by Clive Barker
It was a long walk to the house, but Estabrook was already leading the way, with Skin as scout. What visions were in Charlie’s mind’s eye, Jude wondered, that drove him on with such gusto? The past, perhaps: childhood visits here? Or further back still, to the days of High Yoke’s glory, when the route they were taking had been raked gravel, and the house ahead a gathering place for the wealthy and the influential?
“Did you come here a lot when you were little?” she asked him as they plowed through the grass.
He looked around at her with a moment’s bewilderment, as though he’d forgotten she was with him.
“Not often,” he said. “I liked it, though. It was like a playground. Later on, I thought about selling it, but Oscar would never let me. He had his reasons, of course. . . .”
“What were they?” she asked him lightly.
“Frankly, I’m glad we left it to run to seed. It’s prettier this way.”
He marched on, wielding his branch like a machete. As they drew closer to the house, Jude could see what a pitiful state it was in. The windows were gone, the roof was reduced to a timber lattice, the doors teetered on their hinges like drunks. All sad enough in any house, but near tragic in a structure that had once been so magnificent. The sunlight was getting stronger as the clouds cleared, and by the time they stepped through the porch it was pouring through the lattice overhead, its geometry a perfect foil for the scene below. The staircase, albeit rubble-strewn, still rose in a sweep to a half landing, which had once been dominated by a window fit for a cathedral. It was smashed now, by a tree toppled many winters before, the withered extremities of which lay on the spot where the lord and lady would have paused before descending to greet their guests. The paneling of the hallway and the corridors that led off it was still intact, and the boards solid beneath their feet. Despite the decay of the roof, thestructure didn’t look unsound. It had been built to serve Godolphins in perpetuity, the fertility of land and loin preserving the name until the sun went out. It was flesh that had failed it, not the other way about.
Estabrook and Skin wandered off in the direction of the dining room, which was the size of a restaurant. Jude followed a little way, but found herself drawn back to the staircase. All she knew about the period in which the house had flourished she’d culled from films and television, but her imagination rose to the challenge with astonishing ardor, painting mind pictures so intense they all but displaced the dispiriting truth. When she climbed the stairs, indulging, somewhat guiltily, her dreams of aristocracy, she could see the hallway below lit with the glow of candles, could hear laughter on the landing above and—as she descended—the sigh of silk as her skirts brushed the carpet. Somebody called to her from a doorway, and she turned expecting to see Estabrook, but the caller was imagined, and the name too. Nobody had ever called her Peachplum.
The moment unsettled her slightly, and she went after Estabrook, as much to reacquaint herself with solid reality as for his company. He was in what had surely been a ballroom, one wall of which was a line of ceiling-high windows, offering a view across terraces and formal gardens to a ruined gazebo. She went to his side and put her arm through his. Their breaths became a common cloud, gilded by the sun through the shattered glass.
“It must have been so beautiful,” she said.
“I’m sure it was.” He sniffed hard. “But it’s gone forever.”
“It could be restored.”
“For a fortune.”
“You’ve got a fortune.”
“Not that big.”
“What about Oscar?”
“No. This is mine. He can come and go, but it’s mine. That was part of the deal.”
“What deal?” she said. He didn’t reply. She pressed him, with words and proximity. “Tell me,” she said. “Share it with me.”
He took a deep breath. “I’m older than Oscar, and there’s a family tradition—it goes back to the time when this house was intact—which says the oldest son, or daughter if there are no sons, becomes a member of a society called the Tabula Rasa.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s the way they’d like it to stay, I’m sure. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, but what the hell? I don’t care any more. It’s all ancient history. So . . . I was supposed to join the Tabula Rasa, but I was passed over by Papa in favor of Oscar.”
“Why?”
Charlie made a little smile. “Believe it or not, they thought I was unstable. Me? Can you imagine? They were afraid I’d be indiscreet.” The smile became a laugh. “Well, fuck them all. I’ll be indiscreet.”
“What does the Society do?”
“It was founded to prevent . . . let me remember the words exactly . . . to prevent the tainting of England’s soil. Joshua loved England.”
“Joshua?”
“The Godolphin who built this house.”
“What did he think this taint was?”
“Who knows? Catholics? The French? He was crazy, and so were most of his friends. Secret societies were in vogue back then—”
“And it’s still in operation?”
“I suppose so. I don’t talk to Oscar very often, and when I do it’s not about the Tabula Rasa. He’s a strange man. In fact, he’s a lot crazier than me. He just hides it better.”
“You used to hide it very well, Charlie,” she reminded him.
“More fool me. I should have let it out. I might have kept you.” He put his hand up to her face. “I was stupid, Judith. I can’t believe my luck that you’ve forgiven me.”
She felt a pang of guilt, hearing him so moved by her manipulations. But they’d at least borne fruit. She had two new pieces for the puzzle: the Tabula Rasa and its raison d’être.
“Do you believe in magic?” she asked him.
“Do you want the old Charlie or the new one?”
“The new. The crazy.”
