The Collected Short Fiction

Playing The Game (1988)

When Marie called to say that someone wanted a reporter, Hill went out at once. He'd been staring at the blank page in his typewriter and wondering where he could find the enthusiasm to write. The winner of this week's singing contest at the Ferryman was Barbra Silver, fat as Santa Claus, all tinsel and shiny flesh done medium rare in a solarium—but he couldn't write that, and there wasn't another word in his head, any more than there were still ferries on the river. He headed for the lobby, glad of something else to do.

The man looked as if he hoped not to be noticed. His hands were trying to hide the torn pockets of his raincoat; fallen trouser-cuffs trailed over his shoes. Nevertheless Marie was pointing at him, unless she was still drying her green nails, and as Hill approached he turned quickly, determined to speak. "Do you investigate black magic?" he said.

"That depends." The man had the look of a pest in the street, eyes that expected disbelief and challenged the listener to escape before he was convinced. But the blank page was waiting like the worst question in an examination, and here at last might be a story worth writing. "Come and tell me about it," Hill said.

The man was visibly disappointed by the newsroom. No doubt he wanted the Hollywood version—miles of chattering typewriters beneath fluorescent tubes— rather than the cramped room full of half a dozen'desks, desks and wastebins overflowing with paper and plastic cups and ragged blackened stubs of cheap cigars, the smells of after-shave and cheap tobacco, the window that buzzed like a dying fly whenever a lorry sped through town. Hill dragged two chairs to face each other and sat forward confidentially over his notebook. "Shoot," he said.

"There's a man down by the docks who claims he can cure illness without medicine. He's got everyone around him believing he can. They say he cures their aches and pains and saves them having to go to the doctor about their depressions. Sounds all right, doesn't it? But I happen to know," the ragged man said, lowering his voice still further until it was almost inaudible, "that he puts up his price once they need him. They have to go back to him, you see—it isn't a total cure. Maybe he doesn't mean it to be, or maybe it's all in their minds, until it wears off. Either way, you can see it's an addiction that costs them more than the doctor would."

He was plucking unconsciously at his torn pockets. "I'll tell you something else—every single one of his neighbors believes he should be left alone because he's doing so much good. That can't be right, can it? People don't take to things like that so easily unless they're afraid not to. Why won't they use the short cut through the docks any longer, if they think there's nothing to be afraid of?"

"You're suggesting that there is."

"I've got to be careful what I say." He looked afraid of being overheard, even in the empty room. "I don't live far from him," he said eventually. "Not far enough. I haven't had any trouble with him personally, but my next-door neighbor has. I can't tell you her name, she doesn't even know I'm here. You mustn't try to find her. In fact, to make sure you don't, I'm not going to tell you my name either."

Hill's interest was waning; his editor would never take a story with so few names. "Anyway," the man whispered, "she antagonized Mr. Matta, though she didn't mean to. She caught him up to no good in one of the old docks. So he said that if she was so fond of water, he'd make sure she got plenty. And the very next day her house started getting damp. She's had people in, but they can't find any reason for it, and it's just getting worse. Mold all over the walls—you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it for yourself. Only you'll have to take my word for it, I'm afraid."

He was faltering, having realized at last how unsatisfactory his information was. Yet Hill was suddenly a great deal more interested. Could it really be the same man? If so, Hill had reasons of his own to investigate him—and by God, there was nothing he'd like better. "This Mr. Matta," he said. "What can you tell me about him?"

His informant seemed to decide that he couldn't avoid telling. "He came every year with the carnival. Only the last time he was too ill to be moved, I think, so they found him a house. Or maybe they were glad to get rid of him."

It was the same man. All at once Hill's memories came flooding back: the carnival festooned with lights on the far bank of the river, in which blurred skeins of light wavered like waterweed as you crossed the bridge; the sounds of the shooting gallery ringing flat and thin across the water, the Ghost Train in which you heard the moaning of ships on the bay—and above all M. 0. Matta, with his unchanging child's face and his stall full of games. "So he's still fond of playing games to frighten people, is he?" Hill said.

"He still sells them." That wasn't quite what Hill had meant, but perhaps the man was afraid to think otherwise. Of course Matta had sold games from his stall, though Hill had never understood why people bought them: the monkeys on sticks looked skeletal and desperate, and always fell back with a dying twitch just before they would have reached their goal; the faces of the chessmen were positively dismaying, as Hill had all too strong a reason to remember. In fact, when he recalled the sideshow—the bald bruised heads you tried to knock down with wooden balls but which sprang up at once, grinning like corpses—he couldn't understand why anyone would have lingered there voluntarily at all.

