Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  “My wife!” exclaimed Delbert; theatrically, though throatily. But he was looking with longing at the mysterious couch.

  “No time is passing,” squeaked Petrovan.

  “In that case, will you please blow out the candle?”

  “You’ll need a light of some kind.”

  This tempted Delbert to boldness. “I’d like another drink.”

  “One is enough before sleep.”

  “Am I going to die?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Shall I see my home again?”

  “In a matter of minutes.”

  “The candle’s like a headlight. It’s like the Dungeness lighthouse.” All through his and his sister’s childhood, Delbert’s family had stayed each year at an hotel in Hythe. He and Hesper still went there whenever they could; despite the enormously increased costs. It was a really good place; especially for young children, when one was one.

  “It’ll calm down when you’re alone with it,” said Petrovan.

  III

  Petrovan had been wrong about one thing, even if about nothing else. He had twice spoken of sleep; and so far Delbert had failed to sleep at all. Winds from all quarters were converging upon the hut. Every now and then, objects from the night sky fell heavily on the earthy, grassy roof. The candlelight was now small, as Petrovan had promised, and startlingly distant: light at the end of the tunnel, Delbert could not help thinking. The mantled and aerial angels gleamed ambiguously on all sides. The protection proffered by sexless angels can be terrifying. None the less, Delbert no longer knew when or whether he was frightened or not. Physically, he was most comfortable. As was to be expected, he had never before known so cosy a crib.

  Hesper! Oh, Hesper and their lovely life together! Lovely even when they were apart!

  Now Delbert was not only longing for another wonderful elixir. He would have been grateful for a drink of pure water. Perhaps there was no acceptable source on Petrovan’s island. Delbert was as parched as the man in the last sequence of Erich von Stroheim’s film, but he suspected that multiform thirst was the explanation of his managing to remain awake.

  From the far dream world beyond the tiny light of the candle, a figure was gliding; totally imprecise except that it was carrying a flat bowl. The angels stirred slightly as the figure passed; like shapes in the Wayang. Delbert knew that the bowl contained water and stretched forth both his arms, so considerably shorter than Petrovan’s arms, or even the arms of the boy from the Telegraph Office.

  The figure was standing by Delbert’s couch. Delbert prepared to take the receptacle. He was not used to drinking from a wide bowl; so first he looked.

  There was a picture in the water; at the bottom of it; on the surface of the bowl itself: a moving picture in a half-light.

  Delbert saw Gregory Barfield, the most responsible partner at the office, enjoying the wedding, which must of course be going on at that moment. There was no doubt about the locality: Gregory was togged out as when Delbert had last seen him; and nuptial accessories were discernible on all sides, though not the white bride and beflowered groom, Siamese twins at such a time. At the moment of viewing, Gregory Barfield, with his familiar grin, was holding the hand of another guest, a lady of course; and, in fact, the lady was Hesper.

  She had never said a word to Delbert about going to any wedding; and what about the wording of her telegram? Delbert realised that he had not checked the Office of Transmission. He was so perfectly accustomed to Hesper’s telegrams; almost always from the one Office, a sub-department of the Town Hall itself.

  Delbert forgot to drink, even to attempt to drink; and the figure glided on without his noticing.

  However, he reached a decision, quickly and without difficulty: he had just seen his own thoughts, an occurrence not remarkable in such a place as this, and two things uppermost in his mind had become blended. There is no certainty in anything, only likelihood; and if we lose hold of likelihood, we never cease worrying.

  As soon as he was comparatively settled in his mind, Delbert felt thirstier than ever. First came the thirst for water. Then was likely to return the craving for Petrovan’s fluid speciality. To end that, a protracted, costly, and unpleasant professional cure might be necessary. Probably the recipe had not come from an old book at all. People often made statements of that kind; figments of conversation; reasonable responses.

  Delbert realised that a second figure was approaching.

  He sat right up; as far as was possible on so delectable a divan.

  This time, however thirsty he might be, Delbert still looked first. It was a bigger bowl, but the picture filled it.

  He saw the garden side of his home, but his home was surrounded by figures whom he took to be a new kind of police. All the windows were tightly shut, and the structure exceedingly disconsolate. Rather curiously, there was no crowd of inquisitive, hostile people outside the cordon. No one seemed to care what was happening; to be curious.

  Delbert addressed the figure bearing the bowl. “What is it? What is happening?”

  The figure replied in the gentlest, sweetest voice, though the words were few.

  “You are wanted by the Enforcement.”

  “What do they wish to enforce?”

  But the figure had glided on. Perhaps one sentence only was possible—or was permitted. Delbert saw that the mantled angels, one and all, had altogether ceased to shine. He was alone with the one, faint candle in the unbounded dark; though still comfortable enough in the muscular sense; a consideration never by a wise man to be disregarded.

  There was too little light for the third figure to be seen at all; or possibly Delbert was too distraught.

  “I’m not looking. I’m not drinking.”

  He was aware that the figure continued to stand there, none the less. He was too paralysed positively to turn his back. He perceived that the water in this third bowl was flecked with darting, internal lights, as from very tiny phosphorescent tiddlers.

