by Clive Barker
Or rather, the Art.
That, of all the codes, was the one he beat his head hardest against, and broke only his brow. The Art was talked about in many ways. As the Final Great Work. As the Forbidden Fruit. As da Vinci’s Despair or the Finger in the Pie or the Butt-Digger’s Glee. There were many ways to describe it, but only one Art. And (here was a mystery) no Artist.
“So, are you happy here?” Homer said to him one May day.
Jaffe looked up from his work. There were letters strewn all around him. His skin, which had never been too healthy, was as pale and etched upon as the pages in his hand.
“Sure,” he said to Homer, scarcely bothering to focus on the man. “Have you got some more for me?”
Homer didn’t answer at first. Then he said: “What are you hiding, Jaffe?”
“Hiding? I’m not hiding anything.”
“You’re stashing stuff away you should be sharing with the rest of us.”
“No I’m not,” Jaffe said. He’d been meticulous in obeying Homer’s first edict, that anything found among the dead letters be shared. The money, the skin magazines, the cheap jewelry he’d come across once in a while; it all went to Homer, to be divided up. “You get everything,” he said. “I swear.”
Homer looked at him with plain disbelief. “You spend every fucking hour of the day down here,” he said. “You don’t talk with the other guys. You don’t drink with ‘em. Don’t you like the smell of us, Randolph? Is that it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Or are you just a thief?”
“I’m no thief,” Jaffe said. “You can look for yourself.” He stood up, raising his hands, a letter in each. “Search me.”
“I don’t want to fucking touch you,” came Homer’s response. “What do you think I am, a fucking fag?” He kept staring at Jaffe. After a pause he said: “I’m going to have somebody else come down here and take over. You’ve done five months. It’s long enough. I’m going to move you.”
“I don’t want—”
“What?”
“I mean … what I mean to say is, I’m quite happy down here. Really. It’s work I like doing.”
“Yeah,” said Homer, clearly still suspicious. “Well starting Monday you’re out.”
“Why?”
“Because I say so! If you don’t like it find yourself another job.”
“I’m doing good work, aren’t I?” Jaffe said.
Homer was already turning his back.
“It smells in here,” he said as he exited. “Smells real bad.”
There was a word Randolph had learned from his reading which he’d never known before: synchronicity. He’d had to go buy a dictionary to look it up, and found it meant that sometimes events coincided. The way the letter writers used the word it usually meant that there was something significant, mysterious, maybe even miraculous in the way one circumstance collided with another, as though a pattern existed that was just out of human sight.
Such a collision occurred the day Homer dropped his bombshell, an intersecting of events that would change everything. No more than an hour after Homer had left, Jaffe took his short-bladed knife, which was getting blunt, to an envelope that felt heavier than most. He slit it open, and out fell a small medallion. It hit the concrete floor: a sweet ringing sound. He picked it up, with fingers that had been trembling since Homer’s exit. There was no chain attached to the medallion, nor did it have a loop for that purpose. Indeed it wasn’t attractive enough to be hung around a woman’s neck as a piece of jewelry, and though it was in the form of a cross, closer inspection proved it not to be of Christian design. Its four arms were of equal length, the full span no more than an inch and a half. At the intersection was a human figure, neither male nor female, arms outstretched as in a crucifixion, but not nailed. Spreading out along the four routes were abstract designs, each of which ended in a circle. The face was very simply rendered. It bore, he thought, the subtlest of smiles.
He was no expert on metallurgy, but it was apparent the thing was not gold or silver. Even if the dirt had been cleaned from it he doubted it would ever gleam. But there was something deeply attractive about it nevertheless. Looking at it he had the sense he’d sometimes had waking in the morning from an intense dream but unable to remember the details. This was a significant object, but he didn’t know why. Were the sigils spreading from the figure vaguely familiar from one of the letters he’d read, perhaps? He’d scanned thousands upon thousands in the last twenty weeks, and many of them had carried little sketches, obscene sometimes, often indecipherable. Those he’d judged the most interesting he’d smuggled out of the Post Office, to study at night. They were bundled up beneath the bed in his room. Perhaps he’d break the dream-code on the medallion by careful examination of those.
