by Clive Barker
He heard something very like a sigh in the air around him.
“It may seem ridiculous to you,” Gentle said, “but I’ve followed this course because I wanted to see one face. One loving face.” There was enough truth in this to lend his words real passion. There was indeed a face he’d hoped to find at the end of his journey. “Is it too much to ask?” he said.
There was a flutter of movement in the dingy arena ahead, and Gentle stared into the murk, in the expectation of some colossal door opening. But instead Hapexamendios said, “Turn your back, Reconciler.”
“You want me to leave?”
“No. Only avert your eyes.”
Here was a paradox: to be told to look away when sight was requested. But there was something other than an unveiling afoot. For the first time since entering the Dominion, he heard sounds other than a voice: a delicate rustling, a muted patter, creaks and whirrings stealing on his ear. And all around him, tiny motions in the solid street, as the monoliths softened and inclined towards the mystery he’d turned his back upon. A step gaped and oozed marrow. A wall opened where stone met stone, and a scarlet deeper than any he’d seen, a scarlet turned almost black, ran in rills as the slabs yielded up their geometry, lending themselves to the Unbeheld’s purpose. Teeth came down from an unknitted balcony above, and loops of gut unraveled from the sills, dragging down curtains of tissue as they came.
As the deconstruction escalated, he dared the look he’d been forbidden, glancing back to see the entire street in gross or petty motion: forms fracturing, forms congealing, forms drooping and rising. There was nothing recognizable in the turmoil, and Gentle was about to turn away when one of the pliant walls tumbled in the flux and for a heartbeat, no more, he glimpsed a figure behind it. The moment was long enough to know the face he saw and have it in his mind’s eye when he looked away. There was no face its equal in the Imajica. For all the sorrow on it, for all its wounds, it was exquisite.
Pie was alive and waiting there, in his Father’s midst, a prisoner of the prisoner. It was all Gentle could do not to turn there and then and pitch his spirit into the tumult, demanding that his Father give the mystif up. This was his teacher, he’d say, his renewer, his perfect friend. But he fought the desire, knowing such an attempt would end in calamity, and instead turned away again, doting on the glimpse he’d had while the street behind him continued to convulse. Though the mystif’s body had been marked by the hurts it had suffered, it was more whole than Gentle had dared hope. Perhaps it had drawn strength from the land on which Hapexamendios’s city was built, the Dominion its people had worked their feits upon, before God had come to raise this metropolis.
But how should he persuade his Father to give the mystif up? With pleas? With further flattery? As he chewed on the problem, the ructions around him began to subside, and he heard Hapexamendios speak behind him.
“Reconciler?”
“Yes, Father?”
“You wanted to see my face.”
“Yes, Father?”
“Turn and look.”
He did so. The street in front of him had not lost all semblance of a thoroughfare. The buildings still stood, their doors and windows visible. But their architect had claimed from their substance sufficient pieces of the body he’d once owned to re-create it for Gentle’s edification. The Father was human, of course, and had perhaps been no larger than His son in His first incarnation. But He’d remade Himself three times Gentle’s height and more, a teetering giant that was as much borne up by the street He’d racked for matter as of it.
For all His scale, however, His form was ineptly made, as if He’d forgotten what it was like to be whole. His head was enormous, the shards of a thousand skulls claimed from the buildings to construct it, but so mismatched that the mind it was meant to shield was visible between the pieces, pulsing and flickering. One of His arms was vast, yet ended in a hand scarcely larger than Gentle’s, while the other was wizened, but finished with fingers that had three dozen joints. His torso was another mass of misalliances, His innards cavorting in a cage of half a thousand ribs, His huge heart beating against a breastbone too weak to contain it and already fractured. And below, at His groin, the strangest deformation: a sex He’d failed to conjure into a single organ, but which hung in rags, raw and useless.
“Now,” the God said. “Do you see?”
The impassivity had gone from His voice, its monotony replaced by an assembly of voices, as many larynxes, none of them whole, labored to produce each word.
