by Clive Barker
And, you know, that made me love her all the more.
Then one night I woke with her sleeping beside me. We slept often on the floor, which she preferred to the bed. Beds, she said, reminded her of marriage. Anyway, that night she was lying under a quilt on the carpet of my room, and I, simply out of adoration, was watching her face in sleep.
If one has given oneself utterly, watching the beloved sleep can be a vile experience. Perhaps some of you have known that paralysis, staring down at features closed to your inquiry, locked away from you where you can never, ever go, into the other’s mind. As I say, for us who have given ourselves, that is a horror. One knows, in those moments, that one does not exist, except in relation to that face, that personality. Therefore, when that face is closed down, that personality is lost in its own unknowable world, one feels completely without purpose. A planet without a sun, revolving in darkness.
That’s how I felt that night, looking down at her extraordinary features, and as I chewed on my soullessness, her face began to alter. She was clearly dreaming; but what dreams must she have been having. Her very fabric was on the move, her muscle, her hair, the down on her cheek moving to the dictates of some internal tide. Her lips bloomed from her bone, boiling up into a slavering tower of skin: her hair swirled around her head as though she were lying in water; the substance of her cheeks formed furrows and ridges like the ritual scars on a warrior; inflamed and throbbing patterns of tissue, swelling up and changing again even as a pattern formed. This fluxion was a terror to me, and I must have made some noise. She didn’t wake, but came a little closer to the surface of sleep, leaving the deeper waters where these powers were sourced. The patterns sank away in an instant, and her face was again that of a gently sleeping woman.
That was, you can understand, a pivotal experience, even though I spent the next few days trying to convince myself that I hadn’t seen it.
The effort was useless. I knew there was something wrong with her; and at that time I was certain she knew nothing about it. I was convinced that something in her system was awry, and that it was best to investigate her history before I told her what I had seen.
On reflection, of course, that seems laughably naïve. To think she wouldn’t have known that she contained such a power. But it was easier for me to picture her as prey to such skill, than as mistress of it. That’s a man speaking of a woman; not just me, Oliver Vassi, of her, Jacqueline Ess. We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are.
Anyway, I investigated Jacqueline, as surreptitiously as I could. I had a contact in York, where she had lived with Ben, and it wasn’t difficult to get some inquiries moving. It took a week for my contact to get back to me, because he’d had to cut through a good deal of shit from the police to get a hint of the truth, but the news came, and it was bad.
Ben was dead, that much was true. But there was no way he had died of cancer. My contact had only got the vaguest clues as to the condition of Ben’s corpse, but he gathered it had been spectacularly mutilated. And the prime suspect? My beloved Jacqueline Ess. The same innocent woman who was occupying my flat, sleeping by my side every night.
So I put it to her that she was hiding something from me. I don’t know what I was expecting in return. What I got was a demonstration of her power. She gave it freely, without malice, but I would have been a fool not to have read a warning into it. She told me first how she had discovered her unique control over the sum and substance of human beings. In her despair, she said, when she was on the verge of killing herself, she had found, in the very deep-water trenches of her nature, faculties she had never known existed. Powers which came up out of those regions as she recovered, like fish to the light.
Then she showed me the smallest measure of these powers, plucking hairs from my head, one by one. Only a dozen; just to demonstrate her formidable skills. I felt them going. She just said: one from behind your ear, and I’d feel my skin creep and then jump as fingers of her volition snatched a hair out. Then another, and another. It was an incredible display; she had this power down to a fine art, locating and withdrawing single hairs from my scalp with the precision of tweezers.
Frankly, I was sitting there rigid with fear, knowing that she was just toying with me. Sooner or later, I was certain the time would be right for her to silence me permanently.
But she had doubts about herself. She told me how the skill, though she had honed it, scared her. She needed, she said, someone to teach her how to use it best. And I was not that somebody. I was just a man who loved her, who had loved her before this revelation, and would love her still, in spite of it.
In fact, after that display I quickly came to accommodate a new vision of Jacqueline. Instead of fearing her, I became more devoted to this woman who tolerated my possession of her body.
My work became an irritation, a distraction that came between me and thinking of my beloved. What reputation I had began to deteriorate; I lost briefs, I lost credibility. In the space of two or three months my professional life dwindled away to almost nothing. Friends despaired of me, colleagues avoided me.
It wasn’t that she was feeding on me. I want to be clear about that. She was no lamia, no succubus. What happened to me, my fall from grace with ordinary life if you like, was of my own making. She didn’t bewitch me; that’s a romantic lie to excuse rape. She was a sea: and I had to swim in her. Does that make any sense? I’d lived my life on the shore, in the solid world of law, and I was tired of it. She was liquid; a boundless sea in a single body, a deluge in a small room, and I will gladly drown in her, if she grants me the chance. But that was my decision. Understand that. This has always been my decision. I have decided to go to the room tonight, and be with her one final time. That is of my own free will.
