Imajica

‘I never miss Midnight Mass at St Martin’s-in-the-Field,’ Oscar told him, ‘so I’d appreciate it greatly if the meeting could be concluded quickly enough to allow me time to get there and find a pew with a good view.’

He delivered all of this without a tremor in his voice. McGann attempted to press him as to his whereabouts in the last few days, to which Oscar asked why the hell it mattered.

‘I don’t ask about your private affairs, now do I?’ he said, in a mildly affronted tone. ‘Nor, by the way, do I spy on your comings and goings. Don’t splutter, McGann. You don’t trust me and I don’t trust you. I will take tomorrow’s meeting as a forum to debate the privacy of the Society’s members, and a chance to remind the gathering that the name of Godolphin is one of the cornerstones of the Society.’

‘All the more reason you be forthright,’ McGann said.

‘I’ll be perfectly forthright,’ was Oscar’s reply. ‘You’ll have ample evidence of my innocence.’ Only now, with the war of wits won, did he accept the whisky and soda Dowd had mixed for him. ‘Ample and definitive.’

He silently toasted Dowd as he talked, knowing as he sipped it that there’d be bloodshed before Christmas Day dawned. Grim as that prospect was, there was no avoiding it now.

When he put the phone down he said to Dowd: ‘I think I’ll wear the herringbone suit tomorrow. And a plain shirt. White. Starched collar.’

‘And the tie?’ Dowd asked, replacing Oscar’s drained glass with a fresh one.

‘I’ll be going straight on to Midnight Mass,’ Oscar said.

‘Black, then.’

‘Black.’

CHAPTER TEN

1

The afternoon of the day following the assassin’s appearance at Marlin’s apartment a blizzard descended upon New York with no little ferocity, conspiring with the inevitable seasonal rush to make finding a flight back to England difficult. But Jude was not easily denied anything, especially when she’d set her mind firmly on an objective; and she was certain - despite Marlin’s protestations - that leaving Manhattan was the most sensible thing to do. She had reason on her side. The assassin had made two attempts upon her life. He was still at large. As long as she stayed in New York she would be under threat. But even if this had not been the case (and there was a part of her that still believed that he’d come that second time to explain, or apologize) she would have found an excuse for returning to England, just to be out of Marlin’s company. He had become too cloying in his affections, his talk as saccharine as the dialogue from the Christmas classics on the television, his every gaze mawkish. He’d had this sickness all along, of course, but he’d worsened since the assassin’s visit, and her tolerance for these traits, braced as she’d been by her encounter with Gentle, had dropped to zero.

Once she’d put the phone down on him the previous night she’d regretted her skittish way with him, and, after a heart-to-heart with Marlin in which she’d told him she wanted to go back to England, and he’d replied that it would all seem different in the morning and why didn’t she just take a pill and lie down, she’d decided to call him back. By this time, Marlin was sound asleep. She’d left her bed, gone through to the lounge, put on a single lamp, and made the call. It felt covert, which in a way it was. Marlin had not been pleased to know that one of her ex-lovers had attempted to play hero in his own apartment, and he wouldn’t have been happy to find her making contact with Gentle at two in the morning. She still didn’t know what had happened when she’d been put through to the room. The receiver had been picked up, and then dropped, leaving her to listen with increasing fury and frustration to the sound of Gentle making love. Instead of putting the phone down there and then she’d listened, half-wishing she could have joined the escapade. Eventually, after failing to distract Gentle from his labours, she’d put down the phone and traipsed back to her cold bed in a foul humour.

He’d called the next day, and Marlin had picked up. She let him tell Gentle that if he ever saw hide or hair of Gentle in the building again he’d have him arrested as an accomplice to attempted murder.

‘What did he say?’ she’d asked when the conversation was done.

‘Not very much. He sounded drunk.’

She had not discussed the matter any further. Marlin was already sullen enough, after her breakfast announcement that she still intended returning to England that day. He’d asked her over and over: why? Was there something he could do to make her stay more comfortable? Extra locks on the doors? A promise that he wouldn’t leave her side? None of these, of course, filled her with renewed enthusiasm for staying. If she told him once she told him two dozen times that he was quite the perfect host, and that he wasn’t to take this personally, but she wanted to be back in her own house, her own city, where she would feel most protected from the assassin. He’d then offered to come back with her, so that she wasn’t returning to an empty house alone, at which point - running out of soothing phrases and patience -she’d told him that alone was exactly what she wanted to be.

