The Damnation Game

by Clive Barker

Oh, yes; she remembered. There was a tree in this fog somewhere; she'd seen it in the sauna. It was a blossom-laden freak of a tree, and under it she'd glimpsed such horrid sights. Was that where Marty had gone? Was he hanging from it even now: new fruit?

  Damn it, no! She mustn't give in to such thoughts. It was just a room. She could find the walls if she concentrated, even find the window maybe.

  Careless of what she might stumble over, she turned to her right, and walked four paces, five, until her outstretched hands hit the wall: it was shockingly, splendidly solid. Ha! she thought, fuck you and your tree! Look what I've found. She put her palms flat on the wall. Now; left or right? She threw up an imaginary coin. It came down heads, and she started to edge along to her left.

  No you don't, the room whispered.

  "Try stopping me."

  Nowhere to go, it spat back, just round and round. You've always gone round and round, haven't you? Weak, lazy, ridiculous woman.

  "You call me ridiculous. You. A talking fog."

  The wall she was moving steadily along seemed to stretch on and on. After half a dozen paces she began to doubt the theory she was testing. Perhaps this was a manipulable space after all. Perhaps she was moving away from Marty along some new Wall of China. But she clung to the cold surface as tenaciously as a climber to a sheer cliff. If necessary she would make her way around the entire room until she found the door, Marty, or both.

  Pure cunt, the room said. That's all you are. Can't even find your way out of a little maze like this. Better just lie down and take what's coming to you, the way good cunts should.

  Did she sense a note of desperation in this fresh assault?

  Despair? said the room. I thrive on it. Cunt.

  She had reached a corner of the room. Now she turned along the next wall.

  No you don't, said the room.

  Yes I do, she thought.

  I wouldn't go that way. Oh, no. Really I wouldn't. The Razor-Eater's up here with you. Can't you hear him? He's just a few inches ahead of you. No, don't! Oh, please don't! I hate the smell of blood.

  Pure histrionics; that was all it could muster. The more the room panicked, the more her spirits rose.

  Stop! For your own sake! Stop!

  Even as it shouted in her head her hands found the window. This was what it was so frightened she'd discover.

  CUNT! it shrieked. You'll be sorry. I promise you. Oh, yes.

  There were no curtains or shutters; the window had been entirely boarded up so that nothing could spoil this perfect nullity. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase on one of the planks: it was time she let some outside world in. The wood had been very firmly nailed in place, however. Though she tugged, there was little or no give.

  "Shift, damn you!"

  The plank creaked, splinters sprang off it. "Yes," she coaxed, "here we are." Light, a fractured, all-too-uncertain thread of it, filtered between the planks. "Come on," she cajoled, pulling harder. The top joints of her fingers were bent back in her effort to wrest the wood from its place, but the thread of light had now widened to a beam. It fell on her, and through a veil of dirty air she began to make out the shape of her own hands.

  It wasn't daylight that spilled between the planks. Just the glimmer of streetlamps and car headlights, of starlight perhaps, of televisions blazing in a dozen houses along Caliban Street. It was sufficient, though. With every inch the gap increased, more certainty invaded the room; edge and substance.

  Elsewhere in the room, Marty too felt the light. It irritated him, like someone throwing open spring-morning curtains on a dying man. He crabbed his way across the floor, trying to bury himself in the fog before it dispersed, seeking out the reassuring voice that would tell him nothing was essential. But it had gone. He was deserted, and the light was falling in broader and yet broader strokes. He could see a woman outlined against the window. She had wrenched off one plank and thrown it down. Now she was pulling at a second. "Come to Mama," she was saying, and the light came, defining her within ever more nauseating detail. He wanted none of it; it was a burden, this being business. He exhaled a little whistle of pain and exasperation.

  She turned to him. "There you are," she said, crossing to him and pulling him to his feet. "We've got to be quick."

  Marty was staring at the room, which was now revealed in all its banality. A mattress on the floor; an upturned porcelain cup; beside it, a water jug.

  "Wake up," Carys said, shaking him.

  No need to go, he thought; nothing to lose if I stay here and the gray comes again.

