The Damnation Game

by Clive Barker

  At long last the service came to an end. Suddenly, to the delight and outrage of the congregation, a raucous saxophone broke the solemnity, and a jazz rendering of "Fools Rush In" was blaring over the loudspeakers. Whitehead's final joke, presumably. It earned its laughs; some of the crowd even applauded. From inside the church there came the clatter of people rising from their pews. Marty craned to get a better view of the porch, and failing, threaded his way back through the press of people to a tomb that offered a view. There were birds in the heat-drooped trees, and their pursuits distracted him, catching him up in their swooping play. When he looked back the coffin was almost parallel with him, shouldered, among others, by Ottaway and Curtsinger. The plain box seemed almost indecently exposed. He wondered what they'd dressed the old man in at the last; if they'd trimmed his beard and sewed his eyelids shut.

  The procession of mourners followed on the heels of the pallbearers, a black cortege that parted the candy-colored sea of tourists. To right and left the shutters tutted; some damn fool called, "Watch the birdy." The jazz played on. It was all gratifyingly absurd. The old man, Marty guessed, would be smiling in his box.

  Finally Carys and Mamoulian emerged from the shade of the porch into the brilliance of the afternoon, and Marty was sure he caught the girl cautiously scanning the crowd, fearful that her companion would notice. She was looking for him; he was certain of it. She knew he'd be there, somewhere, and she was looking for him. His mind raced, tripping over itself in its turmoil. If he made a sign to her, however subtle, there was every chance Mamoulian would see it, and that was surely dangerous for them both. Better to hide his head then, painful as it was not to lock glances with her.

  Reluctantly, he stepped down off the tomb as the clump of mourners came abreast of him, and spied what he could from the shelter of the crowd. The European scarcely raised his head from its bowed position, and from what Marty could glimpse between the bobbing heads Carys had given up her search-perhaps despairing of his being there. As the coffin and its black tail wound out of the churchyard, Marty ducked away and over the wall to watch events precede from a better vantage point.

  In the road Mamoulian was speaking to one or two of the mourners. Handshakes were exchanged; commiserations offered to Carys. Marty watched impatiently. Perhaps she and the European would separate in the throng, and he'd get a chance to show himself, if only momentarily, and reassure her of his presence. But no such opportunity presented itself. Mamoulian was the perfect guardian, keeping Carys close to him every moment. Pleasantries and farewells exchanged, they got into the back of a dark green Rover and drove away. Marty raced to the Citroën. He mustn't lose her now, whatever happened: this was perhaps his last chance to locate her. The pursuit proved difficult. Once off the small country roads and onto the highway the Rover accelerated with insolent ease. Marty gave chase as discreetly as the twin imperatives of tactics and excitement would allow.

  In the back seat of the car Carys had a strange, flickering thought. Whenever she closed her lids to blink or shut out the day's glare, a figure appeared: a runner. She recognized him in seconds: the gray track suit, a cloud of steam emerging from the hood, named him before she glimpsed his face. She wanted to glance over her shoulder, to see if he was, as she guessed, behind them somewhere. But she knew better. Mamoulian would guess something was going on, if he hadn't already.

  The European looked across at her. She was a secret one, he thought. He never really knew what she was thinking. She was, in that regard, her mother's child. Whereas he had learned, with time, to read Joseph's face, Evangeline had seldom let a glimmer of her true feelings show. For the space of several months he'd assumed her to be indifferent to his presence in the house; only time had told the true story of her machinations against him. He sometimes suspected Carys of similar pretenses. Wasn't she simply too compliant? Even now she wore the faintest trace of a smile.

  "It amused you?" he inquired.

  "What?"

  "The funeral."

  "No," she said lightly. "No, of course not."

  "You were smiling."

  The trace evaporated; her face slackened. "It had some grotesquerie value, I suppose," she said, her voice dull, "watching them all play up to the cameras."

  "You didn't trust their grief?"

  "They never loved him."

  "And you did?"

