by Clive Barker
For the first time in this dialogue, Clara was lost for words. She simply stared, leaving Jude to fill the silence of her astonishment.
"When I said I've been into the tower in my mind, that isn't strictly true," Jude said. "I've only been under the tower. There's a cellar there, like a maze. It's full of books. And behind one of the walls there's a woman. I thought she was dead at first, but she isn't. She's maybe close to it, but she's holding on."
Clara was visibly shaken by this account. "I thought I was the only one who knew she was there," she said.
"More to the point, do you know who she is?"
"I've got a pretty good idea," Clara said, and picked up the story she'd been diverted from earlier: the tale of how she'd come to leave the Tabula Rasa.
The library beneath the tower, she explained, was the most comprehensive collection of manuscripts dealing with the occult sciences—but more particularly the legends and lore of the Imajica—in the world. It had been gathered by the men who'd founded the Society, led by Roxborough and Godolphin, to keep from the hands and minds of innocent Englishmen the stain of things Imajical; but rather than cataloguing the collection—making an index of these forbidden books—generations of the Tabula Rasa had simply left them to fester.
"I took it upon myself to sort through the collection. Believe it or not, I was once a very ordered woman, I got it from my father. He was in the military. At first I was watched by two other members of the Society. That's the law. No member of the Society is allowed into the library alone, and if any one judges either of the other two to be in any way unduly interested or influenced by the volum they can be tried by the Society and executed. I don't thin it's ever been done. Half the books are in Latin, and who reads Latin? The other half—you've seen for yourself they're rotting on their spines, like all of us. But I wanted order, the way Daddy would have liked it. Everything neat and tidy.
"My companions soon got tired of my obsession and left me to it. And in the middle of the night I felt something... or somebody... pulling at my thoughts, plucking them out of my scalp one by one, like hairs. Of course I thought it was the books, at first. I thought the words had got some power over me. I tried to leave, but you know I really didn't want to. I'd been Daddy's repressed little daughter for fifty years, and I was about ready to crack. Celestine knew it too—"
"Celestine is the woman in the wall?"
"I believe it's her, yes."
"But you don't know who she is?"
"I'm coming to that," Clara said. "Roxborough's house stood on the land where the tower now stands. The cellar is the cellar of that house. Celestine was—indeed, still is— Roxborough's prisoner. He walled her up because he didn't dare kill her. She'd seen the face of Hapexamendios, the God of Gods. She was insane, but she'd been touched" by divinity, and even Roxborough didn't dare lay a finger on her."
"How do you know all this?"
"Roxborough wrote a confession, a few days before he died. He knew the woman he'd walled up would outlive him by centuries, and I suppose he also knew that sooner or later somebody would find her. So the confession was also a warning to whatever poor, victimized man came along, telling him that she was not to be touched. Bury her again, he said, I remember that very clearly. Bury her again, in the deepest abyss your wits may devise—"
"Where did you find this confession?"
"In the wall, that night when I was alone. I believe Celestine led me to it, by plucking thoughts out of my head And putting new ones in. But she plucked too hard. My mind gave up. I had a stroke down there. I wasn't found for three days." "That's horrible—"
"My suffering's nothing compared to hers. Roxborough had found this woman in London, or his spies had, and he knew she was a creature of immense power. He probably realized it more clearly than she did, in fact, because he says in the confession she was a stranger to herself. But she'd seen sights no other human being had ever witnessed. She'd been snatched from the Fifth Dominion, escorted across the Imajica, and taken into the presence of Hapexa-mendios."
"Why?"
"It gets stranger. When he interrogated her, she told him she'd been brought back into the Fifth Dominion preg-nant."
"She was having God's child?"
"That's what she told Roxborough."
'She could have been inventing it all, just to keep him from hurting her."
"I don't think he'd have done that. In fact I think he was half in love with her. He said in the confession he felt like his friend Godolphin. I'm broken by a woman's eye, he wrote."
