The Damnation Game (59 page)
He looked up at the hotel. It was coral-colored in the sliding light—the details of scorch marks and graffiti looked almost too real. A portrait by an obsessive, each detail in absolute focus. He watched the facade awhile, to see if something signaled to him. Perhaps a window might wink, a door grimace; anything to prepare him for what he might discover inside. But it remained politic. Just a solid building, face staled with age and flame, catching the last light of the day.
The front door had been closed by the last visitor to leave the hotel, but no attempt had been made to replace the boards. Marty pushed, and the door opened, grinding across the plaster and dirt on the floor. Inside, nothing had changed. The chandelier tinkled as a gust from outside trespassed into the sanctum; a dry rain of dust flitted down.
As he climbed the first two flights, a smell began to infiltrate; something riper than damp or ash. Presumably the bodies would still be where they’d been left. Substantial decay would have set in. He didn’t know how long such processes took, but after the experiences of recent weeks he was prepared for the worst; even the strengthening smell as he ascended scarcely touched him.
He halted halfway up and took out the bottle of Scotch he’d bought, unscrewed the top, and, still eyeing the remaining flights of stairs, put the bottle to his lips. The mouthful of spirits sluiced his gums and throat, and scorched its way down into his belly. He resisted the temptation to take a second swig. Instead, he resealed the bottle and pocketed it before continuing up.
Memories began to besiege him. He’d hoped to keep them at bay, but they came unbidden, and he wasn’t strong enough to resist them. There were no pictures, just voices. They echoed around his skull as if it were empty, as if he were simply some mindless brute answering the call of a superior mind. The urge to turn tail and run came over him, but he knew that if he capitulated now, and went back to her, the qualms would only deepen. Soon he’d be suspecting every twitch of her arm, wondering if the European was preparing her for murder. It would be another kind of prison: its walls suspicion, its bars doubt, and he’d be sentenced to it for the rest of his life. Even if Carys left, wouldn’t he still be glancing over his shoulder as the years passed, watching for a someone to appear who had a face behind his face, and the European’s unforgiving eyes?
And still, with every step taken, his fears multiplied. He gripped the filthy banister, and forced himself onward and upward. I don’t want to go, the child in him complained. Don’t make me go, please. Easy enough to turn around, easy enough to delay the whole thing. Look! Your feet will do it, just say the word. Go back! She’ll wake eventually; just be patient. Go back!
And if she doesn’t wake? the voice of reason replied. And that made him go on.
As he took another step, something moved on the landing ahead of him. A flea-jump noise, no more; so soft he could barely hear it. A rat, perhaps? Probably. All manner of scavengers would come here, wouldn’t they, in the expectation of a feast. He’d preempted that horror too, and was hardened to the thought.
He reached the landing. No rats scurried away from his footfall, at least he saw none. But there was something here. At the head of the stairs a small brown maggot rolled around on the carpet, twisting upon itself in its enthusiasm to get somewhere. Down the stairs probably: into the dark. He didn’t look at it too closely. Whatever it was, it was harmless. Let it find a niche to grow fat in, and become a fly in time, if that was its ambition.
He crossed the penultimate landing and started up the final flight of stairs. A few steps up, the smell abruptly worsened. The stench of fetid meat assaulted him, and now, despite the Scotch and all the mental preparation, his innards turned over and over; like the maggot on the carpet, twisting and turning.
He stopped two or three steps up the flight, pulled out his whisky, and took two solid throatfuls, swallowing it so quickly it made his eyes water. Then he continued his ascent. Something soft slid beneath his heel. He looked down. Another maggot, the larger brother of the one below, had been arrested in its descent by his foot: it was squashed to a fatty pulp. He glanced at it for only a second before hurrying on, aware that the sole of his shoe was slimy; either that or he was pressing other such grubs underfoot as he went.
The gulps of liquor had made his head sing; he took the last two dozen steps almost at a run, eager to have the worst over with. By the time he’d reached the top of the stairs, he was breathless. He had an absurd image of himself, a drunkard’s fancy, as a messenger coming with news—lost battles, murdered children—to the palace of some fabulous king. Except that the king too was murdered, his battles lost.
