Imajica

There’s a lot of dosh in here.’

‘Have it. It’s no good to me.’

‘Are you sick?’

‘And tired,’ Chant said. ‘Take it, why don’t you? Enjoy it.’

‘There’s a Daimler been following us. Somebody you know?’

There was no purpose served by lying to the man. ‘Yes,’ Chant said. ‘I don’t suppose you could put some distance between them and us?’

The man pocketed the wallet, and jabbed his foot down on the accelerator. The cab leapt forward like a racehorse from a gate, its jockey’s laugh rising above the guttural din of the engine. Whether it was the cash he was now heavy with or the challenge of out-running a Daimler that motivated him, he put his cab through its paces, proving it more mobile than its bulk would have suggested. In under a minute they’d made two sharp lefts and a squealing right, and were roaring down a back street so narrow the least miscalculation would have taken off handles, hubs and mirrors. The mazing didn’t stop there. They made another turn, and another, bringing them in a short time to Southwark Bridge. Somewhere along the way, they’d lost the Daimler. Chant might have applauded had be possessed two workable hands, but the flea’s message of corruption was spreading with agonizing speed. While he still had five fingers under his command he went back to the window and dropped Estabrook’s letter through, murmuring the address with a tongue that felt disfigured in his mouth.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ the cabbie said. ‘It’s not fucking contagious is it, ‘cause if it is -’

‘… not…’ Chant said.

‘You look fucking awful,’ the cabbie said, glancing in the mirror. ‘Sure you don’t want a hospital?’

‘No. Gamut Street. I want Gamut Street.’

‘You’ll have to direct me from here.’

The streets had all changed. Trees gone; rows demolished; austerity in place of elegance, function in place of beauty; the new for old, however poor the exchange rate. It was a decade and more since he’d come here last. Had Gamut Street fallen, and a steel phallus risen in its place?

‘Where are we?’ he asked the driver.

‘Clerkenwell. That’s where you wanted, isn’t it?

‘I mean the precise place.

The driver looked for a sign, and found:

‘Flaxen Street. Does it ring a bell?

Chant peered out of the window.

‘Yes! Yes! Go down to the end, and turn right.

‘Used to live around here, did you?

‘A long time ago.’

‘It’s seen better days.’ He turned right. ‘Now where?

‘First on the left.’

‘Here it is,’ the man said. ‘Gamut Street. What number was it?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

The cab drew up at the kerb. Chant fumbled for the handle, opened the door, and all but fell out on to the pavement. Staggering, he put his weight against the door to close it, and for the first time he and the driver came face to face. Whatever the flea was doing to his system it must have been horribly apparent, to judge by the look of repugnance on the man’s face.

‘You will deliver the letter?’ Chant said.

‘You can trust me, mate.’

‘When you’ve done it, you should go home,’ Chant said. Tell your wife you love her. Give a prayer of thanks.’

‘What for?’

‘That you’re human,’ Chant said.

The cabbie didn’t question this little lunacy.

‘Whatever you say, mate,’ he replied. ‘I’ll give the missus one and give thanks at the same time, how’s that? Now don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, eh?’

This advice given, he drove off, leaving his passenger to the silence of the street.

With failing eyes, Chant scanned the gloom. The houses, built in the middle of Sartori’s century, looked to be mostly deserted; primed for demolition perhaps. But then Chant knew that sacred places - and Gamut Street was sacred in its way - survived on occasion because they went unseen, even in plain sight. Burnished by magic, they deflected the threatening eye and found unwitting allies in men and women who, all unknowing, knew holiness; became sanctuaries for a secret few.

He climbed the three steps to the door, and pushed at it, but it was securely locked, so he went to the nearest window. There was a filthy shroud of cobweb across it, but no curtain beyond. He pressed his face to the glass. Though his eyes were weakening by the moment, his gaze was still more acute than that of the blossoming ape. The room he was looking into was stripped of all furniture and decoration; if anybody had occupied this house since Sartori’s time - and it surely hadn’t stood empty for two hundred years - they had gone, taking every trace of their presence. He raised his good arm and struck the glass with his elbow, a single jab which shattered the window. Then, careless of the damage he did himself, he hoisted his bulk on to the sill, beat out the rest of the pieces of glass with his hand, and dropped down into the room on the other side.

