Imajica

Estabrook’s room was pleasant enough. Spacious and comfortable, its walls adorned with reproductions of Monet and Renoir, it was a soothing space. Even the piano concerto that played softly in the background seemed designed to placate a troubled mind. Estabrook was not in bed but sitting by the window, one of the curtains drawn aside so that he could watch the rain. He was dressed in pyjamas and his best dressing-gown, and smoking. As Maurice had said, he was clearly awaiting his visitor. There was no flicker of surprise when she appeared at the door. And, as she’d anticipated, he had his welcome ready.

‘At last, a familiar face.’

He didn’t open his arms to embrace her, but she went to him and kissed him lightly on both cheeks.

‘One of the nurses will get you something to drink if you’d like,’ he said.

‘Yes, I’d like some coffee. It’s bitter out there.’

‘Maybe Maurice’ll get it, if I promise to unburden my soul tomorrow.’

‘Do you?’ said Maurice.

‘I do. I promise. You’ll know the secrets of my potty-training by this time tomorrow.’

‘Milk and sugar?’ Maurice asked.

‘Just milk,’ Charlie said. ‘Unless her tastes have changed.’

‘No,’ she told him.

‘Of course not. Judith doesn’t change. Judith’s eternal.’

Maurice withdrew, leaving them to talk. There was no embarrassed silence. He had his spiel ready, and while he delivered it - a speech about how glad he was that she’d come, and how much he hoped it meant she would begin to forgive him - she studied his changed face. He’d lost weight, and was without his toupée, which revealed in his physiognomy qualities she’d never seen before. His large nose and tugged-down mouth, with jutting over-large lower lip, lent him the look of an aristocrat fallen on hard times. She doubted that she’d ever find it in her heart to love him again, but she could certainly manage a twinge of pity, seeing him so reduced.

‘I suppose you want a divorce,’ he said.

‘We can talk about that another time.’

‘Do you need money?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘If you do-’

‘I’ll ask.’

A male nurse appeared with coffee for Jude, hot chocolate for Estabrook, and biscuits. When he’d gone, she plunged into a confession. One from her, she reasoned, might elicit one from him.

‘I went to the house,’ she said. ‘To collect my jewellery.’

‘And you couldn’t get into the safe.’

‘Oh no, I got in.’ He didn’t look at her, but sipped his chocolate noisily. ‘And I found some very strange things, Charlie. I’d like to talk about them.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Some souvenirs. A piece of a statue. A book.’

‘No,’ he said, still not looking her way. ‘Those aren’t mine. I don’t know what they are. Oscar gave them to me to look after.’

Here was an intriguing connection. ‘Where did Oscar get them from?’ she asked him.

‘I didn’t enquire,’ Estabrook said with a detached air. ‘He travels a lot, you know.’

‘I’d like to meet him.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ he said hurriedly. ‘You wouldn’t like him at all.’

‘Globe-trotters are always interesting,’ she said, attempting to preserve a lightness in her tone.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t like him.’

‘Has he been to see you?’

‘No. And I wouldn’t see him if he did. Why are you asking me these questions? You’ve never cared about Oscar before.’

‘He is your brother,’ she said. ‘He has some filial responsibility.’

‘Oscar? He doesn’t care for anybody but himself. He only gave me those presents as a sop.’

‘So they were gifts. I thought you were just looking after them.’

‘Does it matter?’ he said, raising his voice a little. ‘Just don’t touch them, they’re dangerous. You put them back, yes?’

She lied and told him she had, realizing any further discussion on the matter would only infuriate him further.

‘Is there a view out of the window?’ she asked him.

‘Of the Heath,’ he said. ‘It’s very pretty on sunny days, apparently. They found a body there on Monday. A woman, strangled. I watched them combing the bushes all day yesterday and all day today, looking for clues I suppose. In this weather. Horrible, to be out in this weather, digging around looking for soiled underwear or some such. Can you imagine? I thought: I’m damn lucky I’m in here, warm and cosy.’

