by Clive Barker
Regent's Park Road was quieter than usual. There were no kids playing on the pavement and, though she'd had a hellish time carving her way through the traffic just two streets away, no vehicles parked within half a mile of the house. It stood shunned, but for her. She didn't need to knock. Before she'd even set her heel on the step the door was opening, and there was Oscar, looking harried, beckoning her in. He answered the door dry-eyed, but as soon as it was closed and locked and bolted, he put his arms around her and the tears began, great sobs that racked his bulk. Over and over he told her how much he loved her, missed her, and needed her, now more than ever. She embraced him and calmed him as best she could. After a time he controlled himself and ushered her through to the kitchen. The lights were burning throughout the house, but after the blaze of the day their contribution looked jaundiced and didn't flatter him. His face was pale, where it wasn't discolored with bruises; his hands were puffed and raw. There were other wounds, she guessed, beneath his unpressed clothes. Watching him brew Earl Grey for them, she saw a look of discomfort cross his face when he moved too fast. Their talk, of course, rapidly turned to their parting at the Retreat.
“I was certain Dowd would slit your throat as soon as you got to Yzordderrex.”
“He didn't lay a finger on me,” she said. Then added, “That's not quite true. He did later. But when we arrived he was too badly hurt.” She paused. “So are you.”
“I was in a pretty wretched state,” he said. “I wanted to follow you, but I could barely stand. I came back here, got a gun, licked my wounds awhile, then crossed over. But by that time you'd gone.”
“So you did follow?”
“Of course. Did you think I'd leave you in Yzordderrex?”
He set a large cup of tea in front of her, and honey to sweeten it with. She didn't usually indulge, but she hadn't breakfasted, so she put enough spoonfuls of honey into the tea to turn it into an aromatic syrup.
“By the time I reached Peccable's house,” Oscar went on, “it was empty. There were riots going on outside. I didn't know where to start looking for you. It was a nightmare.”
“You know the Autarch was deposed?”
“No, I didn't, but I'm not surprised. Every New Year, Peccable would say, He'll go this year, he'll go this year. What happened to Dowd, by the way?”
“He's dead,” she said, with a little smile of satisfaction.
“Are you sure? His type is difficult to kill, my dear, let me tell you. I speak from bitter experience.”
“You were saying—”
“Yes. What was I saying?”
“That you followed us and found Peccable's house empty.”
“And half the city in flames.” He sighed. “It was tragic, seeing it like that. All that mindless destruction. The revenge of the proles. Oh, I know, I should be celebrating a victory for democracy, but what's going to be left? My lovely Yzordderrex: rubble. I looked at it and I said, This is the end of an era, Oscar. After this, everything'll be different. Darker.” He looked up from the tea into which he'd been staring. “Did Peccable survive, do you know?”
“He was going to leave with Hoi-Poltoi. I assume he did. He emptied the cellar.”
“No, that was me. And I'm glad I did it.”
He cast a glance towards the windowsill. Nestling among the domestic bric-a-brac were a series of diminutive figurines. Talismans, she guessed: part of the horde from Peccable's cellar. Some were looking into the room, others out. They were all little paradigms of aggression, with positively rabid expressions on their garishly painted faces.
“But you're my best protection,” he said. “Just having you here, I feel we've got some chance of surviving this mess.” He put his hand over hers. “When I got your note and knew you'd survived, I began to hope a little. Then of course I couldn't get hold of you, and I began to imagine the worst.”
She looked up from his hand and saw on his plagued face a family resemblance she'd never glimpsed before. There was an echo of Charlie in him, the Charlie of the Hampstead hospice, sitting at his window talking about bodies being dug up in the rain.
“Why didn't you just come to the flat?” she said.
“I couldn't leave here.”
“Are you that badly hurt?”
“It's not what's in here that held me back,” he said, putting his hand to his chest. “It's what's out there.”
“You still think the Tabula Rasa's going to come after you?”
“God, no. They're the least of our worries. I half thought of warning one or two of them: anonymously, you know. Not Shales or McGann, or that idiot Bloxham. They can fry in Hell. But Lionel was always friendly, even when he was sober. And the ladies. I don't like the idea of their deaths on my conscience.”
“So who are you hiding from?”
“The fact is, I don't know,” he admitted. “I see images in the bowl, and I can't quite make them out.”
She'd forgotten the Boston Bowl, with its blur of prophetic stones. Now Oscar was apparently hanging on its every rattle.
“Something's crossed over from the Dominions, my dear,” he said. “I'm certain of that. I saw it coming after you. Trying to smother you....”
He looked as though tears were going to overtake him again, but she reassured him, lightly patting his hand as though he were some addled old man.
“Nothing's going to harm me,” she said. “I've survived too much in the last few days.”
