by Clive Barker
“Finger yourself,” he said, not letting her go.
She put her hands between her legs and made a show for him. He’d slickened her well, but her fingers went deeper than his tongue, readying herself for the curiosity. He gorged on the sight, meanwhile, glancing up to her face several times, then returning to the spectacle below. All trace of his previous hesitation had gone. He encouraged her with his admiration, calling her a host of sweet names, his tented underwear proof—as if she needed it—of his arousal. She started to push her hips up from the bed to meet her fingers, and he took firmer grip of her knees as she moved, opening her wider still. Lifting his right hand to his mouth he licked his middle finger and put it down against her pucker of her other hole, rubbing it gently.
“Will you suck me now?” he asked her. “Just a little?”
“Show me it,” she said.
He stepped away from her and took off his underwear. The curiosity was now fully risen and florid. She sat up and put it back between her lips, one hand holding it by its pulsing root while the other continued its dalliance with her own sex. She’d never been good at guessing the point at which the milk boiled over, so she took it from the heat of her mouth to cool him a little, glancing up at him as she did so. Either the extraction or her glance set him off, however.
“Damn!” he said. “Damn!” and started to step back from her, his hand going down to his groin to take the curiosity in a stranglehold.
It seemed he might have succeeded, as two desultory dribbles ran from its head. Then his testicles unleashed their flood, and it came forth in uncommon abundance. He moaned as it came, as much in self-admonishment as pleasure, she thought, that assumption confirmed when he’d emptied his sac upon the floor.
“I’m sorry . . .” he said, “. . . I’m sorry. . . .”
“There’s no need,” she said, standing up and putting her lips to his. He continued to murmur his apologies, however.
“I haven’t done that in a long time,” he said. “So adolescent.”
She kept her silence, knowing anything she said would only begin a further round of self-reproach. He slipped away into the bathroom to find a towel. When he returned she was picking up her clothes.
“Are you going?” he said.
“Only to my room.”
“Do you have to?” he said. “I know that wasn’t much of a performance, but . . . the bed’s big enough for us both. And I don’t snore.”
“The bed’s enormous.”
“So . . . would you stay?” he said.
“I’d like to.”
He made a charming smile. “I’m honored,” he said. “Will you excuse me a moment?”
He switched the bathroom light back on and disappeared inside, closing the door, leaving her to lie back on the bed and wonder at this whole turn of events. Its very oddness seemed appropriate. After all, this whole journey had begun with an act of misplaced love: love become murder. Now a new dislocation. Here she was, lying in the bed of a man with a body far from beautiful, whose bulk she longed to have upon her; whose hands were capable of fratricide but aroused her like none she’d ever known; who’d walked more worlds than an opium poet, but couldn’t speak love without stumbling; who was a titan, and yet afraid. She made a nest among his duck-down pillows and waited there for him to come back and tell her a story of love.
He reappeared after a long while and slipped beneath the sheets beside her. True to her imaginings, he said he loved her at last, but only once he’d turned the light out, and his eyes were not available for study.
When she slept, it was deeply, and when she woke again, it was like sleeping, dark and pleasurable, the former because the drapes were still drawn, and between their cracks she could see that the sky was still benighted, the latter because Oscar was behind her, and inside. One of his hands was upon her breast, the other lifting her leg so that he could ease his upward stroke. He’d entered her with skill and discretion, she realized. Not only had he not stirred her until he was embedded, but he’d chosen the virgin passage, which—had he suggested it while she was awake—she’d have attempted to coax him from, fearing the discomfort. In truth, there was none, though the sensation was quite unlike anything she’d felt before. He kissed her neck and shoulder blade, light kisses, as though he was unaware of her wakefulness. She made it known with a sigh. His stroke slowed and stopped, but she pressed her buttocks back to meet his thrust, satisfying his curiosity as to the limit of itsaccess, which was to say none. She was happy to accept him entirely, trapping his hand against her breast to press it to rougher service, while putting her own at the connecting place. He’d dutifully slipped on a condom before entering her, which, together with the fact that he’d already poured forth once tonight, made him a near perfect lover: slow and certain.
