The Damnation Game (26 page)

Halfway down the second flight of stairs she stopped. There was a curious tingle in the darkened hallway. A chill of night air: and more. She waited, shadow-thin, on the stairs, until her eyes accustomed themselves to the dark. Perhaps she should just go back upstairs, lock her bedroom door behind her, and find a few pills to while away the hours until the sun came up. It would be so much easier than living as she was, with every nerve electric. Along the hall toward the kitchen she caught a movement. A black bulk was framed against the doorway, and then gone.

It’s just the dark, she told herself, playing tricks. She smoothed her hand over the wall, feeling the design of the wallpaper ripple under her fingertips until she found the light switch. She flipped it on. The corridor was empty. The stairway at her back was empty. The landing was empty. She muttered “Stupid” to herself, and padded down the last three stairs and along the corridor to the kitchen.

Before she got there, her suspicions about the chill were confirmed. The back door was in direct line with the kitchen door, and both were open. It was odd, almost shocking in fact, to see the house, which was usually hermetically sealed, exposed to the night. The open door was like a wound in its flank.

She stepped through from the carpeted hallway onto the cool linoleum of the kitchen and was halfway to closing the door when she caught the glass glinting on the floor. The door had not been left open accidentally; somebody had forced his way in. A smell—sandalwood—was pricking her nostrils. It was sickly; but what it covered was sicklier still.

She had to inform Marty; that was the first priority. No need to go back upstairs. There was a phone on the kitchen wall. Her mind divided. Part of her coolly assessed the problem and its solutions: where the phone was, what she must say to Marty when he answered it. Another part, the part that embraced H, that was always frightened, dissolved in panic. There’s somebody close (sandalwood), it said, somebody lethal in the dark, rotting in the dark.

The cooler self kept control. She walked—glad now to be barefoot because she made scarcely a sound—across to the phone. She picked up the receiver and dialed nineteen, the number of Marty’s bedroom. It rang once, then again. She willed him to wake quickly. Her reserves of control were, she knew, strictly limited.

“Come on, come on …” she breathed.

Then there was a sound behind her; heavy feet crunched the glass into smaller pieces. She turned to see who it was, and there was a nightmare standing in the doorway with a knife in his hand and a dog skin slung over one shoulder. The phone slipped from her fingers, and the part of her that had advised panic all along took the reins.

Told you so
, it shouted.
Told you so!

A
phone rang in Marty’s dreams. He dreamed he woke, put it to his ear, and spoke to death on the other end of the line. But the ringing went on even though he’d picked the phone up and he surfaced from sleep to find the receiver in his hand and no one on the line. He put it back in its cradle. Had it rung at all? He thought not.

Still, the dream wasn’t worth going back to: his conversation with death had been gobbledygook. Swinging his legs out of bed he pulled on his jeans and was at the door, bleary-eyed, when from downstairs there came the crash of breaking glass.

T
he butcher had lurched toward her-throwing off the dog’s skin to make an embrace easier. She ducked him once; twice. He was ponderous, but she knew if he once got his hands on her, that was the end. He was between her and the exit into the house now; she was obliged to maneuver her way toward the back door.

“I wouldn’t go out there—” he advised, his voice, like his smell, mixing sweetness and rot. “It’s not safe.”

His warning was the best recommendation she’d heard. She slipped around the kitchen table and out through the open door, trying to skip across the glass shards. She contrived to pull the door closed behind her—more glass fell and shattered—and then she was away from the house. Behind her, she heard the door pulled open so roughly it might have been wrenched off its hinges. Now she heard the dog-killer’s footsteps-thunder in the ground-coming after her.

The brute was slow: she was nimble. He was heavy: she was light to the point of invisibility. Instead of clinging to the walls of the house, which would only take her around to the front eventually, where the lawn was illuminated, she struck out away from the building, and hoped to God the beast couldn’t see in the dark.

Marty stumbled down the stairs, still shaking sleep from his head.

The cold in the hall slapped him fully awake. He followed the draft to the kitchen. He only had a few seconds to take in the glass and the blood on the floor before Carys started screaming.

