The Damnation Game (33 page)

“Go on,” he said, his breath ragged, “go on, take her. Give us a show to remember. Or haven’t you got anything worth displaying?”

Marty heard the sense too late to reply; the naked child was pressing herself against him, and somebody (Curtsinger) was trying to unbutton the top of his trousers. He made one last, ungainly lunge at equilibrium.

“Stop this,” he murmured, looking at the old man.

“What’s the problem?” Whitehead asked lightly.

“Joke over,” Marty said. There was a hand in his trousers, reaching for his erection. “Get the fuck off me!” He shoved Curtsinger back with more force than he’d planned. The big man stumbled and fell against the wall. “What’s wrong with you people?” Emily took a step back from him to avoid Marty’s flailing arm. The wine was boiling up in his belly and throat. His trousers jutted. He looked, he knew, absurd. Oriana was still laughing: not just her, Dwoskin too, and Stephanie. Ottaway just stared.

“You never seen a fucking hard-on before?” he spat at them all.

“Where’s your sense of humor?” Ottaway said. “We just want a floor show. Where’s the harm?”

Marty jabbed a finger in Whitehead’s direction. “I trusted you,” he said. It was all he could find to shape his hurt.

“That was an error then, wasn’t it?” Dwoskin commented. He spoke as if to an imbecile.

“You fucking shut up!” Fighting back the urge to break somebody’s face—anybody’s would do—Marty pulled on his jacket, and with one backsweep of his hand cleared a dozen bottles, most of them full, off the table.

Emily screamed as they shattered around her feet, but Marty didn’t wait to see how much damage he’d done. He backed off from the table and stumbled toward the door. The key was in the lock; he opened it and stepped into the hallway. Behind him Emily had begun to bawl like a baby just woken from a nightmare; he could hear her all the way down the darkened corridor. He hoped to God his jittering limbs would bear him up. He wanted out: into the air, into the night. He lurched down the back staircase, hand outstretched against the wall for support, the steps receding beneath his feet. He reached the kitchen having fallen only once, and opened the back door. The night was waiting. Nothing to see him; nothing to know him. He breathed in cold black air, and it burned in his nostrils and lungs. He staggered across the lawn, almost blind, not knowing which direction he was going in, until he thought of the woods. Taking a moment to reorientate himself, he ran toward them, begging their discretion.

Chapter 46

H
e ran, the undergrowth dragging at his legs, until he was so deep in the stand of trees he could see neither the house nor its lights. Only then did he stop, his whole body thumping like one vast heart. His head felt loose on his neck; bile gurgled at the back of his throat.

“Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.”

For a moment, his gyrating head lost control: his ears whined, his eyes blurred. He was suddenly certain of nothing, not even his physical existence. Panic crawled up from his bowels, raking the tissue of his gut and his stomach as it came.

“Get down,” he told it. Only once before had he felt so close to losing his mind—to throwing back his head and screaming—and that had been the first night at Wandsworth, the first of many years of nights locked in a cell twelve by eight. He’d sat on the edge of the mattress and felt what he was feeling now. The blind beast ascending, squeezing adrenaline from his spleen. He’d mastered the terror then, and he could do it again.

Brutally, he stuck his fingers as far down his throat as he could reach, and was rewarded with a surge of nausea. The reflex begun, he let his body do the rest, throwing up a system full of undigested wine. It was a filthy, cleansing experience, and he made no effort to control the spasms until there was nothing left to vomit.

His stomach muscles aching from the contractions, he uprooted some ferns and wiped his mouth and chin, then washed his hands in the damp soil and stood up. The rough treatment had done its job; there was a marked improvement in his condition.

He turned his back on his spilled stomach and wandered further away from the house. Though the thatch of leaves and branches was heavy above, some starlight trickled down, enough illumination to give a tenuous solidity to trunk and brush. Walking in the ghost-wood enchanted him. He let the gentle spectacle of light and leaf-shade heal his wounded vanity. He saw how all his dreams of finding a permanent and trusted place in Whitehead’s world had been pretension. He was, and always would be, a marked man.

