The Damnation Game

by Clive Barker

"Thank you," said Marty. It was enough.

  The waiter walked away, leaving Marty with an armful of possibilities. Apocryphal tales, most likely: the Greek with the system, the panicking American. A man like Mamoulian was bound to collect rumors; his air of lost aristocracy invited invented histories. Like an onion, unwrapped and unwrapped and unwrapped again, each skin giving way not to the core but to another skin.

  Tired, and dizzy with too much drink and too little sleep, Marty decided to call it a night. He'd use the hundred or so left in his wallet to bribe a taxi driver to drive him back to the estate, and leave the car to be picked up another day. He was too drunk to drive. He glanced one final time into the baccarat room. The game was still going on; Mamoulian had not moved from his station.

  Marty went downstairs to the bathroom. It was a few degrees colder than the interior of the club, its rococo plasterwork facetious in the face of its lowly function. He glanced at his weariness in the mirror, then went to relieve himself at the urinal.

  In one of the stalls, somebody had begun to sob, very quietly, as if attempting to stifle the sound. Despite his aching bladder, Marty found he was unable to piss; the anonymous grief distressed him too much. It was coming from behind the locked door of the stalls. Probably some optimist who'd lost his shirt on a roll of the dice, and was now contemplating the consequences. Marty left him to it. There was nothing he could say or do; he knew that from bitter experience.

  Out in the foyer, the woman on the desk called after him.

  "Mr. Strauss?" It was the English rose. She showed no sign of wilting, despite the hour. "Did you find Mr. Toy?"

  "No, I didn't."

  "Oh, that's odd. He was here."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. He came with Mr. Mamoulian. I told him you were here, and that you'd asked after him."

  "And what did he say?"

  "Nothing," the girl replied. "Not a word." She dropped her voice. "Is he well? I mean, he looked really terrible, if you don't mind me saying so. Awful color."

  Marty glanced up the stairs, scanned the landing.

  "Is he still here?"

  "Well, I haven't been on the desk all evening, but I didn't see him leave."

  Marty took the stairs two at a time. He wanted to see Toy so much. There were questions to ask, confidences to exchange. He scoured the rooms, looking for that worn-leather face. But though Mamoulian was still there, sipping his water, Toy was not with him. Nor was he to be found in any of the bars. He had clearly come and gone. Disappointed, Marty went back downstairs, thanked the girl for her help, tipped her well, and left.

  It was only when he had put a good distance between himself and the Academy, walking in the middle of the road to waylay the first available taxi, that he remembered the sobbing in the bathroom. His pace slowed. Eventually he stopped in the street, his head echoing to the thump of his heart. Was it just hindsight, or had that ragged voice sounded familiar, as it chewed on its grief? Had it been Toy sitting there in the questionable privacy of a toilet stall, crying like a lost child?

  Dreamily, Marty glanced back the way he'd come. If he suspected Toy was still at the club, shouldn't he go back and find out? But his head was making unpleasant connections. The woman at the Pimlico number whose voice was too horrid to listen to; the desk-girl's question: "Is he well?"; the profundity of despair he had heard from behind the locked door. No, he couldn't go back. Nothing, not even the promise of a faultless system to beat every table in the house, would induce him to return. There was, after all, such a thing as reasonable doubt; and on occasion it could be a balm without equal.

  VIII. Raising Cain

  45

  The day of the Last Supper, as he was to come to think of it, Marty shaved three times, once in the morning and twice in the afternoon. The initial flattery of the invitation had long since faded. Now all he prayed for was some convenient get-out clause, a means by which he could politely escape what he was certain would be an excruciating evening. He had no place in Whitehead's entourage. Their values were not his; their world was one in which he was no more than a functionary. There could be nothing about him that would give them more than a moment's entertainment.

  It wasn't until he put on the evening jacket again that he began to feel more courageous. In this world of appearances, why shouldn't he carry off the illusion as well as the next man? After all, he'd succeeded at the Academy. The trick was to get the superficies right-the proper dress code, the correct direction in which to pass the port. He began to view the evening ahead as a test of his wits, and his competitive spirit began to rise to the challenge. He would play them at their own game, among the clinking glasses and the chatter of opera and high finance.

