by Clive Barker
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You don't know who she is?”
“No,” he said, angered now. “This is nonsense.”
“I've seen her, Oscar.”
“How? Nobody but the Tabula Rasa gets into the tower.”
“I could show her to you. Take you to the very place.”
She dropped her volume, studying Oscar's anxious, ruddy features as she spoke. “I think maybe she's some kind of Goddess. I've tried to get her out twice and failed. I need help. I need your help.”
“It's impossible,” he replied. “The tower's a fortress, now more than ever. I tell you, this house is the only safe place left in the city. It would be suicide for me to step out of here.”
“Then that's that,” she said, not about to debate with such timidity. She started down the stairs, ignoring his calls for her to wait.
“You can't leave me,” he said, as though amazed. “I love you. Do you hear me? I love you.”
“There's more important things than love,” she returned, thinking as she spoke that this was easy to say with Gentle awaiting her at home. But it was also true. She'd seen this city overturned and pitched into dust. Preventing that was indeed more important than love, especially Oscar's spineless variety.
“Don't forget to lock up after me,” she said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “You never know what's going to come knocking on the door.”
On the way home she stopped to buy groceries, which had never been her favorite chore but was today elevated into the realms of the surreal by the sense of foreboding she brought with her. Here she was going about the business of purchasing domestic necessities, while the image of the killing cloud turned in her head. But life had to go on, even if oblivion waited in the wings. She needed milk, bread, and toilet paper; she needed deodorant and waste bags to line the bin in the kitchen. It was only in fiction that the daily round of living was ignored so that grand events could take center stage. Her body would hunger, tire, sweat, and digest until the final pall descended. There was peculiar comfort in this thought, and though the darkness gathering at the threshold of her world should have, distracted her from trivialities, its presence had precisely the reverse effect. She was more pernickety than usual about the cheese she bought and sniffed at half a dozen deodorants before she found a scent that pleased her.
The shopping done, she headed home through streets buzzing with the business of a sunlit day, contemplating the problem of Celestine as she went. With Oscar plainly unwilling to aid her, she would have to look for help elsewhere, and with her circle of trusted souls so shrunk, that only left Clem and Gentle. The Reconciler had his own agenda, of course, but after the promises of the night before—the commitments to be with each other, sharing the fears and the visions—he'd surely understand her need to liberate Celestine, if only to put an end to the mystery. She would tell him all she knew about Roxborough's prisoner, she decided, as soon as possible.
He wasn't home when she got back, which was no surprise. He'd warned her that he'd be keeping odd hours as he laid the groundwork for the Reconciliation. She prepared some lunch, then decided she hadn't got an appetite and went to work one up by tidying the bedroom, which was still chaos after the night's traffic. As she straightened the sheets she discovered they had a tiny occupant: the blue stone (or, as she preferred to think of it, the egg), which had been in one of the pockets of her ravaged clothes. The sight of it diverted her from her bed making, and she sat on the edge of the mattress, passing the egg from hand to hand, wondering if perhaps it could deliver her, even briefly, into the cell where Celestine was locked. Itliad of course been much reduced by Dowd's mites, but even when she'd first discovered it in Estabrook's safe it had been a fragment of a greater form and possessed some jurisidiction. Did it still?
“Show me the Goddess,” she said, clutching the egg tight. “Show me the Goddess.”
Spoken plainly that way, the notion of her mind's removal from the physical world, and its flight, seemed absurd. That wasn't the way the world worked, except perhaps at enchanted midnights. Now it was the middle of the afternoon, and the noise of day rose through the open window. She was loath to go and close it, however. She couldn't exile the world every time she wanted to alter her consciousness. The street and the people in it—the dirt and the din and the summer sky—all had to be made part of the mechanism for transcendence, or else she'd come to grief the way her sister had, bound up and blind long before her eyes went from her head.
As was her wont, she began to talk to herself, coaxing the miracle. “It's happened before,” she said. “It can happen again. Be patient, woman.”
But the longer she sat, the stronger the sense of her own ludicrousness became. The image of her idiot devotion appeared in her mind's eye. There she was, sitting on the bed, staring at a piece of dead stone: a study in fatuity,
“Fool,” she said to herself.
Suddenly weary of the whole fiasco, she got up from the bed. In that rising she realized her error. Her mind's eye showed her the motion as if it was detached from her, hovering near the window. She felt a sudden pang of panic and for the second tune in the space of thirty seconds called herself fool, not for wasting time with the egg but for failing to realize that the image she'd taken as evidence of her own failure, that of herself sitting waiting for something to happen, was in fact proof that it had. Her sight had drifted from her so subtly she'd not even known it had gone.
“The cell,” she said, instructing her subtle eye. “Show me the Goddess's cell."
