The Great and Secret Show

by Clive Barker

  For one, a being not purified by the rigors of self-denial would have power over a place kept from all but the purged and the perfect. Fletcher did not entirely understand what Quiddity was (perhaps no human could), but he was certain the Jaff, who'd used the Nuncio to cheat his way out of his limitations, would wreak havoc there. The dream-sea and its island (islands perhaps; he'd heard Jaff once say there were archipelagos) were visited by humanity at three vital times, in innocence, extremis, and love. On the shores of Ephemeris they mingled briefly with absolutes; saw sights and heard stories that would keep them from insanity in the face of being alive. There, briefly, was pattern and purpose; there was a glimpse of continuity; there was the Show, the Great and Secret Show, which rhyme and ritual were created to be keepsakes of. If that island were to become the Jaff's playground, the damage would be incalculable. What was secret would become commonplace; what was holy, desanctified; and a species kept from lunacy by its dream journeys there would be left unhealed.

  There was another fear in Fletcher, less easily thought through because less coherent. It centered on the tale the Jaff had first presented him with, when he'd appeared in Washington with his offer of funds to pursue the riddle of the Nuncio. There had been, he'd said, a man called Kissoon: a shaman who'd known about the Art and its powers, whom the Jaff had finally found in a place that he'd claimed was a loop of time. Fletcher had listened to the account not really believing much of it, but subsequent events had spiralled to such fantastical heights the idea of Kissoon's Loop seemed small beer now. What part the shaman, with his attempt to have the Jaff murder him, played in the grand scheme, Fletcher couldn't know, but his instinct told him it was by no means finished with. Kissoon had been the last surviving member of the Shoal; an order of elevated human beings who had guarded the Art from the likes of the Jaff since Homo sapiens began to dream. Why then had he allowed a man like Jaff, who must have stunk of ambition from the outset, access to his Loop? Why indeed had he been in hiding there at all? And what had happened to the other members of the Shoal?

  It was too late now to pursue answers to these questions; but he wanted to put them into somebody else's head besides his own. He would make one last attempt to bridge the gap between himself and his own. If Howard were not the recipient of these observations then they'd go to nothing when he, Fletcher, made his exit.

  Which brought him back to the grim business ahead; its method and its setting. It had to be a piece of theater; a spectacular last act that would coax the people of Palomo Grove away from their television screens and into the streets, wide-eyed. After some weighing up of alternatives he chose one, and, still calling his son to him, started towards the site of his final liberation.

  Howie had heard Fletcher's call as he fled before the Jaff's army, but the waves of panic that kept breaking over him kept him from fixing their place of origin. He ran blindly, the terata on his heels. It was only when he felt he'd gained sufficient lead to take a breath that his confounded senses heard his name called clearly enough for him to change his route, and follow the summons. When he went, he went with a speed in his heels he'd not believed himself capable of; and even though his lungs labored he squeezed from them sufficient breath for a few words in answer to Fletcher.

  "I hear you," he said as he ran, "I hear you. Father. . . I hear you."

  XI

  ____________ i ____________

  TESLA had told it right. A lousy nurse she was; but a very capable bully. The moment Grillo woke and found her back in his room she told him plainly that suffering in an alien bed was the act of a martyr and became him all too well. If he wanted to avoid cliché he should allow her to take him back to L.A. and deposit his sickly frame where he could be reassured by the scent of his own unwashed laundry.

  "I don't want to go," he protested.

  "What's the use of staying here, besides costing Abernethy a heap of money?"

  "That's a start."

  "Don't be petty, Grillo."

  "I'm sick. I'm allowed to be petty. Besides, this is where the story is."

  "You can write it better at home than lying here in a pool of sweat feeling sorry for yourself."

  "Maybe you're right."

  "Oh . . . is the great man conceding something?"

  "I'll go back for twenty-four hours. Get my shit together."

  "You know you look about thirteen," Tesla said, mellowing her tone. "I never saw you like this before. It's kind of sexy. I like you vulnerable."

  "Now she tells me."

