Imajica

Only later, when she was in love with him and it was too late for common sense to qualify her feelings, did she learn more about him. He trailed a reputation for womanizing that, even if it was ninety per cent invention, as she assumed, was still prodigious. If she mentioned his name in any circle, however jaded it was by gossip, there was always somebody who had some titbit about him. He even went by a variety of names. Some referred to him as the Furie; some as Zach or Zacho or Mr Zee; others called him Gentle, which was the name she knew him by, of course; still others John the Divine. Enough names for half a dozen lifetimes. She wasn’t so blindly devoted to him that she didn’t accept there was truth in these rumours. Nor did he do much to temper them. He liked the air of legend that hung about his head. He claimed, for instance, not to know how old he was. Like herself, he had a very slippery grasp on the past. And he frankly admitted to being obsessed with her sex - some of the talk she’d heard was of cradle-snatching; some of deathbed fucks - he played no favourites.

So, here was her Gentle: a man known to the doormen of every exclusive club and hotel in the city, who, after ten years of high living, had survived the ravages of every excess; who was still lucid, still handsome, still alive. And this same man, this Gentle, told her he was in love with her, and put the words together so perfectly she disregarded all she’d heard but those he spoke.

She might have gone on listening forever, but for her rage, which was the legend she trailed. A volatile thing, apt to ferment in her without her even being aware of it. That had been the case with Gentle. After half a year of their affair, she’d begun to wonder, wallowing in his affection, how a man whose history had been one infidelity after another had mended his ways; which thought led to the possibility that perhaps he hadn’t. In fact she had no reason to suspect him. His devotion bordered on the obsessive in some moods, as though he saw in her a woman she didn’t even know herself, an ancient soul-mate. She was, she began to think, unlike any other woman he’d ever met; the love that had changed his life. When they were so intimately joined, how would she not know if he were cheating on her? She’d have surely sensed the other woman. Tasted her on his tongue, or smelt her on his skin. And if not there, then in the subtleties of their exchanges. But she’d underestimated him. When, by the sheerest fluke, she’d discovered he had not one other woman on the side but two, it drove her to near insanity. She began by destroying the contents of the studio, slashing all his canvases, painted or not, then tracking the felon himself, and mounting an assault that literally brought him to his knees, in fear for his balls.

The rage burned a week, after which she fell totally silent for three days; a silence broken by a grief like nothing she’d ever experienced before. Had it not been for her chance meeting with Estabrook - who saw through her tumbling, distracted manner to the woman she was - she might well have taken her own life.

Thus the tale of Judith and Gentle: one death short of tragedy, and a marriage short of farce.

She found Marlin already home, uncharacteristically agitated.

‘Where have you been?’ he wanted to know. ‘It’s six thirty-nine.’

She instantly knew this was no time to be telling him what her trip to Bloomingdales had cost her in peace of mind. Instead she lied. ‘I couldn’t get a cab. I had to walk.’

‘If that happens again just call me. I’ll have you picked up by one of our limos. I don’t want you wandering the streets. It’s not safe. Anyhow, we’re late. We’ll have to eat after the performance.’

‘What performance?’

‘The show in the Village Troy was yabbering about last night, remember? The Neo-Nativity? He said it was the best thing since Bethlehem.’

‘It’s sold out.’

‘I have my connections,’ he gleamed.

‘We’re going tonight?’

‘Not if you don’t move your ass.’

‘Marlin, sometimes you’re sublime,’ she said, dumping her purchases and racing to change.

‘What about the rest of the time?’ he hollered after her. ‘Sexy? Irresistible? Beddable?’

If indeed he’d secured the tickets as a way of bribing her between the sheets, then he suffered for his lust. He concealed his boredom through the first act, but by intermission he was itching to be away to claim his prize.

‘Do we really need to stay for the rest?’ he asked her as they sipped coffee in the tiny foyer, ‘I mean, it’s not like there’s any mystery about it. The kid gets born, the kid grows up, the kid gets crucified.’

‘I’m enjoying it.’

‘But it doesn’t make any sense,’ he complained, in deadly earnest. The show’s eclecticism offended his rationalism deeply. ‘Why were the angels playing jazz?’