  The figure went on standing. The lights in the bowl became more razory all the time, hurting Delbert’s eyes. He tightened his eyelids, as when in earlier days his hideous grandmother had entered the room; but now it seemed to make no difference. The lambent fish were swimming through the intermediate void.

  Not in the bowl at all, but in the black though flecky air before him, Delbert saw himself. It is always alarming to see oneself, and said by many to be a presage of one’s death; but what Delbert saw was himself in some public security office, surrounded by democratic interrogators, even though the actual instruments of their task were omitted from the picture, presumably left by request in the next room, the first of the rooms with blood on the floor, ceiling, and walls, like the walls of this hut.

  The sharp lights had gone. The bowl had gone. The figure had gone. Ultimately, Delbert clutched at comfort: among the interrogators, none of them in uniform, had been, most unmistakably, Gregory Barfield, the responsible one; which alone suggested, in all probability, that confusion and bald nightmare reigned still. But Gregory’s apparition was not, as it happened, alone as evidence. Delbert had identified the room also. It was a room at the Town Hall; adjacent, actually, to the room in which Hesper mostly worked.

  IV

  “Call it a day, if you wish.”

  Petrovan was standing there. He had come silently in from behind Delbert’s head. He was now wearing a grey, knee-length garment of ancient Hellenic pattern. His legs and huge feet remained bare. It struck Delbert that Petrovan’s legs were as short as his arms were long.

  “Call it tomorrow, if you prefer,” continued Petrovan.

  “What time is it really?” Delbert enquired feebly.

  “Look at your watch. I see you carry one.”

  “My watch has stopped. It stopped long ago.”

  “It has not stopped.”

  Delbert looked up, then held the watch to his right ear, already the better one. The watch was ticking frenziedly. Delbert had never known it make so much din. Of cours
e Petrovan had heard it. The whole oddly-shaped room could hear it. Delbert looked at the dial. The two hands crudely underlined the fact that the time was four or five minutes later than the time at which they had recently ceased to move. This particular watch was always behaving peculiarly; always saying less than it should.

  “Do you want to go?” asked Petrovan. He expelled a prune stone on to the floor, and kicked it neatly into a corner with his bare toes. Then he inserted another prune. He appeared to have a stock of them in his garment, even though ancient Hellenic dress included no pockets. That was something else Delbert had learned at one school or another.

  To his own surprise, Delbert could not at once answer.

  “It’s entirely for you to say,” observed Petrovan, always open-handed.

  “What if I remain?” enquired Delbert in a low voice. He had been having trouble with his voice for some time.

  “You can have anything you wish. Pretty well.”

  “But only an imitation of it? A facsimile?”

  Petrovan giggled. “You would hardly want the reality of it.”

  Delbert continued to reflect. He needed to be entirely fair to all parties.

  “Why me?” he asked. “Why do you make this offer to me?”

  “We’re neighbours.” Petrovan put in two prunes simultaneously; at least two. “Besides,” he added, “not everyone is fit to serve.”

  That really settled it. Delbert was upon his feet in a jiffy. Those words had set the old school bell tinkling and clanging like a fire alarm.

  “I wasn’t being serious,” Delbert said; hoping to score in a tiny way against a conversationalist so absurdly over-weaponed. “I have my wife to think of. She must come first.”

  Petrovan’s merriment might have split the roof timbers, and brought down the earth on their two heads.

  “You remind me of Nietzsche, who had no wife,” he gasped out. “At one time, he was always speaking like that about women. I can hear him now. It was before he took the pox, of course, and went off his clever little balance. Do you know what Nietzsche could never keep his tiny hands off?”

  Delbert shook his head. He had scarcely heard of Nietzsche, or of any other deep Teutonic thinker.

  “Sweet cream cakes at the Konditorei. The floppier and fluffier and featherier the better. You know what Nietzsche said about women in the end? Or rather about Woman?”

  “It’s not my line of country,” replied Delbert firmly. “I’m not interested in such things. I prefer to take life exactly as it comes. I’m going to trot off and catch my boat.”

  He noted, again to his surprise, that he could not now manage even a conventional Thank you. How glad he was that, since he had had to lie down, he had done so fully dressed! He was quite tired of all funny business. He would consult his usual doctor, and, in all other ways too, resume his proper beliefs and optimism.

  “I told you that you were free to choose,” was all Petrovan had to say. He inserted more prunes. “Everyone is free to choose.”

  In his heart, Delbert doubted that last; but Petrovan’s line of talk was as much beyond him as he had always assumed it would be. It was impossible not to succumb at the outset, but enduring attitudes and values soon made a comeback, as they always do.

  In confirmation whereof, Delbert saw that the sun was again shining brightly, though not too brightly. “I’m going to skip,” he said.

  Petrovan spat once more. “Do you know what Soloviev told me?”

  Really, Delbert felt, the old fellow with the hair was becoming a mere bore! Quoting another wordy Continental he had met somewhere, or said he had!

