by Clive Barker
He hung back at the door, leaving Clem to approach the bed first and softly wake the sleeper.
Taylor stirred, an irritated look on his face until his gaze found Gentle. Then the anger at being called back into pain went from his brow, and he said. “You found him.”
“It was Judy, not me,” Clem said.
“Oh. Judy. She’s a wonder,” Taylor murmured.
He tried to reposition himself on the pillow, but the effort was beyond him. His breathing became instantly arduous, and he flinched at some discomfort the motion brought.
“Do you want a painkiller?” Clem asked him.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I want to be clearheaded, so Gentle and I can talk.” He looked across at his visitor, who was still lingering at the door. “Will you talk to me for a while, John?” he said. “Just the two of us?”
“Of course,” Gentle said.
Clem moved from beside the bed and beckoned Gentle across. There was a chair, but Taylor patted the bed, and it was there Gentle sat, hearing the crackle of the plastic undersheet as he did so.
“Call if you need anything,” Clem said, the remark directed not at Taylor but at Gentle. Then he left them alone.
“Could you pour me a glass of water?” Taylor asked.
Gentle did so, realizing as he passed it to Taylor that his friend lacked the strength to hold it for himself. He put it to Taylor’s lips. There was a salve on them, which moistened them lightly, but they were still split, and puffy with sores. After a few sips Taylor murmured something.
“Enough?” Gentle said.
“Yes, thanks.” Taylor replied. Gentle set the glass down. “I’ve had just about enough of everything. It’s time it was all over.”
“You’ll get strong again.”
“I didn’t want to see you so we could sit and lie to each other.” Taylor said. “I wanted you here so I could tell you how much I’ve been thinking about you. Night and day. Gentle.”
“I’m sure I don’t deserve that.”
“My subconscious thinks you do,” Taylor replied. “And, while we’re being honest, the rest of me too. You don’t look as if you’re getting enough sleep, Gentle.”
“I’ve been working, that’s all.”
“Painting?”
“Some of the time. Looking for inspiration, you know.”
“I’ve got a confession to make,” Taylor said. “But first, you’ve got to promise you won’t be angry with me.”
“What have you done?”
“I told Judy about the night we got together,” Taylor said. He stared at Gentle as if expecting there to be some eruption. When there was none, he went on, “I know it was no big deal to you,” he said. “But it’s been on my mind a lot. You don’t mind, do you?”
Gentle shrugged. “I’m sure it didn’t come as any big surprise to her.”
Taylor turned his hand palm up on the sheet, and Gentle took it. There was no power in Taylor’s fingers, but he closed them round Gentle’s hand with what little strength he had. His grip was cold.
“You’re shaking,” Taylor said.
“I haven’t eaten in a while,” Gentle said.
“You should keep your strength up. You’re a busy man.”
“Sometimes I need to float a little bit,” Gentle replied.
Taylor smiled, and there in his wasted features was a phantom glimpse of the beauty he’d had.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I float all the time. I’ve been all over the room. I’ve even been outside the window, looking in at myself. That’s the way it’ll be when I go, Gentle. I’ll float off, only that one time I won’t come back. I know Clem’s going to miss me—we’ve had half a lifetime together—but you and Judy will be kind to him, won’t you? Make him understand how things are, if you can. Tell him how I floated off. He doesn’t want to hear me talk that way. but you understand.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“You’re an artist,” he said.
“I’m a faker.”
“Not in my dreams, you’re not. In my dreams you want to heal me, and you know what I say? I tell you I don’t want to get well. I say I want to be out in the light.”
“That sounds like a good place to be,” Gentle said. “Maybe I’ll join you.”
“Are things so bad? Tell me. I want to hear.”
“My whole life’s fucked, Tay.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. You’re a good man.”
“You said we wouldn’t tell lies.”
“That’s no lie. You are. You just need someone to remind you once in a while. Everybody does. Otherwise we slip back into the mud, you know?”
Gentle took tighter hold of Taylor’s hand. There was so much in him he had neither the form nor the comprehension to express. Here was Taylor pouring out his heart about love and dreams and how it was going to be when he died, and what did he, Gentle, have by way of contribution? At best, confusion and forgetfulness. Which of them was the sicker, then? he found himself thinking. Taylor, who was frail but able to speak his heart? Or himself, whole but silent? Determined he wouldn’t part from this man without attempting to share something of what had happened to him, he fumbled for some words of explanation.
“I think I found somebody,” he said. “Somebody to help me … remember myself.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m not sure,” he said, his voice gossamer. “I’ve seen some things in the last few weeks. Tay … things I didn’t want to believe until I had no choice. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy.”
“Tell me.”
“There was someone in New York who tried to kill Jude.”
“I know. She told me about it. What about him?” His eyes widened. “Is this the somebody?” he said.
“It’s not a him.”
“I thought Judy said it was a man.”
“It’s not a man,” Gentle said. “It’s not a woman, either. It’s not even human, Tay.”
“What is it then?”
“Wonderful,” he said quietly.
He hadn’t dared use a word like that, even to himself. But anything less was a lie, and lies weren’t welcome here.