  "For Christ's sake, Marty!" she yelled at him. From below came the sound of wood shrieking. He's coming, ready or not, she thought.

  "Marty," she shouted at him. "Can you hear? It's Breer."

  The name awoke horrors. A cold girl, sitting at her table laid with her own meat. His terrible, unspeakable joke. The image slapped the fog from Marty's head. The thing that had performed that horror was downstairs; he remembered now, all too well. He looked at Carys with clear, if tearful, eyes.

  "What happened?"

  "No time," she said.

  He limped after her toward the door. She was still carrying one of the planks she'd pulled from the window, its nails still in place. The noise from below mounted still, the din of unhinged door and mind.

  The pain in Marty's torn leg, which the room had so skillfully dulled, now raged up again. He needed support from Carys to make his way down the first flight of stairs. They made the descent together, his hand, bloody from touching the wound, marking their passage on the wall.

  Halfway down the second flight of stairs, the cacophony from the cellar stopped.

  They stood still, waiting for Breer's next move. From below there came a thin creak as the Razor-Eater pushed the cellar door wide. Other than the dim light from the kitchen, which had several corners to round before it reached the hallway, there was nothing to illuminate the scene. Hunter and prey, both camouflaged by darkness, hung on to this tenuous moment, neither knowing if the next would bring catastrophe. Carys left Marty behind and slipped down the remaining steps to the bottom of the stairs. Her feet were all but silent on the carpetless stairs, but after the sense deprivation of Mamoulian's room Marty heard her every heartbeat.

  Nothing moved in the hallway; she beckoned Marty down after her. The passageway was still, and apparently empty. Breer was near, she knew: but where? He was large and cumbersome: hiding places would be difficult to find. Perhaps, she prayed, he hadn't escaped after all, merely given up, exhausted. She stepped forward.

  Without warning, the Razor-Eater emerged from the door of the front room, roaring. The carving knife descended in a swooping stroke. She succeeded in sidestepping the blow, but in doing so all but lost her balance. It was Marty's hand that caught her arm, and dragged her out of the way of Breer's second slash. The force of the Razor-Eater's charge propelled him past her. He slammed against the front door; the glass rattled.

  "Out!" Marty said, seeing the way clear along the passage. But this time Carys had no intention of running. There was a time for running and a time for confrontation; she might never have another opportunity to thank Breer for his many humiliations. She shrugged Marty's hold off and took the wooden club she still carried in a two-handed grasp.

  The Razor-Eater had righted himself, the knife still in his hand, and now he took a raging step toward her. She preempted his attack, however. She raised the plank and ran at him, delivering a blow to the side of his head. His neck, already fractured by his fall, snapped. The nails in the plank pierced his skull, and she was obliged to relinquish her weapon, leaving it fixed like a fifth limb to the side of Breer's head. He fell to his knees. His twitching hand dropped the knife while the other scrabbled for the plank and wrenched it from his head. She was glad of the darkness; the slosh of blood and the tattoo his feet beat on the bare boards were more than enough to appall. He knelt upright for several moments, then pitched forward, pressing the cutlery in his belly all the way home.


  She was satisfied. This time, when Marty pulled at her, she went with him.

  As they made their way along the corridor there was a sharp rapping on the wall. They stopped. What now? More possessing spirits?

  "What is it?" he asked.

  The rapping ceased, then began again, this time accompanied by a voice.

  "Be quiet, will you? There's people trying to sleep in here."

  "Next door," she said. The thought of their complaints struck her as funny, and by the time they'd made their way out of the house, past the wreckage of the cellar door and Breer's cooling camomile, they were both laughing.

  They slipped away down the darkened alleyway behind the house to the car, where they sat for several minutes, tears and laughter coming on them in alternating waves; two mad people, the Calibanese might have guessed; or else adulterers, amused by a night of adventures.

  XI Kingdom Come

  56

  Chad Schuckman and Tom Loomis had been bringing the message of the Church of the Resurrected Saints to the populace of London for three weeks now, and they were sick to the back teeth of it. "Some way to spend a vacation," Tom grumbled daily as they planned their day's route. Memphis seemed a long way off, and they were both homesick for it. Besides, the whole campaign was proving a failure. The sinners they encountered on the doorsteps of this godforsaken city were as indifferent to the Reverend's message of imminent Apocalypse as they were to his promise of Deliverance.