And so here she was, one snail crawl through the blizzard to Kennedy, a five-hour delay and a flight in which she was wedged between a nun who prayed aloud every time they hit an air-pocket, and a child in need of worming, later. Her own sole possessor, in an empty flat on Christmas Eve.

2

The painting in four contrary modes was there to greet Gentle when he got back to the studio. His return had been delayed by the same blizzard that had almost prevented Judith leaving Manhattan, and put him beyond the deadline Klein had set. But his thoughts had not turned to his business dealings with Klein more than once during the journey. They’d revolved almost entirely around the encounter with the assassin. Whatever mischief Pie’oh’pah had worked upon his system it had cleared by the following morning - his eyes were operating normally, and he was lucid enough to deal with the practicalities of departure - but the echoes of what he’d experienced still reverberated. Dozing on the plane he felt the smoothness of the assassin’s face in his fingertips, the tumble of hair he’d taken to be Jude’s over the back of his hands. He could still smell the scent of wet skin, and feel the weight of Pie’oh’pah’s body on his hips, this so persuasive he had an erection apparent enough to draw a stare from one of the stewardesses. He reasoned that perhaps he would have to put fresh sensation between these echoes and their origins; fuck them out; sweat himself clean. The thought comforted him. When he dozed again, and the memories returned, he didn’t fight them, knowing he had a means of scouring them from his system once he got back to England.

Now he sat in front of the painting in four modes, and flipped through his address book looking for a partner for the night. He made a few calls, but couldn’t have chosen a worse time to be setting up a casual liaison. Husbands were home; family gatherings were in the offing. He was out of season.

He did eventually speak to Klein, who after some persuasion accepted his apologies, and then went on to tell him there was to be a party at Taylor and Clem’s house the following day, and he was sure Gentle would be welcome if he had no other plans.

‘Everyone says it’ll be Taylor’s last,’ Chester said. ‘I know he’d like to see you.’

‘I suppose I should go then,’ Gentle said.

‘You should. He’s very sick. He’s had pneumonia, and now cancer. He was always very fond of you, you know.’

The association of ideas made fondness for Gentle sound like another disease, but he didn’t comment on it, merely made arrangements to pick up Klein the following evening and put down the phone, plunged into a deeper trough than ever. He’d known Taylor had the plague, but hadn’t realized people were counting the days to his demise. Such grim times. Everywhere he looked things were coming apart. There seemed to be only darkness ahead, full of blurred shapes and pitiful glances. The Age of Pie’oh’pah, perhaps. The time of the assassin.

He didn’t sleep, despite being tired, but sat up into the small hours with an object of study that he’d previously dismissed as fanciful nonsense: Chant’s final letter. When he’d first read it, on the plane to New York, it had seemed a ludicrous outpouring. But there had been strange times since then, and they’d put Gentle in an apter mood for this study. Pages that had seemed worthless a few days before were now pored over, in the hope that they’d yield some clue, encoded in the fanciful excesses of Chant’s idiosyncratic and ill-punctuated prose, that would lead him to some fresh comprehension of the times and their movers. Whose God, for instance, was this Hapexamendios that Chant exhorted Estabrook to pray to and praise? He came trailing synonyms. The Unbeheld. The Aboriginal. The Wanderer. And what was the greater plan that Chant hoped in his final hours he was a part of?

I AM ready for death in this DOMINION he’d written, if I know that the Unbeheld has used me as His INSTRUMENT. All praise to HAPEXAMENDIOS. For He was in the Place of the Succulent Rock, and left his children to SUFFER here and I have suffered here and AM DONE with suffering.

That at least was true. The man had known his death was imminent, which suggested that he’d known his murderer too. Was it Pie’oh’pah he’d been expecting? It seemed not. The assassin was referred to, but not as Chant’s executioner. Indeed, in his first reading of the letter Gentle hadn’t even realized it was Pie’oh’pah who was being spoken of in this passage. But on this re-reading it was completely apparent.

