The Damnation Game

by Clive Barker

  "It's as though everything gets sticky. I can't shake it off. I hear people talking without them moving their lips. Most of it's meaningless: just rubbish."

  "And it's what they're thinking?"

  "Yes."

  He couldn't find much to say in response, except that he doubted her, and that wasn't what she wanted to hear. She'd come for reassurance, hadn't she?

  "That's not all," she said. "I see shapes sometimes, around people's bodies. Vague shapes... like a kind of light."

  Marty thought of the man at the fence; of how he'd bled light, or seemed to. He didn't interrupt her, however.

  "The point is, I feel things other people don't. I don't think it's particularly clever of me, or anything like that. I just do it. And the last few weeks I've felt something in the house. I get odd thoughts in my head, out of nowhere; I dream... horrible things." She halted, aware that her description was getting vaguer, and she risked what little credibility this monologue had if she went on.

  "The lights you see?" Marty said, backtracking.

  "Yes."

  "I saw something like them."

  She leaned forward.

  "When?"

  "The man who broke in. I thought I saw light coming from him. From his wounds, I suppose, and his eyes and his mouth." Even as he finished the sentence he was shrugging it off as if fearful of contagion. "I don't know," he said. "I was drunk."

  "But you saw something."

  "-Yes," he conceded, without pleasure.

  She got up and crossed to the window. Like father like daughter, he thought: window freaks, both of them. As she stared out across the lawn-Marty never drew the curtains-he had ample opportunity to look at her.

  "Something..." she said, "... something."

  The grace of her crooked leg, the displaced weight of her buttocks; her face, reflected in the cold glass, so intent on this mystery: all enthralled him.

  "That's why he doesn't talk to me any longer," she said.

  "Papa?"

  "He knows I can feel what he's thinking: and he's frightened."

  The observation was a cul-de-sac: she started tapping her foot with irritation, her breath ghosting the window intermittently. Then, out of the blue, she said:

  "Did you know you had a breast fixation?"

  "What?"

  "You look at them all the time."

  "Do I Hell!"

  "And you're a liar."

  He stood up, not knowing what he intended to do or say until the words were out. At last, smothered in confusion, only the truth seemed appropriate.

  "I like looking at you."

  He touched her shoulder. At this point, if they chose, the game could stop; tenderness was a breath away. They could take the opportunity or let it be: resume the repartee, or discard it. The moment lay between them, awaiting instructions.

  "Babe," she said. "Don't shake."

  He moved a half-step closer and kissed the back of her neck. She turned and returned the kiss, her hand moving up his spine to cup the back of his head, as if to sense the weight of his skull.

  "At last," she said, when they broke. "I was beginning to think you were too much of a gentleman." They tumbled onto the bed, and she rolled over to straddle his hips. Without hesitation she reached to fumble with the belt of his bathrobe. He was half-hard beneath her, and uncomfortably trapped. Self-conscious, too. She pulled the bathrobe open, and ran her palms across his chest. His body was solid without being heavy; silk hair spread out from his sternum and down the central groove of his abdomen, coarsening as it descended. She sat up a little to release the robe from his groin. His cock, freed, flipped from four to noon. She stroked its underside: it responded in gulps.

  "Pretty," she said.

  He was getting used to her approbation now. Her calm was infectious. He half-sat up, perching on his elbows to get a better look at her poised above him. She was intent on his erection, putting her index finger into her mouth and transferring a film of saliva to his cock, running fingertips up and down in fluid, lazy motions. He squirmed with pleasure. A rash of heat had appeared on his chest, further signal,, if any were needed, of his arousal. His cheeks burned too.

  "Kiss me," he asked.

  She leaned forward and met his mouth. They collapsed back onto the bed. His hands felt for the bottom of her sweater, and started to ease it up, but she stopped him.

  "No," she murmured into his mouth.

  "... want to see you..." he said.

  She sat back up. He was looking up at her, perplexed.

