by Clive Barker
"I'm hungry."
Grillo raised his head from Ellen's wet face. She opened her eyes.
"What is it?" she said.
"There's somebody outside the door."
She raised her head from the bed and bit on his chin. It hurt, and he winced.
"Don't do that," he said.
She bit harder.
"Ellen . . ."
"So bite back," she said. He didn't have time to curb his bemused look. Catching it, she said: "I mean it, Grillo," and hooked her finger into his mouth, the ball of her hand locked against his chin. "Open," she said. "I want you to hurt me. Don't be afraid. It's what I want. I'm not fragile. I'm not going to break."
He shook her hold off.
"Do it," she said. "Please, do it."
"You want that?"
"How many times, Grillo? Yes. "
Her dislodged hand had gone to the back of his head. He let her draw his face back down to hers and began to nibble at her lips and then her neck, testing her resistance. There was none. Instead, moans that became louder the harder he bit. Her response drowned all misgivings. He began to work down her neck to her breasts, her moans becoming steadily louder, his name breathed between, urging him on. Her skin began to redden, not just with bite-marks, but with arousal. Sweat broke out on her suddenly. He put his hand down between her legs, his other hand holding her arms above her head. Her cunt was wet, and took his fingers readily. He'd begun to pant with the exertion of holding her down, his shirt sticky on his back. Uncomfortable as he was, the scenario aroused him: her body utterly vulnerable, his closed up behind zipper and buttons. His cock hurt, hard at the wrong angle, but the ache only made him harder, hardness and ache feeding on each other as he fed on her, and on her insistence that he hurt her better, open her wider. Her cunt was hot around his straight fingers, her breasts covered with the twin crescents his teeth had left. Her nipples stood like arrow-heads. He sucked them in; chewed on them. Her moans became sobbing cries, her legs convulsing beneath him, almost throwing them both off the bed. When he relaxed his hold for an instant her hand took his and drove his fingers still deeper into her.
"Don't stop, " she said.
He took up the rhythm she'd set, and doubled it, which had her pushing her hips against his hand to have his fingers inside her to the knuckles. His sweat dropped off his face on to hers as he watched her. Eyes clenched closed she raised her head and licked his forehead and around his mouth, leaving him unkissed but gummy with her saliva.
At last, he felt her entire body stiffen, and she arrested the motion of his hand, her breath coming short and shallow. Then her grip on him—which had drawn blood—relaxed. Her head dropped back. She was suddenly as limp as she'd been when she'd first lain down and exposed herself to him. He rolled off her, his heartbeat playing squash against the walls of his chest and skull.
They lay for a time out of time. He could not have said whether it was seconds or minutes. It was she who made the first move, sitting up and pulling her robe around her. The movement made him open his eyes.
She was tying the sash, pulling the front of her robe together almost primly. He watched her start towards the door.
"Wait," he said. This was unfinished business.
"Next time," she replied.
"What?"
"You heard," came the response. It had the tone of a command. "Next time."
He got up from the bed, aware that his arousal probably seemed ridiculous to her now, but infuriated by her lack of reciprocity. She watched his approach with a half-smile on her face.
"That's just the start," she said to him. She rubbed at the places on her neck where he'd bitten her.
"And what am I supposed to do?" Grillo asked.
She opened the door. Cooler air brushed against his face.
"Lick your fingers," she said.
Only now did he remember the sound he'd heard, and half-expected to see Philip retreating from his spyhole. But there was only the air, drying the spittle on his face to a fine, taut mask.
"Coffee?" she said. She didn't wait for an answer, but headed to the kitchen. Grillo stood and watched her go. His body, weakened by his sickness, had begun to respond to the adrenaline pumped around it. His extremities trembled, as though from the marrow outwards.
He listened to the sound of the coffee-making: water running, cups being rinsed. Without thinking he put his fingers, which smelled strongly of her sex, to his nose and lips.
IV
JOKEMEISTER Lamar got out of the limo at the front of Buddy Vance's house and tried to wipe the smile off his face. It was difficult for him at the best of times, but now—at the worst, with his old partner dead and so many harsh words never healed between them—it was virtually impossible. For every action there was a reaction, and Lamar's reaction to death was a grin.
He'd read once about the origins of the smile. Some anthropologist had theorized that it was a sophisticated form of the ape's response to those unwanted in the tribe: the weak or unstable. In essence it said: You 're a liability. Get out of here! From that exiling leer had evolved laughter, which was the baring of teeth to a professional idiot. It too announced contempt, at root. It too proclaimed the object of mirth a liability: one to be kept at bay with grimaces.
Lamar didn't know how the theory stood up to analysis, but he'd been in comedy long enough to believe it plausible. Like Buddy he'd made a fortune acting the fool. The essential difference, in his opinion (and that of many of their mutual friends), was that Buddy had been a fool. Which wasn't to say he didn't mourn the man; he did. For fourteen years they'd been lords of all they'd convulsed, a shared success which left Lamar feeling the poorer for his ex-partner's death despite the breach that had opened between them.
