Imajica

It gave Oscar a perverse joy to sow these doubts. He saw them taking root already. Saw faces that half an hour before had been puffed up with their own infallibility deflated by doubt. It was worth the risk he’d taken with these theatrics, just to see them afraid. But Shales wouldn’t leave this bone alone.

‘The fact remains that this thing was in your employ,’ he said.

‘We’ve heard enough, Hubert,’ McGann said softly. ‘This is no time for divisive talk. We’ve got a fight on our hands, and whether we agree with Oscar’s methods or not - and just for the record, I don’t - surely none of us can doubt his integrity.’ He glanced around the table. There were murmurs of accord on all sides. ‘God knows what a creature like this might have been capable of had it realized its ruse had been discovered. Godolphin took a very considerable risk on our behalf.’

‘I agree,’ Lionel said. He’d come round to Oscar’s side of the table and placed a glass of neat malt whisky in the executioner’s freshly wiped fingers. ‘Good man, I say,’ he remarked. ‘I’d have done the same. Drink up.’

Oscar accepted the glass. ‘Salut,’ he said, downing the whisky in one.

‘I see nothing to celebrate,’ said Charlotte Feaver, the first to sit down at the table despite what lay upon it. She lit a fresh cigarette, expelling the smoke through pursed lips. ‘Assuming Godolphin’s right, and this thing was attempting to get access to the Society, we have to ask why.’

‘Ask away,’ Shales said drily, indicating the corpse. ‘He’s not going to be telling us very much. Which is no doubt convenient for some.’

‘How much longer do I have to endure this innuendo?’ Oscar demanded.

‘I said we’ve heard enough, Hubert,’ McGann remarked.

‘This is a democratic gathering,’ Shales said, rising to challenge McGann’s unspoken authority. ‘If I’ve got something to say - ‘

‘You’ve already said it,’ Lionel remarked with well-lubricated vim. ‘Now why don’t you just shut up?’

‘The point is, what do we do now?’ Bloxham said. He’d returned to the table, his chin wiped, and was determined to reassert himself following his unmanly display. ‘This is a dangerous time.’

‘That’s why they’re here,’ said Alice. ‘They know the anniversary’s coming up and they want to start the whole damn Reconciliation over again.’

‘Why try and penetrate the Society?’ Bloxham said.

‘To put a spoke in our wheels,’ Lionel said. ‘If they know what we’re planning, they can out-manoeuvre us. By the way, was the tie furiously expensive?’

Bloxham looked down to see that his silk tie was comprehensively spattered with puke. Casting a rancorous look in Lionel’s direction, he tore it from his neck.

‘I don’t see what they could find out from us anyway,’ said Alice Tyrwhitt, in her distracted manner. ‘We don’t even know what the Reconciliation is.’

‘Yes we do,’ Shales said. ‘Our ancestors were trying to put Earth into the same orbit as Heaven.’

‘Very poetic,’ Charlotte remarked. ‘But what does that mean in concrete terms? Does anybody know?’ There was silence. ‘I thought not. Here we are, sworn to prevent something we don’t even understand.’

‘It was an experiment of some kind,’ Bloxham said. ‘And it failed.’

‘Were they all insane?’ Alice said.

‘Let’s hope not,’ Lionel put in. ‘Insanity usually runs in the family.’

‘Well I’m not crazy,’ Alice said. ‘And I’m damn sure my friends are as sane and normal and human as I am. If they were anything else, I’d know it.’

‘Godolphin,’ McGann said. ‘You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet.’

‘I’m soaking up the wisdom,’ Oscar replied.

‘Have you reached any conclusions?’

‘Things go in cycles,’ he said, taking his time to reply. He was as certain of his audience as any man could ever hope to be. ‘We’re coming to the end of the millennium. Reason’ll be supplanted by unreason. Detachment by sentiment. I think if I were a fledgling esoteric, with a nose for history, it wouldn’t be difficult to turn up details of what was attempted - the experiment as Bloxham called it - and maybe get it into my head that the time was right to try again.’

‘Very plausible,’ said McGann.

‘Where would such an adept get the information?’ Shales enquired.

‘Self-taught.’

‘From what source? We’ve got every tome of any value buried in the ground beneath us.’

‘Every one?’ said Godolphin. ‘How can we be so sure?’

