Imajica

Whatever power had deranged his senses, its bluff was called when he made contact with her. The roiling forms of her face resolved themselves like pieces of a multi-faceted jigsaw, turning and turning as they found their place, concealing countless other configurations - rare, wretched, bestial, dazzling - behind the shell of a congruous reality. He knew the features, now that they’d come to rest. Here were the ringlets, framing a face of exquisite symmetry. Here were the scars that healed with such unnatural speed. Here were the lips that hours before had described their owner as nothing and nobody. It was a lie! This nothing had two functions at least: assassin and whore. This nobody had a name.

‘Pie’oh’pah.’

Gentle let go of the man’s arm as though it were venomous. The form before him didn’t re-dissolve however, for which fact Gentle was only half glad. That hallucinatory chaos had been distressing, but the solid thing it had concealed appalled him more. Whatever sexual imaginings he’d shaped in the darkness - Judith’s face, Judith’s breasts, belly, sex - all of them had been an illusion. The creature he’d coupled with, almost shot his load into, didn’t even share her sex.

He was neither a hypocrite nor a puritan. He loved sex too much to condemn any expression of lust, and though he’d discouraged the homosexual courtships he’d attracted, it was out of indifference not revulsion. So the shock he felt now was fuelled more by the power of the deceit worked upon him than by the sex of the deceiver.

‘What have you done to me?’ was all he could say. ‘What have you done?’

Pie’oh’pah stood his ground, knowing perhaps that his nakedness was his best defence.

‘I wanted to heal you,’ he said. Though it trembled, there was music in his voice.

‘You put some drug in me.’

‘No!’ Pie said.

‘Don’t give me no! I thought you were Judith! You let me think you were Judith!’ He looked down at his hands, then up at the hard, lean body in front of him. ‘I felt her, not you.’ Again, the same complaint. ‘What have you done to me?’

‘I gave you what you wanted,’ Pie said.

Gentle had no retort to this. In its way, it was the truth. Scowling, he sniffed his palms, thinking that there might be traces of some drug in his sweat. But there was only the stench of sex on him; of the heat of the bed behind him.

‘You’ll sleep it off,’ Pie said.

‘Get the fuck out of here,’ Gentle replied. ‘And if you go anywhere near Jude again, I swear … I swear … I’ll take you apart.’

‘You’re obsessed with her, aren’t you?’

‘None of your fucking business.’

‘It’ll do you harm.’

‘Shut up.’

‘It will, I’m telling you.’

‘I told you!’ Gentle yelled. ‘Shut the fuck up!’

‘She doesn’t belong to you,’ came the reply.

The words ignited new fury in Gentle. He reached for Pie and took him by the throat. The bundle of clothes dropped from the assassin’s arm leaving him naked. But he put up no defence; he simply raised his hands and laid them lightly on Gentle’s shoulders. The gesture only infuriated Gentle further. He let out a stream of invective, but the placid face before him took both spittle and spleen without flinching. Gentle shook him, digging his thumbs into the man’s throat to stop his windpipe. Still he neither resisted nor succumbed, but stood in front of his attacker like a saint awaiting martyrdom.

Finally, breathless with rage and exertion, Gentle let go his hold, and threw Pie back, stepping away from the creature with a glimmer of superstition in his eyes. Why hadn’t the fellow fought back, or fallen? Anything but this sickening passivity.

‘Get out,’ Gentle told him.

Pie still stood his ground, watching him with forgiving eyes.

‘Will you get out?’ Gentle said again, more softly, and this time the martyr replied.

‘If you wish.’

‘I wish.’

He watched Pie’oh’pah stoop to pick up the scattered clothes. Tomorrow, this would all come clear in his head, he thought. He’d have shat this delirium out of his system, and these events - Jude, the chase, his near rape at the hands of the assassin - would be a tale to tell Klein and Clem and Taylor when he got back to London. They’d be entertained. Aware now that he was more naked than the other man he turned to the bed, and dragged a sheet off it to cover himself with.