"That's an odd phrase," Jude thought, thinking of the stone as she did so: its stare, its authority.
"Well, Godolphin died obsessing on some mistress he'd loved and lost, claiming he'd been destroyed by her. The men were always the innocents, you see. Victims of female eonnivings. I daresay Roxborough'd persuaded himself that walling Celestine up was an act of love. Keeping her under his thumb forever."
"What happened to the child?" Judith said.
"Maybe she can tell us herself," Clara replied.
"Then we have to get her out."
"Indeed."
"Do you have any idea how?" "Not yet," Clara said. "Until you appeared I was ready to despair. But between the two of us we'll find some way to save her,"
It was getting late, and Jude was anxious that her absence not be noted, so the plans they laid were sketchy in the extreme. A further examination of the tower was clearly in order, this time—Clara proposed—under cover of darkness.
"Tonight," she suggested.
"No, that's too soon. Give me a day to make up some
excuse for being out for the night,"
"Who's the watchdog?" Clara said.
"Just a man."
"Suspicious?"
"Sometimes."
"Well, Celestine's waited a long time to be set free. She can wait another twenty-four hours. But please, no longer, I'm not a well woman."
Jude put her hand over Clara's hand, the first contact between them since the woman had touched her icy fingers to Jude's cheek. "You're not going to die," she said.
"Oh, yes, I am. It's no great hardship. But I want to see Celestine's face before I leave."
"We will," Judith said. "If not tomorrow night, soon after."
She didn't believe what Clara had said about men pertained to Oscar, He was no destroyer of Goddesses, either by hand or proxy. But Dowd was another matter entirely. Though his facade was civilized—almost prissy at times— she would never forget the casual way he'd disposed of the voiders' bodies, warming his hands at the pyre as though they were branches, not bones, that were cracking in the flames. And, as bad luck would have it, Dowd was back at the house when she returned, and Oscar was not, so it was his questions she was obliged to answer if she wasn't to arouse his suspicions with silence. When he asked her what she'd done with the day, she told him she'd gone out for a long walk along the Embankment. He then inquired as to whether the tube had been crowded, though she'd not told him she'd traveled that way. She said it was. You should take a cab next time, he said. Or, better still, allow me to (hive you. I'm certain Mr. Godolphin would prefer you to travel in comfort, he said. She thanked him for his kindness. Will you be planning other trips soon? he asked. She had her story for the following evening already prepared, but Dowd's manner never failed to throw her off balance, and she was certain any lie she told now would be instantly spotted, so she said she didn't know, and he let the subject drop.
Oscar didn't come home until the middle of the night, slipping into bed beside her as gently as his bulk allowed. She pretended to wake. He murmured a few words of apology for stirring her, and then some of love. Feigning a sleepy tone, she told him she was going to see her friend Clem tomorrow night, and did he mind? He told her she should do whatever she wanted, but keep her beautiful body for him. Then he kissed her shoulder and neck and fell asleep.
She had arranged to meet Clara at eight in the evening, outside the church, but she left for that rendezvous
two hours before in order to go via her old flat. She didn't know what place in the scheme of things the carved blue eye had, but she'd decided the night before that it should be with her when they made their attempt to liberate Celestine...he flat felt cold and neglected, and she spent only a few minutes there, first retrieving the eye from her wardrobe, then quickly leafing through the mail—most of it junk— that had arrived since she'd last visited. These tasks completed, she set out for Highgate, taking Dowd's advice and hailing a taxi to do so. It delivered her to the church twenty-five minutes early, only to find that Clara was already there.
"Have you eaten, my girl?" Clara wanted to know.
Jude told her she had.
"Good," Clara said. "We'll need all our strength tonight."
"Before we go any further," Jude said, "I want to show
you something. I don't know what use it can be to us, but I
think you ought to see it." She brought the parcel of cloth
out of her bag. "Remember what you said about Celestine
plucking the thoughts out of your head?"
"Of course."
"This is what did the same to me."