‘Who knows what angels do?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know whether it’s a comedy or a satire, or what the hell it is,’ he said. ‘Do you know what it is?’

‘I think it’s very funny.’

‘So you’d like to stay?’

‘I’d like to stay.’

The second half was even more of a grab-bag than the first, the suspicion growing in Jude as she watched that the parody and pastiche was a smoke-screen put up to cover the creators’ embarrassment at their own sincerity. In the end, with Charlie Parker angels wailing on the stable roof, and Santa crooning at the manger, the piece collapsed into high camp. But even that was oddly moving. The child was born. Light had come into the world again, even if it was to the accompaniment of tap-dancing elves.

When they exited, there was sleet in the wind.

‘Cold, cold, cold,’ Marlin said. ‘I’d better take a leak.’

He went back inside to join the queue for the toilets, leaving Jude at the door, watching the blobs of wet snow pass through the lamplight. The theatre was not large, and the bulk of the audience were out in a couple of minutes, umbrellas raised, heads dropped, darting off into the Village to look for their cars, or a place where they could put some drink in their systems, and play critics. The light above the front door was switched off, and a cleaner emerged from the theatre with a black plastic bag of rubbish and a broom, and began to brush the foyer, ignoring Jude - who was the last visible occupant - until he reached her, when he gave her a glance of such venom she decided to put up her umbrella and stand on the darkened step. Marlin was taking his time emptying his bladder. She only hoped he wasn’t titivating himself, slicking his hair and freshening his breath in the hope of talking her into bed.

The first she knew of the assault was a motion glimpsed from the corner of her eye: a blurred form approaching her at speed through the thickening sleet. Alarmed, she turned towards her attacker. She had time to recognize the face on Third Avenue, then the man was upon her.

She opened her mouth to yell, turning to retreat into the theatre as she did so. The cleaner had gone. So had her shout, caught in her throat by the stranger’s hands. They were expert. They hurt brutally, stopping every breath from being drawn. She panicked; flailed; toppled. He took her weight, controlling her motion. In desperation she threw the umbrella into the foyer, hoping there was somebody out of sight in the box office who’d be alerted to her jeopardy. Then she was wrenched out of shadow into heavier shadow still, and realized it was almost too late already. She was becoming light-headed; her leaden limbs no longer hers. In the murk her assassin’s face was once more a blur, with two dark holes bored in it. She fell towards them, wishing she had the energy to turn her gaze away from this blankness, but as he moved closer to her a little light caught his cheek and she saw, or thought she saw, tears there, spilling from those dark eyes. Then the light went, not just from his cheek but from the whole world. And as everything slipped away she could only hold on to the thought that somehow her murderer knew who she was.

‘Judith?’

Somebody was holding her. Somebody was shouting to her. Not the assassin, but Marlin. She sagged in his arms, catching dizzied sight of the assailant running across the pavement, with another man in pursuit. Her eyes swung back towards Marlin, who was asking her if she was all right, then back towards the street as brakes shrieked, and the failed assassin was struck squarely by a speeding car, which reeled round, wheels locked and sliding over the sleet-greased street, throwing the man’s body off the bonnet and over a parked car. The pursuer threw himself aside as the vehicle mounted the pavement, slamming into a lamp-post.

Jude put her arm out for some support other than Marlin, her fingers finding the wall. Ignoring his advice that she stay still, stay still, she started to stumble towards the place where her assassin had fallen. The driver was being helped from his smashed vehicle, unleashing a stream of obscenities as he emerged. Others were appearing on the scene to lend help in forming a crowd, but Jude ignored their stares and headed across the street, Marlin at her side. She was determined to reach the body before anybody else. She wanted to see it before it was touched; wanted to meet its open eyes and fix its dead expression; know it, for memory’s sake.