  "Not so fast," she said, and raised the sweater far enough to expose her belly and breasts to him, without taking the garment off. Marty took in her body like a blind man granted sight: the dusting of gooseflesh, the unexpected fullness of her. His hands toured where his eyes went, pressing her bright skin, describing spirals on her nipples, watching the weight of her breasts ride on her rib cage.. Mouth now followed eye and hand: he wanted to bathe her with his tongue. She pulled his head against her. Through the mesh of his hair his scalp gleamed a baby pink. She craned to kiss it but couldn't reach, and slid her hand down instead to take hold of his cock. "Be careful," he murmured as she stroked. There was wetness in her palm; she relinquished her hold.

  Gently, he coaxed her over and they fell side by side across the bed. She pushed the robe off his neck, while his fingers worked at the button at the top of her jeans. She made no attempt to assist, liking the look of concentration he wore. It would be so good to be completely naked with him: skin to skin. But this wasn't the time to risk that. Suppose he saw the bruises and the needle marks, and rejected her. It would be unbearable.

  He had successfully undone the button and unzipped the fly, and now his hands were in her jeans, sliding under the top of her panties. There was urgency in him, and much as she loved to watch his intent, she aided the undressing now, raising her hips from the bed and sliding the jeans and panties down, exposing her body from nipples to knee. He moved over her, leaving a trail of saliva to mark his way, licking at her navel, and lower now, face flushed, his tongue in her, not expert exactly, but eager to learn, nuzzling out the places that pleased her by the sound of her sighs.

  He slid the jeans lower, and when she didn't resist, all the way off. Her panties followed, and she closed her eyes, blotting out everything but his exploration. In his eagerness he displayed the instincts of a cannibal; nothing her body fed him would be rejected; he pressed as deep as anatomy allowed.

  Something itched at the back of her neck, but she ignored it, too concerned with this other sport. He looked up from her groin, with doubt on his face.

  "Go on," she said.

  She wriggled up the bed, inviting him into her. The doubt on his face persisted.

  "What's wrong?"

  "No protection," he said.

  "Forget it."

  He needed no second invitation. Her position, not lying beneath him but half-sitting, allowed her to watch his sweet display, pressing the root of his cock until the head darkened and glossed, before entering her slowly, almost reverentially. Now he relinquished hold of himself, and put his hands on the bed to either side of her, his back arched, a crescent within a crescent, as his body weight carried him in. His lips parted, and his tongue emerged to lap at her eyes.

  She moved to meet him, pressing her hips up to his. He sighed: frowned.

  Oh, Jesus, she thought, he's come. But his eyes opened again still raging, and his strokes, after the initial threat of mistiming, were even and slow.

  Again, her neck irritated her; it felt more than an itch. It was a bite, a drill hole. She tried to ignore it, but the sensation only intensified as her body gave way to the moment. Marty was too intent on their locked anatomies to register her discomfort. His breath was jagged, hot on her face. She tried to move, hoping the ache was just the tension of this position.

  "Marty..." she breathed, "roll over."

  He wasn't sure of this maneuver at first, but once he was on his back, and she sitting on him, h
e caught her rhythm easily. He began to climb again: dizzy with the height.

  The pain at her neck persisted, but she thrust it out of focus. She bent forward, her face six inches above Marty's, and let saliva fall from her mouth into his, a thread of bubbles that -he received with an open grin, pushing up into her as deep as he could go and holding himself there.

  Suddenly, something moved in her. Not Marty. Something or somebody else, fluttering in her system. Her concentration faltered; her heart too. She lost focus on where she was and what she was. Another set of eyes seemed to look through hers: momentarily she shared their owner's vision. She saw sex as depravity, a raw and bestial exchange.

  "No," she said, trying to cancel the nausea that had suddenly risen in her.

  Marty opened his eyes to slits, taking her "no" as a command to postpone the finish.

  "I'm trying, babe..." he said, grinning. "Just don't move."

  She couldn't grasp what he meant at first: he was a thousand miles from her, lying below in a foul sweat, wounding her against her wishes. "OK?" he breathed, holding on until it almost hurt. He seemed to swell in her. The sensation drove the double vision out of her head. The other viewer shrank away behind her eyes, revolted by the fullness and the fleshiness of this act; by its reality. Did the intruding mind feel Marty too, she half-thought, its cortex plumbed by a cock-head that was swelling to cream even now?

