by Clive Barker
"Who are you?"
"Chandaman," the man replied. "Go right in."
There was a light at the far end of the corridor. Jerry pushed open the glass-paneled vestibule doors and walked down towards it.
Behind him, he heard the front door snap closed, and then the echoing tread of Garvey's lieutenant. Garvey was talking with another man, shorter than Chandaman, who was holding a sizeable torch. When the pair heard Jerry approach they looked his way; their conversation abruptly ceased. Garvey offered no welcoming comment or hand, but merely said: "About time."
"The rain…" Jerry began, then thought better of offering a self-evident explanation.
"You'll catch your death," the man with the torch said. Jerry immediately recognized the dulcet tones of: "Fryer."
"The same," the man returned.
"Pleased to meet you."
They shook hands, and as they did so Jerry caught sight of Garvey, who was staring at him as though in search of a second head. The man didn't say anything for what seemed like half a minute, but simply studied the growing discomfort on Jerry's face.
"I'm not a stupid man," Garvey said, eventually.
The statement, coming out of nowhere, begged response.
"I don't even believe you're the main man in all of this," Garvey went on. "I'm prepared to be charitable." "What's this about?"
"Charitable -” Garvey repeated,"- because I think you're out of your depth. Isn't that tight?"
Jerry just frowned.
"I think that's tight," Fryer replied.
"I don't think you understand how much trouble you're in even now, do you?" Garvey said.
Jerry was suddenly uncomfortably aware of Chandaman standing behind him, and of his own utter vulnerability. "But I don't think ignorance should ever be bliss," Garvey was saying. "I mean, even if you don't understand, that doesn't make you exempt, does it?"
"I haven't a clue what you're talking about," Jerry protested mildly. Garvey's face, by the light of the torch, was drawn and pale; he looked in need of a holiday.
"This place," Garvey returned. "I'm talking about this place. The women you put in here… for my benefit. What's it all about, Coloqhoun? That's all I want to know. What's it all about?"
Jerry shrugged lightly. Each word Garvey uttered merely perplexed him more; but the man had already told him ignorance would not be considered a legitimate excuse. Perhaps a question was the wisest reply. "You saw women here?" he said.
Whores, more like," Garvey responded. His breath smelt of last week's cigar ash. "Who are you working for, Coloqhoun?"
"For myself. The deal I offered-”
"Forget your fucking deal," Garvey said. "I'm not interested in deals."
"I see," Jerry replied. "Then I don't see any point in this conversation." He took a half-step away from Garvey, but the man's arm shot out and caught hold of his rain-sodden coat.
"I didn't tell you to go," Garvey said.
"I've got business "Then it'll have to wait," the other replied, scarcely relaxing his grip. Jerry knew that if he tried to shrug off Garvey and make a dash for the front door he'd be stopped by Chandaman before he made three paces; if, on the other hand, he didn't try to escape "I don't much like your sort," Garvey said, removing his hand. "Smart brats with an eye to the main chance. Think you're so damn clever, just because you've got a fancy accent and a silk tie. Let me tell you something -” He jabbed his finger at Jerry's throat,"- I don't give a shit about you. I just want to know who you work for. Understand?" "I already told you-”
"Who do you work for?" Garvey insisted, punctuating each word with a fresh jab. "Or you're going to feel very sick."
"For Christ's sake – I'm not working for anybody. And I don't know anything about any women." "Don't make it worse than it already is," Fryer advised, with feigned concern.
"I'm telling the truth."
"I think the man wants to be hurt," Fryer said. Chandaman gave a joyless laugh. "Is that what you want?" "Just name some names," Garvey said. "Or we're going to break your legs." The threat, unequivocal as it was, did nothing for Jerry's clarity of mind. He could think of no way out of this but to continue to insist upon his innocence. If he named some fictitious overlord the lie would be uncovered in moments, and the consequences could only be worse for the attempted deception.
"Check my credentials," he pleaded. "You've got the resources. Dig around. I'm not a company man, Garvey; I never have been."