You have made a covenant with a thing RARE in this DOMINION or any other, and I do not know if this death nearly upon me is my punishment or my reward for my agency in that. But be circumspect in all your dealings with it, for such power is capricious, being a stew of kinds and possibilities, no UTTER thing, in any part of its nature, but pavonine and prismatic. An apostate to its core.

I was never the friend of this power - it has only ADORERS AND UNDOERS - but it trusted me as its representative and I have done it as much harm in these dealings as I have you. More I think; for it is a lonely thing, and suffers in this DOMINION as I have. You have friends who know you for the man you are, and do not have to conceal your TRUE NATURE. Cling to them, and their love for you, for the Place of the Succulent Rock is about to shake and tremble, and in such a time all a soul has is the company of its loving like. I say this having lived in such a time, and am GLAD that if such is coming upon the FIFTH DOMINION again, I will be dead, and my face turned to the glory of the UNBEHELD.

All praise to HAPEXAMENDIOS.

And to you, sir, in this moment, I offer my contrition and my prayers.

There was a little more, but both handwriting and the sentence structure deteriorated rapidly thereafter, as though Chant had panicked, and scrawled the rest while putting on his coat. The more coherent passages contained enough hints to keep Gentle from sleep, however. The descriptions of Pie’oh’pah were particularly alarming:

‘A RARE thing … a stew of kinds and possibilities …’

How was that to be interpreted, except as a verification of what Gentle’s senses had glimpsed in New York? If so, what was this creature, that had stood before him naked and singular, but concealed multitudes?; this power Chant had said possessed no friends (it has only ADORERS AND UNDOERS, he’d written) and had been done as much harm in these dealings (again. Chant’s words) as Estabrook, to whom Chant had offered his contrition and his prayers? Not human, for certain. Not born of any tribe or nation Gentle was familiar with. He read the letter over and over again, and with each re-reading the possibility of belief crept closer. He felt its proximity. It was fresh from the margins of that land he’d first suspected in New York. The thought of being there had made him fearful then. But it no longer did, perhaps because it was Christmas morning, and time for something miraculous to appear and change the world.

The closer they crept - both morning and belief - the more he regretted shunning the assassin when it had so plainly wanted his company. He had no clues to its mystery but those contained in Chant’s letter, and after a hundred readings they were exhausted. He wanted more. The only other source was his memory of the creature’s jigsaw face, and, knowing his propensity for forgetting, they’d start to fade all too soon. He had to set them down! That was the priority now; to set the vision down before it slipped away!

He threw the letter aside, and went to stare at his Supper at Emmaus. Was any of those styles capable of capturing what he’d seen? He doubted it. He’d have to invent a new mode to reproduce what he’d seen. Fired up by that ambition he turned the Supper on end, and began to squeeze burnt umber directly on to the canvas, spreading it with a palette knife until the scene beneath was completely obscured. In its place was now a dark ground, into which he started to gouge the outline of a figure. He had never studied anatomy very closely. The male body was of little aesthetic interest to him, and the female was so mutable, so much a function of its own motion, or that of light across it, that all static representation seemed to him doomed from the outset. But he wanted to represent a protean form now, however impossible; wanted to find a way to fix what he’d seen at the door of his hotel room, when Pie’oh’pah’s many faces had been shuffled in front of him like cards in an illusionist’s deck. If he could fix that sight, or even begin to do so, he might yet find a way of controlling the thing that had come to haunt him.

He worked in a fair frenzy for two hours, making demands of the paint he’d never made before, plastering it on with palette knife and fingers, attempting to capture at least the shape and proportion of the thing’s head and neck. He could see the image clearly enough in his mind’s eye (since that night no two rememberings had been more than a minute apart) but even the most basic sketch eluded his hand. He was badly equipped for the task. He’d been a parasite for too long, a mere copier, echoing other men’s vision. Now he finally had one of his own -only one, but all the more precious for that - and he simply couldn’t set it down. He wanted to weep at this final defeat, but he was too tired for that. With his hands still covered in paint he lay down on the chilly sheets and waited for sleep to take his confusions away.