‘Because there hasn’t been a significant act of magic performed on earth in two centuries,’ was Shales’s reply. ‘The esoterics are powerless; lost. If there’d been the least sign of magical activity we’d know about it.’

‘We didn’t know about Godolphin’s little friend,’ Charlotte pointed out, denying Oscar the pleasure of that irony dropping from his own lips.

‘Are we even sure the library’s intact?’ Charlotte went on. ‘How do we know books haven’t been stolen?’

‘Who by?’ said Bloxham.

‘By Dowd, for one. They’ve never been properly catalogued. I know that Leash woman attempted it, but we all know what happened to her.’

The tale of the Leash woman was one of the Society’s lesser shames: a catalogue of accidents that had ended in tragedy. In essence, the obsessive Clare Leash had taken it upon herself to make a full account of the volumes in the Society’s possession, and had suffered a stroke while doing so. She’d lain for two days on the cellar floor. By the time she was discovered, she was barely alive, and quite without her wits. She’d survived, however, and eleven years later was still a resident in a hospice in Sussex, witless as ever.

‘It still shouldn’t be that difficult to find out if the place has been tampered with,’ Charlotte said.

Bloxham agreed. ‘That should be looked into,’ he said.

‘I take it you’re volunteering,’ said McGann.

‘And if they didn’t get their information from downstairs,’ Charlotte said, ‘there are other sources. We don’t believe we have every last book dealing with the Imajica in our hands - do we?’

‘No, of course not,’ said McGann. ‘But the Society’s broken the back of the tradition over the years. The cults in this country aren’t worth a damn, we all know that. They cobble workings together from whatever they can scrape up. It’s all piecemeal. Senseless. None of them have the wherewithal to conceive of a Reconciliation. Most of them don’t even know what the Imajica is. They’re putting hexes on their bosses at the bank.’

Godolphin had heard similar speeches for years. Talk of magic in the Western World as a spent force; self-congratulatory accounts of cults that had been infiltrated, and discovered to be groups of pseudo-scientists exchanging arcane theories in a language no two of them agreed upon, or sexual obsessives using the excuse of workings to demand favours they couldn’t seduce from their partners or, most often, crazies in search of some mythology, however ludicrous, to keep them from complete psychosis. But amongst the fakes, obsessives and lunatics, was there perhaps a man who instinctively knew the route to the Imajica? A natural Maestro, born with something in his genes that made him capable of re-inventing the workings of the Reconciliation? Until now the possibility hadn’t occurred to Godolphin - he’d been too preoccupied by the secret that he’d lived with most of his adult life - but it was an intriguing, and disturbing, thought.

‘I believe we should take the risk seriously,’ he pronounced. ‘However unlikely we think it is.’

‘What risk?’ McGann said.

‘That there is a Maestro out there. Somebody who understands our forefathers’ ambition and is going to find his own way of repeating the experiment. Maybe he doesn’t want the books. Maybe he doesn’t need the books. Maybe he’s sitting at home somewhere, even now, working out the problems for himself.’

‘So what do we do?’ said Charlotte.

‘We purge,’ said Shales. ‘It pains me to say it, but Godolphin’s right. We don’t know what’s going on out there. We keep an eye on things from a distance, and we occasionally arrange to have somebody put under permanent sedation, but we don’t purge. I think we’ve got to begin.’

‘How do we go about that?’ Bloxham wanted to know. He had a zealot’s gleam in his dishwater eyes.

‘We’ve got our allies. We use them. We turn over every stone, and if we find anything we don’t like, we kill it.’

‘We’re not an assassination squad.’

‘We have the finance to hire one,’ Shales pointed out. ‘And the friends to cover the evidence if need be. As I see it, we have one responsibility: to prevent, at all costs, another attempt at Reconciliation. That’s what we were born to do.’

He spoke with a total lack of melodrama, as though he were reciting a shopping list. His detachment impressed the room. So did the last sentiment, however blandly it was presented. Who could fail to be stirred by the thought of such purpose, reaching back over generations to the men who had gathered on this spot two centuries before? A few bloodied survivors, swearing that they, and their children, and their children’s children, and so on until the end of the world, would live and die with one ambition burning in their hearts: the prevention of another such apocalypse.