  "God..." she said.

  With the other eyes in retreat, the joy came back.

  "Can't stop, babe," Marty said.

  "Go on," she said. "It's all right. It's all right."

  Flecks of her sweat hit him as she moved on top of him.

  "Go on. Yes!" she said again. It was an exclamation of pure delight, and it took him past the point of return. He tried to stave off eruption for a few more trembling seconds. The weight of her hips on him, the heat of her channel, the brightness of her breasts, filled his head.

  And then somebody spoke; a low, guttural voice.

  "Stop it."

  Marty's eyes fluttered open, glancing to left and right. There was nobody else in the room. His head had invented the sound. He canceled the illusion and looked back at Carys.

  "Go on," she said. "Please go on." She was dancing on him. The bones of her hips caught the light; the sweat on them ran and ran, glowing.

  "Yes... Yes..." he answered, the voice forgotten.

  She looked down at him as imminence infested his face, and through the intricacies of her own flaring sensations she felt the second mind again. It was a worm in her budding head, pushing forward, its sickness ready to stain her vision. She fought it.

  "Go away," she told it, under her breath, "go away."

  But it wanted to defeat her; to defeat them both. What had seemed like curiosity before was malice now. It wanted to spoil everything.

  "I love you," she told Marty, defying the presence in her. "I love you, I love you-"

  The invader spasmed, furious with her, and more furious still that she didn't concede to its spoiling. Marty was rigid, on the threshold; blind and deaf to anything but pleasure. Then, with a groan, he began to spurt in her, and she was there too. Her sensations drove all thoughts of resistance out of her head. Somewhere far off she could hear Marty gasping

  "Oh, Jesus," he was saying, "babe... babe."

  -but he was in another world. They weren't together, even at this moment. She in her ecstasy, he in his; each running a private race to completion.

  A wayward spasm made Marty convulse. He opened his eyes. Carys had her hands glued over her face, fingers spread.

  "You all right, babe?" he said.

  When her eyes opened, he had to bite back a shout. It was, for a moment, not her who stared out between the bars. It was something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Black eyes swiveling in a gray head. Some primeval genus that viewed him-he knew this to his marrow-with hatred in its bowels.

  The hallucination lasted two heartbeats only, but long enough for him to glance down her body and up again to meet the same vile gaze.

  "Carys?"

  Then her eyelids fluttered, and the fan of her fingers closed across her face. For a lunatic instant he flinched, awaiting the revelation. Her hands dropping from her head; the face transformed: a fish's head. But of course it was her: only her. Here she was now, smiling at him.

  "Are you all right?" he ventured.

  "What do you think?"

  "I love you, babe."

  She murmured something as she slumped on him. They lay there for several minutes, his cock diminishing in a cooling bath of mingled fluids.

  "Aren't you getting a cramp?" he asked her after a while, but she didn't reply. She was asleep.

  Gently, he slid her sideways, slipping out of her with a wet sound. She lay on the bed beside him, her face impassive. He kissed her breasts, licked her fingers, and fell asleep beside her.

  32

  Mamoulian felt sick.

  She wasn't easy prey, this woman, despite his sentimental claim upon her psyche. But then her strength was to be expected. She was Whitehead's stock: peasant breed, thief breed. Cunning and dirty. Though she couldn't know precisely what she was doing, she'd fought him with the very sensuality he most despised.

  But her weaknesses-and she had many-were exploitable. He'd used the heroin fugues at first, gaining access to her when she was pacified to the point of indifference. They warped her perception, which had made his invasion less noticeable, and through her eyes he'd seen the house, listened with her ears to the witless conversation of its occupants, shared with her, though it revolted him, the smell of their cologne and their flatulence. She was the perfect spy, living in the heart of the enemy's camp. And as the weeks had gone by he'd found it easier to slip in and oil of her unnoticed. That had made him careless.