That breach had meant Lamar had met the sumptuous Rochelle once only, and that by accident, at a charity dinner in which he and his wife Tammy had been seated at an adjacent table to Buddy and his bride of the year. That description was one he'd used—to gales of laughter—on several talk shows. At the dinner he'd taken the opportunity of putting one over on Buddy by insinuating himself with Rochelle while the groom was emptying his bladder of champagne. It had been a brief meeting—Lamar had returned to his table as soon as he saw that Buddy had seen him—but must have made some impression because Rochelle had called personally to invite him up to Coney Eye for the party. He had persuaded Tammy that she'd be bored by the shindig and arrived a day early to have some time with the widow.
"You look wonderful," he told her as he stepped over Buddy's threshold.
"It could be worse," she said, a reply which didn't mean that much until, an hour later, she told him that the party thrown in Buddy's honor had been suggested by the man himself.
"You mean he knew he was going to die?" Lamar said.
"No. I mean he came back to me."
Had he been drinking he might well have done the old choking and spraying routine, but he was glad he hadn't when he realized she was deadly serious.
"You mean . . . his spirit?" he said.
"I suppose that's the word. I don't really know. I don't have any religion, so I don't quite know how to explain it."
"You're wearing a crucifix," Lamar observed.
"It belonged to my mother. I never put it on before."
"Why now? Are you afraid of something?"
She sipped at the vodka she'd poured. It was early for cocktails, but she needed its comfort.
"Maybe, a little," she said.
"Where's Buddy now?" Lamar asked, impressed by his ability to keep a straight face. "I mean . . . is he in the house?"
"I don't know. He came to me in the middle of the night, said he wanted this party throwing, then he left."
"As soon as the check arrived, right?"
"This isn't a joke."
"I'm sorry. You're right of course."
"He said he wanted everyone to come to the house and celebrate."
"I'll drink to that," Lamar said, raising his glass. "Wherever yo
u are, Buddy. Skol. "
Toast over, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. Interesting woman, he thought as he went. Nuts of course, and—rumor had it—addicted to every chemical high to be had, but he was no saint himself. Ensconced in the black marble bathroom, leered down upon by a row of ghost-ride masks, he set up a few lines of cocaine and snorted himself high, his thoughts turning back to the beauty below. He'd have her; that was the long and short of it. Preferably in Buddy's bed, with Buddy's towels to wipe himself off afterwards.
Leaving his smirking reflection he stepped back on to the landing. Which was Buddy's bedroom? he wondered. Did it have mirrors on the ceiling, like the whore-house in Tucson they'd patronized together once upon a time, and Buddy had said, as he put that damn snake of a dick of his away: one day, Jimmy, I want a bedroom like this?
Lamar opened half a dozen doors before he found the master bedroom. It, like all the other rooms, was decorated with carnivalia. There was no mirror on the ceiling. But the bed was large. Big enough for three, which had always been Buddy's favored number. As he was about to return downstairs Lamar heard water running in the en suite bathroom.
"Rochelle, is that you?"
The light was not on inside, however. Obviously a tap had simply been left to run. Lamar pushed the door open. From inside, Buddy spoke: "No light, please."
Without the coke in his system Lamar would have been out of the house before the ghost spoke again, but the drug pumped him up long enough for Buddy to reassure his partner that there was nothing to be afraid of.
"She said you were here," Lamar breathed.
"You didn't believe her?"
"No."
"Who are you?"
"What do you mean: who am I? It's Jimmy. Jimmy Lamar."
"Of course. Come in. We should have words."
"No . . . I'll stay out here."
"I can't hear you too well."
"Turn off the water."
"I need it to piss."
"You piss?"
"Only when I drink."
"You drink?"
"Do you blame me, with her down there and me unable to touch her?"
"Yeah. That's too bad."
"You'll have to do it for me, Jimmy."
"Do what?"
"Touch her. You're not gay are you?"
"You know better than that."
"Of course."
"The number of women we had together."
"We were friends."
"The best. And I must say you're real sweet, letting me have Rochelle."
"She's yours. And in return—"
"What?"
"Be my friend again."
"Buddy. I missed you."
"I missed you, Jimmy."
"You were right," he said when he got downstairs. "Buddy is here."
"You saw him."
"No, but he spoke to me. He wants us to be friends. Him and me. And you and me. Close friends."
"Then we will be."
"For Buddy."
"For Buddy."
Upstairs, the Jaff turned this new and unexpected element in the game over, and judged it good. He had intended to pass himself off as Buddy—a trick all too easy, given that he'd drunk down the man's thoughts—to Rochelle only. In that form he'd come visiting two nights before, and found her drunk in her bed. It had been easy to coax her into believing he was her husband's spirit; the only difficult part had been preventing himself from claiming marital rights. Now, with the partner under the same delusion, he had two agents in the house to assist him when the guests arrived.
After the events of the previous night he was glad he'd had the foresight to organize the party. Fletcher's machinations had caught him off-guard. In that act of self-destruction his enemy had contrived to put a sliver of his hallucigenia-producing soul into a hundred, maybe two hundred minds. Even now the recipients were dreaming up their personal divinities; and making them solid. They would not, on past evidence, be particularly barbaric; certainly not the equals of his terata. Nor, without their instigator alive to fuel them, would they linger long on this plane of being. But they could still do his well-laid plans much mischief. He might well need the creatures he could summon from the hearts of Hollywood to prevent Fletcher's last testament from interfering.