At this juncture McGann suggested a vote, and one was taken. There were no dissenting voices. The Society was agreed that the way forward lay in a comprehensive purge of all elements - innocent or not - who might presently be tampering, or tempted to tamper, with rituals intended to gain access to so-called Reconciled Dominions. All conventional religious structures would be excluded from this sanction, as they were utterly ineffectual, and presented a useful distraction for some souls who might have been tempted towards esoteric practices. The shams and the profiteers would also be passed over. The pier-end palmists and fake psychics, the spiritualists who wrote new concertos for dead composers, and sonnets for poets long since dust - all these would be left untouched. It was only those who stood a chance of tripping over something Imajical, and acting upon it, that would be rooted out. It would be an extensive and sometimes brutal business, but the Society was the equal of the challenge. This was not the first purge it had masterminded (though it would be the first of this scale); the structure was in place for an invisible but comprehensive cleansing. The cults would be the prime targets: their acolytes would be dispersed, their leaders bought off or incarcerated. It had happened before that England had been sluiced clean of every significant esoteric and thaumaturgist. Now it would happen again.

‘Is the business of the day concluded?’ Oscar asked. ‘Only Mass calls me.’

‘What’s to be done with the body?’ Alice Tyrwhitt asked.

Godolphin had his answer ready and waiting.

‘It’s my mess and I’ll clear it up,’ he said, with due humility. ‘I can arrange to have it buried in a motorway tonight, unless anybody has a better idea?’

There were no objections. ‘Just as long as it’s out of here,’ Alice said.

‘I’ll need some help to wrap it up and get it down to the car. Bloxham, would you oblige?’

Reluctant to refuse, Bloxham went in search of something to contain the carcass.

‘I see no reason for us to sit and watch,’ Charlotte said, rising from her seat. ‘If that’s the night’s business, I’m going home.’

As she headed to the door, Oscar took his cue to sow one last, triumphant mischief.

‘I suppose we’ll be all thinking the same thing tonight,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ Lionel asked.

‘Oh, just that if these things are as good at imitation as they appear to be, then we can’t entirely trust each other from now on. I’m assuming we’re all still human at the moment, but who knows what Christmas will bring?’

Half an hour later, Oscar was ready to depart for Mass. For all his earlier squeamishness, Bloxham had done well, returning Dowd’s guts into the bowel of the carcass, and mummifying the whole sorry slab in plastic and tape. He and Oscar had then lugged the corpse to the lift, and, at the bottom, out of the Tower to the car. It was a fine night, the moon a virtuous sliver in a sky rife with stars. As ever, Oscar took beauty where he could find it, and before setting off, halted to admire the spectacle.

‘Isn’t it stupendous, Giles?’

‘It is indeed!’ Bloxham replied. ‘It makes my head spin.’

‘All those worlds.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Bloxham replied. ‘We’ll make sure it never happens.’

Confounded by this reply, Oscar looked across at the other man to see that he wasn’t looking at the stars at all, but was still busying himself with the body. It was the thought of the coming purge he found stupendous.

‘That should do it,’ Bloxham said, slamming the boot and offering his hand for shaking.

Glad that he had the shadows to conceal his distaste, Oscar shook it, and bid the boor goodnight. Very soon, he knew, he would have to choose sides, and despite the success of tonight’s endeavour, and the security he’d won with it, he was by no means sure that he belonged amongst the ranks of the purgers, even though they were certain to carry the day. But then if his place was not there, where was his place? This was a puzzlement, and he was glad he had the soothing spectacle of Midnight Mass to distract him from it.

Twenty-five minutes later, as he climbed the steps of St Martin’s-in-the-Field, he found himself offering up a little prayer, its sentiments not so very different from those of the carols this congregation would presently be singing. He prayed that hope was somewhere out there in the city tonight, and that it might come into his heart, and scour him of his doubts and confusions; a light that would not only burn in him, but would spread throughout the Dominions, and illuminate the Imajica from one end to the other. But if such a divinity was near, he prayed that the songs had it wrong, because sweet as tales of Nativity were, time was short, and if hope was only a babe tonight then by the time it had reached redeeming age the worlds it had come to save would be dead.