She began to unwrap the eye, a subtle tremor in her fin-gers as she did so. Four months and more had passed since she'd hidden it away with such superstitious care but her , memory of its effect was undimmed, and she half expected it to exercise some power now. It did nothing, though; it lay in the folds of its covering, looking so unremarkable she was almost embarrassed to have made such a show of unveiling it. Clara, however, stared at it with a smile on her lips.
"Where did you get this?" she said.
"I'd rather not say."
"This is no time for secrets," Clara snapped. "How did -you come by it?"•
"I thought we'd agreed—" Clem said."I know It was given to my husband. My ex-husband."
"Who by?"
"His brother."
"And who's his brother?"
She took a deep breath, undecided even as she drew it , whether she'd expel it again as truth or fabrication.
''His name's Oscar Godolphin," she said.
At this reply Clara physically retreated from Judith, almost as though this name was proof of the plague.
"Do you know Oscar Godolphin?" she said, her tone appalled.
"Yes, I do."
"Is he the watchdog?" she said,
"Yes, he is."
"Cover it up," she said, shunning the eye now. "Cover it up and put it away." She turned her back on Judith, running her crabbed hands through her hair. "You and Godolphin?" she said, half to herself. "What does that mean?
What does that mean?"
"It doesn't mean anything," Jude said. "What I feel for him and what we're doing now are completely different issues."
"Don't be naive," Clara replied, glancing back at Jude. "Godolphin's a member of the Tabula Rasa, and a man. You and Celestine are both women, and his prisoners—"
"I'm not his prisoner," Jude said, infuriated by Clara's condescension. "I do what I want when I want."
"Until you defy history," Clara said. "Then you'll see how much he thinks he owns you." She approached Jude again, taking her voice down to a pained whisper. "Understand this," she said. "You can't save Celestine and keep his affections. You're going to be digging at the very foundations—literally, the foundations—of his family and his faith, and when he finds out—and he will, when the Tabula Rasa starts to crumble—whatever's between you will mean nothing. We're not another sex, Judith, we're another spe-ties. What's going on in our bodies and our heads isn't remotely like what's going on in theirs. Our hells are different. So are our heavens. We're enemies, and you can't be on both sides in a war."
"It isn't war," Jude said. "If it was war I'd be angry, and I've never been calmer."
"We'll see how calm you are, when you see how things really stand."
Jude took another deep breath. "Maybe we should stop arguing and do what we came to do," she said. Clara looked at her balefully. "I think stubborn bitch is the phrase you're looking for," Jude remarked.
"I never trust the passive ones," Clara said, betraying a trace of admiration. "I'll remember that."
The tower was in darkness, and the trees clogged the lamp-tight from the street, leaving the forecourt shadowy and the route down the flank of the building virtually lightless. Gara had obviously wandered here by night many times, however, because she went with confidence, leaving Jude : to trail, snared by the brambles and stung by the nettles it had been easy to avoid in the sunshine. By the time she reached the back of the tower, her eyes were better accustomed to the murk and found Clara standing twenty yards from the building, staring at the ground.
"What are you doing back here?" Jude said. "We know
there's only one way in."
"Barred and bolted," she said. "I'm thinking there may
be some other entrance to the cellar under the turf, even if
it's only a ventilation pipe. The first thing we should do is
locate Celestine's cell."
"How do we do that?"
"We use the eye that took you traveling," Clara said. "Come on, come on, give it over."
"I thought it was too tainted to be touched." "Not at all."
"The way you looked at it..."
"It's loot, my girl. That's what repulsed me. It's a piece of women's history traded between two men."
"I'm sure Oscar didn't know what it was," she said, thinking even as she defended him that this was probably untrue.
"It belongs to a great temple—"
"He certainly doesn't loot temples," Jude said, taking
the contentious item from her pocket.
"I'm not saying he does," Clara replied. "The temples
were brought down long before the line of the Godolphins
was even founded. Well, are you going to hand it over or ;
not?"