He walked quietly here, where the trees thickened and the undergrowth, light-starved, thinned. Small animals scuttled ahead of him; night insects whirred in the grass. He stood still to hear the nocturne better. As he did so he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked toward it, seeking focus through the receding corridor of trunks. It was no trick. There was somebody, gray as the trees, standing thirty or so yards from him—now still, now moving again. Concentrating, he fixed the figure in the matrix of shadow and deeper shadow.

It was a ghost surely. So quiet, so casual. He watched it as a deer might watch a hunter; not certain if he had been seen but unwilling to break cover. Fear ran in his scalp. Not of an open blade; he’d long ago faced those terrors and mastered them. This was the prickly heat fear of child-hood; the essential fear. And paradoxically, it made him whole. It didn’t matter if he were four or thirty-four; he was the same creature at heart.

He’d dreamed of such woods, of such encompassing night. He touched his terror reverently, frozen to the spot, while the gray figure—too taken with its own business to notice him—watched the earth between the trees.

They stood in that relation, ghost and he, for what seemed like several minutes. Certainly a good time passed before he heard a noise that was neither owl, nor rodent, filtering between the trees. It had been there all along, he had just failed to interpret it for what it was: the sound of digging. The rattle of tiny stones, the fall of earth. The child in him said bad: leave it be, leave it all be. But he was too curious to ignore it. He took two experimental steps toward the ghost. It made no sign of seeing or hearing him. Taking courage, he advanced a few more steps, attempting to keep as close to a tree as possible, so that should the ghost look his way he could find cover quickly. In this way he advanced ten yards toward his quarry. Close enough to see the host in enough detail for recognition.

It was Mamoulian.

The European was still staring down at the earth at his feet. Marty slid into hiding behind a trunk and flattened himself there, his back to the scene. There was obviously somebody digging, at Mamoulian’s feet; he conceivably had other cohorts in the vicinity. The only safety was in lying doggo and hoping to God no one had been spying on him as he had spied on the European.

At length the digging stopped; and so, as if on an unspoken cue, did the nocturne. It was bizarre. The whole assembly, insect and animal alike, seemed to hold its breath, aghast.

Marty slid down the trunk into crawling position, his ears straining for every clue as to what was going on. He chanced a look.

Mamoulian was moving off in what Marty guessed to be the direction of the house. Undergrowth obscured his view: he could see nothing of the digger, or the other disciples who were accompanying the European. He heard their passage, however; the brush of their dragging steps. Let them go, he thought. He was past protecting Whitehead. That bargain was defunct.

He sat, knees hugged against his chest, and waited until Mamoulian had woven between the trees and disappeared. Then he counted to twenty and stood up. Pins and needles pricked at his lower legs, and he had to rub the circulation back into them. Only then did he start toward the spot where Mamoulian had lingered.

Even as he approached he recognized the glade, though he had previously come to it from the direction of the house. His late-evening walk had taken him in a semicircle. He was standing now in the place he’d buried the dogs.

The grave was open and empty; the black plastic shrouds had been torn apart, their contents unceremoniously removed. Marty stared into the hole not quite comprehending the joke. What use were dead dogs?

There was a movement in the grave; something shifted beneath the plastic sheets. He stepped back from the edge, his gorge too susceptible for this. A nest of maggots presumably, or perhaps a worm the size of his arm, grown fat on dog meat; who knew what hid in the earth?

Turning his back on the hole, he walked toward the house, following the trail Mamoulian had taken, until the trees thinned and the starlight brightened. There, on the borderland between wood and lawn, he stayed, until the sounds of the night reestablished themselves around him.

Chapter 47

S
tephanie excused herself from the table, and went out to the bathroom, leaving the hysteria behind her. As she closed the door one of the men—Ottaway, she thought—suggested she come back in and piss in a bottle for him. She didn’t grace the remark with a reply. However well they paid, she wasn’t going to get involved in that kind of activity; it wasn’t clean.

