The Damnation Game

by Clive Barker

  He bit back more words, and shook his head at his own absurdity.

  "Will you help me?" he asked, in place of further explanation.

  "Of course."

  "Well," he replied. "We'll see, eh?"

  Without warning he suddenly stepped past Marty and returned the way they'd come. The jaunt was apparently over. For several minutes they walked as they had, Whitehead taking the lead, with Marty trailing a discreet two yards behind. Just before they came in sight of the house Whitehead spoke again. This time he didn't break the rhythm of his step, but threw the inquiry over his shoulder. Just four words.

  "And the Devil, Marty?"

  "What, sir?"

  "The Devil. Did you ever pray to him?"

  It was a joke. A little leaden maybe, but the old man's way of making light of his confessional.

  "Well, did you?"

  "Once or twice," Marty answered, skirting a smile. As the words left his lips Whitehead froze dead in his tracks, a hand outstretched behind him to check Marty.

  "Ssh."

  Twenty yards ahead, arrested as it crossed their path, was a fox. It hadn't seen its observers yet, but it could only be a matter of moments before their scent reached its nostrils.

  "Which way?" Whitehead hissed.

  "What?"

  "Which way will it run? A thousand pounds. Straight bet."

  "I haven't got-" Marty began.

  "Against a week's pay."

  Marty began to smile. What was a week's pay? He couldn't spend it anyway.

  "A thousand pounds says it runs to the right," said Whitehead.

  Marty hesitated.

  "Quickly, man-"

  "Done."

  Even on the word, the animal caught their scent. Its ears pricked, its head turned, and it saw them. For an instant it was too stupefied by surprise to move; then it ran. For several yards it took off away from them along the path, not veering to one side or the other, its heels kicking up dead leaves as it went. Then, without warning, it sliced away into the cover of the trees, to the left. There was no ambiguity about the victory.

  "Well done," said Whitehead, pulling off his glove and extending his hand to Marty. When he shook it, Marty felt it tingle like the chips had on a winning night.

  By the time they got back, the rain was beginning to come on more heavily. A welcome hush had descended on the house. Apparently Pearl, unable to bear the barbarians in her kitchen any longer, had thrown a fit and left. Though she'd gone, the offending parties seemed well chastened. Their babble was reduced to a murmur, and few of them made any approach to Whitehead as he entered. Those few that did were quickly slapped down. "Are you still here, Munrow?" he said to one devotee; to another, who made the error of thrusting a sheaf of papers at him, he quietly suggested the man "choke on them." They reached the study with the minimum of interruptions. Whitehead unlocked the wall safe.

  "You would prefer cash, I'm sure."

  Marty studied the carpet. Though he'd won the bet fairly, he was embarrassed by the payoff.

  "Cash is fine," he murmured.

  Whitehead counted out a wad of twenty-pound notes and handed them across.

  "Enjoy," he said.

  "Thank you."

  "Don't thank me," Whitehead said. "It was a straight bet. I lost."

  An awkward silence fell while Marty pocketed the money.

  "Our talk..." the old man said, "... is in the strictest confidence, you understand?"

  "Of course. I wouldn't-"

  Whitehead raised his hand to ward off his protestations.

  "-The strictest confidence. My enemies have agents."

  Marty nodded as though he understood. In a way, of course, he did. Perhaps Whitehead suspected Luther or Pearl. Maybe even Toy, who was so abruptly persona non grata.

  "These people are responsible for the present fall in my fortunes. It's all meticulously engineered." He shrugged, eyes like slits. God, Marty thought, I'd never want to be on the wrong side of this man. "I don't fret about these things. If they want to plan my ruin, let them. But I wouldn't like to think that my most intimate feelings were available to them. Do you see?"

  "They won't be."

  "No." He pursed his lips; a cold kiss of satisfaction.

  "You've seen something of Carys, I gather? Pearl says you spend time together, is that right?"

  "Yes."

  Whitehead came back with a tone of detachment that was patently fake.

