The Damnation Game (23 page)

“Marty …” she breathed, “roll over.”

He wasn’t sure of this maneuver at first, but once he was on his back, and she sitting on him, he caught her rhythm easily. He began to climb again: dizzy with the height.

The pain at her neck persisted, but she thrust it out of focus. She bent forward, her face six inches above Marty’s, and let saliva fall from her mouth into his, a thread of bubbles that he received with an open grin, pushing up into her as deep as he could go and holding himself there.

Suddenly, something moved in her. Not Marty. Something or somebody else, fluttering in her system. Her concentration faltered; her heart too.

She lost focus on where she was and what she was. Another set of eyes seemed to look through hers: momentarily she shared their owner’s vision.

She saw sex as depravity, a raw and bestial exchange.

“No,” she said, trying to cancel the nausea that had suddenly risen in her.

Marty opened his eyes to slits, taking her “no” as a command to postpone the finish.

“I’m trying, babe …” he said, grinning. “Just don’t move.”

She couldn’t grasp what he meant at first: he was a thousand miles from her, lying below in a foul sweat, wounding her against her wishes.

“OK?” he breathed, holding on until it almost hurt. He seemed to swell in her. The sensation drove the double vision out of her head. The other viewer shrank away behind her eyes, revolted by the fullness and the fleshiness of this act; by its reality. Did the intruding mind feel Marty too, she half-thought, its cortex plumbed by a cock-head that was swelling to cream even now?

“God …” she said.

With the other eyes in retreat, the joy came back.

“Can’t stop, babe,” Marty said.

“Go on,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

Flecks of her sweat hit him as she moved on top of him.

“Go on. Yes!” she said again. It was an exclamation of pure delight, and it took him past the point of return. He tried to stave off eruption for a few more trembling seconds. The weight of her hips on him, the heat of her channel, the brightness of her breasts, filled his head.

And then somebody spoke; a low, guttural voice.

“Stop it.”

Marty’s eyes fluttered open, glancing to left and right. There was nobody else in the room. His head had invented the sound. He canceled the illusion and looked back at Carys.

“Go on,” she said. “Please go on.” She was dancing on him. The bones of her hips caught the light; the sweat on them ran and ran, glowing.

“Yes … Yes …” he answered, the voice forgotten.

She looked down at him as imminence infested his face, and through the intricacies of her own flaring sensations she felt the second mind again. It was a worm in her budding head, pushing forward, its sickness ready to stain her vision. She fought it.

“Go away,” she told it, under her breath, “go away.”

But it wanted to defeat her; to defeat them both. What had seemed like curiosity before was malice now. It wanted to spoil everything.

“I love you,” she told Marty, defying the presence in her. “I love you, I love you—”

The invader spasmed, furious with her, and more furious still that she didn’t concede to its spoiling. Marty was rigid, on the threshold; blind and deaf to anything but pleasure. Then, with a groan, he began to spurt in her, and she was there too. Her sensations drove all thoughts of resistance out of her head. Somewhere far off she could hear Marty gasping

“Oh, Jesus,” he was saying, “babe … babe.”

—but he was in another world. They weren’t together, even at this moment. She in her ecstasy, he in his; each running a private race to completion.

A wayward spasm made Marty convulse. He opened his eyes. Carys had her hands glued over her face, fingers spread.

“You all right, babe?” he said.

When her eyes opened, he had to bite back a shout. It was, for a moment, not her who stared out between the bars. It was something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Black eyes swiveling in a gray head. Some primeval genus that viewed him—he knew this to his marrow—with hatred in its bowels.

The hallucination lasted two heartbeats only, but long enough for him to glance down her body and up again to meet the same vile gaze.

“Carys?”

Then her eyelids fluttered, and the fan of her fingers closed across her face. For a lunatic instant he flinched, awaiting the revelation. Her hands dropping from her head; the face transformed: a fish’s head. But of course it was her: only her. Here she was now, smiling at him.

