The Damnation Game Part 20

"Which is?"

"You. Your death. Your soul, for want of a better word."

"You had all I owed you and more, years ago."

"That wasn't the bargain, Pilgrim."

"We all make deals and then change the rules."

"That's not playing the game."

"There is only one game. You taught me that. As long as I win that one . . . the rest don't matter."

"I will have what's mine," Mamoulian said with quiet determination. "It's a foregone conclusion."

"Why not just have me killed?"

"You know me, Joseph. I want this to finish cleanly. I'm granting you time to organize your affairs. To close the books, clean the slates, give the land back to those you stole it from."

"I didn't take you for a Communist."

"I'm not here to debate politics. I came to tell you my terms."

So, Whitehead thought, the execution date is a while away. He quickly put all thoughts of escape out of his head, for fear the European sniff them out. Mamoulian had reached into his jacket pocket. The mutilated hand brought out a large envelope, folded on itself. "You will dispose of your a.s.sets in strict accordance with these directions."

"All to friends of yours, presumably."

"I have no friends."

"It's fine by me." Whitehead shrugged. "I'm glad to be rid of it."

"Didn't I warn you it would become burdensome?"

"I'll give it all away. Become a saint, if you like. Will you be satisfied then?"

"As long as you die, Pilgrim," the European said.

"No."

"You and I together."

"I'll die in my time," Whitehead said, "not in yours."

"You won't want to go alone." Behind the European the ghosts were getting restless. The steam simmered with them.

"I'm not going anywhere," Whitehead said. He thought he glimpsed faces in the billows. Perhaps defiance wasn't wise, he decided. ". . . Where's the harm?" he muttered, half-standing to ward off whatever the steam contained. The sauna lights were dimming. Mamoulian's eyes shone in the deepening murk, and there was illumination spilling up from his throat too, staining the air. The ghosts were taking substance from it, growing more palpable by the second.

"Stop," Whitehead begged, but it was a vain hope.

The sauna had vanished. The steam was discharging its pa.s.sengers. Whitehead could feel their p.r.i.c.kling gaze on him. Only now did he feel naked. He bent for the towel, and when he stood upright again, Mamoulian had gone. He clutched the towel to his groin. He could feel how the ghosts in the darkness smirked at his b.r.e.a.s.t.s, at his shrunken pudenda, at the sheer absurdity of his old flesh. They had known him in rarer times; when the chest had been broad, the pudenda arrogant, the flesh impressive whether naked or dressed.

"Mamoulian . . ." he murmured, hoping the European might yet undo this misery before it got out of control. But n.o.body answered his appeal.

He took a faltering step across the slippery tiles toward the door. If the European had gone, then he could simply walk out of the place, find Strauss and a room where he could hide. But the ghosts weren't finished with him yet. The steam, which had darkened to a bruise, lifted a little, and in its depths something s.h.i.+mmered. He couldn't make sense of it at first: the uncertain whiteness, the fluttering, as of snowflakes.

Then, from nowhere, a breeze. It belonged to the past: and smelled of it. Of ash and brick dust; of the dirt on bodies unwashed for decades; of burning hair, of anger. But there was another smell that wove between these, and when he breathed it the significance of that s.h.i.+mmering air came clear, and he forsook the towel and covered his eyes, tears and pleas coming and coming.

But the ghosts pressed in nevertheless, carrying the scent of petals with them.

37

Carys stood on the small landing outside Marty's room, and listened. From inside, there came the sound of steady sleep. She hesitated a moment-unsure of whether or not to go in-then slipped down the stairs again, leaving him unwoken. It was too convenient to slide into bed beside him, to weep into the crook of his neck where his pulse ticked, to unburden herself of all her fretting and beg him to be strong for her. Convenient and dangerous. It wasn't real safety, there in his bed. She'd find that by herself and in herself, nowhere else.

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 gla.s.s glinting on the floor. The door had not been left open accidentally; somebody had forced his way in. A smell-sandalwood-was p.r.i.c.king 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 a.s.sessed 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 gla.s.s 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 dogskin 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 gla.s.s.

The 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 gla.s.s shards. She contrived to pull the door closed behind her-more gla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 gla.s.s and the blood on the floor before Carys started screaming.From 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 d.a.m.ned come and go: it seemed an age. His head swam with hyperventilation; his throat was hoa.r.s.e 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 rea.s.saulted 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 s.h.i.+vering, 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, d.a.m.n 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."Breer 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 f.u.c.k 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 s.h.i.+t 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 d.a.m.n gun."

They threaded their way through the house. It was absolutely still. No b.l.o.o.d.y 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.Marty 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 b.l.o.o.d.y awful."

"Thank you," she said. "Now will you please go? I'd prefer to throw up with n.o.body watching, if you don't mind."

"You sure?"

"Go on, d.a.m.n 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 rea.s.sure 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.