  She seemed to weigh the question up. "Love..." she said, floating the word on the hot air to see, it seemed, what it would become. "Yes. I suppose I did."

  She made Mamoulian uneasy. He wanted a better grip on the girl's mind, but it refused his best endeavors. Fear of the illusions he might evoke for her had certainly given her a veneer of obsequiousness, but he doubted they'd truly made a slave of her. Terrors were a useful goad, but the law of diminishing returns pertained; each time she fought him he was obliged to find some new, more awesome fright: it exhausted him.

  And now, to add insult to injury, Joseph was dead. He had perished-according to the talk at the funeral-"peacefully in his sleep." Not even died; that vulgarity had been exorcised from the vocabulary of all concerned. He had passed on, or over, or away; he had gone to sleep. But never died. The cant and sentimentality that followed the thief to the grave disgusted the European. But he disgusted himself more. He had let Whitehead go. Not once, but twice, undone by his own desire to have the game concluded with due attention to detail. That, and his concern to persuade the thief to come willingly into the void. Prevarication had proved his undoing. While he had threatened, and juggled visions, the old goat had slipped away.

  That might not have been the end of the story. After all, he possessed the facility to follow Whitehead into death, and bring him out of it, had he been able to get to the corpse. But the old man had been wise to such an eventuality. His body had been kept from viewing, even by his closest companions. It had been locked in a bank safe (how appropriate!) and guarded night and day, much to the delight of the tabloids, who reveled in such eccentricities. By this evening it would be ash; and Mamoulian's last opportunity for permanent reunion would have been lost.

  And yet...

  Why did he feel as if the games they'd played all these years-the Temptation games, the Revelation games, the Rejection, Vilification and Damnation games-were not quite over? His intuition, like his strength, was dwindling: but he was certain that something was amiss. He thought of the way the woman at his side smiled; the secret on her face.

  "Is he dead?" he suddenly asked her.

  The question appeared to flummox her. "Of course he's dead," she replied.

  "Is he, Carys?"

  "We just saw his funeral, for God's sake."

  She felt his mind, a solid presence, at the back of her neck. They had played this scene many times in the preceding weeks-the trial of strength between wills-and she knew that he was weaker by the day. Not so weak as to be negligible, however: he could still deliver terrors, if it suited him.

  "Tell me your thoughts . ." he said, so I don't have to dig for them."

  If she didn't answer his questions, and he entered her forcibly, he'd see the runner for certain.

  "Please," she said, making a sham of cowardice, "don't hurt me."

  The mind withdrew a little.

  "Is he dead?" Mamoulian inquired again.

  "The night he died..." she began. What could she tell but the truth' No lie would suffice: he would know. "... The night they said he died felt nothing. There was no change. Not like when Mama died."

  She threw a cowed look at Mamoulian, to reinforce the illusion of servility.

  "What do you construe from that?" he asked.

  "I don't know," she replied quite honestly.

  "What do you guess?"

  Again, honestly: "That he isn't dead."

  The first smile Carys had ever seen on the European's face appeared. It was merest hint, but it was there. She felt him withdraw the horns of his thought and content himself with musing. He would not press her further. Too many plans to plan
.

  "Oh, Pilgrim," he said under his breath, chiding his invisible enemy like a much-loved but errant child, "you almost had me fooled."

  Marty followed the car off the highway and across the city to the house on Caliban Street. It was early evening by the time the pursuit ended. Parked at a prudent distance he watched them get out of the car. The European paid the driver and then, after some delay unlocking the front door, he and Carys stepped into a house whose dirtied lace curtains and peeling paintwork suggested nothing abnormal in a street whose houses were all in need of renovation. Alight went on at the middle floor: a blind was drawn.

  He sat in the car for an hour, keeping the house in view, though nothing happened. She did not appear at the window; no letters were thrown, wrapped in stones and kisses, out to her waiting hero. But he hadn't really expected such signs; they were fictional devices, and this was real. Dirty stone, dirty windows, dirty terrors skulking at his groin.

