Imajica

‘What the hell is this? I’m turning blue? This is ridiculous.’

Ridiculous maybe, but none too funny. There was a crawl of panic in her stomach. Had she caught some disease from the stone? Was that why Estabrook had wrapped it up so carefully and hidden it away?

She turned on the shower, and stripped. There were no further stains on her body that she could find, which was some small comfort. With the water seething hot she stepped into the bath, working up a lather and rubbing at the colour. The combination of heat and the panic in her belly was dizzying her, and halfway through scrubbing at her skin she feared she was going to faint and had to step out of the bath again, reaching to open the bathroom door, and let in some cooler air. Her slick hand slid on the door-knob however, and cursing she reeled round for a towel to wipe the soap off. As she did so she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her neck was blue. The skin around her eyes was blue. Her brow was blue, all the way up into her hairline. She backed away from this grotesquerie, flattening herself against the steam-wetted tiles.

This isn’t real,’ she said aloud.

She reached for the handle a second time, and wrenched at it with sufficient force to open the door. The cold brought gooseflesh from head to foot, but she was glad of the chill. Perhaps it would slap this self-deceit out of her. Shuddering with cold she fled the reflection, heading back into the candlelit haven of the living room. There in the middle of the coffee-table lay the piece of blue stone, its eye looking back at her. She didn’t even remember taking it out of her pocket, much less setting it on the table in this studied fashion, surrounded by candles. Its presence made her hang back at the door. She was suddenly superstitious of it, as though its gaze had a basilisk’s power, and could turn her to similar stuff. If that was its business she was too late to undo it. Every time she’d turned the stone over she’d met its glance. Made bold by fatalism, she went to the table and picked the stone up, not giving it time to obsess her again but flinging it against the wall with all the power she possessed.

As it flew from her hand it granted her the luxury of knowing her error. It had taken possession of the room in her absence; had become more real than the hand that had thrown it, or the wall it was about to strike. Time was its plaything, and place its toy, and in seeking its destruction she would unknit both.

It was too late to undo the error now. The stone struck the wall with a loud hard sound, and in that moment she was thrown out of herself, as surely as if somebody had reached into her head, plucked out her consciousness and pitched it through the window. Her body remained in the room she’d left, irrelevant to the journey she was about to undertake. All she had of its senses was sight. That was enough. She floated out over the bleak street, shining wet in the lamplight, towards the step of the house opposite hers. A quartet of party-goers - three young men with a tipsy girl in their midst - was waiting there, one of the youths rapping impatiently on the door. While they waited, the burliest of the trio pressed kisses on the girl, kneading her breasts covertly as he did so. Jude caught glimpses of the discomfort that surfaced between the girl’s giggles; saw her hands make vain little fists when her suitor pushed his tongue against her lips, then saw her open her mouth to him, more in resignation than lust. As the door opened, and the four stumbled into the din of celebration, she moved away, rising over the rooftops as she flew, and dropping down again to catch glimpses of other dramas unfolding in the houses she passed.

They were all, like the stone that had sent her on this mission, fragments; slivers of dramas she could only guess at. A woman in an upper room, staring down at a dress laid on a stripped bed; another at a window, tears falling from beneath her closed lids as she swayed to music Jude couldn’t hear; yet another rising from a table of glittering guests, sickened by something. None of them women she knew, but all quite familiar. Even in her short remembered life she’d felt like ail of them at some time or other: forsaken; powerless; yearning. She began to see the scheme here. She was going from glimpse to glimpse as if to moments of her life, meeting her reflection in women of every class and kind.

In a dark street behind King’s Cross she saw a woman servicing a man in the front seat of his car, bending to take his hard pink prick between lips the colour of menstrual blood. She’d done that too, or its like, because she’d wanted to be loved. And the woman driving past, seeing the whores on parade and righteously sickened by them: that was her. And the beauty taunting her lover out in the rain, and the virago applauding drunkenly above, she’d been in those lives just as surely, or they in hers.