  Triply shaved, dressed and cologned, he went down to the kitchen. Oddly, Pearl wasn't in the house: Luther had been left in charge of the night's gourmandizing. He was opening bottles of wine: the room was fragrant with the mingled bouquets. Though Marty had understood the gathering to be small, several dozen bottles were assembled on the table; the labels on many were dirtied to illegibility. It looked as though the cellar were being stripped of its finest vintages.

  Luther looked Marty up and down.

  "Who'd you steal the suit off?"

  Marty picked up one of the open bottles and sniffed it, ignoring the remark. Tonight he wasn't going to be needled: tonight he had things figured out, and he'd let no one burst the bubble.

  "I said: where'd you-"

  "I heard you first time. I bought it."

  "What with?"

  Marty put the bottle down heavily. Glasses on the table clinked together. "Why don't you shut up?"

  Luther shrugged. "Old man give it to you?"

  "I told you. Shove it."

  "Seems to me you're getting in deep, man. You know you're guest of honor at this shindig?"

  "I'm going along to meet some of the old man's friends, that's all."

  "You mean Dwoskin and those fuckheads? Aren't you the lucky one?"

  "And what are you tonight: the wine-boy?"

  Luther grimaced as he pulled the cork on another bottle. "They don't have no waiters at their special parties. They're very private."

  "What do you mean?"

  "What do I know?" Luther said, shrugging. "I'm a monkey, right?"

  Between eight and eight-thirty, the cars started to arrive at the Sanctuary. Marty waited in his room for a summons to join the rest of the guests. He heard Curtsinger's voice, and those of women; there was laughter, some of it shrill. He wondered if it was just the wives they'd brought, or their daughters too.

  The phone rang.

  "Marty." It was Whitehead.

  "Sir?"

  "Why not come up and join us? We're waiting for you."

  "Right."

  "We're in the white room." Another surprise. That bare room, with its ugly altarpiece, seemed an unlikely venue for a dinner party.

  Evening was drawing on outside, and before going on up to the room, Marty switched the lawn floods on. They blazed, their illumination echoing through the house. His earlier trepidation had been entirely replaced by a mixture of defiance and fatalism. As long as he didn't spit in the soup, he told himself, he'd get through.

  "Come on in, Marty."

  The atmosphere inside the white room was already chokingly thick with cigar and cigarette smoke. No attempt had been made to prettify the place. The only decoration was the triptych: its crucifixion as vicious as Marty remembered it. Whitehead stood as Marty entered, and extended his hand in welcome, an almost garish smile on his face.

  "Close the door, will you? Come on in and sit down."

  There was a single empty place at the table. Marty went to it.

  "You know Felix, of course."

  Ottaway, the fan-dancing lawyer, nodded. The bare bulb threw light on his pate, and exposed the line of his toupee.

  "And Lawrence."

  Dwoskin-the lean and trollish-was in the middle of a sip of wine. He murmured a greeting.

 
; "And James."

  "Hello," said Curtsinger. "How nice to see you again." The cigar he held was just about the largest Marty had ever set eyes on.

  The familiar faces accounted for, Whitehead introduced the three women who sat between the men.

  "Our guests for tonight," he said.

  "Hello."

  "This is my sometime bodyguard, Martin Strauss."

  "Martin." Oriana, a woman in her mid-thirties, gave him a slightly crooked smile. "Pleased to meet you."

  Whitehead used no second name, which left Marty wondering if this was the wife of one of the men, or just a friend. She was a good deal younger than either Ottaway or Curtsinger, between whom she sat. Perhaps she was a mistress. The thought tantalized.

  "This is Stephanie."

  Stephanie, the first woman's senior by a good ten years, graced Marty with a look that seemed to strip him naked from head to foot. It was disconcertingly plain, and he wondered if anyone else around the table had caught it.

  "We've heard so much about you," she said, laying a caressing hand on Dwoskin's. "Haven't we?"

  Dwoskin smirked. Marty's distaste for the man was as thoroughgoing as ever. It was difficult to imagine how or why any human would want to touch him.

  "-And, finally, Emily."

  Marty turned to greet the third new face at the table. As he did so, Emily knocked over a glass of red wine.

