The dampness awakened him, overwhelming him with a feeling of disaster. The sheet was wet, as were the pants and top of his pajamas. Thinking he was back at home, he almost called out in tears but stifled his cry in time. Everyone was asleep. The wind whistled through the fir trees outside. Lying on his stomach, Nicolas was afraid to move. At first he hoped that the warmth of his body would dry the sheet and his pajamas before morning came. No one would notice anything the next day unless they climbed up to look, to sniff at the covers. But he didn’t smell the characteristic odor of peepee. This smell was not as sharp, barely noticeable. The consistency of the puddle was different, too, like tacky glue between his body and the sheet. Worried, he stealthily slipped one hand beneath himself and felt something viscous. He wondered if his tummy had come open, letting this sticky liquid leak out. Blood? It was too dark to tell, but he imagined an enormous red stain spreading across the bed, across Hodkann’s blue pajamas. At the slightest movement, his insides would spill out. A wound would have hurt him, though, and he didn’t feel pain anywhere. He was scared. He didn’t dare raise his hand to his face, bringing that gummy stuff, that jellyfish secretion from inside him, close to his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils. He could feel himself staring, his face grimacing with fright at the idea that something ghastly was happening to him that had never, ever happened to anyone else, something supernatural.
In the book of horror stories where he’d found ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ he’d read about a young man who drinks a strange elixir, then watches his body gradually decompose, liquefy into a blackish slime. He isn’t really the one who sees this, in the story – it’s his mother, who is astonished that he won’t leave his room anymore, won’t let anyone in, and speaks in a voice that becomes clotted, curdled, dropping lower and lower until soon it’s a kind of incomprehensible gurgling. Then he gives up talking, communicates through notes slipped under the door, messages on which the writing deteriorates as well, the last ones little more than desperate scribbles on paper covered with oily black stains. And when – beside herself with worry – the mother has the door broken down, all that remains is a revolting puddle on the floor, at the surface of which float two lumps that once were eyes.
Nicolas had read this story eagerly but without any real feeling of terror, as though it couldn’t happen to him, and now something like it was happening to him, now this gluey pus was oozing from his body. It was worse than a cut, it was a leak, something seeping out of him. Soon it would be him.
What would the others find in his bed in the morning?
He was afraid, afraid of them, afraid of himself. He had to run away, he thought, and hide, and dissolve off by himself, alone. It was all over for him. No one would ever see him again.
Cautiously, expecting every moment to hear a horrid slurping noise, he managed to lift his stomach off the sheet. Throwing back the covers, he crawled to the ladder and climbed down. Hodkann’s eyes were closed. Nicolas tiptoed from the dormitory without waking anyone. Out in the hallway, the light switch gave off a tiny orange gleam but he didn’t turn it on. At the very end of the hall, unobscured by shutters or curtains, the milky glow from the window overlooking the woods allowed him to orient himself. He went downstairs, his bare feet chilled by the tiles. On the second floor, all the doors were closed except the one to the small office where the teacher had called his mother that morning. He went in, spotted the telephone, and reflected that he could use it if he wanted. Talking quietly, in the dead of night, without anyone knowing – but to whom? It was also in this office that the teacher and the instructors kept all the notebooks of class records. He could have looked through them, hoping to find something about himself. On those rare occasions when he was left home alone, he used the opportunity to go through his parents’ belongings, his mother’s dressing table, the drawers of his father’s desk, without knowing precisely what secret he was looking for but with the vague certainty that discovering it was a matter of life and death for him and that, if he did discover it, his parents mustn’t ever find out. He was careful to put everything back exactly where it had been so they would not be suspicious. He dreaded not hearing the door creak when they came home, being caught, startled by his father’s hand falling heavily on his shoulder. He felt shaky, and his heart raced with excitement.
He didn’t linger in the office but went on down to the first floor. The pajamas were sticking to his thighs, his stomach. A phantom class was assembled in the dim light of the hall, après-ski boots lined up along the wall, jackets hanging on a row of hooks. The front door was closed, of course, but only with a bolt, which he simply slipped open. He pulled the heavy door silently inward and saw that outside everything was white.