Her journey was nearing its end. She’d reached a bridge from which there would perhaps have been a panoramic view of the city, but the rain in this region was heavier than it had been in Notting Hill, and the distance was shrouded. Her mind didn’t linger, but moved on through the downpour - unchilled, unwetted - towards a lightless tower that lay all but concealed behind a row of trees. Her speed had dropped, and she wove between the foliage like a drunken bird, dropping down to the ground, and sinking through it into a sodden and utter darkness.

There was a momentary terror that she was going to be buried alive in this place, then the darkness gave way to light, and she was dropping through the roof of some kind of cellar, its walls lined not with wine-racks but with shelves. Lights hung along the passageways, but the air here was still dense, not with dust but with something she only understood vaguely. There was sanctity here, and there was power. She had felt nothing like it in her life; not in St Peter’s, or Chartres, or the Duomo. It made her want to be flesh again, instead of a roving mind. To walk here. To touch the books, the brick; to smell the air. Dusty it would be, but such dust; every mote wise as a planet from floating in this holy space.

The motion of a shadow caught her eye, and she moved towards it along the passageway, wondering as she went what volumes these were, stacked on every side. The shadow up ahead, which she’d taken to be that of one person, was of two, erotically entangled. The woman had her back to the books, her arms grasping the shelf above her head. Her mate, his trousers around his ankles, was pressed against her, making short gasps to accompany the jabbing of his hips. Both had their eyes closed, the sight of each other was no great aphrodisiac. Was this coupling what she’d come here to see? God knows, there was nothing in their labours to either arouse or educate her. Surely the blue eye hadn’t driven her across the city gathering tales of womanhood just to witness this joyless intercourse. There had to be something here she wasn’t comprehending. Something hidden in their exchange, perhaps? But no. It was only gasps. In the books that rocked on the shelves behind them? Perhaps.

She drifted closer to scrutinize the titles, but her gaze ran beyond spines to the wall against which they stood. The bricks were the same plain stuff as all along the passages. The mortar between had a stain in it she recognized however: an unmistakable blue. Excited now, she drove her mind on, past the lovers and the books, and through the brick. It was dark on the other side, darker even than the ground she’d dropped through to enter this secret place. Nor was it simply a darkness made of light’s absence, but of despair and sorrow. Her instinct was to retreat from it, but there was another presence here that made her linger; a form barely distinguishable from the darkness, lying on the ground in this squalid cell. It was bound - almost cocooned - its face completely covered. The binding was as fine as thread, and had been wound around the body with obsessive care, but there was enough of its shape visible for her to be certain that this like the ensnared spirits at every station along her route, was also a woman.

Her binders had been meticulous. They’d left not so much as a hair or toenail visible. Jude hovered over the body, studying it. They were almost complimentary: like corpse and essence, eternally divided; except that she had flesh to return to. At least she hoped she did; hoped that now she’d completed this bizarre pilgrimage, and had seen the relic in the wall, she’d be allowed to return to her tainted skin. But something still held her here. Not the darkness, not the walls, but some sense of unfinished business. Was a sign of veneration required of her? If so, what? She lacked the hands for genuflection, and the lips for hosannas; she couldn’t kneel, she couldn’t touch the relic. What was there left to do? Unless - God help her -she had to enter the thing.

She knew the instant she’d formed the thought that this was precisely why she’d been brought here. She’d left her living flesh to enter this prisoner of brick, cord and decay, a thrice-bounded carcass from which she might never emerge again. The thought revolted her, but had she come this far only to turn back because this last rite distressed her too much? Even assuming she could defy the forces that had brought her here, and return to the house of her body against their will, wouldn’t she wonder forever what adventure she’d turned her back on? She was no coward; she would enter the relic, and take the consequences.