Soon, the journey that had begun the first time he'd heard of the Art—so long ago he couldn't even remember from whom—would end with his entering Quiddity. After so many years of preparation it would be like coming home. He'd be a thief in Heaven, and therefore King of Heaven, given that he'd be the only presence there qualified to steal the throne. He would own the dreamlife of the world; be all things to all men, and never be judged.
There were two days left, then. The first, the twenty-four hours it would take him to realize that ambition.
The second, the day of the Art, when he would reach the place where dawn and dusk, noon and night, occurred at the same perpetual moment.
Thereafter, there was only forever.
V
____________ i ____________
FOR Tesla, leaving Palomo Grove was like waking from sleep in which some dream-tutor had instructed her that all life was dreaming. There would be no simple division from now on between sense and nonsense; no arrogant assumption that this experience was real and this one not. Maybe she was living in a movie, she thought as she drove. Come to think of it that wasn't a bad idea for a screenplay: the story of a woman who discovered that human history was just one vast family saga, written by that underrated team Gene and Chance, and watched by angels, aliens and folks in Pittsburgh who had tuned in by accident and were hooked. Maybe she'd write that story, once this adventure was over.
Except that it would never be over; not now. That was one of the consequences of seeing the world this way. For better or worse she would spend the rest of her life anticipating the next miracle; and while she waited, inventing it in her fiction, so as to prick herself and her audience into vigilance.
The drive was easy, at least as far as Tijuana, and left room for such musings. Once she had crossed the border, however, she had to consult the map she'd bought, and was obliged to postpone any further plottings or prophecies. She had committed Fletcher's instructions to memory like an acceptance speech, and they—with help from the map—proved good. Never having travelled the peninsula before she was surprised to find it so deserted. This was not an environment in which man and his works had much hope of sustained existence, which led to the expectation that the Mission ruins, when she reached them, would most likely have been eroded, or swept away into the Pacific, whose murmur grew in volume as her route took her closer to the coast.
She could not have been more wrong in that expectation. As she rounded the bend of the hill Fletcher had directed her to, it was immediately apparent that the Misión de Santa Catrina was very much intact. The sight made her innards churn. A few minutes' drive, and she'd be standing before the site at which an epic story—of which she knew only the tiniest part—had begun. For a Christian, perhaps Bethlehem would have aroused the same excitement. Or Golgotha.
It was not a place of skulls, she found. Quite the reverse. Though the fabric of the Mission had not been rebuilt—its blasted rubble was still spread over a substantial area—somebody had clearly preserved it from further dissolution. The reason for that preservation only became apparent once she'd parked the car, some way off from the building, and approached on foot across the dusty ground. The Mission, built for holy purpose, deserted, then turned to an endeavor its architects would surely have deemed heretical, was once again sanctified.
The closer she approached the jigsaw walls, the more evidence she found before her. First, the flowers, laid in rough bunches and wreaths among the scattered stones, their colors brilliant in the clear sea air.
Second, and more poignant, the small bundles of domestic items—a loaf, a jug, a door handle—that had been bound up with scraps of scrawled-upon paper and laid among the blossoms in such profusion she could scarcely take a
step without treading on something. The sun was slipping away now, but its deepening gold only served to enhance the sense that this was a haunted place. She negotiated the rubble as quietly as she could, for fear of disturbing its occupants, human or otherwise. If there were miraculous beings in Ventura County (walking the streets, no less, unabashed) how much more likely that here, on this lonely headland, there should be won der-workers?
Who they might be, and what shape (if any) they took, she didn't even concern herself to try to guess. But if the number of gifts and supplications laid underfoot testified to anything it was that prayers were answered here.
The bundles and the messages left outside the Mission were affecting enough, but those inside were more moving still. She stepped through a gap in one of the walls into a silent crowd of portraits: dozens of photographs and sketches of men, women and children fixed to the stone along with a fragment of clothing, or a shoe; even spectacles. What she'd wandered through outside had been gifts. These, she guessed, were items for some bloodhound god to sniff. They belonged to missing souls, brought here in the hope that the powers would usher the lost back on to a familiar road and so bring them home.
Standing in the gilded light, surveying this collection, she felt like an intruder. Religious displays had seldom if ever moved her. The sentiments were so smug in their certainty, the images so rhetorical. But this display of simple faith touched a nerve she'd thought numbed by cant. She recalled the way she'd felt the first time she'd returned home for Christmas after a self-imposed exile from the family bosom of five years. It had been as claustrophobic as she'd anticipated, but at midnight on Christmas Eve, walking on Fifth Avenue, a forgotten feeling had sucked all the breath from her, and brought her to tears in an instant: that once she had believed. That belief had come from inside, out. Not taught, not bullied, just there. The first tears that had come were gratitude for the bliss of knowing belief again; their sisters, sadness that it passed as quickly as it had come, like a spirit moving through her and away.
