the throat and forced the trout’s head back. It fought even more frantically. Thompson increased the pressure and felt the neck snap in his hands. The killer felt a rush of happiness. He immediately gutted the fish with his fingers. It was no longer wriggling. He proceeded to devour its sides. The flesh was insipid and hard like that of raw mollusks. Thompson gulped it down feverishly. Bones scratched his throat but he forced himself to carry on, to swallow as much of the meat as he could while the creature’s death still filled him with exaltation.

His nausea did not return until twenty minutes later, once digestion had begun. So all was not lost from the nutritional point of view. Thompson waited for the spasms to end before going back to his vantage point on the bank of the stream to look out for another trout. As he waited he began to think. There was not just trout. There were little animals too. He had never thought of that. Never in his life had Thompson hunted. But the idea of catching an animal and-yes-breaking it was perhaps a temporary solution, a way of countering his lack of appetite, and of surviving, for a little while, yes.