by Clive Barker
The tremors in Celestine’s body were now convulsions, growing as the ambition of the threads increased. They weren’t simply flying wildly, Jude realized; they were reaching out in all directions, up towards the ceiling of the cell and to its walls. Stung by them once, the only way she could avoid further contact was by backing away to the hole through which she’d come and then out, stumbling over the rubble.
As she emerged she heard Dowd’s voice, somewhere in the labyrinth behind her. “What have you been doing, lovey?”
She wasn’t quite sure, was the truth. Though she’d been the initiator of this unbinding, she wasn’t its mistress. The cords had an urgency of their own, and whether it was Celestine who moved them, or Roxborough who’d plaited into them the instruction to destroy anyone who came seeking his prisoner’s release, they were not about to be placated or contained. Some were snatching at the edge of the hole, dragging away more of the bricks. Others, demonstrating an elasticity she hadn’t expected, were nosing over the rubble, turning over stones and books as they advanced.
“Oh, my Lord,” she heard Dowd say, and turned to see him standing in the passageway half a dozen yards behind her, with his surgeon’s knife in one hand and a bloody handkerchief in the other.
This was the first sight she had of him head to foot, and the burden of Pivot shards he carried was apparent. He looked utterly maladroit, his shoulders mismatched and his left leg turned inward, as though a shattered bone had been badly set.
“What’s in there?” he said, hobbling towards her. “Is this your friend?”
“I suggest you keep your distance,” she said.
He ignored her. “Did Roxborough wall something up? Look at those things! Is it an Oviate?”
“No.”
“What then? Godolphin never told me about this.”
“He didn’t know.”
“But you did?” he said, glancing back at her as he advanced to study the cords, which were emerging all the time. “I’m impressed. We’ve both kept our little secrets, haven’t we?”
One of the cords reared suddenly from the rubble, and he jumped back, the handkerchief dropping from his hand. It unfolded as it fell, and the piece of Oscar’s flesh Dowd had wrapped in it landed in the dirt. It was vestigial, but she knew it well enough. He’d cut off the curiosity and carried it away as a keepsake.
She let out a moan of disgust. Dowd started to stoop to pick it up, but her rage—which she’d concealed for Celestine’s sake—erupted.
“You scumbag!” she said, and went at him with both hands raised above her head, locked into a single fist.
He was heavy with shards and couldn’t rise fast enough to avoid her blow. She struck the back of his neck, a clout that probably hurt her more than him, but unbalanced a body already too asymmetrical for its own good. He stumbled, prey to gravity, and sprawled in the rubble. He knew his indignity, and it enraged him.
“Stupid cow!” he said. “Stupid, sentimental cow! Pick it up! Go on, pick it up! Have it if you want to.”
“I don’t want it.”
“No, I insist. It’s a gift, brother to sister.”
“I’m not your sister! I never was and I never will be!”
Mites were appearing from his mouth as he lay on the rubble, some of them grown fat as cockroaches on the power he carried in his skin. Whether they were for her benefit or to protect him against the presence in the wall she didn’t know, but seeing them she took a step away from him.
“I’m going to forgive you this,” he said, all magnanimity. “You’re overwrought, I know.” He raised his arm. “Help me up,” he said. “Tell me you’re sorry, and it’s forgotten.”
“I loathe everything you are,” she said.
Despite the mites, it was self-preservation that made her speak, not courage. This was a place of power. The truth would serve her better here than a lie, however politic.
He withdrew his arm and started to haul himself up. As he did so she took two steps forward and, picking up the bloodied handkerchief, claimed with it the last of Oscar. As she stood up again, almost guilty at what she’d done, she caught sight of a motion in the wall. A pale form had appeared against the darkness of the cell, as ripe and rounded a form as the wall that framed it was ragged. Celestine was floating, or rather was borne up as Quaisoir had been borne up, on ribbons of flesh, the filaments that had once smothered her clinging to her limbs like the remnants of a coat and draped around her head as a living hood. The face beneath was delicately boned, but severe, and what beauty it might have possessed was spoiled by the dementia that burned in it. Dowd was still in the process of rising and turned to follow Jude’s astonished gaze. When he set eyes on the apparition his body failed him, and he fell back onto the rubble, belly down. From his mite-spawning mouth came one terrified word.