If there was any indication of a change in his mental processes it was here, in this strange digression. An earlier Estabrook would have had no patience with any conversation that was not serving a clear purpose. Gossip and its purveyors had drawn his contempt like little else, especially when he knew he was the subject of the tittle-tattle. As to gazing out of a window and wondering how others were faring in the cold, that would have been literally unthinkable two months before. She liked the change, just as she liked the new-found nobility in his profile. Seeing the hidden man revealed gave her faith in her own judgement. Perhaps it was this Estabrook she’d loved all along.

They spoke for a while more, without returning to any of the personal matters between them, and parted on friendly terms, with an embrace that was genuinely warm.

‘When will you come again?’ he asked her.

‘In the next couple of days,’ she told him.

‘I’ll be waiting.’

So, the gifts she’d found in the safe had come from Oscar Godolphin. Oscar the mysterious, who’d kept the family name while brother Charles had disowned it; Oscar the enigmatic; Oscar the globe-trotter. How far afield had he gone, she wondered, to have returned with such outré trophies? Somewhere out of this world, perhaps, into the same remoteness to which she’d seen Gentle and Pie’oh’pah dispatch themselves? She began to suspect that there was some conspiracy aboard. If two men who had no knowledge of each other, Oscar Godolphin and John Zacharias, knew about this other world and how to remove themselves there, how many others in her circle also knew? Was it information only available to men? Did it come with the penis and a mother fixation, as part of the male apparatus? Had Taylor known? Did Clem? Or was this some kind of family secret, and the part of the puzzle she was missing was the link between a Godolphin and a Zacharias?

Whatever the explanation, it was certain she would not get answers from Gentle, which meant she had to seek out brother Oscar. She tried by the most direct route first: the telephone directory. He wasn’t listed. She then tried via Lewis Leader, but he claimed to have no knowledge of the man’s whereabouts or fortunes, telling her that the affairs of the two brothers were quite separate, and he had never been called to deal with any matter involving Oscar Godolphin.

‘For all I know,’ he said, ‘the man could be dead.’

Having drawn a blank with the direct routes, she was thrown back upon the indirect. She returned to Estabrook’s house and scoured it thoroughly, looking for Oscar’s address or telephone number. She found neither, but she did turn up a photograph album Charlie had never shown to her, in which pictures of what she took to be the two brothers appeared. It wasn’t difficult to distinguish one from the other. Even in those early pictures Charlie had the troubled look the camera always found in him, whereas Oscar, younger by half a dozen years, was nevertheless the more confident of the pair; a little overweight, but carrying it easily, smiling an easy smile as he hooked his arm around his brother’s shoulders. She removed the most recent of the photographs, which pictured Charles at puberty, or thereabouts, from the album, and kept it. Repetition, she found, made theft easier. But it was the only information about Oscar she took away with her. If she was to get to the traveller, and find out in what world he’d bought his souvenirs, she’d have to work on Estabrook to do so. It would take time, and her impatience grew with every short and rainy day. Even though she had the freedom to buy a ticket anywhere on the planet, a kind of claustrophobia was upon her. There was another world to which she wanted access. Until she got it, the Earth itself would be a prison.

3

Leader called Oscar on the morning of 17 January, with the news that his brother’s estranged wife was asking for information on his whereabouts.

‘Did she say why?’

‘No, not precisely. But she’s very clearly sniffing after something. She’s apparently seen Estabrook three times in the last week.’

‘Thank you, Lewis. I appreciate this.’

‘Appreciate it in hard cash, Oscar,’ Leader replied. ‘I’ve had a very expensive Christmas.’

‘When have you ever gone empty-handed?’ Oscar said. ‘Keep me posted.’

The lawyer promised to do so, but Oscar doubted he’d provide much more by way of useful information. Only truly despairing souls confided in lawyers, and he doubted Judith was the despairing type. He’d never met her - Charlie had seen to that - but if she’d survived his company for any time at all she had to have a will of iron. Which begged the question: why would a woman who knew (presuming she did) that her husband had conspired to kill her, seek out his company, unless she had an ulterior motive? And was it conceivable that said motive was finding brother Oscar? If so, such curiosity had to be nipped in the bud. There were already enough variables at play, what with the Society’s purge now underway, and the inevitable police investigation on its heels, not to mention his new major domo Augustine (né Dowd) who was behaving in altogether too snotty a fashion. And of course, most volatile of these variables, sitting in his asylum beside the Heath, Charlie himself, probably crazy, certainly unpredictable, with all manner of titbits in his head which could do Oscar a lot of harm. It could be only a matter of time before he started to become talkative, and when he did what better ear to drop his discretions into than that of his enquiring wife?

