The Damnation Game Part 47

"Don't tempt me," he said.

In the hallway Whitehead, his neck broken, became vaguely aware of a perfume in the air. He could see the landing outside the suite from where he was lying. Muranowski Square, with its fatal tree, had long since faded, leaving only the mirrors and the carpets. Now, as he sprawled beside the door, he heard somebody come up the stairs. He glimpsed a figure moving in the shadows; this was the perfumed one. The newcomer approached slowly, but doggedly; hesitating for only a moment at the threshold before stepping over Whitehead's crumpled form and making his way toward the room where the two men had played cards. There had been a while, as they'd chatted over the game, that the old man had fancied he might yet make a fresh covenant with the European; might escape for a few more years the inevitable catastrophe. But it had all gone wrong. They had rowed over some trivia, the way lovers do, and by some incomprehensible mathematic it had escalated to this: death.

He rolled himself over so that he could look the other way, down the corridor toward the gaming room. Carys was lying on the floor among the spilled cards. He could see her corpse through the open door. The European had devoured her.

Now the newcomer interrupted his view as he lurched to the door. From where he lay Whitehead hadn't been able to see the man's face. But he saw the s.h.i.+ne on the machete at his side.Tom caught sight of the Razor-Eater before Chad. His unruly stomach rebelled at the mingled stench of sandalwood and putrefaction, and he threw up on the old man's bed as Breer stepped into the room. He'd come a long way, and the miles had not been kind, but he was here.

Mamoulian stood upright from the wall and faced Breer.

He was not entirely surprised to see that rotted face, though he wasn't sure why. Was it that his mind had not quite relinquished its hold on the Razor-Eater, and that Breer was somehow here at his behest? Breer stared at Mamoulian through the bright air, as if awaiting a new instruction before he acted again. The muscles of his face were so deteriorated that each flicker of his eyeball threatened to tear the skin of its...o...b..t. He looked, thought Chad-his mind high on cognac-like a man full to bursting with b.u.t.terflies. Their wings beat against the confines of his anatomy; they powdered his bones in their fervor. Soon their relentless motion would split him open and the air would be full of them.

The European looked down at the machete Breer was carrying.

"Why did you come?" he wanted to know.

The Razor-Eater tried to reply, but his tongue rebelled against the duty. There was just a soft palate word that could have been "good," or "got" or "G.o.d," but was none of them.

"Have you come to be killed? Is that it?"

Breer shook his head. He had no such intention, and Mamoulian knew it. Death was the least of his problems. He raised the blade at his side to signal his intentions.

"I can wipe you out," Mamoulian said.

Again, Breer shook his head. "Egg," he said, which Mamoulian interpreted, and repeated as "Dead."

"Dead . . ." Chad mused. "G.o.d in Heaven. The man's dead."

The European murmured the affirmative.

Chad smiled. Maybe they were going to be cheated of the destroying wave. Perhaps the Reverend's calculations had been wrong, and the Deluge wouldn't be on them for a few more months. What did it matter? He had stories to tell-such stories. Even Bliss, with all his talk of the demons in the soul of the hemisphere, hadn't known about scenes like this. The Saint watched, licking his lips with antic.i.p.ation.

In the hallway, Whitehead had managed to drag himself three or four yards away from the front door, and he could see Marty, who had managed to stand. Leaning on the lintel of the bathroom door, Marty felt the old man's eyes on him. Whitehead raised a beckoning hand. Groggily, Marty lurched into the hallway, his presence ignored by the actors in the gaming room. It was dark out here; the light in the gaming room, that livid candlelight, was all but sealed off by the partially closed door.

Marty knelt at Whitehead's side. The old man took hold of his s.h.i.+rt.

"You've got to fetch her," he said, the voice almost faded. His eyes bulged, there was blood in his beard, and more coming with each word, but his hold was strong. "Fetch her, Marty," he hissed.

"What are you talking about?"