“Celestine?”
The woman had approached the limits of her cell and now raised her hands to touch the bricks that had sealed her in for so long. Though she merely brushed them, they seemed to flee her fingers, tumbling down to join the rest. There was ample room for her to emerge, but she hung back and spoke from the shadows, her pupils flicking back and forth maniacally, her lips curling back from her teeth as though in rehearsal for some ghastly revelation. She matched Dowd’s single utterance with a word of her own: “Dowd.”
“Yes . . .” he murmured, “it’s me.”
So he’d been honest in some part of his biography at least, Jude thought. She knew him, just as he’d claimed to know her.
“Who did this to you?” he said.
“Why ask me,” Celestine said, “when you were part of the plot?” In her voice was the same mingling of lunacy and composure her body exhibited, her mellifluous tones accompanied by a fluttering that was almost a second voice, speaking in tandem with the first.
“I didn’t know, I swear,” Dowd said. He craned his heavy head to appeal to Jude. “Tell her,” he said.
Celestine’s oscillating gaze rose to Jude. “You?” she said. “Did you conspire against me?”
“No,” Jude said. “I’m the one who freed you.”
“I freed myself.”
“But I began it,” Jude said.
“Come closer. Let me see you better.”
Jude hesitated to approach, with Dowd’s face still a nest of mites. But Celestine made her demand again, and Jude obeyed. The woman raised her head as she approached, turning it this way and that, perhaps to coax her torpid muscles back into life.
“Are you Roxborough’s woman?” she said.
“No.”
“That’s close enough,” she told Jude. “Whose then? Which one of them do you belong to?”
“I don’t belong to any of them,” Jude said. “They’re all dead.”
“Even Roxborough?”
“He’s been gone two hundred years.”
At last the eyes stopped flickering, and their stillness, now it came, was more distressing than their motion. She had a gaze that could slice steel.
“Two hundred years,” she said. It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation. And it wasn’t Jude she was accusing, it was Dowd. “Why didn’t you come for me?”
“I thought you were dead and gone,” he told her.
“Dead? No. That would have been a kindness. I bore His child. I raised it for a time. You knew this.”
“How could I? It was none of my business.”
“You made me your business,” she said. “The day you took me from my life and gave me to God. I didn’t ask for that, and I didn’t want it—”
“I was just a servant.”
“Dog, more like. Who’s got your leash now? This woman?”
“I serve nobody.”
“Good. Then you can serve me.”
“Don’t trust him,” Jude said.
“Who would you prefer I trust?” Celestine replied, not deigning to look at Jude. “You? I don’t think so. You’ve got blood on your hands, and you smell of coitus.”
These last words w
ere tinged with such disgust Jude couldn’t stem her retort. “You wouldn’t be awake if I hadn’t found you.”
“Consider your freedom to go from this place my thanks,” Celestine replied. “You wouldn’t wish to know my company for very long.”
Jude didn’t find that difficult to believe. After all the months she’d waited for this meeting, there were no revelations to be had here: only Celestine’s insanity and the ice of her rage.
Dowd, meanwhile, was getting to his feet. As he did so, one of the woman’s ribbons unfurled itself from the shadows and reached towards him. Despite his earlier protests, he made no attempt to avoid it. A suspicious air of humility had come over him. Not only did he put up no resistance, he actually proffered his hands to Celestine for binding, placing them pulse to pulse. She didn’t scorn his offer. The ribbon of her flesh wrapped itself around his wrists, then tightened, tugging at him to haul him up the incline of brick.
