by Clive Barker
It had been his undoing. The fire that had carried his mother to oblivion had seared every part of him. The ashes of his clothes had been fused with his blistered back, his hair singed from his scalp, his face cooked beyond tenderness. But like his brother, lying in ribbons below, he refused to give up life. His fingers clutched the boards; his lips still worked, baring teeth as bright as a death's—head smile. There was even power in his sinews. When his blood-filled eyes saw Jude he managed to push himself up, until his body rolled over onto its charred spine, and he used his agonies to fuel the hand that clutched at her, dragging her down beside him.
"My mother..."
"She's gone."
There was bafflement on his face. "Why?" he said, shudders convulsing him as he spoke. "She seemed... to want it. Why?"
"So that she'd be there when the fire took Hapexamendios," Jude replied.
He shook his head, not comprehending the significance of this.
"How... could that... be?" he murmured.
"The Imajica's a circle," she said. He studied her face, attempting to puzzle this out. "The fire went back to the one who sent it."
Now the sense of what she was telling him dawned. Even in his agony, here was a greater pain.
"He's gone?" he said.
She wanted to say, I hope so, but she kept that sentiment to herself and simply nodded.
"And my mother too?" Sartori went on. The trembling quieted; so did his voice, which was already frail. "I'm alone," he said.
The anguish in these last few words was bottomless, and she longed to have some way of comforting him. She was afraid to touch him for fear of causing him still greater discomfort, but perhaps there was more hurt in her not doing so. With the greatest delicacy she laid her hand over his.
"You're not alone," she said. "I'm here."
He didn't acknowledge her solace, perhaps didn't even hear it. His thoughts were elsewhere.
"I should never have touched him," he said softly. "A man shouldn't lay hands on his own brother."
As he squeezed out these words there was a moan from the bottom of the stairs, followed by a yelp of pure joy from Clem, and then Monday's ecstatic whoops.
"Boss oh boss oh boss!"
"Do you hear that?" Jude said to Sartori.
"Yes...."
"I don't think you killed him after all."
A strange tic appeared around his mouth, which after a moment she realized was the shreds of a smile. She took it to be pleasure at Gentle's survival, but its source was more bitter.
"That won't save me now," he said.
His hand, which was laid on his stomach, began to knead the muscles there, its clutches so violent that his body began to spasm. Blood bubbled up between his lips, and he moved his hand to his mouth, as if to conceal it. There, he seemed to spit his blood into his palm. Then he removed his hand and offered its grisly contents to her.
"Take it," he said, uncurling his fist.
She felt something drop into her hand. She didn't glance at his gift, however, but kept her eyes fixed on his face as he looked away from her, back towards the circle. She realized, even before his gaze had found its resting place, that he was looking away from her for the final time, and she started to call him back. She said his name; she called him love; she said she'd never wanted to desert him, and never would again, if he'd only stay. But her words were wasted. As his eyes found the circle, the life went from them, his last sight not of her but of the place where he'd been made.
In her palm, bloody from his belly and throat, lay the blue egg.
After a time, she got up and went out onto the landing. The place at the bottom of the stairs where Gentle's body had lain was empty. Clem was standing in the candlelight with both tears and a broad smile on his face. He looked up at Jude as she started down the stairs.
"Sartori?" he said.
"He's dead."
"What about Celestine?"
"Gone," she said.
"But it's over, isn't it?" Hoi-Polloi said. "We're going to live."
"Are we?"
"Yes, we are," said Clem. "Gentle saw Hapexamendios destroyed."
"Where is Gentle?"
"He went outside," Clem said. "He's got enough life in him—"
"For another life?"
"For another twenty, the lucky bugger," came Tay's reply.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she put her arms around Gentle's protectors, then went out onto the step. Gentle was standing in the middle of the street, wrapped in one of Celestine's sheets. Monday was at his side, and he was leaning on the boy as he stared up at the tree that grew outside number 28. Hapexamendios' fire had charred much of its foliage, leaving the branches naked and blackened. But there was a breeze stirring the leaves that had survived, and after such a long motionless time even these shreds of wind were welcome: final, simple proof that the Imajica had survived its perils and was once again drawing breath.