  If he were to be honest, Delbert would have had to admit that he did not know how exactly he had emerged from the hut. It was something else that didn’t seem to matter much.

  Now he was scrambling in his City suit up the less familiar side of the low ridge. At the top, he was pleased to note that the long strip of matting was still in position, though now smeared from side to side with mud, as if whole damp legions had marched up and down it again and again; or been marched. In many places, the matting was now positively driven into the basic mud beneath it, and rapidly merging. As far as Delbert could see while he ran, all the black shapes were still in position under the umbrella trees, watching and guarding, or else merely sunbathing. Fortunately, Delbert had often run on matting. It had been put down when the grass tracks had become quagmires in which immature ankles and knees twisted and tangled like spaghetti. Each year it had very soon become too soppy and deliquescent to use.

  Delbert could hear Petrovan pelting down the course behind him; though upon what rationale it would be difficult to say. Delbert had experience enough neither to slacken nor to quicken, and in no time he had leapt lightly aboard and cast skilfully off. Only when his hands were on the sculls and the blades in the briny did he look back. By then he had no choice, in the nature of the sculling process.

  Petrovan was dancing about like a Numidian, with both long arms waving in the air, and his garment shivering preposterously.

  “Come again whenever you like. Think again whenever you wish.”

  “Farewell, old cock.”

  Actually, Petrovan was more like a cockatoo, but to have called him that would have been ruder than Delbert proposed.

  V

  But all was again familiar; in so far as a hideous screaming main road with no one thing to be said for it, even as a mere utility, with nothing to distinguish it from any other hideous screaming main road, could be described as familiar. For a moment, Delbert looked around at the structures and creations and graffiti on this side of things; all familiar enough too, even though never previously inspected as individual exhibits, thank God.

  Delbert strolled through the traffic, recovering his breath and full composure.

  A thicket of weeds and junk, all more truly and personally familiar, lay at the bottom of his garden, as he had always known it, or at least believed. He plunged in. The thicket had once itself been a garden, but now the squatters were in and out of the homestead, now one, now the other. Everyone remarked upon how well they behaved, how considerate they were. The homestead belonged to a very old lady, who was said still to hang out precariously in one of the rooms, entirely dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Seldom, as will have been gathered, did Delbert make use of this particular plunging route, but the present seemed hardly the moment for squeamishness.

  He found that the delicately ornamental gate at the corner of the evergreen hedge had been bound with a brand-new padlock. He sprang over the obstacle. On the other side of his lawn, by the house, stood a police officer; but one only, and in accepted garb.

  “Who are you?” asked the police officer, stepping towards him.

  “I live here,” said Delbert.

  “Can you prove that?” enquired the police officer.

  “Very easily,” said Delbert, producing his credit card, his driving licence, an insurance certificate, and three fully addressed envelopes from foreign parts.

  “I have bad news for you,” said the police officer. “You’ve had housebreakers.”

  Delbert gazed upwards. The whole building looked smashed to pieces and wan to a degree. The weather was again going off, too.

  “Do you mean we’ve been burgled?”

  “Housebroken. We don’t think they’ve taken much. Often they don’t these days. Probably just pop records and things they think too personal. They don’t like personal things. Sharing should be the word for all. That’s what they say. Better go in and see.”

  Delbert went down the dark passage without a word. Another police officer was on guard by the front door. His was a doubly significant service, because the front door had been blown apart as in wartime. This second officer saluted Delbert gravely. There could be no question of his being other than a normal respectful constable.

  Inside it was much as had been predicted. The authorities acquire experience of these cases and can often analyse at a glance. Here everything possible
had been wrecked or despoiled, but little removed beyond what the first officer had said. The main positive demonstration was that two separate people had done business upon two separate areas of the new carpet in the living room. Two separate people there really must have been; two at the minimum. Also something suggestive had taken place on, in, around, and even beneath Hesper’s once pretty bed.

  Among the main things not taken were seven demands, applications, and interrogations from public bodies. They were piled neatly in the hall; probably by the police. One had come from Gateshead, one from Galashiels, one from somewhere in Wales that not merely began with a G but was almost all Gs: job creative, in every case. Delbert sat down immediately and opened them in succession, breathing heavily the while.

  There seemed to be no other correspondence; but perhaps other correspondence had been deemed suitable for censorship, at present informal. Oh, here was a new wedding invitation; for “Hesper and Delbert Catlow and Jimmy,” whoever he might be.

  Delbert went to the sink and downed glass after glass of water, as if it had been the end of the house match. The police officers waited without; cleaving to protocol; survivors. Delbert waited within. In the end, another of Petrovan’s special foggy sunsets made itself felt: even over here. Not that anything had so far taken place that directly lent support to those three terrifying visions. If a last ditch were ever to come into sight, coincidence could be called upon. There are coincidences everywhere, and likelihood is often linked with them.

  Hesper showed up little more than an hour later than her telegram had promised. She was wearing a silk dress, which Delbert did not think he had seen before. Whether or not he had seen it in the vision, he simply could not remember. Probably he had never noticed. Few men really take heed of what women are wearing at any particular moment; least of all their own women.