"He has her," Whitehead said. "In him. Fetch her, for Christ's sake, or she'll be there forever, like the others." His eyes flicked in the direction of the landing, remembering the scourge of Muranowski Square. Was she there already? A prisoner under the tree, with Vasiliev's eager hands on her? The old man's lips began to tremble. "Can't . . . let him have her, boy," he said. "You hear me. Won't let him have her."

Marty had difficulty sewing the sense of this together. Was Whitehead suggesting that he should find his way into Mamoulian and retrieve Carys? It wasn't possible.

"I can't," he said.

The old man registered disgust, and let go of Marty as though he'd discovered he had hold of excrement. Painfully, he turned his head away.

Marty looked toward the gaming room. Through the gap in the door he could see Mamoulian moving toward the unmistakable figure of the Razor-Eater. There was frailty on the European's face. Marty studied it for a moment, and then looked down at the European's feet. Carys lay there, her face startled by cessation, her skin bright. He could do nothing; why didn't Papa leave him be to run away into the night and heal his bruises? He could do nothing.

And if he ran; if he found a place to hide, to heal, would he ever wash away the smell of his cowardice? Would this moment-the roads dividing, and dividing again-not be burned into his dreams forever? He looked back at Papa. But for the feeble movement of his lips he could have already been dead. "Fetch her," he was still saying, a catechism to be repeated until his breath failed. "Fetch her. Fetch her."

Marty had asked something similar of Carys-to go into the lunatic's lair and come back with a story to tell. How could he now not return the favor? Fetch her. Fetch her. Papa's words were fading with every beat of his failing heart. Maybe she was retrievable, Marty thought, somewhere in the flux of Mamoulian's body. And if not, if not, would it be so hard to die trying to fetch her, and have an end to roads dividing, and choices turning to ash?

But how? He tried to recall how she'd done it, but the procedures were too elaborate-the was.h.i.+ng, the silence-and surely he had scant opportunity to make his voyage before circ.u.mstances changed. His only source of hope lay in the fact of his b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+rt-the way he'd felt, on his way here, that Carys had snapped some barrier in his head, and that the damage, once done, was permanent. Perhaps his mind could go to her through the wound she'd opened, tracing her scent as relentlessly as she'd pursued his.

He closed his eyes, shutting off the hallway and Whitehead and the body lying at the European's feet. Sight was a trap; she'd said that once. Effort too. He must let go. Let instinct and imagination take him where sense and intellect could not.

He conjured her, effortlessly, putting the bleak fact of her corpse out of his head and evoking instead her living smile. In his mind he spoke her name and she came to him in a dozen moments: laughing, naked, puzzled, contrite. But he let the particulars go, leaving only her essential presence in his aching head.

He was dreaming her. The wound was open, and it pained him to touch it again. Blood was running into his open mouth, but the sensation was a distant phenomenon. It had little to do with his present condition, which was increasingly dislocated. He felt as though he was slipping his body off. It was redundant: waste matter. The ease of the procedure astonished him; his only anxiety vas that he'd become too eager; he had to control his exhilaration for fear he throw caution to the wind and be discovered.

He could see nothing; hear nothing. The state he moved in-did he even move?-was not susceptible to the senses. Now, though he had no proof of the perception, he was sure he was abstracted from his body. It was behind, below him: an untenanted sh.e.l.l. Ahead of him, Carys. He would dream his way to her.

And then, just as he had thought he could take pleasure in this extraordinary journey. h.e.l.l opened in front of him-Mamoulian, too intent on the Razor-Eater, felt nothing as Marty breached him. Breer made a half-run forward, lifting the machete and aiming a blow at the European. He sidestepped to avoid it with perfect economy but Breer pivoted around for a second strike with startling speed, and this time, more by chance than direction, the machete glanced down Mamoulian's arm, slicing into the cloth of his dark gray suit.

"Chad," the European said, not taking his eyes off Breer.

