The Damnation Game Part 44

What delusion was this? "Who?" he asked sharply. "Killed who?"

"Marty. He doesn't answer. I killed him."

"Shush . . . shush . . ." The cold fingers stroked her cheek. "Is he dead, then? So: he's dead. That's all that can be said."

". . . I did it . . ."

"No, Carys. It wasn't you. It was something that had to be done; don't concern yourself."

He took her wan face in both hands. Often he had cradled her head when she was a child, proud that she was the pilgrim's fruit. In those embraces he had nurtured the powers she had grown up with, sensing that a time might come when he would need her.

"Just open the door, Carys. Tell him you're here, and he'll open it for you."

"I don't want . . . to see him."

"But I do. You'll be doing me a great service. And once it's over, there'll be nothing to be afraid of ever again. I promise you that."

She seemed to see some sense in this.

"The door . . ." he prompted.

"Yes."

He loosed her face, and she turned away from him to climb the stairs.

In the deep-pile comfort of his suite, his jazz playing on the portable hi-fi he had personally lugged up six flights, Whitehead had heard nothing. He had all that he needed. Drink, books, records, strawberries. A man might sit out the Apocalypse up here and be none the worse for it. He had even brought some pictures: the early Matisse from the study, Reclining Nude, Quai St. Michel; a Miro and a Francis Bacon. The last was a mistake. It was too morbidly suggestive, with its hints of flayed flesh; he'd turned it to the wall. But the Matisse was a joy, even by candlelight. He was staring at it, never less than enchanted by its casual facility, when the knocking came.

He stood up. It was many hours-he'd lost track of time-since Strauss had been here; had he come again? Somewhat groggy with vodka, Whitehead lurched along the hall of the suite, and listened at the door.

"Papa . . ."

It was Carys. He didn't answer her. It was suspicious, her being here.

"It's me, Papa, it's me. Are you there?"

Her voice was so tentative; she sounded like a child again. Was it possible Strauss had taken him at his word, and sent the girl to him, or had she simply come back of her own accord, the way Evangeline had after cross words? Yes, that was it. She'd come because, like her mother, she couldn't help but come. He began to unlock the door, fingers awkward in antic.i.p.ation.

"Papa . . ."

At last he got the best of the key and the handle and opened the door. She wasn't there. n.o.body was there: or so he thought at first. But even as he stepped back into the hall of the suite the door was thrown wide and he was flung against the wall by a youth whose hands seized him at neck and groin and pinned him flat. He dropped the vodka bottle he was carrying and threw up his hands to signify his surrender. When he'd shaken the a.s.sault from his head he looked over the youth's shoulder and his bleary eyes came to rest on the man who had followed the youth in.

Quietly, and quite without warning, he began to cry.They left Carys in the dressing room beside the master bedroom of the suite. It was empty but for a fitted wardrobe and a pile of curtains, which had been removed from the windows and then forgotten. She made a nest in their musty folds and lay down. A single thought circled in her head: I killed him. She had felt his resistance to her investigation; felt the tension building in him. And then, nothing.

The suite, which occupied a quarter of the top story, boasted two views. One was of the highway: a garish ribbon of headlights. The other, that let on to the east side of the hotel, was gloomier. The small dressing-room window faced this second view: a stretch of wasteland, then the fence and the city beyond it. But from her position lying on the floor, all of that was out of sight. All she could see was a skyfield, across which the blinking lights of a jet crept.

She watched its circling descent, thinking Marty's name."Marty. "

They were lifting him into an ambulance. He still felt sick to the pit of his stomach with the roller coaster he'd been on. He didn't want consciousness, because with it came the nausea. The hissing had gone from his ears however; and his sight was intact.

"What happened? Hit-and-run?" somebody asked him.

"He just fell down," a witness replied. "I saw him. Fell down in the middle of the pavement. I was just coming out of the newsagents when I-"

"Marty."

"-and there he was-"

"Marty. "

His name was sounding in his head, clear as a spring-morning bell. There was a renewed trickle of blood from his nose, but no pain this time. He raised his hand to his face to stem the flow but a hand was already there, stanching and wiping.

"You'll be all right," a man's voice said. Somehow Marty felt this to be indisputably true, though it was nothing to do with this man's ministrations. The pain had gone, and the fear had gone with it. It was Carys speaking in his head. It had been all along. Now some wall in him had been breached-forcibly perhaps, and painfully, but the worst was over-and she was thinking his name in her head and he was catching her thought like a lobbed tennis ball. His previous doubts seemed naive. It was a simple act, this thought catching, once you had the knack of it.She felt him wake to her.

For several seconds she lay on her curtain bed while the jet winked across the window, not quite daring to believe what her instincts were telling her-that he was hearing her, that he was alive.