That evening he sent Dowd (he couldn’t get used to that saintly Augustine) up to the clinic, with a basket of fruit for his brother.

‘Find a friend there, if you can,’ he told Dowd. ‘I need to know what Charlie babbles about when he’s being bathed.’

‘Why don’t you ask him directly?’

‘He hates me, that’s why. He thinks I stole his mess of pottage when Papa introduced me into the Tabula Rasa instead of Charlie?’

‘Why did your father do that?’

‘Because he knew Charlie was unstable, and he’d do the Society more harm than good. I’ve had him under control until now. He’s had his little gifts from the Dominions. He’s had you fawn upon him when he needed something out of the ordinary, like his assassin! This all started with that fucking assassin! Why couldn’t you have just killed the woman yourself?’

‘What do you take me for?’ Dowd said with distaste. ‘I couldn’t lay hands on a woman. Especially not a beauty.’

‘How do you know she’s a beauty?’

‘I’ve heard her talked about.’

‘Well, I don’t care what she looks like. I don’t want her meddling in my business. Find out what she’s up to. Then we’ll work out our response.’

Dowd came back a few hours later, with alarming news.

‘Apparently she’s persuaded him to take her to the Estate.’

‘What? What?’ Oscar bounded from his chair. The parrots rose up squawking in sympathy. ‘She knows more than she should. Shit! All that heartache to keep the Society out of our hair, and now this bitch comes along and we’re in worse trouble than ever.’

‘Nothing’s happened yet.’

‘But it will, it will! She’ll wind him round her little finger and he’ll tell her everything.’

‘What do you want to do about it?’

Oscar went to hush the parrots. ‘Ideally?’ he said, as he smoothed their ruffled wings. ‘Ideally I’d have Charlie vanish off the face of the earth.’

‘He had much the same ambition for her,’ Dowd observed.

‘Meaning what?’

‘Just that you’re both quite capable of murder.’

Oscar made a contemptuous grunt. ‘Charlie was only playing at it,’ he said. ‘He’s got no balls! He’s got no vision!’ He returned to his high-backed chair, his expression sullen. ‘It’s not going to hold, damn it,’ he said. ‘I can feel it in my gut. We’ve kept things neat and tidy so far, but it’s not going to hold. Charlie has to be taken out of the equation.’

‘He’s your brother.’

‘He’s a burden.’

‘What I mean is: he’s your brother. You should be the one to dispatch him.’

Oscar’s eyes widened.

‘Oh my Lord,’ he said.

‘Think what they’d say in Yzordderrex, if you were to tell them.’

‘What? That I killed my own brother? I don’t see much charm in that.’

‘But that you did what you had to do, however unpalatable, to keep the secret safe.’ Dowd paused to let the idea blossom. ‘That sounds heroic to me. Think what they’ll say.’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘It’s your reputation in Yzordderrex you care about. isn’t it, not what happens in the Fifth? You’ve said before this world’s getting duller all the time.’

Oscar pondered this for a while, then said: ‘Maybe I should slip away. Kill them both to make sure nobody ever knows where I’ve gone - ‘

‘Where we’ve gone.’

‘- then slip away and pass into legend. Oscar Godolphin, who left his crazy brother dead beside his wife, and disappeared. Oh yes. That’d make quite a headline in Patashoqua.’ He mused for a few moments more. ‘What’s the classic sibling murder?’ he finally asked.

‘The jaw-bone of an ass.’

‘Ridiculous.’

‘You’ll think of something better.’

‘So I will. Make me a drink, Dowdy. And have one yourself. We’ll drink to escape.’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’ Dowd replied, but the remark was lost on Godolphin, who was already plunged deep into murderous thought.

CHAPTER TWENTY

1

Gentle and Pie were six days on the Patashoquan Highway, days measured not by the watch on Pie’s wrist but by the brightening and darkening of the peacock sky. On the fifth day the watch gave up the ghost anyway, maddened, Pie supposed, by the magnetic field surrounding a city of pyramids they passed. Thereafter, even though Gentle wanted to preserve some sense of how time was proceeding in the Dominion they’d left, it was virtually impossible. Within a few days their bodies were accommodating the rhythm of their new world, and he let his curiosity feast on more pertinent matters; chiefly, the landscape through which they were travelling.