Though it was close to the window, and could have flown from there, her eye instead rose at a sickening speed, till she was looking down at herself from the ceiling. She saw her body rock below her, as the flight giddied her. Then her sight descended. The top of her head loomed like a planet beneath her, and she was plunged into her skull, down, down into the darkness of her body. She felt her own panic on all sides: the frantic labor of her heart, her lungs drawing shallow breaths. There was none of the brightness she'd found in Celestine's body, no hint of that luminous blue the Goddess had shared with the stone. There was only the dark and its turmoil. She wanted to make the egg understand its mistake and draw her mind's eye up out of this pit, but if her lips were making such pleas, which she doubted, they were ignored, and her fall went on, and on, as though her sight h,ad become a fly speck in a well and would fall for hours without reaching its bowels.
And then, below her, a tiny point of light, which grew as she approached, to show itself not a point but a strip of rippling luminescence, like the purest glyph imaginable. What was this doing inside her? Was it some relic of the working that had created her, a fragment of Sartori's feit, like Gentle's signature hidden in the brushwork of his forged canvases? She was upon it now, or rather in it, its brightness a blaze that made her mind's eye squint.
And out of the blaze, images. Such images! She knew neither their origins nor their purpose, but they were exquisite enough to make her forgive the misdirection that had led her here rather than to Celestine. She seemed to be in a paradisiacal city, half overgrown with glorious flora, the profusion of which was fed by waters that rose like arches and colonnades on every side. Flocks of stars flew overhead and made perfect circles at her zenith; mists hung at her ankles, laying their veils beneath her feet to ease her step. She passed through this city like a hallowed daughter and came to rest in a large airy room, where water cascaded in place of doors, and the merest stab of sun brought rainbows. There she sat and with these borrowed eyes saw her own face and breasts, so vast they might have been sculpted for a temple, raised above her. Did milk seep from her nipples, and did she sing a lullaby? She thought so; but her attention strayed too quickly from breasts and face to be sure, her gaze turned towards the far end of the chamber. Somebody had entered: a man, so wounded and ill—mended she didn't recognize him at first. It was only when he was almost upon her that she realized the company she kept. It was Gentle, unshaven and badly
fed, but greeting her with tears of joy in his eyes. If words were exchanged she didn't hear them, but he fell to his knees in front of her, and her gaze went between his upturned face and the monumental effigy behind her. It was not, after all, a thing of painted stone, but was in this vision made of living flesh, moving, weeping, even glancing down at the worshiper she was.
AH this was strange enough, but there was stranger still to come, as she looked back towards Gentle and saw him pluck from a hand too tiny to be hers the very stone that had given her this dream. He took it with gratitude, his tears finally abating. Then he rose, and as he made his way back towards the liquid door, the day beyond it blazed, and the scene was washed away in light.
She sensed that the enigma, whatever it signified, was passing away, but she had no power to hold it. The glyph in her core appeared before her, and she rose from it like a diver from some treasure the deep would not relinquish, up through the dark and out into the place she'd left.
Nothing had changed in the room, but a sudden squall was on the world outside, its torrent heavy enough to drop a sheet of water between the raised window and the sill. She stood up, clutching the stone. The journey had left her lightheaded, however, and she knew if she tried to go to the kitchen and put some food in her belly her legs would fold up beneath her, so she lay down and let the pillow have her head awhile.
She didn't think she slept, but it was as difficult to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness as it had been in Quaisoir's bed. The visions she'd seen in the darkness of her own belly were as insistent as some prophetic dream and stayed with her, the music of the rain a perfect accompaniment to the memory. It was only when the clouds moved on, taking their deluge south, and the sun appeared between the sodden curtains, that sleep overcame her.
When she woke, it was to the sound of Gentle's key in the lock. It was night, or close to it, and he switched on the light in the adjacent room. She sat up and was about to call to him when she thought better of it and, instead, watched through the partially open door. She saw his face for only an instant, but the glimpse was enough to make her want him to come in to her with kisses. He didn't. Instead, he paced back and forth next door, massaging his hands as though they ached, working first at the fingers, then at the palms.
Finally, she couldn't be patient any longer and got up, sleepily murmuring his name. He didn't hear her at first, and she had to speak again before he realized it was being called. Only then did he turn and put on a smile for her.
“Still awake?” he said fondly. “You shouldn't have stayed up.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” He put his hands to his face. “This is a hard business, you know. I didn't expect it to be so difficult.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Some other tune,” he said, approaching the door. She took his hands in hers. “What's this?” he said.
She was still holding the egg, but not for long. He had it from her palm with the ease of a pickpocket. She wanted to snatch it back, but she fought the instinct and let him study his prize.
“Pretty,” he said. Then, less lightly: “Where did it come from?”
Why did she hesitate to answer? Because he looked so weary, and she didn't want to burden him with new mysteries when he had a surfeit of his own? It was that in part; but there was another part that was altogether less clear to her. Something to do with the fact that in her vision she'd seen him far more broken that he was at present, wounded and wretched, and somehow that condition had to remain her secret, at least for a time.
He put the egg to his nose and sniffed it. “I smell you,” he said.
“No....”
