Clive Barker - The Damnation Game

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The Damnation Game by Clive Barker
Copyright 1985
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability.
-SHELLY, Prometheus Unbound
Part One
TERRA INCOGNITA
Hell is the place of those who have denied;
They find there what they planted and what dug.
A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing,
And wander there and drift, and never cease
Wailing for substance.
-W.B. YEATS, The Hour Glass
1
The air was electric the day the thief crossed the city, certain that tonight,
after so many weeks of frustration, he would finally locate the card-player.
It was not an easy journey. Eighty-five percent of Warsaw had been leveled,
either by the months of mortar bombardment that had preceded the Russian
liberation of the city, or by the program of demolition the Nazis had
undertaken before their retreat. Several sectors were virtually impassable by
vehicle. Mountains of rubble-still nurturing the dead like bulbs ready to
sprout as the spring weather warmed-clogged the streets. Even in the more
accessible districts the once-elegant facades swooned dangerously, their
foundations growling.
But after almost three months of plying his trade here, the thief had
become used to navigating this urban wilderness. Indeed, he took pleasure in
its desolate splendor: its perspectives tinged lilac by the dust that still
settled from the stratosphere, its squares and parkways so unnaturally silent;
the sense he had, trespassing here, that this was what the end of the world
would be like. By day there were even a few landmarks remaining-forlorn
signposts that would be dismantled in time-by which the traveler could chart
his route. The gas works beside the Poniatowski Bridge was still recognizable,
as was the zoo on the other side of the river; the clock-tower of Central
Station showed its head, though the clock had long since disappeared; these
and a handful of other pockmarked tributes to Warsaw's civic beauty survived,
their trembling presence poignant, even to the thief.
This wasn't his home. He had no home, nor had for a decade. He was a
nomad and a scavenger, and for a short space Warsaw offered sufficient
pickings to keep him here. Soon, when he'd recovered energies depleted in his
recent wanderings, it would be time to move on. But while the first signs of
spring murmured in the air he lingered here, enjoying the freedom of the city.
There were hazards certainly, but then where were there not for a man of
his profession? And the war years had polished his powers of self-preservation
to such brilliance that little intimidated him. He was safer here than the
true citizens of Warsaw, the few bewildered survivors of the holocaust who
were gradually beginning to filter back into the city, looking for lost homes,
lost faces. They scrabbled in the wreckage or stood on street corners
listening to the dirge of the river, and waited for the Russians to round them
up in the name of Karl Marx. New barricades were being established every day.
The military were slowly but systematically reclaiming some order from the
confusion, dividing and subdividing the city as they would, in time, the
entire country. The curfews and the checkpoints did little to hobble the
thief, however. In the lining of his well-cut coat he kept identification
papers of every kind-some forged, most stolen-one of which would be suitable
for whatever situation arose. What they lacked in credibility he made up for
with repartee and cigarettes, both of which he possessed in abundance. They
were all a man needed-in that city, in that year-to feet like the lord of
creation.
And such creation! No need here for either appetite or curiosity to go
unsatisfied. The profoundest secrets of body and spirit were available to
anyone with the itch to see. Games were made of them. Only the previous week
the thief had heard tell of a young man who played the ancient game of cups
and ball (now you see it, now you don't) but substituted, with insanity's wit,
three buckets and a baby's head.
That was the least of it; the infant was dead, and the dead don't
suffer. There were, however, other pastimes available for hire in the city,
delights that used the living as their raw material. For those with the
craving and the price of entry, a traffic in human flesh had begun. The
occupying army, no longer distracted by battle, had discovered sex again, and
there was profit in it. Half a loaf of bread could purchase one of the refugee
girls-many so young they scarcely had breasts to knead-to be used and reused
in the covering darkness, their complaints unheard or silenced by a bayonet
when they lost their charm. Such casual homicide was overlooked in a city
where tens of thousands had died. For a few weeks-between one regime and the
next-anything was possible: no act found culpable, no depravity taboo.