“I told you I was going crazy. But I swear if you had seen the way it changed … it was like nothing on earth.”
“And where is it now?”
“I think it’s dead,” Gentle replied. “I waited too long to find it. I tried to forget I’d ever set eyes on it. I was afraid of what it was stirring up in me. And then when that didn’t work I tried to paint it out of my system. But it wouldn’t go. Of course, it wouldn’t go. It was part of me by that time. And then when I finally went to find it … it was too late.”
“Are you sure?” Taylor said. Knots of discomfort had appeared on his face as Gentle talked, and were tightening.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “I want to hear the rest.”
“There’s nothing else to hear. Maybe Pie’s out there somewhere, but I don’t know where.”
“Is that why you want to float? Are you hoping — “He stopped, his breathing suddenly turning into gasps. “You know, maybe you should fetch Clem,” he said.
“Of course.”
Gentle went to the door, but before he reached it Taylor said, “You’ve got to understand, Gentle. Whatever the mystery is, you’ll have to see it for us both.”
With his hand on the door, and ample reason to beat a hasty retreat, Gentle knew he could still choose silence over a reply, could take his leave of the ancient without accepting the quest. But, if he answered, and took it, he was bound.
“I’m going to understand,” he said, meeting Taylor’s despairing gaze. “We both are. I swear.”
Taylor managed to smile in response, but it was fleeting. Gentle opened the door and headed out onto the landing. Clem was waiting.
“He needs you,” Gentle said.
Clem stepped inside and closed the bedroom door. Feeling suddenly exiled, Gentle headed downstairs.
Jude was sitting at the kitchen table, playing with a piece of rock.
“How is he?” she wanted to know.
“Not good,” Gentle said. “Clem’s gone in to look after him.”
“Do you want some tea?”
“No, thanks. What I really need’s some fresh air. I think I’ll take a walk around the block.”
There was a fine drizzle falling when he stepped outside, which was welcome after the suffocating heat of the sickroom. He knew the neighborhood scarcely at all, so he decided to stay close to the house, but his distraction soon got the better of that plan and he wandered aimlessly, lost in thought and the maze of streets. There was a freshness in the wind that made him sigh for escape. This was no place to solve mysteries. After the turn of the year everybody would be stepping up to a new round of resolutions and ambitions, plotting their futures like well-oiled farces. He wanted none of it.
As he began the trek back to the house he remembered that Jude had asked him to pick up milk and cigarettes on his journey, and that he was returning empty-handed. He turned and went in search of both, which took him longer than he expected. When he finally rounded the corner, goods in hand, there was an ambulance outside the house. The front door was open. Jude stood on the step, watching the drizzle. She had tears on her face.
“He’s dead,” she said.
He stood rooted to the spot a yard from her. “When?” he said, as if it mattered.
“Just after you left.”
He didn’t want to weep, not with her watching. There was too much else he didn’t want to stumble over in her presence. Stony, he said, “Where’s Clem?”
“With him upstairs. Don’t go up. There’s already too many people.” She spied the cigarettes in his hand and reached for them. As her hand grazed his, their grief ran between them. Despite his intent, tears sprang to his eyes, and he went into her embrace, both of them sobbing freely, like enemies joined by a common loss or lovers about to be parted. Or else souls who could not remember whether they were lovers or enemies and were weeping at their own confusion.
From Imajica
There was a balmy rain falling as they left London the next day, but by the time they’d reached the estate the sun was breaking through, and the parkland gleamed around them as they entered. They didn’t make any detours to the house but headed straight to the copse that concealed the Retreat. There was a breeze in the branches, and they flickered with light leaves. The smell of life was everywhere, stirring her blood for the journey ahead.
Oscar had advised her to dress with an eve to practicality and warmth. The city, he said, was subject to rapid and radical shifts in temperature, depending on the direction of the wind. If it came off the desert, the heat in the streets could bake the flesh like unleavened bread. And if it swung and came off the ocean, it brought marrow-chilling fogs and sudden frosts. None of this daunted her, of course. She was ready for this adventure as for no other in her life.
“I know I’ve gone on endlessly about how dangerous the city’s become,” Oscar said as they clucked beneath the low-slung branches, “and you’re tired of hearing about it, but this isn’t a civilized city, Judith. About the only man I trust there is Peccable. If for any reason we were to be separated—or if anything were to happen to me—you can rely upon him for help.”
“I understand.”
Oscar stopped to admire the pretty scene ahead, dappled sunlight falling on the pale walls and dome of the Retreat. “You know, I used only to come here at night,” he said. “I thought that was the sacred time, when magic had the strongest hold. But it’s not true. Midnight Mass and moonlight is fine, but miracles are here at noon as well; just as strong, just as strange.”
He looked up at the canopy of trees.
“Sometimes you have to go away from the world to see the world,” he said. “I went to Yzordderrex a few years back and stayed—oh, I don’t know, two months, maybe two and a half, and when I came back to the Fifth I saw it like a child. I swear, like a child. This trip won’t just show you other Dominions. If we get back safe and sound—”
“We will.”