  "She seems stable much of the time, but essentially that's a performance. I'm afraid she's not well, and hasn't been for several years. Of course she's seen the best psychiatrists money can buy but I'm afraid it's done no good. Her mother went the same way in the end."

  "Are you telling me not to see her?"

  Whitehead looked genuinely surprised.

  "No, not at all. The companionship may be good for her. But please, bear in mind she's a highly disturbed girl. Don't take her pronouncements too seriously. Half the time she doesn't know what she's saying. Well, I think that's it. You'd better go and pay off your fox."

  He laughed, gently.

  "Clever fox," he said.

  In the two and a half months Marty had been at the Sanctuary Whitehead had been an iceberg. Now he had to think about revising that description. Today he'd glimpsed another man altogether: inarticulate, alone; talking of God and prayer. Not just God. There had been that final question, the one he'd thrown away so carelessly:

  "And the Devil? Did you ever pray to him?"

  Marty felt he'd been handed a pile of jigsaw pieces, none of which seemed to belong to the same portrait. Fragments of a dozen scenes: Whitehead resplendent among his acolytes, or sitting at a window watching the night; Whitehead the potentate, lord of all he surveyed, or betting like a drunken porter on the way a fox might run.

  This last fragment puzzled Marty the most. In it, he sensed, was a clue that could unite these disparate images. He had the strangest feeling that the bet on the fox had been fixed. Impossible, of course, and yet, and yet... Suppose Whitehead could put his finger on the wheel anytime he wanted to, so that even the petty chance of a fox running to the right or left was available to him? Could he know the future before it happened-as that why the chips tingled, and fingers too?-or was he shaping it?

  An earlier self would have rejected these subtleties out of hand. But Marty had changed. Being in the Sanctuary had changed him, Carys' ellipses had changed him. In a hundred ways he was more complex than he'd been, and part of him longed for a return to the clarity of black and white. But he knew damn well that such simplicity was a lie. Experience was made up. of endless ambiguities-of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect-and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.

  No; not win. There was no winning and losing here: not in the way that he'd understood before. The fox had run to the left, and he had a thousand pounds folded in his pocket, but he felt none of the exhilaration he had when he'd won on the horses, or at the casino. Just black bleeding into white, and vice versa, until he scarcely knew right from wrong.

  30

  Toy had rung the estate in the middle of the afternoon, spoken to an irate Pearl, who was just about to make her exit, and left a message for Marty to call him at the Pimlico number. But Marty hadn't rung back. Toy wondered if Pearl had failed to pass the message along, or if Whitehead had somehow intercepted it, and prevented a return call being made. Whatever the reason, he hadn't spoken to Marty, and he felt guilty about it. He'd promised to warn Strauss if events started to go badly awry. Now they were. Nothing observable perhaps; the anxieties Toy was experiencing were born out of instinct rather than fact. But Yvonne had taught him to trust his heart, not his head. Things were going to fall down after all; and he hadn't warned Marty. Perhaps that was why he was having such bad dreams, and waking with memories of ugliness flitting in his head.

  Not everyone survived being young. Some died early, victims of their own hunger for life. Toy hadn't been such
a victim, though he'd come perilously close. Not that he'd known it at the time. He'd been too dazzled by the new pools he was introduced into by Whitehead to see how lethal those waters could be. And he'd obeyed the great man's wishes with such unquestioning zeal, hadn't he? Never once had he balked at his duty, however criminal it might have seemed. Why should he be surprised then if, after all these years these same crimes, so casually committed, were in silent pursuit of him? That was why he lay now in a clammy sweat, with Yvonne sleeping beside him, and one phrase circling his skull:

  Mamoulian will come.

  That was the only clear notion he had. The rest-thoughts of Marty, and Whitehead-was a potpourri of shames and accusations. But that plain phrase-Mamoulian will come-stood out in the dross of uncertainty as a fixed point to which all his terrors adhered.