Two thoughts visited him as he slipped into dreams. The first, that with so much burnt umber on his hands he looked as though he’d been playing with his own shit. The second, that the only way to solve the problem on the canvas was to see its subject again in the flesh, which thought he welcomed, and went to dreams relieved of his frauds and pieties, smiling to think of having the rare thing’s face before him once again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Though the journey from Godolphin’s house in Primrose Hill to the Tabula Rasa’s Tower was short, and Dowd got him up to Highgate on the dot of six, Oscar suggested they drive down through Crouch End then up through Muswell Hill and back to the Tower, so that they’d arrive ten minutes late.

‘We mustn’t seem to be too eager to prostrate ourselves,’ he observed as they approached the Tower for a second time. ‘It’ll only make them arrogant.’

‘Shall I wait down here?’

‘Cold and lonely? My dear Dowdy, out of the question. We’ll ascend together, bearing gifts.’

‘What gifts?’

‘Our wit, our taste in suits - well, my taste - in essence, ourselves.’

They got out of the car, and went to the porch, their every step monitored by cameras mounted above the door. The lock clicked as they approached, and they stepped inside. As they crossed the foyer to the lift Godolphin whispered:

‘Whatever happens tonight, Dowdy, please remember - ‘

He got no further. The lift doors opened, and Bloxham appeared, as preening as ever.

‘Pretty tie,’ Oscar said to him. ‘Yellow’s your colour.’ The tie was blue. ‘Don’t mind my man Dowd here, will you? I never go anywhere without him.’

‘He’s got no place here tonight,’ Bloxham said.

Again, Dowd offered to wait below, but Oscar would have none of it. ‘Heaven forfend,’ he said. ‘You can wait upstairs. Enjoy the view.’

All this irritated Bloxham mightily, but Oscar was not an easy man to deny. They ascended in silence. Once on the top floor Dowd was left to entertain himself, and Bloxham led Godolphin through to the chamber. They were all waiting, and there was accusation on every face. A few - Shales, certainly, and Charlotte Feaver - didn’t attempt to disguise their pleasure that the Society’s most ebullient and unrepentant member was here finally called to heel.

‘Oh I’m sorry …’ Oscar said, as they closed the doors behind him. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

Outside, in one of the deserted ante-chambers, Dowd listened to his tinny little radio and mused. At seven the news bulletin brought a report of a motorway collision which had claimed the lives of an entire family travelling north for Christmas, and of prison riots that had ignited in Bristol and Manchester, with inmates claiming that presents from loved ones had been tampered with and destroyed by prison officers. There was the usual collection of war updates, then the weather report, which promised a grey Christmas, accompanied by a spring-like balm. This would on past experience coax the crocuses out in Hyde Park, only to be spiked by frost in a few days’ time. At eight, still waiting by the window, a second bulletin corrected one of the reports from the first. A survivor had been claimed from the entangled vehicles on the motorway: a tot of three months, found orphaned but unscathed in the wreckage. Sitting in the cold gloom, Dowd began to weep quietly, which was an experience as far beyond his true emotional capacity as cold was beyond his nerve-endings. But he’d trained himself in the craft of grief with the same commitment to feigning humanity as he had learning to shiver; his tutor, the Bard; Lear his favourite lesson. He cried for the child, and for the crocuses, and was still moist-eyed when he heard the voices in the chamber suddenly rise up in rage. The door was flung open, and Oscar called him in, despite shouts of complaint from some of the other members.

This is an outrage, Godolphin!’ Bloxham yelped.

‘You drove me to it!’ was Oscar’s reply, his performance at fever pitch. Clearly he’d been having a bad time of it. The sinews in his neck stood out like knotted string; sweat gleamed in the pouches beneath his eyes; every word brought flecks of spittle. ‘You don’t know half of it!’ he was saying. ‘Not the half. We’re being conspired against, by forces we can barely conceive of. This man Chant was undoubtedly one of their agents. They can take human form!’

‘Godolphin, this is absurd,’ Tyrwhitt said.

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘No, I don’t. And I certainly don’t want your bum-boy here listening to us debate. Will you please remove him from the Chamber?’