“Then yes, I think I do. When Oscar used to bring his little presents round, he’d say to me, ‘Have a piece of the miracle.’ I used to throw most of them out, except for the bits and pieces you found. I didn’t want to know where he got them.”
“You never asked him?” she said.
“I did, finally. One night when you were away and I was drunk, he came round with that book you found in the safe, and I asked him outright where he got this smut from. I wasn’t ready to believe what he told me. You know what made me ready?”
“No. What?”
“The body on the heath. I told you about it, didn’t I? I watched them digging around in the muck and the rain for two days and I kept thinking, What a fucking life this is! No way out except feet first. I was ready to slit my wrists, and I probably would have done it except that you appeared, and I remembered the way I felt about you when I first saw you. I remembered feeling as though something miraculous was happening, as though I was reclaiming something I’d lost. And I thought, If I believe in one miracle I may as well believe in them all. Even Oscar’s. Even his talk about the Imajica, and the Dominions in the Imajica, and the people there, and the cities. I just thought, Why not . . . embrace it all before I lose the chance? Before I’m a body lying out in the rain.”
“You won’t die in the rain.”
“I don’t care where I die, Jude, I care where I live, and I want to live in some kind of hope. I want to live with you.”
“Charlie,” she chided softly, “we shouldn’t talk about that now.”
“Why not? What better time? I know you brought me here because you’ve got questions of your own you want answering, and I don’t blame you. If I’d seen that damn assassin come after me, I’d be asking questions too. But think about it, Judy, that’s all I’m asking. Think about whether the new Charlie’s worth a little bit of your time. Will you do that?”
“I’ll do that.”
“Thank you,” he said, and taking the hand she’d tucked through his arm, he kissed her fingers.
“You’ve heard most of Oscar’s secrets now,” he said. “Yo
u may as well know them all. See the little wood way over towards the wall? That’s his little railway station, where he takes the train to wherever he goes.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Shall we stroll over there, ma’am?” he said. “Where did the dog go?” He whistled, and Skin came pounding in, raising golden dust. “Perfect. Let’s take the air.”
III
The afternoon was so bright it was easy to imagine what bliss this place would be, even in its present decay, come spring or high summer, with dandelion seeds and birdsong in the air and the evenings long and balmy. Though she was eager to see the place Estabrook had described as Oscar’s railway station, she didn’t force the pace. They strolled, just as Charlie had suggested, taking time to cast an appreciative glance back towards the house. It looked even grander from this aspect, with the terraces rising to the row of ballroom windows. Though the wood ahead was not large, the undergrowth and the sheer density of trees kept their destination from sight until they were under the canopy and treading the damp rot of last September’s fall. Only then did she realize what building this was. She’d seen it countless times before, drawn in elevation and hanging in front of the safe.
“The Retreat,” she said.
“You recognize it?”
“Of course.”
Birds sang in the branches overhead, misled by the warmth and tuning up for courtship. When she looked up it seemed to her the branches formed a fretted vault above the Retreat, as if echoing its dome. Between the two, vault and song, the place felt almost sacred.
“Oscar calls it the Black Chapel,” Charlie said. “Don’t ask me why.”
It had no windows and, from this side, no door. They had to walk around it a few yards before the entrance came in sight. Skin was panting at the step, but when Charlie opened the door the dog declined to enter.
“Coward,” Charlie said, preceding Jude over the threshold. “It’s quite safe.”
The sense of the numinous she’d felt outside was stronger still inside, but despite all that she’d experienced since Pie ‘oh’ pah had come for her life, she was still ill prepared for mystery. Her modernity burdened her. She wished there was some forgotten self she could dredge from her crippled history, better equipped for this. Charlie had his bloodline even if he’d denied his name. The thrushes in the trees outside resembled absolutely the thrushes who’d sung here since these boughs had been strong enough to bear them. But she was adrift, resembling nobody; not even the woman she’d been six weeks ago.
“Don’t be nervous,” Charlie said, beckoning her in.
He spoke too loudly for the place; his voice carried around the vast bare circle and came back to meet him magnified. He seemed not to notice. Perhaps it was simply familiarity that bred this indifference, but she thought not. For all his talk of embracing the miraculous, Charlie was still a pragmatist, fixed in the particular. Whatever forces moved here, and she felt them strongly, he was dead to their presence.
Approaching the Retreat she’d thought the place windowless, but she’d been wrong. At the intersection of wall and dome ran a ring of windows, like a halo fitted to the chapel’s skull. Small though they were, they let in sufficient light to strike the floor and rise up into the middle of the space, where the luminescence converged above the mosaic. If this was indeed a place of departure, that rarefied spot was the platform.
“It’s nothing special, is it?” Charlie observed.
She was about to disagree, searching for a way to express what she was feeling, when Skin began barking outside. This wasn’t the excited yapping with which he’d announced each new pissing place along the way, but a sound of alarm. She started towards the door, but the hold the chapel had on her slowed her response, and Charlie was out before she’d reached the step, calling to the dog to be quiet. He stopped barking suddenly.