He decided to take lunch that day with the rest of the workers, figuring it’d be best to do as little as possible to irritate Homer any further. It was a mistake. In the company of the good ol’ boys talking about news he’d not listened to in months, and the quality of last night’s steak, and the fuck they’d had, or failed to have, after the steak, and what the summer was going to bring, he felt himself a total stranger. They knew it too. They talked with their backs half-turned to him, dropping their voices at times to whisper about his weird look, his wild eyes. The more they shunned him the more he felt happy to be shunned, because they knew, even fuckwits like these knew, he was different from them. Maybe they were even a little afraid.
He couldn’t bring himself to go back to the Dead Letter Room at one-thirty. The medallion, its mysterious signs, was burning a hole in his pocket. He had to go back to his lodgings and start the search through his private library of letters now. Without even wasting breath telling Homer, he did just that.
It was a brilliant, sunny day. He drew the curtains against the invasion of light, turned on the lamp with the yellow shade, and there, in a jaundiced fever, began his study, taping the letters with any trace of illustration to the bare walls and, when the walls were full spreading them on the table, bed, chair, and floor. Then he went from sheet to sheet, sign to sign, looking for anything that even faintly resembled the medallion in his hand. And as he went, the same thought kept creeping back into his head: that he knew there was an Art, but no Artist, a practice but no practitioner, and that maybe he was that man.
The thought didn’t have to creep for long. Within an hour of perusing the letters it had pride of place in his skull. The medallion hadn’t fallen into his hands by accident. It had come to him as a reward for his patient study, and as a way to draw together the threads of his investigation and finally begin to make some sense of it. Most of the symbols and sketches on the pages were irrelevant, but there were many, too many to be a coincidence, that echoed images on the cross. No more than two ever appeared on the same sheet, and most of these were crude renderings, because none of the writers had the complete solution in their hands the way he did, but they’d all comprehended some part of the jigsaw, and their observations about the part they had, whether haiku, dirty talk, or alchemical formulas, gave him a better grasp of the system behind the symbols.
A term that had cropped up regularly in the most perceptive of the letters was the Shoal. He’d passed over it several times in his reading, and never thought much about it. There was a good deal of evolutionary talk in the letters, and he’d assumed the term to be a part of that. Now he understood his error. The Shoal was a cult, or a church of some kind, and its symbol was the object he held in the palm of his hand. What it and the Art had to do with each other was by no means clear, but his long-held suspicion that this was one mystery, one journey, was here confirmed, and he knew that with the medallion as a map he’d find his way from Shoal to Art eventually.
In the meantime there was a more urgent concern. When he thought back to the tribe of coworkers, with Homer at its head, he shuddered to think that any of them might ever share the secret he’d uncovered. Not that they had any chance of making any real progress decoding it: they were too
witless. But Homer was suspicious enough to at least sniff along the trail a little way, and the idea of anybody—but especially the boorish Homer—tainting this sacred ground was unbearable. There was only one way to prevent such a disaster. He had to act quickly to destroy any evidence that might put Homer on the right track. The medallion he’d keep, of course: he’d been entrusted with it by higher powers, whose faces he’d one day get to see. He’d also keep the twenty or thirty letters that had proffered the best information on the Shoal; the rest (three hundred or so) had to be burned. As to the collection in the Dead Letter Room, they had to go into the furnace too. All of them. It would take time, but it had to be done, and the sooner the better. He made a selection of the letters in his room, parceled up those he didn’t need to keep, and headed off to the Sorting Office.