A boys' brothel had been opened in the Zoliborz District. Here, in an
underground salon hung with salvaged paintings, one could choose from chicks
of six or seven up, all fetchingly slimmed by malnutrition and tight as any
connoisseur could wish. It was very popular with the officer class, but too
expensive, the thief had heard it muttered, for the noncommissioned ranks.
Lenin's tenets of equal choice for all did not stretch, it seemed, to
pederasty.
Sport, of a kind, was more cheaply available. Dogfights were a
particularly popular attraction that season. Homeless curs, returning to the
city to pick at the meat of their masters, were trapped, fed to fighting
strength and then pitted against each other to the death. It was an appalling
spectacle, but a love of betting took the thief to the fights again and again.
He'd made a tidy profit one night by putting his money on a runty but cunning
terrier who'd bested a dog three times its size by chewing off its opponent's
testicles.
And if, after a time, your taste for dogs or boys or women palled, there
were more esoteric entertainments available.
In a crude amphitheater dug from the debris of the Bastion of Holy Mary
the thief had seen an anonymous actor single-handedly perform Goethe's Faust,
Parts One and Two. Though the thief's German was far from perfect, the
performance had made a lasting impression. The story was familiar enough for
him to follow the action-the pact with Mephisto, the debates, the conjuring
tricks, and then, as the promised damnation approached, despair and terrors.
Much of the argument was indecipherable, but the actor's possession by his
twin roles-one moment Tempter, the next Tempted-was so impressive the thief
left with his belly churning.
Two days later he had gone back to see the play again, or at least to
speak to the actor. But there were to be no encores. The performer's
enthusiasm for Goethe had been interpreted as pro-Nazi propaganda; the thief
found him hanging, joy decayed, from a telegraph pole. He was naked. His bare
feet had been eaten at and his eyes taken out by birds; his torso was riddled
with bullet holes. The sight pacified the thief. He saw it as proof that the
confused feelings the actor had aroused were iniquitous; if this was the state
to which his art had brought him the man had clearly been a scoundrel and a
sham. His mouth gaped, but the birds had taken his tongue as well as his
eyes. No loss.
Besides, there were far more rewarding diversions. The women the thief
could take or leave, and the boys were not to his taste, but the gambling he
loved, and always had. So it was back to the dogfights to chance his fortunes
on a mongrel. If not there, then to some barrack-room dice game, or-in
desperation-betting with a bored sentry on the speed of a passing cloud. The
method and the circumstance scarcely concerned him: he cared only to gamble.
Since his adolescence it had been his one true vice; it was the indulgence he
had become a thief to fund. Before the war he'd played in casinos across
Europe; chemin de fer was his game, though he was not averse to roulette. Now
he looked back at those years through the veil war had drawn across them, and
remembered the contests as he remembered dreams on waking: as something
irretrievable, and slipping further away with every breath.
That sense of loss changed, however, when he heard about the cardplayer-
Mamoulian, they called him-who, it was said, never lost a game, and who came
and went in this deceitful city like a creature who was not, perhaps, even
real.
But then, after Mamoulian, everything changed.
2
So much was rumor; and so much of that rumor not even rooted in truth. Simply
lies told by bored soldiers. The military mind, the thief had discovered, was
capable of inventions more baroque than a poet's, and more lethal. So when he
heard tell of a master cardsharp who appeared out of no where, and challenged
every would-be gambler to a game and unfailingly won, he suspected the story
to be just that: a story. But something about the way this apocryphal tale
lingered confounded expectation. It didn't fade away to be replaced by some
yet more ludicrous romance. It appeared repeatedly-in the conversation of the
men at the dogfights; in gossip, in graffiti. What was more, though the names
changed the salient facts were the same from one account to the next. The
thief began to suspect there was truth in the story after all. Perhaps there
was a brilliant gambler operating somewhere in the city. Not perfectly
invulnerable, of course; no one was that. But the man, if he existed, was
certainly something special. Talk of him was always conducted with a caution
that was like reverence; soldiers who claimed to have seen him play spoke of
his elegance, his almost hypnotic calm. When they talked of Mamoulian they
were peasants speaking of nobility, and the thief-never one to concede the
superiority of any man-added a zeal to unseat this king to his reasons for
seeking the card-player out.