  It was carelessness not to have looked before he leaped; to commit himself to her head without first checking what she was doing. He hadn't even thought she might be with the bodyguard; and by the time he'd realized his error he was sharing her sensations-her ridiculous rapture-and it had left him trembling. He would not make such a mistake again.

  He sat in the bare room in the bare house he had bought for himself and Breer, and tried to forget the turbulence he'd experienced, the look in Strauss' eyes as he stared up at the girl. Had the thug glimpsed, perhaps, the face behind her face? The European guessed so.

  No matter; none of them would survive. It wouldn't just be the old man, the way he'd planned at first. All of them-his acolytes, his serfs, all-would go to the wall with their master.

  The memories of Strauss' assaults lingered in the European's entrails; he longed to evacuate diem. The sensation shamed and disgusted him.

  Downstairs, he heard Breer come in or go out; on his way to some atrocity or home from one. Mamoulian concentrated on the blank wall opposite him, but try as he might to exile the trauma, he still felt the intrusion: the spurting head, the heat of the act.

  Forget, he said aloud. Forget the brown fire off them. It's no risk to you. See only the emptiness: the promise of the void.

  His innards shook. Beneath his gaze, the paint on the wall seemed to blister. Venereal eruptions disfigured its emptiness. Illusions; but horribly real to him nevertheless. Very well: if he couldn't dislodge the obscenities, he would transform them. It wasn't difficult to smudge sexuality into violence, turn sighs into screams, thrusts into convulsions. The grammar was the same; only the punctuation differed. Picturing the lovers in death together, the nausea he'd felt receded.

  In the face of that void what was their substance? Transitory. Their promises? Pretension.

  He began to calm. The sores on the wall had started to heal, and he was left, after a few minutes, with an echo of the nothingness he had come to need so much. Life came and went. But absence, he knew, went on forever.

  33

  "Oh, by the way, there was a telephone call for you. From Bill Toy. Day before yesterday."

  Marty looked up at Pearl from his pla
te of steak, and pulled a face.

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  She looked contrite.

  "It was the day I lost my wick with those damn people. I left a message for you-"

  "I didn't get it."

  "-on the pad beside the telephone."

  It was still there: "Call Toy," and a number. He dialed, and waited a full minute before the phone was picked up at the other end. It wasn't Toy. The woman who repeated the number had a soft, lost voice, slurred as if by too much drink.

  "Can I speak to William Toy, please?" he asked.

  "He's gone," the woman replied.

  "Oh. I see."

  "He won't be coming back. Not ever."

  The quality of the voice was eerie. "Who is this?" it asked of him.

  "It doesn't matter," Marty replied. His instinct rebelled against giving his name.

  "Who is this?" she asked again.

  "I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

  "Who is this?"

  He put the receiver down on the slushing insistence at the other end. Only when he had did he realize that his shirt was clinging to a cold sweat that had suddenly sprung from his chest and spine.

  In the love nest in Pimlico, Yvonne asked the vacated line "Who is this?" for half an hour or more before letting the telephone drop. Then she went to sit down. The couch was damp: large, sticky stains were spreading on it from the place where she always sat. She assumed it was something to do with her, but she couldn't work out how or why. Nor could she explain the flies that congregated all over her, in her hair, in her clothes, whining away.

  "Who is this?" she asked again. The question remained perfectly pertinent, though she was no longer speaking to the stranger on the phone. The rotting skin of her hands, the blood she left in the tub after bathing, the horrid look the mirror gave her-all inspired the same hypnotic inquiry: "Who is this?"

  "Who is this? Who is this? Who is this?"

  VI The Tree

  34

  Breer hated the house. It was cold, and the natives in this part of the city were inhospitable. He was regarded with suspicion as soon as he stepped out of the front door. There were, he had to concede, reasons for this. In recent weeks a smell had begun to linger around him; a sickly, syrupy smell that made him almost ashamed to get too close to the pretty ones along the schoolyard railing, for fear they would put their fingers to their noses, making a "poo-poo" sound, and run off calling him names. When they did that, it made him want to die.