by Clive Barker
“He appeared in person, did He?” she said, her skepticism plain.
“Not exactly. I heard Him speaking out of the First. But I saw hints, you know, in the Erasure.”
“And what did He look like?”
“Like a man, from what I could see.”
“Or what you imagined.”
“Maybe I did,” Dowd said. “But I didn't imagine what He told me—”
“That He'd raise you up. Make you His procurer. You've told me all this before, Dowd.”
“Not all of it,” he said. “When I'd seen Him, I came back to the Fifth, using feits He'd whispered to me to cross the In Ovo, and I searched the length and breadth of London for a woman to be blessed among women.”
“And you found Celestine?”
“Yes. I found Celestine—at Tyburn, as a matter of fact— watching a hanging. I don't know why I chose her. Perhaps because she laughed so hard when the man kissed the noose, and I thought, She's no sentimentalist, this woman; she won't weep and wail if she's taken into another Dominion. She wasn't beautiful, even then, but she had a clarity, you know? Some actresses have it. The great ones, anyway. A face that could carry extremes of emotion and not look bathetic. Maybe I was a little infatuated with her....” He shivered. “I was capable of that when I was younger. So ... I made myself known to her, and told her I wanted to show her a living dream, the like of which she'd never forget. She resisted at first, but I could have talked the face off the moon in those days, and she let me drug her with sways and take her away. It was a hell of a journey. Four months, across the Dominions. But I got her there eventually, back to the Erasure....”
“And what happened?”
“It opened.”
“And?”
“I saw the City of God.”
Here at least was something she wanted to know about. “What was it like?” she said.
“It was just a glimpse—”
Having denied him her proximity for so long, she leaned towards him and repeated her question inches from his ravaged face. “What was it like?”
“Vast and gleaming and exquisite.”
“Gold?”
“All colors. But it was just a glimpse. Then the walls seemed to burst, and something reached for Celestine and took her.”
“Did you see what it was?”
“I've tried to remember, over and over. Sometimes I think it was like a net; sometimes like a cloud. Idon't know. Whatever it was, it took her.”
“You tried to help her, of course,” Jude said.
“No, I shat my pants and crawled away. What could I do? She belonged to God. And in the long run, wasn't she the lucky one?”
“Abducted and raped?”
“Abducted, raped, and made a little divine. Whereas I, who'd done all the work, what was I?”
“A pimp.”
“Yes. A pimp. Anyway, she's had her revenge,” he said sourly. “Look at me! She's had more than enough.”
That was true. The life both Oscar and Quaisoir had failed to extinguish in Dowd, Celestine had virtually put out.
“So that's the Father's tale?” Jude said. “I've heard most of it before.”
“That's the tale. But what's the moral?”
“You tell me.”
He shook his head slightly. “I don't know whether you're mocking or not”
“I'm listening, aren't I? Be grateful for small mercies. You could be lying here without an audience.”
“Well, that's part of it, isn't it? I'm not. You could have come here when I was dead. You could maybe not have come here at all. But our lives have collided one last time. That's fate's way of telling me to unburden myself.”
“Of what?”
“I'll tell you.” Again, a labored breath. “All these years I've wondered: Why did God pluck a scabby little actor chappie up out of the dirt and send him across three Dominions to fetch Him a woman?”
“He wanted a Reconciler.”
“And He couldn't find a wife in His own city?” Dowd said. “Isn't that a little odd? Besides, why does He care whether the Imajica's Reconciled or not?”
Now that was a good question, she thought. Here was a God who'd sealed Himself away in His own city, and showed no desire to lower the wall between His Dominion and the rest, yet went to immense lengths to breed a child who would bring all such walls tumbling down.
“It's certainly strange,” she said.
“I'd say so.”
“Have you got any answers to any of this?”
“Not really. But I think He must have some purpose, don't you, or why go to all this trouble?”
“A plot...”
“Gods don't plot. They create. They protect. They proscribe.”
“So which is He doing?”
“That's the nub of it. Maybe you can find out. Maybe the other Reconcilers already did.”
“The others?”
“The sons He sent before Sartori. Maybe they realized what He was up to, and they defied Him.”
There was a thought.
“Maybe Christos didn't die saving mortal man from his sins—”
“But from his Father?”
“Yes.”
She thought of the scenes she'd glimpsed in the Boston Bowl—the terrible spectacle of the city, and most likely the Dominion, overwhelmed by a great darkness—and her body, that had been driven to fits and convulsions by the torments visited upon her, grew suddenly still. There was no panic, no frenzy: just a deep, cold dread.
“What do I do?”
“I don't know, lovey. You're free to do whatever you like, remember?”