But beyond the general picture he garnered from the grapevine, there
were few specifics. He knew that he would have to find and interrogate a man
who had actually faced this paragon across a gaming table before he could
really begin to separate truth from speculation.
It took two weeks to find such a man. His name was Konstantin Vasiliev,
a second lieutenant, who, it was said, had lost everything he had playing
against Mamoulian. The Russian was broad as a bull; the thief felt dwarfed by
him. But while some big men nurture spirits expansive enough to fill their
anatomies, Vasiliev seemed almost empty. If he had ever possessed such
virility, it was now gone. Left in the husk was a frail and fidgety child.
It took an hour of coaxing, the best part of a bottle of black-market
vodka and half a pack of cigarettes to get Vasiliev to answer with more than a
monosyllable, but when the disclosures came they came gushingly, the
confessions of a man on the verge of total breakdown. There was self-pity in
his talk, and anger too; but mostly there was the stench of dread. Vasiliev
was a man in mortal terror. The thief was mightily impressed: not by the tears
or the desperation, but by the fact that Mamoulian, this faceless card-player,
had broken the giant sitting across the floor from him. Under the guise of
consolation and friendly advice he proceeded to pump the Russian for every
sliver of information he could provide, looking all the time for some
significant detail to make flesh and blood of the chimera he was
investigating.
"You say he wins without fail?"
"Always."
"So what's his method? How does he cheat?"
Vasiliev looked up from his contemplation of the bare boards of the
floor.
"Cheat?" he said, incredulously. "He doesn't cheat. I've played cards
all my life, with the best and the worst. I've seen every trick a man can
pull. And I tell you now, he was clean."
"The luckiest player gets defeated once in a while. The laws of chance-"
A look of innocent amusement crossed Vasiliev's face, and for a moment
the thief glimpsed the man who'd occupied this fortress before his fall from
sanity.
"The laws of chance are nothing to him. Don't you see? He isn't like you
or me. How could a man always win without having some power over the cards?"
"You believe that?"
Vasiliev shrugged, and slumped again. "To him," he said, almost
contemplative in his utter dismay, "winning is beauty. It is like life
itself."
The vacant eyes returned to tracing the rough grain of the floorboards
as the thief somersaulted the words over in his head: "Winning is beauty. It
is like life itself." It was strange talk, and made him uneasy. Before he
could work his way into its meaning, however, Vasiliev was leaning closer to
him, his breath fearful, his vast hand catching hold of the thief's sleeve as
he spoke.
"I've put in for a transfer, did they tell you that? I'll be away from here in
a few days, and nobody'll be any the wiser. I'm getting medals when I get
home. That's why they're transferring me: because I'm a hero, and heroes get
what they ask for. Then I'll be gone, and he'll never find me."
"Why would he want to?"
The hand on the sleeve fisted; Vasiliev pulled the thief in toward him.
"I owe him the shirt off my back," he said. "If I stay, he'll have me killed.
He's killed others, him and his comrades."
"He's not alone?" said the thief. He had pictured the card-player as
being a man without associates; made him, in fact, in his own image.
Vasiliev blew his nose into his hand, and leaned back in the chair. It
creaked under his bulk.
"Who knows what's true or false in this place, eh?" he said, eyes
swimming. "I mean, if I told you he had dead men with him, would you believe
me?" He answered his own question with a shake of his head. "No. You'd think I
was mad . . ."
Once, the thief thought, this man had been capable of certainty; of
action; perhaps even of heroism. Now all that noble stuff had been siphoned
off: the champion was reduced to a sniveling rag, blabbering nonsense. He
inwardly applauded the brilliance of Mamoulian's victory. He had always hated
heroes.