“Are you all right?” he ventured.

“What do you think?”

“I love you, babe.”

She murmured something as she slumped on him. They lay there for several minutes, his cock diminishing in a cooling bath of mingled fluids.

“Aren’t you getting a cramp?” he asked her after a while, but she didn’t reply. She was asleep.

Gently, he slid her sideways, slipping out of her with a wet sound.

She lay on the bed beside him, her face impassive. He kissed her breasts, licked her fingers, and fell asleep beside her.

Chapter 32

M
amoulian felt sick.

She wasn’t easy prey, this woman, despite his sentimental claim upon her psyche. But then her strength was to be expected. She was Whitehead’s stock: peasant breed, thief breed. Cunning and dirty. Though she couldn’t know precisely what she was doing, she’d fought him with the very sensuality he most despised.

But her weaknesses —and she had many —were exploitable. He’d used the heroin fugues at first, gaining access to her when she was pacified to the point of indifference. They warped her perception, which had made his invasion less noticeable, and through her eyes he’d seen the house, listened with her ears to the witless conversation of its occupants, shared with her, though it revolted him, the smell of their cologne and their flatulence. She was the perfect spy, living in the heart of the enemy’s camp. And as the weeks had gone by he’d found it easier to slip in and out of her unnoticed. That had made him careless.

It was carelessness not to have looked before he leaped; to commit himself to her head without first checking what she was doing. He hadn’t even thought she might be with the bodyguard; and by the time he’d realized his error he was sharing her sensations—her ridiculous rapture—and it had left him trembling. He would not make such a mistake again.

He sat in the bare room in the bare house he had bought for himself and Breer, and tried to forget the turbulence he’d experienced, the look in Strauss’ eyes as he stared up at the girl. Had the thug glimpsed, perhaps, the face
behind
her face? The European guessed so.

No matter; none of them would survive. It wouldn’t just be the old man, the way he’d planned at first. All of them—his acolytes, his serfs, all—would go to the wall with their master.

The memories of Strauss’ assaults lingered in the European’s entrails; he longed to evacuate them. The sensation shamed and disgusted him.

Downstairs, he heard Breer come in or go out; on his way to some atrocity or home from one. Mamoulian concentrated on the blank wall opposite him, but try as he might to exile the trauma, he still felt the intrusion: the spurting head, the heat of the act.

Forget
, he said aloud. Forget the brown fire off them. It’s no risk to you. See only the emptiness: the promise of the void.

His innards shook. Beneath his gaze, the paint on the wall seemed to blister. Venereal eruptions disfigured its emptiness. Illusions; but horribly real to him nevertheless. Very well: if he couldn’t dislodge the obscenities, he would transform them. It wasn’t difficult to smudge sexuality into violence, turn sighs into screams, thrusts into convulsions.

The grammar was the same; only the punctuation differed. Picturing the lovers in death together, the nausea he’d felt receded.

In the face of that void what was their substance? Transitory. Their promises? Pretension.

He began to calm. The sores on the wall had started to heal, and he was left, after a few minutes, with an echo of the nothingness he had come to need so much. Life came and went. But absence, he knew, went on forever.

Chapter 33

“O
h, by the way, there was a telephone call for you. From Bill Toy. Day before yesterday.”

Marty looked up at Pearl from his plate of steak, and pulled a face.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She looked contrite.

“It was the day I lost my wick with those damn people. I left a message for you—”

“I didn’t get it.”

“—on the pad beside the telephone.”

It was still there: “Call Toy,” and a number. He dialed, and waited a full minute before the phone was picked up at the other end. It wasn’t Toy. The woman who repeated the number had a soft, lost voice, slurred as if by too much drink.

“Can I speak to William Toy, please?” he asked.

“He’s gone,” the woman replied.

“Oh. I see.”

“He won’t be coming back. Not ever.”

