Primogeniture (The Firstborn)

22: Death by Water.

This chapter dedicated to Peter Thomson (otherwise known as Hobnails) for his unflagging support, literary input and vigilant editing skills. 

The Firstborn had lived a long life – the oldest living of his species. In youth he had been energetic, ruthless and willing to go further than most of his contemporaries. He had also been lucky. He had not succumbed to any lingering decease and had managed to live long enough to take advantage of the miraculous life giving advances that he had played such a prominent part in bringing to the world.

He was proud of his achievement and believed that he’d brought about great benefits to human kind and that his name would be immortalised down the ages. However, he had one great fear and that fear was also his inspiration and driving force. He was disproportionately terrified of death.

He wasn’t a religious man and so harboured no concerns for matters of hell fire and damnation – a probable just reward for his many sins and ruthless cruelty throughout his life that even his associates wouldn’t deny. We say associates, for he had no friends or living family. No, it wasn’t the fear of divine retribution that made him panic and break out into a clammy sweat. It was the cold gripping, suffocating fear of nothingness – oblivion – of non-existence; that was the thing he simply could not contemplate. It was in fact his intense fear of dying that kept him alive.

Despite his high hopes of being immortalised down the generations and his anticipation of many more years of life to come, he was mistaken on both these counts. For although he didn’t know it, after so many similar days stretching back nobody knew how many decades. This day was to be his last.

When death finally came, it was not as he had feared or even hoped – that quiet passing, or the long debilitating illness surrounded by sycophantic admirers. When it came, death was brutally undignified, slow and more horrific than his most brutal imagining.

The Firstborn, despite his ability to communicate with his organization around the world, was in reality housebound. The house, however, was a magnificent one with access to numerous gardens, terraces and with vistas overlooking sea and countryside as well as being equipped with every modern convenience.

The Firstborn had a full complement of staff and helpers to attend to his every whim; the entire enterprise modelled on that of Imperial Rome at its height where the Emperor was both sacred and untouchable.

This morning proceeded just like any other morning. The Firstborn’s two trusted lackey’s helped him to his bath. They wheeled him in his chair across the marbled atrium with its panoramic views to the lake and distant mountains beyond, bathed in a white morning light. He was entranced as if seeing it for the first time. It was mornings like this that confirmed his already entrenched belief in life at all cost. Why would anyone want to leave all of this for the blank coldness of oblivion?

His lackey’s were two burly six foot Swedes, identical twins who spoke good English with a slight accent. They doubled as masseuses, physiotherapists and general helpers. They were the closest to The Firstborn, the ones that took care of the everyday needs of a man in his dotage and therefore the ones that mattered if there was to be a successful Palace coup.  

Trusting them implicitly and lulled into a sense of security by the brothers many long years of loyal service, The Firstborn had no suspicions or anxieties in regard to his care. He had never been a man to feel anything other than in complete control and believed that his massive contribution to humanity would ensure that he would be loved and venerated for many years to come.

He had completely failed to grasp the pettiness of the common man – or the greed. It was the small resentments eating away at these two closely bonded twins that made them vulnerable. The small indignities, the rough word to one, which was built up and discussed by the two to become a resentment of both. This made them easy prey to the growing dissatisfaction and ambitions of the eloquent and empathetic Pierre Baptiste.

It did not take much persuasion to convince these two brothers, in their early thirties, that they were worth more than just being the attendants of this wizened and wasted old man whose only ambition was to live on in order to retain his total grip on power. It took very little argument to outline his own revised version of this Brave New World, which was to benefit all of mankind, not just the elite few. Pierre had slowly come to realise the folly and impossibility of the elitist scenario as propounded by The Firstborn and his supporters, just as he had come to find repugnant some of the horrors that had been inflicted in its cause.

Of course, the part the two brothers were to play in the attainment of this new world order was key; their reward – positions that would be central and lucrative, for Pierre was only too aware of the weakness of human nature and a past master when it came to the use of flattery. A technique he always found successful when dealing with, what he would consider to be, the lower orders of mankind. 

So the trap was set, and on the face of it, appeared that it could be easily sprung. After all, this wouldn’t be the first assassination in a warm bath. History was littered with such events – knives and bloody murder. Moreover, the frailty of the subject and the physical strength of the brothers, hardly suggested any practical difficulty. Simultaneously several of the key henchmen and supporters of The Firstborn were to be ‘taken out,’ and replaced with a new administration set up under Pierre and centred in Paris. It was ‘Fait accompli,’ or so Pierre believed.

As the two twins wheeled the Firstborn across the polished marble floor, the elder by five minutes, chatted away in his slightly clipped English and the Firstborn replied in his usual gruff cynical manner, but apart from a bead of perspiration trickling down from the temple of the younger and slightly more nervous twin, all seemed as it would on any other morning.

The plan was simple. The twins would lower the Firstborn into his capacious bath and gently push him under the water. What could possibly be easier? The bathroom was a gleaming white temple to the worship of cleanliness, with every modern convenience of aquatic comfort that money or human ingenuity could devise. The bath was large and sunk into the floor, a necessary luxury in this case for the ease of getting the Firstborn in and out. Even so a mechanical hoist was required for the purpose and this was made ready by the younger twin as the Firstborn sat reading the daily news sheets provided for him by his team as being of particular interest in regard to the longevity debate. 

The elder twin filled the bath with gushing water the temperature set to exactly the correct requirement by a regulator, which was never changed. Whether it was due to a particular sense of malice on behalf of the elder twin or because he felt the job in hand would be made easier, we will never know. But on this particular occasion his left hand eased the regulator control forward a number of turns.

When The Firstborn was lowered into the scalding water he screamed and howled in agony using surprising lung capacity for a man of his age and frailty. However this only led to the elder twin releasing the leaver suddenly, dropping the firstborn fully into the scalding water. The younger twin appeared horrified as the screams increased further in volume. The elder twin, grabbing his brother for aid pushed hard down on the wizened head as the legs kicked and flayed and the bony arms and fingers reached for any means of support which just happened to be the nose and eyes of the younger twin who also set up a loud howling as the vice like grip of the old man sank into his face with no indication of lessening however much his sibling pushed down on the head.

Blood trickled down from the eye socket of the younger sibling as a bony leg catapulted up out of the water catching him in the groin with full and surprising force. The grip the old man had on the younger twin was akin only to the grip he had on life itself, and it seemed like an eternity before the hand went rigid, the body limp and the younger twin was able to prize off the fingers of the emaciated hand and attend to his own injuries, which in this case involved collapsing into the foetal position and giving vent to a loud and agonised howl.