I stood alone in the entrance hall. I seemed to sense a great emptiness in the house. "Hello?" I said uncertainly, and I could hear the echo.
"Thank you for coming," the old man said, and, reacting to the sound of his voice, I looked up. He was upstairs and looking down over the rail. He was wearing a long white bathrobe and carpet slippers. His legs were skinny and were veined like marble.
"Please," he said, "please, come on up."
I went up the stairs. My heart was hammering. I can't explain it, but I was unaccountably nervous. I mean, I wasn't going to be doing anything much, and certainly nothing extraordinary; this was going to be the easiest money I'd ever made.
We went on up to the attic. All the padlocks were off, and the door between the two rooms stood open. Someone had cleared a space in the junk and placed an armchair in the outer room, with a small table and a few magazines alongside. Through the doorway, I could see the device.
It waited.
"First I want to run one final test, and then I'll have to ask for your help in getting aboard," the old man said apologetically. "I'd thought that I could manage on my own, but I find that I can't. After that, you can go outside and close the door and amuse yourself until it's over. I'll call you then."
I stood back and watched while he fiddled around. The device looked like the world's kinkiest piece of gym equipment. Or the world's most sadistic birdcage. After a moment it started to move, and the old man stepped back.
Clockwork. It all ran by clockwork. I could hear the whirring and the clicking and the spinning of escapements as the entire structure-within-the-structure began slowly to rotate. It was awesome, in its way: strangely cruel, strangely beautiful. When the central part was fully inverted, everything locked into place and a new phase of the mechanism began to operate. The elephant's tusk was now raised above the saddle like death's scythe on a cathedral clock tower, and as I watched, it began to bear down on its levered arm.
Jesus, I thought. No.
But it stopped. It stopped with its silvered tip protruding no more than an inch through the gap in the saddle, and there it began to oscillate gently.
I wanted to snort. And without thinking about it, I looked at the old man to share the joke.
But then our eyes met, and I stopped myself. Because I don't think I've ever seen anyone looking so utterly vulnerable; not before, and never since. His eyes seemed to be pleading with me.
So I said nothing.
The machine reset itself smoothly. The old man dropped his bathrobe self-consciously and stepped forward. I have to say that I've seen more meat on an X-ray. I held his elbows and helped him up, and that was the only contact we had. I noticed that there had been a couple of changes since I'd last seen the device. There was a magazine on the music stand, its pages pinned so that it couldn't fall off. It was an old movie fan magazine and it was open at a picture of Joan Crawford in a bathing suit. The other addition consisted of a small clear plastic bottle that hung empty on some buckle-on webbing. This, I had to assume, was the collection point. There was a drop of something swilling around in there already, maybe some preservative or anti-congealant. I had some gloves and a supermarket carrier bag folded up in my pocket; no way did I want to have any closer contact with that stuff than I had to, and I didn't even want to have to look at it.
"Thank you," he said. "I can handle it from here."
"Are you sure?" I said, not knowing how I'd respond if he were to ask me for anything more.
"I'm sure," he said. "I'll call you when it's done."
So I left him there, hooking himself up and strapping himself in, and went through to the other room and closed the door behind me.
I don't know how much time went by. Half an hour, maybe. No more than that. I sat in the chair and I tried to look through some of the magazines, but I couldn't concentrate. I felt disturbed. You come across something like this and, whether you want to or not, you find yourself taking a hard look at what makes you tick. I could sit there and honestly swear that there was nothing about this whole business that connected with me; not the pleasure device, not the books in the library, none of it. And yet…
And yet I still found myself fascinated, unable to look away. That has to mean something.
Doesn't it?
I heard him calling, weakly.
I hesitated for a moment, and then I stood, dropping the magazine, and went over to the door. I could hear him coughing on the other side. I went through.
The central part of the device was still in its inverted position. He was hanging upside down in the straps like a stranded hang glider. The knotted rope was across his eyes like a blindfold, which meant that he could no longer see the magazine or anything else. It was a comical sight. But I could feel only pity.
And then he coughed again and sprayed blood everywhere.
I ran to the machine and tried to find some kind of a release lever on the panel; I don't know what I did, but after a few seconds it all came back to life, and the entire inner cage began to swing back around. He coughed again, and the blood came out in a bright red foam.
The whole thing locked back into its original position; he whimpered at the slight jarring but otherwise made no sound. Something was different here, but I couldn't work out what it was.
And then I realized that the elephant's tusk was missing. The lever mechanism was there, back in its original position, but the calibrated ivory wasn't.
Stupidly, I looked around on the floor to see where it had fallen; as if it was something that you wouldn't notice if you didn't look twice. There was nothing on the floor but dust and footprints, and the old man's slippers lined up exactly where he'd left them.
And blood on the floorboards. The kind of blood splashes that you get under hanged meat.
And I thought with dismay, as I realized that this was no accident but the way that he'd actually planned it, What, the entire tusk?
"Did everything work?" he gasped, and I knew without a doubt that I had a dying man on my hands, here.
"Seems there were one or two things you didn't warn me about," I said.
"I know," he said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I've left letters, you'll be in the clear. But you've got to tell me. Is the material safe?"
I gave it a long pause before I spoke. He turned his head from side to side, like a blind man searching an empty room for reassurance.
And then I said, "I'm sorry. But you completely missed the bottle."
His face crumpled in despair.
"No," he said. "No."
And then he coughed up a couple more pints of his own lifeblood, spraying it all about like a lawn sprinkler first thing on a spring morning so that I had to dodge back or get spattered, and died.
I've no conscience about it. Not even though it had meant that I'd sent him on into the Great Beyond in the most acute state of misery imaginable; in the knowledge that all of the pain and the self-sacrifice were for nothing, and that his last act had been rendered essentially meaningless by what he'd think was a stupid miscalculation.
He hadn't missed the bottle, of course. I left him there for the servants to find and delivered the material to the clinic as we'd agreed. I completed the deal and I picked up the money. As far as I know, everything should have worked out and his relatives ought to be screaming and banging their heads on the walls about now.
But I see no reason to feel guilty at all.
I mean, come on, the man was a masochist.
So far as I could imagine, it had seemed like the kindest thing I could do.