“Be careful,” Jude warned her. “He’s stronger than he looks.”
“It’s all stolen.” Celestine replied, “His tricks, his decorums, his power. None of it belongs to him. He’s an actor. Aren’t you?”
As if in acquiescence, Dowd bowed his head. But as he did so he dug his heels into the rubble and refused to be drawn any further. Jude started to voice a second warning; but before it was out of her mouth, his fingers closed around the flesh and pulled hard. Caught unawares, Celestine was dragged against the raw edge of the hole, and before the rest of her filaments could come to her aid Dowd had raised his wrists above his head and casually snapped the flesh that bound them. Celestine let out a howl of pain and retreated into the sanctuary of her cell, trailing the severed ribbon.
Dowd gave her no respite, however, but went in instant pursuit, yelling to her as he shambled up over the heaped rubble, “I’m not your slave! I’m not your dog! And you’re no fucking Goddess! You’re a whore!”
Then he was gone into the darkness of the cell, roaring. Jude ventured a few steps closer to the hole, but the combatants had retreated into its recesses, and she saw nothing of their struggle. She heard it, however: the hiss of breaths expelled in pain; the sound of bodies pitched against the stone. The walls shook, and books all along the passageway were thrown from their shelves, the tide of power snatching loose sheets and pamphlets up into the air like birds in a hurricane, leaving the heavier tomes to thrash on the ground, broken-backed.
And then, suddenly, it was over. The commotion in the cell ceased utterly, and there were several seconds of motionless hush, broken by a moan and the sight of a hand reaching out of the murk to clutch at the broken wall. A moment later Dowd stumbled into view, his other hand clamped to his face. Though the shards he carried were powerful, the flesh they were seated in was weak, and Celestine had exploited that frailty with the efficiency of a warrior. Half his face was missing, stripped to the bone, and his body was more unknitted than the corpse he’d left on the table above: his abdomen gaping, his limbs battered.
He fell as he emerged. Rather than attempting to get to his feet—which she doubted he was capable of doing—he crawled over the rubble like a blind man, his hands feeling out the wreckage ahead. Sobs came from him now and then, and whimpers, but the effort of escape was quickly consuming what little strength he had, and before he reached clear ground his noises gave out. So, a little time after, did he. His arms folded beneath him, and he collapsed, face to the floor, surrounded by twitching books.
Jude watched his body for a count of ten, then moved back towards the cell. As she came within two yards of his body, she saw a motion and froze in her tracks. There was life in him still, though it wasn’t his. The mites were exiting his open mouth, like fleas hastening from a cooling host. They came from his nostrils, too, and from his ears. Without his will to direct them they were probably harmless, but she wasn’t going to test that notion. She stepped as wide of them as she could, taking an indirect route up over the rubble to the threshold of Celestine’s asylum.
The shadows were much thickened by the dust that danced in the air, an aftermath of the forces that had been unleashed inside. But Celestine was visible, lying crookedly against the far wall. He’d done her harm, no doubt of that. Her pale skin was seared and ruptured at thigh, flank, and shoulder. Roxborough’s purgative zeal still had some jurisdiction in his tower, Jude thought. She’d seen three apostates laid low in the space of an hour: one above and two below.
Of them all, his prisoner Celestine seemed to have suffered least. Wounded though she was, she still had the will to turn her fierce eyes in Jude’s direction and say, “Have you come to crow?”
“I tried to warn you,” Jude said. “I don’t want us to be enemies, Celestine. I want to help you.”
“On whose command?”
“On my own. Why’d you assume everybody’s a slave or a whore or somebody’s damn dog?”
“Because that’s the way the world is,” she said.
“It’s changed, Celestine.”
“What? Are the humans gone then?”
“It’s not human to be a slave.”
“What would you know?” the woman said. “I don’t sniff much humanity in you. You’re some kind of pretender, aren’t you? Made by a Maestro.”