Marty? she thought. This time, instead of the word getting lost in the dark between his mind and hers, it went unerringly home, welcomed into his cortex. He didn't have the skill to frame an answer, but that was academic at this point. As long as he could hear and understand, he could come.

The hotel, she thought. Do you understand, Marty? I'm with the European at a hotel. She tried to remember the name she'd glimpsed over the door. Orpheus; that was it. She had no address, but she did her best to picture the building for him, in the hope that he could make sense of her impressionist directions.He sat up in the ambulance.

"Don't worry. The car'll be taken care of," the attendant said, pressing a hand on his shoulder to get him to lie back down. They'd wrapped a scarlet blanket across him. Red so the blood doesn't show, he registered as he threw it off.

"You can't get up," the attendant told him. "You're in bad shape."

"I'm fine," Marty insisted, pus.h.i.+ng the solicitous hand away. "You've been wonderful. But I've got a prior engagement."

The driver was closing the double doors at the back of the ambulance. Through the narrowing gap Marty could see a ring of professional bystanders straining to catch a final look at the spectacle. He made a dive for the doors.

The spectators were disgruntled to see Lazarus risen, and worse, to see him smiling like a loon as he emerged, apologizing, from the back of the vehicle. Didn't the man have any sense of occasion?

"I'm fine," he told the driver as he backed off through the crowd. "Must have been something I ate." The driver stared at him, uncomprehending.

"You're b.l.o.o.d.y," he managed to mutter.

"Never felt better," Marty replied, and in a way, despite the exhaustion in his bones, it was true. She was here, in his head, and there was still time to make things right, if he hurried.

The Citroen was a few yards down the road; splashes of his blood painted the pavement beside it. The keys were still in the ignition.

"Wait for me, babe, " he said, and started back toward the Pandemonium Hotel.

69

It was not the first time Sharon had been locked out of her house while her mother entertained a man the young girl had never seen before, and would, on past form, never see again; but tonight the expulsion was particularly unwelcome. She felt a summer cold coming on, and she wanted to be in the house in front of the television instead of out in the street after dark vainly trying to devise new skipping games for herself. She wandered down the street, beginning a solitary game of hopscotch, then abandoning it on the fifth square.She was just outside Number Eighty-two. It was a house her mother had warned her to keep clear of. A family of Asians lived on the ground floor-sleeping twelve to a bed, or so Mrs. Lennox had told Sharon's mother-in conditions of criminal squalor. But despite its reputation, Number Eighty-two had been a disappointment all summer: until today. Today Sharon had seen peculiar comings and goings at the house. Some people had arrived in a big car and taken a sick-looking woman away with them. And now, as she idled at the hopscotch game, there was somebody at one of the middle floor windows, a big, shadowy figure, and he was beckoning to her.

Sharon was ten. It would be a year before her first period, and though she had an inkling of the matter between men and women from her half-sister, she thought it a ridiculous palaver. The boys who played football in the street were foulmouthed, grubby creatures; she could scarcely imagine ever pining for their affections.

But the alluring figure at the window was a male, and it found something in Sharon; it turned over a rock. Beneath were the first stirrings of lives that weren't quite ready for the sun. They wriggled; they made her thin legs itch. It was to stop that itch that she disobeyed every prohibition on Number Eighty-two and slipped into the house when next the front door was opened, and up to where she knew the stranger to be.

"h.e.l.lo?" she said, standing on the landing outside the room.

"You can come in," the man said.

Sharon had never smelled death before, but she knew it instinctively: introductions were superfluous. She stood in the doorway and peered at the man. She could still run if she wanted to, she knew that too. She was made yet safer by the fact that he was tied to the bed. This she could see, though the room was dark. Her inquisitive mind found nothing odd in this; adults played games, the way children did.

"Put on the light," the man suggested. She reached up for the switch beside the door and turned it on. The weak bulb lit the prisoner strangely; by it he looked sicker than anybody Sharon had ever set eyes on. He had obviously dragged the bed across the room to the window, and in so doing the ropes that tied him had bitten into his gray skin, so that s.h.i.+ny brown fluids-not quite like blood-covered his hands and trousers, and spattered the floor at his feet. Black blotches made his face, which was also s.h.i.+ny, piebald.

"h.e.l.lo," he said. His voice was warped, as though he was speaking out of a cheap radio. Its weirdness amused her.

"h.e.l.lo," she said back.

He gave her a lopsided grin, and the bulb caught the wetness of his eyes, which were so deep in his head she could scarcely make them out. But when they moved, as they did now, the skin around them fluttered.

"I'm sorry to call you away from your games," he said.

She dawdled in the door, not quite certain whether to go or stay. "I shouldn't really be here," she teased.

"Oh . . ." he said, rolling his eyes up until all the whites showed. "Please don't go."

She thought he looked comical with his jacket all stained and his eyes rolling. "If Marilyn found out I'd been here-"

"Your sister, is that?"