"One last question-" he began.
"You want to know where you can find him."
"Yes."
The Russian stared at the ball of his thumb, sighing deeply. This was
all so wearisome.
"What do you gain if you play him?" he asked, and again returned his own
answer. "Only humiliation. Perhaps death."
The thief stood up. "Then you don't know where he is?" he said, making
to pocket the half-empty packet of cigarettes that lay on the table between
them.
"Wait." Vasiliev reached for the pack before it slid out of sight.
"Wait."
The thief placed the cigarettes back on the table, and Vasiliev covered
them with one proprietorial hand. He looked up at his interrogator as he
spoke.
"The last time I heard, he was north of here. Up by Muranowski Square.
You know it?"
The thief nodded. It was not a region he relished visiting, but he knew
it. "And how do I find him, once I get there?" he asked.
The Russian looked perplexed by the question.
"I don't even know what he looks like," the thief said, trying to make
Vasiliev understand.
"You won't need to find him," Vasiliev replied, understanding all too
well. "If he wants you to play, he'll find you."
3
The next night, the first of many such nights, the thief had gone looking for
the card-player. Though it was by now April, the weather was still bitter that
year. He'd come back to his room in the partially demolished hotel he occupied
numb with cold, frustration and-though he scarcely admitted it even to
himself-fear. The region around Muranowski Square was a hell within a hell.
Many of the bomb craters here let on to the sewers; the stench out of them was
unmistakable. Others, used as fire pits to cremate executed citizens, still
flared intermittently when a flame found a belly swollen with gas, or a pool
of human fat. Every step taken in this new-found land was an adventure, even
to the thief. Death, its forms multitudinous, waited everywhere. Sitting on
the edge of a crater, warming its feet in the flames; standing, lunatic,
amongst the refuse; at laughing play in a garden of bone and shrapnel.
Fear notwithstanding, he'd returned to the district on several
occasions; but the card-player eluded him. And with every failed attempt, with
every journey that ended in defeat, the thief became more preoccupied with the
pursuit. In his mind this faceless gambler began to take on something of the
force of legend. Just to see the man in the flesh, to verify his physical
existence in the same world that he, the thief, occupied, became an article of
faith. A means, God help him, by which he could ratify his own existence
After a week and a half of fruitless searching, he went back to find
Vasiliev. The Russian was dead. His body, throat slit from ear to ear, had
been found the previous day, floating facedown in one of the sewers the Army
was clearing in Wola. He was not alone. There had been three other bodies with
him, all slaughtered in a similar fashion, all set alight and burning like
fire ships as they drifted down the tunnel on a river of excrement. One of the
soldiers who had been in the sewer when the flotilla appeared told the thief
that the bodies had seemed to float in the darkness. For a breathless moment
it had been like the steady approach of angels.
Then, of course, the horror. Extinguishing the burning corpses, their hair,
their backs; then turning them over, and the face of Vasiliev, caught in the
beam of a flashlight, carrying a look of wonder, like a child in awe of some
lethal conjuror.
His transfer papers had arrived that same afternoon.
In fact the papers seemed to have been the cause of an administrative
error that had closed Vasiliev's tragedy on a comic note. The bodies, once
identified, had been buried in Warsaw, except for Second Lieutenant Vasiliev,
whose war record demanded less cursory treatment. Plans were afoot to
transport the body back to Mother Russia, where he would be buried with state
honors in his hometown. But somebody, alighting upon the transfer papers, had
taken them to apply to Vasiliev dead, not Vasiliev living. Mysteriously, the
body disappeared. Nobody would admit responsibility: the corpse had simply
been shipped out to some new posting.
Vasiliev's death merely served to intensify the thief's curiosity.
Mamoulian's arrogance fascinated him. Here was a scavenger, a man who made a
living off the weakness of others, who had yet grown so insolent with success
that he dared to murder-or have murdered on his behalf-those who crossed him.