  "Oh Jesus!" she said.

  "Doesn't matter," Curtsinger said, grinning. He was already drunk, Marty now registered; the grin was too lavish for sobriety. "Couldn't matter less, sweet. Really it couldn't."

  Emily looked up at Marty. She too had already drunk too much, to judge by her flushed complexion. She was by far the youngest of the three women, and almost winsomely pretty.

  "Sit down. Sit down," Whitehead said. "Never mind the wine, for God's sake." Marty took his place beside Curtsinger. The wine Emily had spilled dribbled off the edge of the table, unarrested.

  "We were just saying-" Dwoskin chimed in, "what a pity Willy couldn't have been here."

  Marty shot a glance at the old man to see if the mention of Toy-the sound of weeping came back as he thought of him-had brought any response. There was none. He too, Marty now saw, was the worse for drink. The bottles that Luther had been opening-the clarets, the burgundies-forested the table; the atmosphere was more that of an ad hoc picnic rather than a dinner party. There was none of the ceremony he'd anticipated: no meticulous ordering of courses, no cutlery in regiments. What food there was-tins of caviar with spoons thrust into them, cheeses, thin biscuits-took a poor second place to the wine. Though Marty knew little about wine his suspicions about the old man emptying his cellar were confirmed by the babble around the table. They had come together tonight to drink the Sanctuary dry of its finest, its most celebrated, vintages.

  "Drink!" Curtsinger said. "It's the best stuff you'll ever swallow, believe me." He fumbled for a specific bottle among the throng. "Where's the' Latour? We haven't finished it, have we? Stephanie, are you hiding it, darling?"

  Stephanie looked up from her cups. Marty doubted if she even knew what Curtsinger was talking about. These women weren't wives, he was certain of it. He doubted if they were even mistresses.

  "Here!" Curtsinger sloppily filled a glass for Marty. "See what you make of that."

  Marty had never much liked wine. It was a drink to be sipped and swilled around the mouth, and he had no patience with it. But the bouquet off the glass spoke quality, even to his uneducated nose. It had a richness that made him salivate before he'd downed a mouthful, and the taste didn't disappoint: it was superb.

  "Good, eh?"

  "Tasty."

  "Tasty," Curtsinger bellowed to the table in mock outrage. "The boy pronounces it tasty."

  "Better pass it back over before he downs the lot," Ottaway remarked.

  "It's all got to go," Whitehead said, "tonight."

  "All of it?" said Emily, glancing over at the two dozen other bottles that stood against the wall: liqueurs and cognacs among the wines.

  "Yes, everything. One blowout, to finish the best of the stuff."

  What was this about? They were like a retreating army razing a place rather than leaving anything for those who followed to occupy.

  "What are you going to drink next week?" Oriana asked, a heaped spoonful of caviar hovering above her cleavage.

  "Next week?" Whitehead said. "No parties next week. I'm joining a monastery." He looked across at Marty. "Marty knows what a troubled man I am."

  "Troubled?" said Dwoskin.

  "Concerned for my immortal soul," said Whitehead, not taking his eyes off Marty. This earned a spluttered guffaw from Ottaway, who was rapidly losing control of himself.

  Dwoskin leaned across and refilled Marty's glass. "Drink up," he said. "We've got a lot to get through."

  There was no slow savoring of the wine going on around the table: the glasses were being filled, guzzled and refilled as though the tipple were water. There seemed something desperate in their appetite. But he should have known Whitehead did nothing by halves. Not to be outdone, Marty downed his second glass in two gulps, and filled it to brimming again immediately.

  "Like it?" Dwoskin asked.

  "Willy would not approve," said Ottaway.

  "What; of Mr. Strauss?" Oriana said. The caviar had still not found her mouth.

  "Not of Martin. Of this indiscriminate consumption-"

  He was barely able to get his tongue around the last two words. There was some pleasure in seeing the lawyer tongue-twisted, no more the FanDancer.

  "Toy can go fuck himself," Dwoskin said. Marty wanted to say something in Bill's defense, but the drink had slowed his responses and before he could speak Whitehead had lifted his glass. "A toast," he announced.

