The Damnation Game (18 page)

“Tell him what?”

“That I was here.”

—but if it was just trickery, why didn’t he step forward and apprehend the man?

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Just tell him.“

Marty nodded; he had no courage left in him

“Then, go home.”

“Home?”

“Away from here,” the intruder said. “Out of harm’s way.”

He turned from Marty and the dogs, and as he did so the lights faltered and failed for several dozen yards in either direction.

When they came back on again, the magician had gone.

Chapter 27

“I
s that all he said?”

As ever, Whitehead had his back to Marty as he spoke, and it was impossible to gauge his response to the account of the night’s events.

Marty had offered a carefully doctored description of what had actually happened. He’d told Whitehead about his hearing the dogs and about the chase and the brief conversation he’d had with the intruder. What he’d left out was the part that he couldn’t explain: the images the man had seemingly conjured from his body. That he made no attempt to describe, or even report. He’d simply told the old man that the lights along the fence had failed and that under the cover of darkness the intruder had made off. It made a lame finale to the encounter but he had no powers to improve on his story. His mind, still juggling the visions of the previous night, was too uncertain of objective truth to contemplate a more elaborate lie.

He hadn’t slept for over twenty-four hours now. He’d spent the bulk of the night checking the perimeter, scouring the fence for the place the intruder had breached. There was no break in the wire, however. Either the man had slipped into the grounds when the gates were opened for one of the guests’ cars, which was plausible; or else he had scaled the fence, disregarding an electric charge that would have struck most men dead.

Having seen the tricks the man was capable of Marty was not about to discount this second scenario. After all, this same man had rendered the alarms inoperative-and somehow drained the lights of power along the stretch of fence. How he’d achieved these feats was anybody’s guess. Certainly scant minutes after the man’s disappearance the entire system was fully operational again: the alarms working and the cameras functioning all around the boundary.

Once he’d checked the fences thoroughly, he’d gone back into the house and sat in the kitchen to reconstruct every detail of what he’d just experienced. About four in the morning he’d heard the dinner party break up: laughter, the slamming of car doors. He’d made no move to report the break-in then and there. There was, he reasoned, no use in souring Whitehead’s evening. He just sat and listened to the noise of people at the other end of the house. Their voices were incoherent smears; as if he were underground, and they above. And while he listened, drained after his adrenaline high, memories of the man at the fence flickered in front of him.

He told none of this to Whitehead. Just the plainest outline of events, and those few words: “Tell him that I was here.” It was enough.

“Was he badly hurt?” Whitehead said, not turning from the window.

“He lost a finger, as I said. And he was bleeding pretty badly.”

“In pain, would you say?”

Marty hesitated before replying. Pain was not the word he wanted to employ; not pain as he understood it. But if he used some other word, like anguish—something that hinted at the gulfs behind the glacial eyes—he risked trespass into areas he was not prepared to go; especially not with Whitehead. He was certain that if he once let the old man sense any ambivalence, the knives would be out. So he replied:

“Yes. He was in pain.”

“And you say he bit the finger off?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you’d look for it later.”

“I have. I think one of the dogs must have taken it.”

Did Whitehead chuckle to himself? It sounded so.

“Don’t you believe me?” Marty said, taking the laughter to be at his expense.

“Of course I believe you. It was only a matter of time before he came.”

“You know who he is?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can have him arrested.”

The private amusement had stopped. The words that followed were colorless.

“This is no conventional trespasser, Strauss, as I’m sure you’re aware. The man is a professional assassin of the first rank. He came here with the express purpose of killing me. With your intervention, and that of the dogs, he was prevented. But he will try again—”

“All the more reason to have him found, sir.”

“No police force in Europe could locate him.”

“—if he’s a known assassin—” Marty said, pressing the point. His refusal to let this bone go until he had the marrow from it had begun to irritate the old man. He growled his reply.

“He’s known to me. Perhaps to a few others who have encountered him down the years … but that’s all.”