Jude unwrapped the eye, discovering in herself a reluctance to share it she hadn't anticipated. It was no longer as unremarkable as it had been. It gave off a subtle luminescence, blue and steady, by which she and Clara could see each other, albeit faintly.
Their gazes met, the eye's light gleaming between them like the glance of a third conspirator, a woman wiser than them both, whose presence—despite the dull murmur of traffic, and jets droning through the clouds above—exalted the moment. Jude found herself wondering how many women had gathered in the glow of this light or its like down the ages: gathered, to pray, or make sacrifice, or shelter from the destroyer. Countless numbers, no doubt, dead and forgotten but, in this brief time out of time, reclaimed from anonymity; not named, but at least acknowledged by these new acolytes. She looked away from Clara, towards the eye. The solid world around her suddenly seemed irrelevant—at best a game of veils, at worst a trap in which the spirit struggled and, struggling, gave credence to the lie. There was no need to be bound by its rules. She could fly beyond it with a thought. She looked up again to confirm that Clara was also ready to move, but her companion was glancing out of the circle, towards the corner of the tower.
"What is it?" Jude said, following the direction of Clara's gaze. Somebody was approaching them through the darkness, in the walk a nonchalance she could name in a syllable: "Dowd."
"You know him?" Clara said.
"A little," Dowd said, his voice as casual as his gait. "But really, there's so much she doesn't know."
Clara's hands dropped from Jude's, breaking the charm of three.
"Don't come any closer," Clara said.
Surprisingly, Dowd stopped dead in his tracks, a few yards from the women. There was sufficient light from the eye for Jude to pick out his face. Something, or things, seemed to be crawling around his mouth, as though he'd just eaten a handful of ants and a few had escaped from between his lips.
"I would so love to kill you both," he said, and with the words further mites escaped and ran over his cheeks and chin. "But your time will come, Judith. Very soon. For
now, it's just Clara.... It is Clara, isn't it?"
"Go to hell, Dowd," Jude said.
"Step away from the old woman," Dowd replied.
Jude's response was to take hold of Clara's arm. "You're not going to hurt anybody, you little shit," she said.
There was a fury rising in her the like of which she'd not
felt in months. The eye was heavy in her hand; she was
ready to brain the bastard with it if he took a step towards
them.
"Did you not understand me, whore?" he said, moving ,
towards her as he did so. "I told you: Step away!"
In her rage she went to meet his approach, raising her weighted hand as she did so, but in the instant that she let go of Clara he sidestepped her, and she lost sight of him. Realizing that she'd done exactly as he'd planned, she reeled around, intending to take hold of Clara again. But he was there before her. She heard a shout of horror and saw Clara staggering away from her attacker. The mites were at her face already, blinding her. Jude ran to catch hold of her before she fell, but this time Dowd moved to-wards her, not away, and with a single blow struck the , stone from Jude's hand. She didn't turn to reclaim it but went to Clara's aid. The woman's moans were terrible; so were the tremors in her body.
"What have you done to her?" she yelled at Dowd. "Undone, lovely, undone. Let her be. You can't help her now."
Clara's body was light, but when her legs buckled she carried Jude down with her. Her moans had become howls now, as she reached up to her face as if to scratch out her eyes, for there the mites were at some agonizing work. In -desperation Jude tried to feel for the creatures in the darkness, but either they were too fast for her fingers or they'd gone where fingers couldn't follow. All she could do was beg for a reprieve.
"Make them stop," she said to Dowd. "Whatever you want, I'll do, butplease make them stop."
"They're voracious little sods, aren't they?" he said. He was crouching in front of the eye, the blue light illuminating his face, which wore a mask of chilling serenity. As she watched he picked mites from around his mouth and let them drop to the ground.
"I'm afraid they've got no ears, so I can't call them back," he said. "They only know how to unmake. And they'll unmake anything but their maker. In this case, that's me. So I'd leave her alone, if I were you. They're indiscriminate."