The Damnation Game

by Clive Barker

  "Put down the gun. You won't be needing it."

  He lay the weapon down on the table beside the plate, on which there were still several wafer-thin slices of meat. Beyond the plate, a bowl of strawberries, partially devoured, and a glass of water. The frugality of the meal matched the environment: the meat, sliced to the point of transparency, rare and moist; the casual arrangement of cups and strawberry bowl. An arbitrary precision invested everything, an eerie sense of chance beauty. Between Marty and Whitehead a mote of dust turned in the air, fluctuating between the light bulb and table, its -direction influenced by the merest exhalation.

  "Try the meat, Martin."

  "I'm not hungry."

  "It's superb. My guest brought it."

  "You know who they are, then."

  "Yes, of course. Now eat."

  Reluctantly Marty cut a piece of the slice in front of him, and tasted it. The texture dissolved on the tongue, delicate and appetizing.

  "Finish it off," Whitehead said.

  Marty did as the old man had invited: the night's exertions had given him an appetite. A glass of red wine was poured for him; he drank it down.

  "Your head's full of questions, no doubt," Whitehead said. "Please ask away. I'll do my best to answer."

  "Who are they?" he asked.

  "Friends."

  "They broke in like assassins."

  "Is it not possible that friends, with time, can become assassins?" Marty hadn't been prepared for that particular paradox. "One of them sat where you're sitting now."

  "How can I be, your bodyguard if I don't know your friends from your enemies?"

  Whitehead paused, and looked hard at Marty.

  "Do you care?" he asked after a beat.

  "You've been good to me," Marty replied, insulted by the inquiry. "What kind of coldhearted bastard do you take me for?"

  "My God..." Whitehead shook his head. "Marty..."

  "Explain to me. I want to help."

  "Explain what?"

  "How you can invite a man who wants to kill you to eat dinner with you.

  Whitehead watched the dust mote turning between them. He either thought the question beneath contempt, or had no answer for it.

  "You want to help me?" he said eventually. "Then bury the dogs."

  "Is that all I'm good for?"

  "The time may come-"

  "So you keep telling me," Marty said, standing up. He wasn't going to get any answers; that much was apparent. Just meat and good wine. Tonight, that wasn't enough.

  "Can I go now?" he asked, and without waiting for a reply turned his back on the old man and went to the door.

  As he opened it, Whitehead said: "Forgive me," very quietly. So quietly in fact that Marty wasn't sure whether the words were intended for him or not.

  He closed the door behind him and went back through the house to check that the intruders had indeed gone; they had. The steam room was empty. Carys had obviously returned to her room.

  Feeling insolent, he slipped into the study and poured himself a treble whisky from the decanter, and then sat in Whitehead's chair by the window, sipping and thinking. The alcohol did nothing for the clarity of his mind: it simply dulled the ache of frustration he felt. He slipped away to bed before dawn described the ragged bundles of fur on the lawn too distinctly.

  VII. No Limits

  40

  It was no morning for burying dead dogs; the sky was too high and promising. Jets, trailing vapor, crossed to America, the woods budded and winged with life. Still, the work had to be done, however inappropriate.

  Only by the uncompromising light of day was it possible to see the full extent of the slaughter. In addition to killing the dogs around the house, the intruders had broken into the kennels and systematically murdered all its occupants, including Bella and her offspring. When Marty arrived at the kennels Lillian was already there. She looked as though she'd been weeping for days. In her hands she cradled one of the pups. Its head had been crushed, as if in a vise.

  "Look," she said, proffering the corpse.

  Marty hadn't managed to eat anything for breakfast: the thought of the job ahead had taken the edge off his appetite. Now he wished he'd forced something down: his empty belly echoed on itself. He felt almost lightheaded.

  "If only I'd been here," she said.

  "You probably would have ended up dead yourself," he told her. It was the simple truth.