"Yes?" the blond boy replied. He was still leaning on the wall beside the door, posed there like an indolent hero; he had found Whitehead's cache of cigars, pocketing several and lighting one. He blew a cloud of dusty blue smoke, and watched the gladiators through a blur of drink. "What do you want?"

"Find the pilgrim's gun."

"Why?"

"For our visitor."

"Kill him yourself," Chad replied nonchalantly, "you can do it."

Mamoulian's mind revolted at the thought of laying his flesh on such decay; better a bullet. At close range it would lay the Razor-Eater to waste. Without a head even the dead couldn't walk.

"Fetch the gun!" he demanded.

"No," Chad replied. The Reverend had said plain speaking was best.

"This is no time for games," Mamoulian said, taking his attention off Breer for a moment to glance across at Chad. It was an error. The dead man swung the machete again, and this time the blow found Mamoulian's shoulder, lodging in the muscle close to his neck. The European made no sound but a grunt as the blow fell, and a second as Breer pulled the blade out of its niche.

"Stop," he told his a.s.sailant.

Breer shook his head. This was what he had come for, wasn't it? This was the prelude to an act he'd waited so long to perform.

Mamoulian put his hand up to the wound at his shoulder. Bullets he could take and survive; but a more traumatic attack, one that compromised the integrity of his flesh-that was dangerous. He had to finish Breer off, and if the Saint wouldn't fetch the gun then he'd have to kill the Razor-Eater with his bare hands.

Breer seemed to sense his intention. "You can't hurt me," he tried to say, the words coming out in a jumble. "I'm dead."

Mamoulian shook his head. "Limb from limb," he murmured. "If I must. Limb from limb."

Chad grinned, hearing the European's promise. Sweet Jesus, he thought, this was the way the world would end. A warren of rooms, cars on the freeway winding their last way home, the dead and almost dead exchanging blows by candlelight. The Reverend had been wrong. The Deluge wasn't a wave, was it? It was blind men with axes; it was the great on their knees begging not to die at the hands of idiots; it was the itch of the irrational grown to an epidemic. He watched, and thought of how he would describe this scene to the Reverend, and for the first time in his nineteen years his pretty head felt a spasm of pure joy.

Marty hadn't realized how pleasurable the experience of travel had been a pa.s.senger of pure thought-until he plunged into Mamoulian's body. He felt like a skinned man immersed in boiling oil. He thrashed, his essence screeching for an end to this h.e.l.l of another man's physicality. But Carys was here. He had to keep that thought uppermost, a touchstone.

In this maelstrom his feelings for her had the purity of mathematics. Its equations-complex, but elegant in their proofs-offered a nicety that was like truth. He had to hold on to this recognition. If he once relinquished it he was lost.

Though without senses, he felt this new state struggling to impinge a vision of itself upon him. At the corners of his blind eyes lights flared perspective opened up and closed again in an instant-suns threatened to ignite overhead and were snuffed out before they could shed warmth or illumination. Some irritation possessed him: an itch of lunacy. Scratch me, it said, and you needn't sweat anymore. He countered the seduction with thoughts of Carys.

Gone, the itch said, deeper than you'd dare to go. So much deeper.

What it claimed was perhaps true. He'd swallowed her whole, taken her down to wherever he kept his favorite things. To the place where the zero he'd tampered with at Caliban Street was sourced. Face-to-face with such a vacuum he would shrivel: there would be no reprieve this time. Such a place, the itch salad, such a terrible place. You want to see?

No.

Come on, look! Look and tremble! Look and cease! You wanted to know what he was, well you're about to get a worm's-eye view.

I'm not listening, Marty thought. He pressed on, and though-like Caliban Street-there was no up or down, no forward or back in this place, he had a sense of descent.. Was it just the metaphors he carried with him, that he pictured h.e.l.l as a pit? Or was he crawling through the European's innards to the bowel where Carys was hidden?