Garvey's eye left Jerry's face for a moment and moved to his shoulder. Jerry grasped the significance of the sign a heartbeat too late to prepare himself for the blow to his kidneys from the man at his back. He pitched forward, but before he could collide with Garvey, Chandaman had snatched at his collar and was throwing him against the wall. He doubled up, the pain blinding him to all other thoughts. Vaguely, he heard Garvey asking him again who his boss was. He shook his head. His skull was full of ball-bearings; they rattled between his ears.
"Jesus… Jesus…" he said, groping for some word of defence to keep another beating at bay, but he was hauled upright before any presented itself. The torch-beam was turned on him. He was ashamed of the tears that were rolling down his cheeks.
"Names," said Garvey.
The ball-bearings rattled on.
"Again," said Garvey, and Chandaman was moving in to give his fists further exercise. Garvey called him off as Jerry came close to passing out. The leather face withdrew.
"Stand up when I'm talking to you," Garvey said.
Jerry attempted to oblige, but his body was less than willing to comply. It trembled, it felt fit to die. "Stand up," Fryer reiterated, moving between Jerry and his tormentor to prod the point home. Now, in close proximity, Jerry smelt that acidic scent Carole had caught on the stairs: it was Fryer's cologne. "Stand up!" the man insisted.
Jerry raised a feeble hand to shield his face from the blinding beam. He could not see any of the trio's faces, but he was dimly aware that Fryer was blocking Chandaman's access to him. To Jerry's right, Garvey struck a match, and applied the flame to a cigar. A moment presented itself: Garvey occupied, the thug stymied. Jerry took it. Ducking down beneath the torch-beam he broke from his place against the wall, contriving to knock the torch from Fryer's hand as he did so. The light-source clattered across the tiles and went out.
In the sudden darkness, Jerry made a stumbling bid for freedom. Behind him, he heard Garvey curse; heard Chandaman and Fryer collide as they scrabbled for the fallen torch. He began to edge his way along the wall to the end of the corridor. There was evidently no safe route past his tormentors to the front door; his only hope lay in losing himself in the networks of corridors that lay ahead.
He reached a corner, and made a right, vaguely remembering that this led him off the main thoroughfares and into the service corridors. The beating that he'd taken, though interrupted before it could incapacitate, had rendered him breathless and bruised. He felt every step he took as a sharp pain in his lower abdomen and back. When he slipped on the slimy tiles, the impact almost made him cry out.
At his back, Garvey was shouting again. The torch had been located. Its light bounced down the labyrinth to find him. Jerry hurried on, glad of the murky illumination, but not of its source. They would follow, and quickly. If, as Carole had said, the place was a simple spiral, the corridors describing a relentless loop with no way out of the configuration, he was lost. But he was committed. Head giddied by the mounting heat, he moved on, praying to find a fire-exit that would give him passage out of this trap.
"He went this way," Fryer said. "He must have done."
Garvey nodded; it was indeed the likeliest route for Coloqhoun to have taken. Away from the light and into the labyrinth.
"Shall we go after him?" Chandaman said. The man was fairly salivating to finish the beating he'd started. "He can't have got far."
"No," said Garvey. Nothing, not even the promise of the knighthood, would have induced him to follow. Fryer had already advanced down the passageway
a few yards, shining the torch-beam on the glistening walls. "It's warm," he said.
Garvey knew all too well how warm it was. Such heat wasn't natural, not for England. This was a temperate isle; that was why he had never set foot off it. The sweltering heat of other continents bred grotesqueries he wanted no sight of.
"What do we do?" Chandaman demanded. "Wait for him to come out?"
Garvey pondered this. The smell from the corridor was beginning to distress him. His innards were churning, his skin was crawling. Instinctively, he put his hand to his groin. His manhood had shrunk in trepidation. "No," he said suddenly.
"No?"
We're not waiting."
"He can't stay in there forever."
"I said no!" He hadn't anticipated how profoundly the sweat of the place would upset him. Irritating as it was to let Coloqhoun slip away like this, he knew that if he stayed here much longer he risked losing his self-control. "You two can wait for him at his flat," he told Chandaman. "He'll have to come home sooner or later." "Damn shame," Fryer muttered as he emerged from the passageway. "I like a chase."
