Clive Barker - The Damnation Game

Again, Whitehead posed the haunted question:

"Will we survive?"

This time Toy felt obliged to reply.

"Everything's fine, Joe. You know it is. Profits up in most sectors..."

But evasion wasn't what the old man wanted and Toy knew it. He let the words falter, leaving a silence, after the faltering, more wretched than ever. Toy's stare, now fixed on Whitehead again, was unblinking, and at the corners of his eyes the murk that had taken over the room began to flicker and crawl. He dropped his lids: they almost grated across his eyeballs. Patterns danced in his head (wheels, stars and windows) and when he opened his eyes again the night finally had a stranglehold on the interior.

The bronze head remained unmoved. But it spoke, and the words seemed to come from Whitehead's bowels, dirtied with fear.

"I'm afraid, Willy," he said. "All my life I've never been as frightened as I am now."

He spoke slowly, without the least emphasis, as if he despised the melodrama of his words and was refusing to magnify it further.

"All these years, living without fear; I'd forgotten what it was like. How crippling it is. How it drains your willpower. I just sit here, day in, day out. Locked up in this place, with the alarms, the fences, the dogs. I watch the lawn and the trees-"

He was watching.

"-and sooner or later, the light begins to fade."

He paused: a long, deep hush, except for the distant crows.

"I can bear the night itself. It's not pleasant, but it's unambiguous. It's twilight I can't deal with. That's when the bad sweats come over me. When the light's going, and nothing's quite real anymore, quite solid. Just forms. Things that once had shapes..."

It had been a winter of such evenings: colorless drizzles that eroded distance and killed sound; weeks on end of uncertain light, when troubled dawn became troubled dusk with no day intervening. There had been too few hard-frosted days like today; just one discouraging month upon another.

"I sit here every evening now," the old man was saying. "It's a test I set myself. Just to sit and watch everything eroded. Defying it all."

Toy could taste the profundity of Papa's despair. He hadn't been like this ever before; not even after Evangeline's death.

It was almost completely dark outside and in; without the lawn lights on, the grounds were pitch. But Whitehead still sat, facing the black window, watching.

"It's all there, of course," he said.

"What is?"

"The trees, the lawn. When dawn comes tomorrow they'll be waiting."

"Yes, of course."

"You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning."

He stirred in his seat; his hand moved to his head. Impossible to see what he was doing.

"The things we believe as children: they never leave us, do they? They're just waiting for time to roll around, and us to start believing in them all over again. It's the same old patch, Bill. You know? I mean, we think we move on, we get stronger, we get wiser, but all the time we're standing on the same patch."

He sighed, and looked around at Toy. Light from the hallway fawned through the door, which Toy had left slightly ajar. By it, even across the room, Whitehead's eyes and cheeks glittered with tears.

"You'd better put on the light, Bill," he said. Yes."

"And bring up Strauss."

There was no sign of his distress apparent in his voice. But then Joe was an expert at disguising his feelings; Toy knew that of old. He could close down the hoods of his eyes and seal up his mouth, and not even a mindreader could work out what he was thinking. It was a skill he'd used to devastating effect in the boardroom: nobody ever knew which way the old fox would jump. He'd learned the technique playing cards, presumably. That, and how to wait.

They had driven through the electric gates of Whitehead's estate and into another world. Lawns laid out immaculately on either side of the sepia-graveled driveway; a distant aspect of woodland off to the right, which disappeared behind a line of cypresses as they bore around toward the house itself. It was late afternoon by the time they arrived, but the mellowing light only enhanced the charm of the place, its formality offset by a rising mist that blurred the scalpel edge of grass and tree.

The main building was less spectacular than Marty had anticipated; just a large, Georgian country house, solid but plain, with modern extensions sprawling away from the main structure. They drove past the front door, with its white pillared porch, to a side entrance, and Toy invited him through into the kitchen.

"Put your bags down and help yourself to some coffee," he said. "I'm just going up to see the boss man. Make yourself comfortable."

Alone for the first time since leaving Wandsworth Marty felt uncomfortable. The door was open at his back; there were no locks on the windows, no officers patrolling the corridors beyond the kitchen. It was paradoxical, but he felt unprotected, almost vulnerable. After a few minutes he got up from the table, switched on the fluorescent light (night was falling quickly, and there were no automatic switches here) and poured himself a mug of black coffee from the percolator. It was heavy and slightly bitter, brewed and rebrewed he guessed, not like the insipid stuff he was used to.

It was twenty-five minutes before Toy came back in, apologized for the delay, and told him that Mr. Whitehead would see him now.

"Leave your bags," he said. "Luther will see to them."

Toy led the way from the kitchen, which was part of the extension, into the main house. The corridors were gloomy, but everywhere Marty's eye was amazed. The building was a museum. Paintings covered the walls from floor to ceiling; on the tables and shelves were vases and ceramic figurines whose enamels gleamed. There was no time to linger, however. They wove through the maze of halls, Marty's sense of direction more confounded with every turn, until they reached the study. Toy knocked, opened the door, and ushered Marty in.

With little but a badly remembered photograph of Whitehead to build upon, Marty's portrait of his new employer had been chiefly invention-and totally wrong. Where he'd imagined frailty, he found robustness. Where he'd expected the eccentricity of a recluse he found a furrowed, subtle face that scanned him, even as he entered the study, with efficiency and humor.

"Mr. Strauss," said Whitehead, "welcome."

Behind Whitehead, the curtains were still open, and through the window the floodlights suddenly came on, illuminating the piercing green of the lawns for a good two hundred yards. It was like a conjurer's trick, the sudden appearance of this sward, but Whitehead ignored it. He walked toward Marty. Though he was a large man, and much of his bulk had turned to fat, the weight sat on his frame quite easily. There was no sense of awkwardness. The grace of his gait, the almost oiled smoothness of his arm as he extended it to Marty, the suppleness of the proffered fingers, all suggested a man at peace with his physique.

They shook hands. Either Marty was hot, or the other man cold: Marty immediately took the error to be his. A man like Whitehead was surely never too hot or too cold; he controlled his temperature with the same ease he controlled his finances. Hadn't Toy dropped into their few exchanges in the car the fact that Whitehead had never been seriously ill in his life? Now Marty was face-to-face with the paragon he could believe it. Not a whisper of flatulence would dare this man's bowels.

"I'm Joseph Whitehead," he said. "Welcome to the Sanctuary."

"Thank you."

"You'll have a drink? Celebrate."

"Yes, please."

"What will it be?"

Marty's mind suddenly went blank, and he found himself gaping like a stranded fish. It was Toy, God save him, who suggested: