Imajica

by Clive Barker

  “What about the child?” Quaisoir asked him. “Was it a son or a daughter?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Truly, I don’t.”

  Another lie, and one his captor sensed. She loosened the noose, and he dropped a few inches, letting out a sob of terror and clutching at the filaments in his panic.

  “Don’t drop me! Please God, don’t drop me!”

  “What about the child?”

  “What do I know?” he said, tears beginning again, only this time the real thing. “I’m nothing. I’m a messenger. A spear-carrier.”

  “A pimp,” she said.

  “Yes, that too. I confess it. I’m a pimp! But it’s nothing, it’s nothing. Tell her, Judith! I’m just an actor chappie. A fucking worthless actor chappie!”

  “Worthless, eh?”

  “Worthless!”

  “Then good night,” Quaisoir said, and let him go.

  The noose slipped through his fingers with such suddenness he had no time to take a faster hold, and he dropped like a dead man from a cut rope, not even beginning to shriek for several seconds, as though sheer disbelief had silenced him until the iris of smoky sky above him had closed almost to a dot. When his din finally rose it was high-pitched, but brief.

  As it stopped, Jude laid her palms against the pavement and, without looking up at Quaisoir, murmured her thanks, in part for her preservation but at least as much for Dowd’s dispatch.

  “Who was he?” Quaisoir asked.

  “I only know a little part of this,” Jude replied.

  “Little by little,” Quaisoir said. “That’s how we’ll understand it all. Little . . . by . . . little.”

  Her voice was exhausted, and when Jude looked up she saw the miracle was leaving Quaisoir’s cells. She had sunk to the ground, her unfurled flesh withdrawing into her body, the beatific blue fading from her skin. Jude picked herself up and hobbled from the edge of the hole.

  Hearing her footsteps, Quaisoir said, “Where are you going?”

  “Just away from the well,” Jude said, laying her brow and her palms against the welcome chill of the wall. “Do you know who I am?” she asked Quaisoir, after a little time.

  “Yes,” came the soft reply. “You’re the me I lost. You’re the other Judith.”

  “That’s right.” She turned to see that Quaisoir was smiling, despite her pain.

  “That’s good,” Quaisoir said. “If we survive this, maybe you’ll begin again for both of us. Maybe you’ll see the visions I turned my back on.”

  “What visions?”

  Quaisoir sighed. “I was loved by a great Maestro once,” she said. “He showed me angels. They used to come to our table in sunbeams. I swear. Angels in sunbeams. And I thought we’d live forever, and I’d learn all the secrets of the sea. But I let him lead me out of the sun. I let him persuade me the spirits didn’t matter. Only our will mattered, and if we willed pain, then that was wisdom. I lost myself in such a little time, Judith. Such a little time.” She shuddered. “I was blinded by my crimes before anyone ever took a knife to me.”

  Jude looked pityingly on her sister’s maimed face. “We’ve got to find somebody to clean your wounds,” she said.

  “I doubt there’s a doctor left alive in Yzordderrex,” Quaisoir replied. “They’re always the first to go in any revolution, aren’t they? Doctors, tax collectors, poets. . . .”

  “If we can’t find anybody else, I’ll do it,” Jude said, leaving the security of the wall and venturing back down the incline to where Quaisoir sat.

  “I thought I saw Jesus Christ yesterday,” she said. “He was standing on a roof with his arms open wide. I thought he’d come for me, so that I could make my confession. That’s why I came here: to find Jesu. I heard his messenger.”

  “That was me.”

  “You were . . . in my thoughts?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I found you instead of Christos. That seems like a greater miracle.” She reached out towards Jude, who took her hand. “Isn’t it, sister?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Jude said. “I was myself this morning. Now what am I? A copy, a forgery.”

  The word brought Klein’s Bastard Boy to mind: Gentle the faker, making profit from other people’s genius. Is that why he’d obsessed upon her? Had he seen in her some subtle clue to her true nature and followed her out of devotion to the sham she was?