A few hours before, sitting on the step with Clem, her lack of a place in the Gospel of Reconciliation had depressed her spirits. But now it seemed that fact offered her some frail thread of hope. As Dowd had been so eager to claim at the tower, she belonged to no one. The Godolphins were dead, and so was Quaisoir. Gentle had gone to walk in the footsteps of Christos, and Sartori was either out building his New Yzordderrex or digging a hole to die in. She was on her own, and in a world in which everyone else was blinded by obsession and obligation, that was a significant condition. Perhaps only she could see this story remotely now and make a judgment unswayed by fealty.
“This is some choice,” she said.
“Perhaps you'd better forget I even spoke, lovely,” Dowd said. His voice was becoming frailer by the phrase, but he preserved as best he could his jaunty tone. “It's just gossip frqm an actor chappie.”
“If I try and stop the Reconciliation—”
“You'll be flying in the face of the Father, the Son, and probably the Holy Ghost as well.”
“And if I don't?”
“You take the responsibility for whatever happens.”
“Why?”
“Because”—the power in his voice was now so diminished the sound of the fire he'd built was louder—“because I think only you can stop it.”
As he spoke, his hand lost its grip on her arm. “Well...” he said, “that's done....” His eyes began to flicker closed.
“One last thing, lovey?” he said.
“Yes?”
“It's maybe asking too much ...”
“What is?”
“I wonder ... could you ... forgive me? I know it's absurd ... but I don't want to die with you despising me.”
She thought of the cruel scene he'd played with Quaisoir, when her sister had asked for some kindness. While she hesitated, he began whispering again.
“We were ... just a little ... the same, you know?”
At this, she put out her hand to touch him and offer what comfort she could, but before her fingers reached him his breath stopped and his eyes flickered closed.
Jude let out a tiny moan. Against all reason, she felt a pang of loss at Dowd's passing.
“Is something wrong?” Monday said.
She stood up. “That rather depends on your point of view,” she said, borrowing an air of comedic fatalism from the man at her feet. It was a to
ne worth rehearsing. She might need it quite a bit in the next few hours, “Can you spare a cigarette?” she asked Monday.
Monday fished out his pack and lobbed it over. She took one and threw the pack back as she returned to the fire, stooping to pluck up a burning twig to light the tobacco.
“What happened to fella, m'lad?”
“He's dead.”
“So what do we do now?”
What indeed? If ever a road divided, it was here. Should she prevent the Reconciliation—it wouldn't be difficult; the stones were at her feet—and let history call her a destroyer for doing so? Or should she let it proceed and risk an end to all histories, and futures too?
“How long till it's light?” she asked Monday.
The watch he was wearing had been part of the booty he'd brought back to Gamut Street on his first trip. He consulted it with a flourish. “Two and a half hours,” he said.
There was so little time to act, and littler still to decide on a course. Returning to Clerkenwell with Monday was a cul-de-sac; that at least was certain. Gentle was the Unbeheld's agent in this, and he wasn't going to be diverted from his Father's business now, especially on the word of a man like Dowd, who'd spent his life a stranger to truth. He'd argue that this confession had been Dowd's revenge on the living: a last desperate attempt to spoil a glory he knew he couldn't share. And maybe that was true; maybe she'd been duped.
“Are we going to collect these stones or what?” Monday said.
“I think we have to,” she said, still musing.
“What are they for?”
“They're . . . like stepping stones,” she said, her voice losing momentum as a thought distracted her.
Indeed they were stepping stones. They were a way back to Yzordderrex, which suddenly seemed like an open road, along which she might yet find some guidance, in these last hours, to help her make a choice.
She threw her cigarette down into the embers. “You're going to have to take the stones back to Gamut Street on your own, Monday.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Yzordderrex.”
“Why?”
“It's too complicated to explain. You just have to swear to me that you'll do exactly as I tell you.”
“I'm ready,” he said.
“All right. So listen up. When I'm gone I want you to take the stones back to Gamut Street and carry a message along with them. It has to go to Gentle personally, you understand? Don't trust anybody else with it. Even Clem.”
“I understand,” Monday said, beaming with pleasure at this unlooked—for honor. “What have I got to tell him?”
“Where I've gone, for one thing.”
“Yzordderrex.”
“That's right.”
“Then tell him”—she pondered for a moment—“tell him the Reconciliation isn't safe, and he mustn't start the working until I contact him again.”
“It isn't safe, and he mustn't start the working—""—until I contact him again.”
“I've got that. Is there any more?”
“That's it,” she said. “Now, all I've got to do is find the circle.”
She started to scan the mosaic, looking for the subtle differences in tone that marked the stones. From past experience, she knew that once they'd been lifted from their niches the Yzordderrexian Express would be under way, so she told Monday to wait outside until she'd gone. He looked worried now, but she told him she'd come to no harm.
“It's not that,” he said, “I want to know what the message means. If you're telling the boss it's not safe, does that mean he won't open the Dominions?”
“I don't know.”
“But I want to see Patashoqua and L'Himby and Yzordderrex,” he said, listing the places like charms.
“I know that,” she said. “And believe me, I want the Dominions opened just as much as you do.”