F
rom some unimaginable place, someone cried out. Whitehead heard the voice, a girl’s voice, but lost as he was in a wilderness, he couldn’t fix the cry. He had no idea how long he’d been weeping here, watching the damned come and go: it seemed an age. His head swam with hyperventilation; his throat was hoarse with sobs.

“Mamoulian …” he pleaded again, “don’t leave me here.”

The European had been right-he didn’t want to go alone into this nowhere. Though he had begged to be saved from it a hundred times without result, now, at last, the illusion began to relent. The tiles, like shy white crabs, scuttled back into place at his feet; the smell of his own stale sweat re-assaulted him, more welcome than any scent he’d ever smelled.

And now the European was here in front of him, as if he had never moved.

“Shall we talk, Pilgrim?” he asked.

Whitehead was shivering, despite the heat. His teeth chattered.

“Yes,” he said.

“Quietly? With dignity and politeness?”

Again: “Yes.”

“You didn’t like what you saw.”

Whitehead ran his fingers across his pasty face, his thumb and forefinger digging into the pits at the bridge of his nose, as if to push the sights out. “No, damn you,” he said. The images would not be dislodged. Not now, not ever.

“Perhaps we could talk somewhere else,” the European suggested. “Don’t you have a room we could retire to?”

“I heard Carys. She screamed.”

Mamoulian closed his eyes for a moment, fetching a thought from the girl. “She’s quite all right,” he said.

“Don’t hurt her. Please. She’s all I’ve got.”

“There’s no harm done. She simply found a piece of my friend’s handiwork.”

B
reer had not only skinned the dog, he’d disemboweled it. Carys had slipped in the muck of its innards, and the scream had escaped before she could stop herself. When its reverberations died she listened for the butcher’s footsteps. Somebody was running in her direction.

“Carys!” It was Marty’s voice.

“I’m over here.”

He found her staring down at the dog’s skinned head.

“Who the fuck did this?” he snapped.

“He’s here,” she said. “He followed me out.”

He touched her face. “Are you all right?”

“It’s only a dead dog,” she said. “It was just a shock.”

As they returned to the house, she remembered the dream she’d woken from. There’d been a faceless man crossing this very lawn—were they treading in his footprints now?—with a surf of shit at his heels.

“There’s somebody else here,” she said, with absolute certainty, “besides the dog-killer.”

“Sure.”

She nodded, face stony, then took Marty’s arm. “This one’s worse, babe.”

“I’ve got a gun. It’s in my room.”

They’d come to the kitchen door; the dog’s skin still lay discarded beside it.

“Do you know who they are?” he asked her. She shook her head.

“He’s fat,” was all she could say. “Stupid-looking.”

“And the other one. You know him?”

The other? Of course she knew him: he was as familiar as her own face. She had thought of him a thousand times a day in the last weeks; something told her she had always known him. He was the Architect who paraded in her sleep, who dabbled his fingers at her neck, who had come now to unleash the flood of filth that had followed him across the lawn. Was there ever a time when she hadn’t lived in his shadow?

“What are you thinking?”

He was giving her such a sweet look, trying to put a heroic face on his confusion.

“I’ll tell you sometime,” she said. “Now we should get that damn gun.”

They threaded their way through the house. It was absolutely still.

No bloody footsteps, no cries. He fetched the gun from his room.

“Now for Papa,” he said. “Check that he’s all right.”

With the dog-killer still loose the search was stealthy, and therefore slow. Whitehead wasn’t in any of the bedrooms, or his dressing rooms. The bathrooms, the library, the study and the lounges were similarly deserted. It was Carys who suggested the sauna.

M
arty flung the door of the steam room open. A wall of humid heat met his face, and steam curled out into the hallway. The place had certainly been used recently. But the steam room, the Jacuzzi and solarium were all empty.

When he’d made a quick search of the rooms he came back to find Carys leaning unsteadily on the doorjamb.

“… I suddenly feel sick,” she said. “It just came over me.”

Marty supported her as her legs gave.

“Sit down for a minute.” He guided her across to a bench. There was a gun on it, sweating.

“I’m all right,” she insisted. “You go and find Papa, I’ll stay here.”

