Tracy drew to a flush, and missed. Donn won. He raked in a few chips as the reporter stood up.
"That's all, Barney. Let's have the interview, and we'll push off. Or I will, if Hatton wants to stay."
"Stick around," Donn repeated, his glance meeting Tracy's.
"Sorry-"
"Look, Sam," Donn said argumentatively, "somehow I got a feeling you owe me some money. Now, why not be fair? I hear you're pretty well fixed these days. Don't be a piker, for Pete's sake."
"You-uh-insist?" Tracy's voice was strained.
Donn grinned. He nodded.
Tracy sat down again, chewing his lip. He scowled at the deck.
"Think it's cold?" Donn asked. "Want to deal?"
"You don't play with marked cards," Tracy admitted. "Oh, hell! Let's have some chips. What am I worrying about?" He emptied his wallet.
Fifteen minutes later he said, "Take a check?"
Half an hour later he was signing IOU's.
The game was fast, hard, and dangerous. It was straight, too, but no less perilous for that. The laws of chance were consistently kicked in the pants. Some men have a talent for cards, a sixth sense which is partly memory and partly a keen understanding of psychology. Donn had that talent.
The pendulum swung back and forth. The ante went up. Gradually Tracy began to win again. He and Donn were the heavy winners, and at the end of an hour and a half, he and Hatton were the only ones left in the game, except, of course, Donn himself.
Once Tracy thought Donn was bluffing, and called, but he was wrong. Meantime the stakes mounted. At last Tracy got what he thought was a good hand, and raised on the strength of it.
Donn met and raised. Hatton did the same. Tracy considered his cards-and thrust a stack of blues into the center.
He wrote another check, bought more chips, and raised again. Hatton dropped out. Donn met and raised.
As Tracy pushed his last chips across the table, he realized that this cleaned out his bank account. Simultaneously he felt a curious warmth against his hip.
The book.
Was there another page reference on the cover? Tracy didn't know whether to be glad or sorry. He met Donn's eyes, brown and sparkling with excitement, and saw that the gambler was going to raise again.
He couldn't meet another raise.
He stood up abruptly. "Excuse me. Back in a minute," he said, and before Donn could protest, he headed for the bathroom. The door slammed shut behind him, and he jerked the book out of his pocket. The page number, black against luminous white, was 12.
And the message was: "He's bluffing."
"I'll be damned," Tracy said under his breath.
"That," a low voice remarked, "is inevitable, I'd say. But such perspicacity is rare-eh, Belphegor?"
"Bah!" was the hoarse reply. "Always talk. Action, I'd say-quick, hard, and bloody."
Tracy looked around and saw nothing unusual. He fumbled for the knob behind him, opened the door, and stepped back into the room where he had left Donn and the others.
Only, he saw as he turned, it wasn't the same room.
It was not, strictly speaking, a room at all. It was a three-dimensional surrealist landscape come to life. Overhead was empty gray sky, and a flat plain, curiously distorted as to perspective, stretched to a foreshortened horizon. Odd objects were here and there, inanimate, and with no sensible reason for their presence. Most of them were partially melted.
Three creatures sat in a row facing Tracy.
One was a lean man with huge feet and the head of a unicorn. One was a saturnine, naked giant with malformed horns and a lion's tail. One was-ugh! A sad face with a crown regarded Tracy ill-temperedly. From the bulbous body, with its twelve spider's legs, grew the head of a frog and the head of a cat-an unholy trinity, as it were.
Tracy turned around. The door through which he had come was still there, but it was just a door, standing unsupported, with no framework around it. Moreover, it seemed to be locked, as he found after a frantic tug at the knob.
"Quick, hard, and bloody," said the same hoarse voice, which came from the squinting, saturnine giant with the lion's tail. "Trust me for that."
"Crudity, always crudity," the anthropomorphic unicorn murmured, clasping its knee between its hands. "You're a relic of the dark ages, Belphegor."
"You're a jackass, Amduscias," said Belphegor. The three-headed spidery horror said nothing. It regarded Tracy unwinkingly.
"Look, human," Amduscias began, squinting along its horn, "devil to man, have you any preference?"
Tracy croaked inarticulately. He found his voice with some difficulty.
"P-preference? About what? Where-How'd I get here?"
"Death hath a thousand something doors and they do open both ways," Amduscias quoted inaccurately.
"I'm not dead."
"No," said the demon rather reluctantly. "But you will be. You will be."
"Tooth, horn, and claw," Belphegor interjected.
"Where am I, then?"
"Oh, it's a hinterland," Amduscias said. "Bael made it specially for our rendezvous." He glanced at the silent three-headed creature. "Meg sent us. You know Meg, don't you?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I know her." Tracy licked his lips. He remembered the book, and lifted it with unsteady hands. The number on the cover was unchanged-12.
"Sit down," Amduscias invited. "We have time for a talk before you die."
"Talk," Belphegor growled, yanking viciously at his tail. "Pah! Fool!"
The unicorn head bobbed solemnly. "I am a philosopher. There's no need to keep staring at Bael, human. He may strike you as ugly, but I assure you we're a handsome group, as Hell's lords go. If it's Bael's plurality that troubles you, you should see Asmodee. Our Eurynome-the progenitor of the bogeyman. Sit down and let's talk. It's been years since I spoke with a human being outside of Hell. And the ones in Hell can't carry on a lucid conversation," Amduscias went on ruminatively. "I used to talk with Voltaire a great deal, but since around 1850 he's done nothing but laugh. Mad, quite mad," the demon finished.
Tracy couldn't keep his eyes off Bael. The petulant, melancholy human face regarded him fixedly. The toad face stared at the sky. The cat face looked at nothing. It wasn't Meg, though. That was something. Or was it? Tracy's nails dug into his palms.