The thief became jittery with anticipation. In his dreams, when he was able to
sleep, he wandered in Muranowski Square. It was filled with a fog like a
living thing, which promised at any moment to divide and reveal the card-
player. He was like a man in love.
4
Tonight, the ceiling of squalid cloud above Europe had broken: blue, albeit
pale, had spread over his head, wider and wider. Now, toward evening, the sky
was absolutely clear above him. In the southwest vast cumulus, their
cauliflower heads tinted ocher and gold, were fattening with thunder, but the
thought of their anger only excited him. Tonight, the air was electric, and he
would find the card-player, he was sure. He had been sure since he woke that
morning.
As evening began to fall he went north toward the square, scarcely
thinking of where he was going, the route was so familiar to him. He walked
through two checkpoints without being challenged, the confidence in his step
password enough. Tonight he was inevitable. His place here, breathing the
scented, lilac air, stars glimmering at his zenith, was unassailable. He felt
static run in the hairs on the back of his hand, and smiled. He saw a man,
something unrecognizable in his arms, screaming at a window, and smiled. Not
far away, the Vistula, gross with rain and melt-water, roared toward the sea.
He was no less irresistible.
The gold went out of the cumulus; the lucid blue darkened toward night.
As he was about to come into Muranowski Square something flickered in
front of him, a twist of wind scooted past him, and the air was suddenly full
of white confetti. Impossible, surely, that there was a wedding taking place
here? One of the whirling fragments lodged on his eyelash, and he plucked it
off. It wasn't confetti at all: it was a petal. He pressed it between thumb
and forefinger. Its scented oil spilled from the fractured tissue.
In search of the source, he walked on a little way, and rounding the
corner into the square itself discovered the ghost of a tree, prodigious with
blossom, hanging in the air. It seemed unrooted, its snow-head lit by
starlight, its trunk shadowy. He held his breath, shocked by this beauty, and
walked toward it as he might have approached a wild animal, cautious in case
it took fright. Something turned his stomach over. It wasn't awe of the
blossom, or even the remnants of the joy he'd felt walking here. That was
slipping away. A different sensation gripped him here in the square.
He was a man so used to atrocities that he had long counted himself
unblanchable. So why did he stand now a few feet away from the tree, his
fingernails, meticulously kept, pressed into his palms with anxiety, defying
the umbrella of flowers to unveil its worst? There was nothing to fear here.
Just petals in the air, shadow on the ground. And still he breathed shallowly,
hoping against hope that his fright was baseless.
Come on, he thought, if you've got something to show me, I'm waiting.
At his silent invitation two things happened. Behind him a guttural
voice asked: "Who are you?" in Polish. Distracted for the merest heartbeat by
surprise, his eyes lost focus on the tree, and in that instant a figure
dislodged itself from beneath the blossom-weighed branches and slouched,
momentarily, into the starlight. In the cheating murk the thief wasn't certain
what he saw: a discarded face looking blankly in his direction perhaps, hair
seared off. A scabby carcass, wide as a bull's. Vasiliev's vast hands.
All or nothing of this; and already the figure was retiring into hiding
beyond the tree, its wounded head brushing the branches as it went. A drizzle
of petals fluttered onto its charcoal shoulders.
"Did you hear me?" said the voice at his back. The thief didn't turn. He
went on staring at the tree, narrowing his eyes, attempting to separate
substance from illusion. But the man, whoever he was, had gone. It could not
have been the Russian, of course; reason proclaimed against it. Vasiliev was
dead, found with his face down in the filth of a sewer. His body was probably
already on its way to some far-flung outpost of the Russian empire. He wasn't
here; he couldn't be here. But the thief felt an urgent need to pursue the
stranger nevertheless, just to tap his shoulder, to have him turn round, to
look into his face and verify that it was not Konstantin. Too late already;
the questioner behind him had taken fierce hold of his arm, and was demanding
an answer. The branches of the tree had stopped shaking, the petals had
stopped falling, the man was away.
Sighing, the thief turned to his interrogator.