Of course you'll never get out, the itch said with a smile. Not once you get down there. There's no way back. He'll never s.h.i.+t you out. You'll stay locked up in there, once and for all.

Carys got out, he reasoned.

She was in his head, the itch reminded him. She was flipping through his library. You're buried in the dung-heap; and deep, oh, yes, my man, so deep.

No!

For certain.

No!Mamoulian shook his head. It was full of strange aches; voices too. Or was that just the past chattering to him? Yes, the past. It had buzzed and gossiped in his ear more loudly in these recent weeks than ever in the preceding decades. Whenever his mind had idled, the gravity of history had claimed it, and he had been back in the monastery yard with the snow falling and the drummer-boy at his right-hand side quaking, and the parasites leaving the bodies as they cooled. Two hundred years of life had sprung from that conspiracy of moments. Had the shot that killed the executioner been delayed by mere seconds the sword would have fallen, his head would have rolled, and the centuries he'd lived would not have contained him; nor he they.

And why did this cycle of thoughts return now, as he looked at Anthony across the room? They were a thousand miles and seventeen decades from that event. I'm not in danger, he chided himself, so why quake? Breer was teetering on the edge of total collapse; dispatching him was a simple, if distasteful, task.

He moved suddenly, his good hand s.n.a.t.c.hing at Breer's throat before the other had a chance to retaliate. The European's slender fingers dug through the mush and closed around Breer's esophagus. Then he pulled, hard. A goodly portion of Breer's neck came away in a splutter of grease and fluids. There was a sound like escaping steam.

Chad applauded, cigar in mouth. In the corner where he'd collapsed Tom had stopped whimpering and was also watching the mutilation. One man fighting for his life, the other for his death. Hallelujah! Saints and sinners all together.

Mamoulian flung the fistful of muck away. Despite his formidable injury, the Razor-Eater was still standing.

"Must I tear you apart?" Mamoulian said. Even as he spoke, something scrabbled inside him. Was the girl still fighting her confinement?

"Who's there?" he asked softly.

Carys answered. Not to Mamoulian, but to Marty. Here, she said. He heard her. No, not heard: felt. She summoned him, and he followed.

The itch in Marty was in seventh heaven. Too late to help her, it said: too late for anything now.

But she was close by, he knew it, her presence choking back his panic. I'm with you, she said. Two of us now.

The itch was unimpressed. It smirked at the thought of escape. You're sealed up forever, it said, better concede it. If she can't get out, why should you be able to?

Two, Carys said. Two of us now. For the frailest of moments he caught the intention in her words. They were together, and together they were more than a sum of their parts. He thought of their locking anatomies-the physical act that was metaphor for this other unity. He'd never understood until now. His mind jubilated. She was with him: he with her. They were one indivisible thought, imagining each other.

Go!

And h.e.l.l divided; it had no choice. The province fragmented as they delivered themselves out of the European's grasp. They experienced a few exquisite moments as one mind, and then gravity-or whatever law pertained in this state-demanded its lot. Division came-a rude expulsion from this momentary Eden-and they were plumeting now toward their own bodies, the conjunction over.

Mamoulian felt their escape as a wounding more traumatic than any Breer had so far delivered. He put his finger up to his mouth, a look of pitiful loss on his face. Tears came freely, diluting the blood on his face. Breer seemed to sense a cue in this: his moment had come. An image had spontaneously appeared in his liquefying brain-like one of the grainy photographs in his book of atrocities-except that this image moved. Snow fell; the flames of a brazier danced.

The machete in his hand felt heavier by the second: more like a sword. He raised it; its shadow fell across the European's face.

Mamoulian looked at Breer's ruined features and recognized them; saw how it had all come to this moment. Bowed under a weight of years, he fell to his knees.

As he was doing so, Carys opened her eyes. There had been a vile, grinding return; more terrible for Marty than for herself, who was used to the sensation. But it was never entirely pleasant to feel muscle and fat congeal around the spirit.