“You've never seen a power like this,” he warned her. “And neither's the Fifth.”
“If it came from the Dominions, then it's the Autarch's doing.”
“You sound very certain.”
“That's because I know who he is.”
“You've been listening to Peccable,” he said. “He's full of theories, darling, but they're not worth a damn.”
His not-so-faint condescension irritated her, and she drew her hand out from under his. “My source is a lot more reliable than Peccable,” she said.
“Oh?” He realized he'd caused offense and indulged her. “Who's that?”
“Quaisoir.”
“Quaisoir? How the hell did you get to her?” His surprise seemed to be as genuine as his humoring had been feigned.
“Don't you have any idea?” she asked him. “Didn't Dowd ever talk to you about the old days?”
Now his expression became guarded, almost suspicious.
“Dowd served generations of Godolphins,” she said. “Surely you knew that? Right back to crazy Joshua. In fact, he was Joshua's right-hand man, if man's the word.”
“I was aware of that,” Oscar said softly.
“Then you knew about me too?”
He said nothing,
“Did you, Oscar?”
“I didn't debate you with Dowd, if that's what you mean.”
“But you knew why you and Charlie kept me in the family?”
Now it was he who was offended; he grimaced at her vocabulary.
“That's what it was, Oscar. You and Charlie, trading me; knowing I was bound to stay with the Godolphins. Maybe I'd wander off for a while and have a few romances, but sooner or later I'd be back in the family.”
“We both loved you,” he said, his voice as blank as the look he now gave her. “Believe me, neither of us understood the politics of it. We didn't care.”
“Oh really?” she said, her doubt plain.
“All I know is: I love you. It's the one certainty left in my life.”
She was tempted to sour this saccharine with chapter and verse of his family's conspiracies against her, but what was the use? He was a fractured man, locked away in his house for fear of what the sun might invite over his threshold. Circumstance had already undone him. Any further work on her part would be malice, and though she didn't doubt that there was much in him to despise—his talk of the revenge of the proles had been particularly unattractive—she'd shared too many intimacies with him, and been too comforted by them, to be cruel. Besides, she had something to impart that would be a ha
rder blow than any accusation.
“I'm not staying, Oscar,” she said. “I haven't come back here to lock myself away."^
“But it's not safe out there,” he replied. “I've seen what's coming. It's in the bowl. You want to see for yourself?” He stood up. “You'll change your mind.”
He led her up the stairs to the treasure room, talking as he went.
“The bowl's got a life of its own since this power came into the Fifth. It doesn't need anybody watching, it just goes on repeating the same images. It's panicking. It knows what's coming, and it's panicking.”
She could hear it before they even reached the door: a din like the drumming of hailstones on sun-baked earth.
“I don't think it's wise to watch for too long,” he warned. “It gets hypnotic.”
So saying, he opened the door. The bowl was sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a ring of votive candles, their fat flames jumping as the air was agitated by the spectacle they lit. The prophetic stones were moving like a swarm of enraged bees in and above the bowl, which Oscar had been obliged to set in a small mound of earth to keep it from being thrown over by their violence. The air smelled of what he'd called their panic: a bitter odor mingled with the metallic tang that came before lightning. Though the motion of the stones was reasonably contained, she hung back from the bowl lest a rogue find its way out of the dance and strike her. At the speed they were moving, the smallest of them could have taken out an eye. But even from a distance, with the shelves and their treasures to distract her, the motion of the stones was all consuming. The rest of the room, Oscar included, faded into insignificance as the frenzy drew her in.
“It may take a little time,” Oscar was saying. “But the images are there.” “I see,” she said.
The Retreat had already appeared in the blur, its dome half hidden behind the screen of the copse. Its appearance was brief. The Tabula Rasa's tower took its place a moment after, only to be superseded by a third building, quite different from the pair that had gone before, except that it too was half concealed by foliage, in this case a single tree planted in the pavement.
“What's that house?” she asked Oscar. “I don't know, but it comes up over and over again. It's somewhere in London, I'm certain of that.” “How can you be sure?”
The building was unremarkable: three stories, flat-fronted, and, as far as she could judge, in a dilapidated state. It could have stood in any inner city in England or for that matter in Europe.
“London's where the circle's going to close,” Oscar replied. “It's where everything began, and it's where everything'll end.”
The remark brought echoes: of Dowd at the wall on Pale Hill, talking about history coming around, and of Gentle and herself, mere hours before, devouring each other into perfection.
“There it is again,” Oscar said.
The image of the house had briefly flickered out but now reappeared, brightly lit. There was somebody near the step, she saw, with his arms hanging by his sides and his head back as he stared up at the sky. The resolution of the image was not good enough for her to make out his features. Perhaps he was just some anonymous sun worshiper, but she doubted it. Every detail of this parade had its significance.