The quality of the voice was eerie. “Who is this?” it asked of him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Marty replied. His instinct rebelled against giving his name.

“Who is this?” she asked again.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

“Who is this?”

He put the receiver down on the slushing insistence at the other end. Only when he had did he realize that his shirt was clinging to a cold sweat that had suddenly sprung from his chest and spine.

I
n the love nest in Pimlico, Yvonne asked the vacated line “Who is this?” for half an hour or more before letting the telephone drop. Then she went to sit down. The couch was damp: large, sticky stains were spreading on it from the place where she always sat. She assumed it was something to do with her, but she couldn’t work out how or why. Nor could she explain the flies that congregated all over her, in her hair, in her clothes, whining away.

“Who is this?” she asked again. The question remained perfectly pertinent, though she was no longer speaking to the stranger on the phone.

The rotting skin of her hands, the blood she left in the tub after bathing, the horrid look the mirror gave her-all inspired the same hypnotic inquiry:

“Who is this?”

“Who is this? Who is this? Who is this?”

VI

The Tree

Chapter 34

B
reer hated the house. It was cold, and the natives in this part of the city were inhospitable. He was regarded with suspicion as soon as he stepped out of the front door. There were, he had to concede, reasons for this. In recent weeks a smell had begun to linger around him; a sickly, syrupy smell that made him almost ashamed to get too close to the pretty ones along the schoolyard railing, for fear they would put their fingers to their noses, making a “poo-poo” sound, and run off calling him names. When they did that, it made him want to die.

Though there was no heating in the house, and he had to bathe in cold water, he nevertheless washed from head to foot three or four times a day, hoping to dislodge the smell. When that didn’t work he bought perfume—sandalwood in particular—and doused his body with it after each ablution. Now the comments they called after him weren’t about excreta but about his sex life. He took the brunt of their remarks with equanimity.

Nevertheless, dull resentments festered in him. Not just about the way he was treated in the district. The European, after a courtship that had been polite, was more and more treating him with contempt: as a lackey rather than an ally. It irritated him, the way he was sent to this haunt or that looking for Toy—asked to comb a city of millions in search of a shriveled old man whom Breer had last seen scrambling over a wall stark naked, his scrawny buttocks white in the moonlight. The European was losing his sense of proportion. Whatever crimes this Toy had committed against Mamoulian they could scarcely be profound, and it made Breer weak with tiredness to contemplate another day wandering the streets.

Despite his weariness, the capacity for sleep seemed to have deserted him almost entirely. Nothing, not even the fatigue that killed his nerves, could persuade his body to close down for more than a few eye-fluttering minutes, and even then his mind dreamed such things, such dreadful things, it was scarcely possible to call the slumber blissful. The only comfort remaining to him was his pretties.

That was one of the few advantages in this house: it had a cellar. Just a dry, cool space, which he was systematically clearing of the rubbish left by the previous owners. It was a long job, but he was gradually getting the place the way he wanted it, and though he had never much liked enclosed spaces there was something about the darkness, and the sense of being underground, that answered an unarticulated need in him. Soon he would have it all scrubbed. He would put colored paper chains around the walls, and flowers in vases on the floor. A table maybe, with a cloth on it, smelling of violets; comfortable chairs for his guests. Then he could begin to entertain friends in the manner to which he hoped they would become accustomed.

All his arrangements could be effected much more quickly if he weren’t forever interrupted by the damn-fool errands the European sent him on. But the time for such servitude, he’d decided, had come to an end. Today, he would tell Mamoulian that he wouldn’t be blackmailed or bullied into playing this game. He’d threaten to leave if it came to the worst. He’d go north. There were places north where the sun didn’t come up for five months of the year-he’d read about such places-and that seemed fine to him. No sun; and deep caves to live in, holes where not even moonlight could stray. The time had come to lay his cards on the table.

I
f the air in the house was cold, it was even colder in Mamoulian’s room. The European seemed to exhale a breath that was mortuary-chilled.