  Despite the weather (or maybe because of it), sin wasn't hot news in England these days. Chad was contemptuous: "They don't know what they've got coming," he kept telling Tom, who knew all the descriptions of the Deluge by heart but also knew they sounded better from the lips of a golden boy like Chad than from himself. He even suspected that those few people who did stop to listen did so more because Chad had the looks of a corn-fed angel than because they wanted to hear the Reverend's inspired word. Most simply slammed their doors.

  But Chad was adamant. "There's sin here," he assured Tom, "and where there's sin there's guilt. And where there's guilt there's money for the Lord's Work." It was a simple equation: and if Tom had some doubts about its ethics he kept them to himself. Better his silence than Chad's disapprobation; all they had was each other in this foreign city, and Tom wasn't about to lose his guiding light.

  Sometimes, though, it was difficult to keep your faith intact. Especially on blistering days like this, when your polyester suit was itching at the back of your neck and the Lord, if He was in His Heaven, was keeping well out of sight. Not a hint of a breeze to cool your face; not a rain cloud in sight.

  "Isn't this from something?" Tom asked Chad.

  "What's that?" Chad was counting the pamphlets they still had left to distribute today.

  "The name of the street," Tom said. "Caliban. It's from something."

  "That so?" Chad had finished counting. "We only got rid of five pamphlets."

  He handed the armful of literature to Tom and fished for a comb in the inside pocket of his jacket. Despite the heat, he looked cool and unruffled. By comparison, Tom felt shabby, overheated and, he feared, easily tempted from the path of righteousness. By what, he wasn't certain, but he was open to suggestions. Chad put the comb through his hair, restoring in one elegant sweep the perfect sheen of his halo. It was important, the Reverend taught, to look your best. "You're agents of the Lord," he'd said. "He wants you to be clean and tidy; to shine through every nook and cranny."

  "Here," Chad said, exchanging the comb for the pamphlets. "Your hair's a mess."

  Tom took the comb; its teeth had gold in them. He made a desultory attempt to control his coxcomb, while Chad looked on. Tom's hair wouldn't lie flat the way Chad's did. The Lord probably tutted at that: He wouldn't like it at all. But then what did the Lord like? He disapproved of smoking, drinking, fornication, tea, coffee, Pepsi, roller coasters, masturbation. And for those weak creatures who indulged in any or, God help them, all of the above the Deluge hovered.

  Tom just prayed that the waters, when they came, would be cool.

  The guy in the dark suit who answered the door of Number Eighty-two Caliban Street reminded both Tom and Chad of the Reverend. Not physically, of course. Bliss was a tanned, glutinous man, while this dude was thin and sallow. But there was the same implicit authority about them both; the same seriousness of purpose. He was drawn to the pamphlets too, the first real interest they'd had all morning. He even quoted Deuteronomy at them-a text they were unfamiliar with-and then, offering them both a drink, invited them into the house.

  It was like home from home. The bare walls and floors; the smell of disinfectant and incense, as though something had just been cleaned up. Truth to tell, Tom thought this guy had taken the asceticism to extremes. The back room he led them into boasted two chairs, no more.

  "My name is Mamoulian."

  "How do you do? I'm Chad Schuckman, this is Thomas Loomis."

  "Both saints, eh?" The young men looked mystified. "Your names. Both names of saints."

  "Saint Chad?" the blond one ventured.

  "Oh, certainly. He was an English bishop; we're speaking of the seventh century now. Thomas, of course, the great Doubter."

  He left them awhile to fetch water. Tom squirmed in his chair.

  "What's your problem?" Chad snapped. "He's the first sniff of a convert we've had over here."

  "He's weird."

  "You think the Lord cares if he's weird?" Chad said. It was a good question, and one for which Tom was shaping a reply when their host came back in.

  "Your water."

  "Do you live alone?" Chad asked. "It's such a big house for one person."

  "Of late I've been alone," Mamoulian said, proffering the glasses of water. "And I must say, I'm in serious need of help."