  "Old news, old news. There was a time I'd have given my right arm for you—"

  "Now?"

  "The most I'll do is take you home."

  The Grove could have been a set for a post-holocaust movie, Tesla thought as she drove Grillo out towards the freeway: the streets were deserted in every direction. Despite all that Grillo had told her about what he'd seen or suspected was going on here, she was leaving without getting so much as a glimpse.

  Hold that thought. Forty yards ahead of the car a young man stumbled around the corner and raced across the road. At the opposite sidewalk his legs gave out beneath him. He fell, and seemed to have some difficulty getting up again. The distance was too great and the light too dim for her to grasp much of his condition but he was evidently hurt. There was something misshapen about his body; hunched or swollen. She drove on towards him. At her side, Grillo, whom she'd instructed to doze until they reached L.A., opened his eyes.

  "Are we there already?"

  "That guy—" she said, nodding in the hunchback's direction. "Look at him. He looks even sicker than you do."

  From the corner of her eye she saw Grillo sit bolt upright, and peer through the windshield.

  "There's something on his back," he muttered.

  "I can't see."

  She brought the car to a halt a little way from where the youth was still struggling to get to his feet; and still failing.

  Grillo was right, she saw. He was indeed wearing something. "It's a backpack," she said.

  "No way, Tesla," Grillo said. He reached for the door handle. "It's alive. Whatever it is, it's alive."

  "Stay here," she told him.

  "Are you kidding?"

  As he pushed the door open—that effort alone enough to set his head spinning—he caught sight of Tesla rummaging in the glove compartment.

  "What've you lost?"

  "When Yvonne was killed—" she said, grunting as she dug through the detritus "—I swore I'd never leave home unarmed again."

  "What are you saying?"

  She pulled a gun out of hiding. "And I never have."

  "Do you know how to use that?"

  "Wish I didn't," she said, and got out of the car. Grillo went to follow. As he did so the car began to roll backwards down the mild incline of the street. He pitched himself across the seat to the handbrake, an action violent enough to spin his head around. When he started to haul himself up again it was almost like tripping: total disorientation.

  A few yards from where Grillo was clutching the car door, waiting for his high to pass, Tesla was almost at the boy's side. He was still attempting to get to his feet. She told him to hold on, help was coming, but all she got in reply was a panic-stricken look. He had reason. Grillo had been right. What she'd taken to be a backpack was indeed alive. It was an animal of some kind (or of many kinds). It glistered as it battened upon him

  "What the fuck is that?" she said.

  This time he did reply; a warning wrapped in moans.

  "Get. . . away . . ." she heard him say, ". . . they're . . . coming after me . . ."

  She glanced back at Grillo, who was still clinging to the car door, his teeth chattering. No help to be had there, and the boy's situation seemed to be worsening. With every twitch of the parasite's limbs—there were so many limbs; and joints; and eyes—his face knotted up.

  ". . . Get away . . ." he growled at her, ". . . please . . . in God's name . . . they're coming."

  He'd turned giddily to squ
int behind him. She followed the line of his agonized gaze, down the street from which he'd pelted. There she saw his pursuers. Seeing, she wished she'd taken his advice before she'd locked eyes with him, and all hope of playing the Pharisee was denied her. His plight was hers now. She couldn't turn her back on him. Her eyes—tutored in the real—tried to reject the lesson they saw coming down the street, but they couldn't. No use trying to deny the horror. It was there in all its absurdity: a pale, muttering tide creeping towards them.

  "Grillo!" she yelled. "Get in the car!"

  The pale army heard her, and picked up its speed.

  "The car, Grillo, get in the fucking car!"

  She saw him fumble for the door, barely in control of his responses. Some of the smaller beasts at the head of the tide were already scuttling towards the vehicle at speed, leaving their larger brethren to come after the boy. There were enough, more than enough, to take all three of them apart joint by joint, and the car too. Despite their multiplicity (no two alike, it seemed) there was the same blank-eyed, relentless intention in every one. They were destroyers.

