You must be coming home now, and I want to finish this. I thought of bolting the front door so that you'd think the lock had stuck and perhaps go for a locksmith, but I don't think I'll need to. I haven't much more to tell you. You'll know I'm here long before you find me and read this.
It's getting dark here now in the dining-room with the glass doors shut so that I can't be seen from the street. It makes me feel the wall you knocked down has come back, and my memories are beginning to. I remember now, my wife grew houseplants in here, and I let them all die after she died. I remember the scents that used to fill the room—I can smell them now. She must be here, waiting for me.
And now I'm going to join her in our house. During the last few minutes I've swallowed all the pills. Perhaps that's why I can smell her flowers. As soon as I've finished this I'm going through the trapdoor in the cupboard. There isn't enough space under the house to stretch your arms above your head when you're lying on your back, but I don't think I'll know I'm there for very long. Soon my wife and I will just be in the house. I hope you won't mind if we make it more like ours again. I can't help thinking that one day you may come into this room and find no sliding doors any longer, just a wall. Try and think of it as our present to you and the house.
Playing The Game (1988)
When Marie called to say that someone wanted a reporter, Hill went out at once. He'd been staring at the blank page in his typewriter and wondering where he could find the enthusiasm to write. The winner of this week's singing contest at the Ferryman was Barbra Silver, fat as Santa Claus, all tinsel and shiny flesh done medium rare in a solarium—but he couldn't write that, and there wasn't another word in his head, any more than there were still ferries on the river. He headed for the lobby, glad of something else to do.
The man looked as if he hoped not to be noticed. His hands were trying to hide the torn pockets of his raincoat; fallen trouser-cuffs trailed over his shoes. Nevertheless Marie was pointing at him, unless she was still drying her green nails, and as Hill approached he turned quickly, determined to speak. "Do you investigate black magic?" he said.
"That depends." The man had the look of a pest in the street, eyes that expected disbelief and challenged the listener to escape before he was convinced. But the blank page was waiting like the worst question in an examination, and here at last might be a story worth writing. "Come and tell me about it," Hill said.
The man was visibly disappointed by the newsroom. No doubt he wanted the Hollywood version—miles of chattering typewriters beneath fluorescent tubes— rather than the cramped room full of half a dozen'desks, desks and wastebins overflowing with paper and plastic cups and ragged blackened stubs of cheap cigars, the smells of after-shave and cheap tobacco, the window that buzzed like a dying fly whenever a lorry sped through town. Hill dragged two chairs to face each other and sat forward confidentially over his notebook. "Shoot," he said.
"There's a man down by the docks who claims he can cure illness without medicine. He's got everyone around him believing he can. They say he cures their aches and pains and saves them having to go to the doctor about their depressions. Sounds all right, doesn't it? But I happen to know," the ragged man said, lowering his voice still further until it was almost inaudible, "that he puts up his price once they need him. They have to go back to him, you see—it isn't a total cure. Maybe he doesn't mean it to be, or maybe it's all in their minds, until it wears off. Either way, you can see it's an addiction that costs them more than the doctor would."
He was plucking unconsciously at his torn pockets. "I'll tell you something else—every single one of his neighbors believes he should be left alone because he's doing so much good. That can't be right, can it? People don't take to things like that so easily unless they're afraid not to. Why won't they use the short cut through the docks any longer, if they think there's nothing to be afraid of?"
"You're suggesting that there is."
"I've got to be careful what I say." He looked afraid of being overheard, even in the empty room. "I don't live far from him," he said eventually. "Not far enough. I haven't had any trouble with him personally, but my next-door neighbor has. I can't tell you her name, she doesn't even know I'm here. You mustn't try to find her. In fact, to make sure you don't, I'm not going to tell you my name either."