She hesitated to join him, thinking perhaps he'd prefer to have these moments of meditation uninterrupted. But his gaze came her way after half a minute or so, and though there was only starlight and the last guttering flames in the fretwork above to see him by, the smile was as luminous as ever, and as inviting. She left the step but, as she approached, saw that his smile was slender and the wounds he'd sustained deeper than cuts.
"I failed," he said.
"The Imajica's whole," she replied. "That isn't failure."
He looked away from her, down the street. The darkness was full of agitation.
"The ghosts are still here," he said. "I swore to them I'd find a way out, and I failed. That was why I went with Pie in the first place, to find Taylor a way out—"
"Maybe there isn't one," came a third voice.
Clem had appeared on the doorstep, but it was Tay who spoke.
"I promised you an answer," Gentle said.
"And you found one. The Imajica's a circle, and there's no way out of it. We just go round and round. Well, that's not so bad, Gentle, We have what we have."
Gentle lifted his hand from Monday's shoulder and turned away from the tree, and from Jude, and from the angels on the step. As he hobbled out into the middle of the street, his head bowed, he murmured a reply to Tay too quiet for any but an angel's ear. "It's not enough," he said.
25
For the living occupants of Gamut Street, the days that followed the events of that midsummer were as strange in their way as anything that had gone before. The world that returned to life around them seemed to be totally ignorant of the fact that its existence had hung in the balance, and if it now sensed the least change in its condition it concealed its suspicion very well. The monsoons and heat waves that had preceded the Reconciliation were replaced the next morning with the drizzles and tepid sunshine of an English summer, its moderation the model for public behavior in subsequent weeks. The eruptions of irrationality which had turned every junction and street corner into a little battleground summarily ceased; the night walkers Monday and Jude had seen watching for revelation no longer strayed out to peer quizzically at the stars.
In any city other than London, perhaps the mysteries now present in its streets would have been discovered and celebrated. If such fogs as lingered in Clerkenwell had appeared instead in Rome, the Vatican would have been pronouncing on them within a week. Had they appeared in Mexico City, the poor would have been through them in a shorter time still, desperate for a better life in the world beyond. But England: oh! England. It had never had much of a taste for the mystical, and with all but the weakest of its evocators and feit workers murdered by the Tabula Rasa, there was nobody to begin the labor of freeing minds locked up in dogmas and utilities.
The fogs were not entirely ignored, however. The animal life of the city knew something was afoot and came to Clerkenwell to sniff it out. The runaway dogs who'd gathered in the vicinity of Gamut Street when the revenants had come, only to be frightened off by Sartori's horde, now returned, their noses twitching after some piqua
nt scent or other. Cats came too, yowling in the trees at dusk, curious but casual. There were also visitations by bees, and birds, who twice in the three days following midsummer gathered in the same stupefying numbers as Monday and Jude had witnessed at the Retreat. In all these cases the packs, swarms, and flocks disappeared after a time, having discovered the source of the perfumes and poles that had directed them to the district and gone into the Fourth to have a life under different skies.
But if no two-legged traffic passed into the Fourth, there was certainly some in the opposite direction. A little over a week after the Reconciliation, Tick Raw arrived on the doorstep of number 28 and, having introduced himself to Clem and Monday, asked to see the Maestro. He came into a house that was a good deal more comfortable than his quarters in Vanaeph, furnished as it was from a score of recent burglaries by Monday and Clem. But the atmosphere of domesticity was cosmetic. Though the bodies of the gek-a-gek had been removed and buried, along with their summoner, beneath the long grass in Shiverick Square; though the front door had been mended and the bloodstains mopped up; though the Meditation Room had been scoured and the stones of the circle individually wrapped in linen and locked away, the house was charged with all that had happened here: the deaths, the love scenes, the reunions and revelations.