"My mother. She'd hit me."

The man looked doleful. "She shouldn't do that," he said.

"Well, she does."

"That's shameful," he replied mournfully.

"Oh, she won't find out," Sharon rea.s.sured him. The man was more distressed by her talk of a beating than she'd intended. "n.o.body knows I'm here."

"Good," he said. "I wouldn't want any harm to come to you on my account."

"Why are you all tied up?" she inquired. "Is it a game?"

"Yes. That's all it is. Tell me, what's your name?"

"Sharon."

"You're quite right, Sharon; it's a game. Only I don't want to play anymore. It's started to hurt me. You can see."

He raised his hands as far as he could, to show how the bindings bit. A diet of flies, disrupted from their laying, buzzed about his head.

"Are you any good at untying knots?" he asked her.

"Not very."

"Could you try. For me?"

"Suppose so," she said.

"Only I'm feeling very tired. Come in, Sharon. Close the door."

She did as she was told. There was no threat here. Just a mystery (or two maybe: death and men) and she wanted to know more. Besides, the man was ill: he could do her no harm in his present condition. The closer she got to him the worse he looked. His skin was blistering, and there were beads of something like black oil dotting his face. Beneath the smell of his perfume, which was strong, there was something bitter. She didn't want to touch him, sorry as she felt for him.

"Please . . ." he said, proffering his bound hands. The flies roved around, irritated. There were lots of them, and they were all interested in him; in his eyes, in his ears.

"I should get a doctor," she said. "You're not well."

"No time for that," he insisted. "Just untie me, then I'll find a doctor myself, and n.o.body need know you've been up here."

She nodded, seeing the logic of this, and approached him through the cloud of flies to untie the restraints. Her fingers were not strong, her nails bitten to the quick, but she worked at the knots with determination, a charming frown flawing the perfect plane of her brow as she labored. Her efforts were hampered by the flow of yolky fluid from his broken flesh, which gummed everything up. Once in a while she'd turn her hazel eyes up to him; he wondered whether she could see degeneration occurring in front of her. If she could, she was too engrossed in the challenge of the knots to leave; either that, or she was willingly unleas.h.i.+ng him, aware of the power she wielded in so doing.

Only once did she show any sign of anxiety, when something in his chest seemed to fail, a piece of internal machinery slipping into a lake around his bowels. He coughed and exhaled a breath that made sewerage smell like primroses. She turned her head away and pulled a face. He apologized politely and she asked him not to do it again, then went back to the problem at hand. He waited patiently, knowing that any attempt to hurry her along would only spoil her concentration. But in time she got the measure of the riddle, and the binding began to loosen. His flesh, which was now the consistency of softened soap, skidded off the bone of his wrists as he pulled his hands free.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you. You've been very kind."

He bent to untie the ropes at his feet, his breath, or what pa.s.sed for it, a gritty rattle in his chest.

"I'll go now," she said.

"Not yet, Sharon," he replied; speaking was drudgery now. "Please don't go yet."

"But I have to be home."

The Razor-Eater looked at her creamy face: she looked so fragile, standing under the light. She had withdrawn from his immediate vicinity once the knots were untied, as though the initial trepidation had begun again. He tried to smile, to rea.s.sure her that all was well, but his face wouldn't obey. The fat and muscle just drooped on his skull; his lips felt inept. Words, he knew, were close to failing him. It would have to be signs from now on. He was moving into a purer world-one of symbols, of ritual-a world where Razor-Eaters truly belonged.

His feet were free. In a matter of moments he could be across the room to where she stood. Even -if she turned and ran he could catch her. No one to see or hear; and even if there were what could they punish him with? He was a dead man.

He crossed the room toward her. The little living thing stood in his shadow and made not the least effort to escape him. Had she too calculated her chances and seen the futility of a chase? No; she was simply trusting.

He put out a sordid hand to stroke her head. She blinked, and held her breath at his proximity, but made no attempt to evade the contact. He longed for touch in his fingers, so as to feel her gloss. She was so perfect: what a blessing it would be to put a piece of her in him, to show as proof of love at the gates of paradise.

But her look was enough. He would take that with him, and count himself content; just the somber sweetness of her as a token, like coins in his eyes to pay his pa.s.sage with.

"Goodbye," he said, and walked, his gait uneven, to the door. She went ahead of him and opened the door, then led him down the stairs. A child was crying in one of the adjacent rooms, the whooping wail of a baby that knows no one will come. On the front step Breer thanked Sharon again, and they parted. He watched her run off home.

For his part, he was not certain-at least not consciously-of where he was going to go now, or why. But once down the steps and onto the pavement his legs took him in a direction he had never been before, and he didn't become lost, though he soon made his way into unfamiliar territory. Somebody called him. Him, and his machete and his blurred, gray face. He went as quickly as anatomy allowed like a man summoned by history.