  He hadn't eaten properly since the announcement of Whitehead's death; now for the first time since that morning, he felt healthily hungry. Leaving the house to creeping twilight, he went to find himself sustenance.

  53

  Luther was packing. The days since Whitehead's death had been a whirlwind, and he was dizzied by it. With so much money in his pocket, every minute a new option occurred to him, a fantasy now realizable. For the short term at least he'd decided to go home to Jamaica for a long holiday. He had left when he was eight, nineteen years ago; his memories of the island were gilded. He was prepared to be disappointed, but if he didn't like the place, no matter. A man of his newfound wealth needed no specific plans: he could move on. Another island; another continent.

  He had almost finished his preparations for departure when a voice called him from downstairs. It wasn't a voice he knew.

  "Luther? Are you there?"

  He went to the top of the stairs. The woman he'd once shared this small house with had gone, left him six months ago taking their children. The house should have been empty. But there was somebody in the hall; not one but two people. His interlocutor, a tall, even stately man, stared up the stairs at him, light from the landing shining on his wide, smooth brow. Luther recognized the face; from the funeral perhaps? Behind him, in shadow, was a heavier figure.

  "I'd like a word," said the first.

  "How did you get in here? Who the hell are you?"

  "Just a word. About your employer."

  "Are you from the press, is that it? Look, I've told you everything I know. Now get the hell out of here before I call the police. You've got no right breaking in here."

  The second man stepped out of the shadows and looked up the stairs. His face was made-up, that much was apparent even from a distance. The flesh was powdered, the cheeks rouged: he looked like a pantomime dame. Luther stepped back from the top of the stairs, mind racing. "Don't be afraid," the first man said, and the way he said it made Luther more afraid than ever. What capacities might such politeness harbor?

  "If you're not out of here in ten seconds-" he warned.

  "Where is Joseph?" the polite man asked.

  "Dead."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Of course I'm sure. I saw you at the funeral, didn't I? I don't know who you are-"

  "My name is Mamoulian."

  "Well, you were there, weren't you? You saw for yourself. He's dead."

  "I saw a box."

  "He's dead, man," Luther insisted.

  "You were the one who found him, I gather," the European said, moving a few silent paces across the hallway to the bottom of the stairs.

  "That's right. In bed," Luther replied. Maybe they were press, after all. "I found him in bed. He died in his sleep."

  "Come down here. Furnish the details, if you would."

  "I'm fine where I am."

  The European looked up at the chauffeur's frowning face; felt, tentatively, at the nape of his neck. There was too much heat and dirt in there; he wasn't resilient enough for an investigation. There were other, cruder methods, however. He half-gestured toward the Razor-Eater, whose sandalwood presence he smelled close.

  "This is Anthony Breer," he said. "He has in his time dispatched children and dogs-you remember the dogs, Luther?-with admirable thoroughness. He is not afraid of death. Indeed he enjoys an extraordinary empathy with it."

  The pantomime face gleamed up from the stairwell, desire in its eyes.

  "Now, please," Mamoulian said, "for both our sakes; the truth."

  Luther's throat was so dry the words scarcely came. "The old man's dead," he said. "That's all I know. If I knew any more I'd tell you."

  Mamoulian nodded; the look on his face as he spoke was compassionate, as if he genuinely feared for what must happen next.

  "You tell me something I want to believe; and you say it with such conviction I almost do. In principle I can leave, content, and you can go about your business. Except"-he sighed, heavily-"except that I don't quite believe you enough."

  "Look, this is my fucking house!" Luther blustered, sensing that extreme measures were needed now. The man called Breer had unbuttoned his jacket. He wore no shirt underneath. There were skewers threaded through the fat of his chest, transfixing his nipples, crossways. He reached up and drew two out; no blood came. Armed with these steel needles, he shuffled to the bottom of the stairs.

  "I've done nothing," Luther pleaded.

  "So you say."

  The Razor-Eater began to mount the stairs. The unpowdered breasts were hairless and yellowish.

  "Wait!"

  At Luther's shout, Breer paused.