Whitehead crossed from the window to his desk, unlocked it, and brought out something wrapped in cloth. He laid it on the polished desk-top and unwrapped it. It was a gun.

“You’ll carry this with you at all times in the future,” he told Marty. “Pick it up. It won’t bite.”

Marty took the gun from the desk. It was cold and heavy.

“Have no hesitation, Strauss. This man is lethal.”

Marty passed the gun from hand to hand; it felt ugly.

“Problem?” Whitehead inquired.

Marty chewed on his words before speaking them. “It’s only … well, I’m on parole, sir. I’m supposed to be obeying the letter of the law. Now you give me a gun, and tell me to shoot on sight. I mean, I’m sure you’re right about him being an assassin, but I don’t think he was even armed.”

Whitehead’s expression, hitherto impartial, changed as Marty spoke. His teeth showed yellow as he snapped his reply.

“You’re my property, Strauss. You concern yourself with me, or you get to Hell out of here tomorrow morning. Me!” He jabbed finger at his own chest. “Not yourself. Forget yourself.”

Marty swallowed a throatful of possible retorts: none were polite.

“You want to go back to Wandsworth?” the old man said. All signs of anger had disappeared; the yellow teeth were sheathed. “Do you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“You can go if you want. Just say the word.”

“I said no! … Sir.”

“Then you listen,” the old man said. “The man you met last night means me harm. He came here to kill me. If he comes again—and he will—I want you to return the compliment. Then we’ll see, won’t we, boy?” —the teeth showed again, a fox’s smile. “Oh, yes … we’ll see.”

C
arys woke feeling seedy. At first she remembered nothing of the previous night, but she gradually began to recall the bad trip that she’d undergone: the room like a living thing, the phantom fingertips that had plucked—oh, so gently—at the hairs on the nape of her neck.

She couldn’t remember what had happened when the fingers had delved too deep. Had she lain down, was that it? Yes, now she remembered, she had lain down. It was only then, when her head hit the pillow and sleep claimed her, that the bad times had really begun.

Not dreams: at least not like she’d had before. There’d been no theatrics, no symbols, no fugitive memories weaving between the horrors. There had been nothing at all: and that had been (still was) the terror. She had been delivered into a void.

“Void.”

It was just a dead word when she spoke it aloud: it didn’t begin to describe the place she’d discovered; its emptiness more immaculate, the terrors it awoke more atrocious, the hope of salvation in its deeps more fragile than in any place she had ever guessed at. It was a legendary Nowhere, beside which every other dark was blindingly bright, every other despair she had endured a mere flirtation with the pit, not the pit itself.

Its architect had been there too. She remembered something of his mild physiognomy, which had convinced her not a jot. See how extraordinary this emptiness is, he had boasted; how pure, how absolute? A world of marvels can’t compare, can never
hope
to compare, with such sublime nothingness.

And when she awoke the boasts remained. It was as if the vision were true, while the reality she now occupied was a fiction. As if color and shape and substance were pretty distractions designed to paste over the fact of this emptiness he had shown her. Now she waited, scarcely aware of time passing, occasionally stroking the sheet or feeling the weave of the carpet under her bare feet, waiting in despair for the moment it all peeled back and the void appeared again to devour her.

Well
, she thought,
I’ll go to the sunshine island
. If ever she deserved to play there awhile, she deserved it now, having suffered so much. But something soured the thought. Wasn’t the island a fiction too? If she went there now, wasn’t she weaker next time the architect came, void in hand? Her heart started to beat very loudly in her ears. Who was there to help her? Nobody who understood. Just Pearl, with her accusing eyes and her sly contempt; and Whitehead, content to feed her H as long as it kept her compliant; and Marty, her runner, sweet in his way, but so naively pragmatic she could never begin to explain the complexities of the dimensions she lived in. He was a one-world man; he would look at her bewildered, trying to understand, and failing.

No; she had no guides, no signposts. It would be better if she went back the way she knew. Back to the island.