  No apology would suffice. No humiliation would curb the Last European's anger. Because Toy had been young, and a brute, and he'd had a wicked way with him. Once upon a time, when he'd been too young to know better, he'd made Mamoulian suffer, and the remorse he felt now came too late-twenty, thirty years too late-and after all, hadn't he lived on the profits of his brutality all these years? Oh, Jesus, he said in the unsteady rhythm of his breath, Jesus help me.

  Afraid, and ready to admit to being afraid if it meant she'd comfort hull, he turned over and reached for Yvonne. She wasn't there. Her side of the bed was cold.

  He sat up, momentarily disorientated.

  "Yvonne?"

  The bedroom door was ajar, and the dimmest of lights from downstairs described the room. It was chaos. They had been packing all evening, and the task had still not been finished when, at one in the morning, they'd retired. Clothes were heaped on the chest, of drawers; an open case yawned in the corner; his ties hung over the back of a chair like parched snakes, tongues to the floor.

  He heard a noise on the landing. He knew Yvonne's padding step well. She'd gone for a glass of apple juice, or a biscuit, the way she so often did. She appeared at the door, in silhouette.

  "Are you all right?" he asked her.

  She murmured something like yes. He put his head back on the pillow.

  "Hungry again," he said, letting his eyes close. "Always hungry." Cold air seeped into the bed as she raised the sheet to slip in beside him.

  "You left the light on downstairs," he chided, as sleep started to slide over him again. She didn't reply. Asleep already, probably: she was blessed with a facility for instant unconsciousness. He turned to look at her in the semidarkness. She wasn't snoring yet, but nor was she entirely silent. He listened more carefully, his coiled innards jittery. It was a liquid sound she was making: as though breathing through mud.

  "Yvonne... are you all right?"

  She didn't answer.

  From her face, which was inches from his, the slushing sound went on. He reached for the switch of the lamp above the bed, keeping his eyes on the black mass of Yvonne's head as he did so. Best to do this fast, he reasoned, before my imagination gets the better of me. His fingers located the switch, fumbled with it, then pressed the light on.

  What was facing him on the pillow was not recognizably Yvonne.

  He jabbered her name as he scrambled backward out of bed, eyes fixed on the abomination beside him. How was it possible that she was alive enough to climb the stairs and get into bed, to murmur yes to him as she had? The profundity of her wounding had killed her, surely. Nobody could live skinned and boned like that.

  She half-turned in the bed, eyes closed, as if rolling over in her sleep. Then-horribly-she said his name. Her mouth didn't work as it had; blood greased the word on its way. He couldn't bear to look anymore, or he'd scream, and that would bring them-whoever did this-bring them howling at him with their scalpels already wet. They were probably outside the door already; but nothing could induce him to stay in the same room. Not with her performing slow gyrations on the bed, still saying his name as she pulled up her nightdress.

  He staggered out of the bedroom and onto the landing. To his surprise they were not waiting for him there.

  At the top of the stairs he hesitated. He was not a brave man; nor was he foolish. Tomorrow he could mourn her: but for tonight she was simply gone from him, and there was nothing to be done but preserve himself from whoever'd done this. Whoever! Why didn't he admit the name to himself? Mamoulian was responsible: it had his signature. And he was not alone. The European would never have laid his purged hands on human flesh the way someone had on Yvonne; his squeamishness was legendary. But it was he who'd given her that half-life to live after the murder was done. Only Mamoulian was capable of that service.

  And he would be waiting below now, wouldn't he, in the undersea world at the bottom of the stairs? Waiting, as he'd waited so long, for Toy to traipse down to join him.

  "Go to Hell," Toy whispered to the dark below, and walked (the urge was to run, but common sense counseled otherwise) along the landing toward the spare bedroom. With every step he anticipated some move from the enemy, but none came. Not until he reached the door of the bedroom anyway.

  Then, as he turned the handle, he heard Yvonne's voice behind him:

  "Willy..." The word was better formed than before.

  For the briefest moment he felt his sanity in doubt. Was it possible that if he turned now she would be standing at the bedroom door as disfigured as memory suggested; or was that all a fever-dream?