The layout of the house was still clear in his mind. In dreams he’d drifted through these rooms, and heard the Maestro’s voice summoning him up the stairs, up! up!, to the room at the top where Sartori had worked his work. It was there Chant wanted to go now, but there were new signs of atrophy in his body with every heartbeat. The hand first invaded by the flea was withered, its nails dropped from their place, its bone showing at the knuckles and wrist. Beneath his jacket he knew his torso to the hip was similarly unmade; he felt pieces of his flesh falling inside his shirt as he moved. He would not be moving for much longer. His legs were increasingly unwilling to bear him up, and his senses were close to flickering out. Like a man whose children were leaving him he begged as he climbed the stairs:

‘Stay with me. Just a little longer. Please …’

His cajoling got him as far as the first landing, but then his legs all but gave out, and thereafter he had to climb using his one good arm to haul him onwards.

He was halfway up the final flight when he heard the voiders’ whistle in the street outside, its piercing din unmistakable. They had found him quicker than he’d anticipated, sniffing him out through the darkened streets. The fear that he’d be denied sight of the sanctum at the top of the stairs spurred him on, his body doing its ragged best to accommodate his ambition.

From below, he heard the door being forced open. Then the whistle again, harder than before, as his pursuers stepped into the house. He began to berate his limbs, his tongue barely able to shape the words.

‘Don’t let me down! Work, will you? Work!’

And they obliged. He scaled the last few stairs in a spastic fashion, but reached the top flight as he heard the voiders’ soles at the bottom. It was dark up here, though how much of that was blindness and how much night he didn’t know. It scarcely mattered. The route to the door of the sanctum was as familiar to him as the limbs he’d lost. He crawled on hand and knees across the landing, the ancient boards creaking beneath him. A sudden fear seized him: that the door would be locked, and he’d beat his weakness against it, and fail to gain access. He reached up for the handle, grasped it, tried to turn it once, failed, tried again and this time dropped face down over the threshold as the door swung open.

There was food for his enfeebled eyes. Shafts of moonlight spilled from the windows in the roof. Though he’d dimly thought it was sentiment that had driven him back here, he saw now it was not. In returning here he came full circle, back to the room which had been his first glimpse of the Fifth Dominion. This was his cradle, and his tutoring room. Here he’d smelt the air of England for the first time, the crisp October air; here he’d fed first, drunk first; first had cause for laughter, and later, for tears. Unlike the lower rooms, whose emptiness was a sign of desertion, this space had always been sparsely furnished, and sometimes completely empty. He’d danced here on the same legs that now lay dead beneath him, while Sartori had told him how he planned to take this wretched Dominion, and build in its midst a city that would shame Babylon; danced for sheer exuberance, knowing his Maestro was a great man, and had it in his power to change the world.

Lost ambition; all lost. Before that October had become November Sartori had gone, flitted in the night, or murdered by his enemies. Gone, and left his servant stranded in a city he barely knew. How Chant had longed then to return to the ether from where he’d been summoned; to shrug off the body which Sartori had congealed around him, and be gone out of this Dominion. But the only voice capable of ordering such a release was that which had conjured him, and with Sartori gone he was exiled on earth forever. He hadn’t hated his summoner for that. Sartori had been indulgent for the weeks they’d been together. Were he to appear now, in the moonlit room, Chant would not have accused him of negligence, but made proper obeisances and been glad that his inspiration had returned.

… Maestro …’ he murmured, face to the musty boards.

‘Not here,’ came a voice from behind him. It was not, he knew, one of the voiders. They could whistle, but not speak. ‘You were Sartori’s creature, were you? I don’t remember that.’

The speaker was precise, cautious and smug. Unable to turn. Chant had to wait until the man walked past his supine body to get a sight of him. He knew better than to judge by appearances. He, whose flesh was not his own, but of the Maestro’s sculpting. Though the man in front of him looked human enough, he had the voiders in tow, and spoke with knowledge of things few humans had access to. His face was an overripe cheese, drooping with jowls and weary folds around the eyes, his expression that of a funereal comic. The smugness in his voice was here too, in the studied way he licked upper and lower lips with his tongue before he spoke, and tapped the fingertips of each hand together as he judged the broken man at his feet. He wore an immaculately tailored three-piece suit, cut from a cloth of apricot cream. Chant would have given a good deal to break the bastard’s nose so he bled on it.