No sooner thought than done. Her mind sank towards the binding, and slipped between the threads into the body’s maze. She had expected darkness, but there was light here, the forms of the body’s innards delineated by the milk-blue she’d come to know as the colour of this mystery. There was no foulness; no corruption. It was less a charnel house than a cathedral, the source, she now suspected, of the sacredness that permeated this underground. But, like a cathedral, its substance was quite dead. No blood ran in these veins, no heart pumped, no lungs drew breath. She spread her intention through the stilled anatomy, to feel its length and breadth. The dead woman had been large in life, her hips substantial, her breasts heavy. But the binding bit into her ripeness everywhere, perverting the swell and sweep of her. What terrible last moments she must have known, lying blind in this filth, hearing the wall of her mausoleum being built brick by brick. What kind of crime hung on her, Jude wondered, that she’d been condemned to such a death? And who were her executioners, the builders of that wall? Had they sung as they worked, their voices growing dimmer as the brick blotted them out? Or had they been silent, half-ashamed at their cruelty?

There was so much she wished she knew, and none of it answerable. She’d finished her journey as she’d begun it, in fear and confusion. It was time to be gone from the relic, and home. She willed herself to rise out of the dead blue flesh. To her horror, nothing happened. She was bound here, a prisoner within a prisoner. God help her, what had she done? Instructing herself not to panic, she concentrated her mind on the problem, picturing the cell beyond the binding, and the wall she’d passed so effortlessly through, and the lovers, and the passageway that led out to the open sky. But imagining was not enough. She had let her curiosity overtake her, spreading her spirit through the corpse, and now it had claimed that spirit for itself.

A rage began in her, and she let it come. It was as recognizable a part of her as the nose on her face, and she needed all that she was, every particular, to empower her. If she’d had her own body around her it would have been flushing as her heart-beat caught the rhythm of her fury. She even seemed to hear it - the first sound she’d been aware of since leaving the house - the pump at its hectic work. It was not imagined. She felt it in the body around her, a tremor passing through the long-stilled system as her rage ignited it afresh. In the throne-room of its head a sleeping mind woke, and knew it was invaded.

For Jude there was an exquisite moment of shared consciousness, when a mind new to her - yet sweetly familiar - grazed her own. Then she was expelled by its wakefulness. She heard it scream in horror behind her, a sound of mind rather than throat, which went with her as she sped from the cell, out through the wall, past the lovers shaken from their intercourse by falls of dust, out and up, into the rain, and into a night not blue but bitterest black. The din of the woman’s terror accompanied her all the way back to the house, where, to her infinite relief, she found her own body still standing in the candlelit room. She slid into it with ease, and stood in the middle of the room for a minute or two, sobbing, until she began to shudder with cold. She found her dressing-gown, and as she put it on, realized that her wrists and elbows were no longer stained. She went into the bathroom and consulted the mirror. Her face was similarly cleansed.

Still shivering, she returned to the living room to look for the blue stone. There was a substantial hole in the wall where its impact had gouged out the plaster. The stone itself was unharmed, lying on the rug in front of the hearth. She didn’t pick it up. She’d had enough of its delirium for one night. Avoiding its baleful glance as best she could, she threw a cushion over it. Tomorrow she’d plan some way of ridding herself of the thing. Tonight she needed to tell somebody what she’d experienced, before she began to doubt it. Someone a little crazy, who’d not dismiss her account out of hand; someone already half-believing. Gentle, of course.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Towards midnight, the traffic outside Gentle’s studio dwindled to almost nothing. Anybody who was going to a party tonight had arrived. They were deep in drink, debate or seduction, determined as they celebrated to have in the coming year what the going had denied them. Content with his solitude, Gentle sat cross-legged on the floor, a bottle of bourbon between his legs, and canvases propped up against the furniture all around him. Most of them were blank, but that suited his meditation. So was the future.

He’d been sitting in this ring of emptiness for about two hours, drinking from the bottle, and now his bladder needed emptying. He got up and went to the bathroom, using the light from the lounge to go by rather than face his reflection. As he shook the last drops into the bowl, that light went off. He zipped himself up, and went back into the studio. The rain lashed against the window, but there was sufficient illumination from the street for him to see that the door out on to the landing stood inches ajar.

‘Who’s there?’ he said.

The room was still for a moment, then he glimpsed a form against the window, and the smell of something burned and cold pricked his nostrils. The whistler! My God, it had found him!