She didn’t use the dark to reconfigure him. The man pressing his face into her hair, and biting at her shoulder, wasn’t—like the mystif he’d described—a reflection of imagined ideals. It was Oscar Godolphin, paunch, curiosity, and all. What she did reconfigure was herself, so that she became in her mind’s eye a glyph of sensation: a line dividing from the coil of her pierced core, up through her belly to the points of her breasts, then intersecting again at her nape, crossing and becoming woven spirals beneath the hood of her skull. Her imagination added a further refinement, inscribing a circle around this figure, which burned in the darkness behind her lips like a vision. Her rapture was perfected then: being an abstraction in his arms, yet pleasured like flesh. There was no greater luxury.
He asked if they might move, saying only, “The wound . . . ,” by way of explanation.
She went onto her hands and knees, he slipping from her for a tormenting moment while she did so, then putting the curiosity back to work. His rhythm instantly became more urgent, his fingers in her sex, his voice in her head, both expressing ecstasy. The glyph brightened in her mind’s eye, fiery from end to end. She yelled out to him, first only yes and yes, then plainer demands, inflaming him to new invention. The glyph became blinding, burning away all thought of where she was, or what; all memory of conjunctions past subsumed in this perpetuity.
She was not even aware that he’d spent himself until she felt him withdrawing, and then she reached behind her to keep him inside a while longer. He obliged. She enjoyed the sensation of his softening inside her, and even, finally, his exiting, the tender muscle yielding its prisoner reluctantly. Then he rolled over onto the bed beside her and reached for the light. It was dim enough not to sting, but still too bright, and she was about to protest when she saw that he was putting his fingers to his injured side. Their congress had unknitted the wound. Blood was running from it in two directions: down towards the curiosity, still nestled in the condom, and down his side to the sheet.
“It’s all right,” he said as she made to get up. “It looks worse than it is.”
“It still needs something to staunch it,” she said.
“That’s good Godolphin blood,” he said, wincing and grinning at the same moment. His gaze went from her face to the portrait above the bed. “It’s always flowed freely,” he said.
“He doesn’t look as though he approved of us,” she said.
“On the contrary,” Oscar replied. “I know for a fact he’d adore you. Joshua understood devotion.”
She looked at the wound again. Blood was seeping between his fingers.
“Won’t you let me cover that up?” she said. “It makes me queasy.”
“For you . . . anything.”
“Have you got any dressing?”
“Dowd’s probably got some, but I don’t want him knowing about us. At least, not yet. Let’s keep it our secret.”
“You, me, and Joshua,” she said.
“Even Joshua doesn’t know what we got up to,” Oscar said, without a trace of irony audible in his voice. “Why do you think I turned the light out?”
In lieu of fresh dressing she went through to the bathroom to find a towel. While she was doing so he
spoke to her through the open door.
“I meant what I said, by the way,” he told her.
“About what?”
“That I’ll do anything for you. At least, anything that’s in my power to do or give. I want you to stay with me, Judith. I’m no Adonis, I know that. But I learned a lot from Joshua . . . about devotion, I mean.” She emerged with the towel to be greeted by the same offer. “Anything you want.”
“That’s very generous.”
“The pleasure’s in the giving,” he said.
“I think you know what I’d like most.”
He shook his head. “I’m no good at guessing games. Only cricket. Just tell me.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed and gently tugged his hand from the wound in his side, wiping the blood from between his fingers.
“Say it,” he told her.
“Very well,” she said. “I want you to take me out of this Dominion. I want you to show me Yzordderrex.”