It was a chemical lie, and it killed with time; but life killed in time, didn’t it? And if dying was all there was, didn’t it make sense to go to it happy rather than fester in a dirty hole of a world where the void whispered at every corner? So when Pearl came upstairs with her H, she took it, thanked her politely, and went to the island, dancing.

Chapter 28

F
ear could make the world go round if its wheels were efficiently oiled. Marty had seen the system in practice at Wandsworth: a hierarchy built upon fear. It was violent, unstable and unjust, but perfectly workable.

Seeing Whitehead, the calm, still center of his universe, so changed by fear, so sweaty, so full of panic, had come as an unwelcome shock. Marty had no personal feelings for the old man-or none that he was aware of-but he’d seen Whitehead’s species of integrity at work, and had profited by it. Now, he felt, the stability he had come to enjoy was threatened with extinction. Already the old man was clearly withholding information—perhaps pivotal to Marty’s understanding of the situation—about the intruder and his motives. In place of Whitehead’s previous plain talking, there was innuendo and threats. That was his prerogative, of course. But it left Marty with a guessing game on his hands.

One point was unarguable: whatever Whitehead claimed, the man at the fence had been no conventional hired killer. Several inexplicable things had happened at the fence. The lights had waxed and waned as if on cue; the cameras had mysteriously failed when the man had appeared. The dogs had registered this riddle too. Why else had they shown such a confusion of anger and apprehension? And there remained the illusions—those air-burning pictures. No sleight of hand, however elaborate, could explain them satisfactorily. If Whitehead knew this “assassin” as well as he claimed, then he must know the man’s skills too: he was simply too afraid to talk about them.

Marty spent the day asking the discreetest of questions around the house but it rapidly became apparent that Whitehead had said nothing of the events to Pearl, Lillian or Luther. This was odd. Surely now was the very time to make everyone more vigilant? The only person to suggest he had any knowledge of the night’s events was Bill Toy, but when Marty raised the subject he was evasive.

“I realize you’ve been put in a difficult situation, Marty, but so are we all at the moment.”

“I just feel I could do the job better—”

“—if you knew the facts.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I think you have to concede that Joe knows best.” He made a rueful face. “We should all have that tattooed on our hands, don’t you think? Joe Knows Best. I wish I could tell more. I wish I knew more. I think it’s probably easiest for all concerned if you let the matter drop.”

“He gave me a gun, Bill.”

“I know.”

“And he told me to use it.”

Toy nodded; he looked pained by all of this, even regretful.

“These are bad times, Marty. We’re all … all having to do a lot of things we don’t want to, believe me.”

Marty did believe him; he trusted Toy sufficiently to know that if there’d been anything he could say on the subject, it would have been said.

It was entirely possible that Toy didn’t even know who had broken the seal on the Sanctuary. If it was some private confrontation between Whitehead and the stranger, then maybe a full explanation could only come from the old man himself, and that would clearly not be forthcoming.

Marty had one final interviewee. Carys.

He hadn’t seen her since he’d trespassed on the upper landing the day before. What he’d seen between Carys and her father had unsettled him, and there was, he knew, a childish urge in him to punish her by withholding his company. Now he felt obliged to seek her out, however uncomfortable the meeting might prove.

He found her that afternoon, loitering in the vicinity of the dovecote. She was wrapped up in a fur coat that looked as if it had been bought at a thrift shop; it was several sizes too big for her, and moth-eaten. As it was, she seemed overdressed. The weather was warm even if the wind was gusty, and the clouds that passed across a Wedgwood-blue sky carried little threat: too small, too white. They were April clouds, containing at worst a light shower.

“Carys.”

She fixed him with eyes so ringed with tiredness his first thought was that they were bruised. In her hand she had a bundle, rather than a bunch, of flowers, many still buds.

“Smell,” she said, proffering them.

He sniffed at them. They were practically scentless: they just smelled of eagerness and earth.