Fear made him fleet. He broke from his frozen posture, and raced to the door. He would have been through it and away down the stairs had he not almost tripped on the dog waiting obediently on the other side. It wagged its tail in pleasure at the sight of him, and halted his flight. The whistler was no dog-lover. So who was here? Turning back, he reached for the light-switch, and was about to flip it on when the unmistakable voice of Pie’oh’pah said:

‘Please don’t. I prefer the dark.’

Gentle’s finger dropped from the switch, his heart hammering for a different reason.

‘Pie? Is that you?’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ came the reply. ‘I heard you wanted to see me, from a friend of yours.’ ‘I thought you were dead.’

‘I was with the dead. Theresa, and the children.’

‘Oh God. Oh God.’

‘You lost somebody too,’ Pie’oh’pah said.

It was wise, Gentle now understood, to have this exchange in darkness: to talk in shadow, of the grave and the lambs it had claimed.

‘I was with the spirits of my children for a time. Your friend found me in the mourning-place; spoke to me; told me you wanted to see me again. This surprises me, Gentle.’

‘As much as you talking to Taylor surprises me,’ Gentle replied, though after their conversation it shouldn’t have done. ‘Is he happy?’ he asked, knowing the question might be viewed as a banality, but wanting reassurance.

‘No spirit is happy,’ Pie replied. ‘There’s no release for them. Not in this Dominion or any other. They haunt the doors, waiting to leave, but there’s nowhere for them to go.’

‘Why?’

That’s a question that’s been asked for many generations, Gentle. And unanswered. As a child I was taught that before the Unbeheld went into the First Dominion there was a place there into which all spirits were received. My people lived in that Dominion then, and watched over that place, but the Unbeheld drove both the spirits and my people out.’

‘So the spirits have nowhere to go?’

‘Exactly. Their numbers swell, and so does their grief.’

He thought of Taylor, lying on his deathbed, dreaming of release, of the final flight into the Absolute. Instead, if Pie was to be believed, his spirit had entered a place of lost souls, denied both flesh and revelation. What price understanding now, when the end of everything was limbo?

‘Who is this Unbeheld?’ Gentle said.

‘Hapexamendios, the God of the Imajica.’

‘Is he a God of this world too?’

‘He was once. But he went out of the Fifth Dominion, through the other worlds, laying their divinities waste, until he reached the Place of Spirits. Then he drew a veil across that Dominion -’

‘And became Unbeheld.’

‘That’s what I was taught.’

The formality and plainness of Pie’oh’pah’s account lent the story authority, but for all its elegance it was still a tale of Gods and other worlds, very far from this dark room, and the cold rain running on the glass.

‘How do I know any of this is true?’ Gentle said.

‘You don’t, unless you see it with your own eyes,’ Pie’oh’pah replied. His voice when he said this was almost sultry. He spoke like a seducer.

‘And how do I do that?’

‘You must ask me direct questions, and I’ll try to answer them. I can’t reply to generalities.’

‘All right, answer this: Can you take me to the Dominions?’

‘That I can do.’

‘I want to follow in the footsteps of Hapexamendios. Can we do that?’

‘We can try.’

‘I want to see the Unbeheld, Pie’oh’pah. I want to know why Taylor and your children are in Purgatory. I want to understand why they’re suffering.’

There was no question in this speech, therefore no reply except the other’s quickening breath.

‘Can you take us now?’ Gentle said.

‘If that’s what you want.’

‘It’s what I want, Pie. Prove what you’ve said is true, or leave me alone forever.’

It was eighteen minutes to midnight when Jude got into her car to start her journey to Gentle’s house. It was an easy drive, with the roads so clear, and she was several times tempted to jump red lights, but the police were especially vigilant on this night, and any infringement might bring them out of hiding. Though she had no alcohol in her system she was by no means sure it was innocent of alien influences. She therefore drove as cautiously as at noon, and it took fully fifteen minutes to reach the studio. When she did she found the upper windows dark. Had Gentle decided to drown his sorrows in a night of high life, she wondered, or was he already fast asleep? If the latter, she had news worth waking him for.