There was a strange moment then, when he knew the bastard was still in the room, still watching him, and all he could do was wait for him to leave. Strange because it reminded him of other bedroom partings: sheets tangled, sweat cooling, confusion and self-reproach keeping glances at bay. He waited, and waited, and finally heard the door close. Even then he didn’t turn, but listened to the room to be certain there was only one breath in it: his own. When he finally looked back, and saw that Pie’oh’pah had gone, he pulled the sheet up around him like a toga, concealing himself from the absence in the room, which stared back at him too much like a reflection for his peace of mind. Then he locked the suite door and stumbled back to bed, listening to his drugged head whine like the empty telephone line.

CHAPTER NINE

1

Oscar Esmond Godolphin always recited a little prayer in praise of democracy when, after one of his trips to the Dominions, he stepped back on to English soil. Extraordinary as those visits were - and as warmly welcomed as he found himself in the diverse Kesparates of Yzordderrex - the city state was an autocracy of the most extreme kind, its excesses dwarfing the repressions of the country he’d been born in. Especially of late. Even his great friend and business partner in the Second Dominion, Hebbert Nuits-St-Georges, called Peccable by those who knew him well, a merchant who had made substantial profit from the superstitious and the woebegone in the Second Dominion, regularly remarked that the order of Yzordderrex was less stable by the day, and he would soon take his family out of the city, indeed out of the Dominion entirely, and find a new home where he would not have to smell burning bodies when he opened his windows in the morning. So far, it was only talk. Godolphin knew Peccable well enough to be certain that until he’d exhausted his supply of idols, relics and jujus from the Fifth, and could make no more profit, he’d stay put. And given that it was Godolphin himself who supplied these items -most were simply terrestrial trivia, revered in the Dominions because of their place of origin - and given that he would not cease to do so as long as the fever of collection was upon him and he could exchange such items for artifacts from the Imajica, Peccable’s business would flourish. It was a trade in talismans, and neither man was likely to tire of it soon.

Nor did Godolphon tire of being an Englishman in that most unEnglish of cities. He was instantly recognizable in the small but influential circle he kept. A large man in every way, he was tall and big-bellied; bellicose when fondest, hearty when not. At fifty-two he had long ago found his style, and was more than comfortable with it. True, he concealed his second and third chins beneath a grey-brown beard that only got an efficient trimming at the hands of Peccable’s eldest daughter Hoi-Polloi. True, he attempted to look a little more learned by wearing silver-rimmed spectacles that were dwarfed by his large face but were, he thought, all the more pedagoguish because they didn’t flatter. But these were little deceits. They helped to make him unmistakable, which he liked. He wore his thinning hair short, and his collars long, preferring for dress a clash of tweeds and a striped shirt; always a tie; invariably a waistcoat. All in all, a difficult sight to ignore, which suited him fine. Nothing was more likely to bring a smile to his face than being told he was talked about. It was usually with affection.

There was no smile on his face now, however, as he stepped out of the site of the Reconciliation - known euphemistically as the Retreat - to find Dowd sitting perched on a shooting-stick a few yards from the door. It was early afternoon but the sun was already low in the sky, the air as chilly as Dowd’s welcome. It was almost enough to make him turn round and go back to Yzordderrex, revolution or no.

‘Why do I think you haven’t come here with sparkling news?’ he said.

Dowd rose with his usual theatricality. ‘I’m afraid you’re absolutely correct,’ he said.

‘Let me guess: the government fell! The house burned down.’ His face dropped. ‘Not my brother?’ he said. ‘Not Charlie?’ He tried to read Dowd’s face. ‘What: dead? A massive coronary. When was the funeral?’

‘No, he’s alive. But the problem lies with him.’

‘Always has. Always has. Will you fetch my goods and chattels out of the Folly? We’ll talk as we walk. Go on in, will you? There’s nothing in there that’s going to bite.’

Dowd had stayed out of the Retreat all the time he’d waited for Godolphin (a wearisome three days) even though it would have given him some measure of protection against the bitter cold. Not that his system was susceptible to such discomforts, but he fancied himself an empathic soul, and his time on Earth had taught him to feel cold as an intellectual concept, if not a physical one, and he might have wished to take shelter. Anywhere other than the Retreat. Not only had many esoterics died there (and he didn’t enjoy the proximity of death unless he’d been its bringer), but the Retreat was a passing place between the Fifth Dominion and the other four, including, of course, the home from which he was in permanent exile. To be so close to the door through which his home lay, and be prevented by the conjurations of his first keeper, Joshua Godolphin, from opening that door, was painful. The cold was preferable.