Once he'd seen Matta by the river at low tide, stooping to a fat whitish shape—but he was losing himself in his memories, and there were things he needed to know. "You say your friend antagonized Matta. In what way?"

"I told you, she was taking the short cut home." The man was digging his hands into his pockets, apparently unaware that they were tearing. "She saw the man he lives with taking him into the dock where the crane's fallen in. It was nearly dark, but he just sat there waiting. She thought she heard something in the water, and then he saw her. That's all."

It seemed suggestive enough. "Then unless there's anything else you can tell me," Hill said, "I just need Matta's address."

As soon as he'd given it, the ragged man sidled out, trying to hide behind his shapeless collar. Hill lit his first cigar of the afternoon and thought how popular his investigation should be. They'd used to say that if Matta took a dislike to you when you bought from him, the games would always go wrong somehow—and how many children other than Hill must he have set out to terrify? As for the business with the docks, if that wasn't a case of drug smuggling, Hill was no investigative reporter. He went in to see the editor at once.

"Not enough," the editor said, too busy searching his waistcoat for pipe-cleaners even to look at Hill. "Someone who won't give his name tells you about someone who won't give her name. Smells like a hoax to me, or a grudge. Either way, it isn't for us. Just don't try to run before you can walk. You shouldn't need me to tell you you aren't ready for investigative work."

No, Hill thought bitterly: after two years he was still only good for the stuff nobody else would touch—Our Trivia Correspondent, Our Paltry Reporter. The others were rolling back from the pub as he returned to his desk, like a schoolboy who'd been kept in for being bored. By God, he'd get his own back, with or without the editor's approval. He'd had nightmares for years after the night he had tried to see what Matta was doing in the caravan behind his stall.

All he'd glimpsed through the window was Matta playing solitaire of some kind, so why had the man taken such delight in terrifying him? All at once there had been nobody beyond the window, and the smooth childish face on its wrinkled neck had stooped out of the door, paralyzing the boy as he'd tried to run. "You like games, do you?" the thin soft voice had said. "Then we'll find you one.

The interior of the caravan had been crowded with half-carved shapes. Some looked more like bone than wood, including the one that had been protruding from the humped tangled sheets of the bunk. Eleven-year-old

Hill hadn't seen much more, nor had he wanted to. Matta was setting out a chess game, and Hill hadn't known which was worse: the black pieces with their wide fanged grins, or the white, their pale shiny faces so bland he could almost see them drooling. "And there you are," Matta had whispered, carving the head of a limbless figure so deftly that Hill had imagined his face had already been there.

As soon as Matta placed the figure midway on the chessboard, the shadowy corners of the caravan had seemed full of faces, grinning voraciously, lolling expres-sionlessly. It had taken Hill a very long time to flee, for his legs had felt glued together, and all the time the child's face on the aging body had watched him as if he were a dying insect. But when at last he had managed to run it was even worse: not so much the teeth that had glinted in the dark all the way home as the swollen white faces he'd sensed at his back, ready to nod down to him if he stumbled or even slackened his pace.

He emerged from his memories and found he'd torn the blank page out of the typewriter, so violently that the others were staring at him. Something had to be done about Matta, and soon—not only because of the way he'd exploited Hill's young imagination, but because it sounded as if his power over people had grown, with the same childish malevolence at its core. If this editor wouldn't print the story, Hill would find someone who would—and glancing at the red-veined faces of his colleagues, all of them drunk enough to be content with the worn-out town, he thought that might be the best move of all.

All at once he was eager to finish his chores, in order to be ready for what he had to do. By the time his shift was over he'd dealt with Barbra Silver—"a robust performance" he called it, which seemed satisfyingly ambiguous—and the rest of the trivia that was expected of him. As soon as he left the newspaper office he made for Matta's house.

Though it was still only late afternoon, there wasn't much light in the town. Over the bay the March sky was blue, but once you stepped into the streets it was impossible to see beyond their roofs. Shallow bay windows crowded away, overlapping the narrow pavements. Here was a chemist's, and here a Bingo parlor, smaller than front rooms; elsewhere he saw the exposed ribs of a lost neon sign, and crumbling names that had been painted on plaster. No wonder people felt the need for someone like Matta. "Order You're News Now" said a sign in a newsagent's window, and Hill thought the inadvertent promise might be true for everyone in time, the town was so small and dead.

Soon he reached the docks, which had been disused for years. The town lived off its chemical factories now, since trade no longer came so far upriver. Except for the short cut, wherever it was, there was no reason for anyone to visit the docks. They would be a perfect base for smuggling.