CHAPTER TWELVE

1

Taylor Briggs had once told Judith that he measured out his life in summers. When his span came to an end, he said, it would be the summers he remembered, and counting them, count himself blessed amongst them. From the romances of his youth to the days of the last great orgies in the back rooms and bath-houses of New York and San Francisco, he could recall his career in love by sniffing the sweat from his armpits. Judith had envied him at the time. Like Gentle, she had difficulty remembering more than ten years of her past. She had no recollection of her adolescence whatsoever, nor her childhood; could not picture her parents, nor even name them. This inability to hold on to history didn’t much concern her (she knew no other), until she encountered somebody like Taylor, who took such satisfaction from memory. She hoped he still did; it was one of the few pleasures left to him.

She’d first heard news of his sickness the previous July, from his lover Clem. Despite the fact that he and Taylor had lived the same high life together, the plague had passed Clem by, and Jude had spent several nights with him talking through the guilt he felt at what he saw as an undeserved escape. Their paths had diverged through the autumn months, however, and she was surprised to find an invitation to their Christmas party awaiting her when she got back from New York. Still feeling delicate after all that had happened, she’d rung up to decline, only to have Clem quietly tell her that Taylor was not expected to see another spring, never mind another summer. Would she not come, for his sake? She of course accepted. If any of her circle could make good times of bad it was Taylor and Clem, and she owed them both her best efforts in that endeavour. Was it perhaps because she’d had so many difficulties with the heterosexual males in her life that she relaxed in the company of men for whom her sex were not contested terrain?

At a little after eight in the evening of Christmas Day, Clem opened the door and ushered her in, claiming a kiss beneath the sprig of mistletoe in the hallway before, as he put it, the barbarians were upon her. The house had been decorated as it might have been a century earlier, tinsel, fake snow and fairy lights forsaken in favour of evergreen, hung in such abundance around the walls and mantelpieces that the rooms were half-forested. Clem, whose youth had outrun the toll of years for so long, was not such a healthy sight. Five months before he’d looked a fleshy thirty in a flattering light. Now he looked ten years older at least, his bright welcome and flattery unable to conceal his fatigue.

‘You wore green,’ he said as he escorted her into the lounge. ‘I told Taylor you’d do that. Green eyes, green dress.’

‘Do you approve?’

‘Of course! We’re having a pagan Christmas this year. Dies Natalis Solis Invictus.’ ‘What’s that?’

‘The Birth of the Unconquered Sun,’ he said. The Light of the World. We need a little of that right now.’

‘Do I know many people here?’ she said, before they stepped into the hub of the party.

‘Everybody knows you, darling,’ he said fondly. ‘Even the people who’ve never met you.’

There were many faces she knew awaiting them, and it took her five minutes to get across to where Taylor was sitting, lord of all he surveyed, in a well-cushioned chair close to the roaring fire. She tried not to register the shock she felt at the sight of him. He’d lost almost all of what had once been a leonine head of hair, and every spare ounce of substance from the face beneath. His eyes, which had always been his most penetrating feature (one of the many things they’d had in common), seemed enormous now, as though to devour in the time he had left the sights his demise would deny him. He opened his arms to her.

‘Oh, my sweet,’ he said. ‘Give me a hug. Excuse me if I don’t get up.’

She bent and hugged him. He was skin and bone; and cold, despite the fire close by.

‘Has Clem got you some punch?’ he asked.

‘I’m on my way,’ Clem said.

‘Get me another vodka while you’re at it,’ Taylor said, imperious as ever.

‘I thought we’d agreed-’ Clem said.

‘I know it’s bad for me. But staying sober’s worse.’

‘It’s your funeral,’ Clem said, with a bluntness Jude found shocking. But he and Taylor eyed each other with a kind of adoring ferocity, and she saw in the look how Clem’s cruelty was part of their mechanism for dealing with this tragedy.

‘You wish,’ Taylor said. ‘I’ll have an orange juice. No, make that a Virgin Mary. Let’s be seasonal about it.’

‘I thought you were having a pagan celebration,’ Jude said as Clem headed away to fetch the drinks.

‘I don’t see why the Christians should have the Holy Mother,’ Taylor said. They don’t know what to do with her when they’ve got her. Pull up a chair, sweetie. I heard a rumour you were in foreign dimes.’

‘I was. But I came back at the last minute. I had some problems in New York.’

‘Whose heart did you break this time?’

‘It wasn’t that kind of problem.’

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Be a telltale. Tell Taylor.’