‘I never did meet Sartori,’ the man said. ‘Whatever happened to him?’ He went down on his haunches in front of Chant and suddenly snatched hold of a handful of his hair. ‘I asked you what happened to your Maestro,’ he said. ‘I’m Dowd, by the way. You never knew my master, the Lord Godolphin, and I never knew yours. But they’re gone, and you’re scrabbling around for work. Well, you won’t have to do it any longer, if you take my meaning.’

‘Did you … did you send him to me?’

‘It would help my comprehension if you could be more specific’

‘Estabrook.’

‘Oh yes. Him.’

‘You did. Why?’

‘Wheels within wheels, my dove,’ Dowd said. ‘I’d tell you the whole bitter story, but you don’t have the time to listen and I don’t have the patience to explain. I knew of a man who needed an assassin. I knew of another man who dealt in them. Let’s leave it at that.’

‘But how did you know about me?’

‘You’re not discreet,’ Dowd replied. ‘You get drunk on the Queen’s birthday, and you gab like an Irishman at a wake. Lovey, it draws attention sooner or later.’

‘Once in while …’

‘I know, you get melancholy. We all do, lovey, we all do. But some of us do our weeping in private, and some of us’ - he let Chant’s head drop - ‘make fucking public spectacles of ourselves. There are consequences, lovey, didn’t Sartori tell you that? There are always consequences. You’ve begun something with this Estabrook business, for instance, and I’ll need to watch it closely, or before we know it there’ll be ripples, spreading through the Imajica.’

‥ the Imajica

That’s right. From here to the margin of the First Dominion. To the region of the Unbeheld Himself.’

Chant began to gasp, and Dowd - realizing he’d hit a nerve—leaned towards his victim.

‘Do I detect a little anxiety?’ he said. ‘Are you afraid of going into the glory of our Lord Hapexamendios?’

Chant’s voice was frail now. ‘Yes …’ he murmured.

‘Why?’ Dowd wanted to know. ‘Because of your crimes?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are your crimes? Do tell me. We needn’t bother with the little things. Just the really shameful stuff’ll do.’

‘I’ve had dealings with a Eurhetemec.’

‘Have you indeed?’ Dowd said. ‘How ever did you get back to Yzordderrex to do that?’

‘I didn’t,’ Chant replied. ‘My dealings … were here in the Fifth.’

‘Really,’ said Dowd softly. ‘I didn’t know there were Eurhetemecs here. You learn something new every day. But, lovey, that’s no great crime. The Unbeheld’s going to forgive a poxy little trespass like that. Unless …’ He stopped for a moment, turning over a new possibility. ‘Unless, the Eurhetemec was a mystif. ‥ ’ He trailed the thought, but Chant remained silent. ‘Oh, my dove,’ Dowd said. ‘It wasn’t, was it?’ Another pause. ‘Oh, it was. It was.’ He sounded almost enchanted. There’s a mystif in the Fifth, and what? You’re in love with it? You’d better tell me before you run out of breath, lovey. In a few minutes your eternal soul will be waiting at Hapexamendios’s door.’

Chant shuddered. The assassin …’ he said.

‘What about the assassin?’ came the reply. Then realizing what he’d just heard, Dowd drew a long, slow breath. ‘The assassin is a mystif?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, my sweet Hyo!’ he exclaimed. ‘A mystif!’ The enchantment had vanished from his voice now. He was hard and dry. ‘Do you know what they can do? The deceits they’ve got at their disposal? This was supposed to be an anonymous piece of shit-stirring, and look what you’ve done!’ His voice softened again. ‘Was it beautiful?’ he asked. ‘No, no. Don’t tell me. Let me have the surprise, when I see it face to face.’ He turned to the voiders. ‘Pick the fucker up,’ he said.

