Underfoot, there was a dull clanking and rumbling, as if of ancient underground machinery that was starting – at long last – to fail. Above my head wheeled melancholy seagulls, only they were long since dead – decomposing corpses and nothing more. Bits of them fell off around me as they flew. I was full of terrible, frightening guilt – I knew I was guilty of an unbelievably dreadful crime, but I wasn’t able to remember what it was. A crime against nature, a crime against life itself… a Cosmic Crime – a crime the enormity of which was beyond my limited ability to grasp.
The important thing was to make sure knew no one could associate what had happened with me, I realised numbly. I had to somehow dissociate myself from the crime, whatever it was. I had to distance myself from it as much as I could. I had to remove myself from the scene, and not waste too much time about it. If questioned, I had to deny all knowledge, I had to make sure no one could ever pin it on me. I had to find myself some sort of alibi.
He was a person who had put a huge amount of effort into not acknowledging to himself what a sly, good-for-nothing bastard he was, and that – in my book – is exactly what made him such a sly, good-for-nothing bastard. That could be true of any of us of course. It could be true for any of us but in this particular case it wasn’t. In this particular case it was me. It was yours truly, and this was the first time I’d ever admitted it to myself. ‘It was me all along,’ I cried out, without being able to help myself, ‘it was me that did it!’ I didn’t know what it was that I has done, however. I was shooting in the dark…
The moment of madness passed, and I duly came back to my senses. I came back to my senses with a jolt. ‘What have I done?’ I asked myself – ‘what mess have I landed myself in now? What had possessed me, to give myself away like that. I hoped that no unseen ears or concealed recording devices had overheard me. All the silent however, all was still. No life stirred and after a while I allowed myself to relax a little. ‘Never give the game away’, I told myself severely, ‘whatever else you may do, never ever give the game away.’
The moment of madness had come and gone, and I was left sitting there in the semi-darkness in what appeared to be a burnt-out bunker. I felt hideously exposed. I had dropped the ball this time and no mistake and – despite appearances of all being well – I couldn’t allow myself to believe that had been lucky enough to get away with it. No one gets away with anything in this world, you see. There’s too much surveillance for that. Spy bots disguised as harmless bacteria crawled all over my skin. Psychic probes nosed around in my personal unconscious, discovering stuff about myself that even I didn’t know. I’d be the last to know of course. I’d be the very last to know.
