“You see how simple it is,” he said. “After you are dead I will continue to enjoy for a time the uninterrupted image of you. You will haunt my thought until you grow dim. But I will possess the vanishing shadow…. But now you die.”
Mallare tightened his hold on the beggar’s neck and the man’s cries ended. His head fell forward. Mallare held the dead figure erect, shaking it gently and smiling at the one in his thought.
“Ah, Rita,” he whispered, “it is over now.”
His hands released the throat they were holding. The beggar fell to the ground. Mallare stared at the body and then knelt beside it. His hands passed over the dead face.
“Poor Rita,” he continued. “No longer dangerous.”
[Sixty-six]
He bent over and kissed the matted hair of the dead man.
“Death,” he said aloud as he rose, “is an easy friendship. You would have been sorry a moment ago. But now you are neither sorry nor glad. See, your body is a humble little gratitude.”
Mallare walked away. His thought, like a cautious monitor, re-entered the doors that had closed upon it.
“Curious,” he said aloud, “she followed me and I killed her. Madness is, alas, too logical. I remember almost nothing of the incident. It is a part of the shadows not of me. Still I know it exists. My hands feel tired. But there is nothing to regret. She came too close. And now she lies dead in a strange street. They will find her and perhaps ask me about it. What do I know? Nothing. My memory is innocent. It is after all my superior. I must remain, unquestioning, at its side. This is a pact.”
He returned to his home. The familiar room greeted him like a friendship. He sat [Sixty-seven] down and closed his eyes. Goliath had gone to bed. And she was no longer here.