This was a bad joke from way back, and it brought a smile to Judith’s lips. It also brought the story, which she’d come here swearing she’d keep to herself.

‘Somebody tried to murder me,’ she said.

‘You’re jesting,’ he replied.

‘I wish I was.’

‘What happened?’ he said. ‘Spill the beans. I like hearing other people’s bad news just at the moment. The worse, the better.’

She slid her palm over Taylor’s bony hand. ‘Tell me how you are first.’

‘Grotesque,’ he said. ‘Clem’s wonderful, of course, but all the tender loving care in the world won’t make me healthy. I have bad days and good days. Mostly bad lately. I am, as my ma used to say, not long for this world.’ He glanced up. ‘Look out, here comes Saint Clemence of the Bed Pan. Change the subject. Clem, did Judy tell you somebody tried to kill her?’

‘No. Where was this?’

‘In Manhattan?’

‘A mugger?’

‘No.’

‘Not someone you knew?’ Taylor said.

Now she was on the point of telling the whole thing, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. But Taylor had an anticipatory gleam in his eye, and she couldn’t bear to disappoint him. She began, her account punctuated by exclamations of delighted incredulity from Taylor, and she found herself rising to her audience as though this story were not the grim truth but a preposterous fiction. Only once did she lose her momentum, when she mentioned Gentle’s name, and Clem broke in to say that he’d been invited tonight. Her heart tripped, and took a beat to get back into its rhythm.

Tell the rest,’ Taylor was exhorting her. ‘What happened?’

She went on with her story, but now, with her back to the door, she found herself wondering every moment if he was stepping through it. Her distraction took its toll on the narrative. But then perhaps a tale about murder told by the prey was bound to predictability. She wrapped it up with undue haste.

The point is, I’m alive,’ she said.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Taylor replied, passing his unsipped Virgin Mary back to Clem. ‘Maybe just a splash of vodka?’ he pleaded. ‘I’ll take the consequences.’

Clem gave a reluctant shrug, and claiming Jude’s empty glass, wended his way back through the crowd to the drinks table, giving Jude an excuse for turning round and scanning the room. Half a dozen new faces had appeared since she’d sat down. Gentle was not amongst them.

‘Looking for Mister Right?’ Taylor said. ‘He’s not here yet.’

She looked back to meet his amusement.

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘Mr Zacharias.’

‘What’s so funny?’

‘You and him. The most talked-about affair of the last decade. You know, when you mention him, your voice changes. It gets - ‘

‘Venomous.’

‘Breathy. Yearning.’

‘I don’t yearn for Gentle.’

‘My mistake,’ he said archly. ‘Was he good in bed?’ ‘I’ve had better.’

‘You want to know something I never told anybody?’ He leaned forward, the smile becoming more pained. She thought it was his aching body that brought the frown to his brow, until she heard his words. ‘I was in love with Gentle from the moment I met him. I tried everything to get him into bed. Got him drunk. Got him high. Nothing worked. But I kept at him, and about six years ago - ‘

Clem appeared at this juncture, supplying Taylor and Jude with replenished glasses before heading off to welcome a fresh influx of guests.

‘You slept with Gentle?’ Jude said.

‘Not exactly. I mean, I sort of talked him into letting me give him a blow-job. He was very high. Grinning that grin of his. I used to worship that grin. So there I am,’ Taylor went on, as lascivious as he’d ever been when recounting his conquests, ‘trying to get him hard, and he starts … I don’t know how to explain this … I suppose he began speaking in tongues. He was lying back on my bed with his trousers round his ankles and he just started to talk in some other language. Nothing vaguely recognizable. It wasn’t Spanish. It wasn’t French. I don’t know what it was. And you know what? I lost my hard-on, and he got one.’ He laughed uproariously, but not for long. The laugh went from his face, as he began again. ‘You know I was a little afraid of him suddenly. I was actually afraid. I couldn’t finish what I’d started. I got up and left him to it, lying there with his dick sticking up, speaking in tongues.’ He claimed her drink from her hand, and took a throatful. The memory had clearly shaken him. There was a mottled rash on his neck, and his eyes were glistening.

‘Did you ever hear anything like that from him?’ She shook her head. ‘I only ask because I know you broke up very quickly. I wondered if he’d freaked you out for some reason.’