Now the image decayed again, and the noonday scene, with its gleaming foliage and its pristine sky, gave way to a roiling juggernaut of smoke, all black and gray.
“Here it comes,” she heard Oscar say.
There were forms in the smoke, rising, withering, and falling as ash, but their nature defied her interpretation. Scarcely aware of what she was doing, she took a step towards the bowl.
“Don't, darling,” Oscar said.
“What are we seeing?” she asked, ignoring his caution.
“The power,” he said. “That's what's coming into the Fifth. Or already here.”
“But that's not Sartori.”
“Sartori?” he said.
“The Autarch.”
Defying his own warning, he came to her side and again said, “Sartori? The Maestro?”
She didn't look around at him. The juggernaut demanded her utter devotion. Much as she hated to admit it to herself, Oscar had been right, talking of immeasurable powers. This was no human agency at work. It was a force of stupendous scale, advancing over a landscape she'd first thought covered by a stubble of gray grass but which she now realized was a city, those frail stalks buildings, toppling as the power burned out their foundations and overturned them.
No wonder Oscar was trembling behind locked doors; this was a terrible sight, and one for which she was unprepared. However atrocious Sartori's deeds, he was just a tyrant in a long and squalid history of tyrants, men whose fear of their own frailty made them monstrous. But this was a horror of another order entirely, beyond curing by politics or poisonings: a vast, unforgiving power, capable of sweeping all the Maestros and despots that had carved their names on the face of the world away without pausing to think about it. Had Sartori unleashed this immensity? she wondered. Was he so insane that he thought he could survive such devastation and build his New Yzordderrex on the rubble it left behind? Or was his lunacy profounder still? Was this juggernaut the true city of which he'd dreamed: a metropolis of storm and smoke that would stand to the World's End because that was its true name?
Now the sight was consumed by total darkness, and she let go of the breath she'd been holding.
“It isn't over,” Oscar said, his voice close to her ear.
The darkness began to shred in several places, and through the gashes she saw a single figure, lying on a gray floor. It was herself: a crude representation, but recognizable.
“I warned you,” Oscar said.
The darkness this image had appeared through didn't entirely evaporate, but lingered like a fog, and out of it a second figure came and sank down beside her. She knew before the action had unraveled that Oscar had made an error, thinking this was a prophecy of harm. The shadow between her legs was no killer. It was Gentle, and this scene was here, in the bowl's report, because the Reconciler stood as a sign of hope to set against the despair that had come before. She heard Oscar moan as the shadow lover reached for her, putting his hand between her legs, then raising her foot to his mouth to begin his devouring.
“It's killing you,” Oscar said.
Watched remotely, this was a rational interpretation. But it wasn't death, of course, it was love. And it wasn't prophecy, it was history: the very act they'd performed the night before. Oscar was viewing it like a child, seeing its parents make love and thinking violence was being done in the marital bed. She was glad of his error, in a way, saving her as it did from the problem of explaining this coupling.
She and the Reconciler were quickly intertwined, the veils of darkness attending on the act and deepening their mingled shadows, so that the lovers became a single knot, which shrank and shrank and finally disappeared altogether, leaving the stones to rattle on as an abstraction.
It was a strangely intimate conclusion to the sequence. From temple, tower, and house to the storm had been a grim progression, but from the storm to this vision of love was altogether more optimistic: a sign, perhaps, that union could bring an end to the darkness that had gone before.
“That's all there is,” Oscar said. “It just begins again from here. Round and round.”
She turned from the bowl as the din of stones, which had quieted as the love scene was sketched, became loud again.
“You see the danger you're in?” he said.
“I think I'm just an afterthought,” she said, hoping to steer him away from an analysis of what had been depicted.
“Not to me you're not,” he replied, putting his arms around her. For all his wounds, he was not a man to be resisted easily. “I want to protect you,” he said. “That's my duty. I see that now. I know you've been mistreated, but I can make reparations for that. I can keep you here, safe and sound.”
“So you think we can hole up here and Armageddon will just pass over?”
“Have you got a better idea?”
“Yes. We resist it, at all costs.”
“There's no victory to be had against the likes of that,” he said.
She could hear the stones' thunder behind her and knew they were picturing the storm again.
“At least we've got some defenses here,” he went on. “I've got spirit guards at every door and every window. You saw those in the kitchen? They're the tiniest.”
“All male, are they?”
“What's that got to do with it?”
“They're not going to protect you, Oscar.”
“They're all we've got.”
“Maybe they're all you've got—”
She slipped from his arms and headed for the door. He followed her out onto the landing, demanding to know what she meant by this, and finally, inflamed by his cowardice, she turned back to him.
“There's been a power under your nose for years.”
“What power? Where?”
“Sealed up beneath Roxborough's tower.”