They stepped forward, and raised Chant by his broken arms. There was no strength left in his neck, and his head lolled forward, a solid stream of bilious fluid running from mouth and nostrils. ‘How often does the Eurhetemec tribe produce a mystif?’ Dowd mused, half to himself. ‘Every ten years? Every fifty? They’re certainly rare. And there you are, blithely hiring one of these little divinities as an assassin. Imagine! How pitiful, that it had fallen so low. I must ask it how that came about. ‥’ He stepped towards Chant, and at Dowd’s order one of the voiders raised Chant’s head by the hair. ‘I need the mystif’s whereabouts,’ Dowd said, ‘and its name.’

Chant sobbed through his bile. ‘Please …’ he said, ‘… I meant … I … meant. ‥’

‘Yes, yes. No harm. You were just doing your duty. The Unbeheld will forgive you, I guarantee it. But the mystif, lovey, I need you to tell me about the mystif. Where can I find it? Just speak the words, and you won’t ever have to think about it again. You’ll go into the presence of the Unbeheld like a babe.’

‘I will?’

‘You will. Trust me. Just give me its name and tell me the place where I can find it.’

‘Name … and … place.’

‘That’s right. But get to it, lovey, before it’s too late!’

Chant took as deep a breath as his collapsing lungs allowed. ‘It’s called Pie’oh’pah,’ he said.

Dowd stepped back from the dying man as if slapped. ‘Pie’oh’pah? Are you sure?’

… I’m sure …’

‘Pie’oh’pah is alive? And Estabrook hired it?’ ‘Yes.’

Dowd threw off his imitation of a Father Confessor, and murmured a fretful question of himself. ‘What does this mean?’ he said.

Chant made a pained little moan, his system racked by further waves of dissolution. Realizing that time was now very short, Dowd pressed the man afresh.

‘Where is this mystif? Quickly, now! Quickly!’

Chant’s face was decaying, cobs of withered flesh sliding off his slickened bone. When he answered it, it was with half a mouth. But answer he did, to be unburdened.

‘I thank you,’ Dowd said to him, when all the information had been supplied. ‘I thank you.’ Then, to the voiders, ‘Let him go.’

They dropped Chant without ceremony. When he hit the floor his face broke, pieces spattering Dowd’s shoe. He viewed the mess with disgust.

‘Clean it off,’ he said.

The voiders were at his feet in moments, dutifully removing the scraps of matter from Dowd’s hand-made shoes.

‘What does this mean?’ Döwd murmured again. There was surely synchronicity in this turn of events. In a little over half a year’s time, the anniversary of the Reconciliation would be upon the Imajica. Two hundred years would have passed since the Maestro Sartori had attempted, and failed, to perform the greatest act of magic known to this or any other Dominion. The plans for that ceremony had been laid here, at number twenty-eight Gamut Street, and the mystif, amongst others, had been there to witness the preparations.

The ambition of those heady days had ended in tragedy, of course. Rites intended to heal the rift in the Imajica, and reconcile the Fifth Dominion with the other four, had gone disastrously awry. Many great theurgists, shamans and theologians had been killed. Determined that such a calamity never be repeated, several of the survivors had banded together in order to cleanse the Fifth of all magical knowledge. But however much they scrubbed to erase the past, the slate could never be entirely cleansed. Traces of what had been dreamed and hoped for remained; fragments of poems to Union, written by men whose names had been systematically removed from all record. And as long as such scraps remained, the spirit of the Reconciliation would survive.

But spirit was not enough. A Maestro was needed; a magician arrogant enough to believe that he could succeed where Christos and innumerable other sorcerers, most lost to history, had failed. Though these were bliss-less times, Dowd didn’t discount the possibility of such a soul appearing. He still encountered in his daily life a few who looked past the empty gaud that distracted lesser minds and longed for a revelation that would burn the tinsel away, an Apocalypse that would show the Fifth the glories it yearned for in its sleep.

If a Maestro was going to appear, however, he would need to be swift. Another attempt at Reconciliation couldn’t be planned overnight, and if the next midsummer went unused, the Imajica would pass another two centuries divided. Time enough for the Fifth Dominion to destroy itself out of boredom or frustration, and prevent the Reconciliation from ever taking place.

Dowd perused his newly polished shoes.

‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Which is more than I can say for the rest of this wretched world.’

He crossed to the door. The voiders lingered by the body, however, bright enough to know that they still had some duty to perform with it. But Dowd called them away.

‘We’ll leave it here,’ he said. ‘Who knows? It may stir a few ghosts.’