Twenty-five
I
TWENTY-TWO DAYS AFTER EMERGING from the icy wastes of the Jokalaylau into the balmier climes of the Third Dominion—days which had seen Pie and Gentle’s fortunes rise dramatically as they journeyed through the Third’s diverse territories—the wanderers were standing on a station platform outside the tiny town of Mai-ké, waiting for the train that once a week came through on its way from the city of Iahmandhas, in the northeast, to L’Himby, half a day’s journey to the south.
They were eager to be departing. Of all the towns and villages they’d visited in the past three weeks, Mai-ké had been the least welcoming. It had its reasons. It was a community under siege from the Dominion’s two suns, the rains which brought the region its crops having failed to materialize for six consecutive years. Terraces and fields that should have been bright with shoots were virtually dust bowls, stocks hoarded against this eventuality critically depleted. Famine was imminent, and the village was in no mood to entertain strangers. The previous night the entire populace had been out in the drab streets praying aloud, these imprecations led by their spiritual leaders, who had about them the air of men whose invention was nearing its end. The noise, so unmusical Gentle had observed that it would irritate the most sympathetic of deities, had gone on until first light, making sleep impossible. As a consequence, exchanges between Pie and Gentle were somewhat tense this morning.
They were not the only travelers waiting for the train. A farmer from Mai-ké had brought a herd of sheep onto the platform, some of them so emaciated it was a wonder they could stand, and the flock had brought with them clouds of the local pest: an insect called a zarzi, that had the wingspan of a dragonfly and a body as fat and furred as a bee. It fed on sheep ticks, unless it could find something more tempting. Gentle’s blood fell into this latter category, and the lazy whine of the zarzi was never far from his ears as he waited in the midday heat. Their one informant in Mai-ké, a woman called Hairstone Banty, had predicted that the train would be on time, but it was already well overdue, which didn’t augur well for the hundred other pieces of advice she’d offered them the night before.
Swatting zarzi to left and right, Gentle emerged from the shade of the platform building to peer down the track. It ran without crook or bend to its vanishing point, empty every mile of the way. On the rails a few yards from where he stood, rats, a gangrenous variety called graveolents, to-ed and fro-ed, gathering dead grasses for the nests they were constructing between the rails and the gravel the rails were set upon. Their industry only served to irritate Gentle further.
“We’re stuck here forever,” he said to Pie, who was squatting on the platform making marks on the stone with a sharp pebble. “This is Hairstone’s revenge on a couple of hoopreo.”
He’d heard this term whispered in their presence countless times. It meant anything from exotic stranger to repugnant leper, depending on the facial expression of the speaker. The people of Mai-ké were keen face-pullers, and when they’d used the word in Gentle’s company there was little doubt which end of the scale of affections they had in mind.
“It’ll come,” said Pie. “We’re not the only ones waiting.”
Two more groups of travelers had appeared on the platform in the last few minutes: a family of Mai’kéacs, three generations represented, who had lugged everything they owned down to the station; and three women in voluminous robes, their heads shaved and plastered with white mud, nuns of the Goetic Kicaranki, an order as despised in Mai-ké as any well-fed hoopreo. Gentle took some comfort from the appearance of these fellow travelers, but the track was still empty, the graveolents, who would surely be the first to sense any disturbance in the rails, going about their nest building unperturbed. He wearied of watching them very quickly and turned his attention to Pie’s scrawlings.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to work out how long we’ve been here.”
“Two days in Mai-ké, a day and a half on the road from Attaboy—”
“No, no,” said the mystif, “I’m trying to work it out in Earth days. Right from first arriving in the Dominions.”
“We tried that in the mountains, and we didn’t get anywhere.”
“That’s because our brains were frozen stiff.”
“So have you done it?”
“Give me a little time.”
“Time, we’ve got,” Gentle said, returning his gaze to the antics of graveolents. “These little buggers’ll have grandchildren by the time the damn train arrives.”