"You're living in the middle of a history lesson," Tick Raw said when he sat himself down beside the bed in which Gentle lay.
The Reconciler was healing, but even with his extraordinary powers of recuperation it would be a lengthy business. He slept twenty hours or more out of every twenty-four and barely ventured from his mattress when he was awake.
"You look as though you've seen some wars, my friend," Tick Raw said.
"More than I'd like," Gentle replied wearily.
"I sniff something Oviate."
"Gek-a-gek," Gentle said. "Don't worry, they're gone."
"Did they break through during the ceremony?"
"No. It's more complicated than that. Ask Clem. He'll tell you the whole story."
"No offense to your friends," Tick Raw said, fetching a jar of pickled sausage from his pocket, "but I'd prefer to hear it from you."
"I've thought about it too much as it is," Gentle said. "I don't want to be reminded."
"But we won the day," Tick Raw said. "Doesn't that merit a little celebration?"
"Celebrate with Clem, Tick. I need to sleep."
"As you like, as you like," Tick Raw said, retreating to the door. "Oh. I wonder? Do you mind if I stay here for a few days? There's a number of parties in Vanaeph who want the grand tour of the Fifth, and I've volunteered to show them the sights. But as I don't yet know them myself—"
"Be my guest," Gentle said. "And forgive me if I don't brim with bonhomie."
"No apology required," Tick Raw said. "I'll leave you to sleep."
That evening, Tick did as Gentle had suggested and plied both Clem and Monday with questions until he had the full story.
"So when do I meet the mesmeric Judith?" he asked when the tale was told.
"I don't know if you ever will," Clem said. "She didn't come back to the house after we buried Sartori."
"Where is she?"
"Wherever she is," Monday said dolefully, "Hoi-Polloi's with her. Just my fuckin' luck."
"Well, now, listen," Tick Raw said. "I've always had a way with the ladies. I'll make you a deal. If you show me this city, inside out, I'll show you a few ladies the same way."
Monday's palm went from his pocket, where it'd been stroking the consequence of Hoi-Polloi's absence, and seized hold of Tick Raw's hand before it was even extended.
"You're a gentleman an' a squalor," Monday said. "You got yourself a tour, mate."
"What about Gentle?" Tick Raw said to Clem. "Is he languishing for want of female company?"
"No, he's just tired. He'll get well."
"Will he?" said Tick Raw. "I'm not so sure. He's got the look of a man who'd be happier dead than alive."
"Don't say that."
"Very well. I didn't say it. But he has, Clement. And we all know it."
The vigor and noise Tick Raw brought into the house only served to emphasize the truth of that observation. As the days passed and turned to weeks, there was little or no improvement in Gentle's mood. He was, as Tick Raw had said, languishing, and Clem began to feel the way he had during Tay's final decline. A loved one was slipping away, and he could do nothing to prevent it. There weren't even those moments of levity that there'd been with Tay, when good times had been remembered and the pain superseded. Gentle wanted no false comforts, no laughter, no sympathy. He simply wanted to lie in his bed and steadily become as bland as the sheets he lay upon. Sometimes, in his sleep, the angels would hear him speaking in tongues, the way Tay had heard him talk before. But it was nonsense that he muttered: reports from a mind that was rambling without map or destination.
Tick Raw stayed in the house a month, leaving with Monday at dawn and returning late, having had another day seeing the sights and acquiring the appetites of this new Dominion. His sense of wonder was boundless, his capacity for pleasure prodigal. He found he had a taste for eel pie and Elgar, for Speaker's Corner at Sunday noon and the Ripper's haunts at midnight; for dog races, for jazz, for waistcoats made in Saville Row and women hired behind King's
Cross Station. As for Monday, it was clear from the face he wore whenever he returned that the hurt of Hoi-Polloi's desertion was being kissed away. When Tick Raw finally announced that it was time to return to the Fourth, the boy was crestfallen.
"Don't worry," Tick told him. "I'll be back. And I won't be alone."