Perhaps they weren't following. It was several minutes now since Jerry had heard the voices behind him. His heart had stopped its furious pumping. Now, with the adrenalin no longer giving speed to his heels, and distracting his muscles from their bruising, his pace slowed to a crawl. His body protested at even that.
When the agonies of taking another step became too much he slid down the wall and sat slumped across the passageway. His rain-drenched clothes clung to his body and about his throat; he felt both chilled and suffocated by them. He pulled at the knot of his tie, and then unbuttoned his waistcoat and his shirt. The air in the labyrinth was warm on his skin. Its touch was welcome.
He closed his eyes and made a studied attempt to mesmerise himself out of this pain. What was feeling but a trick of the nerve-endings?; there were techniques for dislocating the mind from the body, and leaving agonies behind. But no sooner had his lids closed than he heard muted sounds somewhere nearby. Footsteps; the lull of voices. It wasn't Garvey and his associates: the voices were female. Jerry raised his leaden head and opened his eyes. Either he had become used to the darkness in his few moments of meditation or else a light had crept into the passageway; it was surely the latter.
He got to his feet. His jacket was dead weight, and he sloughed it off, leaving it to lie where he'd been squatting. Then he started in the direction of the light. The heat seemed to have risen considerably in the last few minutes: it gave him mild hallucinations. The walls seemed to have forsaken verticality, the air to have traded transparency for a shimmering aurora.
He turned a corner. The light brightened. Another corner, and he was delivered into a small tiled chamber, the heat of which took his breath away. He gasped like a stranded fish, and peered across the chamber – the air thickening with every pulse-beat – at the door on the far side. The yellowish light through it was brighter still, but he could not summon the will to follow it a yard further; the heat here had defeated him. Sensing that he was within an ace of unconsciousness, he put his hand out to support himself, but his palm slid on the slick tiles, and he fell, landing on his side. He could not prevent a shout spilling from him.
Groaning his misery, be tucked his legs up close to his body, and lay where he'd fallen. If Garvey had heard his yell, and sent his lieutenants in pursuit, then so be it. He was past caring.
The sound of movement reached him from across the chamber. Raising his head an inch from the floor he opened his eyes to a slit. A naked girl had appeared in the doorway opposite, or so his reeling senses informed him. Her skin shone as if oiled; here and there, on her breasts and thighs, were smudges of what might have been old blood. Not her blood, however. There was no wound to spoil her gleaming body.
The girl had begun to laugh at him, a light, easy laugh that made him feel foolish. Its musicality entranced him however, and he made an effort to get a better look at her. She had started to move across the chamber towards him, still laughing; and now he saw that there were others behind her. These were the women Garvey had babbled about; this the trap he had accused Jerry of setting.
"Who are you?" he murmured as the girl approached him. Her laughter faltered when she looked down at his pain contorted features.
He attempted to sit upright, but his arms were numb, and he slid back to the tiles again. The woman had not answered his inquiry, nor did she make any attempt to help him. She simply stared down at him as a pedestrian might at a drunk in the gutter, her face unreadable. Looking up at her, Jerry felt his tenuous grip on consciousness slipping. The heat, his pain, and now this sudden eruption of beauty was too much for him. The distant women were dispersing into darkness, the entire chamber folding up like a magician's box until the sublime creature in front of him claimed his attention utterly. And now, at her silent insistence, his mind's eye seemed to be plucked from his head, and suddenly he was speeding over her skin, her flesh a landscape, each pore a pit, each hair a pylon. He was hers, utterly. She drowned him in her eyes, and flayed him with her lashes; she rolled him across her abdomen, and down the soft channel of her spine. She took him between her buttocks, and then up into her heat, and out again just as he thought he must burn alive. The velocity exhilarated him. He was aware that his body, somewhere below, was hyper-ventilating in its terror; but his imagination – careless of breath – went willingly where she sent him, looping like a bird, until he was thrown, ragged and dizzy, back into the cup of his skull. Before he could apply the fragile tool of reason to the phenomena he had just experienced, his eyes fluttered closed and he passed out.