It was diverse. In that first week they passed out of the plain into a region of lagoons - the Cosacosa - which took two days to cross, and thence into tracts of ancient conifers so tall clouds hung in their topmost branches like the nests of ethereal birds. On the other side of this stupendous forest the mountains which Gentle had glimpsed days before came plainly into view. The range was called the Jokalaylau, Pie informed him, and legend had it that after the Mount of Lipper Bayak these heights had been Hapexamendios’s next resting place as He’d crossed through the Dominions. It was no accident, it seemed, that the landscapes they passed through recalled those of the Fifth; they had been chosen for that similarity. The Unbeheld had strode the Imajica dropping seeds of humanity as He went - even to the very edge of His sanctum - in order to give the species He favoured new challenges, and like any good gardener He’d dispersed them where they had the best hope of prospering. Where the native crop could be conquered or accommodated; where the living was hard enough to make sure only the most resilient survived, but the land fertile enough to feed their children; where rain came; where light came; where all the vicissitudes that strengthened a species by occasional calamity - tempest, earthquake, flood - were to hand.

But while there was much that any terrestrial traveller would have recognized, nothing, not to the smallest pebble underfoot, was quite like its counterpart in the Fifth. Some of these disparities were too vast to be missed: the green-gold of the heavens, for instance, or the elephantine snails that grazed beneath the cloud-nested trees. Others were smaller, but equally bizarre, like the wild dogs that ran along the Highway now and then, hairless and shiny as patent leather; or grotesque, like the horned kites which swooped on any animal dead or near-dead on the road, and only rose from their meals, purple wings opening like cloaks, when the vehicle was almost upon them; or absurd, like the bone-white lizards that congregated in their thousands along the edge of the lagoons, the urge to turn somersaults passing through their colonies in waves.

Perhaps finding some new response to these experiences was out of the question when the sheer proliferation of travellers’ tales had all but exhausted the lexicon of discovery. But it nevertheless irritated Gentle to hear himself responding in clichés. The traveller moved by unspoilt beauty, or appalled by native barbarism. The traveller touched by primitive wisdom or caught breathless by undreamt-of modernities. The traveller condescending; the traveller humbled; the traveller hungry for the next horizon, or pining miserably for home. Of all these perhaps only the last response never passed Gentle’s lips. He thought of the Fifth only when it came up in conversation between himself and Pie, and that happened less and less as the practicalities of the moment pressed more heavily upon them. Food and sleeping quarters were easily come by at first, as was fuel for the car. There were small villages and hostelries along the Highway, where Pie, despite an absence of hard cash, always managed to secure them sustenance and beds to sleep in. The mystif had a host of minor feits at its disposal. Gentle realized: ways to use its powers of seduction to make even the most rapacious hosteller pliant. But once they got beyond the forest matters became more problematical. The bulk of the vehicles had turned off at the intersections and the Highway had degenerated from a well-serviced thoroughfare to a two-lane road, with more pot-holes than traffic. The vehicle Pie had stolen had not been designed for the rigours of long-distance travel. It started to show signs of fatigue, and with the mountains looming ahead it was decided they should stop at the next village, and attempt to trade it in for a more reliable model.

‘Perhaps something with breath in its body,’ Pie suggested.

‘Speaking of which,’ Gentle said, ‘you never asked me about the Nullianac.’

‘What was there to ask?’

‘How I killed it.’

‘I presumed you used a pneuma.’

‘You don’t sound very surprised.’

‘How else would you have done it?’ Pie said, quite reasonably. ‘You had the will, and you had the power.’

‘But where did I get it from?’ Gentle said.

‘You’ve always had it,’ Pie replied, which left Gentle nursing as many questions, or more, than he’d begun with. He started to formulate one, but something in the motion of the car began to nauseate him as he did so. ‘I think we’d better stop for a few minutes,’ he said. ‘I think I’m going to puke.’