And what man would not? She was (is) sublime.
For a month after that demonstration of power I lived in a permanent ecstasy of her. When I was with her she showed me ways to love beyond the limits of any other creature on God’s earth. I say beyond the limits: with her there were no limits. And when I was away from her the reverie continued: because she seemed to have changed my world.
Then she left me.
I knew why: she’d gone to find someone to teach her how to use her strength. But understanding her reasons made it no easier.
I broke down: lost my job, lost my identity, lost the few friends I had left in the world. I scarcely noticed. They were minor losses, beside the loss of Jacqueline….
“Jacqueline.”
My God, she thought, can this really be the most influential man in the country? He looked so unprepossessing, so very unspectacular. His chin wasn’t even strong.
But Titus Pettifer was power.
He ran more monopolies than he could count; his word in the financial world could break companies like sticks, destroying the ambitions of hundreds, the careers of thousands. Fortunes were made overnight in his shadow, entire corporations fell when he blew on them, casualties of his whim. This man knew power if any man knew it. He had to be learned from.
“You wouldn’t mind if I called you J., would you?”
“No.”
“Have you been waiting long?”
“Long enough.”
“I don’t normally leave beautiful women waiting.”
“Yes you do.”
She knew him already: two minutes in his presence was enough to find his measure. He would come quickest to her if she was quietly insolent.
“Do you always call women you’ve never met before by their initials?”
“It’s convenient for filing; do you mind?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“What I get in return for giving you the privilege.”
“It’s a privilege, is it, to know your name?”
“Yes.”
�
��Well … I’m flattered. Unless of course you grant that privilege widely?”
She shook her head. No, he could see she wasn’t profligate with her affections.
“Why have you waited so long to see me?” he said. “Why have I had reports of your wearing my secretaries down with your constant demands to meet with me? Do you want money? Because if you do you’ll go away empty-handed. I became rich by being mean, and the richer I get, the meaner I become.”
The remark was truth; he spoke it plainly.
“I don’t want money,” she said, equally plainly.
“That’s refreshing.”
“There’s richer than you.”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. She could bite, this beauty.
“True,” he said. There were at least half a dozen richer men in the hemisphere.
“I’m not an adoring little nobody. I haven’t come here to screw a name. I’ve come here because we can be together. We have a great deal to offer each other.”
“Such as?” he said.
“I have my body.”
He smiled. It was the straightest offer he’d heard in years.
“And what do I offer you in return for such largesse?”
“I want to learn—”
“Learn?”
“How to use power.”
She was stranger and stranger, this one.
“What do you mean?” he replied, playing for time. He hadn’t got the measure of her; she vexed him, confounded him.
“Shall I recite it for you again, in bourgeois?” she said, playing insolence with such a smile he almost felt attractive again.
“No need. You want to learn to use power. I suppose I could teach you—”
“I know you can.”
“You realize I’m a married man. Virginia and I have been together eighteen years.”
“You have three sons, four houses, a maid-servant called Mirabelle. You loathe New York, and you love Bangkok; your shirt collar is 16½, your favorite color green.”
“Turquoise.”
“You’re getting subtler in your old age.”
“I’m not old.”
“Eighteen years a married man. It ages you prematurely.”
“Not me.”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Take me.”
“What?”
“Take me.”
“Here?”
“Draw the blinds, lock the door, turn off the computer terminus, and take me. I dare you.”
“Dare?”
How long was it since anyone had dared him to do anything?
“Dare?”
He was excited. He hadn’t been so excited in a dozen years. He drew the blinds, locked the door, turned off the video display of his fortunes.
My God, she thought, I’ve got him.
It wasn’t an easy passion, not like that with Vassi. For one thing, Pettifer was a clumsy, uncultured lover. For another, he was too nervous of his wife to be a wholly successful adulterer. He thought he saw Virginia everywhere: in the lobbies of the hotels they took a room in for the afternoon, in cabs cruising the street outside their rendezvous, once even (he swore the likeness was exact) dressed as a waitress, and swabbing down a table in a restaurant. All fictional fears, but they dampened the spontaneity of the romance somewhat.
Still, she was learning from him. He was as brilliant a potentate as he was inept a lover. She learned how to be powerful without exercising power, how to keep one’s self uncontaminated by the foulness all charisma stirs up in the uncharismatic; how to make the plain decisions plainly; how to be merciless. Not that she needed much education in that particular quarter. Perhaps it was more truthful to say he taught her never to regret her lack of instinctive compassion, but to judge with her intellect alone who deserved extinction and who might be numbered among the righteous.