  I bet you are, Tom thought. The man looked at him as the idea flashed through his head, almost as though he'd said it aloud. Tom flushed, and drank his water to cover his embarrassment. It was warm. Had the English never heard of refrigerators? Mamoulian turned his attention back to Saint Chad.

  "What are you two doing in the next few days?"

  "The Lord's work," Chad returned patly.

  Mamoulian nodded. "Good," he said.

  "Spreading the word."

  " `I will make you fishers of men.' "

  "Matthew. Chapter Four," Chad returned.

  "Perhaps," said Mamoulian, "if I allowed you to save my immortal soul, you might help me?"

  "Doing what?"

  Mamoulian shrugged: "I need the assistance of two healthy young animals like yourself."

  Animals? That didn't sound too fundamentalist. Had this poor sinner never heard of Eden? No, Tom thought, looking at the man's eyes; no, he probably never has.

  "I'm afraid we've got other commitments," Chad replied politely. "But we'll be very happy to have you come along when the Reverend arrives, and have you baptized."

  "I'd like to meet the Reverend," the man returned. Tom wasn't certain if this wasn't all a charade. "We have so little time before the Maker's wrath descends," Mamoulian was saying. Chad nodded fervently. "Then we shall be as flotsam-shall we not?-as flotsam in the flood."

  The words were the Reverend's almost precisely. Tom heard them falling from this man's narrow lips, and that accusation of being a Doubter came home to roost. But Chad was entranced. His face had that evangelical look that came over it during sermons; the look that Tom had always envied, but now thought positively rabid.

  "Chad..." he began.

  "Flotsam in the flood," Chad repeated, "Hallelujah."

  Tom put his glass down beside his chair. "I think we should be going," he said, and got up. For some reason the bare boards he stood on seemed far more than six feet away from his eyes: more like sixty. As though he was a tower about to topple, his foundations dug away. "We've got so many streets to cover," he said, trying to focus on the problem at hand, which was, in a nutshell, how to get out of this house before something terrible happened.

  "Th
e Deluge," Mamoulian announced, "is almost upon us."

  Tom reached toward Chad to wake him from his trance. The fingers at the end of his outstretched arm seemed a thousand miles from his eyes. "Chad," he said. Saint Chad; he of the halo, pissing rainbows.

  "Are you all right, boy?" the stranger asked, swiveling his fish eyes in Tom's direction.

  "I... feel..."

  "What do you feel?" Mamoulian asked.

  Chad was looking at him too, face innocent of concern; innocent, in fact, of all feeling. Perhaps-this thought dawned on Tom for the first time-that was why Chad's face was so perfect. White, symmetrical and completely empty.

  "Sit down," the stranger said. "Before you fall down."

  "It's all right," Chad reassured him.

  "No," Tom said. His knees felt disobedient. He suspected they'd give out very soon.

  "Trust me," Chad said. Tom wanted to. Chad had usually been right in the past. "Believe me, we're on to a good thing here. Sit down, like the gentleman said."

  "Is it the heat?"

  "Yes," Chad told the man on Tom's behalf. "It's the heat. It gets hot in Memphis; but we've got air-conditioning." He turned to Tom and put his hand on his companion's shoulder. Tom let himself give in to weakness, and sat down. He felt a fluttering at the back of his neck, as though a hummingbird was hovering there, but he didn't have the willpower to flick it away.

  "You call yourselves agents?" the man said, almost under his breath. "I don't think you know the meaning of the word."

  Chad was quick to their defense.

  "The Reverend says-"

  "The Reverend?" the man interrupted contemptuously. "Do you think he had the slightest idea of your value?"

  This flummoxed Chad. Tom tried to tell his friend not to be flattered, but the words wouldn't come. His tongue lay in his mouth like a dead fish. Whatever happens now, he thought, at least it'll happen to us together. They'd been friends since first grade; they'd tasted pubescence and metaphysics together; Tom thought of them as inseparable. He hoped the man understood that where Chad went, Tom went too. The fluttering at his neck had stopped; a warm reassurance was creeping over his head. Things didn't seem so bad after all.