Clive Barker
Damnation Game

    
    
    
    
    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