‘But he has evidence to support my thesis,’ Oscar insisted.

‘Oh, does he?’ said Shales.

‘He’ll have to show you himself,’ Oscar said, turning to Dowd. ‘You’re going to have to show them, I’m afraid,’ he said, and as he spoke reached into his jacket.

An instant before the blade emerged Dowd realized Godolphin’s intent, and started to turn away, but Oscar had the edge, and it came forth glittering. Dowd felt his master’s hand on his neck, and heard shouts of horror on all sides. Then he was thrown back across the table, sprawling beneath the lights like an unwilling patient. The surgeon followed through with one swift stab, striking Dowd in the middle of his chest.

‘You want proof?’ Oscar yelled, through Dowd’s screams, and the din of shouts around the table. ‘You want proof? Then here it is!’

His bulk put weight behind the blade, driving it first to the right then to the left, encountering no obstruction from rib or breastbone. Nor was there blood; only a fluid the colour of brackish water, that dribbled from the wounds and ran across the table. Dowd’s head thrashed to and fro as this indignity was visited upon him, only once raising his gaze to stare accusingly at Godolphin, who was too busy about this undoing to return the look. Despite protests from all sides he didn’t halt his labours until the body before him had been opened from navel to throat, and Dowd’s thrashings had ceased. The stench from the carcass filled the Chamber; a pungent mixture of sewage and vanilla. It drove two of the witnesses to the door, one of them Bloxham, whose nausea overtook him before he could reach the corridor. But his gaggings and moans didn’t slow Godolphin by a beat. Without hesitation he plunged his arm into the open body and, rummaging there, pulled out a fistful of gut. It was a knotty mass of blue and black tissue - final proof of Dowd’s inhumanity. Triumphant, he threw the evidence down on the table beside the body, then stepped away from his handiwork, chucking the knife into the wound it had opened. The whole performance had taken no more than a minute, but in that time he’d succeeded in turning the Chamber’s table into a fish-market gutter.

‘Satisfied?’ he said.

All protest had been silenced. The only sound was the rhythmical hiss of fluid escaping an opened artery.

Very quietly McGann said:

‘You’re a fucking maniac.’

Oscar reached gingerly into his trouser pocket and teased out a fresh handkerchief. One of poor Dowd’s last tasks had been its pressing. It was immaculate. He shook out its scalpel creases and began to clean his hands.

‘How else was I going to prove my point?’ he said. ‘You drove me to this. Now there’s the evidence, in all its glory. I don’t know what happened to Dowd - my bum-boy I think you called him, Alice - but wherever he is this thing took his place.’

‘How long have you known?’ Charlotte asked.

‘I’ve suspected for the last two weeks. I was here in the city all the time; watching its every move while it - and you - thought I was disporting myself in sunnier climes.’

‘What the bugger is it?’ Lionel wanted to know, prodding a scrap of alien entrail with his finger.

‘God alone knows,’ Godolphin said. ‘Something not of this world, clearly.’

‘What did it want?’ Alice said. ‘That’s more to the point.’

‘At a guess, access to this Chamber, which’ - he looked at those around the table one by one - ‘I gather you granted it, three days ago. I trust none of you was indiscreet.’ Furtive glances were exchanged. ‘Oh, you were,’ he said. ‘That’s a pity. Let’s hope it didn’t have time to communicate any of its findings to its overlords.’

‘What’s done’s done,’ McGann said, ‘and we must all bear some part of the responsibility. Including you, Oscar. You should have shared your suspicions with us.’

‘Would you have believed me?’ Oscar replied. ‘I didn’t believe it myself at first, until I started to notice little changes in Dowd.’

‘Why you?’ Shales said. ‘That’s what I want to know. Why would they target you for this surveillance unless they thought you were more susceptible than the rest of us? Maybe they thought you’d join them. Maybe you have.’

‘As usual, Hubert, you’re too self-righteous to see your own frailties,’ Godolphin replied. ‘How do you know I am the only one they targeted? Could you swear to me every one of your circle’s above suspicion? How closely do you watch your friends? Your family? Any one of them might be a part of this conspiracy.’