  "Where are you going?" she demanded to know.

  Downstairs, somebody moved.

  "Come back to bed."

  Without turning to refuse her invitation, Toy pushed the door of the spare bedroom open, and as he did so he heard somebody start up the stairs behind him. The footsteps were heavy; their owner eager.

  There was no key in the lock to delay his pursuer, and no time to drag furniture in front of the door. Toy crossed the lightless bedroom in three strides, threw open the French windows, and stepped onto the small wrought-iron balcony. It grunted beneath his weight. He suspected it would not hold for long.

  Below him, the garden was in darkness, but he had a fair idea of where the flower beds lay, and where the paving stones. Without hesitation-the footsteps loud at his back-he clambered over the balcony. His joints complained at this exertion, and more so when he lowered himself over the other side until he was hanging by his hands, suspended by a grip that was every second in danger of giving out.

  A din in the room he'd left drew his glance; his pursuer, a bloated thug with bloody hands and the eyes of something rabid, was in the room-was crossing now toward the windows, growling his displeasure. Toy rocked his body as best he could, praying to miss the paving he knew was directly beneath his bare feet and land in the soft earth of the herbaceous border. There was little chance to fine-tune the maneuver. He let go of the balustrade as the obesity reached the balcony, and for what seemed a long time fell backward through space, the window diminishing above him, until he landed, with no more injury than a bruising, among the geraniums Yvonne had planted only the week before.

  He got to his feet badly winded but intact, and ran down the moonlit garden to the back gate. It was padlocked, but he managed to climb over it with ease-adrenaline firing his muscles. There was no sound of further pursuit, and when he glanced back he could see the fat man was still at the French windows, watching his escape as though lacking the initiative to follow. Sick with a sudden excitement, he sprinted away down the narrow passage that led along the backs of all the gardens, caring only to put distance between himself and the house.

  It was only when he reached the street, its lamps starting to go out now as dawn edged up-over the city, that he realized he was stark naked.

  31

  Marty had gone to bed a happy man. Though there was still much here he didn't understand, much which the old man-despite his promises of explanations-seemed pleased to keep obscured, finally none of that was his business. If Papa chose to have secrets, so be it. Marty had been hired to look after him, and it appeared that he was fulf
illing that obligation to his employer's satisfaction. The results were there in the intimacies the old man had shared with him, and in the thousand pounds beneath his pillow.

  Euphoria prevented sleep: Marty's heart seemed to be beating at twice its usual rate. He got up, slipped on his bathrobe, and tried a selection of videos to take his mind off the day's events, but the boxing tapes depressed him; the, pornography too. He wandered downstairs to the library, found a dog-eared space opera, then slipped back to his room, making a detour to the kitchen for a beer.

  Carys was in his room when he got back, dressed in jeans and a sweater, barefoot. She looked frayed, older than her nineteen years. The smile she offered him was too stage-managed to convince.

  "You don't mind?" she said. "Only I heard you walking about."

  "Don't you ever sleep?"

  "Not often."

  "Want some beer?"

  "No thanks."

  "Sit down," he said, throwing a pile of clothes off the single chair for her. She deposited herself on the bed, however, leaving the chair for Marty.

  "I have to talk to you," she said.

  Marty laid down the book he'd chosen. On the cover a naked woman, her skin a fluorescent green, emerged from an egg on a twin-sunned planet. Carys said:

  "Do you know what's going on?"

  "Going on? What do you mean?"

  "Haven't you felt anything odd in the house?"

  "Like what?"

  Her mouth had found its favorite shape; corners turned down in exasperation.

  "I don't know... it's difficult to describe."

  "Try."

  She hesitated, like a diver at the edge of a high board, then took the plunge.

  "Do you know what a sensitive is?"

  He shook his head.

  "It's someone who can pick up waves. Thought waves."

  "Mind reading."

  "In a way."

  He gave her a noncommittal look. "Is it something you can do?" he said.

  "Not do. I don't do anything. It's more like it's done to me."

  Marty leaned back in the chair, flummoxed.