  “I was happy,” she said, thinking back to the good times she’d shared with him. “Maybe I didn’t always realize I was happy, but I was. I was myself.”

  “You still are.”

  “No,” she said, as close to despair as she could ever remember being. “I’m a piece of somebody else.”

  “We’re all pieces,” Quaisoir said. “Whether we were born or made.” Her fingers tightened around Jude’s hand. “We’re all hoping to be whole again. Will you take me back up to the palace?” she said. “We’ll be safer there than here.”

  “Of course,” Jude replied, helping her up.

  “Do you know which direction to go?”

  She said she did. Despite the smoke and the darkness, the walls of the palace loomed above them, massive but remote.

  “We’ve got quite a climb ahead of us,” Jude said. “It may take us till morning.”

  “The night is long in Yzordderrex,” Quaisoir replied.

  “It won’t last forever,” Jude said.

  “It will for me.”

  “I’m sorry. That was thoughtless. I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Quaisoir said. “I like the dark. I can remember the sun better. Sun, and angels at the table. Will you take my arm, sister? I don’t want to lose you again.”

  Two

  IN ANY OTHER PLACE but this, Gentle might have been frustrated by the sight of so many sealed doors, but as Lazarevich led him closer to the Pivot Tower the atmosphere grew so thick with dread he was glad whatever lay behind those doors was locked away. His guide spoke scarcely at all. When he did it was to suggest that Gentle make the rest of the journey alone.

  “It’s a little way now,” he kept saying. “You don’t need me any more.”

  “That’s not the deal,” Gentle would remind him, and Lazarevich would curse and whine, then head on some distance in silence, until a shriek down one of the passages, or a glimpse of blood spilled on the polished floor, made him halt and start his little speech afresh.

  At no point in this journey were they challenged. If these titanic halls had ever buzzed with activity—and given that small armies could be lost in them, Gentle doubted that they ever had—they were all but deserted now. Those few servants and bureaucrats they did encounter were busy leaving, burdened with hastily gathered belongings as they hurried down the corridors. Survival was their foremost priority. They gave the bleeding soldier and his ill-dressed companion scarcely a look.

  At last they came to a door, this one unsealed, which Lazarevich refused point-blank to enter.

  “This is the Pivot Tower,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “Can’t you feel it?”

  Now it was remarked upon, Gentle did indeed feel a subtle sensation, barely strong enough to be called a tingle, in his fingertips, testicles, and sinuses.

  “That’s the tower, I swear,” Lazarevich whispered.

  Gentle believed him. “All right,” he said. “You’ve done your duty; you’d better go.”

  The man grinned. “You mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, thank you. Whoever you are. Thank you.”

  Before he could skip away, Gentle took hold of his arm and drew him close. “Tell your children,” he said, “not to be soldiers. Poets, maybe, or shoeshiners. But not soldiers. Got it?”

  Lazarevich nodded violently, though Gentle doubted he’d comprehended a word. His only thought was of escape, and he took to his heels the moment Gentle let go of him and was out of sight in two or three seconds. Turning to the beaten
brass doors, Gentle pushed them a few inches wider and slipped inside. The nerve endings in his scrotum and palms knew that something of significance was nearby—what had been subtle sensation was almost painful now—even though his eyes were denied sight of it by the murk of the room he’d entered. He stood by the door until he was able to grasp some sense of what lay ahead. This was not, it seemed, the Pivot Tower itself but an antechamber of some kind, as stale as a sickroom. Its walls were bare, its only furniture a table upon which a canary cage lay overturned, its door open, its occupant flown. Beyond the table, another doorway, which he took, led him into a corridor, staler still than the room he’d left. The source of agitation in his nerve endingswas audible now: a steady tone that might have been soothing under other circumstances. Not knowing which direction it was coming from, he turned to his right and crept down the corridor. A flight of stairs curved out of sight to his left. He chose not to take them, his instinct rewarded by a glimmer of light up ahead. The Pivot’s tone became less insistent as he advanced, suggesting this route was a cul-de-sac, but he headed on towards the light to be certain Pie was not being held prisoner in one of these antechambers.