The roads into the docks were closed off by solid gates, rusty barbed wire, padlocked chains. He had to make his way between the warehouses, through alleys narrow as single file and even darker than the streets. He was relieved to emerge at last onto a dockside. Crumbling bollards sprouted from the broken pavement that surrounded several hundred square yards of murky water; warehouses hemmed in the dock. Above him in the small square lightless openings he heard fluttering. As the stagnant water slopped back and forth their reflections mouthed sleepily, a hundred mouths.

It didn't seem to be the dock the ragged man had mentioned. The alleys led him through another dock on the way to Matta's house, but there was no fallen crane there either, only more blackened warehouses, another hive of holes gaping at the sluggish water. The brow of an early moon peered over the edge of a roof at him; otherwise he felt he was alone in the whole dockland.

The next alley led him to a bridge across a small canal that bordered a street. Almost opposite the bridge was one of the poorest streets in town, its uneven cobblestones glittering with broken glass, its gutters clogged with litter. Each side was a terrace like a stage flat, hardly more than a long two-story wall crammed with front doors and windows. It was the street where Matta lived.

There was nothing to distinguish the house from its neighbors—no sign saying M. o. matta, as there had always been on the sideshow. The black paint of the door was flaking, the number was askew; the windows were opaque with grayish net curtains. He loitered in the empty street, trying to be sure it was the right house. It seemed safe enough to do so, since beyond the curtains the house was dark—but the front door was opened, almost knocking him down, by a man who had to stoop through the doorway. "You want to see Mr. Matta," the huge blank-faced man said.

It wasn't a question. Hill had intended to bring someone whose illness was in no way psychological for Matta to try to cure—but if he fled now, he could never win Matta's confidence. "Yes," he said, though he felt he had no control over his words. "There's something wrong with my leg."

When the hulking man stood aside Hill entered, limping ostentatiously. The front door closed behind him at once, and so did the dark. In the musty unlit hallway, where there was scarcely room for anyone besides the hulking man and the staircase, he felt buried alive. In a moment the other had opened the door to the front room, and Matta sat waiting in a caved-in armchair. "Something wrong with your leg, is it?" Matta said.

He seemed not to have changed at all—the soft secretly delighted voice, the face smooth and placid as a sleeping child's—except that his face looked even more like a mask, on the ropy wizened frame. He was grinning to himself as always, but at least his words were reassuring; for a panicky moment Hill had thought Matta had recognized him. Why should that make him panic? He limped into the room, and Matta said, "Let's see what we can do."

Hill couldn't see much in the room. Boxes, which he assumed contained games, and bits of wood were piled against the walls, taking up much of the limited space; a few chairs were crowded together in the middle of the floor, beneath an empty light socket. The dimness and the smell of wood seemed stale. All at once the hulking man led him forward and sat him in a hard chair opposite Matta. Faces grinned out of the shadows, but they weren't why Hill was apprehensive. The man had led him forward so quickly that he'd forgotten to limp.

The huge man was returning from the darkest corner of the room, between Hill and the door, and he had a knife in his hand. In a moment Hill saw that the man was also carrying a faceless doll. He went to stand behind the armchair. His hands reached over Matta's shoulders, holding the knife and the doll. Hill sucked in his breath inadvertently and waited for Matta to take them—and then he saw that Matta was paralyzed. Only his face could move.

The huge hands began to work at once. In the dimness they looked as if they were growing from Matta's shoulders, their arms no longer than wrists. Almost at once they had finished carving, and the right hand turned the doll for Hill to see. He sat forward reluctantly, and couldn't make himself go closer. He was sure it was only the dimness that made the carved face look exactly like his—but for a moment he felt like a child again, in Matta's power.

Matta had trained his assistant well, that was all. The power was Hill's now, not Matta's. He was going to pretend that his limp was cured, and that would ingratiate him with Matta, help him set his trap. But Matta was gazing at him, and his grin was wider, more gleeful. It looked even more as if he were holding the doll before his face with deformed hands. "You came to spy on us," he said, and at once, almost negligently, one huge hand snapped the doll's leg.

At once Hill couldn't move his leg. Matta was leering at him, a pale mask propped on a wooden body, and above the mask a dim smudge with eyes was watching emptily. Many more faces were watching him, but he reminded himself that the others were only carved, and that allowed him to stumble to his feet. It had only been panic that had paralyzed his leg, after all.

Though Matta was still grinning—more widely, if anything—his eyes were unreadable. "I think you'd better go straight home," he said, his voice soft as dust.

