Chapter Nine
The coronel had acquired, through the timeless stratagem of a knife to Poor Larry’s wool-white throat, the key to Pluck’s room. Now he entered, alone, and shut the door. He stood, as in the hallowed hush of a mausoleum, in the thin, spectral haze allowed by the closed shutters, amidst semi-decipherable objects which, as was the case when stumbling around curse-evoking obstacles in pre-dawn military manoeuvres, he intuited, rather than saw, were there.
The room had not been cleaned, or otherwise altered, since the inspector had last exited it (shortly before, it pains me to remind you, he exited this world). The coronel sat down on the bed and rubbed the back of his hand along the indention in the pillow where the great man’s head had lain.
Then he, with trembling hands, denuded himself of every article of clothing and lay himself down in the bed, cuddling up with the covers, and dreamt.
He dreamt he and Pluck were embracing whilst floating through timeless space. His love for Pluck, he was relieved to realise, was not romantic, let alone erotic—though he couldn’t have, with any honesty, completely ruled out the historical, hypothetical possibility of having engaged in a light bout of sodomy with him, had they both been young men left alone in the barracks in the remote wastelands of, say, Molina de Aragon, or some similarly godforsaken hell on earth, and had the most impeccable hygienic standards been adhered to. No, his love for Pluck was on a much higher plane—a spiritual plane, decided the coronel, although not without some hesitation, for he had never considered himself much of a spiritual man. The sodomy he felt he was enjoying, even now, even now, with Pluck, was what you might be justified in calling a sodomy of the heart, or even of the soul. An interpenetrative, mind you—dually active—mutually violative, ouroborotic sort of sodomising, if that makes any sort of anatomical sense, with synchronised orgasming, meaning, in this context, shared epiphany. At that thought, the coronel’s feeble, shrivelled, withered husk of a penis apologetically spluttered up a few drops of a watery excuse for ejaculate into the holy sheets which had once shrouded Pluck’s classically proportioned buttocks. Even that pathetic oblation had unmanned the coronel of the paltry store of vim he still hoarded, and he splayed out, still asleep, as if on a bier, awaiting his final rest.