“Do you see,” He said again, “the resemblance?”
Gentle stared at the abomination before him and, for all its patchworks and disunions, knew that he did. It wasn’t in the limbs, this likeness, or in the torso, or in the sex. But it was there. When the vast head was raised, he saw his face in the ruin that clung to his Father’s skull. A reflection of a reflection of a reflection, perhaps, and all in cracked mirrors. But oh! it was there. The sight distressed him beyond measure, not because he saw the kinship but because their roles seemed suddenly reversed. Despite its size, it was a child he saw, its head fetal, its limbs untutored. It was eons old, but unable to slough off the fact of flesh, while he, for all his naïvetés, had made his peace with that disposal.
“Have you seen enough, Reconciler?” Hapexamendios said.
“Not quite.”
“What then?”
Gentle knew he had to speak now, before the likeness was undone again and the walls were resealed.
“I want what’s in You, Father.”
“In me?”
“Your prisoner, Father. I want Your prisoner.”
“I have no prisoner.”
“I’m your son,” Gentle said. “The flesh of your flesh. Why do you lie to me?”
The unwieldy head shuddered. The heart beat hard against the broken bone.
“Is there something you don’t want me to know?” Gentle said, starting towards the wretched body. “You told me I could know everything.”
The hands, great and small, twitched and jittered.
“Everything, You said, because I’ve done You perfect service. But there’s something You don’t want me to know.”
“There’s nothing.”
“Then let me see the mystif. Let me see Pie ‘oh’ pah.”
At this the God’s body shook, and so did the walls around it. There were eruptions of light from beneath the flawed mosaic of His skull: little raging thoughts that cremated the air between the folds of His brain. The sight was a reminder to Gentle that, however frail this figure looked, it was the tiniest part of Hapexamendios’s true scale. He was a city the size of a world, and if the power that had raised that city, and sustained the bright blood in its stone, was ever allowed to turn to destruction, it would beggar the Nullianacs.
Gentle’s advance, which had so far been steady, was now halted. Though he was a spirit here and had thought no barrier could be raised against him, there was one before him now, thickening the air. Despite it, and the dread he felt when reminded of his Father’s powers, he didn’t retreat. He knew that if he did so the exchange would be over and Hapexamendios would be about His final business, His prisoner unreleased.
“Where’s the pure, obedient son I had?” the God said.
“Still here,” Gentle replied. “Still wanting to serve You, if You’ll deal with me honorably.”
A series of more livid bursts erupted in the distended skull. This time, however, they broke from its dome and rose into the dark air above the God’s head. There were images in these energies, fragments of Hapexamendios’s thoughts, shaped from fire. One of them was Pie.
“You’ve no business with the mystif,” Hapexamendios said. “It belongs to me.”
“No, Father.”
“To me.”
“I married it, Father.”
The lightning was quieted momentarily, and the God’s pulpy eyes narrowed.
“It made me remember my purpose,” Gentle said. “It made me remember to be a Reco
nciler. I wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t have served you—if it weren’t for Pie ‘oh’ pah.”
“Maybe it loved you once,” the many throats replied. “But now I want you to forget it. Put it out of your head forever.”
“Why?”
In reply came the parent’s eternal answer to a child who asks too many questions. “Because I tell you to,” the God said.
But Gentle wouldn’t be hushed so readily. He pressed on. “What does it know, Father?”
“Nothing.”
“Does it know where Nisi Nirvana comes from? Is that what it knows?”
The fire in the Unbeheld’s skull seethed at this. “Who told you that?” He raged.
There was no purpose served by lying, Gentle thought. “My mother,” he said.
Every motion in the God’s bloated body ceased, even to its cage-battering heart. Only the lightning went on, and the next word came not from the mingled throats but from the fire itself. Three syllables, spoken in a lethal voice.
“Cel. Est. Ine.”
“Yes, Father.”
“She’s dead,” the lightning said.
