Clive Barker - The Damnation Game

He got up boozily from in front of the dead television and went back to the window.

A wind had got up. It had probably blown some dead branch down, which had disturbed the dogs. He'd noticed several dead elms that needed felling in the corner of the estate; probably one of those was the culprit. Still, he'd better look. He went through to the kitchen, and turned on the video screens, flicking from camera to camera along the perimeter fence. There was nothing to see. As he flipped to the cameras just east of the woods, however, the pictures disappeared. White noise replaced the sight of floodlit grass. Three cameras were out of action in all.

"Shit," he said. If a tree were down, and that became a likelier option than ever if the cameras weren't working, he'd have a clearing-up job on his hands. It was odd that the alarms hadn't started, though. Any fall that had incapacitated three cameras must have breached the fence's systems: yet no bells rang, no sirens wailed. He took his anorak off the hook beside the back door, picked up a flashlight, and went outside.

The fence lights glimmered at the periphery of his vision; scanning them quickly he could see none that were out. He set off toward the racket of dogs. It was a balmy night, despite the wind: the first confident warmth of spring. He was glad to be going on a walkabout, even if it was a fool's errand. It might not even be a tree at all; simply an electrical fault. Nothing was infallible. The house fell away behind him, the lit windows diminished. Now, all around him, darkness. He was isolated for two hundred yards between the lights of the fence and those of the house, a strip of no-man's-land over which he stumbled, flashlight inefficiently lighting the turf a few strides ahead of him. In the woods, the wind found an occasional voice; otherwise there was silence.

Eventually he reached the fence where he approximated the noise of the dogs to have come from. All the lights in either direction were working: there was no visible sign of disturbance. Despite the reassuring correctness of the scene, something about it, about the night and the balmy wind, felt odd. Maybe the dark wasn't so benign after all, the warmth in the air not entirely natural for the season. A tick had begun in his stomach, and his bladder was heavy with beer. It was vexing that there were no dogs to be seen or heard. Either he'd made an error of judgment in approximating their position or they'd moved from the spot, pursuing. Or, the absurd thought came, pursued.

The lamps in the uprights of the fence rocked their hooded heads in a fresh gust of wind; the scene danced giddily in the pitching light. He decided he could go no further without relieving his aching bladder. He turned off the flashlight, pocketed it, and unzipped, back to the fence and the light. It was a great relief to piss into the grass; the physical satisfaction made him whoop.

Halfway through, the lights behind him flickered. At first he thought it was simply a trick of the wind. But no, they were actually dimming. Even as they faded, along the perimeter to his right the dogs began again, anger and panic in their voices.

He couldn't stop pissing once he'd started, and for valuable seconds he cursed his lack of bladder control. When he was done he zipped up and started to run in the direction of the din. As he went, the lights came back on again, falteringly, their circuits buzzing as they did so. But they were set too infrequently along the line of the fence to offer much reassurance. Between them, patches of darkness sprawled, so that for one pace out of every ten all was clarity, for the other nine, night. Despite the fear clutching at his gut he ran all-out, the fence flickering past him. Light, darkness, light, darkness-

Ahead, a tableau resolved itself. An intruder was standing on the far side of a light pool thrown down by one of the lamps. The dogs were everywhere, at his heels, at his chest, snapping and tearing at him. The man was still standing upright, legs apart, while they milled around him.

Marty now realized how close he was to witnessing a massacre. The dogs were berserk, tearing at the intruder with all the fury they could muster. Curiously, despite the venom in their attack, their tails were between their legs, and their low growls, as they circled looking for another opening, were unmistakably fearful. Job, he saw, was not even attempting to pounce: he slunk around, his eyes closed to slits, watching the heroics of the rest.

Marty started calling them off by name, using the strong, simple commands Lillian had taught him.

"Stand! Saul! Stand! Dido!"

The dogs were immaculately tutored: he'd seen them put through these exercises a dozen times. Now, despite the intensity of their anger, they relinquished their victim when they heard the command. Reluctantly they fell back, ears flattened, teeth exposed, eyes clamped on the man.

Marty started to walk steadily toward the intruder, who was left standing in a ring of watchful dogs, reeling and bloody. He carried no visible weapon; indeed he looked more like a derelict than a would-be assassin. His plain dark jacket was torn in a dozen places by the attack, and where his skin was exposed blood shone.

"Keep them... off me," he said, his voice wounded. There were bites all over his body. In some places, particularly his legs, pieces of his flesh had been ripped away. The middle finger of his left hand had been bitten through at the second joint, and was depending by a thread of sinew. Blood splashed on the grass. It amazed Marty that the man was even standing upright.

The dogs still circled him, ready to renew the assault if and when the order were granted; one or two of them glanced at Marty impatiently. They were itching to finish their wounded victim off. But the derelict wouldn't grant them a sign of his fear. He only had eyes for Marty, and those eyes were pinpricks in livid white.

"Don't move," Marty said, "if you want to remain alive. If you try to run they'll bring you down. Do you understand? I haven't got that much control over them."

The other said nothing; simply stared. His agony, Marty knew, must be acute. He wasn't even a young man. His uneven growth of stubble showed more gray than black. The skull behind the lax and waxen flesh was severe, the features set on it used and weary: tragic even. His suffering was only apparent in the greasy sheen of his skin, and the fixedness of his facial muscles. His stare had the stillness of a hurricane's eye, and its menace.

"How did you get in?" Marty asked.

"Get them away," the man said. He spoke as if he expected to be obeyed.

"Come back to the house with me."

The other shook his head, unwilling even to debate the possibility.

"Get them away," he said again.

Marty conceded to the other's authority, though not certain why. He called the dogs to him by name. They came to heel with rebuking looks, unhappy to surrender their prize.

"Now come back to the house," Marty said.

"No need."

"You'll bleed to death, for God's sake."

"I loathe dogs," the man said, still not taking his eyes off Marty. "We both do."

Marty hadn't time to think clearly about what the man was saying; he just wanted to stop the situation from escalating again. Blood loss had surely weakened the man. If he fell down Marty wasn't certain he could prevent the dogs from going in for the kill. They were around his legs, glancing up at him irritably; their breath was hot on him.

"If you don't come on your own accord, I'll take you."

"No." The intruder raised his injured hand to chest height and glanced down at it. "I don't need your kindnesses, thank you," he said.

He bit down on the sinew of the mutilated finger, as a seamstress might through a thread. The discarded joints fell to the grass. Then he clenched his seeping hand into a fist, and thrust it into his ravaged jacket.