“Yes, I do. Where have you been keeping it?” He put his empty hand between her legs. “In here?”
The thought was not so preposterous. Indeed she might slip it into that pocket, when she had it back, and enjoy its weight.
“No?” he said. “Well, I'm sure it wishes you would. I think half the world would like to creep up there if it could.” He pressed his hand against her. “But it's mine, isn't it?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody goes in there but me.”
“No.”
She answered mechanically, her thoughts as much on reclaiming the egg as on his proprietorial talk.
“Have you got anything we can get high on?” he said.
“I had some dope....”
“Where is it?"“I think I smoked the last of it. I'm not sure. Do you want me to look?”
“Yes, please.”
She reached up for the egg, but before her fingers could take hold of it he put it to his lips.
“I want to keep it,” he said. “Sniff it for a while. You don't mind, do you?”
“I'd like it back.”
“You'll have it back,” he said, with a faint air of condescension, as though her possessiveness was childish. “But I need a keepsake, something to remind me of you.”
“I'll give you some of my underwear,” she said.
“It's not quite the same.”
He laid the egg against his tongue and turned it, coating it in his spittle. She watched him, and he watched her back. He knew damn well she wanted her toy, but she wasn't going to stoop to begging him for it.
“You mentioned dope,” he said.
She went back into the bedroom, put on the lamp beside the bed, and searched through the top drawer of her dresser where she'd last stashed her marijuana.
“Where did you go today?” he asked her.
“I went to Oscar's house.”
“Oscar?”
“Godolphin.”
“And how's Oscar? Alive and kicking?”
“I can't find the dope. I must have smoked it all.”
“You were telling me about Oscar.”
“He's locked himself up in his house.”
“Where does he live? Maybe I should call on him. Reassure him.” ^
“He won't see you. He won't see anybody. He thinks the world's coming to an end.”
“And what do you think?”
She shrugged. She was quietly raging at him, but she wasn't exactly sure why. He'd taken the egg for a while, but that wasn't a capital crime. If the stone afforded him a little protection, why should she be covetous of it? She was being petty, and she wished she could be other, but without the heat of sex shimmering between them he seemed crass. It was not a flaw she expected to find in him. Lord knows she'd accused him of countless deficiencies in her time, but a lack of finesse had never been one of them. If anything, he'd been too much the polished operator, discreet and suave.
“You were telling me about the end of the world,” he said.
“Was I?”
“Did Oscar frighten you?”
“No. But I saw something that did.”
She told him, briefly, about the bowl and its prophecies. He listened without comment, then said, “The Fifth's teetering. We both know that. But it won't touch us.”
She'd heard the same sentiments from Oscar, or near enough. Both these men, wanting to offer her a haven from the storm. She should have been flattered. Gentle looked at his watch.
“I've got to go out again,” he said, “You'll be safe here, won't you?”
“I'll be fine.”
“You should sleep. Make yourself strong. There's going to be some dark times before it gets light again, and we're going to find some of that darkness in each other. It's perfectly natural. We're not angels, after all.” He chuckled. “At least, you may be, but I'm not.”
So saying, he pocketed the egg.
“Go back to bed,” he said. “I'll be back in the morning. And don't worry, nothing's going to come near you but me. I swear. I'm with you, Judith, all the time. And that's not love talking.”
With that, he smiled at her and headed off, leaving her to wonder what indeed had been talking, if it wasn't love.
11
“And who the fuck are you?” the filthy, bearded face demand
ed of the stranger who'd had the misfortune to stumble into its bleary sight.
The man he was questioning, whom he had by the neck, shook his head. Blood had run from a crown of cuts and scrapes along his brow, where he'd earlier beaten his skull against a stone wall to try and silence the din of voices that echoed between his temples. It hadn't worked. There were still too many names and faces in there to be sorted out. The only way he could answer his interrogator was with that shaking of his head. Who was he? He didn't know.
“Well, get the fuck out of here,” the man said.
There was a bottle of cheap wine in his hand, and its stench, mingled with a deeper rot, on his breath. He pushed his victim against the concrete wall of this underpass and closed upon him.
“You can't sleep where you fuckin' want. If you want to lie down, you fuckin' ask me first. I say who sleeps here. Isn't that right?”
He swung his bloodshot eyes in the direction of the tribe who'd clambered from their beds of trash and newspapers to watch their leader have his sport. There'd be blood, for certain. There always was when Tolland got riled, and for some reason he was more riled by this trespasser than by others who'd laid down their homeless heads without his permission.
“Isn't that right?” he said again. “Irish? Tell him! Isn't that right?”
The man he'd addressed muttered something incoherent. The woman beside him, with a bead of hair bleached to near extinction but black at the roots, came within striking distance of Tolland—something only a very few dared to do.
“That's right, Tolly,” she said. “That's right.” She looked at the victim without pity. “D'you think he's a Jew-boy? He's got a Jew-boy's nose.”
Tolland took down a throatful of wine. “Are you a fuckin' yid?” he said.