It would have pained Jude to hear such dismissal from any source, but from this woman, who’d been for so long a beacon of hope and healing, it was the bitterest condemnation. She’d fought so hard to be more than a fake, forged in a manmade womb. But with a few words Celestine had reduced her to a mirage.
“You’re not even natural,” she said.
“Nor are you,” Jude snapped back.
“But I was once,” Celestine said. “And I cling to that.”
“Cling all you like, it won’t change the facts. No natural woman could have survived in here for two centuries.”
“I had my revenge to nourish me.”
“On Roxborough?”
“On them all, all except one.”
“Who?”
“The Maestro . . . Sartori.”
“You knew him?”
“Too little,” Celestine said.
There was a weight of sorrow here Jude didn’t comprehend, but she had the means to ameliorate it on her tongue, and for all Celestine’s cruelties Jude wasn’t about to withhold the news.
“Sartori isn’t dead,” she said.
Celestine had turned her face to the wall, but now looked back at Jude. “Not dead?”
“I’ll find him for you if you want,” Jude said.
“You’d do that?”
“Yes.”
“Are you his mistress?”
“Not exactly.”
“Where is he? Is he near?”
“I don’t know where he is. Somewhere in the city.”
“Yes. Fetch him. Please, fetch him.” She hauled herself up the wall. “He doesn’t know my name, but I know him.”
“So who shall I tell him you are?”
“Ask him . . . ask him if he remembers Nisi Nirvana.”
“Who?”
“Just tell him.”
“Nisi Nirvana?”
“That’s right.”
Jude stood up and returned to the hole in the wall, but as she was about to step out Celestine recalled her.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Judith.”
“Well, Judith, not only do you stink of coitus, but you have in your hand some piece of flesh which you haven’t given up clutching. Whatever it is, let it go.”
Appalled, Jude looked down at her hand. The curiosity was still in her possession, half hanging from her fist. She pitched it away, into the dust.
“Do you wonder I took you for a whore?” Celestine remarked.
“Then we’ve both made mistakes,” Jude replied, looking back at her. “I thought you were my salvation.”
“Yours was the greater error,” Celestine replied.
Jude didn’t grace this last piece of spite with a reply but headed out of the c
ell. The mites that had exited Dowd’s body were still crawling around aimlessly, looking for a new bolthole, but the flesh they’d vacated had upped and gone. She wasn’t altogether surprised. Dowd was an actor to his core. He would postpone his farewell scene as long as possible, in the hope that he’d be at center stage when the final curtain fell. A hopeless ambition, given the fame of his fellow players, and one Jude wasn’t foolish enough to share. The more she learned about the drama unfolding around her, with its roots in the tale of Christos the Reconciler, the more resigned she was to having little or no role in it. Like the Fourth Magi, expunged from the Nativity, she wasn’t wanted in the Gospel about to be written; and having seen the pitiful place a king’s testament had come to, she was not about to waste time writing her own.
Thirteen
I
CLEM’S DUTIES WERE DONE for the night. He’d been out since seven the previous evening, about the same business that took him out every night: the shepherding of those among the city’s homeless too frail or too young to survive long on its streets with only concrete and cardboard for a bed. Midsummer Night was only two days away, and the hours of darkness were short and relatively balmy, but there were other stalkers besides the cold that preyed on the weak—all human—and the work of denying them their quarry took him through the empty hours after midnight and left him, as now, exhausted, but too full of feeling to lay down his head and sleep. He’d seen more human misery in the three months he’d been working with the homeless than in the four decades preceding that. People living in the extremes of deprivation within spitting distance of the city’s most conspicuous symbols of justice, faith, and democracy: without money, without hope, and many (these the saddest) withoutmuch left of their sanity. When he returned home after these nightly treks, the hole left in him by Taylor’s passing not filled but at least forgotten for a while, it was with expressions of such despair in his head that his own, met in the mirror, seemed almost blithe.
