The Abominable Man

Then he stood up, walked across the room, opened a closet door, reached up with his left hand and took something from the shelf. A long thin object wrapped in a white kitchen towel with a red border.

The object was a carbine bayonet.

He drew it and very carefully wiped off the yellow gun grease before sliding it into its steel-blue scabbard.

In spite of the fact that he was tall and rather heavy, his movements were quick and lithe and economical, and his hands were as steady as his gaze.

He unbuckled his belt and slid it through the leather loop on the sheath. Then he zipped up his jacket, put on a pair of gloves and a chequered tweed cap and left the house.

The wooden stairs creaked beneath his weight, but his footsteps themselves were inaudible.

The house was small and old and stood on the top of a little hill above the main road. It was a chilly, starlit night.

The man in the tweed cap swung around the corner of the house and moved with the sureness of a sleepwalker towards the driveway behind.

He opened the left front door of his black Volkswagen, climbed in behind the wheel and adjusted the bayonet, which rested against his right thigh.

Then he started the engine, turned on the headlights, backed out on to the main road and drove north.

The little black car hurtled forward through the darkness precisely and implacably, as if it were a weightless craft in space.

The buildings tightened along the road and the city rose up beneath its dome of light, huge and cold and desolate, stripped of everything but hard naked surfaces of metal, glass and concrete.

Not even in the central city was there any street life at this hour of the night. With the exception of an occasional taxi, two ambulances and a patrol car, everything was dead. The police car was black with white sides and rushed quickly past on its own bawling carpet of sound.

The traffic lights changed from red to yellow to green to yellow to red with a meaningless mechanical monotony.

The black car drove strictly in accordance with traffic regulations, never exceeded the speed limit, slowed at all cross streets and stopped at all red lights.

It drove along Vasagatan past the Central Station and the newly completed Sheraton-Stockholm, swung left at Norra Bantorget and continued north on Torsgatan.

In the square was an illuminated tree and bus 591 waiting at its stop. A new moon hung above St Eriksplan and the blue neon hands on the Bonnier Building showed the time. Twenty minutes to two.

At that instant, the man in the car was precisely thirty-six years old.

Now he drove east along Odengatan, past deserted Vasa Park with its cold white streetlamps and the thick, veined shadows of ten thousand leafless tree limbs.

The black car made another right and drove one hundred and twenty-five yards south along Dalagatan. Then it braked and stopped.

With studied negligence, the man in the lumber jacket and the tweed cap parked with two wheels on the pavement right in front of the stairs to the Eastman Institute.

He stepped out into the night and slammed the door behind him.

It was the third of April, 1971. A Saturday.

It was still only an hour and forty minutes old and nothing in particular had happened.

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At a quarter to two the morphine stopped working.

He'd had the last injection just before ten, which meant the narcosis lasted less than four hours.

The pain came back sporadically, first on the left side of his diaphragm and then a few minutes later on the right as well. Then it radiated out towards his back and passed fitfully through his body, quick, cruel and biting, as if starving vultures had torn their way into his vitals.

He lay on his back in the tall, narrow bed and stared at the white plaster ceiling, where the dim glow of the night light and the reflections from outside produced an angular static pattern of shadows that were indecipherable and as cold and repellent as the room itself.

The ceiling wasn't flat but arched in two shallow curves and seemed distant. It was in fact high, over twelve feet, and old-fashioned like everything else in the building. The bed stood in the middle of the stone floor and there were only two other pieces of furniture: the night table and a straight-backed wooden chair.

The curtains were not completely drawn, and the window was ajar. Air filtered chilly and fresh through the two-inch crack from the spring-winter night outside, but he nevertheless felt a suffocating disgust at the rotting odour from the flowers on the night table and from his own sick body.

He had not slept but lain wakeful and silent and thought about this very fact – that the painkiller would soon wear off.

It was about an hour since he'd heard the night nurse pass the double doors to the corridor in her wooden shoes. Since then he'd heard nothing but the sound of his own breathing and maybe of his blood, pulsing heavily and unevenly through his body. But these were not distinct sounds; they were more like figments of his imagination, fitting companions to his dread of the agony that would soon begin and to his mindless fear of dying.

He had always been a hard man, unwilling to tolerate mistakes or weakness in others and never prepared to admit that he himself might someday falter, either physically or mentally.

Now he was afraid and in pain. He felt betrayed and taken by surprise. His senses had sharpened during his weeks in the hospital. He had become unnaturally sensitive to all forms of pain and shuddered even at the prospect of an injection or the needle in the fold of his arm when the nurses took the daily blood tests. On top of that he was afraid of the dark and couldn't stand to be alone and had learned to hear noises he'd never heard before.

The examinations – which ironically enough the doctors referred to as the ‘investigation’ – wore him out and made him feel worse. And the sicker he felt, the more intense his fear of death became, until it circumscribed his entire conscious life and left him utterly naked, in a state of spiritual exposure and almost obscene egoism.

Something rustled outside the window. An animal of course, padding through the withered rose bed. A field mouse or a hedgehog, maybe a cat. But didn't hedgehogs hibernate?

It must be an animal, he thought, and then no longer in control of his actions, he raised his left hand towards the electric call-button that hung in comfortable reach, wound once around the bedpost.

But when his fingers brushed the cold metal of the bed frame, his hand trembled in an involuntary spasm and the switch slid away and fell to the floor with a little rattling bang.

The sound made him pull himself together.

If he'd gotten his hand on the switch and pushed the white button, a red light would have gone on out in the corridor above his door and soon the night nurse would have come trotting from her room in her clattering wooden clogs.

Since he wasn't only afraid but also vain, he was almost glad he hadn't managed to ring.

The night nurse would have come into the room and turned on the overhead light and stared at him questioningly as he lay there in his wretchedness and misery.

He lay still for a while and felt the pain recede and then approach again in sudden waves, as if it were a runaway train driven by an insane engineer.

He suddenly became aware of a new urgency. He needed to urinate.

There was a bottle within reach, stuck down in the yellow plastic wastebasket behind the night table. But he didn't want to use it. He was allowed to get up if he wanted to. One of the doctors had even said it would be good for him to move around a little.

So he thought he'd get up and open the double doors and walk to the toilet, which was right on the other side of the corridor. It was a distraction, a practical task, something that could force his mind into new combinations for a time.

He folded aside the blanket and the sheet, heaved himself into a sitting position and sat for several seconds on the edge of the bed with his feet dangling while he pulled at the white nightgown and heard the plastic mattress cover rustling underneath him.

Then he carefully eased himself down until he felt the cold stone floor beneath the damp soles of his feet. He tried to straighten up and, in spite of the broad bandages that pulled at his groin and tightened around his thighs, he succeeded. He was still wearing plastic foam pressure-dressings from the aortography the day before.

His slippers lay beside the table and he stuck his feet into them and walked cautiously and gropingly towards the door. He opened the first door in and the second out and walked straight across the shadowy corridor and into the lavatory.