“You look bloody awful.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Now will you please go? I’d prefer to throw up with nobody watching, if you don’t mind.”

“You sure?”

“Go on, damn you. Leave me be. I’ll be fine.”

“Lock the door after me,” he stressed.

“Yes, sir,” she said, throwing him a queasy look. He left her in the steam room, and waited until he heard the bolt drawn across. It didn’t completely reassure him, but it was better than nothing.

He cautiously made his way back into the vestibule, and decided to take a quick look around the front of the house. The lawn lights were on, and if the old man were there he’d soon be picked out. That made Marty an easy target too, of course, but at least he was armed. He unlocked the front door and stepped out onto the gravel. The floodlights poured unflinching illumination down. It was whiter than sunlight, but curiously dead. He scanned the lawn to right and left. There was no sign of the old man.

Behind him, in the hallway, Breer watched the hero stride out in search of his master. Only when he was well out of sight did the Razor-Eater slouch out of hiding and lope, bloody-handed, toward his heart’s desire.

Chapter 38

H
aving bolted the door Carys returned, groggily, to the bench and concentrated on controlling her mutinous system. She wasn’t certain what had brought the nausea on, but she was determined to get the better of it.

When she had, she’d go after Marty and help him search for Papa. The old man had been here recently, that much was apparent. That he’d left without his gun did not augur well.

An insinuating voice stirred her from her meditation, and she looked up. There was a smudge in the steam, in front of her, a paleness projected onto the air. She squinted to try to make sense of it. It seemed to have the texture of white dots. She stood up, and-far from vanishing-the illusion strengthened. Filaments were spreading to connect one dot to the next, and she almost laughed with recognition as all at once the puzzle came clear. It was blossom she was looking at, brilliant white heads of it caught in sun or starlight. Twitched by some sourceless wind, the branches threw down flurries of petals. They seemed to graze her face, though when she put her fingers to the places there was nothing there.

In her years of addiction to H she’d never dreamed an image that was so superficially benign and yet so charged with threat. It wasn’t hers, this tree. She hadn’t made it from her own head. It belonged to someone who’d been here before her: the Architect, no doubt. He’d shown this spectacle to Papa, and its echoes lingered.

She tried to look away, around to the door, but her eyes were glued to the tree. She couldn’t seem to unfix them. She had the impression that the blossom was swelling, as if more buds were coming into bloom. The blankness of the tree—its horrid purity—was filling her eyes, the whiteness congealing and fattening.

And then, somewhere beneath these swaying, laden branches, a figure moved. A woman with burning eyes lifted her broken head in Carys’ direction. Her presence brought the nausea back. Carys felt faint. This wasn’t the time to lose consciousness. Not with the blossom still bursting and the woman beneath the tree moving out of hiding toward her. She had been beautiful, this one: and used to admiration. But chance had intervened. The body had been cruelly maimed, the beauty spoiled. When, finally, she emerged from hiding, Carys knew her as her own.

“Mama.”

Evangeline Whitehead opened her arms, and offered her daughter an embrace she had never offered while alive. In death, had she discovered the capacity to love as well as be loved? No. Never. The open arms were a trap, Carys knew it. If she fell into them the tree, and its Maker, would have her, forever.

Her head thundering, she forced herself to look away. Her limbs were like jelly; she wondered if she had the strength to move. Unsteadily, she craned her head toward the door. To her shock she saw that it was wide open. The bolt had been wrenched off as the door was beaten open.

“Marty?” she said.

“No.”

She turned again, this time to her left, and the dog-killer was standing no more than two yards from her. He had washed his hands and face of bloodstains, and he smelled strongly of perfume.

“You’re safe with me,” he said.

She glanced back at the tree. It was dissolving, its illusory life dispersed by the brute’s interruption. Carys’ mother, arms still outstretched, was growing thin and wretched. At the last instant before she disappeared she opened her mouth and vomited a stream of black blood toward her daughter. Then the tree and its horrors were gone. There was only the steam, and the tiles, and a man with dog’s blood under his fingernails standing beside her. She’d heard nothing of his forced entry: the reverie at the tree had muted the outside world.