  She leaned down and took hold of the boy's arm, avoiding the racheting limbs of the parasite as best she could. Its hold on him was too intimate to be undone, she saw. Any attempt to separate them would only invite reprisals.

  "Get up," she told him. "We can make it."

  "You go," he murmured. He was utterly wasted.

  "No," she said. "We both go. No heroics. We both go."

  She glanced back at the car. Grillo was in the act of slamming the door as the army's foot-runners came at the car, hopping up on to the roof and hood. One, the size of a baboon, began to throw its body against the windshield repeatedly.

  The others tore at the door handle and worked their barbs between the windows and their frames.

  "It's me they want," the boy said.

  "If we go, they follow?" Tesla said.

  He nodded. Hauling him to his feet, and turning his right arm (the hand badly injured, she saw) over her shoulder, she fired one shot into the approaching mass—which hit one of the larger beasts but didn't slow it a beat—then turned her back on it and began to haul them both away.

  He had directions to give.

  "Down the Hill," he said.

  "Why?"

  "The Mall . . ."

  Again: "Why?"

  "My father . . . is there."

  She didn't argue. She just hoped father, whoever he was, had some help to offer, because if they succeeded in outrunning the army they were going to be in no fit state to defend themselves at the end of the race.

  As she turned the next corner, the boy offering muttered instructions, she heard the car's windshield shatter.

  A short distance from the drama just played out, the Jaff and Tommy-Ray, with Jo-Beth in tow, watched Grillo fumbling for the ignition, succeeding—after some effort—in getting the car started, and driving off, throwing from the hood the terata that had shattered the windshield.

  "Bastard," said Tommy-Ray.

  "It doesn't matter," the Jaff said. "There's plenty more where he came from. You wait 'til the party tomorrow. Such pickings."

  The creature was not quite dead; it let out a thin whine of complaint.

  "What do we do with it?" Tommy-Ray wondered.

  "Leave it there."

  "Some roadkill," came the boy's reply. "People are going to notice."

  "It won't survive the night," the Jaff replied. "By the time the scavengers have got to it nobody'll know what the hell it was."

  "What the fuck's going to eat that? " Tommy-Ray asked.

  "Anything hungry enough," came the Jaff's reply. "And there's always something hungry enough. Isn't that right, Jo-Beth?" The girl said nothing. She'd given up weeping and talking. All she did was watch her brother with pitiful confusion on her face.

  "Where's Katz going?" the Jaff wondered aloud.

  "Down to the Mall," Tommy-Ray informed him.

  "Fletcher's calling him."

  "Yeah?"

  "Just as I hoped. Wherever the son ends up, that's where we'll find the father."

  "Unless the terata get him first."

  "They won't. They have their instructions."

  "What about the woman with him?"

  "Wasn't that too perfect? What a Samaritan. She's going to die, of course, but what a great way to go, full of how big-fucking-hearted you are."

  The remark elicited a response from the girl.

  "Isn't there anything touches you?" she said.

  The Jaff studied her. "Too much," he said. "Too much touches me. The look on your face. The look on his." He glanced at Tommy-Ray, who grinned, then back at Jo-Beth. "All I want to do is see clearly. Past the feelings, to the reasons. "

  "And this is how? Killing Howie? Destroying the Grove?"

  "Tommy-Ray learned to understand, after his fashion. You can do the same if you'll give me time to explain. It's a long story. But trust me when I say that Fletcher's our enemy, and his son our enemy too. They'd kill me if they could—"

  "Not Howie."

  "Oh yes. He's his father's son even if he doesn't know it. There's a prize to be won soon, Jo-Beth. It's called the Art. And when I have it, I'll share it—"

  "I don't want anything from you."

  "I'll show you an island—"

  "No."

  "—and a shore—"

  He reached to her, stroking her cheek. Against her better judgment his words soothed her. It was not the fetus-head she saw in front of her, but a face that had seen hardship; had been plowed by it, and perhaps had wisdom planted.

  "Later," he said. "We'll have plenty of time to talk. On that island, the day never ends."