Not once did she show herself to him, though she used her skills in the most secret of ways to tease pleasure out of his stale nerves.
In the fourth week of their affair they were lying side by side in a lilac room, while the midafternoon traffic growled in the street below. It had been a bad bout of sex; he was nervous, and no tricks would coax him out of himself. It was over quickly, almost without heat.
He was going to tell her something. She knew it: it was waiting, this revelation, somewhere at the back of his throat. Turning to him she massaged his temples with her mind, and soothed him into speech.
He was about to spoil the day.
He was about to spoil his career.
He was about, God help him, to spoil his life.
“I have to stop seeing you,” he said.
He wouldn’t dare, she thought.
“I’m not sure what I know about you, or rather, what I think I know about you, but it makes me … cautious of you, J. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I suspect you of … crimes.”
“Crimes?”
“You have a history.”
“Who’s been rooting?” she asked. “Surely not Virginia?”
“No, not Virginia, she’s beyond curiosity.”
“Who then?”
“It’s not your business.”
“Who?”
She pressed lightly on his temples. It hurt him and he winced.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“My head’s aching.”
“Tension, that’s all, just tension. I can take it away, Titus.” She touched her finger to his forehead, relaxing her hold on him. He sighed as relief came.
“Is that better?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s been snooping, Titus?”
“I have a personal secretary. Lyndon. You’ve heard me speak of him. He knew about our relationship from the beginning. Indeed, he books the hotels, arranges my cover stories for Virginia.”
There was a sort of boyishness in this speech that was rather touching. As though he was embarrassed to leave her, rather than heartbroken. “Lyndon’s quite a miracle worker. He’s maneuvered a lot of things to make it easier between us. So he’s got nothing against you. It’s just that he happened to see one of the photographs I took of you. I gave them to him to shred.”
“Why?”
“I shouldn’t have taken them; it was a mistake. Virginia might have….”
He paused, began again. “Anyhow, he recognized you, although he couldn’t remember where he’d seen you before.”
“But he remembered eventually.”
“He used to work for one of my newspapers, as a gossip columnist. That’s how he came to be my personal assistant. He remembered you from your previous incarnation, as it were. Jacqueline Ess, the wife of Benjamin Ess, deceased.”
“Deceased.”
“He brought me some other photographs, not as pretty as the ones of you.”
“Photographs of what?”
“Your home. And the body of your husband. They said it was a body, though in God’s name there was precious little human being left in it.”
“There was precious little to start with,” she said simply, thinking of Ben’s cold eyes, and colder hands. Fit only to be shut up, and forgotten.
“What happened?”
“To Ben? He was killed.”
“How?” Did his voice waver a little?
“Very easily.” She had risen from the bed, and was standing by the window. Strong summer light carved its way through the slates of the blind, ridges of shadow and sunlight charting the contours of her face.
“You did it.”
“Yes.” He had taught her to be plain. “Yes, I did it.”
He had taught her an economy of threat too. “Leave me, and I’ll do the same again.”
He shook his head. “Never. You wouldn’t dare.”
He was standing in front of her now.
“We must understand each other, J. I am powerful and I am pure. Do you see? My public face isn’t even touched by a glimmer of scandal. I coul
d afford a mistress, a dozen mistresses, to be revealed. But a murderess? No, that would spoil my life.”
“Is he blackmailing you? This Lyndon?”
He stared at the day through the blinds, with a crippled look on his face. There was a twitch in the nerves of his cheek, under his left eye.
“Yes, if you must know,” he said in a dead voice. “The bastard has me for all I’m worth.”
“I see.”
“And if he can guess, so can others. You understand?”
“I’m strong: you’re strong. We can twist them around our little fingers.”
“No.”
“Yes! I have skills, Titus.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“You will know,” she said.
She looked at him, taking hold of his hands without touching him. He watched, all astonished eyes, as his unwilling hands were raised to touch her face, to stroke her hair with the fondest of gestures. She made him run his trembling fingers across her breasts, taking them with more ardor than he could summon on his own initiative.
“You are always too tentative, Titus,” she said, making him paw her almost to the point of bruising. “This is how I like it.” Now his hands were lower, fetching out a different look from her face. Tides were moving over it, she was all alive —
“Deeper—”
His finger intruded, his thumb stroked.
“I like that, Titus. Why can’t you do that to me without me demanding?”
He blushed. He didn’t like to talk about what they did together. She coaxed him deeper, whispering.
“I won’t break, you know. Virginia may be Dresden china, I’m not. I want feeling; I want something that I can remember you by when I’m not with you. Nothing is everlasting, is it? But I want something to keep me warm through the night.”