She found his blood first, spattered in the grey slush underfoot, and then, a little way beyond, the assassin himself, reduced to a lumpen form in the gutter. As she came within a few yards of it, however, a shudder passed down its spine, and it rolled over, showing its face to the sleet. Then, impossible though this seemed given the blow it had been struck, the form started to haul itself to its feet. She saw how bloodied it was, but she saw also that it was still essentially whole. It’s not human, she thought, as it stood upright; whatever it is, it’s not human. Marlin groaned with revulsion behind her, and a woman on the pavement screamed. The man’s gaze went to the screamer, wavered, then returned to Jude.

It wasn’t an assassin any longer. Nor was it Gentle. If it had a self, perhaps this was its face: split by wounds and doubt; pitiful; lost. She saw its mouth open and close as if it was attempting to address her. Then Marlin made a move to pursue it, and it ran. How, after such an accident, its limbs managed any speed at all was a miracle, but it was off at a pace that Marlin couldn’t hope to match. He made a show of pursuit, but gave up at the first intersection, returning to Jude breathless.

‘Drugs,’ he said, clearly angered to have missed his chance at heroism. ‘Fucker’s on drugs. He’s not feeling any pain. Wait till he comes down, he’ll drop dead. Fucker! How did he know you?’

‘Did he?’ she said, her whole body trembling now, as relief at her escape and terror at how close she’d come to losing her life both stung tears from her.

‘He called you Judith,’ Marlin said.

In her mind’s eye she saw the assassin’s mouth open and close, and on them read the syllables of her name.

‘Drugs,’ Marlin was saying again, and she didn’t waste words arguing, though she was certain he was wrong. The only drug in the assassin’s system had been purpose, and that would not lay him low, tonight or any other.

CHAPTER FOUR

1

Eleven days after he had taken Estabrook to the encampment in Streatham, Chant realized he would soon be having a visitor. He lived alone, and anonymously, in a one-room flat on a soon to be condemned estate close to the Elephant and Castle, an address he had given to nobody, not even his employer. Not that his pursuers would be distracted from finding him by such petty secrecy. Unlike homo sapiens, the species his long-dead master Sartori had been wont to call the blossom on the simian tree, Chant’s kind could not hide themselves from oblivion’s agents by closing a door and drawing the blinds. They were like beacons to those that preyed on them.

Men had it so much easier. The creatures that had made meat of them in earlier ages were zoo specimens now, brooding behind bars for the entertainment of the victorious ape. They had no grasp, those apes, of how close they lay to a state where the devouring beasts of Earth’s infancy would be little more than fleas. That state was called the In Ovo, and on the other side of it lay four worlds, the so-called Reconciled Dominions. They teemed with wonders: individuals blessed with attributes that would have made them, in this, the Fifth Dominion, fit for sainthood, or burning, or both; cults possessed of secrets that would overturn in a moment the dogmas of faith and physics alike; beauty that might blind the sun, or set the moon dreaming of fertility. All this, separated from Earth - the unreconciled Fifth - by the abyss of the In Ovo.

It was not, of course, an impossible journey to make. But the power to do so, which was usually - and contemptuously - referred to as magic, had been waning in the Fifth since Chant had first arrived. He’d seen the walls of reason built against it, brick by brick. He’d seen its practitioners hounded and mocked; seen its theories decay into decadence and parody; seen its purpose steadily forgotten. The Fifth was choking in its own certainties, and though he took no pleasure in the thought of losing his life, he would not mourn his removal from this hard and unpoetic Dominion.

He went to his window, and looked down the five storeys into the courtyard. It was empty. He had a few minutes yet, to compose his missive to Estabrook. Returning to his table he began it again, for the ninth or tenth time. There was so much he wanted to communicate, but he knew that Estabrook was utterly ignorant of the involvement his family, whose name he’d abandoned, had with the fate of the Dominions. It was too late now to educate him. A warning would have to suffice. But how to word it so that it didn’t sound like the rambling of a wild man? He set to again, putting the facts as plainly as he could, though doubted that these words would save Estabrook’s life. If the powers that prowled this world tonight wanted him dispatched, nothing short of intervention from the Unbeheld Himself, Hapexamendios, the all-powerful occupant of the First Dominion, would save him.