‘There’s some things you should understand before we leave,’ Pie said as it tied its own left wrist to Gentle’s right, using its belt to do so. ‘This is no easy journey, Gentle. This Dominion, the Fifth, is unreconciled, which means that getting to the Fourth involves risk. It’s not like crossing a bridge. Passing over requires considerable power. And if anything goes wrong, the consequences will be dire.’

‘Tell me the worst.’

‘In between the Reconciled Dominions and the Fifth is a state called the In Ovo. It’s an ether, in which things that have ventured from their worlds are imprisoned. Some of them are innocent. They’re there by accident. Some were dispatched there as a judgement. They’re lethal. I’m hoping we’ll pass through the In Ovo before any of them even notice we were there. But if we were to become separated-’

‘I get the picture. You’d better tighten that knot then. It could still work loose.’

Pie applied himself to the task, with Gentle fumbling to help in the darkness.

‘Let’s assume we get through the In Ovo,’ Gentle said. ‘What’s on the other side?’

The Fourth Dominion,’ Pie replied. ‘If I’m accurate in my bearings, we’ll arrive near the city of Patashoqua.’

‘And if not?’

‘Who knows? The sea. A swamp.’ ‘Shit.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve got a good sense of direction. And there’s plenty of power between us. I couldn’t do this on my own. But together …’

‘Is this the only way to cross over?’

‘Not at all. There are a number of passing places here in the Fifth: stone circles, hidden away. But most of them were created to carry travellers to some particular location. We want to go as free agents. Unseen, unsuspected.’

‘So why have you chosen Patashoqua?’

‘It has … sentimental associations,’ Pie replied. ‘You’ll see for yourself, very soon.’ It paused. ‘You do still want to go?’

‘Of course.’

‘This is as tight as I can get the knot without stopping our blood.’

‘Then why are we delaying?’

Pie’s fingers touched Gentle’s face. ‘Close your eyes,’ it said.

Gentle did so. Pie’s fingers sought out Gentle’s free hand and raised it between them.

‘You have to help me,’ he said.

‘Tell me what to do.’

‘Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.’

He did, from somewhere.

‘Now,’ Pie went on, ‘put your hand to your face, with your thumb against your chin. There are very few incantations in our workings. No pretty words. Just pneuma like this, and the will behind them.’

‘I’ve got the will, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Gentle said.

Then one solid breath is all we need. Exhale until it hurts. I’ll do the rest.’

‘Can I take another breath afterwards?’

‘Not in this Dominion.’

With that reply the enormity of what they were undertaking struck Gentle. They were leaving earth. Stepping off the edge of the only reality he’d ever known into another state entirely. He grinned in the darkness, the hand bound to Pie’s taking hold of his deliverer’s fingers.

‘Shall we?’ he said.

In the murk ahead of him Pie’s teeth gleamed as it matched Gentle’s smile.

‘Why not?’

Gentle drew breath. Somewhere in the house, he heard a door slamming and footsteps on the stairs leading up to the studio. But it was too late for interruptions. He exhaled through his hand, one solid breath which Pie’oh’pah seemed to snatch from the air between them. Something ignited in the fist the mystif made, bright enough to burn between his clenched fingers …

At the door, Jude saw Gentle’s painting almost made flesh. Two figures, almost nose to nose, with their faces illuminated by some unnatural source, swelling like a slow explosion between them. She had time to recognize them both - to see the smiles on their faces as they met each other’s gaze - then, to her horror, they seemed to turn inside out. She glimpsed wet red surfaces, which folded upon themselves not once but three times in quick succession, each fold diminishing their bodies, until they were slivers of stuff, still folding, and folding, and finally gone.

She sank back against the door-jamb, shock making her nerves cavort. The dog she’d found waiting at the top of the stairs went fearlessly to the place where they’d stood. There was no further magic there, to snatch him after them. The place was dead. They’d gone, the bastards, wherever such avenues led.

The realization drew a yell of rage from her, sufficient to send the dog scurrying for cover. She clearly hoped Gentle heard her, wherever he was. Hadn’t she come here to share her revelations with him, so that they could investigate the great unknown together? And all the time he was preparing for his departure without her. Without her!