Hill was so glad when the huge man didn't come for him that he headed blindly for the door. He'd have his revenge another day; Matta wasn't going anywhere. Just now he wanted to escape the dim cell of a room, the musty faces, the staleness. Matta was as bad as he remembered, but now that malevolence was senile. He glanced back from the hall and saw the huge man placing a box on Matta's lap—a game, with something like a worm carved on the lid. He hurried into the deserted twilit street, ignoring the twinge in his knee.

When he reached the canal he looked back. The huge man was watching from the doorway of the house. He stood there while Hill crossed the bridge, and all at once the reporter knew he was watching to see which way Hill went. He strode between the warehouses, into the alley he'd emerged from. As soon as he felt he'd waited long enough he peered out to make sure the man had gone back into the house, then he dodged into the adjacent alley.

They must think they'd scared him off with all their mumbo-jumbo and telling him to go straight home. Let Matta sit and play his game, whatever it was, however he could. Hill was going to find out what they wanted to hide, before they had a chance to do so. Though night had already fallen in the alleys, he ought to be able to see in the dock.

Dark cold stone loomed over him on both sides, blinding him. Perhaps he was going too fast, for sometimes the ache in his knee made him stumble; the rough walls scraped his knuckles. He must have strained a muscle in his leg when the huge man had urged him forward, or when he'd left so hurriedly. At least there seemed to be no obstacles to hinder him.

But there were. He reached a junction only to find that the right-hand alley was blocked by a rusty bedstead. It hardly mattered, since that route led to the docks he had already seen. He groped to the left, mortar crumbling between the bricks and gritting beneath his nails.

Before long he'd had to turn aside several times. Piles of chains and bollards, and in one place a door jammed between the walls, blocked some of the routes; sometimes he had to retrace his steps. In those few places where the glow of the darkening sky managed to reach, he could see nothing but the claustrophobic alleys, the towering windowless walls. He wished he hadn't come so far, for he wasn't sure he could find his way back if he had to do so. If Matta's assistant was responsible for the blocking of the alleys, presumably he would have blocked the route into the dock.

Hill was trying to remember the way back when he heard the wallowing. Something large was moving through water, quite near. It must be a boat—perhaps the one that Matta wanted nobody to see. He limped to the next junction, and saw that the attempts to turn people away hadn't quite succeeded. At the far end of the left-hand alley he could just see the width of a dock.

The end of the alley was blocked by a heap of rubble and twisted metal. It would have kept most people out, especially now when it was so nearly dark, but he hadn't come so far only to leave Matta's assistant the chance to clear away any evidence. He clambered over the rubble and dropped to the uneven pavement, where he almost staggered straight into the water as his aching leg gave way.

More than the danger made him stumble backward. His first glimpse of the water had shown him something larger than he was, inching toward the pavement and rising to meet him. When he looked again he saw it was a length of piping, pale as the moon and stouter than a man. It must have been ripples that had made it seem to move.

He would have to hurry despite his leg, which he must have wrenched while clambering. Already he was having to strain his eyes, though at least the moon was just visible above the warehouse to his left. He limped in that direction, peering at the pavement, the water, the warehouses; the blackness peered back at him hundred-eyed. There seemed to be nothing to find, and he'd ventured beyond the edge of moonlight before he realized that it should not be there at all. How could the moon be only just clearing the roofs when he'd seen its brow half an hour ago, barely visible above a warehouse somewhere over here?

It couldn't have been the moon the first time, that was all. He hadn't time to brood over it, for he had noticed something rather more disturbing; access to the dock from the river was blocked. One end of a bridge had torn loose or been dislodged, wedging tons of rusty iron in the entrance. What could Matta have been waiting for that night if the dock was inaccessible? Just what game was he playing? Surely there was no need to run, whatever the answer was, but Hill was running headlong now, anxious to be out of the darkness. He was so anxious that he almost stepped into space before he realized that the pavement wasn't there.

His bad leg saved him. He'd tottered backward as it threatened to give way. Now he could see the crane, quivering like jelly underwater, through the hole it had torn out of the pavement. There were splintered planks too, which must have bridged the gap until they had been destroyed. The gap was far too wide for him to jump with a bad leg. All at once he felt he was a victim of another of Matta's games, and only his inarticulate rage stood between him and utter panic.