  ____________ ii ____________

  "Why don't they overtake us?" Tesla said to Howie.

  Twice the pursuing forces had seemed certain to overtake and overwhelm them, and twice their ranks had slowed at the very moment they were able to realize their ambition. The suspicion was growing on her that the chase was being choreographed. If so, she fretted, by whom? And what was their intention?

  The boy—he'd muttered his name, Howie, several streets back—was heavier by the yard. The last quarter mile to the Mall stretched before her like a Marine assault course. Where was Grillo when she needed him? Lost in the maze of crescents and cul-de-sacs which made this town such a trial to traverse, or a victim of the creatures that had assaulted the car?

  The answer was neither. Trusting that Tesla's wit would keep her ahead of the horde long enough for him to muster help, he drove like a wild man, first to a public telephone, then on to the address he found in it. Though his limbs felt like lead, and his teeth still chattered, his mental processes seemed to him quite clear, though he knew—from the months after the debacle, which he'd spent in a more or less constant alcoholic stupor—that such clarity could be self-deception. How many screeds had he written under the influence, which had seemed lucidity in ink but read like Finnegans Wake once he was sober? Perhaps that was the case now, and he was wasting valuable time when he should have been knocking on the first door he found and rousing help. His instinct told him he'd get none. The appearance of an unshaven individual talking monsters would earn a quick dismissal on any doorstep but that of Hotchkiss.

  The man was at home, and awake.

  "Grillo? Jesus, man, what the hell's wrong with you?"

  Hotchkiss had no right to boast; he looked as used up as Grillo felt. He had a beer in his hand and several of its brothers in his eyes.

  "Just come with me," Grillo said, "I'll explain as we go."

  "Where?"

  "Have you got guns?"

  "I've got a handgun, yeah."

  "Get it."

  "Wait, I need—"

  "No talk," Grillo said. "I don't know which way they've gone, and we—"

  "Listen," Hotchkiss said.

  "What?"

  "Alarms. I hear alarms."

  They'd begun to ring in the supermarket the moment Fletcher began to
smash the windows. They rang in Marvin's Food and Drug, just as loudly, and in the pet store—the din here swelled by the animals woken from their sleep. He encouraged their chorus. The sooner the Grove shook off its lethargy the better, and he knew no surer way of stirring it than assaulting its commercial heart. The summons begun, he raided two of the six stores for props. The drama he had planned would need perfect timing if he was to touch the minds of those who came to watch. If he failed, at least he would not see the consequences of that failure. He'd had too much grief in his life, and too few friends to help him bear it. Of them all he'd perhaps been closest to Raul. Where was he now? Dead, most likely, his ghost haunting the ruins of the Misión de Santa Catrina.

  Picturing the place, Fletcher stopped in his tracks. What about the Nuncio? Was it possible the remains of the Great Work, as Jaffe had liked to call it, was still there on the cliff-top? If so, and some innocent ever stumbled upon it, the whole sorry story might repeat itself. The self-invited martyrdom he was presently orchestrating would be rendered worthless. That was another task to charge Howard with, before they were parted forever.

  Alarms seldom rang for long in the Grove; and certainly never so many at the same time. Their cacophony floated through the town from the wooded perimeter of Deerdell to the widow Vance's house, on the top of the Hill. Though it was too early for the adults of the Grove to be asleep, most of them—whether touched by the Jaff or not—were feeling oddly dislocated. They talked with their partners in whispers, when they spoke at all; they stood in doorways or in the middle of their dining rooms having forgotten why they'd first risen from the comfort of their armchairs. If asked, many might have stumbled over their own names.

  But the alarms commanded their attention, confirming what their animal instincts had known from daybreak: that things were not good tonight; not normal, not rational. The only place of safety was behind doors locked and locked again.

  Not everyone was so passive however. Some drew blinds aside to see if anyone in the neighborhood was on the street; others got as far as going to the front door (husbands or wives calling them back, telling them there was no need to step outside; that there was nothing to see that couldn't be seen on the television). It only took one individual to venture out, however, before others followed.