He started toward the penthouse; the smell had become so dense it was almost edible. As he had once before, he caught sight of himself in the mirror; he looked down, ashamed, from the frightened face and—God! —the carpet crawled. Not two or three but a dozen or more fat, ragged maggots were laboring, blindly it seemed, to find their way across the carpet, which was stained by their travels. They were like no insect he’d ever seen before, lacking any decipherable anatomy, and all different sizes: some finger-thin, others the size of a baby’s fist, their shapeless forms purple, but streaked with yellow. They left trails of slime and blood like wounded slugs. He stepped around them. They’d got fat on meat he’d once debated with. He didn’t want to examine them too closely.
But as he pushed open the door of the suite, and stepped, cautiously, into the corridor, an appalling possibility crept into his head and sat there, whispering obscenities. The creatures were everywhere in the suite. The more ambitious of them were scaling the pastel walls, gluing the slivers of their bodies to the wallpaper with seeped fluids, edging up like caterpillars, a peristalsis moving through their length. Their direction was arbitrary; some, to judge by their trails, were circling on themselves.
In the dim light of the corridor his worst suspicions merely simmered; but they began to boil when he edged past Whitehead’s sprawled body and stepped into the slaughterhouse room, where the light from the highway made a sodium day. Here the creatures were in yet greater abundance. The whole room swarmed with them, from flea-sized fragments to slabs the size of a man’s heart, throwing out tattered filaments like tentacles to haul themselves about. Worms, fleas, maggots—a whole new etymology congregated at the place of execution.
Except that these weren’t insects, or the larvae of insects: he could see that plainly now. They were pieces of the European’s flesh. He was still alive. In pieces, in a thousand senseless pieces, but alive.
Breer had been unrelentingly thorough in his destruction, eradicating the European as best his machete and failing hands would allow. But it had not been enough. There was too much stolen life buzzing in Mamoulian’s cells; it roared on, in contravention of any sane law, unquenchable. For all his vehemence the Razor-Eater had not finished the European’s life, merely subdivided it, leaving it to describe these futile circles. And somewhere in this lunatic’s menagerie was a beast with a will, a fragment that still possessed sufficient sense to think itself—albeit stutteringly—into Carys’ mind. Perhaps not one piece, perhaps many—a sum of these wandering parts. Marty wasn’t interested in its biology. How this obscenity survived was a matter for a madhouse debating society.
He backed out of the room and stood, shivering in the hall. Wind gusted against the window; the glass complained. He listened to the gusts while he worked out what to do next. Down the corridor a piece of filth fell from the wall. He watched it struggle to turn itself over, and then begin the slow ascent again. Just beyond the spot where it labored lay Whitehead. Marty went back to the body.
Charmaine’s killers had enjoyed themselves mightily before they left: Whitehead’s trousers and underwear had been pulled down, and his groin scrawled on with a knife. His eyes were open; his false teeth had been removed. He stared at Marty, jaw sagging like a delinquent child.
Flies crawled on him; there were patches of decay on his face. But he was dead: which in this world was something. The boys had, as a final insult, defecated on his chest. Flies gathered there too.
In his time Marty had hated this man; loved him too, if only for a day; called him Papa, called him bastard; made love to his daughter and thought himself King of Creation. He’d seen the man in power: a lord. Seen him afraid too: scrabbling for escape like a rat in a fire. He’d seen the old man’s odd species of integrity in practice, and found it workable. As fruitful, perhaps, as the affections of more loving men.
He reached across to seal off the stare, but in their zeal the evangelists had cut off Whitehead’s lids, and Marty’s fingers instead touched the slick of his eyeball. Not tears that wetted it, but rot. He grimaced; withdrew his hand, sickened.
Just to shut off the look on Papa’s face he thrust his fingers under the corpse to heave it onto its belly. The body fluids had settled, and his underside was damp and sticky. Gritting his teeth he rolled the man’s bulk onto its side, and let gravity pull it over. Now at least the old man didn’t have to watch what followed.
