Read Online The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson - Free Book Online Page B

stand up. Maude slipped a hood over his head. It was the same hood that he had worn the night before; he could smell meat on it, and wine, and smoke. The women led him towards the door. He must have looked like a man being taken to the scaffold.
    “So this is my reward,” he said.
    He felt unaccountably light and skittish; he could not resist making jokes, but there was no reaction from any of the women.
    They passed out of the white room and into the passageway. The toilet, he knew, would be on the left, and there would be a second door ahead of him, about fifteen feet away, but that was where his knowledge ended. He could see nothing, of course, and anything he might have heard was drowned by the sound his chains made as he moved. His sense of smell was complicated by the hood. He had to try and ignore what was left over from the banquet. He had to filter all that out. Smell beyond it, somehow. Through the second door they went and out into what felt like a larger space. A landing, perhaps. This was new ground now.
    They turned to the left, took a dozen steps, then turned to the right and stopped. There are stairs here, one of the women told him. He reached out cautiously with one foot, as if testing the temperature of water. The air that brushed against his bare forearms was cool, reminding him of the air in a cellar. He thought he could smell plaster, a smell he usually associated with new buildings, but the staircase was wide and steep, which led him to believe that he was in an old house. Though there were women on either side of him, he found it easiest to climb down sideways, like somebody on skis. He reached the bottom of one flight, and then embarked upon another, one of the women holding him by the upper arm as a precaution.
    At last they reached ground level. The surface beneath his feet was no longer carpeted. Tile, he guessed. Or concrete. Down one step, along, down another step, along again. One of the women turned a key in a lock and pushed at the door, which seemed to resist her for a moment, then they walked out into the air. . . .
    Even through the hood his first breath was exhilarating. He had forgotten air could be so intricate. He could smell the wind and rain in it, and earth, dark earth, and the bitter milk that leaked from the stems of plants. He could also smell the mildewed panes of a glass-house and the rusting screws on the handle of a watering-can. Then the warm, slightly gritty smell of a red-brick wall. Beyond that, he could smell the city, faintly, but in all its richness and variety: bicycle tyres, canal water, pickled herrings, a tram’s electric cables, spilled beer in the entrance to a bar—and, in the distance, at the very limit of his sense of smell, the pungent salty spray that lifted off the North Sea as it hurled itself repeatedly against the land. He stood outside the door and breathed. Just breathed.
    “Nice garden,” he said after a while.
    He was only guessing, of course, but the stillness of the women told him that he had guessed correctly. Beneath his hood he smiled. He felt so sharp all of a sudden. He felt humorous. Though he was bound and chained, though he had three people to contend with, strangers, it seemed to him that he was master of the situation.
    He shook his head. “You know, I think you might have made a mistake.”
    The stillness deepened. It was almost as if the women were no longer there, as if he was talking to himself. At the same time, though, he could sense the glances arrowing between them.
    “You should never have let me out of that room.” He took another draught of air, took it to the bottom of his lungs. “You were too nice,” he said. “Too kind.” He gave that last word a sardonic twist. “I mean, it’s such a risk. . . .”
    He shuffled forwards. No one restrained him. No one spoke. He found that he was standing on grass. He loved the spongy quality it had, the way it gave slightly beneath him. He could feel its dampness through