He stepped inside now, however, having no choice in the matter. The Retreat had been built in neo-classical style: twelve marble pillars rising to support a dome that called for decoration, but had none. The plainness of the whole lent it gravity, and a certain functionalism which was not inappropriate. It was, after all, no more than a station, built to serve countless passengers and now used by only one. On the floor, set in the middle of the elaborate mosaic that appeared to be the building’s sole concession to prettification but was in fact the evidence of its true purpose, were the bundles of artifacts Godolphin brought back from his travels, neatly tied up by Hoi-Polloi Nuits-St-Georges, the knots encrusted with scarlet sealing wax. It was her present delight, this business with the wax, and Dowd cursed it, given that it fell to him to unpack these treasures. He crossed to the centre of the mosaic, light on his heels. This was tremulous terrain, and he didn’t trust it. But moments later, he emerged with his freight, to find that Godolphin was already marching out of the copse that screened the Retreat from both the house (empty, of course; in ruins) and any casual spy who peered over the wall. He took a deep breath and went after his master, knowing the explanation ahead would not be easy.

2

‘So they’ve summoned me, have they?’ Oscar said, as they drove back into London, the traffic thickening with the dusk. ‘Well, let them wait.’

‘You’re not going to tell them you’re here?’

‘In my time, not in theirs. This is a mess, Dowdy. A wretched mess.’

‘You told me to help Estabrook if he needed it.’

‘Helping him hire an assassin isn’t what I had in mind.’

‘Chant was very discreet.’

‘Death makes you that way, I find. You really have made a pig’s ear of the whole thing.’

‘I protest,’ said Dowd. ‘What else was I supposed to do? You knew he wanted the woman dead, and you washed your hands of it.’

‘All true,’ said Godolphin. ‘She is dead, I assume?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve been scouring the papers, and there’s no mention.’

‘So why did you have Chant killed?’

Here Dowd was more cautious in his account. If he said too little, Godolphin would suspect him of concealment. Too much, and the larger picture might become apparent. The longer his employer stayed in ignorance of the scale of the stakes, the better. He proffered two explanations, both ready and waiting:

‘For one thing, the man was more unreliable than I‘d thought. Drunk and maudlin half the time. And I think he knew more than was good for either you or your brother. He might have ended up finding out about your travels.’

‘Instead it’s the Society that’s suspicious.’

‘It’s unfortunate the way these things turn out.’

‘Unfortunate, my arse. It’s a total balls-up is what it is.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘I know you are, Dowdy,’ Oscar said. ‘The point is, where do we find a scapegoat?’

‘Your brother?’

‘Perhaps,’ Godolphin replied, cannily concealing the degree to which this suggestion found favour.

‘When should I tell them that you’ve come back?’ Dowd asked.

‘When I’ve made up a lie I can believe in,’ came the reply.

Back in the house in Regent’s Park Road, Oscar took some time to study the newspaper reports of Chant’s death before retiring to his treasure house on the third floor with both his new artifacts and a good deal to think about. There was a sizeable part of him that wanted to exit this Dominion once and for all. Take himself off to Yzordderrex and set up business with Peccable; marry Hoi-Polloi despite her crossed eyes; have a litter of kids and retire to the Hills of the Conscious Cloud, in the Third, and raise parrots. But he knew he’d yearn for England sooner or later, and a yearning man could be cruel. He’d end up beating his wife, bullying his kids and eating the parrots. So, given that he’d always have to keep a foot in England, if only during the cricket season, and given that as long as he kept a presence here he would be answerable to the Society, he had to face them.

He locked the door of his treasure room, sat down amongst his collection, and waited for inspiration. The shelves around him, which were built to the ceiling, were bowed beneath the weight of his trove. Here were items gathered from the edge of the Second Dominion to the limits of the Fourth. He had only to pick one of them up to be transported back to the time and place of its acquisition. The Statue of the Etook Ha’chiit he’d bartered for in a little town called Slew, which was now. regrettably, a blasted spot, its citizens the victims of a purge visited upon them for the crime of a song, written in the dialect of their community, suggesting that the Autarch of Yzordderrex lacked testicles.

