The MDMA, the alcohol, the datura, the acid: everything exploded in his brain, and he was thrust into a black hole, in which he wandered unconscious, unsure of what was happening.
* * *
Osborne was driving, but his eyes were sticky.
There was an avenue beyond the windshield, and lights like tinsel. Something had awakened in his body, as if he was emerging from a mad dream. He looked around him and realized that he was at the wheel of a car. He was moving through the night without knowing what he was doing here, driving down this empty street. Glowing insects passed in front of the headlights. He tried to slow down, but he had already stopped.
His circulation was reduced to the flow of blood in his veins. He looked about him, lost, hearing nothing but the raucous sobbing of his lungs. The nearest streetlamp was broken, the one after that shone down on a stretch of asphalt. He was in a surreal decor in which everything seemed to be bouncing off everything else. Cold sweat ran down his temples, his jacket and shirt were impregnated with it. The seat, too, was wet. He must have lost gallons. He opened the door and collapsed on the asphalt. It was hard and cold. When he raised his head, a warm trickle was dripping from his forehead.
He licked his bloody lips, found no taste there. He tried to get up, but couldn’t stand. Then he tried to take a few steps, struck some invisible object, and kissed the asphalt again. The moon had tumbled out of the sky.
Face down on the ground, he crawled without recognizing his hands, stopped thinking about them, stopped thinking about anything. In an absurd act of defiance, he managed to get back on his feet.
His body like paper, his fingertips icy, he seemed to be going backwards. The houses stood out in the darkness, but their façades crumbled as he approached them. He had become a chemical product, he had become noa, something mundane and ordinary.
Osborne continued bouncing off the lampposts and cars in his path, then ended up with his back against a metal door. There were black clouds across the moon, wind swept the street, his eyes rolled in the darkness, he had become nothing but the paint on a painting, part of the decor into which he had melted. He wandered, searching for his steps where there weren’t any. At the end of his wandering, he destroyed a wooden barrier poorly secured to the fence around a construction site.
The site stretched away into the darkness. Carried away by the momentum of his entry, he lost his balance and fell heavily without a cry. His head hit the rubble, and a little blood spurted onto his shirt.
The ditch he had fallen into was deep, and the smell was overwhelming. Sweat, phlegm, gastric excreta. Osborne could barely breathe. Body and soul merging in a single fear, he groped at the earth, searching for a handhold that would let him escape this pit and its horrible stench. No trace of the cosmos, the stars were lost, the moon abolished, the sky invented. Thrown naked into the chaos, hemmed in by the walls of this black hole, he was stagnating, a prisoner shivering in the mud, with a taste like stones in his mouth. His limbs tied him to the rock. He was becoming mineral. His body had stopped working.
A mass of clouds passed over the site. Osborne tried frantically to clear the stones around him. Abruptly, he stopped. He had just touched something. Something soft and sticky. He opened his eyes wide and, by the pale light of the moon, saw the terrified face of a woman.
He was losing his head. Unless he had already lost it. With his cuff, he wiped away the blood running over his eyes. Lying beneath him, covered in rubble, the girl’s face continued to look at him, screaming.
Nausea gripped his throat when he saw her mangled skull. Their faces were almost touching. He sat up, aghast. The blood had spread over her dress, his shirt was full of it. An invisible hand gripped him. The blood was fresh, almost warm. The killer was here, somewhere among the huts and the heaps of sand. He was watching him at this very moment. Osborne could feel danger in the very pores of his skin.
Driven by a diabolical energy, he extricated himself from the ditch, his eyes rolled upwards.
The site.
The huts.
The ditch where the corpse was screaming.
The killer’s breath on the back on his neck.
Instinctively, Osborne reached behind him and found his gun. He rolled over, aimed into the shadows and fired blind.
The shot pierced the silence. The landscape started whirling. He thought he saw a figure in the darkness, a fleeing form, then nothing else. The site, the huts, everything seemed deserted.
He was left with the ditch, the ditch and all this blood on his clothes . . .
2.
The breeze was lifting the curtains of the room. Osborne woke up in a panic. Something terrible had happened, he knew it even before he opened his eyes. Huddled against the door, his legs twisted on the wooden floor, a heap of dead skin, he blinked several times before resuming contact with reality.
Then he saw the room and caught his breath, like someone sinking. With diabolical precision, the curtains had been sliced into thin straight vertical strips.
It wasn’t only the curtains: the bedspread, the blanket, the sheets, the pillow, everything was literally cut to pieces.
He shivered. He was huddled on the floor, with his back up against the door. How many hours had it taken to carry out such destruction? And what madman could have done something like that? Who except him? Osborne leaped to his feet, his eyes red with horror and everything he had seen. His lair had been slashed to pieces, and his clothes were covered in blood.
A trickle of foam had run from his mouth, forming a dry column on his chin. His throat was throbbing dully. His head hurt, as if pieces of brain were being torn off. He pressed his hands against his skull, but nothing came out. Not the slightest memory. Just the vision of a hole, a bottomless hole. How long had his amnesia lasted? And where had all this blood come from?
Osborne threw his dirty jacket to the floor, clung to the wall to stop himself falling, and, suddenly feeling violently nauseous, ran to the toilet. As he threw up, long-held-back tears welled up in him, but still no memories. Then he saw the bright red fur on the edge of the bathtub and almost fainted. Globule was lying there, her body gashed in a thousand places. Handfuls of bloody fur and flesh stuck to the enamel. Her little white teeth were sticking out from her mouth in a ghastly grin. Her throat had been cut. She had been slaughtered.
Osborne left the bathroom, mad-eyed. The bile had burned his esophagus, hiccups rose to his throat. Gritting his teeth in order not to cry out, he contemplated the disaster of the room, all those hanging tatters. He didn’t want to understand, but he did understand all the same, he understood that he was alone, alone, with his world in shreds.
While time stood still, birds were chirping through the window. The mutilated curtains hung loosely in the breeze. The noise of cars jolted him back to everyday life, to the good old taste of reality, but he had a lump in his throat. He racked his brains. Good God, what had he done with his night? A last hiccup left a kind of hole in his belly. He kneeled and started searching anxiously.
The revolver was lying on the floor, under the coffee table, but there was no sign of a razor blade or any other sharp object capable of causing such destruction.
Cold tears were running down his cheeks as he spun the cylinder. One bullet was missing.
* * *
New Lynn, in the east of the city. An ambulance and several police cars stood, with flashing lights, outside the site. Held back behind the metal barriers, a dozen journalists were waiting for the investigators to come out, hoping for a first interview.
Captain Timu stood in the middle of the rubble, his hands in the pockets of his linen pants, looking down at the body. It was a local resident who had found it a while earlier, lying in the shadow of a disused sawmill that was due to be demolished to make way for an apartment building. Sent out on the police frequency, the news had been passed on by media, and was already all over town.