Marty stood up. His hands stank. He baptized them liberally with the rest of the Scotch, to cancel the smell. The libation served another purpose: it removed the temptation of the drink. It would be too easy to become muzzy and lose focus on the problem. The enemy was here. It had to be dealt with; put away forever.
He began where he was, in the hall, digging his heels into the pieces of flesh that crawled around Whitehead’s body, squashing their stolen life out as best he could. They made no sound, of course, which made the task simpler. They were just worms, he told himself, dumb slivers of mindless life. And it became yet easier as he went up and down the corridor grinding the meat into smears of yellow fat and brown muscle. The beasts succumbed without argument. He began to sweat, working out his revulsion on this human refuse, eyes darting everywhere to make sure he caught each wretched scrap. He felt a smile twitch at the corners of his mouth-now a low laugh, quite without humor, escaped. It was an easy decimation. He was a boy again, killing ants with his thumbs. One! Two! Three! Only these things were slower than the most laden ant, and he could stamp them down at a leisurely pace. All the power and wisdom of the European had come to this muck, and he—Marty Strauss—had been elected to play the God-game, and wipe it away. He had gained, at the last, a terrible authority.
Nothing is essential
. The words he’d heard—and spoken—in Caliban Street at last made absolute sense. Here was the European, proving the bitter syllogism with his own flesh and bone.
When he’d finished his work in the hallway he returned to the main room and began his labors there, his initial revulsion at touching the flesh dwindling, until with time he was snatching pieces from their perches on the wall and flinging them down to be ground out. When he’d done in the gaming room he went to scour the landing and stairs. Finally, when all was still, he returned to the suite and made a bonfire of the curtains from the dressing room, fueled by the table the old man had played cards on, and tindered by the cards themselves, and then went around the room kicking the larger pieces of flesh into the fire, where they spat and curled and were presently consumed. The smaller pieces he scraped up, the laugh still coming intermittently as he flung little rains of meat into the middle of the conflagration. The room rapidly filled with smoke and heat, neither having any escape route. His heart began to pound loudly in his ears; his arms shone with sweat. It was a long job, and he had to be meticulous, didn’t he? He mustn’t leave a living speck, not a fragment, for fear it live on, become mythical—grow perhaps—and find him.
When the fire died down he fed it the pillows, the records and the paperback books until there was nothing left to burn but himself. There were moments, as he gazed entranced into the flames, that the thought of stepping into the fire was not unattractive. But he resisted. It was only exhaustion tempting him. Instead he crouched in a corner, watching the play of flame-light on the wall. The patterns made him cry; or at least something did.
When, some time before dawn, Carys came up the stairs to claim him from his reverie, he neither heard nor saw her. The fire had long since died down.
Only the bones, shattered by Breer’s dismembering, and blackened and cracked in the fire, were still recognizable. Shards of thighbone, of vertebrae; the saucer of the European’s skull.
She crept in as if fearful of waking a sleeping child. Maybe he had been sleeping. There were feathery images in his head that could only have been dreams: life was not that terrible.
“I woke,” she said. “I knew you’d be here.”
He could barely see her through the grimy air; she was a chalk drawing on black paper: so vulnerable to smudging. The tears came again when he thought of that.
“We must go,” she said, not wishing to press him for explanations.
Perhaps she would ask him in time, when the plaintive look had left his eyes; perhaps she would never ask. After several minutes of her coaxing him and pressing close to him, he slid up from his knee-hugging meditation and conceded to her care.
When they stepped out of the hotel the wind buffeted them, as antagonistic as ever. Marty looked up to see if the gusts had blown the stars off course, but they were steadfast. Everything was in its place, despite the insanity that had mauled their lives of late, and though she hurried him on, he dawdled, his head back, squinting at the stars. There were no revelations to be had there. Just pinpricks of light in a plain heaven. But he saw for the first time how fine that was. That in a world too full of loss and rage they be remote: the minimum of glory. As she led him across the lightless ground, time and again he could not prevent his gaze from straying skyward.
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