The mystif went on with its calculations, leaving Gentle to wander back into the comparative comfort of the waiting room, which, to judge by the sheep droppings on the floor, had been used to pen entire flocks in the recent past. The zarzi followed him, buzzing around his brow. He pulled from his ill-fitting jacket (bought with money he and Pie had won gambling in Attaboy) a dog-eared copy of Fanny Hill—the only volume in English, besides Pilgrim’s Progress, which he’d been able to purchase—and used it to flail at the insects, then gave up. They’d tire of him eventually, or else he’d become immune to their attacks. Whichever; he didn’t care.
He leaned against the graffiti-covered wall and yawned. He was bored. Of all things, bored! If, when they’d first arrived in Vanaeph, Pie had suggested that a few weeks later the wonders of the Reconciled Dominions would have become tedious, Gentle would have laughed the thought off as nonsense. With a gold-green sky above and the spires of Patashoqua gleaming in the distance, the scope for adventure had seemed endless. But by the time he’d reached Beatrix—the fond memories of which had not been entirely erased by images of its ruin—he was traveling like any man in a foreign land, prepared for occasional revelations but persuaded that the nature of conscious, curious bipeds was a constant under any heaven. They’d seen a great deal in the last few days, to be sure, but nothing he might not have imagined had he not stayed at home and got seriously drunk.
Yes, there had been glorious sights. But there had also been hours of discomfort, boredom, and banality. On their way to Mai-ké, for instance, they’d been exhorted to stay in some nameless hamlet to witness the community’s festival: the annual donkey drowning. The origins of this ritual were, they were told, shrouded in fabulous mystery. They declined, Gentle remarking that this surely marked the nadir of their journey, and traveled on in the back of a wagon whose driver informed them that the vehicle had served his family for six generations as a dung carrier. He then proceeded to explain at great length the life cycle of his family’s ancient foe, the pensanu, or shite rooster, a beast that with one turd could render an entire wagonload of dung inedible. They didn’t press the man as to who in the region dined thusly, but they peered closely at their plates for many days following.
As he sat rolling the hard pellets of sheep dung under his heel, Gentle turned his thoughts to the one high point in their journey across the Third. That was the town of Effatoi, which Gentle had rechristened Attaboy. It wasn’t that large—the size of Amsterdam, perhaps, and with that city’s
charm—but it was a gambler’s paradise, drawing souls addicted to chance from across the Dominion. Here every game in the Imajica could be played. If your credit wasn’t good in the casinos or the cock pits, you could always find a desperate man somewhere who’d bet on the color of your next piss if it was the only game on offer. Working together with what was surely telepathic efficiency, Gentle and the mystif had made a small fortune in the city—in eight currencies, no less—enough to keep them in clothes, food, and train tickets until they reached Yzordderrex. It wasn’t profit that had almost seduced Gentle into setting up house there, however. It was a local delicacy:a cake of strudel pastry and the honey-softened seeds of a marriage between peach and pomegranate, which he ate before they gambled to give him vim, then while they gambled to calm his nerves, and then again in celebration when they’d won. It was only when Pie assured him that the confection would be available elsewhere (and if it wasn’t they now had sufficient funds to hire their own pastry chef to make it) that Gentle was persuaded to depart. L’Himby called.
“We have to move on,” the mystif had said. “Scopique will be waiting.”
“You make it sound like he’s expecting us.”
“I’m always expected,” Pie said.
“How long since you were in L’Himby?”
“At least . . . two hundred and thirty years.”
“Then he’ll be dead.”
“Not Scopique,” Pie said. “It’s important you see him, Gentle. Especially now, with so many changes in the air.”
“If that’s what you want to do, then we’ll do it,” Gentle had replied. “How far is L’Himby?”
“A day’s journey, if we take the train.”
That had been the first mention Gentle had heard of the iron road that joined the city of Iahmandhas and L’Himby: the city of furnaces and the city of temples.
“You’ll like L’Himby,” Pie had said. “It’s a place of meditation.”