She studied his face in the dying firelight, looking for some clue as to whether he was being placated, but for all his youth he was a master of concealment. She'd have to trust that he'd put his duties as a messenger above his desire to see the Imajica and relay the spirit of her warning, if not its precise text.
“You've got to make Gentle understand the danger he's in,” she said, hoping this tack would make him conscientious.
“I will,” he said, now faintly irritated by her insistence.
She let the subject lie and returned to the business of finding the stones. He didn't offer his assistance, but retreated to the door, from which he said, “How will you get back?”
She'd found four of the stones already, and the birds on the roof had set up a fresh cacophony, suggesting that they felt some tremor of change below.
“I'll deal with that problem when I get to it,” she replied.
The birds suddenly rose up and, unnerved, Monday stepped out of the Retreat altogether. Jude glanced up at him as she dug out another stone. The fire between them had already been fanned into flame, and now its ashes were stirred up, rising in a smutty cloud to hide the door from view. She scanned the mosaic, checking to see if she'd missed a stone, but the itches and aches she remembered from her first crossing were already creeping through her body, proof that the passing place was about its work.
Oscar had told her, on this very spot, that the discomforts of passage diminished with repetition, and his words proved correct. She had time, as the walls blurred around her, to glimpse the door through the swirling ash and realize, all too late, that she should have looked out at the world one last time before leaving it. Then the Retreat disappeared, and the In Ovo's delirium was oppressing her, its prisoners rising in their legions to claim her. Traveling alone, she went more quickly than she had with Oscar (at least that was her impression), and she was out the other side before the Oviates had time to sniff the heels of her glyph.
The walls of the merchant Peccable's cellar were brighter than she remembered them. The reason: a lamp which burned on the floor a yard from the circle and beyond it a figure, its face a blur, which came at her with a bludgeon and laid her unconscious on the floor before she'd uttered a word of explanation.
18
The mantle of night was falling on the Fifth Dominion, and Gentle found Tick Raw near the summit of the Mount of Lipper Bayak, watching the last dusky colors of day drop from the sky. He was eating while he did so, a bowl each of sausage and pickle between his feet and a large pot of mustard between these, into which meat and vegetable alike were plunged; Though Gentle had come here as a projection—his body left sitting crosslegged in the Meditation Room in Gamut Street—he didn't need nose or palate to appreciate the piquancy of Raw's meal; imagination sufficed.
He looked up when Gentle approached, unperturbed by the phantom watching him eat.
“You're early, aren't you?” he remarked, glancing at his pocket watch, which hung from his coat on a piece of string. “We've got hours yet.”
“I know. I just came—”
"—to check up on me,” Tick Raw said, the sting of pickle in his voice. “Well, I'm here. Are you ready in the Fifth?”
“We're getting there,” Gentle said, somewhat queasily.
Though he'd traveled this way countless times as the Maestro Sartori—his mind, empowered by feits, carrying his image and his voice across the Dominions—and had reacquainted himself with the technique easily enough, the sensation was damn strange.
“What do I look like?” he asked Tick Raw, remembering as he spoke how he'd attempted to describe the mystif on these very slopes.
“Insubstantial,” Tick Raw replied, squinting up at him, then returning to his meal. “Which is fine by me, because there's not enough sausage for two.”
“I'm still getting used to what I'm capable of.”
“Well, don't take too long about it,” Tick Raw said. “We've got work to do.”
“And I should have realized that you were part of that work when I was first here, but I didn't, and for that I apologize.”
“Accepted,” Tick Raw said.
“You must have thought I was crazy.”
“You certainly—how shall I put this? — you certainly confounded me. It took me days to work out why you were so damn obstreperous. Pie talked to me, you know, tried to make me understand. But I'd been waiting for somebody to come from the Fifth for so long I was only listening with half an ear.”
“I think Pie probably hoped my meeting with you would make me remember who the hell I was.”
“How long did it take?”
“Months.”
“Was it the mystif who hid you from yourself in the first place?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, it did too good a job. That'll teach it. Where's your flesh and blood, by the way?”
“Back in the Fifth.”
“Take my advice, don't leave it too long. I find the bowels mutiny, and you come back to find you're sitting in shite. Of course, that could be a personal weakness.”
He selected another sausage and chewed on it as he asked Gentle why the hell he'd let the mystif make him forget.
“I was a coward,” Gentle replied. “I couldn't face my failure.”
“It's hard,” Tick Raw said. “I've lived all these years wondering if I could have saved my Maestro, Uter Musky, if I'd been quicker witted. I still miss him.”
“I'm responsible for what happened to him, and I've no excuses.”
“We've all got our frailties, Maestro: my bowels; your cowardice. None of us is perfect. But I presume your being here means we're finally going to have another try?”
“That's my intention, yes.”
Again, Tick Raw looked at his watch, doing a mute calculation as he chewed. “Twenty of your Fifth Dominion hours from now, or thereabouts.”