“No, Father. I was in her arms a few minutes ago.” He lifted his hand, translucent though it was. “She held these fingers. She kissed them. And she told me—”
“I don’t want to hear!”
“—to remind You—”
“Where is she?”
“—of Nisi Nirvana.”
“Where is she? Where? Where?”
He had been motionless, but now rose up in His fury, lifting His wretched limbs above His head as if to bathe them in His own lightning.
“Where is she?” he yelled, throats and fire making the demand together. “I want to see her! I want to see her!”
IV
On the stairs below the Meditation Room, Jude stood up. The gek-a-gek had begun a guttural complaint that was, in its way, more distressing than any sound she’d ever heard from them. They were afraid. She saw them sloping away from their places beside the door like dogs in fear of a beating, their spines depressed, their heads flattened.
She glanced at the company below: the angels still kneeling beside their wounded Maestro; Monday and Hoi-Polloi leaving off their vigil at the step and coming back into the candlelight, as though its little ring could preserve them from whatever power was agitating the air.
“Oh, Mama,” she heard Sartori whisper.
“Yes, child?”
“He’s looking for us, Mama.”
“I know.”
“You can feel it?”
“Yes, child, I can.”
“Will you hold me, Mama? Will you hold me?”
“Where? Where?” the God was howling, and in the arcs above His skull shreds of His mind’s sight appeared.
Here was a river, serpentine; and a city, drabber than His metropolis but all the finer for that; and a certain street; and a certain house. Gentle saw the eye Monday had scrawled on the front door, its pupil beaten out by the Oviate’s attack. He saw his own body, with Clem beside it; and the stairs; and Jude on the stairs, climbing.
And then the room at the top, and the circle in the room, with his brother sitting inside it, and his mother, kneeling at the perimeter.
“Cel. Est. Ine,” the God said. “Cel. Est. Ine!”
It wasn’t Sartori’s voice that uttered these syllables, but it was his lips that moved to shape them. Jude was at the top of the stairs now, and she could see his face clearly. It was still wet with tears, but there was no expression upon it whatsoever. She’d never seen features so devoid of feeling. He was a vessel, filling up with another soul.
“Child?” Celestine said.
“Get away from him,” Jude murmured.
Celestine started to rise. “You sound sick, child,” she said.
The voice came again, this time a furious denial. “I Am Not. A. Child.”
“You wanted me to comfort you,” Celestine said. “Let me do that.”
Sartori’s eyes looked up, but it wasn’t his sight alone that fixed on her.
“Keep. Away,” he said.
“I want to hold you,” Celestine said, and instead of retreating she stepped over the boundary of the circle.
On the landing the gek-a-gek were in terror now, their sly retreat become a dance of panic. They beat their heads against the wall as if to hammer out their brains rather than hear the voice issuing from Sartori; this desperate, monstrous voice that said over and over, “Keep. Away. Keep. Away.”
But Celestine wouldn’t be denied. She knelt down again, in front of Sartori. When she spoke, however, it wasn’t to the child, it was to the Father, to the God who’d taken her into this city of iniquities.
“Let me touch You, love,” she said. “Let me touch You, the way You touched me.”
“No!” Hapexamendios howled, but His child’s limbs refused to rise and ward off the embrace.
The denial came again and again, but Celestine ignored it, her arms encircling them both, flesh and occupying spirit in one embrace.
This time, when the God unleashed His rejection, it was no longer a word but a sound, as pitiful as it was terrifying.
In the First, Gentle saw the lightning above his Father’s head congeal into a single blinding flame and go from Him, like a meteor.
In the Second, Chicka Jackeen saw the blaze brighten the Erasure and fell to his knees on the flinty ground. A signal fire was coming, he thought, to announce the moment of victory.
In Yzordderrex, the Goddesses knew better. As the fire broke from the Erasure and entered the Second Dominion, the waters around the temple grew quiescent, so as not to draw death down upon them. Every child was hushed, every pool and rivulet stilled. But the fire’s malice wasn’t meant for them, and the meteor passed over the city, leaving it unharmed, outblazing the comet as it went.
