Chapter Sixteen

WHAT DID HE say?! Tlass screamed to himself. What did the fucktard say about my eyes?!

The Saracen watched as panic spiked in the two dark orbs – in truth, he had no interest in explaining to Tlass what he was doing, but he needed the rush of fear and adrenaline to dilate the pupils and engorge the organs with blood. The more blood in them, the longer the eyes would retain the appearance of life after they had been removed.

‘I don’t know you, ’ the Saracen told him, ‘so it’s nothing personal. ’ But of course the Saracen did know him – he knew him in the way that he was always imagining the men who had led his father into a cell in Jeddah so many years ago.

Nothing personal?! Tlass yelled inside his head. He was right, the guy was a fanatic – that’s what the fanatics always said. He tried to muster every hidden reserve, every ounce of energy, willing his muscles to act, trying to buck himself free. The Saracen watched a tiny ripple of movement shimmy down the man’s body. It was sad, really.

Tlass’s eyes filled with tears – of fear, of frustration, of hate. The Saracen reached down, picked up the plastic pouch and untied the cord, allowing it to unroll. It was a surgical kit, and he was happy for Tlass to see it. Another spike of adrenaline and fear, he hoped. Out of one of the pockets he drew an instrument – a four-inch steel scalpel.

Tlass stared at it – a fucking scalpel? He had to do something! Anything! There was the spike, the Saracen noted with satisfaction. ‘I think the right eye first, ’ he said.

By marshalling every sinew in his diminished body, Tlass managed to speak. ‘No, ’ he gasped in a strangled whisper.

If the Saracen heard him, he made no sign. ‘Removing the eyes is a relatively easy procedure, ’ he said calmly, wrapping his fingers around the handle of the instrument

Tlass started climbing a black wall of terror and despair as he watched the scalpel slide towards what many people regard as the most vulnerable part of their body. The blade loomed huge in his right eye as the doctor’s thumb and forefinger kept his eyelids apart. With one deft movement, the Saracen started cutting the lids away.

‘Technically speaking, it’s called an enucleation, ’ he said helpfully. Tlass thought he was going to vomit – he wanted to vomit; anything that might stop the madman.

Blood ran down, half obscuring the sight in his right eye. He could feel the lunatic’s thumb working between the bridge of his nose and the side of the eyeball. The Saracen was pushing the eyeball aside, finding the orbital muscles that held it in its socket, slicing the sinew.

Tlass was drowning under cresting waves of pain. But still he could see out of the eye that was being operated on. Ha, it wasn’t going to work! The Saracen located the last anchor: the optic nerve and the blood supply which coiled around it. Then he cut it.

Half of Tlass’s visible universe instantly disappeared, sucked into a black hole. The eyeball popped out.

The Saracen had to work fast now, tying off the blood supply to the eyeball with a ligature, trying to keep as much fluid as possible trapped within it, plunging the ball into the ice to slow its deterioration. It was the same reason the air-conditioning was blasting. He turned his attention to the left eye – as fast as he had been before, he worked at twice the speed now.

Tlass lost the other half of the universe in a few seconds, the pain so intense he was barely conscious enough to realize that he was totally blind now.

The Saracen opened the locks of the Cadillac, hit the parking lot running and sprinted for the front doors of the institute. In his hand he carried Tlass’s two eyes, firmly nestled in their separate containers of ice.

But they were only the first part of the jigsaw – the next problem was the question of weight.