Hill's interest was waning; his editor would never take a story with so few names. "Anyway," the man whispered, "she antagonized Mr. Matta, though she didn't mean to. She caught him up to no good in one of the old docks. So he said that if she was so fond of water, he'd make sure she got plenty. And the very next day her house started getting damp. She's had people in, but they can't find any reason for it, and it's just getting worse. Mold all over the walls—you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it for yourself. Only you'll have to take my word for it, I'm afraid."
He was faltering, having realized at last how unsatisfactory his information was. Yet Hill was suddenly a great deal more interested. Could it really be the same man? If so, Hill had reasons of his own to investigate him—and by God, there was nothing he'd like better. "This Mr. Matta," he said. "What can you tell me about him?"
His informant seemed to decide that he couldn't avoid telling. "He came every year with the carnival. Only the last time he was too ill to be moved, I think, so they found him a house. Or maybe they were glad to get rid of him."
It was the same man. All at once Hill's memories came flooding back: the carnival festooned with lights on the far bank of the river, in which blurred skeins of light wavered like waterweed as you crossed the bridge; the sounds of the shooting gallery ringing flat and thin across the water, the Ghost Train in which you heard the moaning of ships on the bay—and above all M. 0. Matta, with his unchanging child's face and his stall full of games. "So he's still fond of playing games to frighten people, is he?" Hill said.
"He still sells them." That wasn't quite what Hill had meant, but perhaps the man was afraid to think otherwise. Of course Matta had sold games from his stall, though Hill had never understood why people bought them: the monkeys on sticks looked skeletal and desperate, and always fell back with a dying twitch just before they would have reached their goal; the faces of the chessmen were positively dismaying, as Hill had all too strong a reason to remember. In fact, when he recalled the sideshow—the bald bruised heads you tried to knock down with wooden balls but which sprang up at once, grinning like corpses—he couldn't understand why anyone would have lingered there voluntarily at all.
Once he'd seen Matta by the river at low tide, stooping to a fat whitish shape—but he was losing himself in his memories, and there were things he needed to know. "You say your friend antagonized Matta. In what way?"
"I told you, she was taking the short cut home." The man was digging his hands into his pockets, apparently unaware that they were tearing. "She saw the man he lives with taking him into the dock where the crane's fallen in. It was nearly dark, but he just sat there waiting. She thought she heard something in the water, and then he saw her. That's all."
It seemed suggestive enough. "Then unless there's anything else you can tell me," Hill said, "I just need Matta's address."
As soon as he'd given it, the ragged man sidled out, trying to hide behind his shapeless collar. Hill lit his first cigar of the afternoon and thought how popular his investigation should be. They'd used to say that if Matta took a dislike to you when you bought from him, the games would always go wrong somehow—and how many children other than Hill must he have set out to terrify? As for the business with the docks, if that wasn't a case of drug smuggling, Hill was no investigative reporter. He went in to see the editor at once.
"Not enough," the editor said, too busy searching his waistcoat for pipe-cleaners even to look at Hill. "Someone who won't give his name tells you about someone who won't give her name. Smells like a hoax to me, or a grudge. Either way, it isn't for us. Just don't try to run before you can walk. You shouldn't need me to tell you you aren't ready for investigative w
ork."
No, Hill thought bitterly: after two years he was still only good for the stuff nobody else would touch—Our Trivia Correspondent, Our Paltry Reporter. The others were rolling back from the pub as he returned to his desk, like a schoolboy who'd been kept in for being bored. By God, he'd get his own back, with or without the editor's approval. He'd had nightmares for years after the night he had tried to see what Matta was doing in the caravan behind his stall.
All he'd glimpsed through the window was Matta playing solitaire of some kind, so why had the man taken such delight in terrifying him? All at once there had been nobody beyond the window, and the smooth childish face on its wrinkled neck had stooped out of the door, paralyzing the boy as he'd tried to run. "You like games, do you?" the thin soft voice had said. "Then we'll find you one.