  She laid the pup back on the straw, and stroked the matted fur of Bella's body. Marty was more fastidious than she. Even wearing a pair of thick leather gloves he didn't want to touch the corpses. But whatever he lacked in respect he made up for in efficiency, using his disgust as a spur to hurry the work along. Lillian, though she had insisted on being there to help, was useless in the face of the fact. All she could do was watch while Marty wrapped the bodies in black plastic refuse bags, loaded the forlorn parcels into the back of the jeep, and then drove this makeshift hearse across to a clearing he'd chosen in the woods. It was here that they were to be buried, at Whitehead's request, out of sight of the house. He'd brought two spades, hoping that Lillian would assist, but she was clearly incapable. He was left to do it single-handed, while she stood, hands thrust into the pockets of her filthy anorak, staring at the leaking bundles.

  It was difficult work. The soil was a network of roots, crisscrossing from tree to tree, and Marty soon worked up a sweat, hacking at the roots with the blade of his spade. Once he'd dug a shallow grave, he rolled the bodies into it and began to shovel the earth back on top of them. It rattled on their plastic shrouds, a dry rain. When the filling was done he patted the soil into a rough mound.

  "I'm going back to the house for a beer," he told Lillian. "You coming?"

  She shook her head. "Last respects," she muttered.

  He left her among the trees and headed back across the lawn to the house. As he walked, he thought of Carys. She must be awake by now, surely, though the curtains at the window were still drawn. How fine to be a bird, he thought, to peer through the gap in the curtains and spy on her stretching naked on the bed, sloth that she was, her arms thrown up above her head, fur at her armpits, fur where her legs met. He walked into the house wearing a smile and an erection.

  He found Pearl in the kitchen, told her he was hungry, and went upstairs to shower. When he came down again she had a cold spread laid out for him: beef, bread, tomatoes. He dug in with a will.

  "Seen Carys this morning?" he asked, mouth crammed.

  "No," she replied. She was at her most uncommunicative today, her face pinched up with some fermenting grievance. He wondered, watching her move around the kitchen, what she was like in bed: for some reason he was full of dirty thoughts today, as if his mind, refusing to be depressed by the burial, was eager for uplifting sport. Chewing on a mouthful of salted beef he said:

  "Was it veal you fed the old man last night?"

  Pearl didn't look up from her labors as she said: "He didn't eat last night. I left fish for him, but he didn't touch it."

  "But he had meat," Marty said. "I finished it off for him. And strawberries."

  "He must have come down and got those for himself. Always strawberries," she said. "He'll choke on them one of these days."

  Now Marty came to think of it, Whitehead had said something about his guest providing the meat.

  "It was good, whatever it was," he said.

  "None of my doing," Pearl said, offended as a wife discovering her husband's adultery.

  Marty put the conversation to rest; it was no use trying to raise her spirits when she was in this kind of mood.

  The meal finished, he went up to Carys' room. The house was pin-drop still: after the lethal farce of the previous night it had regained its composure. The pictures that lined the staircase, the carpets underfoot, all conspired against any rumor of distress. Chaos here was as unthinkable as a riot in an art gallery: all precedent forbade it.

  He knocked on Carys' door, lightly. There was no answer, so he knocked aga
in, more loudly this time.

  "Carys?"

  Perhaps she didn't want to speak to him. He'd never been able to predict from one day to the next whether they were lovers or enemies. Her ambiguities no longer distressed him, however. It was her way of testing him, he guessed, and it was fine by him as long as she finally admitted that she loved him more than any other fucker on the face of the earth.

  He tried the handle; the door wasn't locked. The room beyond was empty. Not only did it not contain Carys, it contained no trace of her existence there. Her books, her toiletries, her clothes, her ornaments, everything that marked out the room as hers had been removed. The sheets had been stripped from the bed, the pillowcases from the pillow. The bare mattress looked desolate.

  Marty closed the door and started downstairs. He'd asked for explanations more than once and he'd been granted precious few. But this was too much. He wished to God Toy was still around: at least he'd treated Marty as a thinking animal.

  Luther was back in the kitchen, his feet up on the table among a clutter of unwashed dishes. Pearl had clearly left her province to the barbarians.

  "Where's Carys?" was Marty's first question.