The body does not need the mind. It has procedures aplenty – lungs to be filled and emptied, blood to be pumped and food profited from – none of which require the authority of thought. Only when one or more of these procedures falters does the mind become aware of the intricacy of the mechanism it inhabits. Coloqhoun's faint lasted only a few minutes; but when he came to he was aware of his body as he had seldom been before: as a trap. Its fragility was a trap; its shape, its size, its very gender was a trap. And there was no flying out of it; he was shackled to, or in, this wretchedness.
These thoughts came and went. In between them there were brief sights through which he fell giddily, and still briefer moments in which he glimpsed the world outside himself.
The women had picked him up. His head lolled; his hair dragged on the floor. I am a trophy, he thought in a more coherent instant, then the darkness came again. And again he struggled to the surface, and now they were carrying him along the edge of the large pool. His nostrils were filled with contradictory scents, both delectable and fetid. From the corner of his lazy eye he could see water so bright it seemed to burn as it lapped the shores of the pool: and something else too – shadows moving in the brightness.
They mean to drown me, he thought. And then: I'm already drowning. He imagined water filling his mouth: imagined the forms he had glimpsed in the pool invading his throat and slipping into his belly. He struggled to vomit them back up, his body convulsing.
A hand was laid on his face. The palm was blissfully cool. "Hush," somebody murmured to him, and at the words his delusions melted away. He felt himself coaxed out of his terrors and into consciousness.
The hand had evaporated from his brow. He looked around the gloomy room for his saviour, but his eyes didn't travel far. On the other side of this chamber – which looked to have been a communal shower-room – several pipes, set high in the wall, delivered solid arcs of water onto the tiles, where gutters channeled it away. A fine spray, and the gushing of the fountains, filled the air. Jerry sat up. There was movement behind the cascading veil of water: a shape too vast by far to be human. He peered through the drizzle to try and make sense of the folds of flesh. W as it an animal? There was a pungent smell in here that had something of the menagerie about it.
Moving with considerable caution so as not to arouse the beast's attention, Jerry attempted to stand up
. His legs, however, were not the equal of his intention. All he could do was crawl a little way across the room on his hands and knees, and peer – one beast at another – through the veil.
He sensed that he was sensed; that the dark, recumbent creature had turned its eyes in his direction. Beneath its gaze, he felt his skin creep with gooseflesh, but he couldn't take his eyes off it. And then, as he squinted to scrutinize it better, a spark of phosphorescence began in its substance, and spread – fluttering waves of jaundiced light up and across its tremendous form, revealing itself to Coloqhoun. Not it; she. He knew indisputably that this creature was female, though it resembled no species or genus he knew of. As the ripples of luminescence moved through the creature's physique, it revealed with every fresh pulsation some new and phenomenal configuration. Watching her, Jerry thought of something slow and molten – glass, perhaps; or stone – its flesh extruded into elaborate forms and recalled again into the furnace to be remade. She had neither head nor limbs recognizable as such, but her contours were ripe with clusters of bright bubbles that might have been eyes, and she threw out here and there iridescent ribbons – slow, pastel flames – that seemed momentarily to ignite the very air.
Now the body issued a series of soft noises: scuttlings and sighs. He wondered if he was being addressed, and if so, how he was expected to respond. Hearing footballs behind him, be glanced round at one of the women for guidance. "Don't be afraid," she said.
"I'm not," he replied. It was the truth. The prodigy in front of him was electrifying, but woke no fear in him. "What is she?" he asked.
The woman stood close to him. Her skin, bathed by the shimmering light off the creature, was golden. Despite the circumstances – or perhaps because of them – he felt a tremor of desire.
"She is the Madonna. The Virgin Mother."
Mother? Jerry mouthed, swiveling his head back to look at the creature again. The waves of phosphorescence had ceased to break across her body. Now the light pulsed in one part of her anatomy only, and at this region, in rhythm with the pulse, the Madonna's substance was swelling and splitting. Behind him he heard further footsteps; and now whispers echoed about the chamber, and chiming laughter, and applause.