Before he departed, he presented himself at Gentle's bedside with a proposal.
"Come to the Fourth with me," he said, "it's time you saw Patashoqua."
Gentle shook his head.
"But you haven't seen the Merrow Ti' Ti" Tick protested.
"I know what you're trying to do, Tick," Gentle said. "And I thank you for it, really I do, but I don't want to see the Fourth again."
"Well, what do you want to see?"
The answer was simple: "Nothing."
"Oh, now stop this, Gentle," Tick Raw said. "It's getting damn boring. You're behaving as though we lost everything. We didn't."
"I did."
"She'll come back. You'll see."
"Who will?"
"Judith."
Gentle almost laughed at this. "It's not Judith I've lost," he said.
Tick Raw realized his error then, and came as near to dumbfounded as he ever got. All he could manage was: "Ah...."
For the first time since Tick Raw had appeared at his bedside the month before, Gentle actually looked at his guest. "Tick," he said. "I'm going to tell you something I've told nobody else."
"What's that?"
"When I was in my Father's city..." He paused, as though the will to tell was going from him already, then began again. "When I was in my Father's city I saw Pie 'oh' pah."
"Alive?"
"For a time."
"Oh, Jesu. How did it die?"
"The ground opened up beneath it."
"That's terrible; terrible."
"Do you see now why it doesn't feel like a victory?"
"Yes, I see. But Gentle—"
"No more persuasions, Tick."
"—there are such changes in the air. Maybe there are the miracles in the First, the way there are in Yzordderrex. It's not out of the question."
Gentle studied his tormentor, eyes narrowed.
"The Eurhetemecs were in the First long before Hapexamendios, remember," Tick went on. "And they worked wonders there. Maybe those times have returned. The land doesn't forget. Men forget; Maestros forget. But the land? Never."
He stood up.
"Come with me to a passing place," he said. "Let's look for ourselves. Where's the harm? I'll carry you on my back if your legs don't work."
"That won't be necessary," Gentle said, and throwing off the sheets got out of bed.
Thoug
h the month of August had yet to begin, the early months of summer had been marked by such excesses that the season had burned itself out prematurely, and when Gentle, accompanied by Tick and Clem, stepped out into Gamut Street, he met the first chills of autumn on the step. Clem had found the fog that let onto the First Dominion within forty-eight hours of the Reconciliation, but had not entered it. After all that he'd heard about the state of the Unbeheld's city, he'd had no wish to see its horrors. He led the Maestros to the place readily enough, however. It was little more than half a mile from the house, hidden in a cloister behind an empty office building: a bank of gray fog, no more than twice the height of a man, which rolled upon itself in the shadowed corner of the empty yard.
"Let me go first," Clem said to Gentle. "We're still your guardians."
"You've done more than enough," Gentle said. "Stay here. This won't take long."
Clem didn't contradict the instruction but stepped aside to let the Maestros enter the fog. Gentle had passed between Dominions many times now and was used to the brief disorientation that always accompanied such passage. But nothing, not even the abattoir nightmares that had haunted him after the Reconciliation, could have prepared him for what was waiting on the other side. Tick Raw, ever a man of instant responses, vomited as the stench of putrescence came to meet them through the fog, and though he stumbled after Gentle, determined not to leave his friend to face the First alone, he covered his eyes after a single glance.
The Dominion was decayed from horizon to horizon. Everywhere rot, and more rot: suppurating lakes of it, and festering hills. Overhead, in skies Gentle had barely seen as he passed through his Father's city, clouds the color of old bruises half hid two yellowish moons, their light falling on a filth so atrocious the hungriest kite in the Kwem would have starved rather than feed here.
"This was the City of God, Tick," Gentle said. "This was my Father. This was the Unbeheld."
In a sudden fury he tore at Tick's hands, which were clamped to the man's face.
"Look, damn you, look! I want to hear you tell me about the wonders, Tick! Go on! Tell me! Tell me!"