The figure in front of him was smiling a welcome. It was a woman,
despite the rasp of the voice, dressed in oversized trousers, tied with a
rope, but otherwise naked. Her head was shaved; her toenails lacquered. All
this he took in with senses heightened from the shock of the tree, and from
the pleasure of her nudity. The sheened globes of her breasts were perfect. He
felt his fists opening, the palms tingling to touch them. But perhaps his
appraisal of the body was too frank. He glanced back up at her face to see if
she was still smiling. She was; but his gaze lingered on her face this time,
and he realized that what he'd taken to be a smile was a permanent fixture.
Her lips had been sliced off, exposing gums and teeth. There were ghastly
scars on her cheeks, the remains of wounds that had severed the tendons and
induced a rictus that teased her mouth open. Her look appalled him.
"You want . . . ?" she began.
Want? he thought, his eyes flicking back to the breasts. Her casual
nudity aroused him, despite the mutilation of her face. He was disgusted with
the idea of taking her-to kiss that lipless mouth was more than orgasm was
worth-and yet if she offered he'd accept, and damn the disgust.
"You want . . . ?" she began again, in that slurred hybrid of a voice,
neither male nor female. It was difficult for her to shape and expel words
without the aid of lips. She got the rest of the question out, however. "You
want the cards?"
He'd missed the point entirely. She had no interest in him, sexual or
otherwise. She was simply a messenger. Mamoulian was here. Within spitting
distance, probably. Perhaps watching him even now.
But the confusion of emotions in him blurred the elation he should have
felt at this moment. Instead of triumph, he grappled with a headful of
contrary images: blossom, breasts, darkness; the burned man's face, turning
too briefly toward him; lust, fear; a single star appearing from a flank of
cloud. Hardly thinking of what he was saying, he replied:
"Yes. I want the cards."
She nodded, turned away from him, and started past the tree, its
branches still rocking where the man who was not Vasiliev had touched them,
and crossed the square. He followed. It was possible to forget this go-
between's face while looking at the grace of her barefooted steps. She didn't
seem to care what she trod on. Not once did she falter, despite the glass,
brick and shrapnel underfoot.
She led him across to the remains of a large house on the opposite side
of the square. Its ravaged exterior, once impressive, still stood; there was
even a doorway in it, though no door. Through it, the light of a bonfire
flickered. Rubble from the interior spilled through the doorway and blocked
the lower half, obliging both woman and thief to duck down and scramble up
into the house itself. In the gloom the sleeve of his coat snagged on
something; the cloth tore. She didn't turn to see if he was hurt, though he
cursed audibly. She simply led on over the mounds of brick and fallen roof
timbers while he stumbled after her, feeling ridiculously clumsy. By the light
of the bonfire he could see the size of the interior; this had once been a
fine house. There was little time for study, however. The woman was past the
fire now, and climbing toward a staircase. He followed, sweating. The fire
spat; he glanced around at it, and glimpsed somebody on the far side, keeping
out of sight behind the flames. Even as he watched, the fire keeper threw more
tinder down, and a constellation of livid specks was thrown up against the
sky.
The woman was climbing the stairs. He hurried after her, his shadow-
thrown by the fire-huge on the wall. She was at the top of the stairs when he
was halfway up, and now she was slipping through a second doorway and gone. He
followed on as quickly as he could, and turned through the doorway after her.
The firelight only found its way fitfully into the room he'd stepped
into, and he could scarcely make anything out at first.
"Close the door," somebody asked. It took him a few beats to realize
that the request was being made of him. He half-turned, fumbled for the
handle, found that there was none, and pushed the door closed on aching
hinges.
That done, he looked back into the room. The woman was standing two or three
yards in front of him, her perpetually amused face looking at him, the smile a
gray sickle.
"Your coat," she said, and stretched out her hands to help him shoulder
it off. Once done, she stepped out of his eyeline, and the object of his long
search came into view.
