He half rose, but felt weak and sank back. Naturally, there was nobody there. There couldn’t be. The servants had all been given a few days off. It was his imagination playing tricks with him. It was the strain of the last few days. He was getting on in years for business such as this.
His innards were almost boiling with indigestion and he drained the glass, shifting in his chair, trying to get comfortable. The heat in the room had grown oppressive, but, blast it, there was no one to douse the fire. He fetched a deep, shuddering sigh. He would calm himself, then take out the Stormcloud and restore his previous mood with a leaping rendition of “La Primavera.”
Only calmness did not come. He felt a strange oppression creep stealthily over him—a pressure that seemed to build slowly, layer on layer, from within. This was not indigestion; he was getting ill. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief, aware that his heart was beating uncomfortably fast. He had caught a chill in the crypts, no doubt, hefting those heavy bricks, brought out by his unwise second visit to those clammy, nitred depths. He would take a holiday; leave tomorrow, in fact. The isle of Capraia, he told himself, would be a perfect spot . . .
He extended a trembling hand toward the glass of amaro, but the liqueur suddenly tasted wrong, like hot pitch and vinegar in his mouth—hot, even, in his hand. Burning hot. He rose with a cry, the glass falling away and dashing to pieces against the floor. Fosco whirled, stumbled, righted himself.
Porca miseria, what was happening?
He gasped, felt his eyes smart, felt his mouth go dry, his heart accelerate. For a moment, he wondered if he was having a fit of some kind, or perhaps a heart attack. He’d heard heart attacks often began with a feeling just like this: a feeling that something, something, was terribly wrong. But there was no localized pain to his chest or arm. Instead, the terrible oppression within grew, and still grew, until it enveloped him. His very guts seemed to writhe. He looked around frantically, but there was nothing—not the bottle of port, not the violin, not the furniture or the rich tapestries—nothing to give any aid or explanation.
His insides felt as if they were crawling, boiling. He felt his mouth twitching, his eyes blinking uncontrollably, grimacing, his fingers jerking. The heat was like being suffocated with a burning blanket. His skin felt as if it was covered with a blanket of bees. Now fear and heat rose within him as one: an unendurable, irresistible heat that had nothing to do with the fire on the hearth—
Suddenly he knew. He knew.
“D’Agosta—!” he choked, but his throat closed up and no more words came out.
He whirled toward the closed door of the salotto, staggered forward, fell over the side table with a crash, rose to his knees. His muscles were jerking spasmodically, but with an enormous effort of will, he began to crawl forward.
“Bastardo—!” It came out like a choked cry. As he did so, his limbs began to take on a life of their own, twitching and jerking with a horrible violence, but he had only a few more feet to go; he gave one superhuman lurch, seized the door handle. It was burning hot, and he felt his skin popping and sizzling, yet he clung tenaciously, heaved, turned—locked.
With a suppressed shriek he sank, collapsing at the door, writhing. The heat grew, and grew, like lava spreading itself through his veins. A terrible piercing whine, like the buzz of a monstrous gnat, filled his head. What was that he smelled burning? All of a sudden the count went rigid. His jaws clamped together involuntarily, grinding with such force his teeth chipped and split. Now, unbidden, his many sins and excesses paraded before him in a terrible blur. As the heat continued to grow—intolerable yet still increasing, an inferno of agony he could never have imagined possible—Fosco felt his vision grow dim and strange. His eyes jerked around the room, coming to rest on the fire, while reality itself began to distort, fall away, and he began to see things beyond . . .
. . . Oh, dear Jesus, what is that dark shape rising in the fire . . . ?
And now, summoning every last ounce of willpower he possessed—despite the teeth grinding into meal and the blood that filled his mouth and the swelling tongue that refused to move—Fosco began to slur, in something between a gargle and a groan, the words of the Lord’s Prayer.
Pater noster . . .
He felt his skin blister, his oiled hair curl and smoke. He clawed his hands across the stone floor in agony, tearing away the nails in his efforts to get out the words:
. . . Qui es in coelis . . .
Over the shrieking buzz in his ears, Fosco could hear—as if rising from the deepest depths of the earth—the rich and terrible laughter, not of Sergeant D’Agosta, not of any earthly being . . .
. . . Sanctificetur . . .
He tried, with the last of a supreme effort of will, to continue the prayer, but the subcutaneous fat was boiling beneath the skin of his lips:
. . . Sanctiferrrrrrrr . . .
And then came the point where no sound, not even a scream, was possible to utter.
{ 87 }