  As he came within half a dozen strides of the room somebody moved across the doorway, flitting through his field of vision too quickly to be seen. He flattened himself against the wall and edged towards the room. A wick, set in a bowl of oil on a table, shed the light he’d been drawn to. Beside it, several plates contained the remains of a meal. When he reached the door he waited there for the man—the night watch, he supposed—to come back into view. He had no wish to kill him unless it was strictly necessary. There’d be enough widows and orphans in Yzordderrex by tomorrow morning without his adding to the sum. He heard the man fart, not once but several times, with the abandon of someone who believed himself alone, then heard him open another door, his footsteps receding.

  Gentle chanced a glance around the doorjamb. The room was empty. He quickly stepped inside, intending to take from the table the two knives that were lying there. On one of the plates was an already rifled assortment of candies. He couldn’t resist.

  He picked the most luscious and had it to his mouth when the man behind said, “Rosengarten?”

  He looked around, and as his gaze settled on the face across the room his jaw clenched in shock, breaking on the candy between his teeth. Sight and sugar mingled, tongue and eye feeding such a sweetness to his brain he reeled.

  The face before him was a living mirror: his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his hairline, his bearing, his bafflement, his fatigue. In everything but the cut of his coat and the muck beneath his fingernails, another Gentle. But not by that name, surely.

  Swallowing the sweet liqueur from the candy, Gentle very slowly said, “Who . . . in God’s name . . . are you?”

  The shock was draining from the other’s face, and amusement replacing it. He shook his head. “. . . damn kreauchee . . .”

  “That’s your name?” Gentle replied. “Damn Kreauchee?”

  He’d heard stranger in his travels. But the question only served to amuse the other more.

  “Not a bad idea,” he replied. “There’s enough in my system. The Autarch Damn Kreauchee. That’s got a ring to it.”

  Gentle spat the candy from his mouth. “Autarch?” he said.

  The amusement fled from the other’s face. “You’ve made your point, wisp. Now fuck off.” He closed his eyes. “Get a hold of yourself,” he half whispered. “It’s the fucking kreauchee. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.”

  Now Gentle understood. “You think you’re dreaming me, don’t you?” he said.

  The Autarch opened his eyes, angered to find the hallucination still hanging around. “I told you—” he said.

  “What is this kreauchee? Some kind of alcohol? Dope? Do you think I’m a bad trip? Well, I’m not.”

  He started towards the other, who retreated in alarm.

  “Go on,” Gentle said, extending his hand. “Touch me. I’m real. I’m here. My name’s John Zacharias, and I’ve come a long way to see you. I didn’t think that was the reason, but now I’m here, I’m sure it was.”

  The Autarch raised his fists to his temples, as if to beat this drug dream from his brain.

  “This isn’t possible,” he said. There was more than disbelief in his voice; there was an unease that was close to fear. “You can’t be here. Not after all these years.”

  “Well, I am,” said Gentle. “I’m as confused as you, believe me. But I’m here.”

  The Autarch studied him, turning his head this way and that, as though he still expected to find some angle from which to view the visitor that would reveal him as an apparition. But after a minute of such study he gave it up and simply stared at Gentle, his face a maze of furrows.

  “Where did you come from?” he said slowly.

  “I think you know,” Gentle replied.

  “The Fifth?”

  “Yes.”

  “You came to bring me down, didn’t you? Why didn’t I see it? You started this revolution! You were out in the streets, sowing the seeds! No wonder I couldn’t root the rebels out. I kept wondering: Who is it? Who’s out there, plotting against me? Execution after execution, purge after purge, and I never got to the one at the heart of it. The one who was as clever as me. The nights I lay awake thinking: Who is it? Who? I made a list as long as my arm. But never you, Maestro. Never Sartori.”

