Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick Page A

Brighter and brighter. Red, orange, yellow. White! White and blinding! He reeled in the pure white light. Reveled in it for a moment. A moment only.
    It descended slowly, and he saw it coming. He saw it hovering. He cowered, cringed, abased himself before it, but it began its eternally slow descent nevertheless. “God!” came the strangledcry from his entire being, but it drew nearer, nearer, was upon him.
    A crown of iron came down, settled upon his brow, drew tighter, fit him. It tightened and felt like a circlet of dry ice about his head. Arms? Did he have arms? If so, he used them to try to drag it away, but to no avail. It clung there and throbbed, and he was back in his bunker in the digs, feeling it.
    “Alice!” he cried out. “Alice! Please … !”
    “What, Daddy? What?” as she came to him again.
    “A mirror! I need a mirror! Get the little one on top of the john and bring it to me! Hurry!”
    “Mirror?”
    “Looking-glass! Spiegel! Reflector! The thing you see yourself in!”
    “Okay.” And she ran off.
    “And a knife! I’ll need a knife, I think!” he called out, not knowing whether he had been heard.
    After an aching time, she returned. “I have the mirror,” she said.
    He snatched it from her and held it up. He turned his head and looked into it with his left eye.
    It was there. A black line had appeared in the center of the lump.
    “Listen, Alice,” he said, and stopped then to draw a deep breath. “Listen … In the kitchen … You know the drawer where we keep the knives and forks and spoons?”
    “I think … Maybe …”
    “Go get it. Pull the whole drawer out—very carefully. Don’t drop it. Then bring the whole thing here to me. Okay?”
    “Kitten. Things drawer. Kitten. Things drawer. Things drawer …”
    “Yes. Hurry, but be careful not to drop it.”
    She ran off, and a moment later he heard the crash and the rattling. Then he heard her whimpers.
    He threw his feet over the edge of the bed and collapsed upon the floor. Slowly, he began to crawl.
    He reached the kitchen and left moist handprints upon the tile. Alice cowered in the corner, repeating, “Don’t hit, Daddy. Sorry, Daddy. Don’t hit, Daddy …”
    “It’s all right,” he said. “You can have another piece of chocolate.” And he picked up two sharp knives of different sizes, turned, and began the long crawl back.
    Ten minutes perhaps, and his hands were steady enough to raise the mirror in the left and the small knife in the right. He bit his lip. The first cut will have to be a quick one, he decided, and he positioned the knife beneath the black line.
    He slashed and screamed, almost simultaneously.
    She ran to his side, sobbing, but he was sobbing too, and unable to answer.
    “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” she cried.
    “Give me my shirt!” he cried.
    She pulled it from the pile of his clothing and dropped it on him.
    He touched it gingerly to his brow, wiped the tears from his eyes on its sleeve. He bit his lip again, and from the wet trickle realized that it, too, needed wiping. Then, “Listen, Alice,” he said. “You’ve been a good girl, and I’m not mad at you.”
    “Not mad?” she asked.
    “Not mad,” he said. “You’ve been good. Very good. But you’ve got to go away tonight and sleep in another room. This is because I’m going to be hurting and making noises, and there is going to be lots of blood—and I don’t want you to see all this, and I don’t think you’d like it either.”
    “Not mad?”
    “No. But please go to the old room. Just for tonight.”
    “I don’t like it there.”
    “Just for tonight.”
    “Okay, Daddy,” she said. “Kiss me?”
    “Sure.”
    And she leaned forward, and he managed to turn his head so that she did not hurt him. Then she withdrew, without—thank god!—undue noise.
    She was, he estimated, around twenty-four years old, and, despite her wide shoulders and her fat-girded waist, was possessed of a face not unlike one of Rubens’s cherubs.
    After