  "You never quit, do you?" Luther said. He stubbed out his cigarette on Marty's lunch plate, and turned a page of his magazine.

  Marty felt detonation approaching. He'd never liked Luther, but he'd taken months of sly remarks from the bastard because the system forbade the kind of response he really wanted to give. Now that system was crumbling, rapidly. Toy gone, dogs dead, heels on the kitchen table: who the hell cared any longer if he beat Luther to pulp?

  "I want to know where Carys is."

  "No lady by that name here."

  Marty took a step toward the table. Luther seemed to sense that his repartee had gone sour. He slung down the magazine; the smile disappeared.

  "Don't get edgy, man."

  "Where is she?"

  He smoothed the page in front of him, palm down across the sleek nude. "She's gone," he said.

  "Where?"

  "Gone, man. That's all. You deaf, stupid, or both?"

  Marty crossed the kitchen in one second flat and hauled Luther out of his chair. Like most spontaneous violence, there was no grace in it. The ragged attack threw them both off-balance. Luther half-fell back, an outflung arm catching a coffee cup, which leaped and smashed as they staggered across the kitchen. Finding his balance first, Luther brought his knee up into Marty's groin.

  "Je-sus!"

  "You get your fucking hands off me, man!" Luther yelled, panicked by the outburst. "I don't want no fight with you, right?" The demands became a plea for sanity-"Come on, man. Calm down."

  Marty replied by launching himself at the other man, fists flying. A blow, more chance than intention, connected with Luther's face, and Marty followed through with three or four punches to stomach and chest. Luther, stepping back to avoid this assault,- slid in cold coffee and fell. Breathless and bloodied, he stayed down on the floor where he was safe, while Marty, eyes streaming from the blow to his balls, rubbed his aching hands.

  "Just tell me where she is..." he gasped.

  Luther spat out a wad of blood-tinted phlegm before speaking.

  "You're out of your fucking mind, man, you know that? I don't know where she's gone. Ask the big white father. He's the one who feeds her fucking heroin."

  Of course; in that revelation lay the answer to half a dozen mysteries. It explained her reluctance to leave the old man; it explained her lassitude too, that inability to see beyond the next day, the next fix.

  "And you supply the stuff? Is that it?"

  "Maybe I do. But I never addicted her, man. I never did that. That was him; all along it was him! He did it to keep her. To fucking keep her. Bastard." It was spoken with genuine contempt. "What kind of father does that? I tell you, that fucker could teach us both a few lessons in dirty tricks." He paused to finger the inside of his mouth; he clearly had no intention of standing up again until Marty's bloodlust had subsided. "I don't ask no questions," he said. "All I know is I had to clear out her room this morning."

  "Where's her stuff gone?"

  He didn't answer for several seconds. "Burned most of it," he said finally.

  "In God's name, why?"

  "Old man's orders. You finished?"

  Marty nodded. "I've finished."

  "You and I," Luther said, "we never liked each other from the start. You know why?"

  "Why?"

  "We're both shit," he said grimly. "Worthless shit. Except I know what I am. I can even live with it. But you, you poor bastard, you think if you brown-nose around long enough one of these days someone's going to forgive you your trespasses."

  Marty snorted mucus into his hand and wiped it on his jeans.

  "Truth hurt?" Luther jibed.

  "All right," Marty came back, "if you're so good with the truth maybe you can tell me what's going on around here."

  "I told you: I don't ask questions."

  "You never wondered?"

  "Of course I fucking wondered. I wondered every day I brought the kid dope, or saw the old man sweat when it started to get dark. But why should there be any sense to it? He's a lunatic; that's your answer. He lost his marbles when his wife went. Too sudden. He couldn't take it. He's been out of his mind ever since."

  "And that's enough to explain everything that's going on?"

  Luther wiped a spot of bloody spittle off his chin with the back of his hand. "Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil," he said.

  "I'm no monkey," Marty replied.