It was not Mamoulian, however, that took his eye at first. It was the
carved wooden altar piece set against the wall behind him, a Gothic masterwork
which blazed, even in the gloom, with gold and scarlet and blue. Spoils of
war, the thief thought; so that's what the bastard does with his fortune. Now
he looked at the figure in front of the triptych. A single wick, immersed in
oil, guttered smokily on the table at which he sat. The illumination it threw
up on to the card-player's face was bright but unstable.
"So, Pilgrim," the man said, "you found me. Finally."
"You found me, surely," the thief replied; it had been as Vasiliev had
predicted.
"You fancy a game or two, I hear. Is that right?"
"Why not?" He tried to sound as nonchalant as possible, though his heart
was beating a double tattoo in his chest. Coming into the card-player's
presence, he felt pitifully unprepared. Sweat glued his hair to his forehead;
there was brick dust on his hands and muck under his nails: I must look, he
squirmed, like the thief I am.
By contrast, Mamoulian was a picture of propriety. There was nothing in
the sober clothes-the black tie, the gray suit-that suggested a profiteer: he
appeared, this legend, like a stockbroker. His face, like his dress, was
unrepentantly plain, its taut and finely etched skin waxen by the charmless
oil flame. He looked sixty or thereabouts, cheeks slightly hollowed, nose
large, aristocratic; brow wide and high. His hair had receded to the back of
his skull; what remained was feathery and white. But there was neither frailty
nor fatigue in his posture. He sat upright in his chair, and his agile hands
fanned and gathered a pack of cards with loving familiarity. Only his eyes
belonged to the thief's dream of him. No stockbroker ever had such naked eyes.
Such glacial, unforgiving eyes.
"I hoped you'd come, Pilgrim. Sooner or later," he said. His English was
without inflection.
"Am I late?" the thief asked, half-joking.
Mamoulian laid the cards down. He seemed to take the inquiry quite
seriously. "We'll see." He paused before saying, "You know, of course, that I
play for very high stakes."
"I heard."
"If you wish to withdraw now, before we go any further, I would
perfectly understand." The little speech was made without a trace of irony.
"Don't you want me to play?"
Mamoulian pressed his thin, dry lips together and frowned. "On the
contrary," he said, "I very much want you to play."
There was a flicker-was there not?-of pathos there. The thief wasn't
sure if it was a slip of the tongue, or the subtlest of theatrics. "But I am
not sympathetic . . ." he went on, "to those who do not pay their debts."
"You mean the lieutenant," the thief chanced.
Mamoulian stared at him. "I know no lieutenant," he said flatly. "I know
only gamblers, like myself. A few are good, most are not. They all come here
to test their mettle, as you have."
He had picked up the pack again, and it was moving in his hands as if
the cards were alive. Fifty-two moths fluttering in the queasy light, each one
marked a little differently from the last. They were almost indecently
beautiful; their glossy faces the most unflawed thing the thief had set eyes
on in months.
"I want to play," he said, defying the hypnotic passage of cards.
"Then sit down, Pilgrim," Mamoulian said, as though the question had
never been at issue.
Almost soundlessly the woman had set a chair behind him. As he sat down,
the thief met Mamoulian's gaze. Was there anything in those joyless eyes that
intended him harm? No, nothing. There was nothing there to fear.
Murmuring his thanks for the invitation, he unbuttoned the cuffs of his
shirt and folded the sleeves back in preparation for play.
After a time, the game began.
Part Two
ASYLUM
The Devil is by no means the worst that there is; I would rather have dealings
with him than with many a human being. He honours his agreements much more
promptly than many a swindler on Earth. To be true, when payment is due he
comes on the dot; just as twelve strikes, fetches his soul and goes off home
to Hell like a good Devil. He's just a businessman as is right and proper.
