His lips almost touched her ear, and he spoke in a voice that was only the echo of a whisper.
"Get on your horse, darling," he said. "Sneak out of here and grab one of the cars outside while I keep 'em busy. Drive into town and recruit some large healthy cops. Bring 'em back just as fast as you can. And have breakfast with me."
She only shook her head. Her long hair brushed his mouth.
He couldn't argue with her there.
He left her and hoped that she would go, and knew that she wouldn't. He was glad and yet bitter about that; but it was a confusion of things that he could only take as they broke over him and save to be struggled with some other time.
He had to end this other thing first, no matter how.
He went to the door that the sounds came through, and stopped to put an eye to the keyhole for a second's preview of what he had to walk into. And it was curious that while his face turned to stone his only detached mental reaction was that it was merely exactly what he had imagined in a distant nightmare of unbearable understanding. He had that unreal sensation of being a long way off from all of it, away somewhere, even while the nerve endings curdled under his skin and he began to move under an impetus that was altogether instinctive and altogether quixotic and absurd.
Even while he heard the air-conditioned voice of Dr. Ernst Zellermann, cool and persuasive like the voice of a society psychoanalyst in a darkened consulting-room, the only distinct articulate sound that Re caught and held afterwards, saying: "Why not be reasonable, Patrick, and get it into your head that I must go on until you tell me exactly how much you've been able to accomplish with your masquerade?"
The keyhole glimpse wiped out into a full picture as Simon opened the door.
It was something that would haunt him all his life, something that belonged in a Grand Guignol school of outlandish horror, that was so much worse because the mind had heard all about it long ago and long ago dismissed it as a ghoulish fantasy. Now it was real after all, and the reality had a chill intellectual impact that was capable of leaving scars on the memory of even such a man as the Saint, who thought he had already seen most variations of what there was to be seen in the pathology of macabre dreadfulness.