It was late afternoon now, and he traveled against the flow of human traffic, entering the office by the back door to avoid Homer, though he knew the man’s routine well enough to suspect he’d punched out at five-thirty to the second, and was already guzzling beer somewhere. The furnace was a sweaty rattling antique, tended by another sweaty rattling antique, called Miller, with whom Jaffe had never exchanged a single word, Miller being stone deaf. It took some time for Jaffe to explain that he was going to be feeding the furnace for an hour or two, beginning with the parcel he’d brought from home, which he immediately tossed into the flames. Then he went up to the Dead Letter Room.
Homer had not gone guzzling beer. He was waiting, sitting in Jaffe’s chair under a bare bulb, going through the piles around him.
“So what’s the scam?” he said as soon as Jaffe stepped through the door.
It was useless trying to pretend innocence, Jaffe knew. His months of study had caned knowledge into his face. He couldn’t pass for a naïf any longer. Nor—now that it came to it—did he want to.
“No scam,” he said to Homer, making his contempt for the man’s puerile suspicions plain. “I’m not taking anything you’d want. Or could use.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, asshole,” Homer said, throwing the letters he was examining down among the rest of the litter. “I want to know what you’ve been up to down here. ‘Sides jerking off.”
Jaffe closed the door. He’d never realized it before, but the reverberations of the furnace carried through the walls into the room. Everything here trembled minutely. The sacks, the envelopes, the words on the pages tucked inside. And the chair on which Homer was sitting. And the knife, the short-bladed knife, lying on the floor beside the chair on which Homer was sitting. The whole place was moving, ever so slightly, like there was a rumble in the ground. Like the world was about to be flipped.
Maybe it was. Why not? No use pretending the status was still quo. He was a man on his way to some throne or other. He didn’t know which and he didn’t know where, but he needed to silence any pretender quickly. Nobody was going to find him. Nobody was going to blame him, or judge him, or put him on Death Row. He was his own law now.
“I should explain …,” he said to Homer, finding a tone that was almost flippant, “what the scam really is.”
“Yeah,” Homer said, his lip curling. “Why don’t you do that?”
“Well it’s real simple …”
He started to walk toward Homer, and the chair, and the knife beside the chair. The speed of his approach made Homer nervous, but he kept his seat.
“I’ve found a secret,” Jaffe went on.
“Huh?”
“You want to know what it is?”
Now Homer stood up, his gaze trembling the way everything else was. Everything except Jaffe. All the tremors had gone out of his hands, his guts, and his head. He was steady in an unsteady world.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing,” Homer said. “But I don’t like it.”
“I don’t blame you,” Jaffe said. He didn’t have his eyes on the knife. He didn’t need to. He could sense it. “But it’s your job to know, isn’t it?” Jaffe went on, “what’s been going on down here.”
Homer took several steps away from the chair. The loutish gait he liked to affect had gone. He was stumbling, as though the floor was tilting.
“I’ve been sitting at the center of the world,” Jaffe said. “This little room … this is where it’s all happening.”
“Is that right?”
“Damn right.”
Homer made a nervous little grin. He threw a glance toward the door.
“You want to go?” Jaffe said.
“Yeah.” He looked at his watch, not seeing it. “Got to run. Only came down here—”
“You’re afraid of me,” Jaffe said. “And you should be. I’m not the man I was.”
“Is that right?”
“You said that already.”
Again, Homer looked toward the door. It was five paces away; four if he ran. He’d covered half the distance when Jaffe picked up the knife. He had the door handle clasped when he heard the man approaching behind him.
He glanced round, and the knife came straight at his eye. It wasn’t an accidental stab. It was synchronicity. His eye glinted, the knife glinted. Glints collided, and the next moment he was screaming as he fell back against the door, Randolph following him to claim the letter opener from the man’s head.
The roar of the furnace got louder. With his back to the sacks Jaffe could feel the envelopes nestling against each other, the words being shaken on the pages, till they became a glorious poetry. Blood, it said; like a sea; his thoughts like clots in that sea, dark, congealed, hotter than hot.