The hallway was in semidarkness; the sheen of vases, the richness of the carpet underfoot—all of it spoke wealth, and on previous visits she’d enjoyed the extravagance of the place. But tonight they were so uneasy—Ottaway, Dwoskin, the old man himself—there was an air of desperation in their drinking and their innuendo, and it took any pleasure out of being here. On the other nights they’d all got pleasantly drunk and then there’d been the usual performances, sometimes developing into something more serious with one or two of them. Just as often they were content to watch. And at the end of the night there’d been generous payment. But tonight was different. There was cruelty in it, which she disliked. Money or no money, she wouldn’t come here again. It was time she retired anyway; leave it to younger girls, who at least looked less raddled than she did.

She bent close to the bathroom mirror and tried to reapply her eyeliner, but her hand was shaky with drink, and it slipped. She cursed, and dug in her purse for a tissue to clean off the error. As she did so there was a scuffling sound in the hallway. Dwoskin, she guessed. She didn’t want the gargoyle touching her again, at least not until she was too paralytic with drink to care. She tiptoed to the door and locked it. The sounds outside had stopped. She went back to the sink and turned on the tap; cold water, to splash on her tired face.

D
woskin had gone out after Stephanie. He intended to suggest something outrageous for her to perform on him, something gross for this night of nights.

“Where are you going?” somebody asked him, as he traipsed the hall, or did he just imagine the words? He’d taken a few pills before the party—that always loosened him up—but it tended to put voices in his head, mostly his mother’s. Whether somebody had asked the question or not, he chose not to answer; he just wandered down the corridor, calling for Stephanie. The woman was extraordinary, or so his drugged libido had decided. She had superb buttocks. He wanted to be smothered by those cheeks; to die under them.

“Stephanie,” he demanded. She didn’t reappear. “Come on,” he reassured her, “it’s only me.”

There was a smell in the corridor: just a hint of sewer. He inhaled it. “Foul,” he announced, not unappreciatively. The smell was getting stronger, as though its source was close by, and approaching. “Lights,” he told himself and peered along the wall looking for a switch.

A few yards down the corridor something started to move toward him.

The light was too dim to see properly by, but it was a man, and the man was not alone. There were other shapes, knee-high, mustering in the darkness. The smell was becoming overpowering. Dwoskin’s head had started to dance with color; disgraceful images flickered in the air to accompany the smell. It took him a moment to grasp that this air graffiti was not his doing. It was coming from the man ahead of him. Dashes and dots of light flared and whirled away into the air.

“Who are you?” Dwoskin demanded. In answer, the graffiti ignited into a full-blown literature. Not certain if any sound was coming out, the Troll-King began to screech.

S
tephanie dropped the eyeliner into the sink as the scream reached her. She didn’t recognize the voice. It was high enough to be a woman’s, but it was neither Emily nor Oriana.

The shakes suddenly worsened. She held on to the edge of the sink to steady herself as the noises multiplied: howls now, and running feet.

Somebody was shouting; all but incoherent orders. It was Ottaway, she thought, but she wasn’t going out to check. Whatever was going on beyond the door—pursuit, capture, murder even—she needed none of it. She turned off the light in the bathroom in case it spilled under the door. Somebody ran by, calling on God: now there was desperation. Feet thudded down the stairs; somebody fell. Doors slammed: screams mounted.

She backed away from the door and sat on the edge of the bath. There, in the darkness, she started to sing “Abide with Me”—or what little she could remember of it—very quietly.

M
arty heard the screams too, though he didn’t want to. Even at such a distance, they carried a freight of blind panic that made him clammy.

He knelt down in the dirt between the trees and stopped his ears. The earth smelled ripe beneath him, and his mind seethed with unwelcome thoughts of lying face-up in the ground, dead perhaps, but anticipating resurrection. Like a sleeper on the verge of waking, nervous of the day.

After a while the din became intermittent. Soon, he told himself, he must open his eyes, stand up and go back to the house to see the hows and the whys of all this commotion. Soon; but not yet.

W
hen the noise in the hallway and on the stairs had long stopped, Stephanie crept to the bathroom door, unlocked it and peered out. The corridor was in complete darkness now. The lamps had either been turned off or shattered. But her eyes, accustomed to the blackness of the bathroom, soon pierced the feeble light from the stairwell. The gallery was empty in both directions. There was just a smell in the air like a bad butcher’s shop on a hot day.