The interior of the caravan had been crowded with half-carved shapes. Some looked more like bone than wood, including the one that had been protruding from the humped tangled sheets of the bunk. Eleven-year-old
Hill hadn't seen much more, nor had he wanted to. Matta was setting out a chess game, and Hill hadn't known which was worse: the black pieces with their wide fanged grins, or the white, their pale shiny faces so bland he could almost see them drooling. "And there you are," Matta had whispered, carving the head of a limbless figure so deftly that Hill had imagined his face had already been there.
As soon as Matta placed the figure midway on the chessboard, the shadowy corners of the caravan had seemed full of faces, grinning voraciously, lolling expres-sionlessly. It had taken Hill a very long time to flee, for his legs had felt glued together, and all the time the child's face on the aging body had watched him as if he were a dying insect. But when at last he had managed to run it was even worse: not so much the teeth that had glinted in the dark all the way home as the swollen white faces he'd sensed at his back, ready to nod down to him if he stumbled or even slackened his pace.
He emerged from his memories and found he'd torn the blank page out of the typewriter, so violently that the others were staring at him. Something had to be done about Matta, and soon—not only because of the way he'd exploited Hill's young imagination, but because it sounded as if his power over people had grown, with the same childish malevolence at its core. If this editor wouldn't print the story, Hill would find someone who would—and glancing at the red-veined faces of his colleagues, all of them drunk enough to be content with the worn-out town, he thought that might be the best move of all.
All at once he was eager to finish his chores, in order to be ready for what he had to do. By the time his shift was over he'd dealt with Barbra Silver—"a robust performance" he called it, which seemed satisfyingly ambiguous—and the rest of the trivia that was expected of him. As soon as he left the newspaper office he made for Matta's house.
Though it was still only late afternoon, there wasn't much light in the town. Over the bay the March sky was blue, but once you stepped into the streets it was impossible to see beyond their roofs. Shallow bay windows crowded away, overlapping the narrow pavements. Here was a chemist's, and here a Bingo parlor, smaller than front rooms; elsewhere he saw the exposed ribs of a lost neon sign, and crumbling names that had been painted on plaster. No wonder people felt the need for someone like Matta. "Order You're News Now" said a sign in a newsagent's window, and Hill thought the inadvertent promise might be true for everyone in time, the town was so small and dead.
Soon he reached the docks, which had been disused for years. The town lived off its chemical factories now, since trade no longer came so far upriver. Except for the short cut, wherever it was, there was no reason for anyone to visit the docks. They would be a perfect base for smuggling.
The roads into the docks were closed off by solid gates, rusty barbed wire, padlocked chains. He had to make his way between the warehouses, through alleys narrow as single file and even darker than the streets. He was relieved to emerge at last onto a dockside. Crumbling bollards sprouted from the broken pavement that surrounded several hundred square yards of murky water; warehouses hemmed in the dock. Above him in the small square lightless openings he heard fluttering. As the stagnant water slopped back and forth their reflections mouthed sleepily, a hundred mouths.
It didn't seem to be the dock the ragged man had mentioned. The alleys led him through another dock on the way to Matta's house, but there was no fallen crane there either, only more blackened warehouses, another hive of holes gaping at the sluggish water. The brow of an early moon peered over the edge of a roof at him; otherwise he felt he was alone in the whole dockland.
The next alley led him to a bridge across a small canal that bordered a street. Almost opposite the bridge was one of the poorest streets in town, its uneven cobblestones glittering with broken glass, its gutters clogged with litter. Each side was a terrace like a stage flat, hardly more than a long two-story wall crammed with front doors and windows. It was the street where Matta lived.
There was nothing to distinguish the house from its neighbors—no sign saying M. o. matta, as there had always been on the sideshow. The black paint of the door was flaking, the number was askew; the windows were opaque with grayish net curtains. He loitered in the empty street, trying to be sure it was the right house. It seemed safe enough to do so, since beyond the curtains the house was dark—but the front door was opened, almost knocking him down, by a man who had to stoop through the doorway. "You want to see Mr. Matta," the huge blank-faced man said.