With the fire out of sight, Gentle turned back to his Father.
“What have You done?” he demanded.
The God’s attention lingered in the Fifth for a little time, but as Gentle’s demand came again He withdrew His mind from His target, and His eyes regained their animation.
“I’ve sent a fire for the whore,” He said. It was no longer the lightning that spoke, but His many throats.
“Why?”
“Because she tainted you . . . she made you want love.”
“Is that so bad?”
“You can’t build cities with love,” the God said. “You can’t make great works. It’s weakness.”
“And what about Nisi Nirvana?” Gentle said. “Is that a weakness, too?”
He dropped to his knees and laid his phantom palms on the ground. They had no power here, or else he’d have started digging. Nor could his spirit pierce the ground. The same barrier that sealed him from his Father’s belly kept him from looking into His Dominion’s underworld. But he could ask the questions.
“Who spoke the words, Father?” he asked. “Who said: Nisi Nirvana?”
“Forget you ever heard those words,” Hapexamendios replied. “The whore is dead. It’s over.”
In his frustration Gentle made fists of his hands and beat on the solid ground.
“There’s nothing there but Me,” the many throats went on. “My flesh is everywhere. My flesh is the world, and the world is My flesh.”
On the Mount of Lipper Bayak, Tick Raw had given up his triumphal jig and was sitting at the edge of his circle, waiting for the curious to emerge from their houses and come up to question him, when the fire appeared in the Fourth. Like Chicka Jackeen, he assumed it was some star of annunciation, sent to mark the victory, and he rose again to hail it. He wasn’t alone. There were several people below who’d spotted the blaze over the Jokalaylau and were applauding the spectacle as it approached. When it passed overhead it brought a brief noon to Vanaeph, before going on its way. It lit Patashoqua just as brightly, then flew out of the Dominion through a fog that had just appeared beyond the city, marking the first passing place between the Dominion of g
reen-gold skies and that of blue.
Two similar fogs had formed in Clerkenwell, one to the southeast of Gamut Street and the other to the northwest, both marking doorways in the newly reconciled Dominion. It was the latter that became blinding now, as the fire sped through it from the Fourth. The sight was not unwitnessed. Several revenants were in the vicinity, and though they had no clue as to what this signified, they sensed some calamity and retreated before the radiance, returning to the house to raise the alarm. But they were too sluggish. Before they were halfway back to Gamut Street the fog divided, and the Unbeheld’s fire appeared in the benighted streets of Clerkenwell.
Monday saw it first, as he forsook the little comfort of the candlelight and returned to the step. The remnants of Sartori’s hordes were raising a cacophony in the darkness outside, but even as he crossed the threshold to ward them off, the darkness became light.
From her place on the top stair Jude saw Celestine lay her lips against her son’s and then, with astonishing strength, lift his dead weight up and pitch him out of the circle. Either the impact or the coming fire stirred him, and he began to rise, turning back towards his mother as he did so. He was too late to reclaim his place. The fire had come.
The window burst like a glittering cloud and the blaze filled the room. Jude was flung off her feet, but clutched the banister long enough to see Sartori cover his face against the holocaust, as the woman in the circle opened her arms to accept it. Celestine was instantly consumed, but the fire seemed unappeased and would have spread to burn the house to its foundations had its momentum not been so great. It sped on through the room, demolishing the wall as it went. On, on, towards the second fog that Clerkenwell boasted tonight.
“What the fuck was that?” Monday said in the hallway below.
“God,” Jude replied. “Coming and going.”
In the First, Hapexamendios raised His misbegotten head. Even though He didn’t need the assembly of sight that gleamed in His skull to see what was happening in His Dominion—He had eyes everywhere—some memory of the body that had once been His sole residence made Him turn now, as best He could, and look behind Him.