Marty's eyes had opened too, and he was looking down at the body he occupied. It was heavy, and stale. So much of it-the layers of skin, the hair, the nails-was dead matter. Its very substance revolted him. Being in this state was a parody of the freedom he'd just tasted. He started up from his slumped position with a small cry of disgust, as if he'd woken to find his body crawling with insects.

He looked across to Carys for rea.s.surance, but her attention had been claimed by a sight concealed from Marty by the partially closed door.

She was watching a spectacle she knew from somewhere. But the point of view was different, and it took awhile for her to place the scene: the man on his knees, his neck exposed, his arms spread a little from his body, fingers splayed in the universal gesture of submission; the executioner, face' blurred, raising the blade to decapitate his willing victim; somebody laughing somewhere nearby.

The last time she'd seen this tableau she'd been behind Mamoulian's eyes, a soldier in a snow-spattered yard, awaiting the blow that would cancel his young life. A blow that had never come; or rather had been deferred until now. Had the executioner waited so long, living in one body only to discard it for another, trailing Mamoulian through decade upon decade until at last fate a.s.sembled the pieces of a reunion? Or was this all the European's doing? Had his will summoned Breer to finish a story accidentally interrupted generations before?

She would never know. The act, begun a second time, was not to be postponed again. The weapon sliced down, almost dividing head from neck in one blow. A few tenacious sinews kept it rocking-nose to chest-from the trunk for two succeeding blows before it departed, rolling down between the European's legs and coming to rest at Tom's feet. The boy kicked it away.

Mamoulian had made no sound; but now, headless, his torso gave vent: Noise came from the wound with the blood; complaints sounded, it seemed, from every pore. And with the sound came smoky ghosts of unmade pictures, rising from him like steam. Bitter things appeared and fled; dreams, perhaps, or fragments of the past. It was all one now. Always had been, in fact. He had come from rumor; he the legendary, he the unfixable, he whose very name was a lie. Could it matter if now his biography, fleeing into nothingness, was taken as fiction?

Breer, una.s.suaged, began to berate the open wound of the corpse's neck with the machete, slicing first down then sideways in an effort to cleave the enemy into smaller and yet smaller pieces. An arm was summarily lopped off; he picked it up to sever hand from wrist, forearm from upper arm. In moments the room, which had been almost serene as the execution took place, became an abattoir.

Marty stumbled to the door in time to see Breer strike off Mamoulian's other arm.

"Look at him go!" said the American boy, toasting the bloodbath with Whitehead's vodka.

Marty watched the carnage, unblenched. It was all over. The European was a dead man. His head lay on its side under the window; it looked small; vestigial.

Carys, flattened against the wall beside the door, caught Marty's hand. "Papa?" she said. "What about Papa."

As she spoke Mamoulian's corpse pitched forward from its kneeling position. The ghosts and the din it had spilled had stopped. Now there was only dark blood splas.h.i.+ng from it. Breer bent to further butchery, opening the abdomen with two slashes. Urine fountained from the punctured bladder.

Carys, revolted by the attacks, slipped out of the room. Marty lingered a while longer. The last sight he caught as he followed Carys was the Razor-Eater picking up the head by the hair, like some exotic fruit, and delivering a lateral cut to it.

In the hallway Carys was crouching at her father's side; Marty joined her. She stroked the old man's cheek. "Papa?" she said. He wasn't dead, but neither was he truly alive. There was a flicker in his pulse, no more. His eyes were closed.

"No use . . ." Marty said as she shook the old man's shoulder, "he's as good as gone."

In the gaming room Chad, had begun to shriek with laughter. Apparently the slaughterhouse scenes were reaching new heights of absurdist brio.

"I don't want to be here when he gets bored," Marty said. Carys made no move. "There's nothing we can do for the old man," he said.

She looked at him, bewildered by the dilemma.

"He's gone, Carys. And we should go too."

A silence had started in the abattoir. It was worse, in its way, than the laughter, or the sound of Breer's labors.