“Charlie?” she said.
There was no reply. With the dog quieted she heard a greater quiet. The birds had stopped singing.
Again she said, “Charlie?” and as she did so somebody stepped into the doorway. It was not Charlie; this man, bearded and heavy, was a stranger. But her system responded to the sight of him with a shock of recognition, as though he was some long-lost comrade. She might have thought herself crazy, except that what she felt was echoed on his face. He looked at her with narrowed eyes, turning his head a little to the side.
“You’re Judith?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Oscar Godolphin.”
She let her shallow breaths go, in favor of a deeper draft.
“Oh . . . thank God,” she said. “You startled me. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. Did the dog try and attack you?”
“Forget the dog,” he said, stepping into the chapel. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t believe so,” she said. “Where’s Charlie? Is he all right?”
Godolphin continued to approach her, his step steady. “This confuses things,” he said.
“What does?”
“Me . . . knowing you. You being whoever you are. It confuses things.”
“I don’t see why,” she said. “I’d wanted to meet you, and I asked Charlie several times if he’d introduce us, but he always seemed reluctant. . . .” She kept chattering, as much to defend herself from his appraisal as for communication’s sake. She felt if she fell silent she’d forget herself utterly, become his object. “I’m very pleased we finally get to talk.”
He was close enough to touch her now. She put out her hand to shake his.
“It really is a pleasure,” she said.
Outside, the dog began barking again, and this time its din was followed by a shout.
“Oh, God, he’s bitten somebody,” Jude said, and started towards the door.
Oscar took hold of her arm, and the contact, light but proprietorial, checked her. She looked back towards him, and all the laughable clichés of romantic fiction were suddenly real and deadly serious. Her heart was beating in her throat; her cheeks were beacons; the ground seemed uncertain beneath her feet. There was no pleasure in this, only a sickening powerlessness she could do nothing to defend herself against. Her only comfort—and it was small—was the fact that her partner in this dance of desire seemed almost as distressed by their mutual fixation as she.
The dog’s din was abruptly cut short, and she heard Charlie yell her name. Oscar’s glance went to the door, and hers went with it, to see Estabrook, armed with a cudgel of wood, gasping at the threshold. Behind him, an abomination: a half-burned creature, its face caved in (Charlie’s doing, she saw; there were scraps of its blackened flesh on the cudgel) reaching blindly for him.
She cried out at the sight, and he stepped aside as it lurched forward. It lost its balance on the step and fell. One hand, fingers burned to the bone, reached for the doorjamb, but Charlie brought his weapon down on its wounded head. Skull shards flew; silvery blood preceded its head to the step, as its hand missed its purchase and it collapsed on the threshold.
She heard Oscar quietly moan.
“You fuckhead!” Charlie said.
He was panting and sweaty, but there was a gleam of purpose in his eye she’d never seen the like of.
“Let her go,” he said.
She felt Oscar’s grip go from her arm and mourned its departure. What she’d felt for Charlie had been only a prophecy of what she felt now; as if she’d loved him in remembrance of a man she’d never met. And now that she had, now that she’d heard the true voice and not its echo, Estabrook seemed like a poor substitute, for all his tardy heroism.
Where these feelings came from she didn’t know, but they had the force of instinct, and she would not be gainsaid. She stared at Oscar. He was overweight, overdressed, and doubtless overbearing: not the kind of individual she’d have sought out, given the choice. But for some reason she didn’t yet comprehend, she’d had that choice denied. Some urge profounder than conscious desire had claimed her will. The fears she had for Charlie’
s safety, and indeed for her own, were suddenly remote: almost abstractions.
“Take no notice of him,” Charlie said. “He’s not going to hurt you.”
She glanced his way. He looked like a husk beside his brother, beset by tics and tremors. How had she ever loved him?
“Come here,” he said, beckoning to her.
She didn’t move, until Oscar said, “Go on.”
More out of obedience to his instruction than any wish to go, she started to walk towards Charlie.
As she did so another shadow fell across the threshold. A severely dressed young man with dyed blond hair appeared at the door, the lines of his face perfect to the point of banality.
“Stay away, Dowd,” Oscar said. “This is just Charlie and me.”
Dowd looked down at the body on the step, then back at Oscar, offering two words of warning: “He’s dangerous.”
“I know what he is,” Oscar said. “Judith, why don’t you step outside with Dowd?”
“Don’t go near that little fucker,” Charlie told her. “He killed Skin. And there’s another of those things out there.”
“They’re called voiders, Charles,” Oscar said. “And they’re not going to harm a hair on her beautiful head. Judith. Look at me.” She looked around at him. “You’re not in danger. You understand? Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
She understood and believed him. Without looking back at Charlie, she went to the door. The dog killer moved aside, offering her a hand to help her over the voider’s corpse, but she ignored it and went out into the sun with a shameful lightness in her heart and step. Dowd followed her as she walked from the chapel. She felt his stare.