He had no reason to panic. Surely he could find his way back, since he had to do so. There was no point in waiting for the moon to rise higher, when the clouds never left it alone for very long; besides, he preferred not to see the dock more clearly—the walls and the water maggoty with windows, the buildings that seemed so lonely they no longer had anything human about them, the drowned objects that looked as if they were squirming. He was very near to panic as he scrambled over the rubble into the alley, particularly since the whitish pipe appeared to have drifted closer to the pavement. Perhaps it had been a distorted reflection of the moon; certainly it reminded him less of a pipe.

The moonlight didn't reach into the alleys. When he lowered himself from the heap of rubble, the shock of the darkness was almost physical. He made himself hurry— he knew that the floor of the alley was clear of obstructions—though it felt as if the walls had captured him, were leading him blindfolded, too fast for his limp. Somewhere behind him he heard the wallowing again, which sounded now like someone emerging hugely from a bath. He restrained himself from going back to see. He wasn't even sure that he wanted to know.

He'd regained some confidence, and was striding quickly despite his bad leg, when he ran straight into something like an outstretched limb. He'd cried out before he realized what the obstruction was: a pile of bollards. He must have taken a wrong turning in the dark.

He groped his way back to the last junction and limped in the other direction. Yes, this must be right, for now he was able to follow several alleys unhindered, and soon he could see an open space ahead. He was almost there before he saw the fallen bridge, and realized he had come back to the same alley into the dock.

He couldn't think where he had gone wrong. He could only trudge back into the narrow dark. At least the moonlight was beginning to filter down, and showed him an intersection almost at once. He was sure he hadn't turned here on his way to the dock; he would have noticed the row of whitish tires in the left-hand alley, tires stacked together like a pipe. In the intermittent moonlight they seemed to squirm restlessly, and he was glad he didn't have to pass them.

Three junctions further on he thought he'd found where he had gone wrong. That was a relief, because the moonlight was reaching as far into the alleys as it would come; soon the light would be receding. He could just see the walls in those moments when the clouds exposed the moon, and so he was able to run, despite the throbbing of his leg. He'd turned three corners, skinning his knuckles on one, before he almost ran into the stack of whitish tires.

It was impossible. He stumbled back a few yards to the intersection. There was the dock and the fallen bridge, two intersections distant. But hadn't he seen the tires in the first alley he'd crossed on his way from the dock? He must have been confused by the dark—and by Matta, for he felt as if he was trapped in another of Matta's games.

That made him feel childish, and in danger of panic. But he wasn't childish—Matta was, with his malevolent games. His face was what he was. No doubt he was still sitting with the game his assistant had given him, but Hill refused to try to deduce what that game might be. He needed all his wits to figure out the way back, before the fitful moonlight convinced him that the whitish tires were squirming silently, mouth open, down the alley toward him. They looked rather large for tires.

He turned before he was sure where to go, for the moonlight was draining away, up the walls. He plunged into the thickening dark. He was almost sure of his direction, but hadn't he been sure before? He was levering himself along with his hands on both walls, partly to feel that the suffocating dark was nothing but bricks. That wasn't entirely reassuring, for if he collided with anything now, the first part of him it would touch was his face. For some reason that anxiety intensified once he was out of sight of the whitish segments, the tires. But it was his left hand that collided with something in the dark, an object that was clinging to the wall.

It was a ladder. The icy rungs felt scarred with rust, which flaked away beneath his fingers. The chafing set his teeth on edge, and he was limping away, relieved that it was only a ladder, before he realized the chance he was missing. He went back and bracing his heels against the wall, seized two rungs and tugged. The ladder held. At once, ignoring his bad leg, he began to climb.

It must be windy at the top, for he could hear a large object slithering closer across the roof. The wind didn't matter, for he wouldn't be crossing the roof. He needed only to climb high enough to see where the street was, which general direction he would have to follow. He was climbing eagerly toward the moonlight—too eagerly, for his aching leg gave way, and he almost fell. As he hung there, gripping the rungs in momentary panic, he was close to realizing what game Matta's assistant had brought him.

He tried to grasp the thought, less for its own sake than to distract himself from thinking how high he'd climbed in the dark. He was nearly at the top. Above him the sky swam grayly, suffocating the moon; the edge of the roof sailed free in space. He closed his eyes and clung to the metal, then he recommenced climbing, mechanically but carefully. Matta's game had had something like a worm, a maggot, carved on the box—something fat and sinuous. Of course! One of his hands grabbed a rusty handhold at the roof's edge, then he heaved himself up with the other. There he rested, eyes closed, before looking up. Of course, he should have known at once what the game must be—Matta's version of snakes and ladders.

He was still resting at the top of the ladder when the moon-colored fat-lipped mouth, yawning wide as its body and wider than his head, stooped toward him.