Loo Sanction

St. Martin's-in-the-Fields His pain was vast. But at least it was finite. Sharp-edged waves of agony climaxed in intensity until his body convulsed and his mind was awash. Then, just before madness, the crests broke and swirled over his limen of consciousness, and he escaped into oblivion. But always he emerged again from the delirium, cold and perspiring, weaker than before, and more frightened. A crisp wind fluted through the arches of the belfry in which he was prisoner and drove his tears horizontally back to his temples. During troughs of awareness between crises of pain, his mind cleared, and he was bewildered by his reactions to impending death. Matthew Parnell-Greene ("Uranus" in the planet-code of the counterespionage agency that employed him) had always known that violent death was a very real alternative to retirement in his line of work. He was not physically bravehis imagination was too active for thatso he had sought to mute his fear by callusing that imagination. He had forced himself to rehearse being shot, being knifed, taking a faceful of cyanide gas from a tube concealed in a folded newspaper, being poisonedhis urbane flair always insisting upon the poison being in exotic foods consumed at really good restaurants. And he had attempted to toughen his tender imagination by abrading it with anticipations of the more disgusting alternatives. He had been drowned in a bathtub; he had been suffocated, his face blue and his eyes bulging within a polyethylene bag; air had been injected into his heart. Always he had died well, with a certain dignity, not struggling dumbly against impossible odds. He had imagined pain, but the end had always come quickly. He had long ago realized that he could not withstand torture and had decided he would cooperate fully with his questioners, should it come to that. Fear, pain, anger, even self-pity had been anticipated so often that they held no more dread than he could stand. But his anxious fantasies had not prepared him for the emotion that now overwhelmed his mind: disgust. Disgust was bitter in the back of his throat. Disgust curled the corners of his mouth and dilated his nostrils. When they found him, he would be unsightly, revolting. The thought of it embarrassed him intensely. In the two hours since a watery dawn had made London visible below him, Parnell-Greene's eyes had dimmed many times, with each fresh crisis of pain that carried him over the brink of unconsciousness as some membrane inside him ripped through, sending waves of shock through his body. How long had he been there? Six hours? Half his life? His existence seemed divided into two parts, one containing forty-seven active, colorful years; the other, six hours of pain. And it was the second half that really mattered. He remembered them bringing him to St. Martin's. Although he had been heavily drugged, it was all perfectly lucid. The drugs had been pleasant, euphoric; they had sapped his will, but he remembered everything. Two of them had brought him. They had stood on either side of him because he was unsteady on his feet. He had sat for a time with one of themThe Mutein a back pew, while the other went up to the belfry to see that the apparatus was in place. He remembered the oaken contribution box with its notice: Contributions to keep this church always open and to maintain its services They had led him up the winding metal staircase and out onto the dark windy platform of the belfry. And then they had . . . and then they . . . Parnell-Greene wept at the sadness of it. He sobbed, and that was a mistake. The convulsion ruptured something inside, pain clawed through his body and throbbed in his head. He fainted. The streets below the church streamed with people. Hundreds gushed up Villiers Street and poured from Charing Cross Station, all hurrying towarTrevanian is the author of 'Loo Sanction', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400098286 and ISBN 1400098289.