It wasn't a question. Hill had intended to bring someone whose illness was in no way psychological for Matta to try to cure—but if he fled now, he could never win Matta's confidence. "Yes," he said, though he felt he had no control over his words. "There's something wrong with my leg."
When the hulking man stood aside Hill entered, limping ostentatiously. The front door closed behind him at once, and so did the dark. In the musty unlit hallway, where there was scarcely room for anyone besides the hulking man and the staircase, he felt buried alive. In a moment the other had opened the door to the front room, and Matta sat waiting in a caved-in armchair. "Something wrong with your leg, is it?" Matta said.
He seemed not to have changed at all—the soft secretly delighted voice, the face smooth and placid as a sleeping child's—except that his face looked even more like a mask, on the ropy wizened frame. He was grinning to himself as always, but at least his words were reassuring; for a panicky moment Hill had thought Matta had recognized him. Why should that make him panic? He limped into the room, and Matta said, "Let's see what we can do."
Hill couldn't see much in the room. Boxes, which he assumed contained games, and bits of wood were piled against the walls, taking up much of the limited space; a few chairs were crowded together in the middle of the floor, beneath an empty light socket. The dimness and the smell of wood seemed stale. All at once the hulking man led him forward and sat him in a hard chair opposite Matta. Faces grinned out of the shadows, but they weren't why Hill was apprehensive. The man had led him forward so quickly that he'd forgotten to limp.
The huge man was returning from the darkest corner of the room, between Hill and the door, and he had a knife in his hand. In a moment Hill saw that the man was also carrying a faceless doll. He went to stand behind the armchair. His hands reached over Matta's shoulders, holding the knife and the doll. Hill sucked in his breath inadvertently and waited for Matta to take them—and then he saw that Matta was paralyzed. Only his face could move.
The huge hands began to work at once. In the dimness they looked as if they were growing from Matta's shoulders, their arms no longer than wrists. Almost at once they had finished carving, and the right hand turned the doll for Hill to see. He sat forward reluctantly, and couldn't make himself go closer. He was sure it was only the dimness that made the carved face look exactly like his—but for a moment he felt like a child again, in Matta's power.
Matta had trained his assistant well, that was all. The power was Hill's now, not Matta's. He was going to pretend that
his limp was cured, and that would ingratiate him with Matta, help him set his trap. But Matta was gazing at him, and his grin was wider, more gleeful. It looked even more as if he were holding the doll before his face with deformed hands. "You came to spy on us," he said, and at once, almost negligently, one huge hand snapped the doll's leg.
At once Hill couldn't move his leg. Matta was leering at him, a pale mask propped on a wooden body, and above the mask a dim smudge with eyes was watching emptily. Many more faces were watching him, but he reminded himself that the others were only carved, and that allowed him to stumble to his feet. It had only been panic that had paralyzed his leg, after all.
Though Matta was still grinning—more widely, if anything—his eyes were unreadable. "I think you'd better go straight home," he said, his voice soft as dust.
Hill was so glad when the huge man didn't come for him that he headed blindly for the door. He'd have his revenge another day; Matta wasn't going anywhere. Just now he wanted to escape the dim cell of a room, the musty faces, the staleness. Matta was as bad as he remembered, but now that malevolence was senile. He glanced back from the hall and saw the huge man placing a box on Matta's lap—a game, with something like a worm carved on the lid. He hurried into the deserted twilit street, ignoring the twinge in his knee.
When he reached the canal he looked back. The huge man was watching from the doorway of the house. He stood there while Hill crossed the bridge, and all at once the reporter knew he was watching to see which way Hill went. He strode between the warehouses, into the alley he'd emerged from. As soon as he felt he'd waited long enough he peered out to make sure the man had gone back into the house, then he dodged into the adjacent alley.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 102