“Such faith. If we do, this world will be different, too. Everything changes after this, because you’ll be changed.”
“So be it,” she said.
She took hold of his hand, and they started toward the Retreat. Something made her uneasy, however. Not his words—his talk of change had only excited her—but the hush between them, perhaps, which was suddenly deep.
“Is there something wrong?” he said, feeling her grip tighten.
“The silence …”
“There’s always an odd atmosphere here. I’ve felt it before. A lot of fine souls died here, of course.”
“At the Reconciliation?”
“You know about that, do you?”
“From Clara. It was two hundred years ago this midsummer, she said. Perhaps the spirits are coming back to see if someone’s going to try again.”
He stopped, tugging on her arm. “Don’t talk about it, even in jest. Please. There’ll be no Reconciliation, this summer or any other. The Maestros are dead. The whole thing’s—”
“All right,” she said. “Calm down. I won’t mention it again.”
“After this summer it’ll be academic anyway,” he said, with a feigned lightness, “at least for another couple of centuries. I’ll be dead and buried long before this hoopla starts again. I’ve got my plot, you know? I chose it with Peccable. It’s on the edge of the desert, with a fine view of Yzordderrex.”
His nervous babble concealed the quiet until they reached the door; then he let it drop. She was glad he was silent. The place deserved reverence. Standing at the step, it wasn’t difficult to believe phantoms gathered here, the dead of centuries past mingling with those she’d last seen living on this very spot: Charlie for one, of course, coaxing her inside, telling her with a smile that the place was nothing special, just stone; and the voiders too, one burned, one skinned, both haunting the threshold.
“Unless you see any just impediment,” Oscar said, “I think we should do this.”
He led her inside, to the middle of the mosaic.
“When the time comes,” he said. “We have to hold on to each other. Even if you think there’s nothing to hold on to, there is; it’s just changed for a time. I don’t want to lose you between here and there. The In Ovo’s no place to go wandering.”
“You won’t lose me,” she said.
He went down on his haunches and dug into the mosaic, pulling from the pattern a dozen or so pieces of pyramidal stone the size of two fists, which had been so designed as to be virtually invisible when set in their places.
“I don’t fully understand the mechanisms that carry us over,” he said as he worked. “I’m not sure anybody does completely. But according to Peccable there’s a sort of common language into which anybody can be translated. And all the processes of magic involve this translation.”
He was laying the stones around the edge of the circle as he spoke, the arrangement seemingly arbitrary.
“Once matter and spirit are in the same language, one can influence the other in any number of ways. Flesh and bone can be transformed, transcended—”
“Or transported?”
“Exactly.”
Jude remembered how the removal of a traveler from this world into another looked from the outside: the flesh folding upon itself, the body distorted out of all recognition.
“Does it hurt?” she said.
“At the beginning, but not badly.”
“When will it begin?” she said.
He stood up. “It already has,” he said.
She felt it, as he spoke: a pressure in her bowels and bladder, a tightness in her chest that made her catch her breath.
“Breathe slowly,” he said, putting his palm against her breastbone. “Don’t fight it. Just let it happen. There’s no harm going to come to you.”
She looked down at his hand, then beyond it to the circle tha
t enclosed them, and out through the door of the Retreat to the sunlit grass that lay just a few paces from where she stood. Close as it was, she couldn’t return there. The train she’d boarded was gathering speed around her. It was too late for doubts or second thoughts. She was trapped.
“It’s all right,” she heard Oscar say, but it didn’t feel that way at all.
There was a pain in her belly so sharp it felt as though she’d been poisoned, and an ache in her head, and an itch too deep in her skin to be scratched. She looked at Oscar. Was he enduring the same discomforts? If so he was bearing them with remarkable fortitude, smiling at her like an anesthetist.
“It’ll be over soon,” he was saying. “Just hold on … it’ll be over soon.”
He drew her closer to him, and as he did so she felt a tingling pass through her cells, as though a rainstorm was breaking inside her, sluicing the pain away.
“Better?” he said, the word more shape than sound.
“Yes.” she told him and, smiling, put her lips to his, closing her eyes with pleasure as their tongues touched.
The darkness behind her lids was suddenly brightened by gleaming lines, falling like meteors across her mind’s eye. She lifted her lids again, but the spectacle came out of her skull, daubing Oscar’s face with streaks of brightness. A dozen vivid hues picked out the furrows and creases of his skin; another dozen, the geology of bone beneath; and another, the lineaments of nerves and veins and vessels, to the tiniest detail. Then, as though the mind interpreting them had done with its literal translation and could now rise to poetry, the layered maps of his flesh simplified. Redundancies and repetitions were discarded, the forms that emerged so simple and so absolute that the matter they represented seemed wan by comparison, and receded before them. Seeing this show, she remembered the glyph she’d imagined when she and Oscar had first made love: the spiral and curve of her pleasure laid on the velvet behind her eyes. Here was the same process again, only the mind imagining them was the circle’s mind, empowered by the stones and by the travelers’ demand for passage.