Pie brought the vehicle to a halt, and Gentle stepped out. The sky was darkening, and some night-blooming flower spiced the cooling air. On the slopes above them herds of pale-flanked beasts, relations of the yak but here called doeki, moved down through the twilight of their dormitory pastures, lowing as they came. The dangers of Vanaeph, and the thronged Highway outside Patashoqua, seemed very remote. Gentle breathed deeply, and the nausea, like his questions, no longer vexed him. He looked up at the first stars. Some were red here, like Mars; others gold: fragments of the noonday sky that refused to be extinguished.

‘Is this Dominion another planet?’ he asked Pie. ‘Are we in some other galaxy?’

‘No. It’s not space that separates the Fifth from the rest of the Dominions, it’s the In Ovo.’

‘So, is the whole of planet Earth the Fifth Dominion, or just part of it?’

‘I don’t know,’ it said. ‘All, I assume. But everyone has a different theory.’

‘What’s yours?’

‘Well, when we move between the Reconciled Dominions, you’ll see it’s very easy. There are countless passing places between the Fourth and the Third, the Third and the Second. We’ll walk into a mist, and we’ll come out into another world. Simple. But I don’t think the borders are fixed. I think they move over the centuries, and the shapes of the Dominions change. So maybe it’ll be the same with the Fifth. If it’s reconciled, the borders will spread, until the whole planet has access to the rest of the Dominions. The truth is, nobody really knows what the Imajica looks like, because nobody’s ever made a map.’

‘Somebody should try.’

‘Maybe you’re the man to do it,’ Pie said. ‘You were an artist before you were a traveller.’

‘I was a faker, not an artist.’

‘But your hands are clever,’ Pie replied.

‘Clever,’ Gentle said softly, ‘but never inspired.’

This melancholy thought took him back, momentarily, to Klein, and to the rest of the circle he’d left in the Fifth; to Jude, Clem, Estabrook, Vanessa and the rest. What were they doing this fine night? Had they even noticed his departure? He doubted it.

‘Are you feeling any better?’ Pie enquired. ‘I see some lights down the road a little way. It may be the last outpost before the mountains.’

‘I’m in good shape,’ Gentle said, climbing back into the car.

They’d proceeded perhaps a quarter of a mile, and were in sight of the village when their progress was brought to a halt by a young girl who appeared from the dusk to herd her doeki across the road. She was in every way a normal thirteen-year-old child, but for one: her face, and those parts of her body revealed by her simple dress, were sleek with fawny down. It was plaited where it grew long at her elbow and her temples, and tied in a row of ribbons at her nape.

‘What village is this?’ Pie asked as the last of the doeki lingered in the road.

‘Beatrix,’ she said, and without prompting added, ‘There is no better place in any heaven.’

Then, shooing the last beast on its way, she vanished into the twilight.

2

The streets of Beatrix weren’t as narrow as those of Vanaeph, but nor were they designed for motor vehicles. Pie parked the car close to the outskirts, and the two of them ambled into the village from there. The houses were unpretentious affairs raised of an ochre stone, and surrounded by stands of vegetation that were a cross between silver birches and bamboo. The lights Pie had spotted from a distance weren’t those that burned in the windows, but the lanterns that hung in these trees, throwing their mellow light across the streets. Just about every copse boasted its lantern-trimmer - shaggy-faced children like the herders - some squatting beneath the trees, others perched precariously in their branches. The doors of almost all the houses stood open, and music drifted from several, tunes caught by the lantern-trimmers, and danced to in the dapple. Asked to guess, Gentle would have said life was good here. Slow, perhaps, but good.

‘We can’t cheat these people,’ Gentle said. ‘It wouldn’t be honourable.’

‘Agreed,’ Pie replied.

‘So what do we do for money?’

‘Maybe they’ll agree to cannibalize the vehicle for a good meal, and a horse or two.’

‘I don’t see any horses.’

‘A doeki would be fine.’

‘They look slow.’

Pie directed Gentle’s gaze up the heights of the Jokalaylau. The last traces of day still lingered on the snow-fields, but for all their beauty the mountains were vast and vanishing.

‘Slow and certain is safer up there,’ Pie said. Gentle took Pie’s point. ‘I’m going to see if I can find somebody in charge,’ the mystif went on, and left Gentle’s side to go and question one of the lantern-trimmers.