CHAPTER FIVE

1

Two days after the pre-dawn call from Judith - days in which the water heater in the studio had failed, leaving Gentle the option of bathing in polar waters or not at all (he chose the latter) - Klein summoned him to the house. He had good news. He’d heard of a buyer with a hunger that was not being satisfied through conventional markets, and Klein had allowed it to be known that he might be able to lay his hands on something attractive. Gentle had successfully recreated one Gauguin previously, a small picture which had gone on to the open market and been consumed without any questions being asked. Could he do it again? Gentle replied that he would make a Gauguin so fine the artist himself would have wept to see it. Klein advanced Gentle five hundred pounds to pay the rent on the studio, and left him to it, remarking only that Gentle was looking a good deal better than he’d looked previously, though he smelt a good deal worse.

Gentle didn’t much care. Not bathing for two days was no great inconvenience when he only had himself for company; not shaving suited him fine when there was no woman to complain of beard burns. And he’d rediscovered the old, private erotics: spit, palm and fantasy. It sufficed. A man might get used to living this way; might get to like his gut a little ample, his armpits sweaty, his balls the same. It wasn’t until the weekend that he started to pine for some entertainment other than the sight of himself in the bathroom mirror. There hadn’t been a Friday or Saturday in the last year which hadn’t been occupied by some social gathering, where he’d mingled with Vanessa’s friends. Their numbers were still listed in his address book, just a phone call away, but he felt squeamish about making contact. However much he may have charmed them, they were her friends not his, and they’d have inevitably sided with her in this fiasco.

As for his own peers - the friends he’d had before Vanessa - most had faded. They were a part of his past, and like so many other memories, slippery. While people like Klein recalled events thirty years old in crystalline detail, Gentle had difficulty remembering where he was and with whom even ten years before. Earlier than that still, and his memory banks were empty. It was as though his mind was disposed only to preserve enough details of his history to make the present plausible. The rest it disregarded. He kept this strange fallibility from almost everybody he knew, concocting details if he was pressed hard. It didn’t much bother him. Not knowing what it meant to have a past, he didn’t miss it. And he construed from exchanges with others that though they might talk confidently about their childhood and adolescence, much of it was rumour and conjecture; some of it pure fabrication.

Nor was he alone in his ignorance. Judith had once confided that she too had an uncertain grasp of the past, though she’d been drunk at the time, and had denied it vehemently when he’d raised the subject again. So, between friends lost and friends forgotten, he was very much alone this Saturday night, and picked up the phone when it rang with some gratitude.

‘Furie here,’ he said. He felt like a Furie tonight. The line was alive, but there was no answer. ‘Who’s there?’ he said. Still, silence. Irritated, he put down the receiver. Seconds later, the phone rang again. ‘Who the hell is this?’ he demanded, and this time an impeccably spoken man replied, albeit with another question.

‘Am I speaking to John Zacharias?’

Gentle didn’t hear himself called that too often.

‘Who is this?’ he said again.

‘We’ve only met once. You probably don’t remember me. Charles Estabrook?’

Some people lingered longer in the memory than others. Estabrook was one. The man who’d caught Jude when she’d dropped from the high-wire. A classic inbred Englishman, member of minor aristocracy, pompous, condescending and -

‘I’d like very much to meet with you, if that’s possible.’

‘I don’t think we’ve got anything to say to each other.’

‘It’s about Judith, Mr Zacharias. A matter I’m obliged to keep in the strictest confidence, but it is, I cannot stress too strongly, of the profoundest importance.’

The tortured syntax made Gentle blunt. ‘Spit it out, then,’ he said.

‘Not on the telephone. I realize this request comes without warning, but I beg you to consider it.’

‘I have. And no. I’m not interested in meeting you.’

‘Even to gloat?’

‘Over what?’

‘Over the fact that I’ve lost her,’ Estabrook said. ‘She left me, Mr Zacharias, just as she left you. Thirty-three days ago.’ The precision of that spoke volumes. Was he counting the hours as well as the days. Perhaps the minutes too. ‘You needn’t come to the house if you don’t wish to. In fact, to be honest, I’d be happier if you didn’t.’

He was speaking as if Gentle would agree to the rendezvous, which, though he hadn’t said so yet, he would.