Another of his treasures, the seventh volume of Gaud Maybellome’s Encyclopaedia of Heavenly Signs, originally written in the language of Third Dominion academics but widely translated for the delectation of the proletariat, he’d bought from a woman in the city of Jassick, who’d approached him in a gaming room where he was attempting to explain cricket to a group of the locals, and said she recognized him from stories her husband (who was in the Autarch’s army in Yzordderrex) had told.

‘You’re the English male,’ she’d said, which didn’t seem worth denying.

Then she’d shown him the book: a very rare volume indeed. He’d never ceased to find fascination within its pages, for it was Maybellome’s intention to make an encyclopaedia listing all the flora, fauna, languages, sciences, ideas, moral perspectives - in short, anything that occurred to her - that had found their way from the Fifth Dominion, the Place of the Succulent Rock, through to the other worlds. It was a Herculean task, and she’d died just as she was beginning the nineteenth volume, with no end in sight, but even the one book in Godolphin’s possession was enough to guarantee that he would search for the others until his dying day. It was a bizarre, almost surreal volume. Even if only half the entries were true, or nearly true, Earth had influenced just about every aspect of the worlds from which it was divided. Fauna, for instance. There were countless animals listed in the volume which Maybellome claimed to be invaders from the other world. Some clearly were: the zebra, the crocodile, the dog. Others were a mixture of genetic strands, part terrestrial, part non. But many of these species (pictured in the book like fugitives from a mediaeval bestiary) were so outlandish he doubted their very existence. Here, for instance, were hand-sized wolves, with the wings of canaries. Here was an elephant that lived in an enormous conch. Here was a literate worm that wrote omens with its thread-fine, half-mile body. Wonderment upon wonderment. Godolphin only had to pick up the encyclopaedia and he was ready to put on his boots and set off for the Dominions again.

What was self-evident from even a casual perusal of the book was how extensively the unreconciled Dominion had influenced the others. The languages of earth - English, Italian, Hindustani and Chinese particularly - were known in some variation everywhere, though it seemed the Autarch - who had come to power in the confusion following the failed Reconciliation -favoured English, which was the preferred linguistic currency almost everywhere now. To name a child with an English word was thought particularly propitious, though there was little or no consideration given to what the word actually meant. Hence Hoi-Polloi, for instance; this one of the less strange namings amongst the thousands Godolphin had encountered.

He flattered himself that he was in some small part responsible for such blissful bizarrities, given that over the years he’d brought all manner of influences through from the Succulent Rock. There was always a hunger for newspapers and magazines (usually preferred to books) and he’d heard of baptizers in Patashoqua who named children by stabbing a copy of the London Times with a pin and bequeathing the first three words they pricked upon the infant, however unmusical the combination. But he was not the only influence. He hadn’t brought the crocodile, or the zebra, or the dog (though he would lay claim to the parrot). No, there had always been routes through from Earth into the Dominions, other than that at the Retreat. Some, no doubt, had been opened by Maestros and esoterics, in all manner of cultures, for the express purpose of their passing to and fro between worlds. Others were conceivably opened by accident, and perhaps remained open, marking the sites as haunted or sacred, shunned or obsessively protected. Yet others, these in the smallest number, had been created by the sciences of the other Dominions, as a means of gaining access to the heaven of the Succulent Rock.

In such a place, this near the walls of the Iahmandhas in the Third Dominion, Godolphin had acquired his most sacred possession: a Boston Bowl, complete with its forty-one coloured stones. Though he’d never used it, the Bowl was reputedly the most accurate prophetic tool known in the worlds, and now - sitting amid his treasures, with a sense growing in him that events on Earth in the last few days were leading to some matter of moment - he brought the Bowl down from its place on the highest shelf, unwrapped it, and set it on the table. Then he took the stones from their pouch and laid them at the bottom of the Bowl. Truth to tell, the arrangement didn’t look particularly promising: the Bowl resembled something for kitchen use, plain fired ceramic, large enough to whip eggs for a couple of soufflés. The stones were more colourful, varying in size and shape from tiny, flat pebbles to perfect spheres the size of an eyeball.