With the note finished, Chant pocketed it, and headed out into the darkness. Not a moment too soon. In the frosty quiet he heard the sound of an engine too suave to belong to a resident, and peered over the parapet to see the men getting out of the car below. He didn’t doubt that these were his visitors. The only vehicles he’d seen here so polished were hearses. He cursed himself. Fatigue had made him slothful, and now he’d let his enemies get dangerously close. He ducked down the back stairs - glad, for once, that there were so few lights working along the landings - äs his visitors strode towards the front. From the flats he passed, the sound of lives: Christmas pops on the radio, argument, a baby laughing, which became tears, as though it sensed that there was danger near. He knew none of his neighbours, except as furtive faces glimpsed at windows, and now - though it was too late to change that - he regretted it.

He reached ground level unharmed and, discounting the thought of trying to retrieve his car from the courtyard, headed off towards the street most heavily trafficked at this time of night, which was Kennington Park Road. If he was lucky he’d find a cab there, though at this time of night they weren’t frequent. Fares were harder to pick up in this area than in Covent Garden or Oxford Street, and more likely to prove unruly. He allowed himself one backward glance towards the estate, then turned his heels to the task of flight.

2

Though classically it was the light of day which showed a painter the deepest flaws in his handiwork, Gentle worked best at night; the instincts of a lover brought to a simpler art. In the week or so since he’d returned to his studio it had once again become a place of work: the air pungent with the smell of paint and turpentine, the burned-down butts of cigarettes left on every available shelf and plate. Though he’d spoken with Klein daily there was no sign of a commission yet, so he had spent the time re-educating himself. As Klein had so cruelly observed, he was a technician without a vision, and that made these days of meandering difficult. Until he had a style to forge, he felt listless, like some latter-day Adam, born with the power to impersonate but bereft of subjects. So he set himself an exercise. He would paint a canvas in four radically different styles: a cubist North, an impressionist South, an East after Van Gogh, a West after Dali. As his subject he took Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. The challenge drove him to a healthy distraction, and he was still occupied with it at three thirty in the morning, when the telephone rang. The line was watery, and the voice at the other end pained and raw, but it was unmistakably Judith.

‘Is that you, Gentle?’

‘It’s me.’ He was glad the line was so bad. The sound of her voice had shaken him, and he didn’t want her to know. ‘Where you calling from?’

‘New York. I’m just visiting for a few days.’

‘It’s good to hear from you.’

‘I’m not sure why I’m calling. It’s just that today’s been strange and I thought maybe, oh.’ She stopped. Laughed at herself, perhaps a little drunkenly. ‘I don’t know what I thought,’ she went on. ‘It’s stupid. I’m sorry.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘Maybe we could get together?’

‘I don’t think so, Gentle.’

‘Just to talk.’

‘This line’s getting worse. I’m sorry I woke you.’

‘You didn’t—’

‘Keep warm, huh?’

‘Judith-’

‘Sorry, Gentle.’

The line went dead. But the water she’d spoken through gurgled on, like the noise in a sea-shell. Not the ocean at all, of course; just illusion. He put the receiver down, and -knowing he’d never sleep now - squeezed out some fresh bright worms of paint to work with, and set to.

3

It was the whistle from the gloom behind him that alerted Chant to the fact that his escape had not gone unnoticed. It was not a whistle that could have come from human lips, but a chilling scalpel shriek he had heard only once before in the Fifth Dominion, when, some two hundred years past, his then possessor, the Maestro Sartori, had conjured from the In Ovo a familiar which had made such a whistle. It had brought bloody tears to its summoner’s eyes, obliging Sartori to relinquish it post haste. Later Chant and the Maestro had spoken of the event, and Chant had identified the creature. It was a creature known in the Reconciled Dominions as a voider, one of a brutal species that haunted the wastes north of the Lenten Way. They came in many shapes, being made from collective desire, which fact seemed to move Sartori profoundly.

‘I must summon one again,’ he’d said, ‘and speak with it,’ to which Chant had replied that if they were to attempt such a summoning they had to be ready next time, for voiders were lethal, and could not be tamed except by Maestros of inordinate power. The proposed conjuring had never taken place. Sartori had disappeared a short time later. In all the intervening years Chant had wondered if he had attempted a second summoning alone, and been the voiders’ victim. Perhaps the creature coming after Chant now had been responsible. Though Sartori had disappeared two hundred years ago, the lives of voiders, like those of so many species from the other Dominions, were longer than the longest human span.