  Hearing the Autarch name himself was shocking enough, but this second naming bred utter rebellion in Gentle’s system. His head filled with the same din that had beset him on the platform at Mai-ké, and his belly disgorged its contents in one bilious heave. He put his hand out to the table to steady himself and missed the edge, slipping to the floor where his vomit was already spattered. Floundering in his own mess, he tried to shake the noise from his head, but all he did was unknot the confusion of sounds and let the words they concealed slip through.

  Sartori! He was Sartori! He didn’t waste breath questioning the name. It was his, and he knew it. And what worlds there were in that naming: more confounding than anything the Dominions had unveiled, opening before him like windows blown wide and shattered, never to be closed again.

  He heard the name spoken out of a hundred memories. A woman sighed it as she begged him back into her disheveled bed. A priest beat out the syllables on his pulpit, prophesying damnation. A gambler blew it into his cupped hands to bless his dice. Condemned men made prayers of it; drunkards, mockery; carousers, songs.

  Oh, but he’d been famous! At St. Bartholomew Fair there’d been troupes who’d filled their purses, telling his life as farce. A bordello in Bloomsbury had boasted a sometime nun driven to nymphomania by his touch, who would chant his conjurations (so she said) as she was fucked. He was a paradigm of all things fabulous and forbidden: a threat to reasoning men; to their wives, a secret vice. And to the children—the children, trailing past his house after the beadle—he was a rhyme:

  Maestro Sartori

  Wants a bit o’ glory.

  He loves the cats,

  He loves the dogs,

  He turns the ladies into frogs,

  He made some hats

  Of baby rats;

  But that’s another story.

  This chant, repeated in his head in the piping voices of parish orphans, was worse in its way than the pulpit curses, or the sobs, or the prayers. It rolled on and on, in its fatuous way, gathering neither meaning nor music as it went. Like his life, without this name: motion without purpose.

  “Had you forgotten?” the Autarch asked him.

  “Oh, yes,” Gentle replied, unbidden and bitter laughter coming to his lips with the reply. “I’d forgotten.”

  Even now, with the voices rebaptizing him with their clamor, he could scarcely believe it. Had this body of his survived two hundred years and more in the Fifth Dominion, while his mind went on deceiving itself: holding only a decade of life in its consciousness and hiding the rest away? Where had he lived
all those years? Who had he been? If what he’d just heard was true, this act of remembering was just the first. There were two centuries of memories concealed in his brain somewhere, waiting to be discovered. No wonder Pie had kept him in ignorance. Now that he knew, madness was very close.

  He got to his feet, holding on to the table for support. “Is Pie ‘oh’ pah here?” he said.

  “The mystif? No. Why? Did it come with you from the Fifth?”

  “Yes, it did.”

  A twitch of a smile returned to the Autarch’s face. “Aren’t they exquisite creatures?” he said. “I’ve had one or two myself. They’re an acquired taste, but once you’ve got it you never really lose it again. But no, I haven’t seen it.”

  “Judith, then?”

  “Ah.” He sighed. “Judith. I assume you mean Godolphin’s lady? She went by a lot of names, didn’t she? Mind you, we all did. What do they call you these days?”

  “I told you. John Furie Zacharias. Or Gentle.”

  “I have a few friends who know me as Sartori. I’d like to number you among them. Or do you want the name back?”

  “Gentle will do. We were talking about Judith. I saw her this morning, down by the harbor.”

  “Did you see Christ down there?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She came back here saying she’d seen the Man of Sorrows. She had the fear of the Lord in her. Crazy bitch.” He sighed. “It was sad, really, to see her that way. I thought it was just too much kreauchee at first, but no. She’d finally lost her mind. It was running out of her ears.”

  “Who are we talking about?” Gentle said, thinking one or the other of them had mislaid the path of the conversation.

  “I’m talking about Quaisoir, my wife. She came with me from the Fifth.”

  “I was talking about Judith.”

  “So was I.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “There are two. You made one of them yourself, for God’s sake, or have you forgotten that too?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’d forgotten.”