  41

  It wasn't until the middle of the evening that the old man would consent to see Marty. By that time the edge had been taken off his anger, which was presumably the intention of the delay. Whitehead had forsaken the study and the chair by the window tonight. He sat in the library instead. The only lamp that burned in the room had been placed a little way behind his chair. As a consequence, it was almost impossible to see his face, and his voice was so drained of color that no clue to his mood could be caught from it: But Marty had half-expected the theatrics, and was prepared for them. There were questions to be asked, and he wasn't about to be intimidated into silence.

  "Where's Carys?" he demanded.

  The head moved a little in the cove of the chair. The hands closed a book on his lap and placed it on the table. One of the science fiction paperbacks; light reading for a dark night.

  "What business is it of yours?" Whitehead wanted to know.

  Marty thought he'd predicted all the responses-bribery, prevarication-but this question, throwing the onus of inquiry back onto him, he hadn't expected. It begged other questions: did Whitehead know about his relationship with Carys, for instance? He'd tortured himself all afternoon with the idea that she'd told him everything, gone to the old man after that first night, and the subsequent nights, to report his every clumsiness, every naïveté.

  "I need to know," he said.

  "Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't be told," the dead voice replied "though God knows it's a private hurt. Still, there are very few people I have left to confide in."

  Marty tried to locate Whitehead's eyes, but the light behind the chair dazzled him. All he could do was listen to the even modulation of the voice, and try to dig out the implications beneath the flow.

  "She's been taken away, Marty. At my request. Somewhere where her problems can be dealt with in a proper manner."

  "The drugs?"

  "You must have realized her addiction has worsened considerably in the last few weeks. I had hoped to contain it by giving her enough to keep her content, while slowly reducing her supply. It was working too, until recently." He sighed; a hand went up to his face. "I've been stupid. I should have conceded defeat a long time ago, and sent her to a clinic. But I didn't want to have her taken from me; it was as simple as that. Then last night-our visitors, the slaughter of the dogs-I realized how selfish I was, subjecting her to such pressures. It's too late in the day for
possessiveness or pride. If people find out my daughter's a junkie, then so be it."

  "I see."

  "You were fond of her."

  "Yes."

  "She's a beautiful girl; and you're lonely. She spoke warmly of you. In time we'll have her back amongst us, I'm sure."

  "I'd like to visit her."

  "Again, in time. I'm told they demand isolation in the first few weeks. of treatment. But rest assured, she's in good hands."

  It was all so persuasive. But lies. Surely, lies. Carys' room had been stripped: was that in anticipation of her being "amongst them again" in a few weeks? This was all another fiction. Before Marty could protest, however, Whitehead was speaking again, a measured cadence.

  "You're so close to me now, Marty. The way Bill used to be. In fact, I really think you should be welcomed into the inner circle, don't you? I'm having a dinner party next Sunday. I'd like you to be there. Our guest of honor." This was fine, flattering talk. Effortlessly, the old man had gained the upper hand. "In the week I think you should go down to London and buy yourself something decent to wear. I'm afraid my dinner parties are rather formal."

  He reached for the paperback again and opened it.

  "Here's a check." It lay in the fold of the book, already signed, ready for Marty. "It should cover the price of a good suit, shirts, shoes. Whatever else you want to treat yourself to." The check was proffered between fore and middle finger. "Take it, please."

  Marty stepped forward and took the check.

  "Thank you."

  "It can be cashed at my bank in the Strand. They'll be expecting you. Whatever you don't spend, I want you to gamble."

  "Sir?" Marty wasn't certain he was hearing the invitation properly.

  "I insist you gamble it, Marty. Horses, cards, whatever you like. Enjoy it. Would you do that for me? And when you come back you can make an old man envious with tales of your adventures."

  So it was bribery after all. The fact of the check made Marty more certain than ever that the old man was lying about Carys, but he lacked the courage to press the issue. It wasn't just cowardice, however, that made him hold back: it was burgeoning excitement. He had been bribed twice. Once with the money; again with the invitation to gamble it. It was years since he'd had a chance like this. Money in abundance, and time on his hands. The day might come when he'd hate Papa for waking the virus in his system: but before then a fortune could be won and lost and won again. He stood in front of the old man with the fever already on him.