Chant glanced over his shoulder. The whistler was in sight. It looked perfectly human, dressed in a grey, well-cut suit and black tie, its collar turned up against the cold, its hands thrust into its pockets. It didn’t run, but almost idled as it came, the whistle confounding Chant’s thoughts, and making him stumble. As he turned away the second of his pursuers appeared on the pavement in front of him, drawing its hand from his pocket. A gun? No. A knife. No. Something tiny crawled in the voider’s palm, like a flea. Chant had no sooner focused upon it than it leapt towards his face. Repulsed, he raised his arm to keep it from his eyes or mouth, and the flea landed upon his hand. He slapped at it with his other hand, but it was beneath his thumbnail before he could get to it. He raised his arm to see its motion in the flesh of his thumb, and clamped his other hand around the base of the digit in the hope of stopping its further advance, gasping as though doused with ice-water. The pain was out of all proportion to the mite’s size, but he held both thumb and sobs hard, determined not to lose all dignity in front of his executioners. Then he staggered off the pavement into the street, throwing a glance down towards the brighter lights at the junction. What safety they offered was debatable, but if worst came to worst he would throw himself beneath a car, and deny the voiders the entertainment of his slow demise.

He began to run again, still clutching his hand. This time he didn’t glance back. He didn’t need to. The sound of the whistling faded, and the purr of the car replaced it. He threw every ounce of his energy into the run, reaching the bright street to find it deserted by traffic. He turned north, racing past the Underground station towards the Elephant and Castle. Now he did glance behind, to see the car following steadily. It had three occupants. The voiders, and another, sitting in the back seat. Sobbing with breathlessness he ran on, and - Lord love it! - a taxi appeared around the next corner, its yellow light announcing its availability. Concealing his pain as best he could, knowing the driver might pass on by if he thought the nailer was wounded, he stepped out into the street, and raised his hand to wave the driver down. This meant unclasping one hand from the other, and the mite took instant advantage, working its way up into his wrist. But the vehicle slowed.

‘Where to, mate?’

He astonished himself with the reply, giving not Estabrook’s address, but that of another place entirely.

∧Clerkenwell,’ he said. ‘Gamut Street.’

‘Don’t know it,’ the cabbie replied, and for one heart-stopping moment Chant thought he was going to drive on.

‘I’ll direct you,’ he said.

‘Get in, then.’

Chant did so, slamming the cab door with no little satisfaction, and barely managing to reach the seat before the cab picked up speed.

Why had he named Gamut Street? There was nothing there that would heal him. Nothing could. The flea - or whatever variation in that species it was that crawled in him - had reached his elbow, and his arm below that pain was now completely numb, the skin of his hand wrinkled and flaky. But the house in Gamut Street had been a place of miracles once. Men and women of great authority had walked in it, and perhaps left some ghost of themselves to calm him in extremis. No creature, Sartori had taught, passed through this Dominion unrecorded, even to the least - to the child that perished a heart-beat after it opened its eyes, the child that died in the womb, drowned in its mother’s waters - even that unnamed thing had its record and its consequence. So how much more might the once-mighty of Gamut Street have left, by way of echoes?

His heart was palpitating, and his body full of jitters. Fearing he’d soon lose control of his functions, he pulled the letter to Estabrook from his pocket, and leaned forward to slide the half-window between himself and the driver aside.

‘When you’ve dropped me in Clerkenwell I’d like you to deliver a letter for me. Would you be so kind?’

‘Sorry, mate,’ the driver said, ‘I’m going home after this. I’ve a wife waiting for me.’

Chant dug in his inside pocket and pulled out his wallet, then passed it through the window, letting it drop on the seat beside the driver.

‘What’s this?’

‘All the money I’ve got. This letter has to be delivered.’

‘All the money you’ve got, eh?’

The driver picked up the wallet and flicked it open, his gaze going between its contents and the road.