  "Yes?" said Mamoulian.

  "You keep him off me!"

  "If you have something to tell me, spit it out. I'm more than eager to listen."

  Luther nodded. Breer's face registered disappointment. Luther swallowed hard before speaking. He'd been paid what was to him a small fortune not to say what he was about to say, but Whitehead hadn't warned him that it would be like this. He'd expected a gaggle of inquisitive reporters, perhaps even a lucrative offer for his story to go into the Sunday papers, but not this: not this ogre, with his doll's face and his bloodless wounds. There was a limit to the amount of silence any money could buy, for Christ's sake.

  "What have you got to say?" Mamoulian asked.

  "He's not dead," Luther replied. There: it wasn't so difficult to do, was it? "It was all set up. Only two or three people knew: I was one of them."

  "Why you?"

  Luther wasn't certain on this point. "I suppose he trusted me," he said, shrugging.

  "Ah."

  "Besides, somebody had to find the body, and I was the most believable candidate. He just wanted to make a clean getaway. Start again where he'd never be found."

  "And where was that?"

  Luther shook his head. "I don't know, man. Anywhere, I suppose, where nobody knows his face. He never told me."

  "He must have hinted."

  "No."

  Breer took heart at Luther's reticence; his look brightened.

  "Now come on," Mamoulian coaxed. "You've given me the motherlode; where's the harm in telling me the rest?"

  "There is no more."

  "Why make pain for yourself?"

  "He never told me, man!" Breer took a step up the stairs; and another; and another.

  "He must have given you some idea," Mamoulian said. "Think! Think! You said he trusted you."

  "Not that much! Hey, keep him off me, will you?"

  The skewers glittered.

  "For Christ's sake keep him off me!"

  There were many pities. The first was that one human being was capable of such smiling brutality to another. The second that Luther had known nothing. His fund of information had been, as he'd claimed, strictly limited. But by the time the European was certain of Luther's ignorance the man was past recall. Well; that wasn't strictly true. Resurrection was perfectly plausible. But Mamoulian had better things to do with his waning stamina; and besides, letting the man remain dead w
as the one way he could compensate for the suffering the chauffeur had vainly endured.

  "Joseph. Joseph. Joseph," Mamoulian chided. And the dark flowed on.

  X Nothing; and After

  54

  Having secured himself all he needed for a long vigil at the house on Caliban Street-reading material, food, drink-Marty returned there and watched through most of the night, with a bottle of Chivas Regal and the car radio for company. Just before dawn he deserted his watch and drove drunkenly back to his room, sleeping through until almost noon. When he woke his head felt the size of a balloon, and as stalely inflated; but there was purpose in the day ahead. No dreams of Kansas now; just the fact of the house and Carys locked up in it.

  After a breakfast of hamburgers he returned to the street, parking far enough away to be inconspicuous, yet close enough to see the comings and goings. He spent the next three days-in which the temperature rose from the high seventies into the middle eighties-in the same location. Sometimes he'd catch a few minutes of cramped sleep in the car; more often he returned to Kilburn to snatch an hour or two. The furnace of the street became familiar to him in all its moods. He saw it just before dawn, flickering into solidity. He saw it in midmorning, young wives out with children, business in their walk; in the gaudy afternoon too; and in the evening, when the sugar-pink light of a declining sun made brick and slate exult. The private and public lives of the Calibanese unfolded to him. A spastic child at Number Sixty-seven, whose anger was a secret vice. The woman at Number Eighty-one who welcomed a man to the house daily at twelve-forty-five. Her husband, a policeman to judge by shirt and tie, was welcomed home each night with a ration of doorstep ardor in direct proportion to the time wife and lover had spent together at lunchtime. More too: a dozen, two dozen stories, interlocking, dividing again.

  As to the house itself, he saw occasional activity there, but not once did he glimpse Carys. The blinds at the middle windows were kept drawn throughout the day and only lifted in the late afternoon, when the strongest of the sun was past. The single top-story window looked to be permanently shuttered from inside.