He reached for the handle of the knife, and clenched it. Never before in his life had he shed blood; not even squashed a bug, at least intentionally. But now his fist on the hot wet handle seemed wonderful. A prophecy; a proof.
Grinning, he pulled the knife out of Homer’s socket, and before his victim could slide down the door stuck it into Homer’s throat to the hilt. This time he didn’t let it lie. He pulled it out as soon as he’d stopped Homer’s screams, and he stabbed the middle of the man’s chest. There was bone there, and he had to drive hard, but he was suddenly very strong. Homer gagged, and blood came out of his mouth, and from the wound in his throat. Jaffe pulled the knife out. He didn’t stab again. Instead he wiped the blade on his handkerchief and turned from the body to think about his next move. If he tried to lug the sacks of mail to the furnace he risked being discovered, and sublime as he felt, high on the boor-slob’s demise, he was still aware that there was danger in being found out. It would be better to bring the furnace here. After all, fire was a moveable feast. All it required was a light, and Homer had those. He turned back to the slumped corpse and searched in the pockets for a box of matches. Finding one, he pulled it out, and went over to the satchels.
Sadness surprised him as he prepared to put a flame to the dead letters. He’d spent so many weeks here, lost in a kind of delirium, drunk with mysteries. This was good-bye to all that. After this—Homer dead, the letters burned—he was a fugitive, a man without a history, beckoned by an Art he knew nothing about, but which he wished more than anything to practice.
He began to screw up a few of the pages, to provide some initial fodder for the flame. Once begun, he didn’t doubt that the fire would sustain itself: there was nothing in the room—paper, fabric, flesh—that wasn’t combustible. With three heaps of paper made, he struck a match. The flame was bright, and looking at it he realized how much he hated brightness. The dark was so much more interesting; full of secrets, full of threats. He put the flame to the piles of paper and watched while the fires gained strength. Then he retreated to the door.
Homer was slumped against it, of course, bleeding from three places, and his bulk wasn’t that easy to move, but Jaffe put his back into the task, his shadow thrown up against the wall by the burgeoning bonfire behind him. Even in the half minute it took him to move the corpse aside the heat grew exponentially, so that by the time he glanced back at the room it was ablaze from side to side, the heat stirring
up its own wind, which in turn fanned the flames.
It was only when he was clearing out his room of any sign of himself—eradicating every trace of Randolph Ernest Jaffe—that he regretted doing what he’d done. Not the burning—that had been altogether wise—but leaving Homer’s body in the room to be consumed along with the dead letters. He should have taken a more elaborate revenge, he realized. He should have hacked the body into pieces, packaged it up, tongue, eyes, testicles, guts, skin, skull, divided piece from piece—and sent the pieces out into the system with scrawled addresses that made no real sense, so that chance (or synchronicity) would be allowed to elect the doorstep on which Homer’s flesh would land. The mailman mailed. He promised himself not to miss such ironic possibilities in the future.
The task of clearing his room didn’t take long. He had very few belongings, and most of what he had meant little to him. When it came down to basics, he barely existed. He was the sum of a few dollars, a few photographs, a few clothes. Nothing that couldn’t be put in a small suitcase and still leave room alongside them for a set of encyclopedias.
By midnight, with that same small suitcase in hand, he was on his way out of Omaha, and ready for a journey that might lead in any direction. Gateway to the East, Gateway to the West. He didn’t care which way he went, as long as the route led to the Art.
From Everville
The interior smelled of stale incense and week-old sushi—the odors, in short, of bad magic. It made Harry’s heart hammer to smell those smells. How many times do I have to do this? he found himself wondering as he advanced into the murk. How many times into the maw, into the sickened body? How many times before I’ve done my penance?
Ted laid his hand on Harry’s shoulder.
“There,” he murmured, and directed Harry’s gaze off to the right. Some ten yards from where they stood was a further flight of stairs, and from the bottom a wash of silvery light.