Having set them out, Godolphin had second thoughts. Did he even believe in prophecy? And if he did, was it wise to know the future? Probably not. Death was bound to be in there somewhere, sooner or later. Only Maestros and deities lived forever, and a man might sour the balance of his span knowing when it was going to end. But then, suppose he found in this Bowl some indication as to how the Society might be handled? That would be no small weight off his shoulders.

‘Be brave,’ he told himself, and laid the middle finger of each hand upon the rim, as Peccable, who’d once owned such a Bowl and had it smashed by his wife in a domestic row, had instructed.

Nothing happened at first, but Peccable had warned him the Bowls usually took some time to start from cold. He waited, and waited. The first sight of activation was a rattling from the bottom of the Bowl as the stones began to move against each other, the second, a distinctly acidic odour rising to jab at his sinuses, the third, and most startling, the sudden ricocheting of one pebble, then two, then a dozen, across the Bowl and back, several skipping higher than the rim. Their ambition increased by the movement, until all forty-one were in violent motion, so violent that the Bowl began to move across the table, and Oscar had to take a firm hold of it to keep it from turning over. The stones struck his fingers and knuckles with stinging force, but the pain made sweeter the success that now followed, as the speed and motion of the multifarious shapes and colours began to describe images in the air above the Bowl.

Like all prophecy, the signs were in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps another witness would have seen quite different forms in the blur. But what Godolphin saw seemed quite plain to him. The Retreat for one, half-hidden in the copse. Then himself, standing in the middle of the mosaic, either coming back from Yzordderrex or preparing to depart. The images lingered for only a brief time before changing, the Retreat demolished in the storm of stones and a new structure raised in the whirl: the Tower of the Tabula Rasa. He fixed his eyes on the prophecy with fresh deliberation, denying himself the comfort of blinking to be certain he missed nothing. The Tower as seen from the street gave way to its interior. Here they were, the wise ones, sitting around the table contemplating their divine duty. They were navel-defluffers and snot-rollers to a man. Not one of them would be capable of surviving an hour in the alleyways of East Yzordderrex, he thought, down by the harbour where even the cats had pimps. Now he saw himself step into the picture, and something he was doing or saying made the men and women before him jump from their seats, even Lionel.

‘What’s this?’ Oscar murmured.

They had wild expressions on their faces, every one. Were they laughing? What had he done? Cracked a joke? Passed wind? He studied the prophecy more closely. No, it wasn’t humour on their faces. It was horror.

‘Sir?’

Dowd’s voice from outside the door broke his concentration. He looked away from the Bowl for a few seconds to snap: ‘Go away.’

But Dowd had urgent news. ‘McGann’s on the telephone,’ he said.

‘Tell him you don’t know where I am,’ Oscar snorted, returning his gaze to the Bowl.

Something terrible had happened in the time between his looking away and looking back. The horror remained on their faces, but for some reason he’d disappeared from the scene. Had they dispatched him summarily? God, was he dead on the floor? Maybe. There was something glistening on the table, like spilled blood.

‘Sir!’

‘Fuck off, Dowdy.’

‘They know you’re here, sir.’

They knew; they knew. The house was being watched, and they knew.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell him I’ll be down in a moment.’

‘What did you say, sir?’

Oscar raised his voice over the din of the stones, looking away again, this time more willingly: ‘Get his whereabouts. I’ll call him back.’

Again, he returned his gaze to the Bowl, but his concentration had faltered, and he could no longer interpret the images concealed in the motion of the stones. Except for one. As the speed of the display slowed he seemed to catch - oh so fleetingly - a woman’s face in the mêlée. His replacement at the Society’s table, perhaps; or his dispatcher.

2

He needed a drink before he spoke to McGann, and Dowd, ever the anticipator, had already mixed him a whisky and soda, but he forsook it for fear it would loosen his tongue. Paradoxically, what had been half-revealed by the Boston Bowl helped him in his exchange. In extreme circumstances he responded with almost pathological detachment: it was one of his most English traits. He had thus seldom been cooler or more controlled than now, as he told McGann that yes indeed he had been travelling, and no, it was none of the Society’s business where or about what pursuit. He would of course be delighted to attend a gathering at the Tower the following day, but was McGann aware (indeed did he care?) that tomorrow was Christmas Eve?