  Dwoskin stumbled to his feet, knocking over an empty bottle which in turn felled another three. Wine gurgled out of one of the spilled bottles, weaving across the table and splashing on to the floor.

  "To Willy!" Whitehead said, "wherever he is."

  Glasses raised and tapped together, even Dwoskin's. A chorus of voices offered up

  "To Willy!"

  -and the glasses were noisily drained. Marty's glass was filled up by Ottaway.

  "Drink, man, drink!"

  The drink, on Marty's empty stomach, was causing ructions. He felt dislocated from events in the room: from the women, the Fan-Dancer, the crucifixion on the wall. His initial shock seeing the men like this, wine on their bibs and chins, mouthing obscenities, had long since faded. Their behavior didn't matter. Getting more of these vintages down his throat did. He exchanged a baleful look with Christ. "Fuck you," he said under his breath.

  Curtsinger caught the comment. "My very words," he whispered back.

  "Where is Willy?" Emily was asking. "I thought he'd be here."

  She offered the question to the table, but nobody seemed willing to take it up.

  "He's gone," Whitehead replied eventually.

  "He's such a nice man," the girl said. She dug Dwoskin in the ribs. "Didn't you think he was a nice man?"

  Dwoskin was irritated by the interruptions. He had taken to fumbling at the zipper on the back of Stephanie's dress. She made no objection to this public advance. The glass he held in the other hand was spilling wine into his lap. He either didn't notice or didn't care.

  Whitehead caught Marty's eye.

  "Entertaining you, are we?" he said.

  Marty wiped the nascent smile off his face.

  "Don't you approve?" Ottaway asked Marty.

  "Not up to me."

  "I always got the impression the criminal classes were quite puritanical at heart. Is that right?"

  Marty looked down from the Fan-Dancer's drink-puffed features and shook his head. The jibe was beneath contempt, as was the jiber.

  "If I were you, Marty," Whitehead said from the other end of the table, "I'd break his neck."

  Marty shrugged. "Why bother?" he said.

  "Seems to me, you'r
e not so dangerous after all," Ottaway went on.

  "Who said I was dangerous?"

  The smirk the lawyer wore deepened. "I mean. We were expecting an animal act, you know?" Ottaway moved a bottle to get a better look at Marty. "We were promised-" The conversation around the table had ground to a halt, but Ottaway didn't seem to notice. "Still, nothing's quite as advertised, is it?" he said. "I mean, you ask any one of these godforsaken gentlemen." The table was a still-life; Ottaway's arm swept around to include everyone in his tirade. "We know, don't we? We know how disappointing life can be."

  "Shut up," Curtsinger snapped. He stared woozily at Ottaway. "We don't want to hear."

  "We may not get another chance, my dear James," Ottaway replied, his courtesy contemptuous. "Don't you think we should all admit the truth? We are in extremis! Oh yes, my friends. We should all get down on our knees and confess!"

  "Yes, yes," said Stephanie. She was trying to stand but her legs were of another mind. Her dress, the back unzipped, threatened to slip. "Let's all confess," she said.

  Dwoskin pulled her back into her chair.

  "We'll be here all night," he said. Emily giggled. Ottaway, undeterred, was still talking.

  "Seems to me," he said, "he's probably the only innocent one amongst us." Ottaway pointed at Marty. "I mean, look at him. He doesn't even know what I'm talking about."

  The remarks were beginning to irritate Marty. But there'd be precious little satisfaction in threatening the lawyer. In his present state Ottaway would crumble under one blow. His bleary eyes didn't look far from unconsciousness. "You disappoint me," Ottaway murmured, with genuine regret in his voice, "I thought we'd end better than this..."

  Dwoskin stood up. "I've got a toast," he announced. "I want to toast the women."

  "Now there's an idea," Curtsinger said. "But we'll need a fire." Oriana thought this the funniest remark she'd heard all night.

  "The women!" Dwoskin declared, raising his glass. But nobody was listening. Emily, who had been lamblike so far, had suddenly taken it into her head to strip off. She'd pushed her chair back and was now unbuttoning her blouse. She wore nothing beneath; her nipples looked rouged, as if in preparation for this unveiling. Curtsinger applauded; Ottaway and Whitehead joined in with a chorus of encouraging remarks.