J.N. NESTROY, Hollenangst
I
Providence
5
After serving six years of his sentence at Wandsworth, Marty Strauss was used
to waiting. He waited to wash and shave himself every morning; he waited to
eat, he waited to defecate; he waited for freedom. So much waiting. It was all
part of the punishment, of course; as was the interview he'd been summoned to
this dreary afternoon. But while the waiting had come to seem easy, the
interviews never had. He loathed the bureaucratic spotlight: the Parole File
bulging with the Discipline Reports, the Home Circumstance Reports, the
Psychiatric Evaluations; the way every few months you stood stripped in front
of some uncivil servant while he told you what a foul thing you were. It hurt
him so much he knew he'd never be healed of it; never forget the hot rooms
filled with insinuation and dashed hopes. He'd dream them forever.
"Come in, Strauss."
The room hadn't changed since he'd last been here; only become staler.
The man on the opposite side of the table hadn't changed either. His name was
Somervale, and there were any number of prisoners in Wandsworth who nightly
said prayers for his pulverization. Today he was not alone behind the plastic-
topped table.
"Sit down, Strauss."
Marty glanced across at Somervale's associate. He was no prison officer.
His suit was too tasteful, his fingernails too well-manicured. He looked to be
in late middle-age, solidly built, and his nose was slightly crooked, as if it
had once been broken and then imperfectly reset. Somervale offered the
introduction:
"Strauss. This is Mr. Toy . . ."
"Hello," Marty said.
The tanned face returned his gaze; it was a look of frank appraisal.
"I'm pleased to meet you," Toy said.
His scrutiny was more than casual curiosity, though what-thought Marty-
was there to see? A man with time on his hands, and on his face; a body grown
sluggish with too much bad food and too little exercise; an ineptly trimmed
mustache; a pair of eyes glazed with boredom. Marty knew every dull detail of
his own appearance. He wasn't worth a second glance any longer. And yet the
bright blue eyes stared on, apparently fascinated.
"I think we should get down to business," Toy said to Somervale. He put
his hands palm down on the tabletop. "How much have you told Mr. Strauss?"
Mr. Strauss. The prefix was an almost forgotten courtesy.
"I've told him nothing," Somervale replied.
"Then we should begin at the beginning," Toy said. He leaned back in his
chair, hands still on the table.
"As you like," said Somervale, clearly gearing himself up for a
substantial speech. "Mr. Toy-" he began.
But he got no further before his guest broke in.
"If I may?" said Toy, "perhaps I can best summarize the situation."
"Whatever suits," said Somervale. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a
cigarette, barely masking his chagrin. Toy ignored him. The off-center face
continued to look across at Marty.
"My employer-" Toy began "-is a man by the name of Joseph Whitehead. I
don't know if that means anything to you?" He didn't wait for a reply, but
went on. "If you haven't heard of him, you're doubtless familiar with the
Whitehead Corporation, which he founded. It's one of the largest
pharmaceutical empires in Europe-"
The name rang a faint bell in Marty's head, and it had some scandalous
association. But it was tantalizingly vague, and he had no time to puzzle it
through, because Toy was in full flight.
"-Although Mr. Whitehead is now in his late sixties, he still keeps
control of the corporation. He's a self-made man, you understand, and he's
dedicated his life to its creation. He chooses, however, not to be as visible
as he once was-"
A front-page photograph suddenly developed in Strauss' head. A man with
his hand up against the glare of a flashbulb; a private moment snatched by
some lurking paparazzo for public consumption.
"-He shuns publicity almost completely, and since his wife's death he
has little taste for the social arena-"
Sharing the unwelcome attention Strauss remembered a woman whose beauty
astonished, even by the unflattering light. The wife of whom Toy spoke,
摘要:

TheDamnationGamebyCliveBarkerCopyright1985Noryetexempt,thoughrulingthemlikeslaves,Fromchance,anddeath,andmutability.-SHELLY,PrometheusUnboundPartOneTERRAINCOGNITAHellistheplaceofthosewhohavedenied;Theyfindtherewhattheyplantedandwhatdug.ALakeofSpaces,andaWoodofNothing,Andwanderthereanddrift,andneverc...

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